Life in Canada

I have real issues with the insanely thorough and ever-expanding spying being perpetrated against the average citizens of the world. Consider:

The NSA stores metadata from half a billion telephone calls, emails, and text messages in Germany alone every month.

In direct violation of the law, France has been revealed to have been intercepting and storing most of that nation’s internal Internet and phone communications for years. The NSA is said to have obtained over 70 million phone records on French citizens in a single 30 day period.

The “Fairview” program is being used by the NSA to spy on the communications of Brazilian citizens.

Direct access to monitor communications lines has been given to the British spy agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) by Verizon, Vodaphone, and BT.

The NSA has cracked numerous forms of encryption used by private citizens and is planting back doors into consumer products with the help of the tech industry, often through the use of malware and outright theft of keys.

Most major smartphones are now able to be tapped into by the NSA. These devices contain a world of information on many of us, from our personal correspondence to where we happen to be at any moment. We help make this form of surveillance possible because we want the convenience offered by this technology.

Google and Yahoo have had their unencrypted data center communications intercepted by the NSA, allowing almost full access to whatever these companies store in “the cloud” on our behalf.

I could go on; there are many more revelations, but the point has been made. Everyone is affected at some point. And everyone should feel violated.

While we share in the outrage, we don’t share in the surprise.

In an exclusive interview with CBC News, the former head of Canada’s most secretive intelligence agency says there should be greater parliamentary scrutiny of the clandestine spy service at the heart of Brazilian espionage allegations.

Calls for more openness are certain to get louder in the wake of fresh allegations the agency spied on Brazil's mining and energy ministry in search of corporate secrets.

John Adams, former chief of the Communications Security Establishment of Canada, says the secretive organization needs more parliamentary oversight. (CSEC)

In a rare interview, former spymaster John Adams told CBC News he thinks the government must do more "to make Canadians more knowledgeable about what the intelligence agencies are trying to do on their behalf."

Adams recently retired after seven years as head of the Communications Security Establishment Canada, and he admits the agency has deliberately kept Canadians in the dark about its operations for decades.

“There’s no question that CSEC is very, very biased towards the less the public knows the better, and in fact it seems to have worked, because you very seldom see them on the front page of the newspapers.”

Part of CSEC's mandate is to monitor foreign communications, including those coming into Canada.

But it cannot target domestic telephone or email traffic. I believe there not a grain of truth in the premise!

"That's against the law," says Adams, who left the highly secretive Ottawa-based agency last year. "Absolutely not."

But, he adds, "We have got capability that is unique to this country. No one else has it," Adams said.

Warning for Canadians

Adams admits that CSEC is not immune from some of the practices causing a furor in the U.S. and Britain, but stresses they are all legal.

For instance, he says, CSEC is gathering huge amounts of so-called metadata from phone companies and internet providers, information on large numbers of people including their complete phone and email records.

“Metadata is an issue, there’s no doubt about it,” Adams says, “but they can only use what they decide is relevant to ongoing investigations.”

American internet users are also up in arms over revelations that the NSA has been making deals with major telecommunications companies to get past the security encryption codes protecting customer data.

Adams won’t reveal details about how CSEC spies operate in this country, but they are apparently breaking through encryption.

“The reality is encryption is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere, so clearly if intelligence agencies are going to seek information, they’re going to be able to breach encryption.”

All of which helps to explain Adams’s warning for average Canadians: if you think anything you read, write or send via the internet is private, think again.

"The reality is if you're on the internet, you literally might as well be on the front page of the Globe and Mail," Adams says.

“You have to know that probably if someone’s interested in you, they may well be listening or reading or whatever it might be.”

Don’t count on passwords for protection, either.

“If you use a word that’s in the dictionary, they’ll crack it in less than a minute.”

Adams says about 900 of CSEC’s roughly 2,000 employees are involved in the spy business, both gathering intelligence and analyzing it.

A lot are young, talented computer hackers.

“These young people … they’re computer scientists, they’re engineers, they’re just interested in the business. And they can do things with CSEC that if they did them outside of CSEC would frankly be against the law.”

Privacy commissioner concerned

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada's privacy commissioner, is among those who worry Canadians are being kept in the dark about what goes on at CSEC.

"We don't know enough about what CSEC does," Stoddart said in an interview, adding that her office doesn't have the authority to shine a light on CSEC.

