Conde Nast says Vancouver is Number One. Forbes has the city in second place, just behind Los Angeles. But whether Vancouver is the most traffic-congested city in North America or merely runner-up, it's a disgrace.
Vancouver has some baked-in problems, foremost among them are waterways - False Creek, English Bay, Coal Harbour. Five bridges - Burrard, Granville, Cambie, Lion's Gate and Second Narrows (iron workers). That's compounded by a traffic grid that hasn't met the city's needs since the early 80s. A lot of people who work in the city live in the burbs. They cross those five bridges, plus the bridges spanning the Fraser River, twice every workday. Choke points.
Even Vancouver's residential neighbourhoods are gridlocked. A friend of mine regularly visits her mother in a nursing home, nowhere near the downtown core. She complains of waiting between four or five lights to make a left hand turn in a residential neighbourhood.
When I set up my first shop in the downtown core I could make it in ten minutes from my house to the parkade beneath my office tower. Today that can easily take you an hour or more.
But Vancouver is run by developers eager to profit from an influx of new residents, many of them with lots of money. They're in constant pursuit of places where they can slap up the next high-rise condo. And a complacent city council and bureaucracy is always ready to do their bidding.
In a presentation to council on January 31, project director Kevin McNaney told councillors there's already "substantial amount of view protection" in Northeast False Creek.
McNaney said urban design experts informed city staff that it would be difficult for Vancouver to achieve its urban design goals while preserving the view corridors.
He also said the three new towers will provide more variation to the skyline, as well as "a celebratory moment in the skyline where we can celebrate one of our biggest entertainment districts in the province of British Columbia."
The world but especially the Western alliance breathed a huge sigh of relief at the collapse of the former Soviet Union in late 1991. Over the following years, nation after nation dialed back their military preparedness, declaring what was then called a peace dividend. Defence budgets fell from about 4% of GDP to around 1.5%, in some cases (Canada) even less. The future would be one of fewer guns and ever more butter. The nuclear Sword of Damocles had been sheathed.
Yet, instead of being appropriately grateful for our blessing, we did little to build a lasting peace. What we did was to siphon up the former Warsaw Pact states into our alliance, NATO, and then march our armies literally up to Russia's doorstep. Yeah, that Russia, the nation and people who still had vivid memories of the last time armies from Western Europe massed their tanks along the borders of the Rodina.
Triumphalism was the order of the day, especially in Washington. We, i.e. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, had crushed the Soviet menace until it collapsed under its own weight. Instead of being grateful for having averted a war we celebrated having won a war.
This is a too common failing of the United States. They're pretty good at winning battles, campaigns, but they've been utterly inept at the next step, the important phase, winning the peace. Once the smoke clears and the barrels cool, they go all ADHD.
There's a price to be paid for this neglect. Ours has been a resumption of that Cold War we talked ourselves into believing had been won. Now the emphasis is on every one reinflating their military budgets, again practicing Armageddon-grade warfare, and feverishly re-arming.
For America, this has taken the form of an additional $300-billion of military funding. That's just to top it off. We're told that money will go to refurbish an American military worn out by its endless wars in the Middle East/South Asia. That doesn't sound especially alarming but maybe that money is earmarked for something less benign.
An op-ed in Aviation Week by US defence analyst Robert Stallard contends that $300-billion is going elsewhere - into preparations for waging war with China and/or Russia. Stallard suggests the big winners will be space warfare (the ability to defend your own space assets while obliterating your adversary's), cyber-warfare (you'll just have to wait to see what the three players have in mind), and black projects, stuff that won't even be showcased to Congress. Some of these programmes such as hyper-velocity and directed-energy (set phasers to "obliterate") are already under development and have been considered in a few published articles of unknown reliability.
I would like to call it Cold War II but it doesn't seem to be a noticeable departure from the thinking of Cold War I. It may be merely a continuation of our incredibly dangerous past following a quarter-century of relative dormancy. One thing is certain. Whatever it is, "it's on."
Shame on us for having so negligently bequeathed this future to our kids and grandkids. This did not have to be.
It’s no secret that Trump respects men who keep women in their place: “You have to treat ’em like shit.” Perhaps that’s why top White House staffer Rob Porter got a hero’s goodbye this week, even as a picture of his ex-wife’s battered face was splashed across the news.
Porter, accused of assaulting both of his ex-wives and a former girlfriend, gave his resignation but “was not pressured to do so”, according to press secretary Sarah Sanders. In fact, Sanders lauded Porter as having the full confidence of the president and Gen John Kelly, and took the time to read Porter’s statement, in which he called the accusations “vile” and a “smear campaign”.
The only reason Porter left at all was because the picture of his ex’s bruised face surfaced. Given that Trump has been shopping around the theory that the Access Hollywood tape of him bragging about grabbing women’s genitals isn’t really him,I almost expected the White House to call the picture “fake news”.
The truth is that Porter’s history of abuse allegations is less of an anomaly than a feature of this administration. Former chief strategist Steve Bannon was charged with domestic violence and battery in 1996 after his then wife called 911; police noted at the time that she had marks on her wrists and neck that supported her account of being assaulted. The charges were dismissed when his wife failed to appear in court.
At this point perhaps it’s easier if we just sort out which of the president’s men hasn’t been accused of beating women.
Even then, it’s not great. Trump endorsed accused child molesterRoy Moore for Senate, and is longtime friends with former RNC finance chair Steve Wynn – accused of harassment and sexual assault by dozens of women. And, of course, there’s Trump himself; the president has been accused many times over of offenses ranging from groping to a gruesome account of rape from his ex-wife, Ivana.
This is an administration overflowing with men who hurt women. Even so, we can’t become jaded as to how incredibly remarkable this all is. The White House, knowing that Porter abused multiple women, called him a man of integrity. They looked at a picture of his battered wife and defended him, still. He left the administration not in shame or disgrace, but honored.
“You have to treat ’em like shit” is no longer an embarrassing old Trump quote. It’s a mandate.
Look into his eyes. A second or two. Then look at what he's holding out for you to see. Does he have to move his lips to convey what he's saying?
Kudos to the Edmonton Journal for publishing Dr. Shindler's op-ed, "BC's Pipeline Vigilance is Backed by Science." Rachel, and her courtier, Justin, probably won't be happy to hear what Dr. Shindler has to report for it guts their "don't worry, be happy" sham. He writes:
In November 2015, an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada issued a report on what was needed to be able to safely transport crude oil, including both bitumen and diluted bitumen. They found that we knew surprisingly little of what was necessary to safely transport these materials, and to mitigate the damage from the inevitable spills.
