YVES LOGGHE/The Associated Press
Despots in business
Re The High Cost Of Doing Business With Undemocratic Regimes (March 21): Geoffrey York wrote what a great many Canadians have been saying privately for a long time. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where Human Rights Watch estimated in 2009 that 200,000 women and girls had been raped since 1998, is Canada's top African investment portfolio at $3.34-billion.
Canada should introduce regulations to make sure that our companies do not engage in practices abroad that would be illegal here, and compel them to disclose tax and revenue paid to foreign governments, as the U.S. has done in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.
Lee Harding, Coquitlam, B.C.
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I enjoyed Geoffrey York's article on dealing with despots, and the vexed problem of Canadian firms investing in operations in undemocratic states, especially in developing nations. I agree about the complexities of actual situations on the ground.
Nonetheless the fact remains that responsible firms can and do contribute to modernizing development even in non-democratic countries, by practising accountability, advancing employee literacy, helping reduce poverty, and supporting racial and gender equity. This was famously the case of U.S. corporations investing in South Africa 20 years ago.
Good companies can do good things in bad states.
Vincent di Norcia, Barrie, Ont.
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Judges' writing
Re One Word Comes To Mind In Tussle Over Judge's Writing: Catfight (March 19): Christie Blatchford used "rank speculation" - her words - to attribute a motive for why I have expressed concern over Ontario Court of Appeal Justice David Watt's style of fact writing. Unfortunately, rather than critically examine the concern raised, she imagined that I was motivated to critique because of my relationship to Mr. Justice Casey Hill, who was once overturned by Judge Watt. Let me be clear. Judge Hill's name never entered my mind when I spoke to Kirk Makin (The Judge Who Writes Like A Paperback Novelist - March 11) and I have never discussed this issue with him.
My purpose in commenting so publicly about a respected appellate court judge's writing was to bring attention to the fact that the way judges write facts can serve to perpetuate systemic problems in our society. This is the role of legal academics.
Some have defended Judge Watt's writing style as an attempt to make legal judgments more comprehensible. But this is not the issue. The issue raised by me and others has nothing to do with how the law is written. Rather, it is about ensuring that the very personal facts about real people, accused and victim, and about tragic and serious issues are treated in legal judgments with respect and dignity.
David M. Tanovich, professor of law, University of Windsor
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In a vacuum
It might be helpful to your readers to have some comparative information about how other parliamentary democracies treat information about the costs of new or amended legislation (Harper Government To Be Found In Contempt - March 18). In the United Kingdom or Australia, governments are required to provide impact analyses of new statutes either before or when bills are tabled.
The analyses traditionally deal with the costs and benefits, including costs to government and compliance costs to the private sector, but also may provide assessments of such matters as regional impacts or impacts on certain sectors, such as aboriginal groups.
The Canadian government, which does perform impact analyses for regulations, has not chosen to follow the example of other mature parliamentary systems and appears to prefer that both citizens and parliamentarians exercise their democratic rights in an information vacuum.
Margot Priest, Almonte, Ont.
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Not carelessness
The Globe's nicely done imprecation (Keep Building Nuclear Plants, Now More Than Ever - March 19) included a comparison of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, both invoked as leading examples of "technology, gone terribly wrong and used carelessly." I think, rather, it is the comparison that can be so described.
Neither horror is fairly described as the result of carelessness; on the contrary, both were clearly deliberate. But in that deliberation, to lump the two together is appalling, the implication being that there is some moral or functional equivalency between Nazi racists and American military planners. By all means let's build good nuclear plants; but the cause is not helped by falsely imagined history.
John Morris, Whitby, Ont.
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The nuclear-promoting article claims that Fukushima "shows us that nuclear plants must be better regulated and such cheap designs avoided or decommissioned." If these imperatives were not followed in the wake of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, why would they be followed after Fukushima?
John Michela, department of psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario
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GST for health
Re A Small Tumour, A Giant Time Bomb (March 19): Margaret Wente seems to think it is acceptable for seniors to shoulder more of their health-care costs even though they have been paying into the system for decades. At the same time, she seems to believe that seniors should continue to pay for child care and education even though they do not consume the money associated with these services.
Suggesting that governments cannot afford to continue providing the health care they have been providing fails to consider the revenue side of the equation. Perhaps they cannot afford the tax cuts they have implemented. Maybe the GST should return to 7 per cent with the additional 2 per cent being earmarked for health care.
My income is above average and if such steps were implemented, I would be paying more than most. But how can I spend my tax cut if I die because of inadequate health care?
Raymond Perrin, Ottawa
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Risk aversion: good
With two wars taking place right now, who would want a reckless and less brainy man than Barack Obama sitting in the most powerful seat in the world (Little Sign Of The 'Urgency Of Now' - March 18)?
If President Obama has an aversion to risk and tends to seek consensus, is that not all to the good? Here is a President who consults with foreign leaders, gaining valuable consensus with European and Arab countries. He does not rush off to war. The world awaits a new perspective.
Virginia Edman, Toronto
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Damn fools
Michael Lennick's letter (O Rings Okay - March 19) brought to mind my father's thoughts on engineers' attempts to foolproof things. An engineer himself, his credo was that "it is not too difficult to make something fool proof ... to make it damn-fool proof is an entirely different matter."
Michael L. Vollmer, Burlington, Ont.