Tag Archives: Canada

Canada Pulls Out of UN Racism Conference

Posted on by
1

The Associated Press reports that Canada has withdrawn from next year’s planned United Nations Conference on Racism planned for South Africa. Like the previous UN Conference on Racism in 2001, this one is slated to be yet another UN Conference on Israeli Bashing.

As Salon noted in its coverage of the 2001 Conference, the Conference in fact featured incidents of anti-Semitism,

Inside the U.N. conference grounds and within its tents, the rhetoric and agitprop were also white hot. Fliers were found with Hitler’s photo above the question: “What if I had won? There would be no Israel, and no Palestinian bloodshed.” A press conference held by the Jewish caucus was cut short by a rowdy group of Iranian women, one of whom screamed, “Six million dead and you’re holding the world hostage!”

This time around, the UN has ensured that a similar debacle with Libya elected to chair the event, Cuba as vice-chair, and Iran on the organizing committee. Presumably, the Sudanese government may be offered the keynote this time around.

Lego Loses Canadian Trademark Lawsuit — Thank Goodness

Posted on by
Reply

The other day I mentioned Lego’s longstanding financial problems and why I think it has had such problems earning profits. One thing I left out was Lego’s focus on silly lawsuits. All other things being equal, a company that decides to deal with its competitors in the legal arena rather than the marketplace is a company that has completely lost its direction.

Lego’s trademark lawsuit against rival Mega Bloks was especially egregious. Lego’s patents on its plastic bricks began running out in the 1970s — in Canada it lost its patent protection in 1988.

Rather than try to out-compete Mega Bloks and other competitors, however, Lego has tried to exclude them from the marketplace with ridiculous trademark lawsuits. Since its patent has run out, Lego has claimed that it has a trademark on the look and feel of its plastic bricks, and that any companies that make plastic bricks compatible with Legos are violating that trademark.

The Canadian Supreme Court unanimously rejected this bizarre line of reasoning, correctly noting that,

Trademark law should not be used to perpetuate monopoly rights enjoyed under now-expired patents.

. . .

The fact is . . . that the monopoly on the bricks is over, and Mega Bloks and Lego bricks may be interchangeable in the bins of the playrooms of the nation — dragons, castles and knights may be designed with them, without any distinction.

Unlike the privately-held Lego, which is bleeding money, the publicly traded Mega Bloks recently posted a $20.4 million profit in the 3rd quarter of 2005. On the other hand, the general view among plastic brick aficionados is that Lego bricks are much higher quality and Mega Bloks are, in general, cheap Lego knock offs.

Also some of the stories referenced here incorrectly state that Mega Bloks bricks are not compatible with Legos. Mega Bloks, like Lego, manufactures a number of different sized bricks, and its “Micro” bricks are, in fact, compatible with standard Legos.

Sources:

Mega Bloks wins SCOC ruling on Lego trademark. CBC News, November 17, 2005.

Lego can’t block toy maker Mega Bloks, says Supreme Court of Canada. Allan Swift, Canadian Press, November 17, 2005.

There Is No Right to Read in Canada

Posted on by
Reply

This story is just bizarre. Some Canadian bookseller accidentally sold 14 copies of the new Harry Potter novel before they were supposed to go on sale. So the publisher asked for and received an injunction which makes it illegal for those people to actually read the copies of the book they purchased.

The Times reports,

The supreme court of British Columbia issued a court order preventing anyone from “displaying, reading, offering for sale, selling or exhibiting in public” their books. J. K. RowlingÂ’s legal advisers said that the author was entitled to prevent buyers from reading their own books even though they had not broken the law.

“The fact is that this is property that should not have been in their possession,” said Neil Blair, a legal specialist for Christopher Little, the authorÂ’s literary agent. “Copyright holders are entitled to protect their work. If the content of the book is confidential until July 16, which it is, why shouldnÂ’t someone who has the physical book be prevented from reading it and thereby obtaining the confidential information? How they came to have access to the book is immaterial.”

