EconomicsAustralia Canada USA: Price rises: Oil, cocoa, now barley

Montreal Gazette (Mar7,2k11)

Barley shortages could have 

beer drinkers crying in their suds

BY BRADLEY BOUZANE, POSTMEDIA NEWS AND REUTERS MARCH 7, 2011 7:02 PM

• STORY
• PHOTOS ( 1 )

Flooding lowered the quality of the latest barley crops in Canada and Australia, leaving some unsuitable to turn into malt, the germinated barley product used in beer.

Photograph by: Daniel Munoz/Reuters, Daniel Munoz/Reuters

Some commodities 

experiencing price rises

(click individual commodities below)

Barley    Cocoa 

Coffee - Vietnam, Kenya, Uganda,

               Brazil - Columbia 

Oil - Shale Gas - Canada  Tar sands oil 

         Eurozone 

         OPEC - US Strategic

Canada: Healthcare: Market Watch points out that privately-financed healthcare is wedging into the Canadian system

A lot of insulting direct at the USA occurs in Canada; when Americans take to insulting Canadian, it also comes as little surprize.  But when I find it coy and cute in a noozhorse that has little warrant to run pejoratives against the nearest neibor, the practice rankles, as does that going in the other direction.  At the end of the blockquote that follows, you'll perhaps notice the source of m+ pique.

Oct. 19, 2010, 2:44 p.m. EDT·CORRECTED

Canada’s public health care at crossroads

Private medicine makes inroads as nation struggles with long waits

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By Russ Britt, MarketWatch

A previous version of this story gave an incorrect name for the Canadian Healthcare

Association. The story has been corrected.

GATINEAU, Quebec (MarketWatch) — Just across the Ottawa River from the Parliament building, the seat of Canada’s government, Linda Irving is defying her nation’s 45-year-old health-care system.

Irving is concerned about abdominal pains she’s had for a few months, and skittish about the four-month wait her sister-in-law endured before recently undergoing kidney cancer surgery.

So she isn’t taking any chances. Irving is “jumping the queue” and paying $750 for her own magnetic resonance imaging at a privately run clinic in Gatineau, just inside Quebec and not too far from her home in Ottawa.

“I’ve had an issue for the last few months with swollen glands. It’s something that’s been bothering me,” Irving said. “I know if I were to wait for one on the Ontario side with the public [system], it would take several months.”

Long wait in Canada for health care

If you're a Canadian seeking non-urgent medical treatment, the waits can be legendary. But most residents north of the border say they wouldn't trade their health-care system for anything. MarketWatch's Russ Britt reports.

Each Canadian province manages its own health care, and so Quebec allows its citizens to pay for some private procedures such as MRIs. Irving’s home province of Ontario forces residents to wait up to a year to get the imaging done under Canada’s government-run insurance program. So she’s engaging in what some call “medical tourism.”

Irving’s case is emblematic of the debate currently going on inside the U.S.’s neighbor to the north: whether to introduce more privatization into the Canadian health-care system that has been a source of national pride for nearly half a century.

Just as the U.S. is rethinking the way it handles health care, Canada is re-examining over the next four years how to maintain the system that provides medical treatment for all regardless of income.

A new accord

The country wants to reformulate the network in an effort to cut back on wait times and medical tourism. In 2014, the nation of 34 million people is set to write a new health “accord,” renewing the pact it signed in 2004, and is expected to further address Canadian health-care shortcomings. Read more on Canada's limited health care opportunities.

Privatization is inching its way into the system, as evidenced by treatment centers that are beginning to pop up in the nation’s eastern province of Quebec as well as British Columbia in the west. The heartland province of Alberta also is questioning the status quo.

Meanwhile, Canada’s provinces are struggling with their tax structures, hoping the funds they devote to health care can keep up with a rapidly aging population and skyrocketing medical costs. In Ontario, medical costs eat up close to 50% of all provincial revenue.

But the nation as a whole seems fiercely devoted to the concept of free health care for all. Just as President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are under fire from Republicans in the 2010 election season for trying to remake the U.S. health-care system, a radical revamping of Canada’s system could draw fire for members of Parliament.

“It’s a lose-lose situation when you talk about health with the feds. They know it’s such an intrinsic value in this country. No one wants to give up universal care. We don’t want to be like the United States, frankly,” said Pamela Fralick, chief executive of the lobby group Canadian Healthcare Association.

