Quotulatiousness

October 20, 2011

This is why you don’t want to be a wine importer in Ontario

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

In the lastest issue of the Ontario Wine Review, Michael Pinkus explains the 16-point process that all independent wine and liquor importers have to follow in order to get their products into customers’ hands:

Recently I received an email from an agent giving a blow by blow account of the process of getting booze onto the shelf of our beloved Monopoly, including the hair pulling and gnashing of teeth that goes along with it.

[. . .]

“I can take samples to the Licensees — Restaurants & Hotels — and if they want to buy it this is the procedure:

1) They must purchase a minimum of one full case
2) They must pay the LCBO a 25% deposit
3) If I want to reduce the freight rate down from $100+ per case to a reasonable freight rate . . . more like $12/case then I need to gather a minimum of 20 cases in orders with specific Licensees names on them who have all paid the deposit.
4) The LCBO Private Ordering department then processes the paperwork
5) The producer would then ship the product to an LCBO pick-up location
6) We wait until the LCBO consolidates our small order into a large container with other suppliers
7) The product usually takes 4 months to arrive and then spends another month going through Lab Analysis at a cost to the supplier of $175 per product.
8) When the product finally gets released we have to hope that the original licensees that ordered it all take delivery
9) The producer gets paid 60 – 90 days after the order lands in Ontario (while the agent pays to get it out of the Private Ordering warehouse).
10) The agent then has to chase the customer for at least 90 days to get them to pay since they will likely have an excuse not to have a cheque ready upon delivery
11) We have to do this for a total a 300 cases sold within one year to EARN the privilege of getting into the Consignment warehouse.
12) Once granted consignment space . . . we can start to ship from the producer to the LCBO consignment warehouse by the pallet (~56 cases)
13) In consignment, the product can be shipped without an advanced licensee order . . . but still must sell by the case to customers.
14) The producer gets paid once ALL of the order is sold through: 120 – 240 days later.
15) If the product does not sell through within 120 days of arrival then the LCBO confiscates the remaining order, discounts it, and puts it into a sale warehouse.
16) This frees up more space back in the consignment warehouse so that they can trap more agents into over-shipping and then the LCBO can punish them for trying to treat Ontario like a free enterprise liquor system.

Oh, and if the LCBO decides to add your product to their regular merchandise, you’ll be out of luck as it’ll probably sell for less than you can (and your hotel and restaurant customers are paying for exclusivity in a lot of cases, so they’ll stop ordering through you if it’s available in the LCBO retail stores).

October 19, 2011

Selley: Milewski is right on Tories’ “tough on crime” policies

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Chris Selley can’t be accused of being a Terry Milewski fan, but he does agree with Milewski’s message:

The CBC recently sent Terry Milewski to Texas, the blood and guts state, where he asked conservative politicians and various experts what they thought of building more prisons, and filling them up, as a means of driving down crime. “Don’t,” was the basic answer. “It doesn’t work. That’s why we’re doing the opposite.”

It was a nice piece on a serious policy issue. It reminded us that the federal government seems to consider crime legislation inside a hermetically sealed chamber. But for that very reason, nothing any journalist says is likely to make any difference. If contrary evidence carried any weight in Cabinet, the omnibus tough-on-crime bill, C-10, wouldn’t be before Parliament. The fact that elites recoil at its provisions and spew champagne out of their noses is a feature, not a bug.

And, if I may briefly adopt the voice of a partisan blogger, the mainstream media would denounce the law of gravity if it somehow helped the Liberals (or the NDP, depending what day it is). The CBC, in the memorable words of Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, “lies all the time.” And Mr. Milewski, as we all know, chairs the left-wing media conspiracy.

This is not an ideal policy-making environment. But I’m going to try to change minds on a single, narrow, easily fixable issue: Mandatory minimum sentences for non-serious crimes. I can’t see any level on which they are supportable.

Supreme Court rules that linking to defamatory material is not libel

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

The Supreme Court of Canada makes the common sense ruling:

Hyperlinking to defamatory material on the internet does not constitute publishing the defamatory material itself, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Wednesday.

