The Blog of Harald

So Ipsos-Reid called me yesterday. I love giving them my opinion, because it tends to be different from the herd’s…

Speaking of herds, the big question series was about BSE. One pair of questions was:

* If other countries want to require that we test *all* cattle destined for export, should we?
* If we are testing all exported cattle, would it be acceptable to continue to spot-check domestically sold beef, or should we test all domestic cattle too?

I think that if we’re doing more testing in one arena than another, unscrupulous distributors are going to dump all suspect beef on the domestic market (instead of simply destroying it), thus *increasing* the risk to our food supply. So while I support full testing for export (because our economy requires exports), I believe it follows that we have to test all of our cattle (even though the scientific community believes that spot-checking is “safe enough”). C’est la vie, I guess.

The other thing they asked me about was waterfront property taxes in cottage country. The issue: Market Value Assessment means that when the market value of your house rises, so do your property taxes. Unfortunately, there’s been a boom in waterfront cottage prices, and so people who have had properties in their family for generations are suddenly unable to afford the taxes. It’s gotten so skewed that in many municipalities, 5% of the land is providing 50% of the tax revenue…

Now I don’t think pure, free-market MVA is a good way to set property taxes. (Of course, the old way of *not* adjusting for market value didn’t work either). So I came down firmly on the side of existing property owners in that part of the survey…

They also asked me about the relative social responsibility of Bell Canada and Telus, and about steak restaurants. Since I usually visit my local mom ‘n’ pop steak place, and haven’t been to The Keg in ages, I was able to skew those results too :-)