Still, just as some in the U.S. are wondering whether a little more governmental influence might help to bring down costs, Canadians are contemplating whether help from the private sector could aid in the daunting battle to reduce wait times for MRI screenings, hip and knee surgeries and cataracts treatments, to name a few.

Pain management

Dr. Jeffrey Turnbull, president of the Canadian Medical Association, acknowledges that, yes, there have been isolated incidents in which patients waiting for treatment have died. And many others with waits imposed upon them endure months of significant pain.

“That is common. I’m the chief of staff of [Ottawa] Hospital. That discomfort and pain, I see that daily,” Turnbull said. “Is there a health-related cost to wait times? Absolutely.”

For residents of Canada’s vast rural regions, the process is even more onerous. They often find themselves waiting months to see a specialist, then several more months if an MRI is needed. After that is another wait for diagnosis and treatment.

Each medical-related trip may involved hundreds of miles of travel for rural residents. Canada is the world’s second largest nation in square miles, but its population is roughly one-tenth that of the U.S. And 80% of its population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border.

“It’s so sensitive, so hot. That’s why I say, it’s a lose-lose situation. No one wants to go there because it polarizes people. It’s so divisive,” said the health-care association’s Fralick. “The good news is, if you get sick, you’re going to be looked after. You might not get everything. But you’re not going to die on the street.”

Hospital crowding

Balancing free health care with the needs of its people, though, is becoming more difficult for Canada. The frigid nation is finding many of its hospitals overcrowded and there is a question of whether those who need to be admitted actually will.

 I found m+self suddenly reading the word "frigid" in this context, and asked m+self Wh+?  The word can mean "cold", "unable to enjoy sexual intercourse", or "a state of mind that is frozen" and that cannot change incrementally but must be repressively unchangeable until change of mind and perhaps of heart too, explodes and rev+zes itself in a total transformation, wordview shift, or (in the sc+ences) a paradigm shift (Thomas Kuhn).  On a more mundane level, it's a learning style with its problems, as all learning styles have their problems -- since they're glued to the individual's basic psychocognitive patterns.  Thanks for the article, author Russ Britt; but really, Russ, coudn't you specify or skip the cute and annoying deployment of nawty adjectives -- in this case, an adjective that coud be read as xenophobic.  On the other hand, for all I know, Russ, you're a Canadian, and the Lord knows we have too much Canadian national self-hatred up here.  That's bothersome too.  And that's a source of the hatred of America that abounds among many, as a compensation technique of the psyche perhaps.

Click the headline to read more of Britt's article, if you're interested further.

-- EconoMix

EconomicsCanada: Housing: Slow growth

Canada, the world's tenth largest national economy, has slid into the "no-growth" category. In the thinking of most economists, entrepeneurs, and business leaders regards growth as the criterion of success in economic relations. Retired prof Dr Bob Goudzwaard, the outstanding reformational economist over recent decades, has long argued to disestablish "growth" as the preceived norm for any business (?) and certainly any national economy. A market situation where the goal of growth has been abandoned comes in conflict the orthodox economic mainstream, of course; but market, growth, and the economists geared to such considerations call the Goudzwaard approach into question, as we see from the inevitable joblessness that arises from no-growth.

Growth is a necessity for the country's economic well-being. The following data leaves us wondering which choice to make in these unsettled days.

The Canadian leading index of 10 economic components has averaged 0.9% growth per month over the past 12 months. Growth rarely exceeds 1%.

The slowdown was caused largely by a 4.1% drop in the housing index, which is composed of new housing starts and house sales.

The mid-summer slowdown in house building and house sales is said to be at least a warning sign in regard to the presumed health of the Canadian economy's maintenance and development.

I'm trying to assimilate the green-movtivated research by Goudzwaard (his disseration written for his doctorate was an early exploration of "unpriced scarcity" -- clean water, breathable air, etc).

-- EconoMix

Canada: Insurance Industry: Life insurers want to expand, demand govt redo the pension system

Toronto's Globe and Mail carries a telltale lengthy article by Tara Perkins (updated Aug20,2k9). Here's a snippet:

The industry's drive comes amid a raging debate over the problems, exacerbated by the recession and tumultuous stock markets, with how Canadians save for retirement. Aging baby boomers and the slow extinction of defined benefit plans are among the factors that have left many without sufficient financial protection for their retirement.

