It’s light, it’s strong and it’s expensive
Aluminum, that is. It hit $3,000 a tonne this week — a 13 year high— and that is going to make a lot of things more expensive from beer cans and aluminum foil to cars and aircraft parts. Another thing to secretly push inflation higher.
A good friend of mine worked for Alcan, the Canadian Aluminum giant— since sold to mining giant Rio Tinto. My friend taught me a lot about aluminum. That line up there about it’s light, it’s strong was one of his. We shot a documentary in an aluminum plant and one of the first things they teach you is don’t touch aluminum: hot aluminum is the same colour as cold aluminum. If it’s hot it will melt your hand.
Aluminum is the most common metallic element on earth, but it is hard to get at. It was once more expensive than gold before they got round to mass producing it. It takes a lot of electricity to produce which is why they produce of aluminum in parts of Canada with cheap hydro-electricity. Alcan owns most of its own hydropower stations. One of the big uses of aluminum is making cars and trucks lighter to save on energy. Here are some of the things that aluminum is used for and that will get pricier.
The rich world is in a taxing mood
Should five percent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman
Tax Man Mr. Trudeau
Richer voters in Canada— the federal election is on Monday-- plan to vote Liberal even though prime minster Justin Trudeau promises higher taxes.
Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman
Tax Man Mr Johnson
Boris Johnson plans to hike taxes in Britain. Just what tax he is raising is a bit mystifying for a non-Brit, though the new tax doesn't appear to be nineteen, the Beatles reference to 19 shillings in a pound, which was made up of 20 shillings back then. Many members of Conservative Party are up in arms. There are cries of Blue Labour (the Tory colour) from the High Tories who think Boris is too left for them.
Don't ask me what I want it for
(Ah, ah, Mr. Wilson)
If you don't want to pay some more
(Ah, ah, Mr. Heath)
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman
Tax Woman Ms. AOC
Democratic member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a dress she may come to regret wearing. President Biden and the Democrats are raising taxes on the rich, but not by as much as they planned. “America’s billionaires, who, at worst, would have to yield a few crumbs.” said Edward Luce of the Financial Times.
Economic Freedom
The chart below sent out by the free market Fraser Institute. It shows countries which it gauges have open economies.
It puts Hong Kong at number one, which seems a bit outdated given how China is exerting more control there. And in Europe France is coloured in as less free. Odd, but the richest man in the world, richer than Jeff Bezos and richer than Bill Gates, is a Frenchman: Bernard Arnault, the chairman and chief executive of the French luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Bernard is number one, at least for now.
Holders of crypto are younger, richer and better educated
I am a broken record, but one day governments will shut down cryptocurrencies.
If nothing else, it commits green sins, according to a piece in The Guardian:
“A single bitcoin transaction generates the same amount of electronic waste as throwing two iPhones in the bin, according to a new analysis by economists from the Dutch central bank and MIT.”
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Essay of the Week
Among other things I am a writer for hire. A few years ago I wrote the biography of Harry Steele, a man from a tiny village in Newfoundland who went on to own an airline, shipping company and a string of radio stations along with salmon fishing camps in Newfoundland and Labrador.
This is an early chapter that talks about the place he was born.
Musgrave Harbour
Musgrave Harbour is a tiny, isolated, outport on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, once known as Muddy Hole. It was first settled in 1834, by a family called Whiteway. The census of 1836 lists 11 members of the Whiteway clan living in Muddy Hole. That rather undignified name was changed in 1886; Musgrave honours Sir Anthony Musgrave, the Governor of the British colony of Newfoundland in the early 1860s.
A true child of the British Empire, Sir Anthony was born in the West Indies and served as a colonial governor from Jamaica to Queensland in Australia, where he died in 1888. There are 16 places around the world named for Musgrave. It is certain he never visited the town. He was frustrated as Governor of Newfoundland because he tried to convince the people to join Confederation.
