Activist judges making law in BCE case

Terence Corcoran makes the case for reversing the Quebec Court of Appeal's recent decision in the BCE case. Once again our august judiciary is making the law under the guise of interpreting it.

It would be a spectacular long-term Canadian shareholder disaster, and possibly a corporate governance disaster, if the BCE takeover were to crash over the short-term interests of a relatively small group of bondholders.

[...]

The role of the Supreme Court, if it accepts the appeal, would be to uphold shareholder rights and reverse Wednesday's Quebec Court of Appeal decision. That decision against BCE appears to significantly expand the subversive idea -- long a shadow over Canadian corporate law -- that shareholders are just another group of interested parties in a long list of "stakeholders."

As the appeal court put it, the BCE board of directors, and a special independent committee of the board, made a "mistake" in deciding not to make special arrangements with the owners of about $5-billion in Bell Canada long-term debt, the debenture holders. "In Canada, the directors of a corporation have a more extensive duty" than to maximize value to shareholders. This more extensive duty means the board "must have regard, among other things, to the reasonable expectations of the debenture holders, and those may be more extensive than merely respecting their contractual legal rights."

What's the point of a contract if one side is automatically forced to go beyond it?

Obama fails the farm bill test

Change?

If you look around America today, you see the Olson logic playing out. Interest groups turn every judicial fight into an ideological war. They lobby for more spending on the elderly, even though the country is trillions of dollars short of being able to live up to its promises. They’ve turned environmental concern into subsidies for corn growers and energy concerns into subsidies for oil companies.

The $307 billion farm bill that rolled through Congress is a perfect example of the pattern. Farm net income is up 56 percent over the past two years, yet the farm bill plows subsidies into agribusinesses, thoroughbred breeders and the rest.

[...]

The question amid this supposed change election is: Who is going to end this sort of thing?

Barack Obama talks about taking on the special interests. This farm bill would have been a perfect opportunity to do so. But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries.

[...]

Obama, sad to say, failed the farm bill test.

How to make the Globe and Mail front page

It helps if the editor has an axe to grind:

Let’s play a game of You Be the Editor. Here’s the deal: the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration forces a local airline to shut down one of its seven return flights each weekday between Toronto and Newark, N.J. News? Yes. Front-page news? Of course not—unless you’re the Globe and Mail. No one has it in for Porter Airlines like the Globe. Ditto for Porter’s landlord, the Toronto Port Authority, a piddling public sector organization that, like the Freemasons, is assumed to nefariously wield much more power and influence than it does and, all told, takes up far more space and time in the city’s public imagination than it deserves.

"Piracy is just another business model"

There are better ways of beating the pirates than suing your customers:

Media piracy will always be with us. But the pirates, Mr. Bylund writes, “can be beaten — it happens all the time — but not primarily by means of legal threats and lawsuits.” Rather, he says: “You subjugate these rebels with the tools of free enterprise. Piracy is just another business model, and the pirates will lose and go away when you come up with a better model.”

Consumers make buying decisions based on three factors, according to Mr. Bylund: “price, convenience and quality.” Pirates will always win on price (free), but media companies can and do beat them on the other factors. Among the examples he cites is the cable channel Comedy Central, owned by Viacom (comedycentral.com). The Web site offers the complete archives of “The Daily Show” and makes them searchable. Hulu, owned by NBC and Fox, offers many television shows and some movies with limited (and short) advertisements (hulu.com). All are offered in high-quality video.

But it should not stop there, Mr. Bylund says. “Figure out an ad-supported model if you can, or charge less than a dollar per episode. Let people burn it to DVD or play the file on iPhones for a buck.” Eventually, “piracy will force all the big-time content producers to move in this kind of direction,” Mr. Bylund says. “Capitalism, properly applied, will beat the rebels every time.”

