Why "free enterprise" needs a little less freedom

Big Steve was in Lac-Megantic the other day to announce a $95 million gift from the Canadian taxpayer towards cleaning up the mess left by feisty free-enterpriser Fast Eddie Burkhardt's killer crude train. If you read the fine print you find that it's actually a matching grant; the Canadian taxpayer will match the Quebec taxpayers up to a maximum of $95 million.

In other words, taxpayers are committed to cleaning up Mr. Burkhardt's mess one way or the other. Harper is just giving notice that after the clean-up cost passes $190 million the Quebec tax-payers are on their own.

Where is Fast Eddie in all this?

Long gone.

Meanwhile, up Yellowknife way, the staggeringly expensive Giant Mine clean-up continues apace, or rather at a snails pace. That was another textbook case of a feisty free-enterpriser, in fact a series of them, making hay while the sun was shining. Then one day the gold was gone and the jobs were gone and the free-enterprisers were gone and all that's left is 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide.

The estimated billion dollar clean-up isn't even a clean-up; it's a containment. The actual clean-up is being left to future generations of taxpayers.

That's the trouble with free-enterprisers. They're only around for the good times. They make hay while the sun shines. They enjoy the adulation of the business press for a few years, and when the going gets tough and the clouds move in, they're outta there, leaving the public to clean up their mess.

There will be plenty more disasters coming down the pike and the pipeline in the future. Who do you think will pick up the tab for decommissioning those privatized nuclear reactors in Ontario? Bruce Power bought the project to generate profits, not to clean up when the profits are gone. The tax-payers of Ontario paid for that project when the private sector first built it, pay for the enormous cost over-runs every month on their hydro bills, and will pay for it again several times over when it's time to decommission.

You can be sure that the folks pocketing the profits today will be long gone by the time that happens.

So given that the public will be paying for all this anyway, maybe the public should demand a little more say well before we're left with just the mess.

Why protesters target Canadian mining companies; they're stupid

Who in their right mind would even think about objecting to a Canadian mining company coming to their neighborhood and destroying the local eco-system in return for creating a few temporary jobs?

Apparently folks in at least ten countries are doing exactly that. How is such a thing even possible? Haven't those people heard that Canadian mining conglomerates are so overweeningly generous in the blessings they bestow on their hosts that they have been made the official bearers of Canadian foreign aid?

Yes, the Fantino-Harper brain trust recently decreed that henceforth Canadian taxpayers will only fund foreign aid that is piggy-backed on the foreign operations of the mining sector. This is a sly way of of subsidizing the mining sector and calling it "foreign aid."

That's bound to make the locals suspicious, especially if they catch wind of stories such as the billion dollar tax-payer funded cleanup of the Giant Mine in Canada's north. The inescapable conclusion for folks in Colombia or Peru or Panama can only be; if those Canadians are willing to foul their own nest to get at the gold, what kind of a mess are they going to leave here?

That's the kind of stigma the good folks at Eco Oro are facing at their operation in Colombia. In spite of every reassurance from the Canadians, the misguided locals continue to protest the mine, leading a company spokesperson to exclaim, " We believe the people marching must take action to educate themselves..."

I think they already have!

Giant Mine makes history one last time

Twenty years ago one could scarcely open the Globe and Mail without seeing some fawning tribute to Peggy Witte, the brilliant woman who had clawed her way to, if not the pinnacle, at least the higher reaches of the Canadian gold mining industry.

Peggy's Royal Oak Mines ran the Giant Mine in Yellowknife.

The Globe was writing about the Giant mine again today. The mine is well on it's way to becoming the most expensive pollution cleanup in Canadian history.

Canadian taxpayers face the prospect of spending at least a billion dollars on site remediation. We've been gifted, among other things, "a toxic smorgasbord of buildings, tailings ponds, and a quarter million tonnes of arsenic".

Nowhere in today's article was Peggy's name mentioned. Nor was the fact that the union lock-out she initiated led to the bloodiest labour conflict in Canadian history. Nor was the fact that a few years after she succeeded in breaking the union her mine went into receivership anyway.

An accidental oversight I'm sure.