What If?

Remember the heady days of 2015 when Harper was swept out of power and Justin Trudeau along with his chosen cabinet arrived at Rideau Hall to be sworn in? It was a time of such promise, a Liberal restoration hearkening back to that party's progressive past. All that talk of "sunny ways" even if almost no one understood the reference.

Our not-ready-for-prime-time prime minister boasted of the mandate letters he had issued to each of his cabinet appointees. Mr. Trudeau proclaimed that, in his government, each minister would have a dual mandate - to boost the economy and whatever in hell their designated ministry was supposed to handle.

When the entire cabinet is charged with expanding the national economy the government's priority is plain. The economy trumps all else. It, and it alone, holds every vote at the cabinet table. When you think about that, it's pretty sophomoric.

The inherent conflict in a dual mandate cabinet was as obvious as it was ignored. Nowhere was this more blatant than in the environment portfolio doled out to and still held by Dame Cathy McKenna. With time she would use her dual mandate to excuse not properly defending the environment. There's a great clip, I believe from the Council of Canadians, where McKenna hauls that one out to fend off well-deserved criticism at a townhall in her Ottawa riding. Her advocacy for the environment would be soft, soft, soft, soft particularly if it might be seen as unhelpful to economic expansion. Economy -1, Environment - no score.

This, perhaps, goes a long way to explain the cognitive dissonance that cripples the Trudeau government. Who can forget when Trudeau and McKenna strode onto the floor of the 2015 Paris Climate Summit and announced "Canada's back" heralding an end to the darkness of the Harper regime when Canada was regularly denounced as a "climate pariah."

Before long the new Liberal government reached the six month mark and the rockstar prime minister, darling of the Western world, was asked about his priorities. He said that, above all else, he wanted to be seen as a global free-trader which simply corroborated the unbalanced focus on the economy in those ministerial mandate letters.

I wonder where we would be today if the prime minister had issued a different mandate letter to his cabinet, one in which the environment and safety of Canadians replaced the economic-boosterism co-equal mandate in those letters?

Like it or not - and there's nothing to like about it - we're approaching crunch time on the climate, on the environment, on the very survival of humankind and most other life on the planet. In the 12,000 year history of human civilization this is the gravest threat humanity has ever faced and it's multi-pronged. We are in a battle for survival and we're not fighting back.

The British Parliament this week declared a state of national emergency over the threat of climate change. I suppose they must be far more endangered than we are on this side of the pond. What's that? They're not? It's a global threat of existential dimension? We're all under threat? Then why aren't we declaring a national emergency? Oh, I see, it's the economy. We must continue the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth and Canadians, especially the young and future generations, can just lump it.  Only they won't say that, will they? That's because their focus is perverse, grossly destructive, and morally as well as economically indefensible. That may not sound like the government you thought you elected in 2015 but it is.

This is a bad movie and it's about to get far worse. So far we've been dicking around with climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and laughable initiatives to create the appearance of doing something about it. As if. So far they've gotten away with it because the Canadian people have a complacency, a dullness about all this. It seems sort of abstract, something that we can pretend is twenty or thirty years off and who knows what they'll think of by then.

That delusion is going to be shattered next week with the release of an 1,800 page UN report on something a bit different - the ecology, biodiversity and our rampaging extinction of life on Earth.  This is one you can't slough off on the grandkids. It's coming for you - in your lifetime.

Now if that's a jolt ask yourself "who knew?" I don't know how to tell you this but a lot of people knew and they've known for years, a couple of decades anyway. Science types have researched the hell out of it, written up their findings in plenty of papers, even published reports for public consumption such as the Living Planet Reports of 2014, 2015 and others.

These people told us, clearly, even bluntly, that, in the 40-year span of the neoliberal order ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, and embraced by every political leader since, we had cut the populations of terrestrial creatures by fully half. The next report found that we had driven the population of marine creatures to half their former numbers.

Hint: you can't wipe out half the life on Earth in 40 years unless you're doing something very, very wrong. And, when you have wiped out half the life on Earth in 40 years, it's time to do something very, very different. Only that didn't happen. All those reports, like every other bit of worrisome revelation, was simply flushed down the Memory Hole within a couple of days, erased from public consciousness. BTW - it used to be just half. We're down by nearly two-thirds today.

You don't have experts at your beck and call to advise you on these things. Your government, however, does. It has PhDs up the yin-yang. This stuff didn't go down the Memory Hole for them. The long and short of it is that your government either knew or ought to have known that this catastrophe was almost upon us.

"Knew or ought to have known." That's a phrase with significance to attaching criminal liability. It's no defence to say you didn't know if you ought to have known and every government is obliged to know about every grave threat facing its people. That probably doesn't weigh heavily on you right now but, give it another decade or so, and it definitely will by then.

That trucker who wound up killing 16 players of the Humboldt Broncos is in jail because he failed to heed warning signs that should have averted that tragedy. Your government has failed to heed warning signs but they're on a civilizational scale,  not a team bus.