The agency has its own watchdog, retired judge Robert Decary, who is stepping down for personal reasons at the end of the year.

Decary has a total staff of about a dozen people, only about half of whom are actual investigators.

Decary doesn’t give interviews, but Adams says CSEC processes more data in a day than all of Canada’s banks combined, so “obviously he doesn’t have the resources to look at everything.”

But Adams says the watchdog’s team does have access to enough key data to know whether CSEC is “doing something against the privacy law.”

In his final report to Parliament, Decary said he was unable in one instance to be able to determine if CSEC had broken the law, and he called for greater transparency.

Critics say Decary is not entirely independent, pointing out he reports to the defence minister, not Parliament, and even then his reports have to be vetted by CSEC for “national security reasons.”

As a result, Decary and his predecessors have produced reports that are rarely enlightening to the public.

Even Adams, the former CSEC director, says it's time for the agency to be more open and report to a special all-party parliamentary committee.

That may come soon if CSEC continues to land in hot water over its foreign spying.

Allegations that CSEC spied on Brazil are just the latest.

Documents obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and published in the British newspaper the Guardian in June suggest CSEC may have been part of a scheme to hack the phone calls and emails of ministers and diplomats at a G20 summit in London in 2009.

The leaked documents were apparently part of the intelligence debriefing after the summit, and those that made reference to spying on foreign diplomats included the CSEC’s official seal along with those of the NSA and the British spy service known as GCHQ.
Big Brother’s little brother

Thomas Drake, a former NSA intelligence executive turned American whistleblower, says the Canadian logo on the document is proof that CSEC was somehow involved in the London spying.

“The fact that their seal shows up on those slides means they are participants by virtue of that alone.”

Drake says the Canadian and American intelligence agencies have a close relationship, though the U.S. and British agencies generally call the shots because of the sheer size of their operations.

“You can assume that in terms of CSEC, that it is one of the little brothers of Big Brother NSA,” Drake says.

So CSEC is “generally going to go along with whatever NSA and GCHQ say. They are in partnership.”

CSE’s participation in spying at the London summit is now bound to raise questions about whether Canada spied on its own guests at the G20 summit the following year in Toronto.

OTTAWA - Canada is rapidly catching up to the United States as a country divided between haves and have-nots, according to a study issued Tuesday by the Conference Board.

The Conference Board says income inequality has been rising more in Canada than in the United States since the mid-1990s, and faster than in many peer countries.

In fact, the think-tank says Canada had the fourth-largest increase in income disparity among a sample group of 17 advanced economies in the period between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s.

"Even though the U.S. currently has the largest rich-poor income gap among these countries, the gap in Canada has been rising at a faster rate," said Anne Golden, the board's chief executive.

"High inequality raises a moral question about fairness and can contribute to social tensions," she added.

Overall, income inequality rose in 10 of the countries sampled, rising fastest in Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

Canada was next. Its Gini index, a complicated formula which measures income deviations from a perfectly equal distribution, rose 9.2 per cent to 0.320.

By contrast, the U.S. had the highest income inequality of the group with a Gini reading of 0.378.

The Conference Board notes that Canada's index number put it in group of countries considered to have a medium range of income inequality.

A reading above 0.4 would designate high levels of income inequality, and under 0.3 indicates a low income gap.

Overall, the Conference Board says income inequality has increased in countries representing 71 per cent of the world's population. Twenty-two per cent live in countries where inequality is declining.

VANCOUVER — The riots that swept across London and other British cities this week already have resulted in more than 1,700 arrests, with some rioters already convicted and serving jail time of 4 years

But two months after the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, not a single rioter has been charged, despite dozens of people who turned themselves in and confessed after photos and videos were posted on the Internet.

The quick justice being meted out in London stems from a different system of justice, said Rob Gordon, a former British police officer who now is director of the criminology school at B.C.’s Simon Fraser University.

London police have the power to lay charges, he said, while in B.C., police have to recommend charges to the Crown, which then reviews the evidence and must decide whether a charge is in the public interest and if there is a substantial likelihood of conviction.

“It’s a much swifter justice process,” Gordon said of the London riot convictions coming days after the incident occurred.

He also pointed out that there is a sense of urgency in London because of continuing rioting in other cities in England. Five people were killed in the four nights of rioting that rocked the country.