High-Priority Research Needs Identified by the Expert Panel
Research is needed to better understand the environmental impact of spilled crude oil in high-risk and poorly understood areas, such as Arctic waters, the deep ocean and shores or inland rivers and wetlands.
Research is needed to increase the understanding of effects of oil spills on aquatic life and wildlife at the population, community and ecosystem levels.
A national, priority-directed program of baseline research and monitoring is needed to develop an understanding of the environmental and ecological characteristics of areas that may be affected by oil spills in the future and to identify any unique sensitivity to oil effects
A program of controlled field research is needed to better understand spill behaviour and effects across a spectrum of crude oil types in different ecosystems and conditions.
Research is needed to investigate the efficacy of spill responses and to take full advantage of “spills of opportunity.”
Research is needed to improve spill prevention and develop/apply response decision support systems to ensure sound response decisions and effectiveness. Research is needed to update and refine risk assessment protocols for oil spills in Canada.
Such a research plan would take several years and considerable funding to complete. On the face of it, B.C. Premier John Horgan’s plan to do the necessary homework before allowing the pipeline and terminal to be built seems to be well supported by science.
One might ask: Why hasn’t the science been done to protect the environment while bitumen is shipped? After all, both the federal and Alberta governments have known for years that they wished to ship crude oil or bitumen from the West Coast.
Most likely, they were counting on the B.C. government to simply wink and approve the pipeline with the most cursory of environmental impact assessments. After all, past B.C. governments have done this with all sorts of industrial developments, to the detriment of B.C.’s environment.
Crude oil spills are no joke. Effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill are still clearly visible on long reaches of the Alaskan coast, and some species still show effects of the spill. We still have a thriving fishery on the West Coast, in striking contrast to Eastern Canada, where timid politicians were bullied into choosing jobs and industries over salmon and cod.
Trudeau and Notley are trying to pull a fast one on British Columbia. Notley has done everything to hector BC except launch the flying monkeys.
There's a legal maxim that he who propounds must prove. You assert some claim, the onus is on you to prove it. That onus is squarely on these governments and the Bitumen Barons they so tirelessly serve.
Even more relevant is the "precautionary principle" which, if it applies anywhere, it's the transportation and shipping of dilbit. It holds that the commencement of a process or introduction of a product whose ultimate effects are disputed or unknown should be resisted.
Dave Shindler is professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Alberta, a voice who inconveniently does not hesitate to speak truth to power.
She used to be Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Now she's just Sarah Sanders. I wonder if papa Pastor Mike had anything to do with that.
I often catch SarahSan's daily White House press briefings. Lately there's been an endless amount of talk about budget, budget, budget and SarahSan routinely fingers the Democrats for denying America's military the money it needs to, oh, I don't know, fail to win wars. Trump browbeat the Democrats. SarahSan browbeats the Democrats. They do it because it works. Chuck "Rollover" Schumer invariably plays dead and goes along to get along. Voila, another $300 billion for the Pentagon.
My, my, my, don't those Republicans like to spend money America don't have. After causing the meltdown of 2007-08, they were fierce austerians when Obama went the Keynesian route and poured money into the economy to prevent the Great Recession from turning into the Great Depression, Redux.
However, now the Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House and the economy is booming (for some), it's time to tax wealth, pay off debt and restore the nation's fiscal health. Only that's not happening. No, this year the budget ensures the feds will lot a trillion dollar deficit - in a boom economy. That all but guarantees that when the US economy next weakens, the American working public, blue and white collar, will be left in a desperately bad way.
Critics, including Stephen Miles, director of the Washington DC-based Win Without War advocacy group, said the new military spending numbers were a symptom of misplaced national priorities.
“When our nation can’t manage to turn the lights on for the people of Puerto Rico, when we can’t help those suffering from opioid addiction get treatment, and when we can’t ensure education and healthcare to all of our citizens, how is it possible we can justify spending billions more on weapons that don’t work to fight enemies that don’t exist?” Miles said in a statement issued on Wednesday.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, supported the deal, calling it a “win for the American people”.
In 2016, as the world’s biggest military spender, the United States racked up a larger outlay ($611bn) than the next eight countries combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The potential $80bn leap in military spending in 2018 would itself surpass the total annual military budget of any other country apart from China.
...
The extraordinary levels of US defense expenditure were highlighted in a recent report by the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
The US “spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined”, the report said, and yet “US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world”.
America, the richest, most powerful and most dangerous nation in the Third World.
Rather than drinking more oil revenue Kool-Aid, Alberta should be more concerned with being saddled with massive cleanup costs when the market evaporates for the lowest-value petroleum on the planet. The Alberta government estimates that outstanding environmental liabilities now top $31 billion, yet security bonds cover only 0.5 per cent of that amount. Industry’s demonstrated desire to wash their hands of thousands of orphaned conventional oil and gas wells portends big problems if the bitumen market goes bust.
After squandering a resource bounty for decades and having virtually nothing to show for it other than public debt of $45 billion, the government of Alberta seems incredulous that British Columbians are less than enthused about dangerous diluted bitumen shipments off our coast. A spill of this toxic unstable emulsion, particularly in the confined airshed of Canada’s busiest port, would be catastrophic.
Premier John Horgan is correct to put the interests of British Columbians first, as Rachel Notley is doing with her own province.
It didn’t have to be this way. Alberta extracted $500 billion more petroleum than Norway, yet this small Nordic country has so far managed to sock away more than $1 trillion USD from the resource. If Alberta’s finances weren’t in such a shambles, perhaps there wouldn’t be a panic to punch a pipeline with such a dubious business case to the B.C. coast.
Alberta’s self-inflicted financial problems should not become B.C.’s environmental problems.
Mitchell points out that Norway, a country that has exported half a trillion dollars less oil than Alberta, is now sitting on the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Why? Because when the Norwegians began realizing their North Sea oil bounty they listened to then Alberta premier, Peter Lougheed, who warned of the economic calamity that would befall jurisdictions that didn't treat windfall oil revenues cautiously, prudently.