The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate.

What's the bottom line? We have to change, really change, if we want to survive. At a minimum that is going to mean abandoning the neoliberal order and its insatiable drive for perpetual exponential growth. We can't survive the world the Liberals and Conservatives promote yet they're too deep in their embrace of neoliberalism to change. We have to get free of them.

David Suzuki's Warning - Don't Rely On the Federal Government When Your Life's at Stake.

As our environment slides into meltdown, David Suzuki has a word of warning - don't count on your political leadership to do the right thing.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna have young children who will surely be greatly affected by climate change, but they've done little to raise the IPCC's alarm or educate the public about the severity of climate disruption. It's all because of politics. They don't want to jeopardize their chances in the next election so they avoid antagonizing some segments of society. 

As the SNC-Lavalin scandal unfolds, we see politicians held hostage by corporate threats of job losses or head offices moving to other countries. As economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs recalls, ozone-depleting CFCs were not eliminated by raising taxes on them or encouraging the public to stop buying CFC-containing spray cans or refrigerators. They were legislated out. 

We're in a battle for a liveable future and must make a declaration of war against catastrophic climate change. It's too late to remove the carbon we've already put into the atmosphere, so we'll have to live with the results for decades. But it makes no sense to continue to add to what is already at a devastating level higher than it's been for millions of years.  

...Many of my colleagues argue it's too late, that we're like the coyote, already over the edge, about to fall. Is that an argument for doing nothing? I don't think so, because we still don't really know whether we're the coyote or the roadrunner. And even if we fall, we might be able to avoid being crushed by the falling rock or anvil. Let's stop all the name-calling and denial, listen to the experts, seize the challenge, and make the commitment to meet the IPCC target. 

That baseline target, cutting emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, is not even on our government's radar. They have no plan to meet that target even as they ramp up extraction, transmission and export of high-carbon, high-cost, low-value bitumen. If you want to know where they stand on looming climate catastrophe you need look no further.

The economic, social, and environmental consequences of whatever governments do or don't do now will be enormous, but we have to do all we can to keep from hitting bottom. As Abraham Lincoln said: "Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality."

The Funny Thing Is - It's Here and What Have We Done to Adapt to It?

You might not have seen video of the dramatic flash flooding that swept the historic town centre of Elliott City, Maryland, but that doesn't matter. Perhaps you didn't see the devastation of New York City and the Jersey Shore by Hurricane Sandy. Maybe you've been in a coma for the last decade and more.

Most of us, at least most of the sentient population, have experienced powerful yet "early onset" impacts of climate change. "Global Weirding" is one example. Spring weather conditions in the midst of winter. Floods and droughts. Coastal erosion. The ever poleward migration of species - birds, mammals, fish, insects, even viruses. There are shared or common impacts and others that are regional or even local, sometimes the result of topography.

Our government tells us it has a plan. It's going to introduce carbon pricing that should encourage a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of some order by some future date, perhaps 10, certainly not more than 20 years from the date of implementation, if ever. As Catherine McKenna so fecklessly reminds us, this is a "national unity" issue first and foremost.

There are two parts to this problem. One is mitigation - cutting GHG emissions in hope of forestalling the onset of climate change. The other, the one that gets so little love, is adaptation. That goes to our resilience to withstand steadily worsening climate change impacts that we're not going to be able to avert. That is "locked in" climate change, the steadily heating atmosphere that will unleash severe storm events of increasing frequency, severity and duration. It's the sort of thing that promotes a category 3 hurricane to a full blown category 5 monster.

There are ways to blunt nature's worsening weather wedgies but they're not cheap. Some sea level rise can be contained, for a while, by constructing stronger and higher sea walls in suitable areas. Major cities can construct major floodways along the lines of the Red River Floodway, "Duff's Ditch," that Manitoba premier Roblin built in the 60s to protect Winnipeg. We know that Calgary could sure use one or more of those, Toronto too. Then there's the restoration and replacement of essential infrastructure that was engineered and constructed to meet the gentler climate demands of a time now past.

Here's one thing we know. Fixing this problem will never be cheaper than it is right now. It might have been cheaper yet if we had only started ten years ago but that is spilt milk at this point. We know it will be vastly more costly, adding in economic loss and disruption, if we keep putting this off much longer. So what's the hold up?

What's going on in your region? Are they building the road networks of the future? Are they reinforcing your bridges and overpasses? Anyone upgrading your water mains and sewers? How about your already wobbly electrical grid? Getting a new one of those? Is your public health authority preparing for the new challenges of a new climate?

You'll recognize that your government has the problem in hand because they'll be spending tens of billions, many tens of billions of dollars on climate proofing your society.

Back in 2014, when Calgary was swamped from its most recent, once in a gazillion year floods, the World Council on Disaster Management held its annual conference in Toronto.

Dr. Saeed Mirza, emeritus professor at Montreal’s McGill University specializing in structural engineering, added that the monumental infrastructure costs accumulated over decades of negligence have left Canada particularly vulnerable to catastrophic events. 