Sentences have been swift and tough in England — one boy reportedly caught with a case of bottled water looted from a supermarket was given a six-month jail sentence.

Gordon said he can understand why people here in Canada are curious that no charges have been laid for any of the incidents of setting police cars on fire, smashing windows and looting stores that so appalled average citizens.

“It isn’t very speedy,” he said of our system of justice.

Vancouver police declined to comment Friday on the differences between the two justice systems, referring a Vancouver Sun reporter to its detailed July 20 news release, which said 37 people had turned themselves in, including seven females, and 111 people had been identified as suspects.

The news release said the 50-person integrated riot investigation team was reviewing thousands of images of rioters captured by cellphones, plus police said earlier there are another 1,500 hours of video.

Crown spokesman Neil MacKenzie said Friday that four Vancouver prosecutors are continuing to work with police to make sure all the available evidence is looked at before laying charges.

“There’s a massive amount of information,” he explained, adding the Crown and police don’t want someone charged, only to find later that the person was involved in another riot incident.

“We both want to be in a position to be satisfied we have all the available evidence with respect to a suspect,” MacKenzie said. “It can be potentially disadvantageous to the Crown proceeding to court with only partial information.”

The Crown did receive eight files from Vancouver police recommending charges days after the riot. But those files were sent back to police for additional information that was required, MacKenzie said.

So far, only two people have been charged for an assault that took place during the riot which erupted in downtown Vancouver after the hometown Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final to the Boston Bruins on June 15.

Edgar Ricardo Garcia, 20, has been charged with aggravated assault and will next appear in court Aug. 19; Joshua Lyle Evans, 27, was charged with possession of a dangerous weapon and will appear in court Sept. 27.

After Evans was charged, his lawyer, Matthew Nathanson suggested that Evans disarmed a man with a knife who had stabbed Evans’ friend, so Evans should not have been charged.

Police looked into the lawyer’s complaint and have since passed along new information to the Crown, which still is under review, MacKenzie said

Sino-Forest Corp. [TRE.TO]has been a high-flying stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange. But investors who have been around the TSX for a while probably aren't surprised by the accounting scandal surrounding the widely held company.

Al Rosen, a prominent forensic accountant in Toronto, certainly isn't.He believes new international accounting rules known as the International Financial Reporting Standards, which have been adopted in Canada, probably mean there will be more balance sheets blowing up on Canadian investors — not less.

This isn't to say that Sino-Forest Corp. is guilty of anything, says Rosen. It's simply too early to say that.

Here's what we think we know so far:

A recent report from analyst Carson Block of the Muddy Waters hedge fund alleged that Sino-Forest had overstated the value of its assets, including the ownership of vast tracts of forest, triggering a huge price drop in the shares in late May and early June.

And shareholders were hurt again earlier this week when American hedge fund manager Paulson & Co. dumped 34.7 million Sino-Forest shares, representing a 14-per-cent stake in the company.

While Sino-Forest may yet be vindicated, the Muddy Waters complaint had a familiar ring to many Canada investors, especially people who once owned companies like Nortel or Garth Drabinsky's Livent.

Essentially, Muddy Waters alleges Sino had incorrectly stated the value of some of its assets and may have dealt improperly with companies with which it had relationships. As a result this may have made the company look far more valuable than it was.

Companies that tend to inflate their assets and profits often utilize weak "revenue recognition rules," says Rosen. Such asset inflation is commonplace in Canada and may or may not have occurred in Sino-Forest's case.

Revenue inflation was in large part the case with Nortel, where the value of some of accounts receivable assets on its balance sheet were inappropriately interpreted as being cash equivalents (but some were never collected in cash). The trouble is, those are the same assets and revenues that equity analysts use to value a company.

And unfortunately for investors, who believed what the analysts were telling them, their shares usually become worthless when the true value is revealed.

Rosen says under the new IFRS rules (applicable in 2011) it will become even easier for executives to create phantom assets values and phoney profits.

"It's a major, major step backwards in Canada," says Rosen. "It's a wide open field for crooks because you don't have to report as much relevant information to shareholders."
And some of the issues raised by Muddy Waters clearly involve questions of ownership and the value of assets.