Chinese carbon subsidies

While the developed countries propose and implement costly measures to reduce carbon emissions, China's seemingly insatiable appetite for carbon gets subsidized:

Soaring oil prices have not slowed China's consumption of oil as statistics show that China's apparent consumption of crude oil and refined oil products both hit record highs in the first quarter of the year.

According to statistics released Tuesday by the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association (CPCIA), China's apparent consumption of oil products composed of gasoline, diesel and kerosene rose by 16.5 percent year on year to 52.73 million tonnes in the first three months, and crude oil, rose by 8 percent to 91.8 million tonnes.

[...]

State ceilings on prices of domestic oil products was the major reason contributing to China's surging oil consumption in the first quarter [emphasis added].

The "Emboldenment" Effect

There's probably a lesson in this for Jack Layton, Stéphane Dion and other critics of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan:

Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity? Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an "emboldenment" effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.

h/t: Marginal Revolution

In the service of the oil industry

The standard criticism of Conservative climate change policy is that Harper would never do anything that would hurt the Alberta oil industry. Hope this shuts them up:

Oil sands face tough environmental rules

Mar 10, 2008 04:41 PM
THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA–The federal government is laying out new rules that would force new oil-sands plants to capture and store carbon and would ban the building of dirty, coal-fired power plants.

The bans would be effective as of 2012.

Nine out of 10 economists...

Mr. Flaherty believes Ontario is failing to adapt to a changing world because its business taxes are the highest in Canada. In a speech in Toronto yesterday, he offered as evidence Ontario's declining share of national GDP; its weaker than average economic growth; and, an unemployment rate higher than the national average. He said the federal government has cut corporate income tax rates from to 15% from 22.1%, while Ontario's rate is only half a percentage point lower than in 2000, "with no plans in place for further reductions."

Mr. McGuinty's response is that tax cuts are not enough on their own and that governments have to make targeted investments in troubled industries to stimulate growth.

Let's see:The manufacturing sector is not doing too well in Ontario, although the rest of the country seems to be doing okay.But isn't the auto sector the problem? Well, if we strip out transportation equipment, which includes autos....

Hey, look at that: Ontario still lags.

Doug Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets, says, nine out of 10 economists would side with Mr. Flaherty and advocate creating as favourable an economic environment as possible and then allowing the market to pick the winners and losers.

What does he know? Ontario's "targeted investments" are working out so well.


Update: Flaherty takes another kick at McGuinty in a speech yesterday:

In fact, a combination of the strong Canadian dollar, a slowing U.S. economy, higher energy prices and increased competition from emerging markets has left several sectors struggling. Here in the manufacturing heartland of Canada the impact has been acute. But the economic impact is in direct contrast to national economic trends generally.

For instance, we are experiencing the second-longest period of economic expansion in Canadian history. Yet Ontario's share of the national nominal GDP has gone from 41.4% in 2002 to 38.6% in 2006.

Ontarians are seeing a lack of leadership, a lack of vision and a lack of economic stewardship.

Ontario manufacturing underperforms

Ontario's economy has been lagging the rest of the country for some time. The "economic engine" of Canada is clearly sputtering.

The easy explanation is that the Ontario economy is weak because of the province's greater dependence on the manufacturing sector. This weakness reflects the struggle by Ontario manufacturers to adapt to the sharp run up in the Canadian dollar, higher energy prices and intense competition from China.

However, manufacturers elsewhere in the country also face these pressures. And they seem to be doing a better job of coping. While manufacturing shipments from Ontario dropped 1.2% in 2007, shipments rose 1.7% elsewhere in the country. Moreover, out of a total of 21 subsectors, the rest of Canada outperformed Ontario in 15.

Click on chart for larger image.

Maybe Dalton McGuinty needs to consider what his government is doing wrong before asking the feds for help. Any suggestions?

Another bookstore bites the dust

It's rather sad to see another independent bookstore close. I once worked in one (which is also no longer in business) and have spent a lot of money in them.