Lougheed, very accurately, warned of boom and bust cycles. Boom cycles in which prices skyrocketed, like a sponge absorbing the easy money in peoples' pockets, wealth that evaporated overnight when the next bust cycle hit. Alberta prided itself on no sales tax, a benefit that really accrued to vendors who jacked up price tags commensurately.
Little Norway listened. It didn't overheat its economy. It didn't squander its resource windfall. It didn't even invest that money in its own economy. It did everything that Alberta's reckless leaders didn't. An unbroken chain of fiscal sots, Rachel very much included.
Federal Green Party leader Elizabeth May says proposed rule changes for environmental assessments in Canada still leave the country’s environmental protection regime behind where it was prior to the Stephen Harper government.
May said she’s worried the regulation changes are too ambiguous and open to political interference while failing to bring back the kind of stringent regulations Canada had 15 years ago before the Harper government weakened them.
“It’s a substantially weird piece of hybrid legislation,” May told The Tyee. “It keeps much of what Harper did without restoring all of our protections.”
...
May said the changes break election promises, ignore advice from expert panels and don’t address Harper-era omnibus bills that weakened environmental legislation. Those bills removed protections for fish habitat and opened up development on bodies of water.
May said the regimes lost with those bills have not been reinstated with Bill C-69.
Meanwhile, the Dogwood Initiative, is baring its teeth.
McKenna and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have repeatedly said the pipeline will get built.
But if Bill C-69’s regulations were meant to gain goodwill back from British Columbians it likely won’t work, said Kai Nagata of the Dogwood Initiative.
Rhetoric from pro-pipeline groups saying B.C. is defying the Constitution and bravado from the prime minister insisting the pipeline will be forced through because it is in the national interest is not helping matters, Nagata said.
B.C. is merely trying to protect its own interests he said.
“It’s not British Columbians that are threatening the fabric of Canada. It’s the people who are calling for the federal government to crack down on us like some sort of doormat compared to the other provinces.”
Not for nothing is he called the "Cheeto Benito" or the "Mango Mussolini."
Now America's own El Douchie, Donald J. Trump has ordered the Pentagon to arrange a yuuge military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, something to outdo Macron's Bastille Day parade in Paris. He wants the whole deal - troops, tanks, formations of America's best warplanes flying overhead.
Think of it as America's way of thanking Donald Trump for his service. He is, after all, the commander in chief you know, always ready to throw a snappy salute whenever he sees one of his minions in uniform. It wasn't always that way
of course. When it was Donald's turn to serve, during Vietnam, Trump was scoring Cheney-class draft deferments, five of them. Seems he had heel spurs (hey, Trump booster, Rush Limbaugh got out of the draft due to supposed anal cysts - that obviously still plague him). But let bygones be bygones. Trump loves the military now - at least from a safe distance.
It seems the parade will be staged on the 4th of July. Pentagon planners are racing against the clock to figure out how to do a world-beating military parade. Fortunately they don't have to re-invent the wheel. Just do what these other great world leaders did.
When Trudeau tries to squirm off the hook for making a farce of his solemn promises about cleaning up the National Energy Board, full consultation with First Nations and, the real kicker, "social licence," he goes straight for the double-talk by which you know he's lying right into your face - again.
It's bad enough that he's a liar but he's not even good at it. He's not convincing, not if you really listen to his horseshit.
He came out to Nanaimo where the crowd wasn't particularly pleased with his pipeline decision on the Kinder Morgan line. He said there were unhappy people on both sides and he had to reach a "compromise." Then he launched into the really greasy horseshit, the stuff about how Canada's green future depended on exporting as much Black Death bitumen as conceivably possible.
But, wait. What's this voice of reason "compromise" he keeps touting? What is a compromise but some form of quid pro quo, give and take. So, let's see. Alberta gets something, the goddamned pipeline, and British Columbia gets what, oh yeah, the shit end of the stick.
I think what Justin is really getting at is carbon pricing. We know all about that here in B.C. We've had it for years. We did it because, given the way the climate is going, it was the right thing to do. Not nearly enough, mind you, but a start. We're going to have to do far better than that before long but we sort of broke the ice.
So that must be Justin's vaunted compromise. It was a compromise between Ottawa and Alberta, a Justin-Rachel deal. She would stop breaking Justin's balls over carbon pricing and he would throw B.C. into the ditch, the one they're digging for that new pipeline.
In other words, Justin is rewarding Rachel for doing nothing more than the right thing, eventually, maybe, and belatedly at that. So just what does B.C. get out of this compromise? Let's see.
We get a bigger, perhaps three times bigger, pipeline system crossing our seismically active territory. A mega-pipeline operated by an American outfit with a lengthy and lousy pipeline safety record. Plus we get a new armada of heavily laden supertankers plying our, at times, very treacherous waters.
Been following the oil tanker disasters of recent months? In January the Sanchi went down carrying 136,000 tons of oil. Some of it is already washing up on the Japanese shoreline. The good news is that was light crude oil. It was at the other end of the scale from Trudeau-Notley's heavy crude bitumen laced with abrasives, acids, heavy metals, carcinogens and other crap.
Sorry, Canada, but your prime minister took my province and hung us out to dry. It's sort of like Justin's way of saying, "You play ball with me, or else, and then I'll stick the bat straight up your ass." Not the sort of thing that inspires a lot of patriotism.
Update:
To see what an unmitigated scam Trudeau and Notley intend to perpetrate on British Columbians, read Emma Gilchrist's excellent analysis of Ottawa and Alberta's bitumen scheme and everything (warning, there's a lot) they're not telling anyone. Sure there's a conspiracy here and the conspirators are Rachel Notley and Justin Trudeau.
It's telling what has Notley's knickers in a bunch. British Columbia has said it wants no "additional" bitumen flowing into the province until the safety of a bitumen spill and the adequacy of the government's vaunted "world class" oil spill response can be assessed. Trudeau has never wasted an opportunity to proclaim that this has all been done, the science is in. Well, Justin, where the f#@k is it then? Why haven't you circulated this, high and low, to every newsroom in B.C. and every mailbox of every British Columbian?
Notley isn't losing her shit over a bitumen embargo because there isn't one, nor has one been threatened. She has gone ballistic over the prospect that British Columbia wants to assess the risks of dilbit spills, ashore and at sea, and this supposedly wonderful oil spill response apparatus. That's what she's out to thwart, trying to depict it, quite falsely, as a wrongful embargo on dilbit by a petulant British Columbia.
