On Quebec tuition fee increases

Although I’ve wanted to comment on the Quebec students’ strike for a while now, I’ve been holding back to give it some time to see how things play out. Now that the affair has entered full-out circus mode, I feel it’s safe to offer my own two cents.

For those who aren’t so familiar with the situation, here’s the Coles Notes version of it. The Quebec government is deeply in debt, to the tune of more than $180 billion. To try and balance the books, the Quebec government (among other measures) has increased the provincial sales tax, the provincial fuel tax, and property taxes, and is charging people an extra $200 annual premium for health care (essentially an extra tax). The government also announced a few months back that it planned to raise post-secondary tuition fees by 75% over the next five years. A coalition of student groups formed to protest the tuition fee increases, and quickly gained momentum.

With that momentum, the nature of the protests changed. Groups that were either loosely affiliated or completely unaffiliated with the student organizations latched on to the protests, swelling their numbers, but at the same time rendering them much more volatile and confrontational. Mask-wearing young men who most people doubt are students at all have used protests as vehicles to smash windows, throw smoke bombs in subway stations, and otherwise act out. A few well-groomed young dandies have appointed themselves as leaders of the student movement, each no doubt seeing the next Mario Dumont when he looks in the mirror. With each day that passed, the whole affair began to look more like an inverted political hybrid of the US Tea Party & Occupy Wall Street movements, and less and less like something that represents students’ interests. Although polls indicate the majority of the Quebec population does not support the protesters, the week before last the Quebec government decided to negotiate a compromise with the main student organizations, offering to spread the tuition increases out over seven years, and to set up a panel, which would include student representatives, to search for ways to make post-secondary institutions more efficient, with any savings to go toward offsetting tuitions. The student groups polled their memberships and most have rejected the government’s offer. The government education minister has now resigned, and the circus is now on in earnest.

In all the media attention being given to this event, there are a few things that are not being discussed that warrant further reflection. Bear in mind when reading the following comments that I do not live or teach in Quebec, although some of my students are Quebecers. My observations are those of an informed person looking across his neighbour’s fence (or in this case, across the river, where student protests have shut down the Univeristé de Québec Outaouais a couple times).

First, let’s consider the substance of the matter – tuition fees. Most people are by now aware that Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in North America. In Quebec, tuition fees are measured in the hundreds of dollars, whilst in other provinces they’re measured in the thousands, and at many US schools, in the tens of thousands. This has been explained by a number of Quebec intellectuals as being the result of a sort of social contract struck >40 years ago in the wake of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Long after higher education became widely accessible in the rest of North America, in Quebec it had remained disproportionately reserved for Anglophones and privileged Francophones. A succession of reform-minded Quebec governments made it an unofficial policy to keep tuitions fees low while expanding the number of post-secondary schools and spaces within them, so as to make higher education accessible. Low tuition fees have now become a political sacred cow and a middle-class entitlement.

Even with the proposed increase in tuition fees, Quebec’s would still be the lowest in North America. Many commentators in the English-language media have seized on this point, and use it to portray Quebec as a spoiled, spendthrift province. I was not entirely surprised students protested the tuition fee increases; regardless of the baseline, a 75% increase is substantial. Gas is cheap in Canada as compared with Europe; were the federal government proposed to raise its tax on gasoline by 75%, our gas would still be cheaper than in Europe. But can you imagine the outcry from our nation of suburban SUV-drivers if the government actually tried to do it? No one would care what Europeans might think – cheap gasoline is a middle-class Canadian entitlement. So let’s not beat up on the Quebec students for making a fuss – be surprised if they didn’t.

My concern is more with the cheap-tuition entitlement itself. In a recent Globe and Mail column, Jeffrey Simpson noted that only 1/3 of Quebec kids go to university today while in Ontario, where tuition fees are much higher, over 40% do. Average household incomes in Quebec are not substantially different from Ontario, so it would seem that tuition fees are not the main barrier to post-secondary education in Quebec. There is more to it than just this, however. In Ontario, a student’s tuition fees make up almost ½ of the actual cost of their education. This seems to me a reasonable share. Society as a whole benefits from having a well-educated workforce, and study after study shows that individuals with a higher education earn more on average than those who do not. Since both the individual and the community (including those who do not possess a post-secondary education) gain, they should share similarly in the cost.