The ruling will alleviate fears that holding someone liable for how they use hyperlinks on websites, personal ones or others, could cast a chill on internet use.

The responsible use of the internet and how traditional defamation law applies to modern technologies were at issue in this case, which was watched closely by media organizations and civil liberties groups.

How someone can protect their reputation in the internet age when content is passed around with the quick click of a button was also considered in the case. On social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, users often share links, and the court’s ruling could have dramatically disrupted that function had it gone the other way.

In its unanimous decision, the court said a hyperlink, by itself, should never be considered “publication” of the content to which it refers. But that doesn’t mean internet users shouldn’t be careful about how they present links. The court says that if someone presents content from the hyperlinked material in a way that repeats the defamatory content, they can be considered publishers and are therefore at risk of being sued for defamation.

October 18, 2011

Sable Island becomes Canada’s newest national park

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:46

Canada’s newest national park is a tiny dot of sand out in the Atlantic:

It is just a long, slender, green-bean of a thing, but this dune off the cold coast of Nova Scotia is anything but a harmless strip of sand. Its swirling waters are known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, for they have swallowed 350 ships since 1583. Its underwater Scotian Shelf hosts 18 shark species who feast on the island’s grey seals.

The island is tall and narrow — 40-km in length, and only 1.5-km in width — and its body is held together by a skeleton of beach grass that traps the sand granules and the pirate wreckage buried within. Hundreds of untamed horses run wild, their matted manes unruly in the blustering wind where the Labrador current collides with the warm gulf stream and breeds thick fog.

This is Sable Island, a crescent-shaped mass roughly 300 kilometres out to sea. On Monday, Sable Island was formally named a Canadian national park reserve to ensure, the environment minister said in a statement, that the “iconic” and “fabled” island will be protected for all time.

[. . .]

Now that Sable Island is a national park, rigs are prohibited within one nautical mile of its shores, and its surface will never again be drilled. Some fear the new distinction will spur tourism and threaten the island, but Ms. Hirtle said resources are so scarce that she does not foresee a “Sable Island Club Med.”

October 16, 2011

“We have reached a point where the average earnings of a two income family can barely support the spending of government”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Canadians have an addiction problem. They’re addicted to government:

Consider the following:

  • The Government of Saskatchewan alone spent over $11 billion last year (April 2010 to March 2011) to provide services for its citizens. That works out to nearly $11,000 for every man, woman, and child in the province, or $44,000 for a family of four.
  • The average wage for a person in Saskatchewan is about $44,000/year.
  • If the provincial government relied solely on the income tax of its citizens, then a family of four would have no choice but to have both parents work . . . one to provide for the family and one to provide for the government.

Now consider what other levels of government spend.

  • At the municipal level, the City of Regina has an operating budget of about $2500/person. Federally, the Government of Canada spends about $8,000/person.
  • All together our three levels of Government spend over $21,000/person . . . or $84,000 for a family of four.

We have reached a point where the average earnings of a two income family can barely support the spending of government . . . let alone pay for food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their children.

The reality is that “free” public services come with a cost . . . and these costs increase as we demand more “free” stuff.

One of the truths about addictions is that they require larger and larger “hits” . . . that provide ever smaller and smaller “highs”. This results in people either becoming so dependent on the substance that they cannot function without it . . . or they pursue the addiction to its ultimate conclusion, an overdose.

H/T to Katewerk for the link.

Rick Mercer on the (secret) border security negotiations

Filed under: Cancon, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

The argument for value-added taxes

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

In an article about the Canadian copy-cat protests, Mike Moffatt addresses some of the demands to increase taxes on the wealthy and explains why value-added taxes (like the much-hated Harmonized Sales Tax) are more efficient:

The Occupy Canada protests which began Saturday took place in over a dozen cities with mostly modest turnouts. They also lacked a cohesive goal or message, as their critics in the media are fond of pointing out. The protests did, however, address a number of important societal issues, such as the growing gap between the rich and the poor. As has been acknowledged by both Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, rising income inequality in Canada is a real and legitimate concern.