Harry Steele, without a doubt the most illustrious son of Musgrave Harbour, was born there on June 9, 1929. The Steele family, like just about everyone else in Musgrave Harbour, eked out a subsistence living. There was some farming, and just about every man in the village did some fishing, as did Harry's father, Stanley, though his main job was working in the woods. He was a contractor with the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company. He would organize the work crews in central Newfoundland, where his wife Katie (Power) worked with him.
Back then there weren't any chainsaws or mechanical harvesters to help bring in the trees. A man worked in the woods with a bucksaw, sometimes with a partner depending on the size of the trees. Stanley used to have just under a hundred men working under him, and part of the deal was that he was responsible for their lodging including food; his wife ran that end of the operation making sure that everybody was fed.
Life was hard. There was some subsistence farming, but crops struggled to grow so people ate a lot of root vegetables. Underpinning it all was isolation, sticking into the cold North Atlantic with only the ocean between Musgrave Harbour and Ireland. There was no transportation other than by sea.
Musgrave Harbour may have been isolated, but the Steele family and everyone else in town were connected to the outside world in one way or another. Harry Steele was a boy with an intense curiosity about his village and the wider world he would go on to become such a part of.
Take the Anglo-Newfoundland Development company. It was founded in 1903 by the two Harmsworth brothers, the British owners of London's Daily Mail newspaper. The forests of Newfoundland helped feed the voracious newspaper reading habits of the British public. The Daily Mail alone sold a million copies a day in the capital of the British Empire at a time when London was the largest city in the world. The press barons worried that a war with Germany would cut off their supply of newsprint from Finland and Sweden, so they financed the construction of a mill at Grand Falls.
No one could have known that the son of one of the workers in the woods would one day be a media baron, with a few newspapers of his own, but mostly on the radio side. Harry Steele went on to surprise everyone who knew him as a boy. He may even have surprised himself.
Building newsprint mills in Newfoundland meant railway construction, a new port, and work for thousands of Newfoundlanders. Stanley Steele supervised the cutting of pulpwood for the mill in the 1920s and 30s. When he wasn't doing that, he fished out of Musgrave Harbour. It was a tough life, but a happy one. The people of the village made their own fun, according to the late Beaton Mouland, a childhood friend of Harry's.
"Life was very good. People used to help each other," says Beaton who is three years older than Harry and lived in a retirement home in Gander when we spoke to him a few years ago. "We had nice times…out in the garden eating potatoes when the fine weather was on…. We had good times and enjoyed a little scoff together."
If you find his use of the word scoff a bit archaic, it appears to be common parlance in Musgrave Harbour. It means to eat, of course, a word the English borrowed from the Dutch, and there is even a festival in town called the Muddy Hole Scuff and Scoff. Today people come to Musgrave Harbour to walk its seven-kilometre white sand beach, and look out to the Atlantic and perhaps see a passing iceberg.
Harry's mother, born Kathleen Power and always called Katie, was another hard worker. She came from Brighton, in north-central Newfoundland. Katie was a Catholic, and mixed marriages were unusual at the time. Apart from keeping their modest home, she cooked meals for as many as 100 men in the lumber camp during the logging season.
Katie Steele had two children, Audrey and Harry. Though her son wasn't a great student, she recognized he was an inquisitive boy with an insatiable curiosity. She encouraged him to finish high school; many children in Newfoundland outports dropped out early to work in fish plants or go to sea. The lack of education trapped them in the life their families had lived for generations, though they may not have objected to the simple life of hard work and isolation.
About 400 people lived in Musgrave Harbour at the start of the Great Depression. There was not much cash but a lot of barter, as people traded fish for firewood and saved the folding money for things they had to buy from the outside world, from flour to clothes.
There was only one place to buy those things: the store run by T.W. Abbott, a man who fascinated the young Harry Steele. Here was someone who didn't have to fish or cut wood to make a living.
"My grandparents, Stanley Steele and Kathleen Steele, taught my father the basic things about hard work, accountability, responsibility, honouring your word, making the best of what you have," says Peter Steele. "But that was subsistence, carving a life out of hard conditions as opposed to entrepreneurial ability."