In Quebec, tuition contributes a fragment toward the overall cost of a student's post-secondary education. The population of the province as a whole – 2/3 of whom will not acquire a post-secondary education – is paying most of the bills. Whatever promises were made to the grandparents of today’s students, accessibility has improved, and those who benefit most directly from higher education should be expected to make a fair contribution toward its costs. Taxpayer resources that currently subsidize university tuitions could be used for any number of programs that have a greater benefit for all (for example, eliminating the need for a $200 surcharge on health care). The student leaders are portraying their fight as one for social justice. It is not or, at least, that is not how it began. At the outset it was no more than a struggle to maintain an entitlement program. Raising tuition fees would be more socially just than maintaining them artificially low. It may well be that the student protests have since morphed into a much larger cause or set of causes seeking social and economic reforms in Quebec, but the initial stimulus was anything but.

As a final note, it’s worth pointing out that many students have not joined the protest movement, and have been attempting to attend their classes throughout. My sympathies and support lay with them. It troubles me to see them unable to attend classes because others block their access to campuses or cause such a ruckus that campuses must be closed to ensure personal safety. Those who do not attend class are free to do so, and should be respected for standing up for their beliefs, but they in turn should also be careful to respect the rights of those who do not share their cause.

Social capital and the case of the parent council's missing $70K

How did my kid’s school’s parent council lose $70,000? The whole mystery still isn’t solved, should any budding Sherlocks or Miss Marples be looking for a case. If you want the facts and nothing but the facts (or at least, those facts that are public), you can Google it and find out.* Being a pedantic professor-type, I’d rather offer the longer version, geography-lesson-containing answer so far as I understand it. It starts and finishes with place-based social capital or, more precisely, the absence of it.

Social capital, it is often argued, is both a product and a builder of successful communities. The World Bank embraces the concept as a key component of international development, the climate change research community suggests it is a key ingredient for enhancing our capacity to adapt to the impacts of global warming, political scientists have lamented its erosion in 21st century North American life as we spend more time on our couches and less time interacting with our neighbours. Most people in the know think it’s a pretty good thing.

What is social capital? It’s a social scientist’s slang for the economically tangible benefits that arise from trusted social connections. For example, if a friend gives you inside information about a job that’s opening up at her office, and you end up getting it because of her, that’s social capital. If your neighbour offers to look after your kids tomorrow night to save you the cost of a sitter – that’s social capital. If you go out on a date with someone who picks up the bill for dinner, that’s not social capital. Their motivation is not to make sure you’re well fed.

There are two key elements linked to the formation, maintenance and use of social capital – reciprocity and trust. These two elements mean it’s often family members with whom we develop our biggest reservoirs of social capital, but large amounts of it can develop among friends and neighbours as well. Why is reciprocity key? If an acquaintance helps you out and you don’t reciprocate at the next opportunity, chances are they won’t help you again. But if you do reciprocate, your friendship is likely to grow stronger (and you reinforce the likelihood of future reciprocity). As you form a social network of likeminded people who informally share resources and help one another whenever possible (i.e. where reciprocity is the norm), you develop a high level of trust in your social network (and they in you). Honest and caring behaviour toward one another becomes the expected norm; the social capital is too valuable to jeopardize through negative behaviour. With high levels of trust, you feel willing to loan or share with one another valuable possessions, and help one another out in times of difficulty. There’s the old saying that when times get rough, you learn who your real friends are; a social scientist might argue it’s when you find out how much social capital you have.

I am fortunate to live in a small neighbourhood where there is strong social interconnectedness and a lot of latent social capital, well beyond ordinary neighbourliness. You see it in many places – like our Saturday morning soccer league for the kids that is better organized than Toronto FC and where the games are just as well attended, and the outdoor rink maintained by the hoser dads that has the best ice you’ve ever skated on. Last Saturday was the neighbourhood park cleanup, which drew dozens of families and finished with a BBQ of the best locally made sausages. If a family experiences a serious illness or worse (and most of us will eventually), that family won’t need to feed itself for weeks, the neighbourhood looks after the cooking. I could go on, but you get the picture. I should note that not all families who live in this neighbourhood are equally interconnected with one another, and that a lot of the networking centers on families with kids. We have a great person at the community centre who acts as a focal point for communication and organization. There are also plenty of homes where the people keep to themselves or have their connections elsewhere And, we all have our own social networks that extend beyond our neighbourhood elsewhere. My point is simply that there is a specific set of social networks and social capital that are specific to this place, to this neighbourhood.