You might have heard of it, the Carbon Budget. That is the amount, in tonnes, of the greenhouse gas, CO2, that we can still add to the atmosphere and yet supposedly have a snowball's chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
Big news from America where Washington's Energy Department has released a report projecting that there'll be no reduction in US emissions from now until 2050, probably even some increase. If that's accurate it means that the United States of America, representing some 4.4 per cent of global population, will gobble up the entire carbon quota for the other 95.6 per cent.
Burn Baby, Burn.
Perhaps inspired by the Energy Department's report, a few days ago Exxon released its own report to shareholders saying the petro-market is sound into the indefinite future and it'll have no problem flogging all of its proven reserves and should continue exploring for new oil fields.
Well kids, there goes the neighbourhood. As Exxon Mobil goes, so goes Aramco, Sinopec, Petro China, Shell, BP, Total - the lot of them. And that means that Trudeau and Notley are in on it too. It's Mardi Gras for carbon energy. Carbon taxes, are you kidding?
Since the heady days of the Paris Climate Summit in December, 2015, I've been banging the drum for the warning the Potsdam Institute's climate wizard, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, issued to the conference delegates. He said that averting climate catastrophe might be possible provided the world governments acted in concert to effect an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry.
Schellnhuber knew what, inside ourselves, most of us know. This massive industry, said to represent some 27 trillion dollars of subscribed wealth on the stock markets and bourses around the world wouldn't let go. It would have to be put down. That is the "induced" part of Schellnhuber's warning.
Without the political will to put down the fossil fuelers, we're gonna burn. It's only a matter of physics - and geology, environmental geography, chemistry, atmospherics, glaciology, biology and botany, marine biology, oceanography and hydrology, meteorology, epidemiology, medicine, climatology, agronomy, seismology, paleontology - every discipline that had tested and corroborated the central thesis of climate change.
Twenty seven trillion dollars and growing. Money talks, science walks. You and me? We're just along for the ride.
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has suggested that global warming may be beneficial to humans, in his latest departure from mainstream climate science.
Pruitt, who has previously erred by denying that carbon dioxide is a key driver of climate change, has again caused consternation among scientists by suggesting that warming temperatures could benefit civilization.
The EPA administrator said that humans are contributing to climate “to a certain degree”, but added: “We know humans have most flourished during times of warming trends. There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing.
What's the difference between all-out nuclear war and catastrophic climate change? So far we haven't been stupid enough to resort to all-out nuclear war.
Both of them can end civilization, indeed most life on Earth. The way we're going it's unclear which will get the job done first.
Canada, of course, doesn't field a nuclear arsenal but it sure as hell is doing its bit on the other threat, runaway global warming. We have huge proven reserves of the filthiest, most dangerous, high-carbon ersatz oil on the planet, Athabasca bitumen. And we've got two provinces and a succession of federal governments hell bent on getting as much of that deadly crap as conceivably possible to foreign markets.
When challenged on this, our prime minister pops a fuze and says the only thing he can come up with. Here's what he told an angry crowd yesterday in Nanaimo: "We wanted a national carbon reduction plan, a national emissions plan that is going to allow us to reach our climate goals, to reach our Paris commitments but in order to do that, part of moving forward is approving the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It is something many people feel very strongly about on either side, but that is the nature of the compromise we had to make in the best interests of Canada."
That's some ripe horseshit to be sure. Flogging Black Death is "part of moving forward." It's "in the nature of the compromise" that the Liberal government "had to make in the best interests of Canada."
If that's "moving forward," in what direction exactly is Canada heading? Well, given that Trudeau's climate goals were set by Stephen Harper and we're not on track to even meet those, you can probably figure out where Justin is taking us.
One of America's top climate scientists and advocates, James Hansen, had this to say five years ago about the Tar Sands.
"To avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we need to limit the climate forcing severely. It's still possible to do that, if we phase down carbon emissions rapidly, but that means moving expeditiously to clean energies of the future. Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don't understand the situation or that they just don't give a damn."
Hansen isn't alone. Climate science backs him up. When Justin Trudeau and his environment minister burst onto the floor of the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, they scored big by urging that the old target for maximum global warming, then at 2 degrees Celsius, be cut to a humanity-saving 1.5C. McKenna and Trudeau didn't hear, nor heed, the warning of another top world climate scientist at the Paris Summit, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber's warning that any hope of holding global warming to 1.5 C would depend on an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry.
Schellnhuber said if we want to do this we can if the petro-states move quickly to shut down their fossil fuel resources and rapidly transition to alternative energy. It doesn't sound like Hans had Trudeau's let 'er rip energy policy in mind.
Here's the thing. Trudeau, Notley and their Oil Patch patrons, frame this as a purely economic issue. Schellnhuber argues it goes way beyond economics.
“In the end it is a moral decision. Do you want to be part of the generation that screwed up the planet for the next 1,000 years? I don’t think we should make that decision.”
Oil field experts say that these new pipelines are 30-year investments. Barring some collapse of markets, those investing the hundreds of billions of dollars into these pipelines have confidence that they'll reap their rewards. And, so long as the Oil Patch has reliable and indulgent governments like Harper's and Trudeau's, they're probably taking a safe bet.
Trudeau sees calls for real action to fight climate change as "sanctimonious crap." Ask David Suzuki:
Trudeau called him personally June 28, 2015, to talk about the Liberal platform on climate change that was to be revealed the next day. “I didn’t call Justin, he called me,” Suzuki said. “He wanted an endorsement and he wanted to tell me exactly what his program was.”
The program includes support for the Keystone XL pipeline, a rejection of the Northern Gateway pipeline and a commitment to work with the provinces to establish a cap-and-trade system.
“I said, ‘Justin, stop it, you’re just being political, you just want to make headway in Alberta,’” Suzuki says he told Trudeau. “You’re for the development of the tar sands, you’re for the Keystone pipeline, but you’re against the Northern Gateway, you’re all over the damn map!”
Suzuki went on to advise Trudeau that taking the target of a two-degree rise in temperature seriously means 80 per cent of the oil sands has to stay in the ground. Suzuki believes stopping oil sands development will mean “no debate about pipelines or expanding railways or shipping stuff offshore—none of that comes into it.”
