[LINK] "Canada gets Saddam's uranium"

I was not expecting to read this, in The Globe and Mail or elsewhere or, really, anywhere at all.

OTTAWA AND TORONTO -- Almost everything about the deal made for spy novel fodder: a multimillion-dollar shipment of yellowcake uranium, the final vestiges of Saddam Hussein's once-hyped nuclear program, quietly moved from Baghdad to Montreal via a controversial U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean, all done under orders of absolute secrecy.

But for all the cloak and dagger, it was a relatively straightforward transaction. "It was business as usual," Transport Canada spokeswoman Marie-Anyk Côté said of the deal that saw Saskatoon-based Cameco Corp. purchase some 550 tonnes of yellowcake, which is used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. The volatile, but often transported, cargo arrived in Montreal by ship on Saturday.

Although Cameco says the U.S. military, which helped organize the sale, asked for the deal to be done in secrecy, the Canadian government agency that monitors such transports was less paranoid.

[. . .]

With major mining operations in Saskatchewan, Cameco is the world's largest producer of uranium. Company spokesman Lyle Krahn said Cameco was contacted by the U.S. State Department "earlier this year," and asked to join in the bidding process for the Iraqi material.

Although the deal is technically with the Iraqi government - Baghdad gets the money - Washington had a significant driving role in the deal.

The yellowcake, all of which is believed to date before 1991, originated at the Tuwaitha nuclear complex south of Baghdad. Military and diplomatic officials initially considered sending the uranium to Kuwait's port on the Persian Gulf, but such a route would pass through Shia-controlled areas of Iraq within close proximity to insurgents. Kuwait was also reluctant to proceed.

After Cameco secured the contract to buy the uranium, U.S.-led crews began moving the yellowcake from corroded, decades-old compartments to about 3,500 secure barrels. In April, convoys moved the shipment from Tuwaitha to Baghdad's international airport.

It took two weeks and 37 flights in May to transport the cargo to a U.S. military base in Diego Garcia, a tiny British territory in the Indian Ocean, before it was shipped to Montreal.

Cameco would not disclose how much it is paying for the 550 tonnes of Iraqi "yellowcake," but Mr. Krahn indicated Cameco would make money on the deal. That would suggest Cameco paid less than market rates for the uranium. The spot price for the metal currently stands at $59 (U.S.) a pound while the so-called "term price" is about $80 a pound.

At $59 a pound, the material would be worth about $72-million. At $80 a pound, about $97-million.

[META] Blogroll Update

I've added Dooney's Cafe, an online forum that apparently started in real-time in the Toronto restaurant Dooney's Cafe and hosts some very interesting essays written by such people as the very respectable Stan Persky (official website, Wikipedia).

Go, read!

[URBAN NOTE] The Orange Order in Toronto

A couple of days ago, as if thinking of my most recent post on ethnic conflict in Canada, Torontoist's Kevin Plummer had an interesting post up there part of their Historicist series, "Orangemen and The Glorious Twelfth of July".

Nowadays, the Orange Order is thought of as a quaint anachronism, a benevolent society that marches every twelfth of July to commemorate the victory of William III at the Battle of the Boyne. But the Protestant fraternal organization once had a stranglehold on power in Toronto, and its subjugation of Irish Catholics gave the parade on every "Glorious Twelfth" an ominous undercurrent of potential violence. While Toronto's municipal affairs were never as corrupt as elsewhere, the Orange Order operated as a de facto political machine throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1845 and 1900, all but three of Toronto's twenty-three mayors and countless city councillors were members of an Orange Lodge. Protestant principles and moral order, as espoused by the Order, were synonymous with good governance and permeated the city's culture. Moreover, the city council's control over patronage ensured that fellow lodge members filled the civic administration, municipal utilities, and even, for a time, the police and fire departments.

[. . .]

The deep Protestant flavour to city life made "The Belfast of Canada," as Toronto was nicknamed, anything but hospitable to the great influx of Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived in the wake of the Great Famine. Despite their population growing from about 2,000 in the 1840s to 12,135 (or over 27% of the total population) in the 1860s, Irish Catholics could find only unskilled factory work that offered little opportunity to escape the appalling conditions of the slum neighbourhoods of Corktown and Cabbagetown. As local historian Bruce Bell described it: "To be Irish and Catholic at the height of Victorian Toronto meant menial work with no promise of advancement."

Wikipedia observes, accurately, that the Orange Order had become a major influence in Ontario's public life, managing to convince Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald to hang Louis Riel in 1885 on charges of treason else risk losing the Orange Order vote.

Eventually, Plummer goes on to conclude, the shift of city politics away from issues of personality to questions of day-to-day bureaucratic management, Irish Catholics no longer particularly stand out, and neighbourhoods like Corktown and Cabbagetown are fast gentrifying. Still, there's a commenter at Torontoist who defends the glorious fredeoms of the Glorious revolution against the people who respect an authoritarian pope. I guess that some thinks do manage to hang around.