My kid attends a public school in the next neighbourhood over from mine. The school has its own social networks associated with it; some of them overlap with those of our neighbourhood, others don’t. Some are informal, like the parents who take turns picking up one another’s kids, arranging play-dates and so forth. Two others are formal: the parent council and the book fair organizing committee. The book fair has been going for fifty years now. It collects used book donations throughout the year and each fall hosts one of Canada’s largest used book sales. It is a big undertaking requiring scores of volunteers (my family included), and raises tens of thousands of dollars. The money raised is then given to a school in Africa, to the district school board to support activities at less fortunate schools in our own city, and to the parent council of our school. This past year, the parent council’s share was $25,000 – no small amount of money.

The parent council is also a volunteer organization, with the formal purpose to serve as a liaison between parents and school administration. It is not run by the school itself or the school board. The parent council also operates a lot of activities that benefit the school. For example, it runs the lunchtime milk program, it sells wholegrain-crust pizza for Friday lunches, and it organizes the on-site after-school childcare program. Through its own fundraising programs and the book fair donation, the parent council has organized lots of activities for the kids they might not otherwise get, and was planning to help redevelop the aging play structure in the kindergarten area.

Sometime between February and March, all the money disappeared from the parent council’s bank account, as did the treasurer. The missing amount is estimated at $70,000. All the pizza money, all the milk money, all the parents’ cheques for the after-school care program are all gone, and none of the bills have been paid since January, meaning the council is now tens of thousands of dollars in debt. No one is saying publicly the treasurer absconded with the money, only that it's suspicious and the police have been called in. The most recent parent council meeting was, as might be expected, well-attended (including by the media). So what happened? The president of the parent council explained that the council functions on a basis of trust; they are all volunteers and must trust each member to perform their roles responsibly. The treasurer had held his position for many years, and there had never been any problems in the past, so no one was keeping a close watch on the finances. In February, council members learned the daycare co-op that runs the after school program and other outstanding bills had not been paid, so an e-mail was sent to the treasurer. He replied that it was a mix-up in the accounts and would be resolved right away. Instead, he broke off contact with everyone, and has not been heard from since. The only saving grace is that when the book fair president caught wind of bills not being paid, she immediately made sure the $25,000 book fair donation got deposited to a school-run bank account, otherwise it might have disappeared too. It remains to be seen how this will all shake out. The parent council is currently asking the school board for a loan to pay off their outstanding debts. How they will then pay off the loan is anyone’s guess, especially if the authorities are unable to track down the wayward treasurer and the missing funds.

There are a number of practical lessons to be gained from this experience, but I’d like here to look closer at the linkage between social capital and trust. Members of parent council share a common interest in doing things for the school on behalf of the parents at large. They are volunteers, and very giving ones, but their allegiance is not necessarily to one another. Yes, to accomplish their goals, they must work productively with one another, but they are not necessarily engaged in reciprocal, giving relations directly with one another. It is through mutual reciprocity that trust forms, and not through merely a shared commitment to the school and a will to work with one another. In the absence of reciprocity between individuals and the ability to regulate one another’s behaviour through the giving and withholding of social capital, trust is unreliable. Trust was not the way to operate parent council. That is why formal organizations – even volunteer ones – require rules, regulations, constitutions, transparency and public financial reporting.

A second problem with our parent council – and here’s the geography lesson – is that social capital functions best when it is grounded in place. In that bygone era when all Canadians lived in small towns, they knew all their neighbours and a handshake was as good as a contract. If you participated actively in community social networks, your “word” was good. You could enter a store with no money and walk out with what you wanted, the shopkeeper knowing you were “good for it”. A trade-off, of course, was that everyone knew your business, you could never keep anything important secret.

Social capital-based trust is still reliable when it's place specific, the only thing is, we urbanites don’t know all our neighbours today. That was also a problem with our parent council. Nobody seems to know where this treasurer had been living (and his address isn’t in the school directory – a bad sign) nor seen much of him lately. Given the minimally reciprocal relations among council members, having a treasurer with no visible presence in our community – no matter who that person might be and regardless of past experience – was not such a great idea in hindsight. Now, I do believe that most people act properly most of the time even when no one is watching them, as appears to have been the case with our treasurer for a number of years. And most people do the right thing toward others whether or not a payback in social capital might be earned. But, a situation where trust is unreliable, where there is no social capital to enforce good behaviour, and where there’s lots of money floating around is a situation best avoided. And that, I think, is the solution to this mystery.

*You'll note I've avoided any names. This case is public knowledge, but I'm not going to further fuel the notoriety - after all, I do have to live here.