That doesn't come as news to Rosen, who points out that under IFRS rules management has tremendous freedom to set the of value assets. For example, a property company could value a building at its original purchase price, revalue it each quarter or establish a one-time value increase.

Three companies in Canada could have three values for the same building. But investors have no way of knowing what the accurate value really is. "You can put any damn figure you want on a balance sheet," says Rosen. "And they are all in accordance with the IFRS rules. It's just sheer stupidity."

It's interesting to note the U.S., where Wall Street triggered the international financial crisis when markets were blindsided by worthless derivatives, doesn't want anything to do with the new IFRS rules that have been embraced by Canada.

"The U.S. has looked at the IFRS rules," says Rosen, "and they call it a race to the bottom, and they look at Canadians and think we're the stupidest people on earth."

Still, in Canada, major accounting firms have supported IFRS - which was developed by the European Union. But Rosen says this is because it lowers their liability when company audits turn out to be profoundly wrong.

"It pushes the responsibility onto the board of directors," said Rosen. "And the federal and provincial regulators go along with it."

One of the problems investors now face under IFRS is a lack of clarity. In the past, says Rosen, he was able to go to court and explain to a judge that a clear accounting rule had been violated and could not be misinterpreted.

But under the IFRS rules, Rosen says regulations are much more open to interpretation and therefore abuse.

Oddly, particularly in light of the Wall Street-inspired financial crisis, Canada has always trailed the U.S. when it comes to forcing companies to be truthful in their audits.

"We've always lagged the U.S. in accounting standards," says Rosen. "And it's a double-barrelled lag. It's a lag in accounting, in what you have to do, and it's a lag in auditing in what you have to check. Essentially, you audit in Canada by asking management to sign a letter saying that the crooked information they put on the financial statement is OK."

And, unfortunately for Canadian investors, they may increasingly find they are left with very little when someone like the Muddy Waters hedge fund comes looking for the truth.

Canada gets failing grade for lax enforcement of anti-bribery laws

OTTAWA - Canada has been singled out as the only country in the G7 that's failing to enforce anti-bribery rules against its businesses operating abroad.

For the seventh year in a row, Transparency International has ranked Canada as having "little or no enforcement," despite Canada's signature on an OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. I am not surprised since transparency is not prevalent even at Canadian Government levels

Canada is by far the largest exporter among the 21 countries listed by Transparency International as failing to live up to their convention promises.

The watchdog group ranks Canada with other laggards such as Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece and Slovenia, but also Australia, New Zealand and Israel.

Transparency International's seventh annual report laments a lack of overall movement among the 38 signatories to the anti-bribery convention a decade after it was adopted and points the finger at a lack of political will from the top in countries such as Canada.

Canada has had only a single bribery conviction in the last decade, but the report notes that 23 investigations were started last year — prompting hope that Canada may start showing real enforcement teeth.

United States - Visa and Mastercard beneficiaries of State Department lobbying effort

WikiLeaks Staff, 8 December 2010, 14.00 GMT
More articles ...
- U. S. Empire Secret Shopping List

Visa and Mastercard both received lobbying support from the Department of State under President Obama, the latest Cablegate release reveals.

A cable from the Moscow embassy, dated 1st February 2010, details a new Russian card processing law which the embassy said would “disadvantage U.S businesses”, and urged senior US officials to take action. (click here).

“This draft law continues to disadvantage U.S. payment card market leaders Visa and MasterCard, whether they join the National Payment Card System or not,” it said.

Russia was considering whether to implement a new system of card payments (called NPCS), which would create a new payment processor run by Russia’s state banks. This would then handle all processing for domestic banking in the country.

“The fees for these services are estimated at Rb 120 billion ($4 billion) annually...the vast majority of Visa’s business in Russia is done with cards issued and used in Russia; with earnings from processing going to NPCS, Visa would no longer profit from these transactions.”

When discussing possible causes of the restrictive legislation, a senior Visa employee in the country told embassy officials he believed the move was due to Russian suspicions that Visa and Mastercard passed information to the US government.

“[Redacted] believes that, at least at the Deputy Minister level, MinFin’s hands are tied. Implying that Russian security services were behind this decision, [redacted] said, ‘There is some se-cret (government) order that no one has seen, but everyone has to abide by it." “As described reftel, credit card company and bank representatives have told us that GOR (government of Russia) officials apparently assume that US payment systems routinely share data associated with payment transactions by Russian cardholders with intelligence services in the US and elsewhere.”

