RE: [cdn-nucl-l] RE: CBC National video on CRL moly-99 shutdown and restart

["Andy English" <andyenglish@vianet.ca>]

who the hell is chuck boredman>?
 

-----Original Message-----
From: cdn-nucl-l-admin@mailman1.cis.McMaster.CA
[mailto:cdn-nucl-l-admin@mailman1.cis.McMaster.CA] On Behalf Of chuck
boardman
Sent: 30 January 2008 9:15 PM
To: Whitlock, Jeremy; Cdn-Nucl-LISTSERV (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [cdn-nucl-l] RE: CBC National video on CRL moly-99 shutdown and
restart

Is Canada’s Economy a Model for America?
Imprimis/Hillsdale College ^ | January 2008 Issue | Mark Steyn


Posted on 01/13/2008 12:26:20 PM PST by Nasty McPhilthy


I was a bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What
happened?” I wondered. “Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian
economy cancel?” It is a Saturday night, and the Oak Ridge Boys are playing
the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the President
likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And
if giving a talk on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak
Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t
know what is.

Unlike America, Canada is a resource economy: The U.S. imports resources,
whereas Canada exports them. It has the second largest oil reserves in the
world. People don’t think of Canada like that. The Premier of Alberta has
never been photographed in Crawford, Texas, holding hands with the President
and strolling through the rose bower as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was. 
But Canada is nonetheless an oil economy—a resource economy. Traditionally,
in America, when the price of oil goes up, Wall Street goes down. But in
Canada, when the price of oil goes up, the Toronto stock exchange goes up,
too. So we are relatively compatible neighbors whose interests diverge on
one of the key global indicators.

As we know from 9/11, the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia use their oil wealth to
spread their destructive ideology to every corner of the world. And so do
the Canadians. Consider that in the last 40 years, fundamental American
ideas have made no headway whatsoever in Canada, whereas fundamental
Canadian ideas have made huge advances in America and the rest of the
Western world. To take two big examples, multiculturalism and socialized
health care—both pioneered in Canada—have made huge strides down here in the
U.S., whereas American concepts—such as non-confiscatory taxation—remain as
foreign as ever.

My colleague at National Review, John O’Sullivan, once observed that
post-war Canadian history is summed up by the old Monty Python song that
goes, “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK.” If you recall that song, it begins as a
robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods. But
it ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into a kind of
transvestite pickup who likes to wear high heels and dress in women’s
clothing while hanging around in bars. Of course, John O’Sullivan isn’t
saying that Canadian men are literally cross-dressers—certainly no more than
35-40 percent of us — but rather that a once manly nation has undergone a
remarkable psychological makeover. If you go back to 1945, the Royal
Canadian Navy had the world’s third largest surface fleet, the Royal
Canadian Air Force was one of the world’s most effective air forces, and
Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space of two
generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly
feminized culture that prioritizes all the secondary impulses of
society—welfare entitlements from cradle to grave—over all the primary ones.

And in that, Canada is obviously not alone. If the O’Sullivan thesis is
flawed, it’s only because the lumberjack song could stand as the post-war
history of almost the entire developed world.

Today, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States
and pretty much every party in the rest of the Western world are nearly
exclusively about those secondary impulses—government health care,
government day care, government this, government that. And if you have
government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you
also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change
the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to
that of junkie and pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change
back. Americans don’t always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest
of the developed world is. In Canadian and Continental cabinets, the defense
ministry is now a place where an ambitious politician passes through on his
way up to important jobs like running the health department. And if you
listen to recent Democratic presidential debates, it is clear that American
attitudes toward economic liberty are being Canadianized.

To some extent, these differences between the two countries were present at
their creations. America’s Founders wrote of “life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness.” The equivalent phrase at Canada’s founding was “peace, order
and good government” —which words are not only drier and desiccated and stir
the blood less, but they also presume a degree of statist torpor. Ronald
Reagan famously said, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other
way around.” In Canada it too often seems the other way around.

