Canada

Source: The Globe and Mail

Net revenue from government-run lotteries, video lottery terminals, casinos and slot machines not in casinos totalled $13.75-billion in 2009, essentially unchanged from $13.67-billion the year before.

Statistics Canada says revenue from gambling levelled off at roughly $13.7-billion in 2007 after increasing steadily from $2.73-billion in 1992.

In 2009, casinos accounted for a third (34 per cent) of the net revenue from the gambling industry.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton made an unsolicited $38.6 billion offer for the world's largest fertilizer producer, Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc., in an aggressive wager that developing economies will drive up demand for the world's food supply.

Potash is an important nutrient that replenishes soil and increases farmland's crop yield. Global potash supplies are relatively limited, and Potash Corp., based in the prairies of central Canada, controls approximately 20% of the supply.

The offer is likely to set off a long struggle for the fate of the Canadian company, a crown jewel of the country's natural-resources-based economy.

Potash's board rejected the BHP offer of $130 a share in cash, a 16% premium to Potash's Monday closing price, calling it "grossly inadequate."

In trading Tuesday, the fertilizer company's shares soared far above the offer, a sign traders expect BHP to raise its bid or other suitors to emerge. Potash shares closed at $143.17, up $31.02, or 27.7%.

The company's chief executive, Bill Doyle, said the board wasn't opposed to a sale, "we just don't expect someone to come steal the company."

People familiar with the matter said BHP would decide in the next few days whether to take its offer directly to Potash shareholders, a move that would officially make BHP's unsolicited offer a hostile one.

Potash adopted a shareholder-rights plan on Tuesday that puts a 20% ceiling on any single stakeholder.

Such a "poison pill" may be less effective in Canada than in the U.S. because a hostile bidder can lobby Canadian securities regulators to have the target company eliminate its plan and allow a tender offer to shareholders.

BHP's shares closed Tuesday at $70.21, down $1.73, or 2.4%, in trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Wednesday morning in Australia, shares fell 3.7%.

Analysts speculated that mining rivals Vale SA of Brazil, and the Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto PLC could consider counteroffers. Vale, which not long ago made a $3.8 billion purchase of fertilizer assets, declined to comment. Rio Tinto didn't immediately return a call.

Mr. Doyle of Potash declined to say what might be a suitable offer. People close to the company, based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, said an offer would need to factor in Potash's record high of nearly $240 in mid-2008. The offer from BHP was made in a letter Aug. 12 that Potash disclosed on Tuesday.

Looming over any merger negotiations is a national debate in Canada about open markets and foreign takeovers.

Over the past decade, the country has seen most of its big natural-resources companies and many industrial ones taken over by buyers from the U.S., Europe and South America.

The deals included the sales of aluminum and nickel mines to Brazil's Vale and Switzerland's Xtrata, the purchase of Canada's biggest steel producer by U.S. Steel Corp., and the piecemeal sale of struggling tech giant Nortel Networks Corp. to buyers from the U.S. and Europe.

While demand for commodities has fueled Canada's economic growth, there is lingering worry among some that the country is losing its corporate mettle.

In 2009, Canada amended its foreign-takeover code, raising the size of deals that require scrutiny but allowing the government explicit power to veto deals thought to pose a danger to national security.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the government would review any transaction but otherwise declined to comment.

As the world's largest mining company, BHP has remained unbowed by a costly and ultimately unsuccessful attempt in 2008 to take over Rio Tinto, its big Anglo-Australian rival.

For BHP's chief executive, South African Marius Kloppers, a play for Potash fits into a broader theme of economic development, particularly in China and India.

"World GDP and GDP development is being driven by...new people entering the modern industrial age...by massive urbanization processes," Mr. Kloppers said in an interview in 2008. This, he said, is "having a huge knock-on effect in demand for our products."

A deal for Potash would represent a shift for BHP, which specializes in minerals and metals and has limited experience with customers who buy fertilizer. Potash is the common name for fertilizer derived from potassium, and includes potassium carbonate and other salts. It is one of the common fertilizers farmers use, along with nitrogen and phosphate.