Suzuki says this is when the exchange turned nasty. “He said, ‘I don’t have to listen to this sanctimonious crap.’ I proceeded to call him a twerp.”
Mr. Trudeau obviously won't be talking about this but if you want to know how Athabasca bitumen impacts humanity's chances of averting climate catastrophe, a good place to start is this 2012 U. Vic. paper by Neil Swart and Andrew Weaver. I suppose, in Trudeau's mind, that's just more sanctimonious crap.
Hansen, Schellnhuber, Suzuki, and Weaver, there are plenty more voices backing them up. You can't reconcile their science with Mr. Trudeau's political bafflegab.
Schellnhuber is right. This is a moral issue. It's a deadly serious moral issue. Deadly as in lethal. Remember how we used to export asbestos to sketchy markets offshore even though we knew it would condemn people in the Third World to a horribly painful end? Well, we're doing something along those same lines with bitumen.
Climate change is already claiming innocent lives, predominantly in the poorest, most vulnerable corners of the world. They're dying from heatwaves, drought, flooding, severe storm events, sea level rise, crop failures and more. We've now got a new phenomenon, climate wars - wars that are triggered in whole or in part by the devastation of climate change. The civil war in Syria began as the result of famine caused by crop failure. And this is just the early onset stuff. There's a lot more coming their way. These people are collateral damage to our economic imperative.
I'm one of a growing number of British Columbians steadfastly opposed to the machinations of Harper-Trudeau, Klein-Notley, the Tar Sanders and their very sketchy dilbit pipeline operators with their horrible accident track record. They've shown us what these pipelines do to the territories they cross. Ask the people of Kalamazoo, Michigan. That, of course, was Enbridge. But what do you know about the current contender, Kinder-Morgan? Let's put it this way. If they were operating school buses instead of pipelines you would probably wind up home-schooling your kids.
And when it comes to an armada of lumbering, dilbit-laden supertankers navigating British Columbia's very challenging and dangerous coastal waters, there are many problems. The odds aren't on our side. We've had Coast Guard and RCN officers, merchant mariners, all advise Trudeau's National Energy Board that a supertanker calamity isn't a matter of if but when and how often.
It was March 24, 1989, nearly 30 years ago, that the Exxon Valdez came to grief in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Ten million gallons were spilled. But that wasn't dilbit. It was conventional crude oil, kid's stuff. That spill covered 1,300 miles of coastline, 11,000 square miles of ocean. More than a quarter of a century later the oil still isn't cleaned up.
On March 24, 2014, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the spill, NOAA scientists reported that some species seem to have recovered, with the sea otter the latest creature to return to pre-spill numbers. Scientists who have monitored the spill area for the last 25 years report that concern remains for one of two pods of local orca whales, with fears that one pod may eventually die out.[33] Federal scientists estimate that between 16,000 and 21,000 US gallons (61 to 79 m3) of oil remains on beaches in Prince William Sound and up to 450 miles (725 km) away. Some of the oil does not appear to have biodegraded at all. A USGS scientist who analyses the remaining oil along the coastline states that it remains among rocks and between tide marks. "The oil mixes with seawater and forms an emulsion...Left out, the surface crusts over but the inside still has the consistency of mayonnaise – or mousse."[34] Alaska state senator Berta Gardner is urging Alaskan politicians to demand that the US government force ExxonMobil to pay the final $92 million (£57 million) still owed from the court settlement. The major part of the money would be spent to finish cleaning up oiled beaches and attempting to restore the crippled herring population.
The Exxon Valdez spilled conventional crude oil and yet Trudeau and Notley want to put us to that very risk only with something vastly worse, dilbit, diluted-bitumen. Bitumen, a persistent sludge laced with acids, abrasives, toxins, heavy metals and carcinogens, that will head right for the sea bed where it will remain for decades contaminating the coastal waters, devastating the marine ecology. To borrow Hansen's words, "they just don't give a damn."
The Trudeau government put the lie to its vaunted "world class oil spill clean up" preparations when Dame Cathy's environment ministry was caught having approved an incredibly dangerous chemical, Corexit, for use in BC waters as an oil dispersant. We know a lot about Corexit from its use during the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills.
If you don't know about this chemical that our federal government has cleared for use in British Columbia's coastal waters, watch this.
If you've got the stomach for it and want to watch the entire Vice expose on Corexit, you can watch it here.
This is the reality of what Justin Trudeau wants to do to our coast, intends to do to our coast, tells us he is going to do to our coast.
Pushing ever more bitumen onto world markets is morally reprehensible. Worse yet, it's a betrayal of our own kids and grandkids. Shipping it in the most lethal possible form, dilbit, rather than requiring that it be refined on site, in Athabasca, to remove the most odious components - the acids, the abrasives, the heavy metals, the carcinogens, the pet coke, and the sludge - is equally reprehensible. To even imagine using Corexit in British Columbia's coastal waters is fiendishly reckless. And they're doing it all just to put a few extra bucks in Rachel Notley's and her Oil Patch patrons' pockets.
"We wanted a national carbon reduction plan, a national emissions plan that is going to allow us to reach our climate goals, to reach our Paris commitments but in order to do that, part of moving forward is approving the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It is something many people feel very strongly about on either side, but that is the nature of the compromise we had to make in the best interests of Canada."
That's Trump-grade bullshit to be sure. We can't have a national emissions plan, we can't meet our commitments under the Paris Climate accord, unless we rapidly expand our extraction and export of the world's highest-cost/highest-carbon ersatz petroleum.
The Dauphin doesn't grasp the concept of cognitive dissonance but the crowd in his Nanaimo townhall audience could smell the reek of it on him. Well I suppose it's comforting in a way that we're not the only country with a leader who will, at the drop of a hat, stand there and lie right to your face.
Yes, kids, the way to get speeding under control is for us to drive 90 mph through school zones.
You want a "compromise" Justin? There is a compromise to be had. Simply refine the bitumen on site in Athabasca. Refine out the heavy metals. Refine out the acids and toxins. Refine out the carcinogens. Refine out the pet-coke. Refine out the sludge. Leave those components, the chemicals that create the greatest and lasting threat to British Columbia and our coastal waters, where they belong, right where they came from.
You want a pipeline that respects British Columbia? Come back to us with a proposal to transport fully refined, synthetic crude. With all the dilbit garbage removed - the diluent and the dangerous by-products - you won't need nearly as many tankers. Fewer tankers = lessened risk of marine accidents. And, when you do have a catastrophic accident - and the Coast Guard, RCN officers and merchant mariners have all testified it's only a matter of when and how often - well then the worst we'll have to deal with is a conventional oil spill.