British lawyers described the injunction as “unfair and excessive” but added that the reader did not have a right in law to read the book. Korieh Duodu, a media lawyer for David Price Solicitors and Advocates, said: “I have never heard of such a wide-ranging order. One sympathises with the reader from a non-legal point of view, but property rights often trump civil liberties. There is no human right to read.”

No human right to read? WTF?

Source:

Reading ban on leaked Harry Potter. The Times (London), July 13, 2005.

Should Americans Be Allowed to Import Drugs from Canada?

Posted on by
Reply

The whole reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada issues is a bit odd because it tends to reverse traditional political views. Democrats who complain about the horrors of outsourcing jobs and the evils of free trade suddenly find themselves on the side of free trade across the Canadian border. Republicans who are nominally the party of free trade suddenly find themselves talking like anti-globalization activists about the dangers of weak safety standards in countries where the drugs might be made (and, as Clark Venable notes, it’s misleading to claim that the reimported drugs are made in America or Canada).

I am a free trader, a fan of the pharmaceutical industry and an ardent supporter of reimportation. Clark Venable quotes from a New England Journal of Medicine article that purports to make the case against reimportation, but really offers up the main reason to support it,

The mass exportation of prescription medication to the United States threatens the preferential pricing set by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board.2 Companies may also choose not to market medication in Canada in order to protect the larger and more lucrative U.S. market.3 At risk is nothing less than the ability of countries to set their own policy regarding pharmaceuticals. The availability of Canadian medication is not a viable long-term solution to the problems of drug costs in the United States and represents a substantial threat to the access and affordability of drugs in Canada.

Yes, absolutely — this is precisely what needs to happen to bring sanity back to prescription drug pricing.

The current situation is quite simple. Canada tells a pharmaceutical manufacturer that it will only buy a drug at say $2/pill. The manufacturer says fine, we’ll make that up by charging American consumers $4/pill. The end result is that Americans end up subsidizing Canada’s system of socialized medicine. They get all the benefits of the lower price, while Americans pay the price in higher prices and also to a certain extent a penalty that discourages innovative new products (since in order for a product to be truly profitable, a company has to be able to sustain high prices in the U.S. market, so there is a disincentive to develop products that might be profitable if there were a market system in other countries rather than only in the United States).

As the NEJM notes, allowing reimportation of drugs will go along way to busting up that system which is a very good thing for Americans. Canadians (and other countries for that matter) must know that they cannot be free riders on American consumers forever. If their governments are going to continue to demand below market prices from drug companies, they are going to have to face a tradeoff of important medications being withdrawn or not being made available at all.

It should also be pointed out that the U.S. government also artificially inflates the cost of drugs with requirements that companies sell drugs to Medicare at the lowest rate they are sold for in the United States. Hmmmm…so if a company offers a subgroup a discounted price, it has to offer the government that same discounted price. Guess how pharmaceutical companies decide to price drugs given those incentives.

Keep Your Hands Off My Canadian Bacon

Posted on by
Reply

The Bush administration kicked off its term in office by imposing Draconian tariffs on imported wood from Canada and now it seems to likely to bookend its first term with equally stupid tariffs on Canadian pork products.

The U.S. International Trade Commission claims that Canada unfairly subsidizes hog farmers. Canadian hog farmers say that’s simply not true. Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn. Look, if the Canadian government is subsidizing hogs for export to the United States, it is basically transferring wealth from Canada to the United States — who in their right minds would want to stand up and say “stop giving us your money! We want to pay higher prices for pork products!”

Well, the Bush administration might. Pork producers are big businesses in swing states like Ohio where Dick Isler, executive vice president of the Ohio Pork Producers Council tells the Gannett News Service, “In general we have seen large numbers of producers, especially in the last two or three years, who have not been able to make a profit and as a result are not able to raise hogs any longer.”