There are plenty of reasons to expect rising demand for fertilizer. The world is projected to add an average of 57 million people a year between 2000 and 2050, leading to a population of 8.9 billion in 2050, according to United Nations projections. Rising incomes in growing economies will also push up demand for diverse diets, and fertilizer is a sure way to increase food production.

Such long-term global trends have turned Potash Corp. into a highflying stock that has soared since 2005.

BHP is also counting on China and other rapidly growing nations placing a premium on producing more food, to be independent from foreign suppliers.

Meeting such a basic need is critical, as vividly demonstrated in 2008, when a sharp rise in the cost of food kicked off riots in some parts of the world. This summer's scare over wheat supplies amid a Russian drought provided another reminder.

"It's just a bet that food is going to continue to be precious, and become more precious," said Emerson Nafziger, a professor of agronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's a bet that the whole world is going to need to replace nutrients in the soil as crops are removed."

China produces only about roughly half as much corn as the U.S. on a given amount of farmland. U.S. farmers generate more than 10 metric tons per hectare (2.47 acres), while China produces just over five and India just over two.

While there are various reasons for such gaps in production, including water and use of genetically modified seeds, fertilizer use is one of the factors.

USDA forecasts released last week show the world will likely consume more grain through next year than farmers are able to produce, which will inevitably shrink the globe's grain reserves again.

Source: CBC

A group of central Ontario parents is demanding their children's schools turn off wireless internet before they head back to school next month, fearing the technology is making the kids sick.

Some parents in the Barrie, Ont., area say their children are showing a host of symptoms, ranging from headaches to dizziness and nausea and even racing heart rates.

They believe the Wi-Fi setup in their kids' elementary schools may be the problem.

The parents complain they can't get the Simcoe County school board or anyone else to take their concerns seriously, even though the children's symptoms all disappear on weekends when they aren't in school.

"Parents are getting together and realizing this is the pattern," said Rodney Palmer of the Simcoe County Safe School Committee.

"We went to the school board and they did nothing."

The symptoms, which also include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia, have been reported in 14 Ontario schools in Barrie, Bradford, Collingwood, Orillia and Wasaga Beach since the board decided to go wireless, Palmer said.

"These kids are getting sick at school but not at home," he said.

"I'm not saying it's because of the Wi-Fi because we don't know yet, but I've pretty much eliminated every other possible source."

The Simcoe County school board could not be reached for comment Friday because their offices were closed.

The parents group has offered to pay for wired connections if the board switches off the Wi-Fi, Palmer said.

"They didn't even say no," he said. "They ignored it and … reaffirmed their position supporting Wi-Fi.

"They are culpable and … they have the gall to go on the record and say they haven't had any doctor's notes. Well what doctor has been schooled about the rate of microwave infections?"

Susan Clarke, a former research consultant to the Harvard School of Public Health, said Wi-Fi technology alters fundamental physiological functioning and can cause neurological and cardiac symptoms.
Young kids most susceptible

"We have the physics that show that children, especially young children, are going to absorb much more radiation than older children and adults because of their thinner skulls and because the size of their brains more closely approximates the size of the wavelength being deployed," Clarke said.

Wireless technology also wastes energy, is less secure than wired connections, could be violating a student's right to a safe environment and should be turned off in schools, Clarke added.

"The simple solution is plug back in the wired, ported system that's already there and unplug the wireless," she said. "It's real easy and it costs nothing. In fact, it will save money."

Professor Magda Havas of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont., who does research on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation, issued an open letter to parents and boards saying she is "increasingly concerned" about Wi-Fi and cellphone use at schools.

Claims by Health Canada that Wi-Fi is safe provided exposures to radiation are below federal guidelines are "outdated and incorrect," based on the growing number of scientific publications reporting adverse health and biological effects, Havas wrote.

"It is irresponsible to introduce Wi-Fi microwave radiation into a school environment where young children and school employees spend hours each day."