Alas, I rarely buy books from bookstores anymore. I still buy books, just not from bookstores. Amazon.ca (notice my banner link) now gets most of my business. Apparently, I'm not the only one:

Staff at The Book Room, a 169-year-old shop presently located on a corner of Halifax's bustling Barrington Street, unwittingly opened the box to discover the same titles they already had in stock -- plus an invoice from one of the big Internet booksellers.

"Somebody had ordered a bunch of books from Amazon," Charles Burchell, who managed the bookstore for more than 40 years, recounted in a recent interview. "To find that it was books we had on our shelves that they could have had in five minutes rather than five days if they'd walked downstairs ... that really made us sit up and take notice."

It was a slap in the face to the independent store that has been fighting a losing battle against book behemoths, the proliferation of literature to supermarkets and big box stores and the convenience of Internet ordering for the better part of a decade.

"It said to me that there's a group of people out there who don't want to make use of a bookstore," Mr. Burchell lamented. "We really couldn't see a future anymore."

It is easy to get all nostalgic, but this is about economics. Before the internet, a knowledgeable clerk in an independent bookstore was a key source of information. Most clearly loved books and could be a very valuable resource, particularly if their interests happened to coincide with yours. In part, it was this knowledge that you paid for when you bought a book at list price.

With the internet, that information and more is available online for free. The economies of scale for an online bookseller in providing this information are virtually limitless. An independent bookstore cannot really compete against that without embracing the same tools or by focusing on very specialized market niches.

Sadly, it is either adapt or perish.

Dalton warned us about this

Is this what Dalton McGuinty warned us about in the last election?

The hands of students in Fareena Masood's Grade 3 class fly into the air when the teacher asks for the number of syllables in "communication."

The question stumps a few of the young students at the Islamic Foundation School -- "Is it four?" one asks -- before another student correctly answers five.

As Masood -- called Sister Fareena by her students -- writes the answer on the blackboard, one boy whispers an excited "yes" as he checks his own page.

Next on the teacher's list, written in chalk on the blackboard, are the words "wonderful" and "school."

They're fitting words for a vocabulary lesson at the Scarborough private school which is one of 25 schools ranked first in the province by the 2008 Fraser Institute report card on elementary education. The school, which has 497 male and female students from JK to Grade 12, earned a perfect 10 score, according to the report.

It seems to me they are doing something right.

You've got Liberals!

They should have closed it after they discovered the first one. If you've got one, there's always more.

Public health authorities shut down one of Chinatown's most prominent restaurants yesterday after a passerby took a photo of rats on a countertop.

The rats were visible through a window of the Dumpling House Restaurant yesterday afternoon, passerby Vivian Hui said.

[...]

Dumpling House, at 328 Spadina Ave., hosted a photo op by then Liberal leadership candidate Paul Martin during the April, 2003, SARS crisis. The restaurant is popular with celebrities, and has been well reviewed by various publications.

More at blogTO

Democrats bad for Canada

The Canadian fascination with the U.S. Democratic party has always puzzled me. With three quarters of Canadian exports going south of the border, we have a vested interest in keeping the border open. Yet, both candidates in the Democratic primary have been bashing NAFTA.

First, here is Barack Obama speaking of his opponent Hillary Clinton:

"Her supporting NAFTA didn't give jobs to the American people."

Hillary's defense:

"I was not in the Senate at the time. I did not have a vote. I find his argument to be quite tortured. I have been a vocal critic of NAFTA starting in my campaign for the Senate in 1999."

It would not be good for Canada if either were to become U.S. president.

Lost in move to 24 Sussex Drive

With Warren gone, let's hope Kathy Shaidle gets his columnist gig at the National Post:

When bloggers first heard of the accusations against Steyn and Levant, and began mounting campaigns to "stop the CHRCs" from further stifling freedom of speech, many were encouraged by a rediscovered, then widely circulated, quotation from future Prime Minister Stephen Harper, circa 1999:

"Human Rights Commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society … It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff."

Looks like Stephen Harper lost a few things during his move to 24 Sussex Drive. Namely, a principle or two.