“The frequency and intensity of these events has been increasing at an escalating rate and what was a one-in-100-year event at one time may become the norm,” he said. 

“When we look at Calgary, we had a flood there in 2005 and they called it a one-in-100-year flood, while this one according to some descriptions in the news has been three times as bad.” 

Mirza estimated that Canada’s infrastructure requirements have reached a cost of about $1 trillion, while a recent survey by the McKinsey Global Institute earlier this year stated that worldwide infrastructure needs are about $57 trillion.

Now there's a handsome number, 57 trillion dollars to meet the world's essential infrastructure needs. Boy have we been robbing Peter to cut taxes for Paul!

Here's another number, one that our politicians have foremost in their minds. It's 27 trillion dollars. That's roughly the value of proven fossil fuel reserves already subscribed on global stock markets and bourses.  That number keeps our politicos tossing in their beds at night because they know if the carbon bubble bursts, most of that wealth simply evaporates causing no end of fiscal mayhem to banks, institutional investors, pension plans and, yes, government treasuries. No wonder these little shits love their pipelines so much.

Canada's approach? Oh, we'll throw 30, maybe 35 billion at the problem over 5 years. Maybe we can cook up some sweetheart deals to get the private sector to come up with another 50, maybe 60 billion that they can then fleece back from the public together with interest and hefty profits.

Here's the problem. 30 billion dollars, that's a political number that is not connected in any way to the enormity of the problem. It's just whatever they pulled out of their backsides. That much was clear when, in March of this year, a joint audit by the federal environment commissioner and the auditors general of nine provinces found that the premiers and your prime minister don't have a clue.

Neither the federal government nor the provinces have adequately assessed the risks a changing climate poses to the country and have no real idea what might be needed to adapt to it, concludes a scathing new audit released Tuesday. 

...It says while many governments have high-level goals to cut emissions, few have detailed plans to actually reach those goals, such as timelines, funding or expected results from specific actions. 

Assessments to adapt to the risks posed by climate change have been haphazard, inconsistent and lacking in detail, with no timeline for action and no funding, the report notes. 

It also calls Canada’s emissions goals a hodgepodge of different targets, with no consistency in how emissions are measured or whether cuts will target overall greenhouse gas outputs or just those from specific economic sectors. Only two provinces and Ottawa have actually laid out their specific 2030 emissions targets, and none are on track to meet them, Gelfand said.

Dame Cathy disingenuously steered the audit into mitigation and well clear of adaptation. Then again, she would.

“The previous government did nothing for a decade, but we’re 100 per cent committed to our target,” McKenna said. “Hard things are hard, we have a plan and we’re already seeing measurable results.”

That sounds just like what Harper used to say about Chretien - all talk, no meaningful action.  The problem didn't begin with Harper, dearie.

There's something telling that Cathy didn't even address adaptation. What it tells me is that I and you, we, and our kids and grandkids are pretty much on our own as far as this government, like its predecessors, is concerned.

What that means is that we're getting "behind the power curve" on climate change adaptation which means it will become increasingly more costly and more difficult to deal with as their dereliction mounts, year by year. Unless something changes, we're in for a hard landing.

The Perils and Pitfalls of the J. Trudeau Memorial Pipeline - They're Very Real

To hear many east of the Rockies tell it, a dilbit spill in British Columbia's coastal waters isn't going to happen, although it is, and, should it, they have a "world class" oil spill response programme, although they don't. Those are just lies they have to spin to scrub the narrative of their "national interest" claim. Isolate all the problems and then you can say it's a matter of economics and one recalcitrant province.

South of the border, the Americans are remarkably candid about the realities of an increase in tanker traffic resulting from the J. Trudeau Memorial Pipeline expansion. Their honesty is a refreshing break from the nonsense this prime minister tries to force feed British Columbians.

The presence of that much more oil puts the Strait at a “very high” risk of spills, according to one study by Canadian authorities. Another showed that in six of seven simulated spill-response drills by B.C. officials, more than half the oil during a major spill would have remained in the water five days after a hypothetical accident. 

“We haven’t felt that in the past the standards and capability across the border were as strong as they are on the U.S. side,” said Jensen, with the Department of Ecology. 

In addition, oil-sands petroleum has in previous accidents proved more difficult to clean up than North Slope crude. A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chemist has argued that oil from Alberta could sink if left on the surface too long, making cleanup virtually impossible.

“We don’t really know how to clean a spill of that stuff up,” said Kongsgaard, of the Puget Sound Partnership. “You’re not going to hear from the cleanup people that we really understand how it behaves at all.” 

But the fact that Haro Strait and Boundary Pass just to the northeast are the most likely place for any serious accident poses a special kind of concern for many officials. 

The region’s endangered killer whales concentrate in those areas, and “We’ve seen that they don’t move around to avoid spilled oil,” said Brad Hanson, a marine-mammal expert with NOAA.