The reality was hard work.
"There weren't any power tools or modern technology. There was a man working in the woods with a bucksaw with a partner depending on the size of the trees. Stanley Steele used to have just under a hundred workers, people working under him and part of the deal was that he was responsible for their lodging including food and that's where my grandmother used to run that end of the operation on the contract they had made to ensure everybody was fed."
"The entrepreneur that my father encountered as a young boy that led him toward, on the business side, was a gentleman known as T.W. Abbott. He was the local merchant in Musgrave Harbour, a larger-than-life figure from whom everybody bought their provisions," says Peter. "Put this in the context of Musgrave Harbour of the day where you had four or five hundred people, who lived a subsistence existence working to get the cash through forestry and fishing to get the basics. T.W. Abbott controlled that part of the economy, consumerism and staples."
Harry saw that T.W, Abbott lived a comfortable existence in Musgrave Harbour, though he was hardly a plutocrat like the legendary oligarchs of St. John's known as the Water Street Merchants.
The shop was simple, wooden floors like many other general stores in isolated outports and rural towns. Behind the cash register was a framed photograph showing two men, one smiling, the other frowning. Underneath the smiling man were the words: "I sold for cash." Written below the frowning face: "I sold for credit."
T.W. Abbott was held in such esteem that he was known by his initials; history does not record his actual Christian name, just the formal T.W.. Harry spoke of him often in his adult life.
"T.W. Abbott was not only the first entrepreneurial person in life that my father encountered. My father always loved that picture behind the cash register at T.W. Abbot's store and he referenced it numerous times over his lifetime It resonated so much with my father that he never forgot it," says Peter Steele.
"My father saw that T.W. had a better life because he owned that business that made him a contributor and a man in charge of his own destiny. That affected my father deeply his whole life. He was the first person to show him that by being in business one could get a better material life."
Other people who had seen the wide world impressed Harry. Someone like his cousin Lloyd Cuff who had fought overseas in the Second World War. When the local soldiers came marching home, a record player blasted out marching music in the streets of Musgrave Harbour. Harry sat enraptured as his cousin told him of meeting the great British General, Bernard Montgomery. The veterans spoke of the war, probably not the horrors they saw, but certainly the places and people they had seen.
Beaton Mouland says things were primitive in Musgrave Harbour. There was no electricity in the early days and little in the way of creature comforts: most residences had an outhouse. No one thought of it as a hardship, that's the way life was. Beaton remembers it all with a smile on his face.
They went to a two-room school, Wesleyan Hall where two teachers taught every grade from the first year of elementary school to the last year of high school. It was what was called a primer school; one room was for kindergarten to grade five, the other room from grades six to eleven.
"Harry was a nice young fellow. His home wasn't very far from ours. We went to school together. It was what they called Wellesley (sic) Hall, and the hall was up top. They used to have concerts up there at Christmas time. He was a nice young man when we were growing up together. We used to run together, run home from school together and all that stuff," says Beaton.
Beaton remembers that he and his brother Huey had to chop a lot of firewood in the summer to prepare for winter. "We had to use wood in the iron stoves because there was no electricity."
Harry stayed on in school, whether from ambition or because there was no work in Musgrave Harbour. He graduated high school from the two-room schoolhouse but soon was restless. There was little paid work to speak of in Musgrave Harbour.
"When we was young there were no jobs, not like it is now. I could do anything then, painting, and I was a good carpenter," says Beaton, who says he learned carpentry on his own. "Just by looking at people. I built nine small lobster boats about 20 feet long for people doing lobster catching."
They also had to entertain each other. "We would go to their home, and they would come to our home." The nearest town was Doting Cove, he described "only a sliver and as the people would come in up the road to say hello." It is the east of Musgrave Harbour, and the only other close neighbour is Ragged Harbour to the west.
"It was poor. There wasn't much money around in those days," says Beaton of life there. You grew your own vegetables, and you'd have to go out in the woods to get wood to warm yourselves. You had a very nice home, but you had to put your firewood into an iron stove to keep warm."