Congratulations kid!

My daughter was recently accepted into the Grade 9 arts program at two of Toronto's top high schools of the arts. While I have never doubted her talent, it is certainly gratifying that others see it too.

Congratulations kid!

Hybrid cars: green snake oil

Prius owners, still think you're saving the planet now?

In a recent journal article, French researchers suggest that:

the misinformed craze for hybrid vehicles especially in the USA, and increasingly in Japan and Europe, and potentially in China, could represent a red light for more innovative technologies, such as viable fuel-cell cars that can use sustainably sourced fuels, such as hydrogen.

[...]

"There is a general convergence of strategies towards promoting hybrid vehicles as the mid-term solution to very low-emission and high-mileage vehicles," the researchers assert, "this is largely due to Toyota’s strategy of learning the technology, while building up its own ‘quasi-standard’, thanks to its high-quality and reliability reputation and its high market share on the North American market." They add that, "Such a convergence is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communication campaigns than on pure rationale scientific arguments and may result in the need for any manufacturer operating in the USA to have a hybrid electric vehicle in its model range in order to survive."

Bullshit detector

Andrew Potter points to this little gem in the Globe and Mail:

Constitutional expert Errol Mendes of the University of Ottawa said he researched the issue yesterday and could find no similar examples of a confidence motion such as the one the Tories unveiled - one involving the unelected Senate. "This is insane," he said.

In quoting such an expert, it evidently did not occur to the Globe journalists, Brian Laghi and Jane Taber, that Professor Mendes might have a stake in the game:

Professor Errol Mendes was nominated to the Privy Council Office by the Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin.

I guess it also did not occur to them to ask how many times a Liberal-dominated, unelected Senate has blocked the legislation of a minority Conservative government?

A lesson for tax and spend liberals

Hell, the Conservative Party might learn something too.

Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute explains the relationship between tax rates, government revenues and economic growth:



via Café Hayek

Smearing the lense of history with Vaseline

I guess I should have paid more attention when I took a film studies course in university. Toronto Star book columnist (and former film critic) Geoff Pevere writes:

John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" – so named by the dashing young candidate at the Democratic leadership convention of 1960 – was barely two years old when veteran filmmaker John Ford suggested the whole thing might be a lie. The context was a 1962 Ford movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a Western about a lawyer (played by James Stewart) who negotiates a bogus claim to heroism to a seat in the U.S. Senate.

At the movie's climax, a newspaper editor is informed that the real man who shot the desperado Liberty Valance isn't the man everybody thinks it was – meaning the eminent politician is something of a fraud. The truth leaves the newspaperman unimpressed.

"This is the west, sir," he says. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

It makes more sense now. Still, you have to wonder what benefit Barack Obama hopes to get from the Kennedy family endorsement of his candidacy when it's based on a lie.

For the Democrats and left generally, 1968 has become a kind of rallying call to unity. The year evokes a kind of lost Eden, the last moment when the communal idealism of youth culture functioned as a kind of umbrella that covered – and sheltered – everyone.

[...]

But did that country ever really exist? According to Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism– and the volume from which the above quote was pulled – the Democratic Party version of the 1960s is a "Sorelian myth. An age when the 'good guys' overturned a corrupt system, rebelled against their 'square' parents, and ushered in an age of enlightenment and decency, now under threat from oppressive conservatives who want to roll back its utopian gains." Balderdash, according to Goldberg: "Liberal baby boomers have smeared the lens of memory with Vaseline." They've printed the legend.

So much for authenticity.

Patrick Moore: Thinking nuclear

I saw Patrick Moore speak a number of years ago. At the time, I was very impressed with his practical perspective on key environmental issues. However, his conversion from a hardcore, old-style environmentalist to someone willing to work with business to achieve real environmental progress has been hard for many of his former colleagues to accept, which is probably as good a recommendation he can get.

