All posts by Thomas Hall

Documents show lack of polices for government records.

Access-to-information story
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There’s a problem with how the Canadian government stores important information. In some cases, it doesn’t.

The issue came to light in a series of letters written last April and obtained through an Access to Information request.

The letters begin with the information commissioner, Suzanne Legault, writing to Treasury Board President Tony Clement, about missing policies.

Legault writes that there is no formalized system in place to ensure records from a government organization that is closed, or joins another government office, are saved.

Records can disappear or, even if they are saved, be impossible to search through because no one will know what’s in them or how they’re organized.

Clement responded saying all the documents from an office that is closed are subject to the Library and Archives Act and taken care of by Library and Archives Canada.

That is not good enough according to Michel Drapeau, a lawyer and Ottawa University professor specializing in access to information law.

“It’s obviously a gap,” Drapeau said. “There is a legal vacuum there.”

If you’re looking for documents from an organization that has closed “there is nothing you can do,” Drapeau said.

The Access to Information Act allows anyone to request records from a public institution, including emails, memos, and meeting minutes. But if those records don’t exist, they can’t be asked for.

Legault’s concerns relate to over a dozen government offices that have, or soon will be, closed or amalgamated.

The lack of policies means that there is no consistency with how records from these and other organizations are handled.

When the Canadian Artists and Producers Professional Relations Tribunal was closed in April last year, its records were transferred to the Canadian Industrial Relations Board.

Diane Chartrand, the executive director of the Industrial Relations Board, was transferred as well. She not only knows the records well, she brought them all with her.

“I’m not sure if that’s how it works at every organization, but in this case that’s what happened,” Chartrand said about the transfer of records.

Chartrand said anyone wishing to file an access to information request for tribunal documents from before April 1 2013, can simply file the request through Industrial Relations Board now.

But if you’re looking for documents from International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, you won’t be as lucky.

The centre was closed in 2012 without a plan for its records. The case was bad enough that it made it into the Office of the information commissioner’s 2012-2013 annual report.

“We learned that some were sent to Library and Archives Canada and others to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada,” the report says.

The information commissioner closed the file and recommended that the requester make a new request to the Department of Foreign Affairs, which should have received the records in question.

Drapeau says this type of problem is all too possible without clear policies, and there isn’t much someone looking for records can do.

He said you could make a complaint to the information commissioner, which would usually trigger a search for the documents, but because the organization no longer exists it no longer falls under Access to Information laws, so the information commissioner isn’t able to begin a search.

Drapeau said an option is to try a “wild goose chase” and file access to information requests at related government offices hoping they might have copies of the documents you’re looking for.

For now, Legault said in an email that she will “continue to monitor this situation carefully.”

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The end of Ontario coal

Database Assignment
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By: Thomas Hall

Jason Paris
Nanticoke Generating Station. Credit: Jason Paris

North America’s largest coal-fired power plant, and biggest producer of greenhouse gasses, is burning no more.

Nanticoke generating station was once a critical piece of Ontario’s power supply. Since the late 1970s its eight massive boilers produced thousands of megawatts of power and consumed countless tonnes of coal.

Jack Gibbons, from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, said they began their campaign to rid Ontario of coal power 17 years ago and the closure of Nanticoke is a significant win for the campaign.

“It was Ontario’s number one smog polluter and Canada’s number one greenhouse gas emitter,” Gibbons said. “It was also Ontario’s number one source of airborne mercury emissions, which is a potent neurotoxin.

In 2009 Ontario Power Generation began to phase out the plant, closing four of its boilers. In January 2014 its last fire burned out, almost a year ahead of schedule.

But the closure of Nanticoke wasn’t with out its opponents. It was one of the biggest employers in the region.

Craig Manley is the general manager of planning and economic development for Haldimand County where Nanticoke sits on the edge of Lake Erie. The area directly affected by the shutdown.

He said the closure was gradual, a few boilers at a time, which helped to mitigate the impact.