The Ontario Ministry of Education said it has heard from the parents in Simcoe County and received a complaint passed along from a Peterborough family worried about Wi-Fi in schools. But the ministry said it is up to local school boards to deal with the issue.

"The boards, the principals and the teachers should work together to address those concerns," said ministry spokeswoman Erin Moroz.

The provincial New Democrats said they too had been hearing from parents worried about the effects of wireless technology on children, and called on the chief medical officer of health to investigate.

"Within a few months of Wi-Fi being installed, stories start coming forward with kids complaining about headaches, neurological effects, loss of balance and problems with fine motor skills," said NDP health critic France Gelinas.

"There is enough anecdotal evidence from parents that this is worth looking into."

Palmer plans to find alternate schools or even home school his two children this fall if the board doesn't agree to turn off the Wi-Fi and said other parents will likely follow suit if the symptoms return.

"If they're going to continue to endanger the health of children, I can predict that many of the parents who are now writing us saying their kids have been fine all summer are going to have a change of heart about the third week of September when their kids are coming home from school with these problems, particularly the ones that are passing out and falling down, hitting their head on the gym floor," he said.

While parents worry about younger children, concerns about the health effects of wireless technology prompted Lakehead University to virtually ban Wi-Fi from its campuses in Thunder Bay, Ont., and Orillia, Ont.

"There will be no Wi-Fi connectivity provided in those areas of the university already served by hard wire connectivity until such time as the potential health effects have been scientifically rebutted or there are adequate protective measures that can be taken," says Lakehead's policy on Wi-Fi and cellular antennas.

Source: Yahoo News

A man's dream to keep his roost atop a gold mine has been buried by a Quebec judge.

Ken Masse's childhood house is the last obstacle standing in the way of a multibillion-dollar mining project in the town of Malartic. But he has refused to budge.

Masse, 35, balked at lucrative offers for his mother's home and stared down an expropriation order, even after the neighbourhood was transformed from residential area to wasteland.

But Masse's stance buckled Tuesday under a Superior Court judge's order that awarded Osisko Mining Corp. possession of the property.

Osisko warns that Masse now has until Monday to get out.

In his ruling, Justice Robert Dufresne wrote that Masse's house is holding back key preparation work for the mining project, set to exploit one of Canada's largest gold reserves.

The former Malartic municipal councillor, who has been representing his mother, said he turned down a $350,000 offer from Osisko for his $14,000 house.

According to court documents, the family had been seeking $1 million from the mining company.

Now they will receive market-level compensation determined by a provincial tribunal in exchange for the home. Osisko must also provide additional sums to help defray the costs of moving.

The reclusive, thick-bearded man has said his fight wasn't about money, but about protecting property rights and the environment from a massive open-pit mine.

Supporters of the project, including Malartic's mayor, say Osisko will bring tax revenue and jobs to the declining mining town located about 550 kilometres northwest of Montreal.

Mayor Andre Vezeau hopes the ruling means the town of 3,500 can finally turn the page and get to work.

"Most people find it a shame that Mr. Masse is left with so little when he could have had so much more," Vezeau said in an interview Wednesday.

"We are disappointed that it came to this — we would have preferred that it be resolved on friendlier terms."

Vezeau expects Masse and his mother, Mary Elizabeth Wilczynski, to get little more than market value for the 70-year-old, two-floor house.

Masse was the lone holdout from a relocation project that saw Osisko buy out 204 of 205 homeowners in his neighbourhood, which literally sits on top of the deposit.

Many of the houses were moved to another part of town, while others were destroyed.

His ramshackle house sits alone in a grey landscape of rock and sand as the mining project closes around it.

Masse had been scheduled to appear in court next month to fight a government expropriation order, but the date was moved up after Osisko requested an emergency court decision.

Locals believe Masse's curious showdown with the mining company was due in large part to the influence of a fast-talking, self-proclaimed billionaire named Rejean Aucoin.

Aucoin, described by the family as an adviser, was at the centre of a bizarre courtroom incident Monday that was outlined in the judge's decision.