The embassy’s economic officer, Matthias Mitman, concluded his cable by calling for action. “While the draft legislation has yet to be submitted to the Duma and can still be amended, post will continue to raise our concerns with senior GOR officials,” he said.

“We recommend that senior USG officials also take advantage of meetings with their Russian counterparts, including through the Bilateral Presidential Commission, to press the GOR to change the draft text to ensure U.S. payment companies are not adversely affected.”

In the last decade or so of my life, in my humble opinion incompetent and sometimes cowardly leadership has done more to change the face of our world than perhaps in any other time in my short time on earth. Recent,in my view, badly managed events like Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq have proven that blind faith in our rulers is more than foolish--it can be downright dangerous.

The world possibly has grown more complicated and more volatile, and it follows that making intelligent decisions about the people in charge has never been more crucial. The quality of discernment ( insight and good judgment ) is often missing after the election of such persons. The 'spin' works for sure.

What causes us to follow bad leaders and how can we stop it? The answer in Canada is simple: ~Public Apathy~

If we want better leaders, we need to become better informed I personally use the GOYA technique and need more demanding knowledgeable followers. The realm of 'Animal Farm' which in my view has a civic address in Nova Scotia, must cease

I would love to have the support of a 'free press' ......... a free and independent press that is. I am still looking in Canada. It should be one Canada's best protections from being taken in by unscrupulous leaders ......... if we had one.?

I personally find it so difficult here in the Nova Scotia province of Canada to find out important breakdown details about almost any subject matter As an example, the actual method of calculating the price of Gas is almost impossible to find out. It seems that everything is in place but nothing is available. The veneer covers it all. Try it yourself ask for a clear method. This is my challenge to readers.

If incompetence were all we had to worry about when it came to bad political leaders, we could count ourselves lucky. But bad leaders are frequently dangerous, even deadly. After all most of these leaders who are 'pillars of society' are well off often legally and financially trained professionals who in fact make the laws that make themselves so dangerous. An enigma..a paradox?.. You choose.

Just ask the survivors of America’s Katrina disaster or visit graves relating to the Haitian disaster aftermath, about the amount of damage incompetent leadership can cause. Ask the people of Afghanistan and of Vietnam and perhaps Korea.. the list goes on. and closer to home Ask the people who have lost life-time investments because of poor government decisions, poor expensive laws and 'greed' with poor government fiscal management with zero accountability. Ask the long growing line of the unemployed and the waiting lines in hospital corridors and waiting rooms.

In Canada ask the elderly. Ask the First Nations people.. Oh Canada

We are living in a world where right and wrong are not polar opposites but only shades of difference. Thinking is required. The seemingly obvious course of action is often wrong. What’s certain on the surface is often an illusion. Dogma leads to despair. We are living in an age when measured action is a necessity. But how do we measure it. Should this change if we are unhappy with the current methodology Intelligence isn’t a luxury. I pray that We’ve used up our stupid quotient. It is time to get it right. We must cast away all the things that get in the way of knowledge.We must set our sights on a higher purpose, built upon facts, new science, and just plain smarts.

The world is no longer a simple place. It is interconnected, unpredictable, and speeding toward who knows where. Events seemingly of any nature are driven out of control, and to a large extent they are. The spin cloud cover is magic.

I truly believe we must educate the young to be devoted to true knowledge and not superstition, to enlightenment and not ignorance, to inclusion and not rejection, to reality and not blind faith, and to honesty and transparency by our leaders with powerful audit facilities to measure the actions of both failures and successes.

We need to believe in ourselves again. We need leaders who measure up.We must demand much more of those who say, ”Follow me.”

We want( but do we need) to enhance our self-esteem and sense of self-worth. How about self compassion insteaad ? We want a sense of competence, power, achievement, and confidence that we can cope with and exercise control over our environment and governments.

Our leaders of course fulfill this WANT feeling and tell us 'by voting for them that this 'WANT' will come to to be'..yeh...?