Over the last 30 years, the income gap between the top 1 per cent (or more accurately, the top 0.1 per cent) and the rest of us has increased substantially. Furthermore, this inequality is growing faster in Canada than it is in most other countries, including the United States. The Conference Board of Canada has reported that Canada has fallen to 12th out of 17 countries in its peer group when it comes to income inequal-ity. Between 1980 and 2005, before tax earnings increased by 16 per cent for the top 20 per cent, but fell by over 20 per cent for the bottom 20 per cent. The Occupy Canada protests are the product of a rising tide only lifting a few boats.

[. . .]

So how do we reduce inequality? The obvious place to start would be to borrow solutions from countries where after-tax income inequality is relatively low. Three countries that consistently score well on income inequality measures are Denmark, Finland and Sweden. These three Nordic countries share very similar tax structures, featuring moderate-to-low marginal corporate tax rates, moderate-to-high income tax rates and very high value added sales tax rates (VATs, similar to Ontario’s HST). The average VAT in these three countries is 25 per cent, a rate nearly twice that of the average Canadian federal GST plus provincial sales tax or HST. A onepercentage-point increase in the HST alone would raise $5 billion to $6 billion per year for the federal government, so increases by a few percentage points could adequately fund programs designed to reduce inequality. No country on Earth has been able to find a way to fund the kind of social programs and redistribution needed for “reasonable” levels of inequality without VAT rates significantly higher than Ontario’s HST.

Why are high sales taxes needed to fund social programs rather than higher corporate taxes or higher income taxes? Put simply, VATs are the hardest taxes to avoid paying. Higher income taxes reduce labour effort by the taxed. Higher corporate tax rates reduce investment. Canada’s corporate income tax rate was, not so long ago, twice what it is today. Adjusted for the inflation and the size of the economy, however, the higher corporate tax rates brought in similar levels of revenue then as they do now. There are some ways to avoid the HST, of course, but these are far more limited than they are for other taxes. The HST, as with all VATs, is a cash cow that provides governments with the necessary resources to tackle important societal issues.

October 15, 2011

The secret way Supreme Court justices are appointed

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Christie Blatchford isn’t a fan of the secret and convoluted way that our Supreme Court is staffed:

According to the latest serious rumour, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson are poised to make two appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The two will be chosen from a secret short list of six names produced by an all-party selection committee which whittled down a bigger secret list (given to them by the Justice Minister after his officials mysteriously came up with what is believed to have been 12 names) and only after consultation with unnamed officials from provincial law societies and law schools and unnamed senior judges.

[. . .]

The lack of openness is a particular concern with the Supreme Court, which, as has been evident recently, and even in its current ostensibly non-activist form, is plenty activist about telling government when it is wrong.

I refer of course to the Insite decision, which effectively told the federal government, particularly the former health minister Tony Clement, that its policy against this particular supervised injection site was arbitrary, ill-conceived and violated drug users’ rights to “life, liberty and security of the person” as defined by the Charter of Rights.

As it happens, in the end I reluctantly concurred with the result (that Insite stays open), but there’s no getting away from the bottom line that a group of unelected judges over-ruled the elected government and effectively legislated policy, albeit in a specific case.

[. . .]

Canadians are comforted by the fact ours isn’t like the American system, where presidential appointments to the Supreme Court have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate (such an unseemly business, such a circus) and where, o! the horror, some lower-court judges actually run for office.

How is it better to have kings emerge from a secretive inside-baseball process, for all we know involving a witches’ chants and eye of newt, than to vote for them?

October 14, 2011

Harper back-pedals promises to adjust number of seats in the Commons

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

Quebec once again demonstrates that you don’t have to have many of your MPs in the government benches to “wag the dog” about representation in the House of Commons:

Fears of a Quebec backlash have delayed the Harper government’s plan to give the growing parts of Canada a larger share of seats in the House of Commons.

As a result, the changes the Tories promised in the spring campaign may not be in place in time for the 2015 election, leaving millions of voters once again underrepresented in Parliament.

The bill to change the way seats are allocated, which would give Ontario an expected 18 additional MPs, British Columbia seven and Alberta five, aims to redress the severe shortage of seats in large and growing urban areas.

