Nortel had other troubles, but Shields is almost certainly right when he says that that cyber theft contributed to its bankruptcy, and the loss of almost 100,000 jobs.

When I saw this, I thought this was a China thing.

Cause there goes another $60M in Iron and Steel Mills and Ferro-Alloy Manufacturing exports.
But I’m sure it’s just the Dutch Disease.
h/t: maz2

Elect socialists, reap rewards….

The Quebec Employers Council, the largest business group in the province, expressed “deep concern about the negative impacts” of the PQ tax hikes, and economist Brigitte Alepin warns Marois could chase away the richest taxpayers.

China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what makes it sustainable and what will make it fail.

h/t Melinda Romanoff

An opinion piece by Diane Francis;

The new Game of Thrones is not about military conquest but about picking off trophy assets from countries, like Canada, that are Boy Scouts and naïve enough to let them do so. And growing and nurturing large successful entities is essential to any nation-state. Size matters.

h/t Brian

Here we are ….

Beijing-based PetroChina said it has completed the acquisition of a 20% stake in Shell’s 100%-owned land and assets in Groundbirch, in northeastern British Columbia. PetroChina didn’t disclose the value of the deal and Shell declined to comment.

h/t Adrian

… that both “Saskatchewan” and “potash” were the subject of international intrigue, high-tech espionage and a potential plot for a James Bond movie, one of the most interesting aspects to the story was that the hackers also targeted the two primary Toronto law firms involved in the transaction: Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP, which represented BHP, and Stikeman Elliott LLP, which represented Potash Corp.
The law firms had sophisticated Internet security systems in place to prevent the malware from accessing and disclosing any confidential information about the transaction or any other client information. But the fact cyber-spies interested in the potash deal would attack law firms for information that might give them, their “customer,” or perhaps their country an edge, should reinforce within the legal community the importance of continuously maintaining and updating online security.
[…]
The BHP/Potash story should serve as a wake-up call to clients who need to be sure the confidential information contained on their lawyer’s servers relating to their businesses will be kept confidential and secure, and immune from attack by cyber criminals or cyber spies.

Or, you know – it could serve as a “wake-up call” that China is a criminal enterprise.
h/t RV

Further to Kate’s post, one just hopes that damn oil pipeline to the west coast gets built for the Chinese and other Asian markets (more here).

…or Americans–including immigrants’ progeny–when they are in constant contact with their home culture?

…The cheap, instant and often nearly constant communication made possible by the technology revolution has fundamentally altered the experience of moving away from home.
“Because telecommunications is everywhere and is so cheap, people never really leave their communities,” Mark Podlasly, founder of the Brookmere Management Group, a Vancouver consulting firm, told me. “You can leave but still have a 24/7 connection with your home community. People are never really gone. You can be a citizen anywhere.”..

And it isn’t just the Internet. See what’s at Rogers Cable:

…
Arabic (4)
Bangla (3)
Bengali (1)
Cantonese (6)
English (4)
German (2)
Greek (3)
Gujarati (1)
Hebrew (1)
Hindi (18)
Italian (2)
Japanese (1)
Korean (2)
Malayalam (1)
Mandarin (10)
News (1)
Polish (3)
Portuguese (3)
Punjabi (8)
Russian (6)
Spanish (9)
Tagalog (4)
Tamil (6)
Urdu (4)
Vietnamese (1)

And see the “Packs” and “Packages”.

Further to this from Adrian MacNair on the recent Fraser Institute immigration study,

Family Reunification is Breaking the Canadian Piggy Bank

a lot of individuals’ piggy banks are being broken too:

Housing costs soar in Vancouver
Surging real estate prices in Vancouver are pushing ownership costs into uncharted territory, putting it in the top ranks of the world’s most expensive cities and triggering fears the market is poised for a fall…

Funny that the Globe and Mail story not once mentions immigrants–but see this:

Vancouver Housing Prices Pass New York and London as Chinese ‘Move’ In

Well worth a look:

The Centre for Immigration Policy Reform

THE inventor Sir James Dyson has warned that Chinese students are infiltrating British universities to steal technological and scientific secrets and even planting software bugs to relay the information to China.
Dyson, best known for inventing the bagless vacuum cleaner, said he had evidence that the bugs were left by postgraduates to ensure the thefts continued after they had returned home.
He said the extent to which foreign students dominated many science, technology and engineering research posts, often paid for by the British taxpayer, was “madness”.
[…]
“I’ve seen frightening examples. Bugs are even left in computers so that the information continues to be transmitted after the researchers have returned home.”
A number of such cases have been uncovered at British universities, with leading research institutions the most heavily targeted.

Or in the US. China ‘to overtake US on science’ in two years

The silence of a lamb Liberal leader:

Mickey I. is not quite the noble in the face of the Dragon/Dragon militant?

…Earlier on the count and China:

Mickey I. upsucking to the deadly Dragon…

In Afstan, no less. See the end of this post, which contains some essential reading for those longing to embrace China–as so many of our politicians, pundits and businesses do:

Dragon watch: Should a Chinese company get a substantial holding in Potash Corp. (and other matters)?
…

…

CSIS Chief Richard Fadden has spent months trying to tell Canadians that hostile foreign powers and alien non-state actors were trying to influence our public life through covert means. Nobody listened until this week, and then we all acted like teenagers learning their parents have sex lives.

Ain’t nothin’ he won’t do for the Chinese yuan:

Keeping face with the dragon/Grovelling for Mammon

Rigzone;

Athabasca Oil Sands announced that, subject to certain customary approvals, it has entered into a series of agreements with PetroChina International Investment Company Limited (PetroChina International), a wholly-owned subsidiary of PetroChina Company Limited (PetroChina), pursuant to which PetroChina will acquire a 60 per cent working interest in AOSC’s MacKay River and Dover oil sands projects for a consideration of Cdn $1.9 billion.

It’s Friday! Go away.
Go enjoy some blues with Darcey. He’s featuring a a “great” Chinese Lager. You remember the Chinese right? They pretty much own America and are the only people capable of putting a halt to the wing nut to their east.
Enjoy your weekend, it’ll be the last one for a while that you won’t be encumbered by politicians on their summer break. Remember Klein’s words when dealing with those pesky types, cause I guarantee, OFF™ doesn’t work.
Anyway, have a good weekend all. Kate is supposed to be back on Sunday.
Cheers,
lance

Nortel’s China Syndrome;

Toronto-based Nortel, whose stock has lost 96% of its value last year, announced in September that it would sell its metro Ethernet business, an Internet-focused piece of the company that generates about $1.5 billion a year in revenue.
The most interested potential acquirer of that division of Nortel may be Huawei, which bid $400 million for Nortel’s offering in September, according to Avian Securities–a generous offer considering that the company’s current market capitalization, hammered by debt and missed earnings projections, languishes at less than half that value.
[…]
A January 2007 report for the U.S. Air Force written by the RAND research group highlighted the military background of Huawei chief executive Ren Zhengfei: Before he founded Huawei in 1988, Ren was an engineering director for the Chinese military’s telecom research department. Today, “Huawei maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves a multifaceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei’s political patron and research and development partner,” according to the report.
A month later, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation issued its own report, citing Huawei as a security threat and arguing that “if a PLA protégé firm acquired an American firm that provided computer network equipment, software and services to the U.S. government, the possibilities for cyber-espionage would be virtually unlimited.”

h/t Brian M.