REPLACING ASSETS UNDER ACCELERATED DEPRECIATION LAWS

The accelerated depreciation laws provide more revenue in earlier years of a new asset due to shielding of taxes. The laws seem designed to encourage farmers to purchase assets more often. This paper exams the optimal purchase period for a beef cattle farm buying replacement cows. While the accelerated depreciation laws do help farms, the optimal asset life is seldom shortened.Farm Management,

Open Cow Replacement Decisions: an Application of Asset Replacement Theory

Beef producers must decide what to do with a cow that fails to conceive during the breeding season. Keeping the open cow results in a years expenses without any revenue. Replacing the open cow with a bred heifer provides immediate revenue although it will take a few years before the heifer reaches peak productivity. A net present value framework is employed to examine this decision. The problem is unique because the open cow and the replacement heifer have different life spans. Finding a common timeframe is impossible since both alternatives will eventually employ replacement heifers if a long enough time frame is considered.Livestock Production/Industries,

Legislating Trust

As governments in Canada and elsewhere have considered statutes to ensure that electronic communications are legally effective, they have invariably had to face questions about the reliability of those communications. Can we trust electronic messages, documents, and signatures? Are they the same in law as if they were on paper? What conditions should be imposed in order to give us the right assurances that we can trust them? To answer these questions properly, we need to understand the nature of “trust” and the extent to which legislation can be a source of it, and what other sources should be enlisted to allow prudent legal operations in the digital age. In this article I raise and suggest answers to a number of questions that arise out of the use of electronic communications. Can we trust electronic messages, documents, signatures? Are they the same in law as if they were on paper? What conditions should be imposed in order to give us the right assurances that we can trust them? I will be describing the legal policy responses to the ubiquity of electronic communications, with particular reference to electronic commerce and electronic government, and with a focus on how legislation works in this context

Solving Legal Issues in Electronic Government: Authority and Authentication

This article is an overview of some of the legal themes and issues faced by governments in the electronic age, with particular regard to their own operations: electronic service delivery and the administration of government itself. Electronic government is the performance of any function of government using electronic records and electronic communications. It may involve, in the language of the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act, ‘‘us[ing] electronic means to create, collect, receive, store, transfer, distribute, publish or otherwise deal with documents or information.’’ The term thus covers the provision of governmental services to the public, including commu- nication from the public to the government. It also extends to the ‘‘back office’’ of government, the methods of public administration within the Executive Branch of government and between government and those who supply goods and services to it. The term is sometimes used to extend to regulation of private activities carried on electronically, either as extensions of traditional activity or as new types of con- duct made available by means of electronic communica- tions. The current paper does not address such questions

Solving Legal Issues in Electronic Government: Jurisdiction, Regulation, Governance

This paper looks at who can be governed, what can be governed, and how it can be governed in an electronic world. Whether law aims to be enabling (i.e., confirming the ground rules and the legal effectiveness of general conduct) or normative (i.e., imposing standards of conduct on more or less willing subjects), the new media presents difficulties for its rational evolution. These are distinct questions from those raised by government online. Electronic service delivery issues tend to focus on how government can carry on its traditional programs using electronic means and how the law can support it in doing so. The programs themselves evolve through the changing media, but not so much that they stop being recognizable. The transformation of government to deliver services electronically is just beginning, and the changes are not yet dramatic. Here we start with a view of ‘‘jurisdiction’’, which considers how governments can regulate private conduct, whether in resolving disputes, protecting consumers, or repressing criminal or other offensive behaviour. The discussion looks at the courts and other dispute resolution methods, administrative processes, and alternative means to achieve the goals that have traditionally been sought by systems of direct commands and penalties. We then look at questions of the role of government faced with an electronic economy, particularly monetary and fiscal policy and taxation in general. The impact of electronic communications on the functioning of the democratic system is next: electronic publication of laws, electronic voting, governance models and public expectations. Finally, we review how technical rules and standards affect conduct that has been the purview of government, and some of the technical standards bodies whose role becomes more important in the electronic age

E-Commerce Legislation and Materials in Canada: Lois sur le commerce électronique au Canada et documents connexes by Sunny Handa, Claude Marseille & Martin Sheehan (Markham, Ont.: LexisNexis Butterworths, 2005)

This hefty volume is a useful compendium of the basic source materials for the law of electronic commerce in Canada. It offers the text of all the general-purpose legislation that removes legal barriers to the use of electronic communications, for all jurisdictions in the country. It then takes a dozen related areas of law, from domain names to taxation, from competition law to consumer protection, from security to standards, and offers a quick overview and the key documents applicable to each. In each case the commentary is in English then in French, and where the texts are available in both lan- guages, they are presented in both, either together or in turn. The present volume is the second edition of the work

Solving Legal Issues in Electronic Government: Authority and Authentication

This article is an overview of some of the legal themes and issues faced by governments in the electronic age, with particular regard to their own operations: electronic service delivery and the administration of government itself. Electronic government is the performance of any function of government using electronic records and electronic communications. It may involve, in the language of the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act, ‘‘us[ing] electronic means to create, collect, receive, store, transfer, distribute, publish or otherwise deal with documents or information.’’ The term thus covers the provision of governmental services to the public, including commu- nication from the public to the government. It also extends to the ‘‘back office’’ of government, the methods of public administration within the Executive Branch of government and between government and those who supply goods and services to it. The term is sometimes used to extend to regulation of private activities carried on electronically, either as extensions of traditional activity or as new types of con- duct made available by means of electronic communica- tions. The current paper does not address such questions

The Law of Privacy in Canada (Student Edition) by Barbara A. McIsaac, Rick Shields, Kris Klein (Toronto: Thomson Carswell, 2004)

To help lawyers advise their clients on their rights and obligations in this complex and novel field, the various legal publishers have offered an array of guides and textbooks analyzing the law of privacy. Thomson/Carswell turned for its book to the national law firm of McCarthy Tétrault. Three McCarthy lawyers (Barbara McIsaac, Rick Shields, and Kris Klein) are listed as authors of The Law of Privacy in Canada, and several others have contributed significant parts of the text, and they have done a creditable job in pulling it all together. It seems to be the only thorough and up-to-date analysis of privacy rules for both the public and the private sector in Canada