When proceedings began, Dufresne told Aucoin, who is not a lawyer, he had to sit in the courtroom area reserved for the public.

The judge wrote that Aucoin continuously interrupted the court, giving directives to Masse and Wilczynski.

Aucoin was eventually escorted out of the courtroom by security guards.

On his way out, he told Masse and Wilczynski to follow him without presenting their arguments — and they did.

"The Court deplores the departure of Ms. Wilczynski and Mr. Masse," Dufresne wrote in the 12-page decision.

"The Court will not be taken hostage by parties that refuse to submit their arguments."

Neither Aucoin nor Masse could be reached for comment Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for Osisko says the company had been trying to reach a deal with the Masse family for the last three years.

Now, Helene Thibault says they have to be out of the house before 8:45 a.m. on Monday.

"It's unfortunate for both sides to end up in court, in front of a judge, to solve the problem," she said from Malartic.

"But we are satisfied with the judgment."

Masse, who quit his council post last year in protest over the mine, has since isolated himself from most people in town.

Guy Morrissette, the only municipal councillor to oppose the mining project with Masse, wonders how the court decision will affect his former colleague's mental well-being.

"I don't know how he's going to react, that has always worried me — he's so wrapped up in this case," said Morrissette, who had concerns about how quickly the project was approved.

"I know I'm not the only one who's worried."

Still, Morrissette never doubted this day would come.

"It was a question of time," he said.

Housing in Canada is seen by most as money in the bank, but that equity can quickly evaporate, and from all the indicators that I've been looking at for the last several months, the decline is now underway...


Source: The Greater Fool

...Perhaps the greatest financial irresponsibility of this generation was to give hundreds of thousands of people with little money billions of dollars at rates which will reset 200% or 300% higher. This alone is reason to believe we are headed for a multi-year housing melt.

Slagging sales and rising listings now, price crumbles by Christmas, desperate sellers in 2011, vultures in 2012, then three years of mortgage renewals as VRM victims meet interest rate reality. If you think there’ll be housing bargains in a year or two, just wait for 2014. You’ll be able to buy houses and write the womenfolk into the offer.

But perhaps I’m a tad conservative. I received this note hours ago from a guy who was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan, chopping toxic mortgage paper at the height of the US housing bubble:

“Straight from the horse’s mouth, the Toronto Real Estate Board, Toronto prices in May averaged $446K, and in the first two weeks of July they’ve crashed down to $427K, putting Toronto prices on a pace to hit $340,000 in 1 years time— but in my experience, the acceleration of the downward trajectory will increase exponentially once the mortgage holders attempt to get out of their mortgages. I foresee prices breaking below $400K by Christmas, and then a steady progression towards below $300K for most of 2011.

He continues: “Canada will see the same housing crisis as the States has been, and for the naysayers, must I remind them that Canada did and does have subprime mortgages— 0/40 & 5/35 mortgages (with the 5% downpayment amortized across the mortgage essentially resulting in 0-down mortgages), artificially and historically unprecedented interest rates, and a general mentality that Canada is different, that housing prices can only go up. But we all know how that ended in the States. In Spain. In Australia. In Japan. In Ireland.”

Yesterday US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke rattled markets when he told Congress the American economy faces “unusually uncertain prospects.” That spoiled a perfectly good stock rally, sank our dollar and dashed hope that recent bad economic news was a fluke. The reality is sinking in that even after tanking interest rates to zero, paying people to buy houses, bailing out whole industries and spending $1.5 trillion buying back crappy mortgages and government bonds, Washington is stymied.

Now I mention these things because you should know them. Most people don’t. They’re busy buying Capri pants and riding mowers.

Credit’s been so easy to come by in our society, so normal and accepted, so routine and innocuous, that we’re now addicted. Using other people’s money to buy houses cars and plasma TVs has made us immune to the fact we don’t generate enough ourselves, that we’re living beyond our means.

...

