ORNGE air ambulance is paying $50,000 a month for a Hamilton hangar that sits empty and unused.

It’s the latest blunder at the provincial service tasked with transporting patients, saving lives and spending health care dollars wisely.

“Yes, there has been a significant delay in getting (hangar renovation) done,” ORNGE chief operating officer Tom Lepine said in an interview Thursday.

The massive, 31,000-square foot hangar at the Hamilton International Airport is owned by Cargojet. ORNGE has decided to move its Toronto air ambulance base to Hamilton and leased the hangar in December 2010, according to ORNGE spokesman Gannon Loftus. At roughly $50,000 a month, the publicly funded ORNGE has wasted an estimated $600,000 for space that until the last few weeks has sat idle.

“There was a delay in getting the structural steel” needed to outfit the hangar to ORNGE’s specifications, Lepine said. The plan is to have two helicopters and an airplane use the hangar. Crew quarters have to be built and Lepine said his goal is to open for business in April.

ORNGE receives $150 million a year from Ontario taxpayers to provide airborne medical transport from numerous bases across the province. For many years it has located a key base at the Toronto Island, with close proximity to the top hospitals in Ontario. Lepine said studies have shown him that a combination of lack of access to emergency services (a land ambulance picking up a patient has to use the ferry) and weather conditions on the island made it a poor choice for a base. Numerous paramedics interviewed by the Star say that is wrong, but last year ORNGE decided to move to Hamilton.

Ford executive team blunts budget cuts

Rob Ford’s executive team has removed some of the sting from his proposed 2012 budget, stripping out controversial cuts that would have shredded arts grants, eliminated an emergency fund for the city’s poor, stopped sidewalk snow-clearing and slashed the library budget.

With a flurry of motions that so overwhelmed the clerk Mr. Ford had to call a half-hour recess, councillors tabled 11 motions that kept the mayor’s core budget in place while addressing public concerns about the fiscal blueprint.

The motions blunted the cuts while adhering to a strict spending allowance from the mayor’s office of roughly $6-million, the amount remaining from a surge in property-tax assessments city staff reported last week.

They also stay within the 2.5-per-cent increase for residential taxes, with Mr. Ford proclaiming he does not want to spend “a nickel more.”

The mayor, who supported all the measures as a single package, praised the efforts of his executive.

“I am very proud of my executive and I am very, very, very confident this is getting through council,” he said.

Author of Controversial Piracy Bill Now Says ‘More Study’ Needed

The senator who introduced hotly debated legislation intended to shut down pirate websites said Thursday he is backing away from one of the most controversial parts of the bill, amid criticism from Web companies, human rights groups and Internet engineers.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said he would recommend that “more study” be given to a provision in the bill that would give the U.S. attorney general new authority to seek court orders compelling Internet service providers to block the sites’ domain names or Web addresses. A vote to bring the bill to the Senate floor for debate is scheduled for this month.

The bill, known as the PROTECT IP Act, is co-sponsored by more than 40 senators, a sign of broad support. It is backed by major Hollywood studios and other copyright holders that say the legislation is needed to combat foreign websites that sell access to pirated movies and counterfeit goods. (Among the studios advocating the legislation is Twentieth Century Fox Film, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp.)

But since the bill’s introduction last year, human rights groups and major Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have raised concerns about the First Amendment implications of shutting down entire websites, as well as potential technical problems that could arise from such blocking. A similar debate is taking place around the House version of the legislation, called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Cyber-Crimes Pose 'Existential' Threat, FBI Warns

Despite the increased frequency and severity of online crime and espionage in 2011, many American corporations and consumers are still not taking the threat seriously, the FBI's top cyber official said Thursday.

The risk posed by criminal hackers is "existential, meaning it could eliminate whole companies," said Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director. If hackers were able to tamper with critical infrastructure such as the power grid, "it could actually cause death," Henry said in remarks at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York.

To highlight the growing threat, Henry cited several recent FBI investigations, such as one involving a smaller company that went out of business after hackers stole $5 million from accounts, another concerning a larger firm that "virtually overnight" lost a decade of research and development worth $1 billion, and still another regarding hackers who encrypted millions of records of a health services company and demanded money for the password.

"We've seen the number and sophistication of the attacks by these cyber actors increase dramatically," Henry said.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen, primarily through the financial services sector, just in the last couple years," he said. An organized crime ring in Eastern Europe, for example, earned about $750,000 per week from cyber theft, he added.

For a Richer Retirement, Lower Business Taxes

Once again, tongues are wagging about defined benefit pension plans, particularly the impact of the upcoming budget on public sector retirement packages. An aging workforce and longer life expectancy have made it more expensive to provide them. What to do? Some recommend scaling back the entitlement while others advocate increasing the employer contribution.

Yet an obvious part of the solution is the one that everyone forgets: lower business taxes. Virtually every defined benefit plan in the country owns shares in the country's largest and most profitable enterprises. If these businesses make good after-tax money, they can pay better dividends to the pension funds that own their shares.

Take the Canada Post Pension Plan (CPC Pension). During the recent debate over the Canada Post strike, members of the New Democratic Party simultaneously demanded that the existing pension fund for mail workers be preserved and that corporate taxes should rise to pay for more government spending.