Down the page we soon meet these proposals by the insurance corporations greedy for profits on our earnings and our employers' contributions to our future pensions.

The life insurance industry, which is responsible for about two-thirds of defined contribution plans in Canada, has also been talking to provincial and federal governments about “private sector solutions that we think will be as effective as any government-sponsored ones,” said Frank Swedlove, president of the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association.

Again, as in the USA on the healthcare plans (as blogged yesterday and earlier on reWrite frontpage), the CLHIA led by Sun Life Financial is trying the binomial-logic charade h+l+ted in my blog-entries on the USA healthcare situation.

There are not two options (as "the industry" maintains) and there is no provision in either govt (feds and provinces) for faith-based and other not-for-profits to organize co-ops with memberships that set their own pension-insurance policies within the framework of laws that woud/shoud provide this option too, while these latter woud be constantly dialoguing with "the life insurance industry" and govt -- of course.

“Some of the proposals that have been made raise some concerns for us,” Mr. Swedlove said. “Some of these proposals relate to a government-sponsored defined contribution plan, and we don't think that that's the best way to go.

Where's the freedom of association, the provision for membership co-ops as insurers of life, healthcare, and pension-addons? This does not preclude a residual govt plan for those who refuse to buy life insurance or manage their pension income thru umbrelled-megacorporations or govt, but want responsible communal institutionalization of any pension reform so that their own plan fits into the pattern alongside and in competition with the insurance-profits greed-corporations and govt; in the proposed communal pension-unions each "plan" based on a given community's irreducible worldview, woud be included in the overall mosaic of pluralization.

“We think there are opportunities to increase pension activity for Canadians by changing some of the pension rules that exist in the country.”

Changing them to favour greed-corporations, that is. Don't be deceived by the innocuous words put out by the quoted industry spokesman.

And what of that already existing one-third of the industry not in the greed-corporations lobbying umbrella? Is the Lutheran communal Thrivent active in Canada too, and is it part of the life insurance forms welcomed and sustained? [Yes, a reader comments: "In Canada, the Lutheran-based insurance society is FaithLife Financial, headquartered in Waterloo,Ontario." Hat Tip to Anonymous; see Comments.] Also, the Lutheran Brotherhood? If they're here in the nearly-erased one-third of the life insurance industry, then at least some communal life-ensurers with memberships and voters woud not only exist already here in Canada (as I guess), but they woud be already equipped to supply infrastructure for taking on the new proposed pension providers, additional to the Canadian Pension Plan based on past contributions by my pay-ins thru my employers in earlier phases of my life. CPP is adjudged by many to be inadequate for many, and this criticism surely has some truth to it -- for those who can afford to buy pension-insurance addons for their retirements.

The greed-corporations that want to become major players in "pension insurance" to the exclusion of all communities of faith and other potential membership co-ops, these greed insurance corps in their present discourse have tried to erase, to cover up, what already exists and what coud come into existence if govt were truly even-handed.

-- Economix

Economics: Canada: Analyzing features of the Federal Budget in relation to paying down the debt

Taking up the responsiblities that refWrite's general editor, Owlb, has shouldered hitherto, may I introduce myself as the new reporter-commentator for economics and business concerns here.

Owlb has instructed both Politicarp (on politics) and myself (EconoMix on economics) to keep analyzing the current fed Canadian govt's budget, each from our own particular specialities; and, additionally now, also the new budget brawt down by the majority Liberal got of Ontario. The two budgets have some similarities, tho in the first case a pre-election budget introduced by the fed Conserve minority govt and in the second case another pre-election budget that will figure in the October election called by the Lib govt of the province of Ontario.

Both budgets have provisions for Child Benefits, an issue regarding which the reformational-founded now ecumenical Christian lobby group in Canada, Citizens for Public Justice, has campaigned for nearly two decades. CPJ's valuable analysis provides these thawts:

The past two budgets [Conservative] have reintroduced unnecessary complexity to Canada’s child benefit system. Budget 2006 created the Universal Child Care Benefit, a flat-rate taxable benefit for families with children under the age of seven. Budget 2007 creates a non-refundable credit that helps middle and higher income families but excludes those still struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table.