The housing market, and the Canadian middle class, is at serious risk. There’ll be no job-filled recovery here while the US stumbles. No chance mortgage rates will ever sink back below 2%. No planes full of rich Chinese or Iranian greater fools to save us. Instead, next year’s headlines will be about negative equity and the TV casts will feature first-time sellers stunned they’re losing everything.

This is the pornography of debt, thanks to the lust for houses.

Source: The Tyee

Just two weeks ago the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development abruptly cancelled a big report on the tar sands and the project's extreme water impacts. The parliamentarians even destroyed draft copies of their final report.

After listening to testimony from scores of scientists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, aboriginal chiefs and environmental groups, the committee dropped the whole affair like a bucket of tar. (For the record, the Alberta government, a petro-state with Saudi visions of grandeur, refused to show up and testify.)

Killing reports paid for by Canadian taxpayers on a $200-billion backyard development is not the sort of behavior one associates with a "responsible energy producer," but there you have it. While federal panjandrums argue that the tar sands may be key to our economic prosperity, our politicians couldn't put aside their partisan views long enough to complete a national report on the project's formidable water liabilities.

Fortunately, civilians can do what politicians can't. In the interests of accountability and transparency, I read through 300 pages of evidence and pulled out the sort of uncomfortable revelations that Ottawa doesn't want U.S. oil customers, industry investors or Canadian taxpayers to know.

The evidence, of course, all points to one embarrassing conclusion: Ottawa has managed its mandate in the tar sands as irresponsibly as the U.S. Mineral Management Services oversaw the safety of deep sea drilling in the Gulf.

Failing to regulate

Let's begin with the sorry testimony of federal regulators. They all agreed that Environment Canada has responsibilities in the tar sands under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the Species at Risk Act, the Migratory Bird Convention and the Fisheries Act.

But nobody appears to be standing on guard. Even though Environment Canada has a clear mandate to protect fish from tar sands pollutants, the agency has completed but one fish study on an industrial development with a geographical footprint larger than 20 Calgaries or 17 Denvers.*

Fred Wrona, Environment Canada's acting director general for Water Science and Technology, even admitted that a 2003 study found that oil-sand pollutants did indeed poison wild fish. "Beyond that, we have actually done no additional in-field studies looking at fish health effects." Incredible.

...

But two University of Waterloo scientists, who study tailings pollution and groundwater for living, gave evidence proving that Environment Canada was out to lunch. James Barker, an earth science professor at the University of Waterloo, testified that the tailing ponds do leak and seep. In particular "seepage of process affected water is occurring from the (Suncor's) Tar Island dike into the sediments of the Athabasca River" at a rate of 67 litres per second.

Moreover the risk of more toxic seepage from the expanding tailing ponds into groundwater would escalate as mining projects increase bitumen production. "Newer oil sands tailings operations are forced really by geography to be located closer to or on top of sandy aquifers... the risk of local groundwater contamination is fairly high."

...

The view from downstream

Everyone living downstream from the project (more than 40,000 people) bitterly told the committee that the federal government had repeatedly neglected its duties. Chief Bill Erasmus, regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations for the Northwest Territories, called for an immediate halt to tar sands expansion until the government prepared emergency plans in case of catastrophic breaches in some 20 tailing ponds. (At least one is as large as the Aswan Dam on the Nile River.) He also called for a dry tailing process as well as a 10-year plan to immediately clean up six billion barrels of mining waste in the region.

Michael Miltenberger, environment and natural resources minister for the Northwest Territories, wondered why the federal government had abandoned the Mackenzie River Basin Transboundary Waters Master Agreement. After 25 years of negotiations ,the federal government, four provinces and two territories finally agreed to protect the world's third largest watershed in 1997. But ever since the world's largest energy project started to fill up Ottawa coffers, the federal government ignored an agreement.

...

A very bad report

So there you have it: some of the dismal evidence that the federal government didn't want to share with the world. The facts show that Canadian regulators have not behaved responsibly, honorably or prudently.

Ottawa has squandered surface and groundwater resources in the region.