Diplomats strive to be invisible, but the once pick for US ambassador to South Korea turned out to be anything but invisible and that should have us all very worried.
One top U.S. official said embassy staff learned through news reports that their embassy would remain without a top envoy, raising concern that the critical strategic post will remain empty for the foreseeable future.
Now, as the U.S. and its allies look to ramp up pressure against Pyongyang while avoiding military conflict, the prolonged — and now indefinite — vacancy of the job of ambassador to Seoul is raising concern that any hope for a diplomatic solution to the standoff with North Korea is diminishing. ...
A senior administration official confirmed to NBC News that Cha withdrew from consideration after disagreeing with the administration about its approach to the North Korean crisis. A second senior administration official and a third person close to the decision tells NBC News that South Korea’s government had been informed that Cha was to be nominated as ambassador and he had received his clearances — but then some of his policy positions upset the White House.
A senior White House official confirmed that Cha had withdrawn from consideration and wished him well, but said the policy disagreements have been mischaracterized in the media. The official did not elaborate.
Cha, a professor at Georgetown University, penned an editorial for The Washington Post, which first reported that he had withdrawn from consideration. In it, he said that with regard to confronting North Korea, "the answer is not, as some Trump administration officials have suggested, a preventive military strike."
"To be clear," Cha continued, "(t)he president would be putting at risk an American population the size of a medium-size U.S. city — Pittsburgh, say, or Cincinnati — on the assumption that a crazy and undeterrable dictator will be rationally cowed by a demonstration of U.S. kinetic power."
Did you get that? There's such a cabal within the White House clamoring for a preventive military "first strike" that he withdrew himself from nomination so that he could be free to warn the American people, via The Washington Post, of what is really going on within Trump's Oval Office. This makes Dr. Strangelove look a bit like Shirley Temple, only that was fiction, this is fact. Oh dear.
Adios, People's Republic. Hello the Chinese Republic of Haves and Have-Nots.
For decades following its post-war creation, the People's Republic of China preached the virtues of a classless society. Of course it wasn't really true. Some fared well, most didn't. Some peoples' kids got educated, most didn't. Yet everyone was expected to pay lip service to the egalitarian idea.
That was then. This is now. China has had nearly two decades of its "economic miracle" but, while that has benefited Chinese society it was also left it divided especially along urban-rural lines.
A while back I read a paper written by three leading Chinese economists that explored how their country would likely develop in the 21st century. It dealt with areas such as food security, population growth, the emerging entrepreneurial/consumer class. It also touched on China's growing class divide.
The paper argued that Chinese society would, of necessity, fracture. Everyone would aspire to a much higher standard of living, in some cases a Western standard of living: bigger houses, more cars, better food, luxuries of every description. It made the argument that a class of individuals were so vital to China's advancement that that they had to be treated differently, better than the masses. A metaphor was used: an island of privilege floating on a sea of relative poverty. There simply weren't nearly enough resources on the planet to float all Chinese junks. They predicted that India would face the same predicament, only worse.
The fact that China’s urban middle classes are doing pretty well says little about whether China has anything like a true middle-class society. Income inequality is a problem throughout the world, but in China, inequalities run much deeper than in the West. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese are still excluded from full participation in the country’s rapidly developing urban economy. And that exclusion is in danger of ossifying into something resembling a permanent caste system.
China’s economic growth is legendary, and China really has come a long way since Deng Xiaoping declared China open for business 40 years ago. The three big urban agglomerations of eastern China — the areas centered on Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong — have already converged in GDP per capita with developed Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea, at least in purchasing power parity terms. And even poor, inland cities like Chengdu are doing well compared to secondary cities in other middle-income countries.
But rural China still lags far behind. That’s not surprising; rural areas all over the world tend to be poorer than cities
Even in the United States, rural households are on average 4 percent poorer than urban households.
But in China, the rural income deficit averages 63 percent nationwide, and that’s in a country with a lot of very poor urban areas that outsiders rarely hear about.
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Today, China has started to declare its rich eastern cities to be “full.” The Chinese government intends to cap Beijing’s population at 23 million, just 1 million above its current level. Shanghai’s population is to be capped at 25 million by 2040, a goal that may prove difficult considering that its population already exceeds 24 million. While these limits are certain to be breached, China’s repressive party-state does have the capacity to coerce would-be city-dwellers to move elsewhere.
It’s not just glamorous megacities like Beijing and Shanghai that are closing their doors. Even second-tier cities and provincial capitals like Chengdu are increasingly pushing out the poor. Forcible slum clearance in China often involves the destruction of so-called urban villages: densely populated but often chaotically planned former villages that have been swallowed up by the growth of nearby metropolises.
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China’s President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has staked his reputation on a promise to turn China into a moderately prosperous society by 2020. It’s not much of a gamble. China already is a “moderately” prosperous society. The real challenge is to grow China into a fully prosperous society , and that can only be done by raising the rest of the country to something like the income levels that prevail in the eastern coastal cities — or at least those of second-tier inland cities like Chengdu.
That means expanding the middle class, not just by getting a few more people over an arbitrary income line, but by expanding economic opportunities and fighting social exclusion. Here, the politics get more difficult. In a distinctively Chinese form of discrimination, the natives of cities like Beijing and Shanghai often look down on their country cousins from places like Sichuan. China may not be a democracy, but articulate middle-class professionals do have the ability to influence policy, especially in their own cities. Increasingly, the policy they want is exclusion.
Around the world but especially in North America, governments have adapted to the neoliberal order, globalism, by focusing on short-term growth even while imperiling our future generations.
More voices in recent years have joined the chorus calling for the revival of posterity. Now it's the World Economic Forum, the Billionaire Boys' Club of Davos, joining the ranks.
Davos, the place where the man boy in polka dot socks goes to preen. The World Economic Forum has released a damning report warning young people that their governments' focus on short term growth is failing their generation and those to follow.
The global obsession with short-term growth has led to historically high levels of income inequality and a growing gap between old and young people, according to a damning new report by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
In a surprisingly stark warning about the impact of short-termism, the WEF calls for a new way of assessing national accomplishment beyond gross domestic product (GDP), a measure it says fuels increasing income and wealth inequality.
