Chalk River

THE PLEDGE
The Government's commitment, advanced by Hon Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources in December, 2008:
"ensuring that the Canadian medical community receives a consistent and reliable supply of medical isotopes has been of critical importance to me. I have been actively engaged with both my departmental officials, and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), to determine how best to continue meeting this objective. [...]
"In January, at Canada's request, a meeting of governments and industry focused on isotope security of supply will take place in Paris, France. This is a global issue which warrants a global response, and I will ensure that Canada plays a leadership role in the planned discussions. [...]
"Ensuring the conditions for a reliable supply of medical isotopes in Canada continues to be a priority of our Government. I look forward to working closely with my colleagues, Canada's medical community, and our global partners to further address this matter."
from a statement issued by the Minister on December 15, 2008

THE LIE
"For whatever reason, Atomic Energy was not able to make that project work. There was no prospect that it would work. [...]
"Eventually, we anticipate Canada will be out of the business" of making medical isotopes [...]
"we can't spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and never produce an isotope."
from statements by Harper on June 10, 2009, quoted in the Toronto Star

AECL is a "dysfunctional," $30-billion "sinkhole": "The government has put $30 billion into AECL over its history and it's been one of the largest sinkholes of government money probably in the history of the government of Canada. [...] I don't think we're going out on a limb to say it has been a fairly dysfunctional place."
from statements by Harper's communications director, Kory Teneycke, on June 11 to Canadian Press [what is that name, anyway? some hokey spoonerism of Tory Canuck?]

THE TRUTH
The achievements of the Chalk River facility, the National Reactor Unit or NRU, are described on its website as follows:

"Since it began operation in 1957, the NRU reactor has made substantial contributions to the science, technology, energy, health, and economy of Canada. Medical isotopes produced in NRU are used in the treatment of more than 20,000,000 patients around the world each year: a huge contribution to world health, and a significant Canadian export business. Following from the Nobel Prize winning work of Canadian Bert Brockhouse at Chalk River...neutron scattering continues to be a field of excellence in Canadian science. Knowledge gained at test facilities in NRU has been an essential foundation for developing the current fleet of CANDU power stations...an important source of electricity for Canada, and generate no greenhouse gases. This catalogue of achievements makes the NRU reactor the most ambitious and productive science facility in Canada."

AECL employs over 5,000 highly skilled employees delivering a range of nuclear services worldwide and its reactors supply 16% of Canada's electricity. And finally, what we can be most proud of is that "For over 50 years AECL has been safely and passionately developing peaceful and productive applications of nuclear energy."

A panel of experts of the US National Academy of Science is incredulous that Canada has abandoned the MAPLE reactors project. According to the panel's January 2009 report: "The decision to discontinue work on the Maple reactors is not consistent with AECL continuing to produce Mo-99 over the long term. The committee assumes that the worst-case scenario for fixing the Maple reactors involves the replacement of the reactor cores. The cost of such replacements would likely be small (tens of millions of dollars)." Moreover, "AECL could probably contract with another organization to fix the Maple reactors—and, if desired, to convert the NPF [new processing facility] to LEU [low-enriched uranium]-based production—if it does not have the necessary in-house technical expertise or resources to do the work itself."

So instead of directing stimulus spending and infrastructure disbursements to facilities that:

• improve the health of Canadians and the world
• help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions
• continue our longstanding leadership in nuclear research
• complete a project that Canadian taxpayers have already invested in heavily
• stabilize international supplies of medical isotope in a secure facility
• hire highly skilled knowledge workers

the Government has instead elected to abandon the project and throw its money into the automakers' coffers, the perfect antithesis for all that AECL achieves. The auto bailout price tag for 2009? $10.8 bln, plus an additional $3.5 bln from Ontario, or roughly enough money to operate the AECL for half of its illustrious five-decade history.

from the National Academies Press, Medical Isotope Production Without Highly Enriched
Uranium

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, right, and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty shake hands
after addressing a news conference in Toronto, Monday, June 1, 2009 to discuss
details on the future of GM Canada. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese)

UPDATE 20 July 2009
Along the same lines, from the Liberal Party site: Harper's decision to leave isotope business hurting Canada.