It has failed to collect baseline data making the project both unsafe and insecure.

The ponds are leaking and the project is polluting the river.

The federal government has failed to issue national standards for regulating tar-sands pollutants such as naphthenic acids.

It, too, has neglected to transparently monitor water quality and quantity in the world's third largest watershed.

This evidence partly explains why the committee destroyed its final report. Tory MPs that behave like wannabe bitumen salesmen explain the rest.

Linda Duncan, an NDP MP who served on the querulous committee studying water and bitumen, promises to soon write her own report. Francis Scarpaleggia, the vice chair and Liberal MP, says he'll do the same.

But what stuns Duncan (and should anger every blue-blooded Canadian) is simply this: "The federal government has failed to properly regulate the oil sands and in so doing they've put the resource at risk."

Isn't that what corrupt U.S. oil regulators did in the Gulf?

The naked shorting in the metals market means that there is far more paper silver and gold than there is physical. For those looking to exit paper certificates and take possession of the physical the lesson from the story below might just be that the ability to make that transaction may be drawing to a close. The explosion in the metals market resulting from this long held practice of naked shorting, if not contained by some form of heavy handed state intervention, will cause tremors worldwide while bringing collapse to the institutions involved in this ongoing fraud.


Source: The Globe and Mail

In the end, nothing else would do for Scotiabank but that Amar Patel – 73 years old, bald from chemotherapy, in the throes of metastatic breast cancer – should drag her aching bones down to the bank’s head office in downtown Toronto.

The trip from her airy apartment above the Indian Rice Factory, the landmark restaurant she founded in 1970 and has run ever since, was an agony of no fewer than five transfers – from the hospital bed in her living room to a commode, from commode to the chair lift for the first set of stairs, from that chair to the next chair lift for the second set, from that chair to a walker, from walker to the car.

This exercise took 59 minutes and the best efforts of her son Aman, daughter-in-law Deepa and restaurant employee Chandan Sindhwal.

I should note that despite her illness and pain, Mrs. Patel, who hadn’t been out of the apartment for almost two months, was gracious, beautiful in a red-striped caftan and, but for occasional moans when the car hit a rough patch of road, remarkably uncomplaining.

All she wanted was to do was take delivery of the silver the bank was holding for her in the form of the certificates she’d bought decades earlier.

It was, or ought to have been, an uncomplicated transaction.

Another major financial institution, TD Bank, managed to handle the same transaction within a couple of days, and delivered the bullion to Mrs. Patel’s local branch for pickup.

By this Thursday, Mrs. Patel had done the following to obtain Scotiabank’s agreement to give her what is rightfully hers:

In early March, Aman, a Toronto criminal lawyer, had attended the downtown headquarters to explain his mom’s situation. He suggested that either a bank official go to her apartment to witness her signature (he even offered to pick up and drive back the official) or consider meeting his mother in the car outside the bank to save her a bit of the journey: Both requests were rejected.

On March 17, Aman faxed the silver certificates to his mom’s local Scotiabank branch and then drove his mother there; they were advised she would have to attend the King/Bay office downtown.

For a time, Mrs. Patel gave up; she was hoping she could tackle it in a few weeks or months, when she was better and had her strength back.

When that didn’t happen, she hired a Bay Street lawyer and, through him, signed a power of attorney appointing Aman as her attorney.

In early July, Scotiabank asked first to “pre-inspect” the POA, then demanded the original; then pronounced it unacceptable because it wasn’t sealed; then insisted that a notarized copy, with covering letter from the lawyer, be produced; finally, the notarized POA had to be submitted to the home branch, then the bank’s legal department.

Even with these various approvals finally in place, Aman was told (being a lawyer, he has notes of all these conversations and e-mails) that the bank could still deny the transaction if it was deemed not to be in Mrs. Patel’s “best interest.”

So she hired another lawyer, this time to help her get what was hers.

Then the bank said it had to decide if the transaction was to be for the benefit of the attorney, from a business point of view. In other words, Scotiabank would decide if the transaction made business sense – not Mrs. Patel, or her lawyer, or Aman, who had her POA.