Based on an analysis of its annual Inclusive Development Index (IDI) that focused on 11 measures of economic progress (in addition to GDP) for 29 developed countries, the WEF report warns that both rich and poor countries are failing to protect future generations – highlighting high levels of public debt and economic drivers that depend on a high rate of carbon dioxide emissions as two key factors.
Even in countries with the strongest economic growth in terms of GDP, such as the US, the report found evidence of “inclusion” (where increased wealth and opportunity is being shared more widely) to be lacking.
Out of the 30 nations in Canada's group we placed a thoroughly mediocre 15th. Our report card is here.
As I wrote this post it reminded me of a passage from James K. (son of John K.) Galbraith's book, The Predator State, that speaks to posterity and planning and the pitfalls of prostrating our societies to "the market."
A country that does not have a public planning system simply turns this function over to a network of private enterprise - domestic or foreign - which then becomes the true seat of economic power. And that is why the struggle over planning is, and remains, such a sensitive issue: it is a struggle over power. It is a struggle not between democracy and the corporation, but between those - scientists, engineers, some economists, and public intellectuals - who attempt to represent the common and future interest and those - banks, companies, lobbyists, and the economists whom they employ - that represent only the tribal and current interest. It is an uneven struggle. It is a struggle in which, outside of wartime and the zone of permanent planning called the Pentagon, the planners have prevailed only on rare occasions, notably during the Great Depression. But it is an inescapable struggle. If the future is to be provided for, you must have a community of planners, and some way must be found to support them, to permit them to develop their plans and resolve their differences, and to give them access to the levers of power. To walk away from this problem with a shrug about "markets" is to disenfranchise the future. To enable planning guarantees nothing. But to "rely on the market" is to guarantee that the interests of the future will never be provided for.
The World Justice Project's latest Rule of Law Report is out. It's not terrible but it's far from good either and it's getting worse.
“The WJP’s findings provide worrying confirmation that we live in very dangerous times for the rule of law and human rights,” said Murray Hunt, director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law.
“The worldwide resurgence of populism, authoritarian nationalism and the general retreat from international legal obligations are trends which, if not checked, pose an existential threat to the rule of law. Preventing violations of the rule of law and human rights is always better than curing them after the event,” Hunt said.
Since the publication of the last WJP Rule of Law Index in October 2016, a majority of countries worldwide saw their scores decline in the areas of human rights, checks on government powers, and civil and criminal justice. The greatest decline was seen in Factor 4, Fundamental Rights (71 countries dropped out of 113), which measures absence of discrimination, right to life and security, due process, freedom of expression and religion, right to privacy, freedom of association, and labor rights.
The second greatest decline was seen in Factor 1, Constraints on Government Powers (64 countries dropped out of 113), which measures the extent to which those who govern are bound by law. In addition, more countries’ overall rule of law score declined (34%) than improved (29%) as compared to their 2016 Index scores—a troubling trend. Thirty-seven percent of countries’ overall rule of law score remained the same.
Who can forget the heady days of 2015 when a newly minted prime minister and his enviromin stormed the Paris Climate Summit to promote a new global warming limit of just 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, sweeping aside the old target of 2C by 2100,
So, how is that working out? Well, Canada is well off target for meeting its greenhouse gas emissions reductions. And we're still sticking with Stephen Harper's pathetic targets. In other words, they were just f#@king with ya.
The fact is, it seems we're already out of time for that 1.5 C nonsense. Britain's Met Office warns that we're going to break through that 1.5 C ceiling in the next five years.
“It is now possible that continued warming from greenhouse gases along with natural variability could combine so we temporarily exceed 1.5C in the next five years,” said Stephen Belcher, the chief scientist at the Met Office.
Global temperatures have been steadily rising over the past 20 years, and in each of the last three years averages have topped the 1C threshold. Last year was the second hottest on record, and the hottest not to have been given an additional boost by the El Niño effect.
The 1.5C threshold was set at Paris as an ambitious target because scientists fear that a world warmer than that would be susceptible to ever wilder climactic events that in turn would precipitate greater drought, habitat loss, food insecurity and mass migration.
The thing to bear in mind is that we've already "locked in" centuries of warming. The greenhouse gas, CO2, lasts for centuries. How many centuries we still don't know. Methane, by contrast, is 104 times more powerful than CO2 over the first 20 years but falls off quickly after that so, by the end of a hundred years, its warming factor is only 28 times more powerful than CO2. A mere 28 times. It's like the burner on the stove that you can't turn off.
And every tanker that sails from a Canadian port with a gutload of high-carbon bitumen makes an already nightmarish situation far worse. Trudeau knows that. Notley knows that. They don't give a f#@k what happens to your grandkids. They've got bitumen to flog, as much and as fast as possible.
And here's another thing to bear in mind. These figures are based on man-made emissions - methane from agriculture, CO2 from internal combustion engines, that sort of thing. Only now we're not alone. We've awoken the sleeping giant, nature itself. As we've thawed the Arctic nature is releasing increasing volumes of seabed methane, clathrates, and methane no longer safely sequestered within the melting tundra and permafrost.
Toynbee blames much of the toxic pollution that now befouls London as the inevitable side effect of privatization of utilities, transportation and even the mail service.
As with most of the gravest problems facing Britain, the solutions are relatively easy to find: the problem, as ever, in this fractured and fractious country, is summoning up the collective political will to take action.
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Take the explosion of van deliveries as the Amazon I–want-it-now impulse is followed by every company that wants to stay in business. Be it Argos or John Lewis, everyone delivers it to your doorstep fast, multiple vans criss-crossing each other and knocking on the same doors over and over. Van traffic has grown faster than any other vehicle type since 2005.
Why? Royal Mail visits every household once a day, these days delivering mostly junk mail at ever-rising stamp prices for lack of volume business. As predicted, private companies cherrypick easy deliveries, leaving Royal Mail to take single letters to every remote farm.
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After Carillion and the shock suggestion Capita and others might be wobbling, the reality of the destruction caused by privatisation is beginning to dawn even on true believers, such as the infamous Barnet council. Labour is right to plan taking back control of utilities, mail and transport, though they have yet to make that case sound not just ideological but pressingly practical. They need to spell out the daily reality of the harm privatisation and illusory “choice” has done over the last decades, not least in the poisoned air we breathe.