I feel our leaders are more often than not, Narcissistic? an 'asset' that enables the “mirror hungry” person to rise in organizations, society, and politics. If this is so then its is not hard to see why such people are generally so successful. After all, they:

* Exhibit high levels of self-confidence that people equate with competence.
* Have an infectious enthusiasm.
* Have an unrelenting drive for power.
* Are good at office politics.
* Are frequently charming.
* Build large numbers of quick, albeit superficial, relationships.
* Are able to make quick decisions with seeming ease.
* Have especially in Canada, Machiavellian “street smarts”when it comes to getting their way.

We must diligently employ Kipling's 'Poem'

“I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.”

And we must insist on an answers based on real truth, not empty rhetoric. Don’t just tell us that the torch has been passed to a new generation. Tell us what you intend to do with the torch. Words aren’t enough. We want a clear and practical path to tomorrow.

In my opinion Canada needs a method like some USA states to be able rescind any leader if they do wrong or are not able to carry out the promises they made or they downright lied.

It’s time to send a message to corrupt politicians, incompetent bureaucrats, and all those who assume power and then abuse it that we won’t take their failures and betrayal anymore. We all fail at times, its the way of life but to cover it up and deny it is wrong. These people in my view have no conscience so they are able to sleep every night.!

If you are sick of being misled by politicians who promise much and deliver little, this blog is for you.
If you are tired of being seduced by the imagery of false prophets and
tricked by those who exploit corrupt influence for personal gain, this blog is for you.
If you are tired of leaders enriching themselves and that includes in Nova Scotia misappropriation* at your expense, this blog is for you.
If you are tired of voting for change and getting only more of the same, this book is for you.
If you are tired of members of Parliaments and the Senior ministers putting
politics ahead of voters’ concerns and country needs, this blog is for you.

If you are ready to make your leaders and I include clergy, and myriads
all those others who proclaim they are “in charge,” your servant rather than your savior...then this blog is for you.

Lets find out - cost out and then cast out the many leechers. We can not afford them bureaucrats?.

Do you know who these bureaucrats are fellow Canadians? ...Lets make a list.. please contact me..

It wasn’t always that way .. Canada..

In law, misappropriation is the intentional, illegal use of the property or funds of another person for one's own use or other unauthorized purpose.

More to come...

Summerfallow at the highest level since 1999

Summerfallow, namely land on which no crop will be grown during the year, was estimated at 12.1 million acres, an increase of 93.9% from the 6.2 million acres reported in 2009. Summerfallow area has not been this high since 1999, when it was 15.0 million acres.

In Saskatchewan, 9.7 million acres were reported, an increase of 135.9% compared with 4.1 million acres in 2009. Much of the increase occurred in the East and East-central districts, where respondents reported severe flooding during the May and June seeding period. Manitoba reported 760,000 acres, an increase of 60.0% from 475,000 acres in 2009. Alberta remained unchanged at 1.6 million acres.


Get ready for a real heist in Prices..and not because of the shortage..but by opportunist companies which of course the Govt will tax...Neat eh...

OTTAWA — Canada's 18 federal unions are meeting in Ottawa for two days starting Tuesday to develop a united front against what they believe is the Harper government's gathering assault on the public service.

Facing one of the largest deficits in Canadian history, union leaders are braced for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to turn to the public service to balance his books.

One big concern is persistent rumblings about cutting to the public service's generous pensions and benefits.

John Gordon, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, says the Conservatives have long grumbled about public service pensions. The government has said it won't cut transfers to the provinces or raise taxes, but will rely on economic growth and government spending cuts to eliminate the deficit.

Flaherty has said the "handsome arrangements" of all public servants came up at a recent federal-provincial meeting in Whitehorse on pension reform.

But union leaders say the government should be prepared for an all-out fight if it tampers with their defined benefit pension plan or tries to convert it a defined contribution plan as has happened in the United Kingdom.

Ron Cochrane, co-chair of the National Joint Council, which represents public service management and unions, said "nothing would galvanize even the most apathetic public servant like touching their pension.''

And the unions will be the first to pounce on MPs, judges and deputy ministers whose pensions are even richer than those of the rest of the public service.

The most talked about way for the government to reduce the pension costs of its employees is to make public servants, who now make about 32 per cent of the contributions to the plan, to pick up half the share of the cost.

Federal employees paid $1.2 billion in contributions into the plan in 2007-2008 while the government kicked in $2.6 billion.

In my view Canada should look at the English experience of greedy unions and support a plan to examine and adjust pensions if needed


see article here