Flaherty reluctant to counter U.S. pulp mill subsidy with Canadian payments
By John Geddes - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - 2 Comments
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is firmly reluctant to spend billions countering a massive new U.S. subsidy for pulp and paper producers by offering a comparable Canadian pay-out to forest products companies.
“We really don’t want to do that,” Flaherty told Maclean’s in an interview earlier this week. “That’s the sort of thing that’s been talked about time and time again around the G20 finance ministers’ table, around the leaders’ summits in Washington and London—to avoid protectionist measures.”
“This is the lesson of the 1930s,” he added. “This is a recipe for a downward spiral into depression.”
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Government, the economy, and why Canadians should happily keep on being hewers of wood
By John Geddes - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 5:11 PM - 8 Comments
Sit down for an on-the-record conversation with the average industry lobbyist in Ottawa, and the chat is likely to be bland—a mix of flattering the party in power and trying to cast a particular industry’s narrow interests as national ones.
Avrim Lazar, president and CEO of the Forest Products Association of Canada, certainly doesn’t hesitate to push his sector’s concerns. But he’s less guarded on broader issues than is the norm for his species. And as a senior bureaucrat before he jumped to the association, he also knows the government-industry dynamic from both sides.
In a telephone interview from London, following a recent summit there of global forest industry executives, Lazar offered his views on how the recession has caused a “radical” change in the role of government, why Canada hasn’t moved seriously to boost economic competitiveness, and why Canadians should embrace their destiny as hewers of wood. After the jump, an edited transcript of the interview:
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