All that being said, if you remove health care from the equation, the
differences between our two economies become relatively marginal. The Fraser
Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World 2007 Annual Report” ranks the
U.S. and Canada together, tied in fifth place along with Britain. And here’s
an interesting point: The top ten most free economies in this report are
Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, United States, United
Kingdom, Canada, Estonia, Ireland, and Australia. With the exception of
Switzerland and Estonia, these systems are all British-derived. They’re what
Jacques Chirac dismissively calls les anglo-saxon. And he and many other
Continentals make it very clear that they regard free market capitalism as
some sort of kinky Anglo-Saxon fetish. On the other hand, Andrew Roberts,
the author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, points
out that the two most corrupt jurisdictions in North America are Louisiana
and Quebec—both French-derived. Quebec has a civil service that employs the
same number of people as California’s, even though California has a
population nearly five times the size.

In the province of Quebec, it’s taken more or less for granted by all
political parties that collective rights outweigh individual rights. For
example, if you own a store in Montreal, the French language signs inside
the store are required by law to be at least twice the size of the English
signs. And the government has a fairly large bureaucratic agency whose job
it is to go around measuring signs and prosecuting offenders. There was even
a famous case a few years ago of a pet store owner who was targeted by the
Office De La Langue Française for selling English-speaking parrots. The
language commissar had gone into the store and heard a bird saying, “Who’s a
pretty boy, then?” and decided to take action. I keep trying to find out
what happened to the parrot. Presumably it was sent to a re-education camp
and emerged years later with a glassy stare saying in a monotone voice, “Qui
est un joli garcon, hein?”

The point to remember about this is that it is consonant with the broader
Canadian disposition. A couple of years ago it emerged that a few Quebec
hospitals in the eastern townships along the Vermont border were, as a
courtesy to their English-speaking patients, putting up handwritten pieces
of paper in the corridor saying “Emergency Room This Way” or “Obstetrics
Department Second on the Left.” But in Quebec, you’re only permitted to
offer health care services in English if the English population in your town
reaches a certain percentage. So these signs were deemed illegal and had to
be taken down. I got a lot of mail from Canadians who were upset about this,
and I responded that if you accept that the government has a right to make
itself the monopoly provider of health care, it surely has the right to
decide the language in which it’s prepared to provide that care. So my point
isn’t just about Quebec separatism. It’s about a fundamentally different way
of looking at the role of the state.

The Two Economies

So, granted the caveat that the economically freest countries in the world
are the English-speaking democracies, within that family there are some
interesting differences, and I would say between America and Canada there
are five main ones.

First, the Canadian economy is more unionized. According to the Fraser
Institute report, since the beginning of this century, the unionized
proportion of the U.S. work force has averaged 13.9 percent. In Canada it
has averaged 32 percent. That is a huge difference. The least unionized
state in America is North Carolina, at 3.9 percent, whereas the least
unionized province in Canada is Alberta, with 24.2 percent—a higher
percentage than any American state except Hawaii, Alaska, and New York. In
Quebec, it’s 40.4 percent. If you regard unionization as a major obstacle to
productivity, investment, and employment growth, this is a critical
difference.

I drive a lot between Quebec and New Hampshire, and you don’t really need a
border post to tell you when you’ve crossed from one country into another. 
On one side the hourly update on the radio news lets you know that Canada’s
postal workers are thinking about their traditional pre-Christmas strike—the
Canadians have gotten used to getting their Christmas cards around Good
Friday, and it’s part of the holiday tradition now—or that employees of the
government liquor store are on strike, nurses are on strike, police are on
strike, etc. Whereas you could listen for years to a New Hampshire radio
station and never hear the word “strike” except for baseball play-by-play.

In a news item from last year, an Ottawa panhandler said that he may have to
abandon his prime panhandling real estate on a downtown street corner
because he is being shaken down by officials from the panhandlers union. 
Think about that. There’s a panhandlers union which exists to protect
workers’ rights or—in this case—non-workers’ rights. If the union-negotiated
non-work contracts aren’t honored, the unionized panhandlers will presumably
walk off the job and stand around on the sidewalk. No, wait...they’ll walk
off the sidewalk! Anyway, that’s Canada: Without a Thatcher or a Reagan, it
remains over-unionized and with a bloated public sector.

Not that long ago, I heard a CBC news anchor announce that Canada had
“created 56,100 new jobs in the previous month.” It sounded like good news. 
But looking at the numbers, I found that of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200
were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining
43,000 were on the public payroll. In other words, 77 percent of the new
jobs were government jobs paid for by the poor slobs working away in the
remaining 23 percent. So it wasn’t good news, it was bad news about the
remorseless transfer of human resources from the vital dynamic sector to the
state.