On global environmental inequality

I was recently asked to take part in a public panel discussion with the title of “Inequality in Turbulent Times: A Post-Normal Panel”. It’s coming up Wednesday night, and I’m still not entirely certain what I’m going to say, so I thought that maybe by blogging about it, I might refine my thoughts and come up with something halfway decent.

The panel is organized by the British Council and will be moderated by Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson. It has been convened in large measure to showcase a scholar visiting from the UK, Professor Ziauddin Sardar, a Pakistani-born physicist and public intellectual well-known for his thoughts and research on the future of Islam. The title of the panel reflects the subject of his presentation; I must confess I am not entirely sure what ‘post-normal times’ are, but I’m looking forward to finding out. The other speakers are Howard Duncan, head of the Metropolis Project on international migration, and Lori Beaman, a Canada Research Chair who studies religious freedom. Collectively, the other panellists and the moderator are an awfully interesting bunch, and it is them, not me, the audience will be coming to hear speak. I’d be more comfortable sitting with the audience taking notes but it’s too late for that now. So, in for a penny, in for a pound as the British would say.

Inequality seems to be the main theme of the evening, which is a pretty useful term to use when describing global environmental issues. We have entered an era when human activities are causing rapid changes to the Earth’s systems. We’ve modified the stratosphere, we’ve modified the climate. The oceans, increasingly stripped of their fish life, are becoming great gyres of plastic garbage. The most fertile soils are being degraded and eroded by industrial farms, our rivers are overloaded with chemicals and fertilizers. We all know this already, the damage we’re doing to our environment is chronicled in first-year environmental science textbooks.

But not all people contribute equally to this great waste that we’re laying to the planet. And not all people suffer equally the consequences. Those whose choices and actions have the greatest impact on the planet – me, you, and anyone else with the time and luxury to read a blog or attend an evening panel discussion – are those likely to suffer the least. Those whose actions do the least harm to the natural environment are most likely to be themselves harmed. This, to me, sounds like the essence of inequality.

Studies have shown that Inuit mothers in northern Quebec have elevated levels of dangerous chemicals like PCBs and flame retardants in their breast milk. There are no chemical factories in their remote Arctic villages, they do not use or purchase things that contain such products. We in the south have contaminated their wild caught foods with our pollution. Ecological footprint studies estimate that, if everyone on Earth consumed as much as the average southern Canadian, several additional planets worth of resources would be needed. Using similar methods, it has also been estimated that the urban poor in Bangladesh’s largest city, Dhaka, have no ecological footprint. In fact, by living on the most meagre of food rations and depending heavily on recovering and reusing things others have thrown in the garbage, Dhaka’s poor actually provide a net benefit to the planet, and offset by a small amount the ecological damage done by others. We ought to keep them in mind the next time we congratulate ourselves for being dutiful users of our blue recycling boxes and green composting bins.

In practical terms, what are the ramifications of this global environmental inequality? Two other themes being discussed by other panellists are immigration and security. Let’s start with immigration. Most people will have heard of the term “environmental refugees”, and come across media reports warning that global warming and sea level rise will displace tens or hundreds of millions of people in coming decades. Is this likely? Environmental migration takes many forms, from sun-seeking snowbirds moving to Florida to parents with asthmatic kids moving out of the smoggy city, to any number of other variants.

The one we worry most about is distress migration – people fleeing natural disasters. The three most common environmental triggers of distress migration are droughts, floods and tropical cyclones. Anthropogenic climate change is expected to lead to more frequent droughts in many regions, especially those that are already water scarce. Flood trends are a bit harder to predict; there are a lot of other human actions that influence the likelihood of flooding in any given place. Tropical cyclones are showing a trend toward growing intensity. The short answer is that environmental stimuli for distress migrations are indeed likely to be stronger in many regions in coming years.

But people displaced by events such as these tend not to show up as refugees at the airports and border stations of the world’s rich countries. For example, one recent study estimates that when severe drought strikes rural Mexico, migration from that country to the US goes up by only a few percent. After Hurricane Mitch struck Central America, US Border services intercepted several thousand additional Hondurans trying to enter the US clandestinely the following year. Again, significant, but only a tiny fraction in comparison with the hundreds of thousands who had been left homeless by that storm.

The reality is that most environmental migration takes place internally, within countries. This worries security experts, for the places most likely to experience increases in environmentally related migration in coming years include many where conflicts and tensions already exist, places like Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East. Will climate change trigger a downward spiral of growing refugeeism, political instability and violence in such places, as some pundits have suggested? Fortunately, there are few recent examples of conflicts between or within states that are directly caused by environmental phenomena. However, as food riots of recent years have shown, governments need to be aware that as the impacts of climate change filter down through economic and food production systems, the potential for instability will increase. Especially where inequality is endemic.

