statism watch

The Daily Mail
October 6, 2008

Every person in Britain could have their internet history, email records and telephone calls tracked under a proposed £12billion plan by ministers.

The system – dubbed ’sinister’ by the Tories – would see hundreds of hidden devices planted to tap into communications on the internet and via mobile phone providers.

And a national database would be created to store the information which officials say would help in the fight against terrorism and organised crime.  [Yeah right - Ed.]

£1billion has already been allocated to the Government’s central intelligence agency GCHQ to finance the first stage of the controversial project.

The big brother scheme is set to attract fierce opposition from human rights groups.

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Steve Ladurantaye, Globe and Mail
October 6, 2008

It was a rough ride for North American investors Monday, with markets closing sharply lower but nowhere near the eye-popping lows they hit earlier in the day.

The S&P/TSX – down more than 1,000 points, or 11 per cent, earlier in the session – closed down 5.3 per cent, or 572.92 points, to 10230.43.

The Dow Jones industrial average traded 3.6 per cent lower, closing down 369.88 points to 9,955.50 – after falling 7.7 per cent, or 800 points earlier. It closed below 10,000 points for the first time since April, 2005. The S&P 500 fell 3.8 per cent, or 41.89 points, to 1,057.34.

Investors raced to get out of stocks Monday, as the financial crisis rocking the United States showed signs of moving deeper into Europe and Asia and the price of oil plummeted.

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The state shouldn’t have to tell a company to protect it’s customers. This is criminal activity. Assault, whether it be by a club or a pathogen, is criminal. This is an important distinction – “deregulation” is not permission to run roughshod over the rights of a nation’s citizens. However, it does provide a crisis-opportunity for the Federal Government and associated corporate lobbies to push for irradiation of meat and produce.

Robert Cribb, Toronto Star
October 6, 2008

Meat plants not required to tell food inspectors when bacteria found

Four months before the Maple Leaf outbreak started claiming lives, Canada’s food safety agency quietly dropped its rule requiring meat-processing companies to alert the agency about listeria-tainted meat, a Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

Twenty people died as a result of the outbreak this past summer, and federal meat inspectors and their union say this rule change likely made the country’s listeria outbreak far worse than it had to be.

Before April 1, if a company preparing meat for sale to the public had a positive test showing listeria it “would have had to have been, not only brought to the (federal) inspector’s attention, but the inspector would have been involved in overseeing the cleanup,” says Bob Kingston, head of the union that represents Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) inspectors.

Kingston and four veteran inspectors interviewed for this story fear the change, part of the deregulation of Canada’s food safety net, continues to pose a public health threat.

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Michael Geist, Toronto Star
October 6, 2008

The emergence of cultural funding as a hot-button political issue in the current election campaign appears to have taken virtually everyone by surprise. The roughly $50 million in cuts may be tiny in terms of the overall federal budget, yet the significant impact on the cultural community has propelled the issue onto the national stage.

While leaders debate the merits of public funding for the arts, whoever forms the next government will quickly face a far bigger cultural funding issue that promises to make the current dispute seem like a short preview as compared to the forthcoming main attraction.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will hold hearings on new media regulation in early 2009 and barring a change of heart, the focal point will be the prospect of a mandated levy on Internet service providers to fund new media cultural production.

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CBC News
October 6, 2008

A former police officer jailed for refusing to testify at a public inquiry into child sex abuse allegations in eastern Ontario has been released from an Ottawa jail.

A website dedicated to the inquiry says Perry Dunlop was greeted by family and friends when he left jail on Sunday. He spent seven months in custody on civil and criminal contempt charges.

Dunlop was instrumental in sparking the judicial inquiry that examined how allegations of sexual abuse in the Cornwall-area were handled in the 1990s. But he defied court orders to testify, claiming he’d lost faith in the justice system. He was arrested at his home in Duncan, B.C., last February.

Dunlop began looking into an alleged pedophile ring that supposedly involved senior civic officials, clergymen and police officers on his own time in 1993.

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