http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2009/11/04/consumer-ceo-pay.html

Chief executives in 35 of the top Fortune 500 companies were overpaid by about 129 times their “ideal salaries” in 2008, according to an analysis by a Purdue University researcher.

Venkat Venkatasubramanian, a chemical engineer, said he’s devised a new way to calculate the true worth of top CEOs based on equations found in chemical engineering.

His paper — What is Fair Pay for Executives? An Information Theoretic Analysis of Wage Distributions — was published Tuesday in the online open-access journal Entropy.

Fair pay for an average S&P 500 CEO should ideally be in the range of 8 to 16 times the lowest employee salary, according to Venkatasubramanian’s calculations.

By contrast, average CEO pay ratios were about 11-to-1 in Japan, 15-to-1 in France, 20-to-1 in Canada and 22-to-1 in Britain in 2006.

Since the 1970s in the United States, the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest employee’s salary has gone up to as high as 344-to-1 from about 40-to-1.

//////////////

Gas bills going down by 8%

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2009/11/04/sk-gas-decrease911.html

Natural gas bills in Saskatchewan are going down about eight per cent, the government announced Wednesday.

In the morning, cabinet approved a rate decrease at SaskEnergy, retroactive to Nov. 1.

For a typical residential customer, bills will go down by about $6.75 a month or $81 annually, a 7.8 per cent decrease. Gas bills are a combination of the commodity cost of the gas and the delivery cost.

This time it’s the commodity cost of natural gas that’s changing, dropping by 12.6 per cent in response to falling market prices.

Meanwhile, a hike on the delivery cost of the gas is being considered.

////////////////////

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and the McDonald’s restaurant chain are denouncing an email making the rounds that suggests there’s a problem with the country’s beef supply.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2009/11/04/sk-cattle-beef-email-hoax-mcdonalds.html

The electronic note claims the hamburger-maker is making plans to buy beef from South America.

“This email chain is a hoax,” McDonald’s said in a news release issued Tuesday. It said the note contained a number of false claims and was similar to other bogus emails that had circulated in the past in different parts of the United States.

It said a Canadian version of the email surfaced earlier this year.

Beef producers say the issue is important because of the volume of sales to the fast food giant.

“This one is so blatantly untrue,” Brad Wildeman, president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and a feedlot operator in Saskatchewan, told CBC News.

“[McDonald's] is our No. 1 customer,” Wildeman said. “And we just don’t think it’s fair to target either the beef industry … or one of our major customers with outright lies.”