Note: The most recent data set is from 2012.

“As a major employer, it was an important part of our tax base,” Manley said. “And certainly we don’t see the degree of impact at this stage of the game, but we do anticipate that there will be a reduced revenue stream to the municipality.”

Only a handful of employees remain out of the 600 or so that worked at Nanticoke, said Manley. Their job is to keep Nanticoke from falling into ruin case Ontario Power Generation, which owns the plant, decides they need to convert some of the boilers to gas or biomass burners.

Something Manley said Haldimand County wants to see happen.

“We’ve always taken the perspective that there’s been a lot of public sector investment in both the facility and the transition network that leads into the province,” Manley said. “And we feel there are opportunities in the long term to reposition that for natural gas or biomass or combination thereof.”

But Gibbons from the Ontario Clean Air Alliance would rather see the plant torn down.

“It’s an old plant with old boilers and if they were to burn biomass it would be a very inefficient use of biomass,” Gibbons said.

Ontario Power Generation’s director of corporate relations and communication, Bill McKinlay, said there is a chance some of the boilers could be converted.

“It depends on the need for the electricity in the future,” McKinlay said. “It’s a decision that would be made by the Ontario power authority. But what converting to gas offers is very quick ramp rates, so you can bring a station on quickly to meet peak demand and then pull it back.”

McKinlay says that 95 per cent of Ontario’s energy comes from sources that do not emit greenhouse gas, including nuclear power.

Gibbons says he’s looking forward to the end of the 17-year struggle to end coal-fired power in the province.

“Ontario is virtually coal free. There’s still the Thunder Bay coal plant, which is going to be converted to biomass later this year,” Gibbons said. “But southern Ontario is coal free and all of Ontario will be coal free by the end of this year.”

Freedom to fear

Assignment 2, Whatever-Happened-To? Assignment
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Every few Valentine’s Days author Salman Rushdie gets a reminder of the importance of free speech.

A card arrives reminding him there are groups that want to kill him for a story he wrote about a schizophrenic 25 years ago.

It’s freedom to read week in Canada. A week devoted to reflecting on freedom of expression, said Franklin Carter from Canada’s Book and Periodical Council.

It’s also the 25 anniversary of one of the most well known threats to free speech.

It began in January of 1989 when Rushdie’s new book, The Satanic Verses, was burned on the streets of the United Kingdom.

A month later on Valentine’s Day Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa—a judgment—calling for the execution of Rushdie.

The bounty on Rushdie’s head was millions of US dollars. Rushdie, a British citizen who was born in Mumbai, was rocketed into the international spotlight when radical Muslims forced him into hiding for over 13 years.

He was kept safe by 24-hour security. But others weren’t so lucky.

The book’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed in the face until he died. Another publisher was shot but survived.

The threat was even felt in Canada.

“Canada customs seized an inbound shipment of The Satanic Verses,” said Carter who remembers the events well. “They had classified it as hate propaganda directed at Muslims.”

Though temporary, the seizures attracted enough international attention to be mentioned on C-Span during an interview with journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Carter said the initial ripples caused by the Ayatollah’s fatwa have grown into waves of fear.

When it comes to publishing something potentially inflammatory to Muslims “there are all kinds of signs that people aren’t willing to take the risk,” he said.

In late 2009 a book by Jytte Klausen about the infamous caricatures of Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper was censored by Yale University Press for fear of backlash.

The cartoons caused an international crisis when they were first published in 2006, closing embassies and resulting in the deaths of at least 200 people.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press told the New York Times, “when it came between that [publishing the cartoons] and blood on my hands, there was no question” that they would not publish the cartoons.

“Even South Park won’t show cartoons” of Mohammed for fear of violence,” Carter said referring to the cartoon comedy known for pushing boundaries.

Though the threat of violence is real, Carter said we as a society have “internalized Khomeini’s fatwa.”

“I think that this unwillingness to publish is partly born out of cowardice,” Carter said. “So part of the solution is overcoming the fear.