But the Conservatives are still grappling with the fact that the change would disadvantage Quebec, which it continues to court despite being virtually shut out there in May. The province has 23 per cent of Canada’s population and 24 per cent of the seats in the House, but its share would fall to 22 per cent under the new formula. The NDP, which achieved a breakthrough there in the election, and many Quebec politicians vehemently oppose the plan.

October 13, 2011

Canadian liberty: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

Karen Selick reports on a recent court decision that shows just how far Canadians’ liberties are constrained by the judiciary:

Dairy farmer Michael Schmidt has been campaigning to legalize the sale of raw (unpasteurized) milk for 17 years. In 2010, he was acquitted on 19 charges by a justice of the peace who ruled that “cow sharing” was a legitimate way to provide raw milk to informed consumers who don’t live on farms.

On Sept. 28, a judge reversed portions of that decision and found Schmidt guilty on 13 charges.

But the judge ventured beyond the subject of raw milk, saying: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right.”

The implications are far reaching. If the judge is right about this, future courts could similarly declare that you have no right to eat meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, vegetables or grains, even if government approved. In short, you may have no right to eat anything at all.

[. . .]

In one very technical sense, the courts’ statements are accurate: There is no specific reference to milk, or indeed, any food in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the U.S. Bill of Rights. But both documents are equally silent about any right to get out of bed in the morning, to stretch, to brush your teeth, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes. If constitutions had to enumerate every single thing that North Americans normally consider themselves free to do, they would be a zillion pages long.

Instead, the people who drafted these constitutional documents used a simple shortcut to eliminate the zillion pages. They said that people had the right to liberty.

The Charter was, after all, designed to rein in government, not to rein in individuals. It did not purport to grant us our rights or freedoms; rather, it recognized that those freedoms already existed. It guarantees in its very first section that the state may not infringe on our freedoms except by “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

October 12, 2011

“There is no off-the-shelf exam [that can] detect sociopathic killers”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Michael Friscolanti explains how former Colonel Russell Williams managed to avoid coming to the attention of the police for so long:

An elite officer who piloted prime ministers and the Queen—and oversaw the country’s largest air force base—was doubling as a depraved sexual predator who somehow managed to ascend the ranks without a whiff of suspicion. Grasping for an explanation, the Canadian Forces launched an “immediate review” of the way candidates are selected for senior command positions—and whether enhanced psychological testing might have revealed the real Russ Williams.

The answer, sadly, is no. Among hundreds of pages of internal military documents, obtained by Maclean’s under the Access to Information Act, is a draft version of that review. It confirms what leading experts have long maintained: there is no off-the-shelf exam that employers, armed forces or otherwise, can use to detect sociopathic killers. “Given the recent events in CFB Trenton, it is natural for the CF to question whether or not the organization could have identified a sexual sadist or predicted that an individual would become a serial sexual murderer,” the report says. But that “would be unrealistic to expect.”

Every recruit is subject to various levels of screening, including a criminal records check and an aptitude test. Members also undergo an annual evaluation that assesses past performance and potential for promotion. To be considered for senior command (colonels in the army and air force; captains in the navy), an officer’s file must be “thoroughly reviewed” and endorsed by a board of superiors who examine “personal characteristics, demonstrated leadership ability, education and professional development.” Nothing in Williams’s file, an impeccable 23-year career, offered the slightest hint of his alter ego.

The “Ontario education system [is] a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Stephen Gordon explains why Ontario’s two parallel school systems are helping to prove the efficacy of school choice:

Public funding for the Ontario separate school system is sometimes a controversial topic for reasons I won’t get into here. But by offering one set of parents with the choice of which school they can send their children, the Ontario education system has set up a remarkably clean and ongoing experiment in the effects of school choice. Catholics have the choice of sending their elementary-school aged children either to separate or to public schools, and non-Catholics do not have this choice.

Elementary school administrators in the two systems face very different constraints:

  • Public schools have a monopoly on non-Catholics who can’t afford private school.
  • Separate schools face a clientele that always has the option of switching to the public school system.

