All Abuzz About Insects

Bug season has begun in my part of the world with more rehashed research on the benefits of bugs and why we need more of them. More bugs are not something anyone wants to contemplate on a cool damp morning in cottage country. Clouds of biting blackflies are gathered outside my windows hungrily waiting for me to step outside. Millions of stinging mosquitos are breeding in puddles left by the spring rains. Not to mention deer flies, horse flies, gnats, no-see-ums and many others whose sole purpose for living is to drive humans mad.

   Meanwhile news sites are reminding us of the United Nation’s report on how insects are good for our planet and good for us to eat. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that 35 years from now the world will have nine billion people and food production will need to almost double. Land scarcity, fished out oceans, water shortages, and climate change will make feeding the world more difficult.  Insects, the UN says, are the solution to feeding a hungry world.

   “In the future, as the prices of conventional animal proteins increase, insects may well become a cheaper source of protein than conventionally produced meat and ocean- caught fish.”

   Raising livestock for beef, pork, lamb, poultry is inefficient, and some people say, unethical. You have to grow billions of tons of grain to feed those animals, then they pass gas which adds to global warming.

   Insects are protein packed and can be reared with little technical knowledge and capital investment. They don’t require butchering; you can eat them whole. And, I gather, they don’t pass gas.

   So there it is: the solution to the spring fly season is to start eating them.

   I’ve unintentionally breathed in and swallowed my share of bugs. I have never found them tasty, satisfying nor healthful. Whenever I feel myself running low on protein I’ll vote for a hamburger or a couple of strips of bacon.

Niagara Falls’ Dirty Little Secret

   Just finished a little holiday celebrating a special anniversary in Niagara Falls. Hotel room overlooking the falls, pleasant dinners out, some sightseeing and a trip to the casino. Totally enjoyable, except for the muggings.

Panorama: American falls left, Canadian falls right

   The first mugging was at the breakfast restaurant when I noticed a charge listed as TIF. It was three per cent of the bill. I inquired and was told it is a tax for “tourism improvement.” I assumed this was just another tax mugging. After all, Canada is a world-class innovator of devious ways to pick its citizens’ pockets.

   The TIF kept appearing to beat me up. It was there when I paid the hotel bill; almost $13. And an hour later when a waitress brought me a bill for breakfast. I became more and more perplexed, so I pulled out the smartphone and consulted Dr. Google. He informed me that TIF, which sometimes goes by other names, is not a government tax. It is an extra charge dreamed up by Niagara hotels and restaurants. The Ontario government has raised concerns about the charge but has never done anything about it. It is three per cent of your bill for food and lodging and is said to raise $15 million a year for the businesses.

   Most interesting: It is VOLUNTARY, although no hotel or restaurant employee will tell you that. There is no legal requirement to pay TIF or whatever other name is being used. If you are in Niagara and see it on your bill, ask them to remove it.

   Niagara hotels and restaurants are scooping enough money without nicking clients another three per cent just because they want to. The place is outrageously expensive because it is a tourist destination (almost $4 for a cup of coffee with your breakfast). People pay inflated prices because Niagara Falls is a scenic, historic and fun place to visit but we deserve better than being mugged for extra cash masquerading as a tax.
  

Smoking Challenges China's Prosperity

   Industrial smog isn’t the only health hazard threatening the future of China. Tobacco smoke is killing an estimated one million Chinese every year and smoking related disease is straining the country’s health care system.

   There are 365 million tobacco smokers in China consuming close to 40 per cent of the world’s cigarettes. The Global Adult Tobacco Survey has shown that 52.9 per cent of Chinese men and 2.4 per cent of the women smoke.

    Getting so many millions of people to quit smoking is a gargantuan task. Compounding the task is a sad fact: Chinese governments, like Canadian governments, are addicted to tobacco revenue. Revenues from tobacco taxes and tobacco production account for fifteen per cent of the Chinese central government’s annual revenue, says the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The annual budgets of Chinese cities in agricultural areas are hugely dependent on tobacco revenue.

