Why China’s days as a rare earth bully are numbered
By Erica Alini - Friday, July 15, 2011 - 19 Comments
Have you ever begged your six-month-old to stop throwing the pacifier off the edge of the high chair only to watch him do it again with a profoundly amused, puffy-cheeked smile? That must be how American, Japanese and European diplomats feel today. After pleading with China not to re-issue rare earth quotas, Beijing did just that, imposing new restrictions that would keep exports of the strategic materials at roughly last year’s levels.
Rare earth metals are the little-known but vitally important stuff that things like iPhone and laptop monitors, and wind turbine and hybrid car parts are made of. As Maclean’s reported last November, these metals are so crucial to much of the high-tech industry that, like oil and diamonds, they have effectively become a tool for geopolitical arm-twisting. Continue…
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Flaherty reluctant to counter U.S. pulp mill subsidy with Canadian payments
By John Geddes - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 10:06 AM - 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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Megapundit: Inside the Jock Zone
By selley - Friday, August 8, 2008 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments
Must-reads: John Robson on the Greyhound murder; …Christie Blatchford on Adam van Koeverden; Rosie
Must-reads: John Robson on the Greyhound murder; Christie Blatchford on Adam van Koeverden; Rosie DiManno on the athletes’ village; Dan Gardner on our horrible future; Vaughn Palmer on the World Trade University; Lorne Gunter on the Wheat Board.
The federal miscellany
The Liberals are still broke, the Wheat Board is still a communist abomination and Stephen Harper is still tearing the country apart. On the bright side, TGIF!Lorne Gunter says the Liberals “simply cannot afford to fight a general election”—a shocking revelation the Edmonton Journal quite understandably put in its headline—and as such will be forced to play “crutch to the Tories’ Tiny Tim” for the foreseeable future. The truth is revealed in paragraph 14, however, where Gunter pegs the likelihood of the Grits being able to afford an election campaign “without resorting to more bank loans” (our emphasis) as “highly unlikely.” So, there you have it: they’ll resort to more bank loans. Problem solved. Thanks for stopping by.
The Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe (who filed her wildly oversold assessment of Grit finance yesterday), handicaps the battle for Vancouver-Centre between lefty poli-sci professor Michael Byers and incumbent Hedy Fry, arguing it will be “one of the most compelling” races in the coming election (which will occur once the Liberals take out some more bank loans). Byers’ chosen issues: homelessness in his tiding, the “militarization” of the Arctic, shutting down private medical centres, “taking a break” from combat in Kandahar, big government solutions to climate change, and cruise ships “spew[ing] diesel fumes into Vancouver’s harbour.” Fry’s chosen issues, so far as we can tell: incumbency, not upsetting the applecart, and the benefits of the status quo.