Here are a couple of interesting tidbits from a from a recent interview with CNET:

As a co-founder of Greenpeace, even though I was a scientist, I made the same mistake in those days as all the rest of my colleagues did. We kind of lumped nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons as if all things nuclear were evil. It was an honest mistake. We were totally focused on the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War. Nuclear testing was what Greenpeace started on and we were peaceniks, and I think it's fair to say that the antinuclear-energy movement to some extent was formed out of the peace movement.

[...]

How people manage to perceive that nuclear is dangerous when no one has ever been hurt by it is hard for me to understand, but there it is. It's a scared thing and it's like many of the campaigns today that are based on scaring people about something invisible. In this case, radiation. In agriculture, it's invisible pesticide residues. In climate, it's invisible carbon dioxide. In genetic engineering, it's invisible genes. Actually, a majority of the what are being called environmental campaigns these days are basically scare campaigns based on people not being able to see what it is that they are supposed to be afraid of. You can make up all kinds of stories about things people can't see.

Turning it up to 11

It started with Spinal Tap.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

[...]

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

[...]

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

In other words, sound quality now sucks as musicians and producers try to cut through the noise of modern life and the technological limitations of MP3s by turning up the apparent volume of their music.

While part of the blame can undoubtedly be pinned on the iPod, people also seem more than willing to sacrifice sound quality for the convenience of being able to listen to their personal music collections anywhere and any time. For example, I use my iPod almost every day -- on the subway to work, when driving my car or walking the dog -- but rarely sit down to listen to an album on my home sound system. I do appreciate good sound quality, but give me convenienceand 2,000 songs in my pocket, and high fidelity falls to second place.

No need to make winter tires mandatory in Ontario

Anyone who has ever driven in the snow knows that winter tires are a good idea. All-season radials just don't cut it in the snowy regions of the country, particularly if they have some mileage on them.

When I lived in Montreal, I had snow tires. Montreal gets a lot of snow. It was stupid not to put winter tires on your car. Hence, Quebec's recent move to make winter tires mandatory is largely redundant. Most people use them. Those that don't get into more accidents.

In published reports, the head of a Quebec task force on road safety, Jean-Marie de Koninck, pointed to statistics showing snow tires help save lives.

"There's about 10% of the people right now that don't have winter tires on and they're involved in 38% of the accidents on the road in the winter," de Koninck said before Christmas.

The simple solution is for insurers to charge lower premiums to drivers who put snow tires on their cars than to drivers who do not. Quebec's system of no-fault insurance is probably behind its move to preempt a market solution to the problem since the driver who is responsible for an accident does not bear the full cost of the damage he causes. As a result, his future insurance premiums will reflect only the damage done to his own car.

Which brings us to Dalton McGuinty.

Ontario may follow the lead of its provincial neighbour and make winter snow tires madatory for winter driving.

[...]

Premier Dalton McGuinty has said he will consider making it a law in Ontario and OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino has already said he is behind the idea.

Have you seen car insurance premiums in this province? Get into one at-fault accident and your premiums will skyrocket. What better incentive is there to put snow tires on your car than that? That is, if you really need them at all.

Here in Toronto, we don't get a lot of snow. What we do get tends to melt quickly, aided by prodigious amounts of salt.

Do the math. If you only drive in southern Ontario and avoid driving the two or three times a season when we might get a meaningful amount of snow, it makes little economic sense to spend hundreds of dollars on snow tires. Moreover, cars with snow tires are considerably less fuel efficient. If you drive on snow-free roads the rest of the time, you will be burning extra gas.

That doesn't sound like the environmentally correct thing to do. And if the climate change lobby is to be believed, it will only hasten the rise in average temperatures in Ontario.

With winter in Ontario supposedly on the endangered list, why would McGuinty even consider making winter tires mandatory in Ontario? One can only conclude that if Dalton does go ahead with this, he doesn't believe his own hype about global warming.

Robin Sears got it right

Sorry Warren, but Robin Sears got it right.