“Some say the problem is with us, people in the west,” he said. “The secular, liberal, multi-cultural west who have just come to a cultural and intellectual mindset that it’s just not right and proper to offend people.”

And it’s this fear that Carter says is leading us towards a lack of freedom.

“If you enshrine in law and culture, and in practice, that offending people, even inadvertently, is forbidden, you destroy freedom from oppression, you destroy freedom of the press, you destroy freedom of speech,” he said.

Though Carter says the threat of electronic surveillance is having the greatest chill on freedom of expression, the legacy created by the fatwa has changed how our society values the freedom to say and write what we want.

Perhaps the best example of this chill is Rushdie recently telling the BBC that the Satanic Verses would probably not be published today due to the risk of attacks.

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SE News (Text)

Detour Gold watching its cash flow

Business Assignment
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A gold mine slated to be Canada’s biggest is watching its  costs closely until it reaches full capacity.

Detour Gold’s interim-CEO, Paul Martin, told Reuters on Jan. 28 that the company’s board of directors has given him the green-light to hedge up to 50-percent of the mine’s output to ensure there is stable cash flow for the rest of the mine’s start-up.

Kelly Smith, an analyst for Haywood Capital Inc., explained that by hedging, or selling the mine’s output ahead of time at a fixed price, Detour guarantees its income.

Smith says this is a good strategy for a mine that is just starting operations and has lots of overhead, but it’s potentially bad for investors.

“If gold prices go lower, it was a smart thing to do,” said Smith, “but if gold goes higher, it wasn’t such a smart thing to do.

“An investor doesn’t want a mine to speculate on the price of gold. But in this case, they’re doing it as a measure to protect their revenues, and ensure that they can cover their costs while they go through the ramp up.”

Smith said the mine has been plagued by the usual troubles of an operation of its size that is in the “ramp-up” phase.

Part of Detour’s problem is that they began building the mine as gold prices started to fall from their 2011 peak of almost $1,900, as the chart below shows.

(gold data from: http://www.investing.com/commodities/gold-historical-data)

Detour has an average cost per ounce of gold produced of $1,214 USD, so if gold price drop below $1,200 like they did in late 2013, the mine is losing money. Which is why shareholders are tentative, says Smith.


DETOUR GOLD (Text)
“It’s marginally undervalued, however they (Detour) need potentially more capital to complete the ramp up,” said Smith.

The northern Ontario mine’s full year-end statements are due early February, but the company announced in a press release last week that it missed its minimum target of 240,000 ounces of gold produced by about 8,000 ounces.

And that potential need for more capital isn’t helping share prices either. If Detour needs to raise capital by issuing more stock, they’ll dilute existing share prices. So despite Smith’s valuation of Detour at $8.50 a share, the share price remains at around $6.30, and probably won’t move much until its year-end reports are released.

“When they start the plant up there are always things that you have to fix,” said Smith. “So you’re constantly stopping and starting the plant, you’re making repairs, you’re fine tuning, and all of that costs money.”

The gold mine began operations in June of last year and according to it’s own definition only began commercial scale operations on Sept. 1.

But shareholders began to grumble when the company’s third quarter results showed disappointingly narrow margins. Then the company’s founder and CEO Gerald Panneton resigned in November after a meeting with the board of directors and stock prices took another dip.

But on Jan. 27 interim CEO Paul Martin, Detour’s former CFO, said in a press release, that the second year of operation will “serve as a stepping stone towards further production increases and cost reductions.


Detour 2014 Guidance (Text)
“The significant shutdown in December impacted our progress but I am please to report that we are mow back on track with milling rates having returned to pre-shutdown numbers,” Martin said.

The challenge for Detour in the next year, said Smith, is making sure they have the cash to cover their expenses until they mine is fully operational.

Until then they’re in a vulnerable position.

“They’re just right at that critical point in their start-up,” Smith said.  “They say they’ll have it (operating) at design capacity in Q4, and we’re seven, eight months away from that.”