It's times like these that you get to know your friends from your, let's put it this way, your adversaries. The way I see it, our adversaries are the Alberta thugs, Notley and her soon to be replacement, Jason Kenney, and the Ottawa thugs, your prime minister Trudeau and his pack of drylander MPs. It is passing curious that on this pipeline/supertanker steamroller, Justin doesn't have one of his British Columbia MPs leading the charge. Those cowards have gone mute, perhaps Justice Minister Jody excepted and even Jody is keeping her lip buttoned. The rest are fretting about whether they'll get their asses handed to them next year. No, the Gang of Four are Quebec's Trudeau, Manitoba's Carr, Ontario's McKenna and Quebec's Garneau.  A dilbit spill will be no skin off their asses. And, to prove it, McKenna even approved massively toxic Corexit as an oil spill dispersant.

But we do have friends. We have friends in Washington state and Oregon and California, even in Alaska. Notley and Trudeau remind us of the difference between friend and - well, adversary. Notley showed that she's no friend when she passed legislation allowing her government to cut off oil and gas supplies to British Columbia. Trudeau, our other adversary, let her get away with it.

Washington governor, Jay Inslee, however showed that we have a real friend to the south when he assured BC premier Horgan that Washington would supply us with the required fossil fuels if Alberta put the screws to us. It almost seems reminiscent of the Berlin airlift. Notley, with Trudeau's concurrence, threatens to disrupt life for ordinary British Columbians if we don't submit to her will. And then the Good Guys put in an appearance with a friendly "fear not."

Times like these make me just a little sympathetic to Donald Trump who cannot find the billions of dollars he'll need to build his wall along the Mexican border. British Columbians already have the wall we might need. It's huge and it's granite and it reaches thousands of feet into the sky. It's even aligned right, north and south. It's the Rocky Mountains and all the other mountain ranges west of it.

It's not unusual for newcomers to have trouble adjusting to those mountains. They complain that the mountains make them somehow feel cut off from their families and home provinces. Some just go back from whence they came. Some find those mountains distressing but most of us find them assuring, our own Great Wall.

Our majestic mountains create not just a physical divide but also a psychological separation. I wonder if Trudeau gets that. I'm not sure he does.

National Observer Slams Canada's Business Writers for Media Malpractice

...it is not the media’s job to assume that opinions without evidence are equal in worth to opinions which are fact-based. Or to assume that the scale and decibel level coming from oilsands advocates is proof of their cause. A noise meter is not evidence. Or to assume that the voices of opposition should be discounted as, at best, merely emotional and at worst, severely irrational.

Paul McKay, writing in the National Observer, takes Canada's business journalists and a lot of their fellow journos to the woodshed, accusing them of "media malpractice."

He begins with the story of an American school teacher, Ida Tarbell, who, in 1902, broke into journalism with a 19-part investigative series that set fire to the industrial barons and their monopolies.

Tarbell’s target was America’s biggest petroleum conglomerate, Standard Oil. She exposed, installment by installment, the brutally ruthless tactics (including serial Congressional bribery) the corporate colossus used to gain and maintain monopolies for shareholders and its galvanic founder, John D. Rockefeller. It enlightened the public, humbled the high and mighty, and ushered in a ‘trust-busting’ progressive U.S. President who ramrodded federal anti-monopoly laws through a simultaneously amazed, apoplectic Congress. Standard Oil and the Rockefellers never saw Tarbell, a former schoolteacher, coming. No one had dared to ask the questions she did, let alone print them.

Soon, fellow ‘muckraker’ reports exposed corruption and monopoly abuses in Chicago meatpacking plants, rapacious railroad barons, municipal graft, laboursafety violations and union-busting, and appalling conditions in public insane asylums. One investigative report revealed that the owner of the worst slum tenements in New York City was the richest church in America.

The best of these journalists used an alloy of evidence and audacity. They dared to ask questions others were too lazy, inept or timid to ask. Our profession has its heroes – like Emile Zola accurately accusing the French government and military of knowingly convicting an innocent officer of treason. Or Woodward and Bernstein daring to ask if a troupe of third-rate, bungling burglars might be henchmen for President Richard Nixon. Or, more recently, Michael Lewis exposing breath-taking ‘big shorts’, rogue hedge funds and algorithm flash trading. 

But a history of business journalism proves these figures are an exception. It is notorious for failing to detect bubbles before they burst with calamitous consequences.

...In Canada, our business press only belatedly dug up the real dirt on companies like Henry Pellatt’s Home Bank after its 1923 collapse, Viola Macmillan’s 1964Windfall mining scam, the fatal coal methane levels at Clifford Frame’s Westraymine, the $6 billion Bre-X swindle (which was exposed after the chief prospector jumped from a helicoptor with false, salted samples) and the collapse of apparently venerable Nortel Networks in 2009. 

In fact, the leading figures behind these spectacular failures were often lauded by the business press right up to the moment they became disgraced. The evidence of imminent demise was lurking, but nobody went looking for it. None dared ask tough questions. They did not do their job.