But is this due to “unfair” subsidies? In fact, the decline in U.S. hog farms — and rise in imports from Canada — began in 1998 which, not surprisingly, also happens to be when the Canadian dollar crashed and burned compared to the U.S. dollar (I worked for a company at the time that moved all of a number of lucrative telecommunications contracts to Canadian firms strictly to take advantage of the currency savings).

The current comparative advantage that Canada has in producing some goods, such as wood or hogs, benefits both countries, but especially the United States where cheap imports can help deter inflationary pressures. This state of affairs won’t last forever, and the Bush administration would be crazy to arbitrarily tell Americans, “no, you must pay more for pork products because our farmers just can’t compete with Canadian farmers.”

Source:

U.S. panel mulls trade sanctions to stem hog imports. Greg Wright, Gannett News Service, May 8, 2004.

Why Not Go All the Way on Reimportation of Drugs?

Posted on by
Reply

The debate over allowing Americans to import drugs from Canada — where they are generally cheaper — is fascinating if only to watch free trade Republicans come out in favor of protectionism and protectionist Democrats suddenly find the free trade religion.

I agree with those who believe Americans should be able to buy imported drugs from practically anywhere. If you can get your medication in Mexico or Canada cheaper than in the United States, go for it.

The main argument against this is that drug companies in Canada, for example, are forced to charge lower prices by the government there. Without higher drug prices in the United States, there won’t be enough money for future research and development.

This argument has some appeal, but frankly this is a problem the drug companies themselves are going to solve. Look, the basic problem is that drugs in Canada are far too cheap. Rather than challenge Canada’s ridiculous formulary pricing, drug companies just cave and pass on the costs of doing so to Americans. Screw that. Hopefully, allowing importation of prescription drugs will give the drug companies some backbone in such countries.

The other argument against reimportation of prescription drugs is, in my opinion, a red herring — that such drugs may be unsafe by American standards. Certainly those who favor reimportation dismiss such arguments as simply industry-serving nonsense.

But why not go all the way with this? Why not let American firms adopt manufacturing standards that are acceptable in Canada (or Mexico for that matter)? Why not let Americans import drugs from Canada (or other countries) that have yet to be approved by the FDA?

If it’s good enough for Canadians, it’s good enough for Americans, right?

Canadians Use Terrorism as a Cover for Absurd Secrecy as Well

Posted on by
Reply

Apparently American law enforcement isn’t the only ones using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to keep secret things that should be routinely be made public. According to this Ottawa Citizen story, an Ottawa-based terrorist task force invoked the specter of terrorism to keep secret how much it spent procuring a coffee maker, silverware and a thermostat.

The task force said it would not respond to a request for the information under Canadian-style freedom of information laws on the grounds that to do so would be “injurious to the conduct of international affairs, the defence of Canada or the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities.”

According to the Ottawa Citizen story,

The release of the records on the JTF2 contracts came only after a lengthy bureaucratic battle. At first, the unit claimed that the records could not easily be found and it would take 54 hours to search for the documents at a cost of $540 to the Citizen. Those fees were eventually dropped after the newspaper pointed out that most of the records were contained in an easily-accessible computer printout.

Presumably, Al Qaeda has a plot to hijack silverware in Canada and use it for some nefarious purpose.

Source:

Coffee: The latest threat to security. David Pugliese, The Ottawa Citizen, September 28, 2003.

Goofy Albertan Separatists

Posted on by
Reply

Jim Roepcke links to this story about a goofy Albertan separatist group. What would Albertans do once they separate from Canada,

“One of the things that was suggested would be a couple of nuclear submarines moving around the world,” Bruce Hutton told a news conference Tuesday. “That makes us a formidable power. With the amount of money we’ve sent to Ottawa in the last six years, we could have nuclear submarines.”

My idea is that instead they could use the money to built a secret undersea city from which to plot Alberta’s takeover of the world. That would make about as much sense.