Of the two, separate school administrators have the greater incentive to provide higher-quality education: if the separate system were widely known to be dysfunctional, it would likely disappear.

Basic economics would predict that the competitive pressures on separate school administrators would provide stronger incentives to provide better education outcomes. And that seems to be just what is happening. A recent study (pdf) by McMaster University economists Martin Dooley and Abigail Payne in collaboration with UC-Berkeley’s David Card that examine these effects finds “a statistically significant but modest-sized impact of potential competition on the growth rate of student achievement.” In a related study using similar data, a CD Howe study done by Wilfrid Laurier’s David Johnson finds that of the 13 ‘above-average’ school boards, 11 are in the separate school system, while none of the 10 ‘below-average’ school boards are.

October 11, 2011

Stephen Gordon: There is no case for Canada to “do something” about jobs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:17

One of the side-effects of living right next door to the US is that Canadians often have more information about the state of the economy in the US than they do about their own economy. Calls for the federal government to “do something” about jobs is a good example:

But it doesn’t make much sense for Canada to ‘do something’ about job creation because of problems in the U.S. labour market. Why would anyone look at U.S. data and go on to infer that the rate of job creation in Canada requires a policy response?

[. . .]

The best proxy I’ve been able to find for the hiring rate is the number of workers who have been at their current jobs for less than three months. Movements in the number of people hired should show up here, albeit with a certain lag. As far as I can make out [. . .] the hiring rate fell significantly in 2009, but returned to trend in 2010. The data from 2011 are consistent with those of the boom years of 2005-2007.

Calling for the government to ‘do something’ about job creation when hiring rates are already at pre-recession levels is puzzling. At best, it is a demand that the government undertake busy work: activities that achieve little beyond demonstrating that it is ‘doing something’. And judging from the response, it is also a demand that the government is happy to meet.

October 9, 2011

Rick Mercer on the War of 1812 Bicentennial

Filed under: Cancon, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:58

Matt Gurney: Even the media were bored by the Ontario election

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

Did you find the recent Ontario election a big snore-fest? You’re not alone. So did the journalists covering the “festivities”:

Ontario politics is a bit dull at the best of times, but that’s unfortunate. It’s a large, populous province, with the economy to match. It’s troubled now, battered and bruised from years of mismanagement and the global economic crisis, but it’s still the centre of Canada’s economic gravity. Ontario needs to do well.

And yet, even by the usual standards for snooze-inducing Ontario partisanship, last week’s election was lame. The Liberals, under Dalton McGuinty, essentially breezed through it, never saying much. Whenever a punch was thrown — and not many were — they seemed to just bounce off the inexplicable forcefield that somehow protects Mr. McGuinty from consequences for his electoral missteps. The Tim Hudak-led PCs made the mistake of thinking that Ontarians were eager to vote them into power, and then ran a tone-deaf campaign that was only notable for its costly mistakes. The proof of that is found in the exit polling data: The Tories focused obsessively on Dalton McGuinty’s record of tax hikes, branding him “the Tax Man.” But only 15% of Ontario’s voters identified that as their main worry, meaning that the PCs’ biggest ad buy missed 85% of the electorate. And the NDP, under Andrew Horwath, mainly offered ridiculous suggestions like protectionist Buy Ontario legislation and arbitrarily freezing some consumer prices for purely political purposes. Outside of northern Ontario, not a lot of people think that’ll do much good.

The voter turnout reflected that: It’s estimated right now to have been roughly 49%, less than half of eligible voters. There’s cause to fret about that, and wonder what’s to be done, but for now, let’s just accept that rather than a sign that our democracy is broken, or doomed, it’s really what Rex Murphy said it was in his Saturday column — a deliberate rebuke of all the parties by a frustrated, insulted electorate. A pox on all their houses, as it were. If so, there was some early warning that that would be the case — even the journalists whose job it is to muster up excitement for politics had a hard time concealing their displeasure during this campaign.

I found it interesting that one of the most popular posts I’ve put up in the last several months was the one about how to refuse your ballot under Ontario’s election law. That’s certainly an indication of the relative level of voter disenchantment with the candidates and parties.

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