   There are millions of tobacco growers in China and the state-owned China National Tobacco Corp. produces two of every five cigarettes produced worldwide. So millions of Chinese are dependent on tobacco money.

   Reducing smoking to save lives and reduce health costs means flirting with economic disaster. That’s why Chinese tobacco policies have been so contradictory.

   Anti-tobacco crusaders outside China have suggested replacing tobacco crops with food crops. The idea is that as tobacco crops dwindle, the state tobacco company will have to pay higher prices to alternative tobacco sources. Paying more for tobacco leaf will mean having to raise consumer tobacco prices. Higher retail prices are touted as a means of getting people to quit smoking.

   Canada has tried that. And, Canada has a continuing contraband tobacco problem.

   Canada also tried crop replacement in 2008, forcing a majority of tobacco farmers out of business. However, since then the Canadian tobacco growing business is growing again with production up 140 per cent by some estimates.

Smoke Shack in SOntario - Ron Poling

   Much of that new growth has been in southern Ontario where Grand River Enterprises on the Six Nations Reserve has developed into a major cigarette producer. It has a contract to supply 12 million pounds of tobacco to China.

   Higher taxes and more law enforcement are not the most effective ways to reduce smoking rates. The most effective tool in getting people to stop smoking is education. It’s a long and slow and difficult process but it works. 
   The good news from China is that the country is making a start in that direction.

The Starving Writer Story

   Except for a small literary elite, Canadian writers are starving. More Canadians are being published than ever before, but very few are earning enough to keep themselves fed. Dozens of first-time authors appear daily because of the relative ease and small expense of self-publishing, but few even recover their costs. 

   Publishers Weekly reports the number of self-published titles in the U.S. jumped from 133,036 in 2010 to 211,269 in 2011. There are no provable figures for Canada.

   Traditional book publishers continue to struggle meanwhile, with authors suffering smaller advances, smaller royalties and smaller promotional efforts. For most writers it is impossible to earn even a basic living writing books.

    One place where it is easier is Norway. In that country of five million people the Arts Council of Norway buys 1,000 copies of every new book published and distributes them to libraries. The authors receive royalties on those copies. More than one-half of the Norwegian population aged nine to 79 uses a public library and the Norwegian literacy rate is said to be about 100 per cent.

    Also helpful: books are not subject to Value Added Taxes and there generally is no charge for anyone to attend a public university. Norway, like some other European countries also bans deep discounting of books.

    In Canada, books are subject to taxes, deep discounting is rampant and the Supreme Court has allowed educators to photocopy books without compensating the authors.

    Hundreds of thousands of words could be written on how a combination of neglect and bad policy is killing the Canadian writer.

    However, one fact taken from 2011 Statistics Canada data clearly illustrates the problem: There now are 4.1 public relations professionals for every journalist in Canada. So, the number of people being paid to tell you what their companies want you to hear is rising against a declining number of people who try to get you the unvarnished facts.

   More and more people who set out to be writers are becoming public relations professionals because being a journalist or an independent writer has become a hard way to keep food on the table.

The Missing Middle Ground

   It is an increasingly polarized world in which we live. The search for middle ground through intelligent debate has gone missing. One example:

   Dick Metcalf, one of North America’s best known gun journalists, has been shunned and banished. He was fired from Guns and Ammo magazine where he was the back page columnist. His TV show on firearms was cancelled.

   Metcalf became a pariah in the sporting arms community because he wrote a column last December titled Let’s Talk Limits. It raised the argument that some gun regulation is not an infringement of the U.S. Second Amendment granting the right to bear arms.

   “The fact is all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be,” he wrote.

   Guns and Ammo fired him after hearing from readers and a gun industry that  will not tolerate discussion of gun regulation. Metcalf received death threats.

