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2 - Orono Weekly Times, Wednesday, July 16, 2003 Subscriptions $29.91 + $2.09 GST = $32.00 per year. Publications Mail Registration No. 09301 • Agreement No. 40012366 Publishing 48 issues annually at the office of publication. "We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Publications Assistance Program (PAP) toward our mailing costs. " Orono Weekly Times 5310 Main Street, P.O. Box 209, Orono, Ontario LOB 1M0 Email: oronotimes@speedline.ca • Phone/Fax 905-983-5301 Publisher/Editor Margaret Zwart The Orono Weekly Times welcomes letters to the editor on subjects of interest to our readers. Opinions expressed to the editor and articles are those of the writers and do not necessarily necessarily reflect the opinions of the Orono Weekly times. Letters must be signed and contain the address and phone number of the writer. Any letter considered unsuitable will not be acknowledged or returned. We reserve the right to edit for length, libel and slander. If your retail or classified ad appears for the first time, please check carefully. Notice of an error must be given before the next issue goes to print. The Orono Weekly Times will not be responsible for the loss or damage of such items. No beef with local beef So often when a segment of our community is hurting, we are powerless to help. Not so with the current slump in the beef industry. While questions as to how a single cow with mad cow disease, disease, (which didn't get into the food chain) could have caused such a furor are still being asked, our farmers are left to cope with the fall-out. We didn't have to go far to find willing subjects for this week's front page photo. In fact, once you get beyond the village--everywhere village--everywhere you look, you can see cattle. Therefore it goes without saying, that if the U.S. border stays closed to Canadian beef much longer, many local farmers will be hit hard. The Ontario Cattlemen's Association claim that beef imports are up 20 per cent in Canada over last year at this time. This they attribute to the fact that we are deep into the summer barbequing season, and there is high demand for grilling steaks which make up only 28 percent of the beefs carcass. The high demand has caused a shortage in grilling steaks and a surplus in the less expensive, less tender cuts of beef. The Beef Information website website at www.beefmfo.org can be very helpful for recipe ideas and marinating directions. Thus there are a number of things--we as beef consumers can do to help our beef producers. We can make sure the beef we're buying at the grocery store is cut from Canadian Beef. The meat counter at the grocery store will have signage either on the meat rack or over the meat case indicating if the product is cut from Canadian graded beef or USDA meat. If you are confused about where the meat came from, the meat manager at the gro- ceiy store should be able to tell you. Another thing we can all do is buy those cheaper cuts of meat. According to the communications director at the Ontario Beef Information Centre, until the backlog of the less tender cuts of meat is cleared up, processors aren't going to continue to slaughter animals till they have a market for the whole carcass. Buying meat at the local butcher or from the local farmer will ensure that the farmers in this community will benefit. Special notice to our subscribers - The Orono Weekly Times will be closed for holidays the last week of July and first week in August. There will be no papers published July 30th or August 27th. Letter to the Editor CCA's first priority "reopening our border to exports of Canadian beef and cattle" AS I S 66 it ...by Peter Jaworski Citizens benefit from freer economy The Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease") crisis is now into its ninth week. The investigation completed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was thorough and comprehensive. All cattle that had contact with the one isolated isolated cow were traced and tested with all results negative. negative. Science has shown that Canadian beef is safe, yet export markets remain closed. Cattle producers are growing increasingly frustrated and some may question what their national cattle association is doing about the situation. Since the announcement on May 20 of BSE in a single cow that was condemned and not processed into beef, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association Association (CCA) has devoted all resources toward this crisis. I along with CCA Executive Vice President Dennis Lay era ft and other top CCA elected officials have traveled to Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton and Washington for important face-face-meetings. face-face-meetings. Representatives of the Canada Beef Export Federation have traveled to Mexico for discussions on reopening reopening that market. We have also been in constant contact with Federal Government representatives representatives during their negotiations negotiations with Japan. In Washington we met with senior staff of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, the Canadian Embassy and Australia and New Zealand cattle industry representatives. A joint letter from CCA and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association to the Federal Governments of both Canada and the U.S. resulted. The letter strongly urges that the steps needed to re-establish trade in cattle and beef while protecting public CATTLEMEN continued page 7 "They should do three things- Privatize. Privatize. Privatize. Privatize. " That was Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman's suggestion for Russia when he was asked what that country could do to get their economy moving in the right direction. The right direction for any economy, of course, is up, up, and up. The point of reforming reforming economies is, in the main, to improve general prosperity. This isn't to say that different reasons for reform do not exist-a desire to "level the playing field," for instance, or to make it so that the leading apparatchiks and members of a particular political party and their claque get all the rewards-but it is to say that it ought to be priority number one. And if it is, then freeing the economy-rather than "guiding," "guiding," or "planning" it--is the best way to get there. And not just for an elite few-in nations with generally free market economies that prosperity isn't monopolized by a dominant clique of capitalists and politicians. politicians. And if to you that isn't news, well then at least the empirical proof of it should be. That empirical proof comes in the form of the Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report released last week through the Economic Freedom Network, a group consisting of 153 member think tanks and Institutes in 59 different countries. countries. Instytut Adama Smitha in Poland, for instance, participated. participated. So did the Cato Institute in Washington D.C., as well as our own Fraser Institute, which is responsible for originating the idea, and enlarging the Network. One of the more important lessons of the Report is that with economic liberty comes greater democratization, improved environmental outcomes, outcomes, significantly improved situations for the impoverished, impoverished, as well as a greater demand for, and consequent increase in, civil liberties. "The most important discoveries discoveries [of the Report]," McMahon explained to me, "are how well [economic freedom] freedom] correlates with positive outcomes for people, particularly particularly freedom and democracy." democracy." "In general," write Drs. James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, the co-authors of the JAWORSKI continued page 3