The second difference between our economies is that Canada’s is more
protected. I was talking once to a guy from the Bay area who ran a gay
bookstore, and he swore to me that he’d had it with President Bush and that
he was going to move to Vancouver and reopen his bookstore there. I told him
that would be illegal in Canada and he got very huffy and said indignantly,
“What do you mean it’s illegal? It’s not illegal for a gay man to own a
bookstore in Canada.” I said, “No, but it’s illegal for a foreigner to own a
bookstore in Canada.” He could move to Canada, yes, but he’d have to get a
government job handing out benefit checks. His face dropped, and I thought
of pitching one of those soft-focus TV movie-of-the-week ideas to the
Lifestyle Channel, telling the heartwarming story of a Berkeley gay couple
who flee Bush’s regime to live their dream of running a gay bookstore in
Vancouver, only to find that Canada has ways of discriminating against them
that the homophobic fascists in the United States haven’t even begun to
consider.

The third difference is that Canada’s economy is more subsidized. Almost
every activity amounts to taking government money in some form or other. I
was at the Summit of the Americas held in Canada in the summer of 2001, with
President Bush and the presidents and prime ministers from Latin America and
the Caribbean. And, naturally, it attracted the usual anti-globalization
anarchists who wandered through town lobbing bricks at any McDonald’s or
Nike outlet that hadn’t taken the precaution of boarding up its windows. At
one point I was standing inside the perimeter fence sniffing tear gas and
enjoying the mob chanting against the government from the other side of the
wire, when a riot cop suddenly grabbed me and yanked me backwards, and a
nanosecond later a chunk of concrete landed precisely where I had been
standing. I bleated the usual “Oh my God, I could have been killed” for a
few minutes and then I went to have a café au lait. And while reading the
paper over my coffee, I learned that not only had Canadian colleges given
their students time off to come to the Summit to riot, but that the Canadian
government had given them $300,000 to pay for their travel and expenses. It
was a government-funded anti-government riot! At that point I started
bleating “Oh my God, I could have been killed at taxpayer expense.” Say what
you like about the American trust-fund babies who had swarmed in to
demonstrate from Boston and New York, but at least they were there on their
own dime. Canada will and does subsidize anything.

Fourth point: The Canadian economy is significantly more dirigiste (i.e.,
centrally planned). A couple of years ago it was revealed that the
government had introduced a fast-track immigration program for exotic
dancers (otherwise known as strippers). Now as a general rule, one of the
easiest things to leave for the free market to determine is the number of
strippers a society needs. But for some reason, the government concluded
that the market wasn’t generating the supply required and introduced a
special immigration visa. To go back to President Bush’s line, maybe this is
one of those jobs that Canadians won’t do, so we need to get some Ukrainians
in to do it. Naturally, the exotic dancers are unionized, so it’s only a
matter of time before the last viable industry in Quebec grinds to a halt
and American tourists in Montreal find themselves stuck in traffic because
of huge numbers of striking strippers. What governmental mind would think of
an exotic dancer immigration category?

Fifth and obviously, the Canadian economy is more heavily taxed: Total
revenue for every level of government in the U.S. is approximately 27
percent of GDP, while in Canada it’s 37 percent. And yes, that 37 percent
includes health care—but you would have to be having an awful lot of
terminal illnesses each year to be getting your money’s worth from what
you’re giving to the treasury for that.

Canadian Dependence on the U.S.

Yet, having criticized Canada’s economy in various features, let me say
something good about it: It doesn’t have the insanely wasteful federal
agricultural subsidies that America has. In fact, if a Canadian wants to get
big-time agriculture subsidies, he’s more likely to get them from the U.S. 
government. I’m sure most people here know that very few actual
farmers—that’s to say, guys in denim overalls and plaid shirts and John
Deere caps with straws in the stumps of their teeth—get any benefit from
U.S. agricultural subsidies. Almost three-quarters of these subsidies go to
20,000 multi-millionaire play farmers and blue chip corporations. Farm
subsidies are supposed to help the farm belt. But there’s a map of where the
farm subsidies go that you can find on the Internet. And judging from the
beneficiaries, the farm belt runs from Park Avenue down Wall Street, out to
the Hamptons, and then by yacht over to Martha’s Vineyard, which they really
ought to rename Martha’s Barnyard. Among the farmers piling up the dollar
bills under the mattress are Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson, the oil company
Chevron, and that dirt-poor, hardscrabble sharecropper David Rockefeller. 
But what you may not know is that also among their number is Edgar Bronfman,
Sr., who isn’t just any old billionaire, he’s the patriarch of Montreal’s
wealthiest family, owner of Seagram’s Whiskey, which subsequently bought
Universal Pictures. So the U.S. taxpayer, in his boundless generosity, is
subsidizing the small family farms of Canadian billionaires. As a Canadian
and a broken-down New Hampshire tree farmer myself, I wondered whether I
could get in on the U.S. farm program, but as I understand it, it would only
pay me for a helicopter pad on top of my barn and a marble bathroom in my
grain silo.