For months in advance of the campaign they fed reporters with anonymous quotes about "unhappy Conservatives" and supplied YouTube with nasty videos and their canvassers with slippery doorstep lines. As the damage to Tory began to show up in public polls, they raised the pressure with egregious performances by Dalton McGuinty fretting about creating a "segregationist" Ontario, and suggesting that Ontario would suffer the same fate as "London and Paris" if the policy were adopted. In a clear appeal to Islamophobia they successfully ground the Conservative numbers down by nearly ten points in less than three weeks. At Toronto dinner parties one heard “progressive” downtown Liberals muttering quietly that Tory’s policy would fund "some crazy imam’s Mississauga madrassa."

Update: Warren responds in the comments:

Steve, with respect, a question:

Do you think that the hundreds of thousands of Onatrians who voted for McGuinty are also bigots? Or that they are dummies, and so easily manipulated?

I look forward to your answer, as always, with interest.
Warren K

And my rather long-winded response:

Warren,

One of the things I have always admired about your work is your courage in drawing attention to the real bigots in our midst. I commend you for writing about the seamy underside of white supremacists and skinhead thugs. These guys are scum whose ideas need to be exposed and discredited.

But that is what makes your willingness to tap into such prejudice for political ends so incomprehensible. Here we have a party that exults in its inclusiveness, yet is willing to jettison such principle for electoral advantage. It is a dangerous game that will have repercussions for years to come.

You know as well as I do that we are all bigots in some way. The key is to recognize one’s prejudice. One of the things that makes Canadian society great is that despite our inherent prejudices, we tend to treat each other reasonably well and don't usually don't let our prejudices rule us.

What I found so reprehensible about Liberal tactics in the last election is that the party had no inhibitions about tapping into such underlying prejudice. The intent to tap into prejudice was clear. And it worked.

Did people consciously vote Liberal because they don’t like Muslims? I am sure that some did, and at the margin that is what wins elections. But I suspect the preferences of many more were shifted subconsciously by an underlying, mostly unfounded, discomfort about Muslims.

If anyone should know about manipulation, it is you. For the most part, elections are not won or lost on policy. If they were, then the Liberals would have lost since, beyond bland generalities, they did their best to avoid talking about policy. For election strategists, policy is simply another hook on which to ply their trade.

The past Ontario election was not about policy. Concern about faith-based schools was not even on the map for the vast majority of Ontarians before the election commenced. Yet somehow it became the central issue to the exclusion of all else. Other important issues – poverty, productivity, competitiveness, energy security, the environment, etc. – were largely ignored. But your tactics helped secure another Liberal majority government. I hope it was worth it.
Steve

Eric Lindros rehabilitates his reputation

I always thought Eric Lindros was a jerk. I never gave him a second chance after he dissed my hometown when he refused to play for the Soo Greyhounds because he thought he couldn't get a good education in Sault Ste. Marie.

Funny, the schools seemed good enough for Wayne Gretzky, who actually went to my high school. For the most part, the quality of the schools would have been the least of Lindros' problems since from my recollections the players were hardly ever in class.

In retrospect, my high school was probably the exception. It was a good public high school. In general, however, the schools in Sault Ste. Marie suck, falling well below provincial averages. Lindros had a point, even if I did not want to listen to it at the time.

Lindros also partly rehabilitates my opinion of him with this announcement:

Lindros saved one of his biggest assists for last, announcing that he's donating $5 million in support of the London Health Sciences Foundation, which includes the Fowler Kennedy Sport Medicine Clinic.

Dr. Peter Fowler, who was being honoured along with Lindros at a dinner last night, treated the hockey star throughout his career and became a good friend and mentor.

Cliff Nordal, president and CEO of London Health Sciences Centre, said he'd done some research and believes it's the single largest donation ever by a Canadian athlete.

Even for a star hockey player, that's real money. But if Lindros really wanted to make amends to the people of Sault Ste. Marie, he should have also considered donating money to their schools.