And now their failure turns to bitumen and pipelines and the alchemy of trying to conjure convenient facts out of thin air.

Which brings us to Canada’s bitumen bubble, and missing-in-action media coverage, which amounts to malpractice. 

In the days following Kinder Morgan’s ultimatum that it would jettison its planned Trans Mountain oil pipeline and forsake Canada unless it gains a clear and certain path to final approvals by May 31, a collective wail of lamentations ensued from oil companies, the pipeline manufacturers, the Alberta premier and Opposition leader, the Prime Minister and his senior cabinet members, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and major banks. This is natural and fitting, and so is media coverage of their collective fury and resolve to avert that ultimatum. It is a big story. It needs to be covered.

The questions that go unasked.

In my view, Canada’s mainstream business news platforms (with a few stellar exceptions) have failed in their responsibility to make facts and evidence the cornerstone of their oilsands coverage. I routinely read the business sections of the Globe, Toronto Star, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun,National Post and Financial Post. I scan BNN daily and the political panel shows of CBC and CTV.

To my knowledge, no one has asked these four key questions: 

What proof is there that Asian refiners have signed contracts to purchase vast volumes of Alberta raw bitumen for decades to come? If these do not exist, there is no demand.

What proof is there that Asian refiners are willing to contractually commit to a much higher price than U.S. refiners will pay for raw Alberta bitumen? If such contracts do not exist, there is no price certainty to support oilsands expansion. 

What proof is there that Alberta bitumen ranks high in global comparisons of oil quality, price, and ocean supertanker access, shipping costs and speed? 

Which private Big Oil players have recently placed big bets buying new, undeveloped oil sand properties, which would underpin Alberta’s expansion plans? 

Tellingly, the working assumption seems to be that such business case certainty must exist, even though there is no evidence of it. That there isn’t a bitumen bubble, because no reporters have dared to ask if Alberta’s oilsands ambitions really amount to a bright and shining lie. Just as generations of children don’t press their parents very hard about that pony they expect to get for Christmas and how it will get down the chimney. The answer might be unthinkable. 

But this media malpractice is not just a sin of omission, of failing to ask tough questions. It is a sin of commission when business journalists or media personalities lob only softball questions to oilsands advocates. They print or broadcast assumptions masking as facts, and confuse what many Albertans would like to happen with what is likely to happen because of inconvenient facts.

Negating science. Science, what science? Never heard of it.

In a month of media coverage about the escalating battle about the Kinder Morgan pipeline, not once have I seen a climate scientist interviewed about the risk greatly expanded bitumen exports might pose to people and the biosphere. In effect, science (the most reliable source of facts) has been banished from the debate stage, leaving provincial economics and national politics to dominate every discussion. How convenient. 

This has partitioned the parameters of debate, and the very vocabulary used. The fate of Alberta future oilsands and pipeline projects gets confronted not by respected climate or marine scientists, but video clips of Left-Coast environmentalists with a placard in one hand and a latte in the other. Bitumen with a demonstrably deadly chemical signature becomes a benign ‘product’ or ‘resource,’ barely different from wheat, lumber or potash. 

Yet the world’s top climate scientists have explicitly warned that Alberta’s oilsands amount to a delayed-fuse ‘carbon bomb’ our biosphere cannot tolerate. Top international economists, led by the esteemed and astute Lord Nicholas Stern, have identified those same bitumen deposits as ‘unburnable’ stranded assets. To date, these scientists and economists have not issued warnings about the perils of Canadian potash exports. 

Once adopted, these unchallenged oilsands euphemisms take on a force of their own and foster new imperatives. Of course, Albertans should be outraged if they can’t get their ‘resource’ to market. Of course the federal government should step in to protect the sanctity of equitable, inter-provincial trade. Ergo, the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion becomes a matter of national interest, where supporters are patriots, opponents are almost treasonous and any province which defers approvals until more science is completed is worthy only of being ‘nation-shamed.'

A Press that goes along to get along asks few questions.

...the business press readily reported alarming forecasts that western Canada would lose untold billions in future wealth should the two new pipelines not get built. Those forecasts of forfeited wealth came from major Canadian banks which assumed, without providing evidence, that exported bitumen could fetch much higher prices from Asian refiners than U.S. counterparts now pay. The banks did not disclose that they also have billions in outstanding loans to oilsands and pipeline projects. I saw no media reports or commentators that called out this brazen conflict of interest. 

In an equally glaring case, former Bank of Canada chief Mark Carney (who now heads the Bank of England and is a perennial newsmaker), warned on behalf of a consortium of central banks that global corporations involved in fossil fuel financing or production must assess and explicitly warn their shareholders about ‘stranded asset’ risks in a climate-constrained world. It fell on deaf ears at business news desks in Canada. 

But last week, Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, joined other global banks, insurance pools and pension funds in declaring it would no longer risk loans to new oilsands projects, or planned pipelines like the Trans Mountain expansion and Keystone XL. That may amount to a final, fatal bullet aimed squarely at Alberta’s bitumen bubble.

