After six days of intensive and often acrimonious negotiations, trade ministers from the 149 member countries of the World Trade Organization reached an agreement to restart stalled global trade talks.

J. Paul Grayson’s review of Jeffrey Cormier’s 2004 book, The Canadianization Movement: Emergence, Survival and Success, (Bulletin, December 2005) points to some weaknesses which concern us.

I was honoured to represent CAUT, along with executive director James Turk and associate executive director David Robinson, at meetings last month in Melbourne, Australia, hosted by the National Tertiary Education Union and Education International.

Dr. David Graham is a senior official in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Drug Safety — the office responsible for monitoring drugs once they’ve been approved for sale.

I must admit to being shocked and appalled by the protectionist, defensive tone of the President’s Column (Bulletin, December 2005) opposing the proposed General Agreement on Trade in Services, and especially the opening up to “trade” in higher education services. I don’t know that the internationalists in Canadian higher education were ever consulted prior to the president taking this protectionist editorial stand.

Professor Rudner confuses CAUT’s concerns about the inclusion of education services within the General Agreement on Trade in Services with a general anti-internationalist stance. This suggests that opposition to trade agreements like GATS necessarily translates to opposition to the internationalization of higher education. On the contrary, CAUT has long been and remains a strong advocate for increased international cooperation, mobility and exchanges of students and staff. The point is that these initiatives should be governed by educational priorities, and not by the commercial mandates that dominate trade agreements, such as GATS.

I wonder whether the editor was conscious of the ironic juxtaposition on the front page of the December Bulletin.

Canada’s three funding agencies have announced the release of an updated interagency policy statement on ethical conduct in research involving humans. The latest version incorporates editorial and technical corrections, among other changes. A summary of amendments can be found on the last page of the statement.

A CAUT investigatory committee has made a series of recommendations about continuing education programs, following from its investigation of allegations of violation of Dr. Laurent Leduc’s academic freedom at the University of St. Michael’s College (University of Toronto).

National post-secondary education faculty unions and associations from more than 30 nations met in Melbourne, Australia for the 5th Education International Conference on Higher Education and Research. Key issues included academic freedom, commercialization, privatization, trade negotiations, security, working conditions, brain drain/ brain gain and the situation of general staff.

Mary Kandiuk, reference librarian at Scott Library at York University, is the recipient of the sixth CAUT Academic Librarians’ Distinguished Service Award.

Academic staff at the University of Sudbury have voted 100 per cent in favour of strike action to achieve bargaining goals.

Leona Jacobs, systems librarian at the University of Lethbridge, is CAUT’s visiting scholar for 2006

In the village hall of my prairie childhood, news reels preceded the movies on Friday evenings. In late summer, when not much else was happening in the world, we were treated to footage of the Queen’s Plate, the premier horse race in Ontario.