This Thursday, having heard nothing from the bank about whether it would honour the now-approved and vetted POA, Aman called and got Judy McBride, the head of customer service at King and Bay Streets. She told him the bank would not honour the POA, and that Mrs. Patel had to come down in person.

Aman again explained how weak his mother was, to no avail.

That afternoon, Aman, his wife and Chandan managed to carry out the five transfers and get Mrs. Patel in the car.

Once they arrived downtown, Aman went in to ask, one last time, if Scotiabank would at least dispatch people outside to do the signing in the car; absolutely not, came the answer.

They got Mrs. Patel into the commode chair and into the lovely, high-ceilinged headquarters with its polished marble floors they went.

Ms. McBride asked a number of questions, in my presence. Among them, “Do you understand what this transaction is that is taking place? We’re taking your certificates and giving you the actual bullion? Why would you want to do that? It’s more difficult for you to cart around.”

At this point, Aman’s seemingly endless store of patience was exhausted and he said, mildly I thought in the circumstances, “That’s none of your business.”

Ms. McBride said that it was, that “simply putting a POA in place doesn’t give carte blanche,” that the bank had a responsibility too, and asked Mrs. Patel, “Why would you need the physical metal?”

Ms. McBride said the bank “reserves a right to ask questions” because, she said, “We need a comfort level.”

Bank spokesman Joe Konecny denied the bank ever insisted Mrs. Patel had to come in person, said they were “willing to act” on the POA, but that “a heightened level of due diligence was required for a number of reasons,” among them, bizarrely, that the transaction wasn’t initiated at her home branch, although that branch had directed her downtown.

In any case, after about an hour, Mrs. Patel finally got her silver.

But it must have been a mortifying experience for this very dignified woman to make such a trip in her bedclothes, and the whole thing struck me as a profoundly condescending and arbitrary intrusion of bank functionaries into Mrs. Patel’s and her family’s business. And what if her son wasn’t a lawyer who knew how to fight back? What if she’d had a stroke and wasn’t able to sign the documents?

This type of revenue creation is akin to state cannibalism. Nobody ends up winning in the end.

Source: CBC

The BC Lottery Corporation's expanded online gambling website PlayNow.com crashed hours after its launch Thursday due to overwhelming popular demand, an official says.

Michael Graydon, president of the corporation, said the casino site saw so much traffic it had to be closed for maintenance.

"It's been an overwhelming success with people in British Columbia to the point where we hit 100 per cent capacity in the first day," Graydon said Friday.

"So we decided to close the site down for a half a day, add some new hardware and servers to the system to be able to accommodate it. We're in the process of doing that. Our IT people are working very hard to get it up and running."

Billed as the first government-sanctioned online casino in North America, the site was immediately controversial.

The expanded site was relaunched by B.C. Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman on Thursday morning.

Coleman said the expanded site will include casino games, bingo, sports, lotteries and other games, with the aim of generating about $100 million in revenue.

The government says it will help raise money for education, social programs and health care by capturing gambling revenue that would normally flow to illegal offshore gambling websites.

But NDP house leader Mike Farnworth doesn't like the BCLC's plans to lure people to the site with offers of free money.

According to the website, everybody who signs up gets $10 to gamble with, and anyone who spends $100 before the end of August gets another $100 free.



"No one says, 'Why don't you pop into a B.C. liquor store and we'll give you a free case of beer.' I don't think they should be offering incentives for people to go try online gaming," said Farnworth.

I'm not sure what natural health products have to do with recycling hazardous materials?(!)


Source: The Toronto Star

Checking her receipt as she left a downtown Canadian Tire, Chris Colorado noticed a new charge.

Her $1.99 bottle of dish soap was accompanied by a 13-cent “eco fee.”

The levy for thousands of new products, from pharmaceuticals to fire extinguishers, quietly came into effect July 1, the same day as the harmonized sales tax.