These concurrent demands are painfully ironic. The top five holdings in the CPC Pension are Toronto Dominion Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia, Suncor, and Canadian Natural Resources. Banks and oil companies -- the twin villains in every left-wing storyline -- pay dividends to the pension fund of these unionized workers. These dividends come from after-tax profit. If the business tax rate rises, the after-tax profit remaining for the pension funds drops.

At the time of the strike, the Canada Post Fund had $202 million invested in Toronto Dominion Bank. When TD profits, it can reinvest the money in growth or pay dividends to the shareholders (either way, the pension fund gets a better return on its investment).

However, TD can only pay out these benefits on after-tax earnings. If taxes go up, dividends and capital gains necessarily go down and shareholders (including the postal workers) lose out. It is really that simple.

Enbridge affiliates have had 175 leaks, spills over 10 years in U.S.

OTTAWA — Subsidiaries of the company that wants to build the Gateway pipeline through northern B.C. have reported more than 170 pipeline leaks and spills in the United States since 2002, accident reporting data show.

Records filed with the U.S. government show companies owned by Calgary-based Enbridge Energy experienced 159 reportable accidents and incidents involving liquid pipelines and another 16 in their natural gas lines.

The reports detail minor incidents, with only a few gallons lost, and major accidents, including the 2007 leak from an Enbridge pipeline in Clearbrook, Minnesota, that killed two workers and led to $2.4 million U.S. in fines against the company.

Stephen Harper won’t impose a social agenda on Canada, but he will export it

It’s a big week for the tinfoil hat crowd in this town.

Stephen Harper’s hidden social agenda appeared to be finally, fully, in bloom, with reversals on same-sex marriage laws and Conservative backbenchers freely and publicly flexing their anti-abortion muscles.

But it turns out that while the legions of Harper opponents were waiting for the hard-right social agenda to be firmly planted in Ottawa, the Conservatives are actually exporting those policies.

While federal lawyers argue that couples from outside Canada who thought they had legally tied the knot here were actually never married in the eyes of this government, the Prime Minister says the same-sex marriage debate is closed at home.

“We have no intention . . . of opening or reopening this issue,’’ Harper said.

Last autumn, federal lawyers intervened in a case in the United Kingdom, arguing that a Canadian same-sex couple who were joined in a civil union there was not recognized as married under Canadian law.

Are some marriages more equal than others?

Today’s news that government lawyers are arguing same-sex marriages performed in Canada are not valid if the couple resides in a jurisdiction that doesn’t recognize them has caused considerable controversy. It’s a case that pits established equality rights against the intricacies of Canadian family law and principles of international comity (i.e. recognizing other countries’ laws).

The legal issues involved are complex. While there is no residency requirement to get married in Canada, there is one for divorce (to get a divorce you must have lived in Canada for a year). For that reason the ability of non-resident, same-sex partners who get married in Canada to later obtain a divorce has been up in the air.

The difference here is that government lawyers do not simply want to deny a divorce because the couple does not meet the residency requirement. Instead, they argued that because Florida and the United Kingdom (the jurisdictions the couple comes from) do not recognize same-sex marriage, their marriage in Canada was never valid in the first place.

This argument is based on a well-established rule in Canadian family law. Marriages performed in Canada that involve non-residents tend to be governed by the rules of their home jurisdictions.

Same-sex divorce options explored by Harper government

The Harper government is considering how to make divorce possible for same-sex couples who had to come to Canada to get married.

Thousands of gays and lesbians who could not marry in the country where they live have travelled to Canada seeking a legal marriage. But Canada's divorce laws don't allow people who haven't lived in Canada for at least a year to end their marriage.

In a statement to CBC News, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said he would be "looking at options to clarify the law so that marriages performed in Canada can be undone in Canada."

Earlier Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper insisted his government doesn't want to reopen the debate over same-sex marriage, despite newly-revealed legal arguments from a federal lawyer that a same-sex marriage performed in Canada is not valid if it isn't recognized as legal in the place where the couple lives.

"When we first came to office we had a vote on this issue. We have no intention of further reopening or opening this issue," Harper said at a shipbuilding announcement in Halifax, adding that he did not know the details of the government's submission in this case.

‘Radical ideological agenda’ easy to spot from downtown Toronto

From the depths of his pipeline-free riding in the heart of Toronto, National Resources Minister Joe Oliver has lashed out at “environmental and other radical groups” for “[threatening] to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.”

Gosh, I haven’t heard environmental activists smeared like that since Glen Clark labelled Greenpeace campaigners against old-growth logging “enemies of British Columbia.” Guess who won that round?

This time, the activists’ great sin is to oppose the proposed Gateway pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands – across B.C. and the territory of scores of native groups battling the project – to Kitimat, where tankers the size of 3.5 football fields will load up with crude and head for Asia through the province’s narrow, pristine, coastal waterways.

Who could be opposed to that but radicals? Never mind that B.C. will bear most of the ecological risk, without much permanent economic benefit.

Mr. Oliver’s diatribe also included outrage that funds from non-Canadians are being used in the fight against a project fuelled by the interests of foreign-based oil companies, including authoritarian China’s huge, state-owned energy company, Sinopec.

Ethical oil, indeed.

And who’s behind this ideologically driven, outside cash, Mr. Oliver was asked. “Billionaire socialists from the United States – people like George Soros,” he replied.

Sounds like someone itching to get into those wacky Republican debates and show up Mitt Romney for the socialist he really is.

Original Article
Source: Globe