On the positive side, this new tax credit builds within the tax system greater recognition of the cost of parenting for all families. However, the same goal could be reached by creating a universal flat-rate child benefit that is non-taxable. A straight $310 refundable credit for all children under 18 could achieve tax recognition of the cost of parenting in a way that includes all parents. It would also help low income families get closer to exiting poverty. It is an unfortunate that the credit proposed in Budget 2007 excludes poor families. In that respect, it is a step backwards in Canadian social policy.

I won't quote further what the Christian lobby group goes on to treat in its Fed budget analysis under "Child Care," because that section introduces presuppositions and policy that bear a longer discussion--as it now adopts the vast expensive institutionalization that many people see CPJ/s stance as a programmatic ideological takeover of child care by other than parents. It seems to me that one must make a distinction between Quebec's child-care system which is motivated by exposing even the youngest kids to the French language, and more pluralistic systems where majaority-language-perservation is not a provincial motive of the utmost priority. While there is language differentiation, as far as I know there is no room for faith and values differentiation as these mite be freely chosen by different segments of the population--if they had a choice. But that takes us away from the Fed Budget 2007.

What I missed in CPJ's analysis and appreciation of the Budget-as-is centers on a feature that affects the ability of any future govt to improve child-care for all in a non-uniformitarian way, a feature that affects families now and in future generations (including future immigrant families who are not even yet members of our Canadian society): the Conservs made the move in this budget to pay down a significant portion of the Federal Debt of Cdn$ 619,701 millions. This is the Gross Federal Debt figure; I haven't found the Net figure, but I did find this passage on the peak of the

The federal debt

	See also...
	Inflation
	The Consumer Price Index
	The Canadian dollar
	The federal debt

By 1995, the federal government had been spending more than it collected in revenues for 25 consecutive years. The deficit (the amount by which government spending exceeds revenues in any given year) was $37.5 billion on a public accounts basis. As a result of persistent deficit financing, Canada's total debt load (the accumulation of all past deficits and surpluses since Confederation) had grown from $20 billion in 1971 to over $545 billion in 1995. By 1994/95, covering the interest costs alone was costing Canadians $42 billion—more than the annual deficit and some 26% of the entire federal budget. By March 1997, the net federal debt reached an all time high of $588 billion.

While CPJ offers many valuable thawts and horizons in its Budget analysis, it doesn't even notice that a chunk of debt has been paid down that benefits everyone. Now, this money for debt-reduction in the Budget doesn't come from the poor, those on Disability and Welfare, who don't work and don't pay Income Taxes (altho if they do file, they usually do get small refunds). And the poor do pay GST and PST sales taxes. But, again, not Income Taxes.

Rather, this money toward debt-reduction comes precisley from the middle-class. That's why the middle-class is selected out for certain family rebates on their Income Taxes, this round. Why can't CPJ graciously acknowledge this instead of pitting income-classes against one another in its analysis?

Now, Fed Debt-reduction does benefit the poor longterm, it does benefit children and youth who will have less national debt on their shoulders when they become adult income-earners of the middle-class and responsible for the accounts of the body body politic, and it does benefit both immigrants and families immigrating to Canada in the future.
Fed Debt-reduction helps those currently in poverty now, only obliquely, because many of them may never join the middle-class, become wage-earners, and thus shoulder the debt thru Income Taxes. But many of them will climb the ladder some, and enter the middle-class. Upon doing so, those poor-become-middle-level income-earners will then shoulder whatever Fed-Debt remains. But as long as they remain poor, they don't pay down thru Income Taxes, only a bit thru GST (sales tax) part of which is reduced thru rebates from the very Income Tax system to which they don't pay.

An economy of care must care about the poor, the middle class, and the paying down of the debt.

Surpluses both achieved and anticipated have allowed the government to direct more money toward paying off the accumulated debt. As a result, the cost of paying interest on the debt has dropped from a high of 33 cents of every dollar of revenue collected by the federal government in 1995/96 to 19 cents in 2001/02. Another promising sign is the decrease in the debt-to-GDP ratio, which gives a picture of the size of a nation's debt in relation to the size of its economy. Though still high by historical and international standards, Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio had fallen from 69% in 1995/1996 to 46% in 2001/02.

CPJ's analysis of the Conservative minority govt's budget 2008 has at least one major serious blindspot, a blindspot that leads to a skewered analysis and an unfortunate level of incoherence in the analysis that then is attributed to the budget itself. This projection of its own incoherence onto the budget is lamentable.