Harry has fond memories of growing up there. Anyone who is successful as he became would almost certainly be well grounded in childhood. Harry remembers the good times, but he also remembers the grinding poverty of Musgrave Harbour.
"The big thing in Newfoundland in those days was the scarcity of everything and no money. I followed a few friends of mine from Musgrave Harbour and looked for work where they went," recalls Harry. But he didn't fancy what they were doing. "You couldn't get paid any money to make a living. So, I worked for three years in Deer Lake, as a labourer on the roads. It was like going to end of the world," says Harry.
It might be a short distance on the map, but getting there involved going by boat to another village, then a long walk, a train ride on the slow-moving, narrow gauge Newfie Bullet and then some more walking. It was tough work, though the young Harry Steele was used to work and he was strong and healthy. Then came the big change.
"I decided I should go back to school at Memorial University. I had to be subsidized otherwise I would never have made it."
While he was working in Deer Lake, Harry decided working on the roads for the rest of his life was not for him. He looked around for other things to do. First, he applied to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who were new to the local population since Newfoundland had just joined Canada. The RCMP turned him down.
The Royal Canadian Navy had a recruiting office, and that was his first contract with the navy. That helped pay the freight at university, but so did a grant from Joey Smallwood, the first premier of Newfoundland, as we will see in the next chapter.
There is a fish plant in Musgrave Harbour by the name of Beothic Fish Plant. Many others plants in Newfoundland closed completely, but Beothic operates on a skeleton staff compared to its heyday before the closure of the cod fishery. Today it operates mostly during the crab season which runs from the end of April until October. It doesn't process fish, just unloads fishermen's catches and sends it on to another plant in Newfoundland.
There was always something to do. Beaton remembers he and his uncle used to blast rock to make driveways and the rocks were also used as ballast to keep wharves in place.
Beaton left Musgrave Harbour when he was 45 years old and went to Gander where he worked for Catherine and Harry at the Albatross Hotel.
He was the maintenance manager there for twenty years. "I was sometimes up at night time if somebody wanted something. I could do most everything, but I wasn't allowed to do wiring because it was too dangerous. I could put a small outlet in, but that's it. But the rest I could do anything at all. Jack of all trades they used to call me." When the Steele family built a new house in Gander, Beaton worked on it as a carpenter.
Harry was loyal to his childhood friend. Beaton went to Nova Scotia to work on the Steele's house in Dartmouth. He also went to the Steele's modest condo in Florida.
"Me and my wife was down there a month before Harry and Catherine come back. They were going around the world on a cruise, and I was there for a month in February," says Beaton who still lives in a comfortable old people's home in Gander.
Like Harry Steele, Rex Murphy is a success story from Newfoundland. The two men are different, the navy man and entrepreneur versus the Rhodes Scholar and sharp-witted journalist; but the two share a love of Newfoundland, and each admires the accomplishments of the other.
Rex Murphy thinks to know Harry Steele, you have to understand Newfoundland and places like Musgrave Harbour that formed his character.
"There's a cliché, and clichés are sometimes true. I would think the key to Harry Steele if you were looking for one is Newfoundland, Musgrave Harbour and Newfoundland in the 1930's and 1940's. They were isolated," says Rex, sitting over a light lunch of spring rolls in a Chinese restaurant by Lake Ontario in Toronto.
"He told me, and I can't remember the name of the other town where he had met this young lady, he'd walk along the railway line or the shoreline path in the winter to go down seventeen miles to visit the girlfriend. It was the hard old days and the people were so tough," says Rex.
"No one knows the thirties and forties in Newfoundland unless you've had a relation, like my father, who went through them. Steele was one of those guys, at eighty-nine now, who proves it, that nothing in the environment could ever stop him. He came out of that breed that's up around the north-east coast, the sealing captains. I think that Harry Steele would have been a sealing captain if he had been born about thirty years earlier."