What's that blur? Oh, that's Notley and Trudeau and McKenna spinning like Dervishes.

For failures to unravel Looney Tunes logic, candidates abound. Alberta premier Rachel Notley, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and federal environment minister Catherine McKenna blithely claimed that ramping up carbon-laced bitumen exports would garner new cash to help pay for low-carbon investments in Alberta and B.C. marine safety upgrades. And that Canada could meet its solemn Paris pledge to reduce national carbon emissions while two oilsands provinces go totally rogue. Alberta touted its vaunted carbon tax on large emitters as a sign of climate leadership, but all future raw bitumen exports are exempt. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promised a reform of national environmental assessment laws, then exempted oilsands and pipelines in the draft regulations.

...But what if this red-hot rhetoric, and a potentially ruinous breakdown in the bonds of Confederation, are actually warning signs that a bitumen bubble is beginning to crack open? Last year, Big Oil players dumped $22.5 billion in oilsands assets. If that is accurate, it is perhaps too much to expect politicians from Alberta and Ottawa to question the future their reputations and political fortunes rest on. 

But when the stakes are so high, and when there are whiffs of panic, extortion and even all-out political warfare in the air, it is precisely the time business journalists should be asking tough questions and demanding answers. Where are the Asian contracts to buy vastly more raw bitumen for decades? What price have they promised to pay? How does that square up with competing, global oil supply rivals? Who has prepared a serious global oil market analysis? 

That is our job. It is our professional, perhaps even patriotic, duty to do it well.

It seems odd that this story begins with an American schoolteacher, Ida Tarbell, and ends with a Canadian schoolteacher, Justin Trudeau. I guess they just don't make them like they used to.

What We Need to See For Starters

Tankers, safe? No.

Even double hulled ships can founder in many ways. Their hulls can still be pierced by rocky projections, especially if they're battered against those rocks repeatedly in stormy seas. They can lose steerage. It does happen. They can suffer engine failure at a critical moment. Fires always pose a problem given that tankers are full of stuff intended to burn.

Now, a government that goes to some lengths to assure anxious citizens that an armada of heavily laden, clumsy supertankers can safely navigate the Strait of Georgia needs to tell those citizens, in detail, real detail, what happens when things go wrong. What happens if one of their tankers is broken on the rocks in a storm? What happens if there's a collision with another ship? What happens if the ship experiences a major fire? What happens if that tanker sinks?

The Georgia Strait, the passage these tankers will ply, has a maximum depth of 447 metres or a little over 1,665 feet. The mean depth is only 515 feet.

So, what do you do if you have a dilbit laden tanker broken in two lying on its side in 1,665 feet of water that's ripped by tides and currents? How do you make that safe? Have you got anything capable of handling a task that massive at those depths? If so, what? What if it's only at the mean, 515 feet. How do you make that safe? What have you got capable of handling that Herculean challenge? Nothing? That's what I thought.

What happens if those currents carry that dilbit out onto the seabed? How far will it go after a month, after three months, after a year?

We know that the marine food chain begins at the seabed. How much contamination will dilbit or just bitumen cause to the marine food chain? For how long? Decades, generations, essentially forever? How long does it take for the heavy metals and the carcinogens to leach out? How do those deadly elements enter the food chain? How do they work their way up the food chain through bioconcentration? How long before it reaches the salmon, the orca and the humpbacks? What havoc will it wreak on the seals and sea lions, the porpoise and dolphins? What about the Dungeness crab and the giant Pacific octopus, the sidestripe and the spot prawns, the squid? What will it do to our oyster beds, our mussels and our scallops? Will it turn the main prey fish, the herring and the sardines, into toxic time bombs for those many species which, without them, cannot survive? Will it take weeks, months, a year? How long will it continue to contaminate the marine ecosystem, one of the richest in the world? Decades, generations, essentially forever?

Trudeau, McKenna, Garneau, that idiot Carr, they all ought to have verifiable answers (they have lied, a lot. they cannot be taken at their word) to each and every one of these questions. They ought to have those answers at their fingertips. They ought to have it published and a leaflet delivered to every home in the area.

What's their plan if this enters the human food chain? Are they planning on closing off the Strait, perhaps the Salish Sea, to the public, to boaters and sport fishermen? Are they going to tell the fishing boat owners and their crews, the sport fishing guides, the whale watching operators, to start flipping burgers and selling fries? What's the plan for those people?

We know that Dame Cathy has approved the use of Corexit as an oil spill dispersant. It's the same toxic garbage that was used on both the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters. It doesn't really disperse oil. It merely sinks it to the bottom. Research from the Gulf of Mexico revealed that Corexit makes oil some 52 times more toxic. However it does get oil out of sight  and out of sight is, supposely, out of mind. Just approving the use of Corexit is an admission, what lawyers call a declaration against interest. It is an admission that they haven't got a hope of cleaning up a dilbit spill.