But unlike that tax, provincial agencies have done little to publicize the new fees, catching consumers like Colorado by surprise.

“I’ve never heard anything about this fee. No one’s talking about it,” she said. “The fact they just put it without us knowing, I don’t think it’s honest. I don’t like it.”

Manufacturers must pay the province a levy for recycling their products. Some companies are passing these costs, ranging from a few cents to several dollars per product, onto consumers.

Stewardship Ontario, the agency overseeing the eco fees, began its $2.5 million public education campaign at the beginning of the month, which consists of posters and radio spots, as well as a group which tours public events and provides information about the program.

“We would rather spend the money to educate people than to spend the money months ahead to say, ‘Hey, there’s a new eco fee coming,’ ” said spokeswoman Amanda Harper Sevonty.

“Our message to consumers isn’t about the eco fees. Our message to consumers is about here are the materials and what to do with them.”

==

What gets the fee:
All aerosol containers, from paint to hairspray.
Rechargeable batteries, as well as non-lead acid motive batteries.
Corrosives and irritants, such as household bleaches, drain cleaners and detergents.
Assorted toxic, flammable and reactive products.
Syringes and needles.
Pharmaceuticals for humans and pets, including prescription medicine, over-the-counter drugs and natural health products.
Fluorescent tubes and bulbs.
Fire extinguishers.

==

By clicking the makethedrop.ca website and inserting their postal codes, residents can find which products they can recycle and where the closest collection site is located. There are 92 special disposal sites across the province.

Some retailers and consumers, however, say the silence has hurt the cause. If the consumers don’t know of the fees before they buy the item, they won’t know what to do with the waste.

When the first round of products was levied in 2008, Len McAuley was given a sign explaining the fees to customers at Pollock’s Home Hardware on Roncesvalles Ave.

“With this second phase, they haven’t sent us anything,” he said. “Basically, the list is getting longer. The government’s not communicating to the public.”

The fees now cover all aerosol containers from hairspray to whipped cream, pharmaceuticals, syringes, mercury-containing devices and other toxic, corrosive or flammable products.

The start date of the new levies was set when the program came into effect two years ago and by coincidence fell on the same day as the HST launch, Harper Sevonty said.

Clayton Thomas-Müller eloquently sums up the nature of the beast when he refers to Canada as an "energy colony of the worlds largest military power". When I made a trip into northern Ontario this year I spoke at length with some of the locals who described to me the changing face of natural resource exploitation and what is clearly a quickening of the pace towards complete privatization of Canada's most precious timber and mineral deposits. The economic devastation in these northernmost regions is obvious, the result of years of buy-outs, closings, and takeovers as American and foreign multinationals purchase access and siphon all profit out of the region. European logging companies who are restricted in their own nations from clear cutting vast swaths of forest set up shop in order to take advantage of Canada's lax environmental standards, leaving communities bereft when these companies, with little concern for long term sustainability, exhaust one region and head to the next, leaving only destruction in their wake.

The tars sands of northern Alberta are one such example of Canada's policy of corporate plunder to the detriment of the local population, and some might even say to the global population as a result of climate disruption. The sheer scale of devastation that results from the processing of this tar can only be the reflection of a deeply ignorant and power driven political class, who have facilitated and endorsed the expansion of what is referred to as a 'national sacrifice area', which happens to be the largest and most egregious single episode of energy related ecological disruption the world has ever seen, aside perhaps from the oil and gas volcano now erupting in the Gulf of Mexico.


Source: Democracy Now

A group of lawmakers are calling on the Obama administration to take a closer look at the significant environmental impacts of a proposed massive pipeline that would carry Canadian tar sands oil 2,000 miles from northern Alberta all the way down to refineries in Texas and tankers off the Gulf Coast. Tar sands mining emits three times more greenhouse gas pollution than traditional oil and has come under heavy criticism from environmental and indigenous groups. Democracy Now!’s Mike Burke speaks to Clayton Thomas-Müller, a Canadian indigenous activist with the Indigenous Environmental Network.