Once again the full regular team is in studio to present this edition, Lynn, Wojtek and Marc Listen
A new study by an economist with Canada’s biggest trade union has shown some very interesting results. Jordan Brennan is with Unifor, the largest private sector union in the country. He undertook an extensive study of free trade and its affect in Canada. The data-packed study goes all the way back to the 19th century to examine business and trade trends before and after free trade deals. His conclusion is that “free trade” isn’t really free at all.
Canadians were told that free trade would lower tariff and improve the flow of goods in and out with lower costs. The study shows that Canada’s tariffs were historically low, around 3 percent and that the free trade deals have resulted in little noticeable difference with tariffs just under 1 percent, and that what has resulted from the Canada US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and subsequent Mexico US Canada North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has benefitted big business, but not the average Canadian.
The analysis is called “Ascent of Giants: NAFTA, Corporate Power, and the Growing Income Gap Wojtek spoke with Jordan Brennan about the study.
Phone scams are a plague. They are many and varied, and they work all too often. One kind involves phoning victims and pretending to be a technician from Microsoft, and saying they’ve discovered that your computer is infected.
They then say they can repair it or clean it, on-line electronically, for a fee.
The actual Microsoft corporation says that 2.8 million Canadians get such calls each year, and surprisingly about 200,000 fall for the scam and send money. Also surprisingly, many never realize they’ve been conned.
Lynn spoke with Avner Levin, director of the Privacy and cyber Crime Institute ar Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario.
There are often news stories about how some politicians, government officials, and agencies waste citizens hard-earned tax dollars. This is certainly not exclusive to Canada, but a non-profit taxpayers advocacy group has been doing something a bit unusual about it.
For the past 17 years, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has been handing out its annual awards to people and entities they’ve highlighted as some of the worst examples of government waste. They’re called the “Teddy Awards”, named after a former government bureaucrat, who before being fired for his excesses, managed to rack up an impressive bill at the public’s expense for such things as lavish meals, including a $700 lunch for two in Paris.
Past winners have included provincial politicians who collected $1000 a month for sitting on a committee which hadn’t met in years, A school maintenance union that billed $143 to attach a pencil sharpener to a desk, and $266 for hanging three pictures on a wall, the CEO of Ontario’s electrical power supplier Hydro One for having $45,000 in personal expenses, a $1.5 million salary and a $3 million severance check…among many others. In this edited version,
Marc spoke with Aaron Wudrick,federal director of the CTF who begins by talking about this year’s “winners”..
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