The Perils of Cross-Cultural Statistics

Posted on by
Reply

In an excellent article about the UK’s failed experiment in gun control, Janet Malcolm offer an amazing example of the perils of using statistics as-is from different countries. As we all know, the United States has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The U.S. homicide rate, for example, is almost three time as high as that of Great Britain. Sort of. . . Well, maybe not …

The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isnÂ’t subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police “massage down” the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.

The same oddity occurs with infant mortality. You’d think that establishing when a person is born and when they die would be fairly straightforward, but in fact the United States records infant mortality statistics in a way that is out of step with the rest of the world and which artificially inflates the U.S. infant mortality rate (the short version is that in the U.S. many premature infants who die shortly after birth are counted in birth and death statistics, whereas in most of the world they are not considered live births).

Or take Reporters Without Borders report which ranks freedom of speech and puts Canada at 5th in the world while the U.S. comes in at 17. The U.S. comes in so low because of the relatively large number (for a Western nation) of reporters who are jailed, almost always because they refuse to reveal a source.

But this is largely an artifact of the United States’ peculiar prior restraint doctrine. In the United States it is almost impossible to for the government to prevent publication of anything in a newspaper. The government can go in later and subpoena a reporter or a person can sue for libel, but the odds of getting a court to enjoin publication is very close to zero except for a few extreme national security issues.

In many Western countries, there is no such limit and there are strict laws that prevent newspapers and broadcast outlets from reporting on certain topics. For example, most of the cases where reporters are jailed for not revealing sources are criminal cases. Most other Western countries, including Canada, place much stricter limits on what can be reported in coverage of criminal cases and don’t run into these sorts of problems.

Source:

Gun ControlÂ’s Twisted Outcome
Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S. Joyce Lee Malcolm, Reason, November 2002.

Reporters Without Borders is publishing the first worldwide press freedom index. Reporters Without Borders, October 2002.

Misleading WHO Study on Violence

Posted on by
Reply

Last week many news outlets reported on a study by the World Health Organization that blondes were becoming extinct — that turned out to be a hoax. No such study existed. But now WHO seems to be using a genuine report to distort the rate of homicides by intimate partners.

The New York Times summarizes the WHO report on intimate murder this way,

The study found that violence against women by their male partners occurs in all countries, regardless of economic class and religion. Data from Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel and South Africa show that 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

But the situation is not the same for male murder victims. In the United States, for instance, only 4 percent of men murdered from 1976 to 1996 were killed by their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends.

The problem with this statistic is that it makes it appear that the odds of a man being murdered by a girlfriend, wife or ex-wife is far lower than the risk that a woman will be killed by a boyfriend, husband or ex-husband.

But in the United States, the actual annual figures break out to something like 1,300 women killed by male intimates compared to about 600 men killed by female intimates. In most years, about 1/3rd of all murders by intimate partners are committed by women.

But at the same time, it is correct that only 4 percent of men who are murdered are killed by women they have an intimate relationship with. But this is because men are so much more likely to be murdered than are women. As WHO notes, men constitute approximately 3/4 of all homicide victims (in the United States, about 80 percent of murder victims are men).

Another major problem with WHO’s study on violence is that it lumps in suicide as an act of violence. Yes suicide is a problem and needs to be addressed, but somebody who wants to kill himself is not the same sort of social problem as somebody who wants to kill other people. Out of the 1.6 million victims of violence annually that WHO cites, well over 1 million of those deaths are the result of suicides.

Finally, WHO has lowballed the number of people who died as a result of violence at only 191 million in the 20th century. The complete report isn’t available online, but that figure is way too small unless WHO is playing with politics with who counts as a victim of violence.

Sources:

First ever Global Report on Violence and Health released. World Health Organization, Press Release, October 3, 2002.


War, Murder and Suicide: A Year’s Toll Is 1.6 Million. Sheryl Gay Stroberg, New York Times, October 3, 2003.