Canadian Business Innovation Tanks Under Harper

Canadian business innovation has dropped from 11th to 22nd place in the world over the past year.

Earlier this month, and for the second consecutive year, Canada dropped two places overall in the annual ranking of global economic competitiveness by the World Economic Forum. Canada's economic competitiveness has now gone from 9th to 14th since 2009. This is just a small part of the story though.

The real story came out a couple of days ago in a report issued by the Conference Board of Canada, entitled Who Dimmed the Lights? Canada’s Declining Global Competitiveness Ranking.

In this report, it is revealed that Canada's innovation and business sophistication dropped 6 places, from 15th to 21st over the past year. Even worse, the report says that Canada's innovation performance dropped from 11th to 22nd.

The innovation performance indicator measures factors such as such as "university–industry collaboration in R&D, quality of scientific research institutions, capacity for innovation, company spending on R&D, and government procurement of advanced technology products".

Don't tell me - sending raw materials to Asia and buying stuff churned out over there in sweatshops no longer qualifies as "thinking outside the box". Combine this with the Conservative government's war on science and it is easy to see how Canada has dropped so quickly.

I don't even know how this all meshes with what's going on on the street. For example, at least four pharmaceutical multinationals closing major research labs in the Montreal area alone this year. The latest of these, Boehringer Ingelheim, will result in 170 high tech job losses.

On the link above, there is a table which further breaks down the indicators into sub categories. Canada is worst in Nature of Competitive Advantage (81st), Value Chain Breadth (53rd), Government Procurement of Advanced Technology Products (47th) and Quantity of Local Suppliers (33rd).

Solving the problem won't be a matter of simply ramping up university graduate numbers though - Canada is already 6th in availability of scientists and engineers.

Exactly how we're going to turn this around, I don't know. One thing for sure is that current Harper government policies have us headed in the wrong direction with a bullet.

The fossil fuel industry does not need subsidies

"In 2011 the five largest oil companies made $137 billion"

Omnibus Scandalbus

Recently Canadians have begun to take notice of the Harper Conservatives' tactic of piling dozens or hundreds of pieces of legislation into one supersized bill, so that most of what is in it slips under the radar of public scrutiny and accountability. Much of the content of this legislation goes unnoticed and undebated, as has been well documented in the case of the 2012 omnibus budget bill, for example.

What many of us haven't noticed, unfortunately, is that they have brought this same tactic into play in another sphere of politics. This would be the always fertile branch of creative corruption and scandals.

Rather than throw all their transgressions and wrongdoings into one or two baskets, such as the Liberals or previous Conservative governments have done, so that the opposition can yammer on about them for years or decades, the Harper Cons have perfected an excellent new strategy.

The new strategy is called the "Omnibus Scandalbus". The Omnibus Scandalbus has room for all the Conservative MPs to ride in luxurious comfort (no need to upgrade your seat, Bev Oda!), while reflective windows and tight security protect the MPs from any prying curiosity seekers or journalists.

All questions for any passengers, from accredited stylists and party enthusiasts, are to be submitted a month in advance and will answered by a professional bus driver most knowledgeable in right turns and obstructions.

The Omnibus Scandalbus is a highly efficient means of scandal management pioneered by Harper's brilliant strategists, enabling the Conservative government to ride in air-conditioned comfort, while, all around outside, the cacophony of a supersized gaggle of scandals fades into the innocuous hum of background noise.

Japan PM to Restart Nuclear "Under Intense Pressure from Banks"

The PM of Japan has approved restarting nuclear reactors despite public opinion running at over 70% against the move.

According to this report in Bloomberg, the decision was taken under "intense pressure from banks". With the peak summer season approaching, there has been concern that electricity shortages could result in slowdowns at factories.

Meanwhile, there are new reports of radiation entering the global food chain from the Fukushima disaster.

Procedures to restart reactors are said to be beginning immediately.

Quebec tuition fees among the highest in the world

Surprise, surprise! As usual, the media has been giving us the wrong dope. 

This time, it's the intrepretation fed to us by the corporate media regarding the student "strike" in Quebec that has been going on for the past few months.

