Good Times?

The Globe and Mail was positively filled with good news today. Well, none of it was really news, but it was all good.

First off, Ottawa Flush With Surplus Cash. On current trends it looks like Ottawa will take in $5 billion more than forecast in the budget. People can criticize, but when the government is managing it's books exactly the same way I manage my own - conservatively - I'm not going to. I find it funny that, on the one hand, people bemoan how predictable this turn of events was. And on the other hand, people complain how it's impossible for people to rely on these budget estimates when they're always wrong. Either you can figure out an estimate of our fiscal situation based on the budget forecast or you can't - you can't have it both ways.

Anyway, for the last few years employment growth has been strong, commodity prices have been high and corporate profits have been at record levels. Under the circumstances you would almost expect the results to come in ahead of a forecast which has to allow for the possibility of an economic slowdown. So people can complain away but if Ottawa keeps piling up surpluses and putting them against the debt, we're all getting wealthier and that's fine by me.

Unsurprisingly, Andrew disagrees, but that's OK since we've pretty much agreed to disagree on this topic.

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Second, some encouraging results from an industry sponsored propaganda poll looking to drum up support for tougher measures against copying.

"the survey asked students about their attitudes toward theft and found that most did not put illegal software downloading in the same category as offences such as shoplifting.

About 96 per cent agreed that stealing software from a store would be considered a serious offence. By comparison, 40 per cent felt the same way about illegal downloading, file swapping or making copies of commercial software."

It's good to see that, despite industry funded advertising to the contrary, people were able to see the ethical difference between depriving the store of an item they were planning to sell (and causing them a loss nearly equal to the students gain) and making a copy of software (not causing any loss to the company).

The students also seemed to be able (unlike the study authors) to distinguish between plagiarizing (taking credit for someone else's work) and simple copying (making a copy of someone else's work but taking no credit for its creation),

"On the issue of intellectual property rights, about 87 per cent said they would have a problem with someone plagiarizing their own work. When it comes to downloading commercial software, however, just 40 per cent showed similar concerns.

The disconnect, the report said, was particularly strong among computer-science students."

Maybe the media literacy courses they teach these days are actually paying off! For a more useful bit of discussion on intellectual property than the industry poll, see this excellent column by Michael Geist in the Star on why the blank media copyright levy has outlived its usefulness.

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Finally, it seems like Newfoundland & Labrador is moving forward with plans for the Lower Churchill project, a massive hydroelectric plant in Labrador. Personally, I am indifferent to whether it is done with or without help from Hydro Québec, but, what I do think is that, when we look back in 50 years, the people who started work on big hydroelectric projects now will be seen as having made smart decisions.

Already, Canadian provinces with well developed hydro resources have a competitive advantage over those that don't and this is only going to grow as a combination of dwindling supplies and increased environmental concerns drives the price (and volatility of the price) of fossil fuels higher.

I believe that if Ontario had taken the billions it has invested in the Nuclear sector and devoted it instead to developing a robust grid linking and developing the hydro capacity of Manitoba, Northern Ontario and Québec, the energy picture would be a lot brighter there. There are issues with hydro of course, such as the flooding of land and Native land claims, but my feeling is that these issues are the lesser of the evils you have to deal with to generate power and that, if dealt with properly, they don't really have to be evils at all.