How are you going to make this right with anybody, everybody affected? Who's going to put up the money? Notley? She's broke. Trudeau? Fat chance. He's the last guy anybody should trust. He breaks his word as easily and often as ordinary folks break wind only they're a good deal less noxious.

What about our First Nations? We celebrate them when they recreate the voyages of their ancestors in their majestic and massive cedar canoes. As far as they're concerned the Salish Sea is their ancestral waters. What are you going to do if you ruin that for them? How can you conceivably make that right? How do you place a price tag on someone's ancient birthright?

What about the precautionary principle, Justin? It's the law of the land, the law of Canada. Its purpose is to protect ordinary Canadians, their homes and their livelihoods, from reckless dumbasses like Trudeau and Notley and Kinder Morgan and the bitumen barons who can't answer these questions. The onus is on them to prove that this can be done safely.

As far as can be told, Justin imagines the precautionary principle may be the law of Canada, just not coastal British Columbia. We are apparently beyond the protection of that law as far as Trudeau is concerned. He and his minions and the corporations they serve aren't too keen on answering these fundamental questions because they all know, full well, what that would mean to their infernal pipeline.

Fuck that.

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Update: I realize this is an angry post. Perhaps it should be tempered with a touch of levity. Here for your amusement is Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to Enviromin Cathy McKenna. Let the hilarity ensue.

Great. Now Notley Imagines She's Speaking for All Canadians. You Too?

Rachel Notley is taking to the interwebs in her war with British Columbia. If it's war B.C. wants, it's war she'll get.

Now the Alberta premier, speaking for Alberta and all Canadians (including you, I guess) is going to expose the recalcitrant coastal curmudgeons, damned hippies and geriatric draft dodgers,  as never before.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Notley explained that this would drive home Alberta's message in the “ongoing dispute that British Columbia has triggered with Alberta and with all Canadians.”

“Albertans (will) be able to engage with people in other parts of the country to help make our point around why this is so important for Canada, for the Canadian economy, for Canada’s environmental progress, for all these issues,” Notley told a press conference in Edmonton, Alta.

But B.C.'s goal of improving scientific research into spills was actually supported by the federal government's Environment Department in 2016.

In January of that year, Environment and Climate Change Canada told the federal pipeline regulator, the National Energy Board, that there were significant "knowledge gaps and uncertainties with respect to hydrocarbon product behaviours in the marine environment," and that the company should commit to funding more research to strengthen spill response planning and risk assessment.

"Significant knowledge gaps." Now there's an understatement. 

As renowned Alberta ecologist, the University of Alberta's professor David Schindler wrote in a recent op-ed in the Edmonton Journal, we know essentially nothing about what a dilbit spill in British Columbia's coastal waters would mean. This admits of but two possibilities. Either the federal government hasn't researched the threat, which would make Justin Trudeau a despicable liar. Or it has done the research and, for some reason, has chosen not to share it with the public, especially coastal British Columbians. 

Me? I'm going to assume Ottawa has done the research and knows what a generational, environmental catastrophe awaits British Columbia's coast when, (not if but when and how often*) a wallowing, fully loaded supertanker has a mishap. And I'm going to make that assumption based on the decision of Dame Cathy McKenna's environment minister to quietly approve the use of the lethal chemical stew, Corexit, as an oil spill dispersant.

Before that other Albertan asshat, Shifty Steve Harper, rescinded it, our federal government imposed a tanker exclusion zone, that kept U.S. supertankers carrying Alaska crude oil to the lower 48 well out of British Columbia coastal waters. That wasn't dilbit. It was the far more benign conventional crude oil. Canada didn't implement that exclusion zone for shits and giggles. We knew the hazards even a conventional oil spill would pose to our coastal waters.

So, let's recap. Justin Trudeau's own environment ministry has said all along that the essential research into dilbit spills hasn't been done, directly contradicting this prime minister's empty assurances. The eminent science body, the Royal Society of Canada, says the research hasn't been done, not a lick of it. Alberta's most renowned ecologist, professor Dave Schindler says the British Columbia government's argument isn't intransigent. In fact it's pretty much unassailable. Trudeau lies to our faces and says his government has the science but won't produce it. Possibly his dog ate it. McKenna's environment ministry has green-lighted a vicious chemical compound that sinks oil spills straight to the bottom where the toxic sludge will contaminate the marine ecosystem for generations. And those uppity British Columbians should just shut up and keep their damned questions to themselves.

* during National Energy Board hearings, many experienced mariners from the Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Navy and the merchant marine testified that a tanker spill isn't a matter of if but of when and how often.

Trade, Trade, Trade

I recall an interview with prime minister Trudeau at the 6-month mark of his ascent to power. He told the interviewer that his overarching responsibility was to be an agent of trade. Trade to grow the economy. Trade to generate prosperity.

Trudeau's Harperesque pursuit of CETA and TPP demonstrates that he means business. This goes straight back to those mandate letters he issued to his freshly minted cabinet ministers as they were sworn in. Even Catherine McKenna's marching orders stipulate that her priorities are to be the economy and the environment. There's no doubt that she meant it when she said she was "as much an economic minister as an environmental minister."

