statism watch

David Friend, The Toronto Star
May 17, 2008 04:30 AM

Judge opposes blocking some fraud lawsuits against creators, sellers of stricken investments

An Ontario Superior Court judge has delayed a decision on restructuring $32 billion worth of frozen asset-backed commercial paper as he continues to examine legal provisions that would protect some parties from lawsuits.

Justice Colin Campbell said yesterday he recognizes “the continued urgent need for a comprehensive solution,” but he still has concerns with the restructuring plan put forward by a committee headed by Bay Street lawyer Purdy Crawford.

The judge’s comments focused on a key issue of the plan, a legal “release” that would prevent lawsuits against banks, securities dealers and others involved in creating and selling the seized-up paper.

The plan’s current design is broad enough that it would release certain parties from claims of fraud, Campbell wrote, even if noteholders hadn’t had a chance to voice their concerns when the Crawford committee was structuring a plan.

“I simply do not have sufficient facts at this time on which to reach a conclusion one way or another,” Campbell said.

The judge questioned whether the release would be authorized under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and whether the release was “necessarily fair and reasonable.

“Those who believe they have claims in fraud were not consulted before the plan was developed. Their voices may well be of a different kind and quality from the votes of other noteholders who by their votes were willing to compromise claims of negligence in all its forms,” he wrote.

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Eileen Fairweather, Daily Mail
Last updated at 23:39 17 May 2008

Imagine a country where strangers have the right to ask intrusive questions and store the answers on a database.

Where everyone from police officers to leisure-centre staff can demand: “Tell me who you feel close to?”

They will also have been trained to ask questions about sexual behaviour, family life, religion, secret fears, weight and “sleeping arrangements” at home.

Incredibly, thousands of Government and council apparatchiks in Britain became entitled on April 1 to ask such questions of anyone under 19.

This horrifying invasion of privacy has begun, almost unnoticed, because the Government has cleverly presented it as being in the interests of “child protection”.

The new questionnaire, known as the Common Assessment Framework (CAF), is part of a £20million programme called Every Child Matters (ECM), ostensibly set up to ensure youngsters are safe and leading positive lives.

Professionals – such as police officers, teachers and doctors – and volunteers are now under orders to subject children to a questionnaire if they consider them “at risk”: a definition so broad that many decent parents could find themselves labelled as potential abusers.

The questions don’t need a parent’s consent since any child over 12 is deemed responsible enough to grant permission for an interview.

Any child not achieving the Government’s five “outcomes” – being healthy, staying safe, enjoying life, “making a positive contribution”, and achieving ” economic well-being” – is now defined as having “additional needs”.

How did this idiocy come about? Margaret Hodge announced the ECM agenda in 2003, just after Tony Blair ignored his friend’s unsavoury history as leader of Islington Council during one of Britain’s worst child-abuse scandals and, to widespread protest, made her Children’s Minister.

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Megan Ogilvie, The Toronto Star
May 17, 2008 04:30 AM

Amid the idyllic peacefulness of a Grey-Bruce County farm, a milk battle is brewing

Michael Schmidt strides down the country lane, his black and white border collie jogging ahead to sniff at clumps of dirt.

When the farmer reaches his back pasture, he calls to the dog in German and Beppo streaks into the field to round up the 30-odd Canadienne cows grazing the new spring grass. The sleek animals trot towards the fence. Their deep brown flanks glisten in the afternoon sun.

“Ach,” says Schmidt. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

These are the cows that are causing all the fuss. More specifically, it’s the milk that streams from the teats of these cows — thick, creamy, yellow milk, sold unpasteurized in glass jars — that has the Ontario government and two public health units taking Schmidt to court.

It has launched a flurry of investigation into Schmidt’s farming practices, and officials have used surveillance cameras and a full-out raid on his farm in 2006 to collect evidence. A mole was even sent to infiltrate the farmer’s inner circle.

…

Things ticked happily along until 1994 when officials raided the farm and charged him with selling raw milk. Schmidt hired a lawyer to help him fight the charges, but at the end of the long struggle, which was peppered with bizarre and sinister events — a cousin was kidnapped, he says, and two cows murdered — he ended up pleading guilty and losing 200 hectares of the farm to cover legal costs.

After things settled, Schmidt and his farm had 12 years of peace. His raw milk enterprise grew, and the farmer clawed out of debt by selling cartons of eggs, homemade loaves of organic wheat bread and bacon and sausage from the pigs.

But then, on a dreary November morning in 2006, ministry officials flooded his farm. As Schmidt complied with their orders and answered their questions, one of his employees videotaped the raid for their own evidence.

“We always kept the cameras with us because I knew, for 12 years I knew, they would be back,” says Schmidt.

Footage shows ministry officials entering the dairy dressed in biohazard suits. After eight hours, officials left with bottles of raw milk and all of Schmidt’s dairy, even his cheese-making equipment.

Schmidt later learned a team from the Ministry of Natural Resources had been watching his farm for months. In fact, two officers went undercover as regular citizens to gain access to his milk — and to get the evidence needed to lay the 20 charges now before the courts.

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The Regional Municipality of York’s Health Services Department prohibited Schmidt from distributing raw milk within its borders in December 2006. In May 2007, the region served Schmidt with an order from the Ontario Superior Court prohibiting him from further contravening the 2006 order.

When Schmidt did not comply, officials tracked his activity in Thornhill in January with the help of surveillance cameras. Ministry and public health officials would not comment on either of the two cases while they are before the courts.

Kathryn Boor, a professor and department chair of food science at Cornell University, says there is no solid scientific evidence that consuming raw milk can cure health problems and ailments. But, she adds, that does not stop people from believing that it can.

“A huge part of medicine is faith and believing that you’re going to get better.”

University of Guelph food scientist Art Hill says studies show pasteurization does not diminish the nutritional qualities of milk.

“From the best data we have, I can’t see any particular advantage to drinking raw milk.”

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Donald Savoie, The Globe and Mail
May 17, 2008

Officers of Parliament have come under increasing scrutiny in the media, and none too soon. They have been in fashion for some time, and their number and mandate have expanded considerably. Establishing new officers of this kind, however, can never get at the root cause of what ails our institutions. The issue is much broader and needs the urgent attention of Canadians and our elected representatives. In brief, the unwritten part of our Constitution and our national political and administrative institutions simply no longer correspond to present-day requirements.

The chain of accountability, from voters to MP, from MP to prime minister and cabinet ministers, from ministers to the heads of government departments and agencies, and from senior civil servants to front-line managers to their employees, has broken down. No officer or officers of Parliament can repair it. They have neither the mandate nor the legitimacy to play more than a supporting role.

The relationship among Parliament, the prime minister, ministers and public servants is in need of repair, and we are ill served by pretending that all is well. We should no longer tolerate court government, by which a political leader with the help of a handful of courtiers shapes and reshapes instruments of power at will. Those with the power to introduce change for the better are reluctant to do so because they enjoy being able to wield tremendous power.

…

Inside government, prime ministers and their courtiers, perhaps to get things done, have concentrated effective power in their own hands. By “court government,” I mean that effective power now rests with the prime minister and a small group of carefully selected courtiers. I also mean that there has been a shift from formal decision-making processes in cabinet and in the civil service, to informal processes involving only a handful of key actors. The government of Canada now makes policy by announcement rather than by a policy process.

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