From the very beginning, our media, even the CBC, has entirely ignored the details of the students' position, to the extent that most of us, myself included, have been led to believe that they are probably being unreasonable. Rebels without a cause, as Jacques Villeneuve called them.

That's because, as the media has repeated dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times, that "Quebec already has the lowest tuition fees in Canada / North America" by far.

What the media has failed to deliever is a comprehensive comparison of our tuition fees with those in other countries besides the U.S.

I myself tried to look up this info and did find that one or two Scandanavian countries have nominal tuition fees. But I didn't readily find anything about our major G8 partners like France and Germany.

Finally, a day or two ago, the following link was included with a CBC story (120 or so days into the student strike):

http://www.studyineurope.eu/tuition-fees

I also found another so-called comparison today ~ this also looks like a "promo" for charging higher tuition fees, but the reality of low tuition fees in may countries is evident:

http://jimsheng.hubpages.com/hub/Comparison-of-cost-of-higher-education-around-the-world

So, bottom line, it turns out that the vast majority of developed countries in the world have tuition fees that are much lower even than Quebec's. Only the U.K. and a couple of other countries around Europe have tuition fees anywhere near as high as ours.

It is a known and proven fact that higher tuition fees work as a deterrent to low and middle class individuals pursuing an education (everyone's "I put myself through college..." stories notwithstanding)

So, what about it? Despite the extremely skewed presentation of the situation our media gives us, it seems that the Quebec students at least have a sound basis on which they are making their demands.

As a sidebar, we already know what a failure the U.S. profit-driven healthcare system is. U.S. healthcare costs being anywhere from 50-100% higher than all other countries, yet their life expectancy is substantially lower than Canada and many other developed countries.

Perhaps we need to rethink our approach to higher education?

Could Someone Bring Down e-Commerce?

Is it possible to prevent technology from running out of control?

Is it already out of control?

It may be that we won't know the answers to those questions before it is too late.

Case in point:

Do a google search for "Accept PP/CreditCard ,One World One Price", in quotes.

This will bring up 100,000s into the millions of results.

Every single result is another page or profile of an extremely dubious (to give the benefit of the doubt) selling site. The sites in question contain thousands of pages of copyrighted material listed for sale without the knowledge of the copyright owners, complete with famous logos, icons and trade names of numerous familiar and reassuring corporations and e-commerce entities. The sites include a mind-boggling array of domain names and sub-domains, some of them, at least, indicating (or appearing) that they utilize a well-known new generation domain name server that is known for secure hosting features. Each individual site contains a number of confidence building features, right down to a phony online chat window that says something like "Mandy Johnson is standing by to answer your questions".

The activities of this site have come to the forefront because of apparent unauthorized use of thousands of pages of material from one high profile e-commerce site in particular, although there could be any number of other transgressions.

The concerning part about this is the apparent automated duplication of the site over massive numbers of domains and sub-domains. It is presumed that, if the site is indeed illegitimate, it will eventually be closed one way or another.

But the question must be asked, what if someone, with access to near-free labour, decided to pull a scam in this same spirit ~ but actually did a better job of it? What if they built it to be really convincing and created a thousand or a million clones simultaneously?

Quebec Total Ban on Fracking as USGS Links it to Earthquakes

Last Tuesday the Quebec environment minister announced an absolute ban on fracking while the process is studied.

That move is looking like a stroke of genius today, as the U.S. Geological Survey is releasing a report showing an unprecedented increase in earthquakes occurring in the U.S. heartland.

The study identifies a six-fold increase of magnitude 3.0 or higher quakes that has occurred since 2001 in the U.S. heartland. Significantly, the scientists say that the cause of the increase in seismic activity is almost certainly manmade.

Quebec has been shown to have significant natural gas reserves in the St. Lawrence Valley that could potentially be accessed using the fracking technique. The process involes horizontal drilling and underground blasting with high pressure mixtures of waste water and chemicals to release gas trapped in shale formations..

There has been a moratorium in effect in Quebec since last March. However the new ban will include even experimental fracking designed to test the process. Testing will now occur only in the lab.

Last month, a series of small earthquakes in Ohio was blamed on fracking.