Trade it is then. But, if you're going to make trade your priority, your dominant responsibility, then surely you have to accept full responsibility for the fallout from that pursuit. That's on you, Slick.

One element of that fallout is the rise of Canada's homegrown "precariat." It's a term used to describe the future this free-trading government has bequeathed to our youth. In case you're wondering, that's a future fraught with insecurity and economic peril.

Earlier this week, Trudeau finance minister, Bill Morneau, delivered the bad news telling Canadians that they would just have to get used to "job churn" - a future of intermittent employment and a constant scramble for the next job, that essential paycheque to meet the rent and heat the apartment.

Morneau defined his government's focus will be to train and retrain and retrain regularly laid off Canadians as they're tossed "from job to job to job."

What Morneau avoided was any mention of why he's consigned Canada's most vulnerable to a nomadic working life, always wondering when the current job will end and where they'll find the next temporary spot, how long it will take to find and how they'll avoid falling through the floorboards when that inevitable dislocation happens again and again and again.

Morneau won't mention how his own government and its predecessors laid the foundation for this upheaval and uncertainty through its obsessive pursuit of neoliberalism and global free trade, the constant downward spiral. He won't explain why, when even the World Bank and International Monetary Fund can no longer remain silent on the social and economic damage inflicted by globalism, his government remains a faithful adherent to this toxic ideology.

I'm sorry Morneau and you too, Trudeau, but, when you tell Canadians to forego their hopes and resign themselves to a future in the precariat, what you're really telling them is that you won't change course and liberal democracy be damned.

It wasn't always this way. Here are a few observations from two real American Idols - Lincoln and T. Roosevelt.

Let's begin with Abraham Lincoln who declared:

“I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind.”

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

If it is, indeed, man's duty "to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind," how is he to do that when his government consigns him to the precariat and tells him to "get used to it"?

If Labour is "the superior of capital" how is it that your government chooses to stack the deck so that capital prevails at the direct cost and damage to labour and our society?

Now let's turn to Teddy Roosevelt who observed:

"In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows."

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth."

"Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled."

"There is a wide-spread belief among our people that, under the methods of making tariffs which have hitherto obtained, the special interests are too influential. Probably this is true of both the big special interests and the little special interests. These methods have put a premium on selfishness, and, naturally, the selfish big interests have gotten more than their smaller, though equally selfish, brothers. The duty of Congress is to provide a method by which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration."

"Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation."

"Now, with the water power, with the forests, with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the special interests should be driven out of politics. Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part."

"The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him. No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them."

"The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs, — but, first of all, sound in their home, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well, — just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success."

Now, I know these passages carry a certain homespun-ness that can seem awkward but I dare you to tell me - whether you're a Conservative, New Democrat, Liberal or Green - would you really prefer a government that doesn't embrace every one of these principles? What would you give to have a government that did, a genuinely progressive party?

Climate change is, or should be, a non-partisan issue. It's the ultimate scientific question spanning the gamut of Earth sciences - geology, climatology, atmospherics and meteorology, hydrology and oceanography, physics, agronomy, epidemiology, on and on and on. Those disciplines are all separate voices. They have their own scientific focus, their own scientific history, and they each test the "hypothesis" against the best research, analysis and knowledge of their own discipline. Discipline, by discipline, by discipline - without exception - they have all tested the theory of climate change against their own strictures and found in that ever more corroboration.

Progressivism, like climate change, can and should be a non-partisan issue. You shouldn't have to be a Conservative or Liberal or, even, New Democrat to reach out and grab these precepts and notions. Even Edmund Burke wrote of matters progressive.

And so how do our Latter Day Liberals and Conservatives justify so abandoning the Canadian people and, especially, our younger generations? Who elected them to give the future the finger?

This, of course, brings us back to Morneau's finger to young and future Canadians to just "suck it up." If you were one of those kids, you might look at us and the governments we imposed on them as truly predatory acts.

I can only defend some of what we've done by claiming "we didn't know." We really didn't know the scope or the nature or the self-destructive qualities of neoliberalism. But we've had our eyes opened now,  at least other than those who chose to turn their heads, and we don't have any excuse to keep tolerating the Morneau's and the Trudeau's and Harper's of this world who see no obligation to ensure the Canada bequeathed to our young and future generations won't be a much degraded remnant of the country we have exploited for our ease and comfort.

It's not unfair to say that Morneau's dystopian vision is, in a word, revolting. That's "revolting" as in justifying resistance, civil disobedience, perhaps even upheaval. If this government isn't leaving our young people and generations to come the best possible future it can provide, if it isn't even attempting to fix this crisis of our own making, why should any young person accept it? Why should they find any legitimacy in such a government?

If I stumbled across an act of civil disobedience underway today, I would be very tempted just to look the other way. This form of governance is not legitimate to me either.