Staff reporters at the country’s most prominent business news publication, The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, are at it again – distorting an important issue: the possible sale of Ontario Crown corporations by neglecting to include vital information that could have balanced their reports.

The sad fact is that virtually all of modern medicine floats on a sea of drug company money. So when your doctor pulls out her prescription pad, chances are high that the doctor’s decision to prescribe a particular medication will have been influenced by industry-sponsored clinical trials, published in industry-funded medical journals and extolled at industry-funded continuing medical education events.

The long-anticipated collapse of the Asper family’s Canwest Global media empire – which included 11 daily newspapers, the Global TV network of 11 stations, 13 specialty TV channels and more than 80 websites – in October 2009 was the latest development in the shameful history of corporate-owned media in Canada.

On November 14 an unprecedented agreement was struck between Russell Athletic and the union representing unjustly laid off workers at its former Jerzees de Honduras (JDH) factory.

In mid December, Robert Fowler, a career Canadian diplomat who is currently the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy to Niger, and his aide Louis Guay, an official at Foreign Affairs, were abducted in Niger. They were kidnapped not long after visiting a mine operated by Montréal-based SEMAFO (Société d’exploitation minière-Afrique de l’Ouest). The president and CEO of SEMAFO, Benoit La Salle, told the National Post: “Louis [Guay] called me and said he was going down there on a UN mission and that he heard the mine was a Canadian success and he wanted to report this back to Canada.”

The pundits are very busy these days looking for scapegoats among the swindlers, liars and manipulators who by their greed and excesses have caused the meltdown that led to this mother of all stock market crashes. Now it’s true that in the midst of every economic boom some masters of the universe exercise no scruples in grabbing their share, and then some, of the profit bonanza; and when conditions sour, find novel ways of hiding their true bottom lines to keep investor capital coming their way.

Like a thousand other domestic mining companies operating abroad, Glamis is supported through Canadian stock exchanges, the world’s biggest source of capital for mining. Canada’s laws protect investors by imposing reporting, disclosure and other obligations on corporations. These laws, however, do little to protect people in developing countries from mining risks, including the human-rights abuses that often accompany such mega-projects.

Business interests have been grazing in the groves of academe for at least a century, and their presence has always troubled people concerned with academic freedom and the ability of institutions of higher learning to pursue research unfettered by the dictates of profit-seeking.

Nearly fifty years ago, when Canadian Dimension was founded, the New Left sounded the alarm about the proliferating ties between industry and universities, with such prescient essays as E.P. Thompson’s “The Business University” and James Ridgeway’s The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis. However, the sixties

“The people here are the unluckiest people in the world,” our guide commented, as we drove through the winding back roads to avoid the many police outposts scattered throughout the mountains. We were all well aware that underneath the vast beauty surrounding us lay the source of a major conflict: the Kashipur region of the eastern Indian state of Orissa sits above one of the world’s largest bauxite reserves. While this may be good news for the major aluminum multinationals, like Canada’s Alcan Inc., it is a curse, not a blessing, for many of the local inhabitants.

It is day 16 of the strike at Symington Yard, the Canadian National Railway’s main hump yard in Winnipeg. The workers have been on strike since February 20. Since a deal has by now been reached, the question is why CN rail workers from Winnipeg to Montréal felt it was time to send a message to CN’s corporate headquarters.