Edgar Bronfman’s dependence on U.S. taxpayers is symbolic of more than just
the stupidity of federal agriculture subsidies. In the end, there’s no such
thing as an independent Canadian economy. It remains a branch plant for the
U.S. Over 80 percent of Canadian exports come to America. From time to time,
nationalist politicians pledge to change that and start shipping goods
elsewhere. But they never do because they don’t have to—they’ve got the
world’s greatest market right next door. So when people talk about the
Canadian model as something that should be emulated, they forget that it
only works because it’s next to the American model. The guy who invented the
Blackberry email device is Canadian, but it’s not been a gold mine for him
because he’s selling a lot of them in Labrador or Prince Edward Island. It’s
been a gold mine because he’s selling a lot of them in New York and
California and in between.

Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health
care, the most eminent Canadian idea looming in the American context. That
is, public health care in Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. 
A small news story from last month illustrates this:

A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. 
The four girls were born at a U.S. hospital because there was no space
available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units. Autumn, Brook, Calissa,
and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls,
Montana. Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive
care unit in Canada, but none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a
respiratory technician were flown 500 kilometers to the Montana hospital,
the closest in the U.S., where the quadruplets were born on Sunday.

There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t
expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same
level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote,
rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes
more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the
Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait
and wait—six months for an MRI, a year for a hip replacement, and so on. But
here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health
care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward.

In conclusion, I’m not optimistic about Canada for various reasons—from the
recent Chinese enthusiasm for buying up the country’s resources to the
ongoing brain drain—but also for a reason more profound. The biggest
difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent,
psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized
health care, but that America has a healthy fertility rate and we don’t. 
Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is enough to maintain a stable
population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian
couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic
decline. Consider the math: 10 million parents have 7.5 million children,
5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million great-grandchildren. You can
imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under
that scenario, and that’s before your average teenage burger-flipper gets
tired of supporting entire gated communities and decides he’d rather head
south than pay 70 percent tax rates.

So, to produce the children we couldn’t be bothered having ourselves, we use
the developing world as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s
population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population
growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native
Canadians—already only amounting to 25 percent of the country’s population
growth—will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future.
It’s like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the
stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but
if it is, it won’t have much—if anything—to do with you.

In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are
wrong. Not only is Canada’s path not a model for America, it’s not a viable
model for Canada. As Canadians are about to discover, the future belongs to
those who show up for it.

© 2007 Hillsdale College. All Rights Reserved.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Whitlock, Jeremy" <whitlockj@aecl.ca>
To: "Cdn-Nucl-LISTSERV (E-mail)" <cdn-nucl-l@mailman1.cis.McMaster.CA>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:06 PM
Subject: [cdn-nucl-l] RE: CBC National video on CRL moly-99 shutdown and
restart


> There are actually eight cooling loops on the NRU, but two of them are 
> relevant to the current controversy.
>
> See www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionD.htm#nru-safety.
>
> Jeremy Whitlock
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cdn-nucl-l-admin@mailman1.cis.McMaster.CA
>> [mailto:cdn-nucl-l-admin@mailman1.cis.McMaster.CA]On Behalf Of Jerry 
>> Cuttler
>> Sent: 2008 Jan 29 10:59 PM
>> To: Canadian Nuclear Discussion List
>> Subject: [cdn-nucl-l] CBC National video on CRL moly-99 shutdown and 
>> restart
>>
>>
>> High drama.
>> The sound is terrible---very weak.
>> It's difficult to hear anyone speaking except the CBC commentator and 
>> the antinuke (Norm Rubin).  Media manipulation?
>> The diagram show only two cooling pipes, but I believe there are at 
>> least six cooling sources with multiple back up power supplies for 
>> the pumps.
>>
>>
>> http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/video/politicseconomy/showdown
> _at_chalk_river_1.html
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