The Deficit

THE LIE
On June 25, 2009, Stephen Harper was interviewed by CTV’s Steve Murphy who asked about the ballooning deficit projections for 2009, now estimated at $50 billion. “In relative terms our deficit is a quarter of the deficit in the US, the deficit in Great Britain, half the deficit in Europe.”
Tape of the interview

THE TRUTH
According to the OECD Economic Outlook Report dated June 2009, deficit as a proportion of GDP for Canada will be 4.8%. For the other nations Harper mentions and other European G7 countries, the projections are: US, 10.2%; UK, 12.8%; France, 6.7%; Germany, 3.7%; Italy, 5.3%. While Harper is correct that we are in better shape than the US and UK, we do not have one-quarter of their deficit, and we are at about the same level as other European peers.

The OECD report

Employment Insurance

The following is quoted verbatim from the Liberal Party website:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made several misleading statements about EI in the House of Commons yesterday.

“It is simply a proposal... to raise payroll taxes to the roof in perpetuity for workers in small business.”

Fact: There is absolutely no requirement to raise payroll taxes in order to increase EI eligibility. The Liberal plan for EI eligibility does not include any increase in revenue collection. Payroll taxes are frozen and Liberals support leaving them that way.

“The Liberal Leader... is making the proposal that a Canadian could work 45 days and collect employment insurance for a year and that would be the system in every region in perpetuity.”

Fact: You can only receive EI if you’ve paid into the system and been laid off through no choice and no fault of your own. EI is not, in Diane Finley’s words, “lucrative for (laid-off Canadians) to stay home and get paid for it.” The government’s EI policy allows for a variable length of eligibility by region – ranging from 19 to 50 weeks – and the Liberal proposal doesn’t change that. Liberals are making proposals that reflect the reality of the recession while Conservatives remain oblivious to the growing crisis.

“The proposal... would do nothing for the economy, for the recession today.”

Fact: Laid-off workers are those most likely to spend 100 percent of their benefits to provide for their immediate day-to-day needs – things like food, rent and transportation – providing direct economic stimulus to some of the hardest-hit regions in the country. For every $1 spent by laid-off workers, local economies benefit from $1.60 in economic spin-offs.

“Over 80 percent of those who are paying into (Employment Insurance) are receiving benefits.”

Fact: Under the current rules, less than 60 percent of unemployed Canadians who have paid into EI receive benefits. 150,000 more people would be eligible for EI under our proposal – which would provide fairness for nearly half of the over 300,000 people laid off under your watch since last October.

“We have an EI system that responds to market needs. When we have difficulties as we have now, the system responds – benefits increase, eligibility increases as well.”

Fact: EI only adjusts after the unemployment rate has risen dramatically – cold comfort for those who lose their job without EI benefits before the unemployment number skyrockets. EI was not designed to react quickly to the massive, nationwide job losses experienced under this Conservative government.

Five misrepresentations in one Question Period exchange leaves us with one question: why is the Prime Minister trying to divide Canadians on fairness for laid-off workers?

Housing Starts

THE LIE
"We’re also helping Canadians invest in new homes, through the First-Time Home Buyers Tax Credit and the new Home Buyers’ Plan. And it’s working, friends; housing starts were up by more than 10,000 last month."
from a speech on the Economic Action Plan, June 11, 2009

THE TRUTH
It sounds as though 10,000 more homes were built in May than April, or than last May. What the CMHC actually reported was that the Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate of housing starts increased by 10,800. What's the SAAR, you ask? "All starts figures in this release, other than actual starts, are seasonally adjusted annual rates (SAAR) – that is, monthly figures adjusted to remove normal seasonal variation and multiplied by 12 to reflect annual levels." In other words, if you were to take the improvement seen in May, and extrapolate that over an entire year, there would be an increase of 10,800. That represents an estimated increase of 900 housing starts in May.

I should also note that the starts are not distributed evenly throughout Canada. Ontario enjoyed the sharpest improvement in urban starts of 22% (11-figure cash infusions into auto industry and infrastructure), while BC suffered a decline in the SAAR of 5% (zero bridging support for industries like forestry and lumber, mining). Moreover, housing start levels are still well below that estimated by demographic demand, about 27% below it.

CMHC in da house

Harper gets the neighbours (Bush II and Calderon) to help pretty things up a little.

Stimulus Spending

THE LIE
“Today, I am here to announce that only 10 weeks into this fiscal year, fully 80 percent of our Plan's funding has been committed and is being implemented across this country!”
from a transcript of Harper's speech of June 11, 2009

THE TRUTH
Though there is federal approval for stimulus spending, it is a lie to describe 80 percent of the stimulus plan’s funding as being implemented. Most shovel-ready projects have yet to break ground. And the ones that aren't shovel ready are still clogged in the planning phase.
One reality check, and another