   He isn’t the first gun journalist banished for trying to broaden the discussion on regulating guns. Jim Zumbo, one of the more famous names in sport shooting and hunting, was banished after he posted in 2007 an Outdoor Life blog saying that military style weapons are terrorist weapons best avoided by hunters.

   The Canadian gun control debate has followed the other extreme: regulate every aspect of guns in an effort to make all guns disappear. Fortunately, debate has been allowed and has resulted in some sanity being restored to gun control. The federal government has dismantled the stupidly bureaucratic and costly gun registry while maintaining licensing of gun owners and rules for training and safe storage.
   More changes are needed in Canada to create a system that is fairer for legitimate sporting arms owners while ensuring public safety. One change needed is to remove gun control decisions from the RCMP and give it to a competent civilian authority. 
    Meanwhile, how Americans deal with their gun issues is their business and they will work them out in their own way.  The shame is that any discussion of gun control is smothered even when it comes from gun enthusiasts and Second Amendment defenders like Metcalf and Zumbo.

  

More Taxes, More Police but Still More Contraband

   The contraband cigarette circus continues with governments unwilling to try new ways to stop it despite so much evidence that increased taxes and enforcement have not been especially effective.

   The federal government recently increased its tobacco taxes $4 a carton and has given the RCMP another $91 million for high-tech electronic surveillance along the Ontario-Quebec-U.S. borders. A carton of 200 taxed cigarettes now ranges from roughly $80 to $112  depending on local taxes. 'Baggies' of 200 untaxed cigarettes can be purchased for under $10. People who smoke like the idea of buying their cigarettes for a fraction of the retail store cost, even if they are illegal.

   The federal government admits that the contraband problem is not improving. It says that 30 to 50 per cent of tobacco purchased in Canada is bought illegally. Contraband tobacco has been spreading steadily outward from Ontario-Quebec into the Atlantic and western provinces. 

   Governments won’t try different strategies against contraband tobacco for two reasons: They are addicted to tobacco tax revenue ($7.5 billion in 2011), and they fear backlash from powerful anti-smoking lobbyists such as the Canadian Cancer Society. I have nothing against the anti-smoking lobby. They are sincere and dedicated in their commitment to help people stop smoking. However, they are totally grounded to the argument that higher taxes are the best way to reduce smoking.

   There is evidence that slashing tobacco taxes dramatically reduces contraband tobacco and does not significantly increase the number of people who smoke. Most governments and anti-smoking organizations around the world refuse to consider that argument. 

   The contraband tobacco issue is extremely complicated and needs fresh thinking. And, as noted in Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry it cannot be fully resolved until Canadian governments get serious about resolving Native sovereignty issues.

Savouring the Sweetness of Entitlement

   “Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.”

The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed that greedy thought in his novel The Brothers Karamazov 125 years ago.

   Dostoyevsky’s words have become a mantra for politicians and others who consider themselves important enough to suck up entitlements as thoroughly as a sewer vacuums. Examples of demanding more and taking more stretch from sea to shining sea, notably in government and politics.

   There is the Canadian Senate expense account scandal, of course, and the outrage about Alberta Premier Aliston Redford’s air travel expenses. The Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police apologized and had to pay back the cost of using on-duty RCMP officers as an honour guard for his marriage to a senior Ottawa bureaucrat.

   A fresh example is found at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Its president Hubert Lacroix has apologized for claiming $30,000 in expenses to which he wasn’t entitled. He says it was a careless error. If you can’t figure out your expense account, what are you doing running the CBC?

   Also, it’s been revealed that the CBC’s millionaire news reader Peter Mansbridge took big bucks to speak to petroleum producers. The Toronto Sun said the speaking fee was $28,000. In my journalistic world the only people you take money from are your employers. Mansbridge said it’s OK because all his paid speaking engagements are cleared by CBC senior management, which includes the president who can’t figure out his own expenses correctly.

   We live in a country where the elite and people in power have become so blinded by entitlement that they have difficulty seeing the difference between right and wrong.