The relatives of some of the thousands of Nazi victims who were tortured and murdered in the Hamburg headquarters of the Gestapo have accused authorities and property developers of insulting their memory following the transformation of the building into a luxury complex with scant reference to its past.
The Stadthöfe (city courts) in the centre of the German port city, has been marketed under the title Hommage to Life by its owners, Quantum Immobilien.
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“Nobody who was brought here for interrogation came out unhurt,” said Detlef Baade, whose father was tortured by Hamburg’s Gestapo in 1933. “We have a societal obligation to do this. We owe it to the dead,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Protesting under the slogan “Commerce instead of Commemoration? Never!” the demonstrators also brought attention to the wrought-iron greeting over the entrance to the Stadthöfe, which they say is chillingly reminiscent of the Arbeit Macht Frei slogan at Auschwitz and should be removed. The greeting reads: “Bienvenue (welcome) /Moin moin (a colloquial phrase for hello)/ Stadthof”.
Political cowardice is something we're getting used to from our federal Liberal government. Justin Trudeau may have a lovely smile but very, very weak knees. When it comes to taking bold steps demanded of true vision, he's usually a no-show. Can you say "electoral reform"? I know Justin cannot.
Then there's the problem of Canada's decaying, sometimes derelict infrastructure. That's everything from the electrical grid to sewer and water lines, roads and highways, air and sea ports, railway lines. Those are essential services. Without them our society would probably collapse within a week after the grocery store shelves fell empty.
We're now at that point where successive governments, federal and provincial, have kicked the problem down the road so long and so far that we've run out of road. Governments have to dig deep to come up with the money to fix what can no longer be ignored but this is the age of "Everyday Low Taxes." Absent real leadership, tax increases can destroy political futures.
I recall Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the true test of political leadership was the ability of a leader to persuade the public to support a measure that was either painful or unpleasant. If you can't get them to swallow the bitter medicine, you're shite as a leader. Which brings us back to Trudeau, the Liberal government and our major infrastructure problem. That problem, in four words, is "somebody has to pay."
The Trudeau government, in an act that marries cowardice with betrayal, has decided to let the public sector take over the government's own responsibilities. They call it PPP or Public-Private Participation. The private contractor builds, and essentially owns, the highway recovering its costs and a hefty profit directly from the public.
One of the grand lies that's endlessly told by the politicians perpetrating this cowardly dodge is that the private sector carries all the risk. That's why they get to lard their pockets with that extra profit. It's a nice story but history, especially recent history, reminds us that it's bullshit.
By recent history I mean last month's failure of British construction giant, Carillion. The Tories had done all sorts of PPP deals with Carillion - roads, hospitals, schools, prisons, you name it. It was all great until it wasn't. When Carillion went down, all that risk bounced straight back into the laps of the public - and the public purse. After all, someone has to pick up where the outsourcing contractor left off.
The recent collapse of Carillion, which had contracts with the government to provide services such as NHS cleaning, school dinners and prison maintenance, has intensified the spotlight on the sector.
Days after Carillion plunged into liquidation, the government was forced to deny that rival outsourcer Interserve was on the same path to oblivion, after it had been reported that it was on a watchlist of troubled companies.
Serco, one of the largest outsourcing players, has been struggling to regain its financial stability since a 2013 scandal when it overcharged the Home Office for electronic tagging of criminals.
Now Capita has become the latest in the sector to suffer a major setback as its new chief executive, Jon Lewis, “kitchen-sinked” an array of bad news by releasing it all at the same time. Shares in the firm tumbled 47.5% to a 15-year low after Lewis slashed profit forecasts, announced plans to tap the market for £700m of investment and suspended a dividend that was worth more than £200m to shareholders last year.
Some industry observers saw the writing on the wall for the outsourcing sector long ago. Tim Wainwright, an expert on outsourcing at global accountancy firm EY, said outsourcers have been squeezed by the need to provide services ever more cheaply, even as their costs have risen.
So now prime minister What, Me Worry? and his finance minister Bill Churn Baby, Churn Morneau want to drag Canada - and the Canadian public - down the same road traveled by Carillion, Interserve, Serco and Capita. There you go, problem solved.
Bill Morneau, our federal finance minister, tells us the government's dodgy-sounding scheme to let private investors build and manage public infrastructure is a "win-win-win," as though such a thing exists. ...
Anyway, he must feel a bit of a fool. He's from Bay Street, and must know that in business, somebody usually gets the better end of a deal, and generally, the great white sharks of the business world — the huge institutional investors he's hoping will relieve the government of a traditional responsibility — eat very well indeed.
Trudeau is even promising the private sector zero or little risk.
According to information in documents obtained by the Canadian Press, the government is promising a healthy, guaranteed "revenue stream" for years. The exact return is not specified, but such investors tend to demand between 10 and 20 per cent – "equity-like return and bond-like risk," as the Wall Street aphorism so neatly puts it.
Best of all for the investors, according to the documents, the government is suggesting it might even chip in some extra cash to pad investors' returns. It's a path to heaven with no alternate route to hell.
And guess who will pay for all this? The cheery fog exhaled by Morneau and his fellow cabinet ministers isn't very specific about that, but there is ultimately only one bill-payer, and we all know who he, or she, is.
Shooting blindfolded. Not a real confidence builder.
Government documents suggest that the goal is to raise about $240 billion from investors over the next 12 years, for a total of $300 billion in spending.
But how the government arrived at that figure is a mystery. There has been no methodical assessment of what we need. Other countries have done that sort of homework. We haven't.
The government's own Economic Advisory Council complained about this lack of data, and finally just resorted to citing estimates between $150 billion and $1 trillion. That's quite a margin. Another authoritative study, the McKinsey Report, has said there's no need at all for additional infrastructure spending in Canada.
"Meaning we don't have a clue," says an assessment by Azfar Ali Khan and Randall Bartlett, economists at the University of Ottawa's Institute for Fiscal Studies and Democracy. "We don't even know what and where the investment needs are."
In any case, there are precisely no projects under way. At least none that we know of. So far, apparently, it's been a confidential, informal courtship of big-money investors — a dance with tightfisted, powerful people, all looking for the sweetest deal possible.
So, kids, prepare yourselves and your own kids and their kids for a potential multi-generational ass raping. Sort of like British Columbia's Fast Cat ferry fiasco only times a gazillion.