There is still time to change the path we’re on, although the longer we wait, the greater the chance we take. I have my own ideas as to what these are, and I’ve touched upon some of these in previous blog postings. I’m hopeful that Wednesday night I’ll hear additional prescriptions for addressing inequality raised by other panellists and audience members on Wednesday night, ones that may also likely go a long way addressing global environmental inequality. If I hear any, I’ll b be sure to write about them.

On scale, responsibility, and the latest George Clooney film

A few weeks ago I saw the film The Descendants, and have been thinking about it fairly regularly ever since. Set in Hawaii, it has two basic plot lines, connected through the character of middle-aged lawyer Matt King, played by George Clooney. At the beginning of the film, Matt's wife, a fun-loving material girl, is involved in a speedboat accident that leaves her in a coma. Matt has been checked out from his family for a while; his elder, teenaged daughter is off at boarding school where she spends most of her time wasted; his younger daughter, a teeny-bopper, has trouble socializing with other kids. The accident prompts Matt to reassemble his family and attempt parenting again, only to get a shock: his eldest daughter informs him that her mother was having an extra-marital affair with, they soon discover, a plastic jerk of a real estate agent. Matt spends much of the movie trying to find this guy, but I won't spoil this story any further.

The second plot line is that Matt and his extended family, numbering in the dozens of cousins, etc, are heirs to one of the largest pieces of undeveloped private coastline in Hawaii. The family came to this inheritance due to a fortuitous 19th century marriage between one of their ancestors and the daughter of an important native Hawaiian family. The land was supposed to remain in the family in perpituity, but state laws have changed to prohibit this, and so the family must decide what to do with the land. Several large property developers have offered to pay outrageous sums of money to transform the land into condos, hotels, golf courses, etc. Matt has executive authority over the property on behalf of the descendants (hence the title of the film), and has agreed to put the decision of what to do with it to a vote amongst his relatives. It is clear from the outset that most of the descendants want to become fabulously rich by selling the land, even though it's clear that few of them have any financial woes.

As the film progresses, Matt starts to rethink the meaning of his own life (especially in terms of his relationship with his children) as well as what it means to be responsible for the land his extended family has been fortunate enough to have inherited. What quickly becomes apparent to him and to the viewer is that these two things are not divisible. It is this dialectic that has had me thinking so often about the film.

Geographers are often interested in questions of scale, and the potential connections between seemingly distinct phenomena that occur at different scales. Are landslides in rural Nepal connected somehow with sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean? (They are). Could landslides in Honduras be prevented by fair-trade coffee labelling in Canada? (Potentially.) Does my decision to buy a fast-food outlet's junk-quality coffee in a disposable cup with plastic lid contribute to anthropogenic climate change, deforestation, and consequent landslides in Nepal and Honduras? (Yes, but the size of the contribution is comparable to the contribution of a drop of water to filling a swimming pool).

The Descendants revisits, and provides an appealling answer to, the age old question of "what is the purpose of my life". Note here I do not say the "meaning of life" - that is too broad a question, since it includes the meaning of an eartworm's life, a tree's life, the evolution of living organisms from primordial ooze, is there a God, and so on. No, I explicitly mean the purpose of the life of any one of us as individual living things within the context of a much larger planet of other living and non-living things. This is an important question to ponder from time to time (but not to obsess over - thart would be unhealthy).

All living things have purpose in aggregate. In terms of the greater operation of the ecological systems of the planet, earthworms are as important a species as humans - in fact, probably more so. Earthworms survive just fine without humans, but human food systems depend heavily on the actions of earthworms. However, any one individual human can have, at least potentially, an almost infinitely greater impact on the functioning of the plant than can an individual earthworm.

Of course, many of us live lives like earthworms in that we as individuals have little direct impact on things beyond our immediate vicinity or day-to-day existence. We make bumps in our couch each evening as we watch TV, dig flower gardens in the yard, choose to take this route to go shopping and not that one, hope for a promotion at work, and so forth. Each of these actions has consequences for the people and places we encounter along the way, but at no greater scale than that. Rarely do we deliberately set out to change our neighborhood, much less the world at large. It is only through aggregation, like the drops that fill the swimming pool, that our actions effect change over the long term and/or across wide spatial scales. That is one reason why it is so hard to get people stop consuming low-grade coffee from disposable cups or to care about climate change - if I'm but one drop in the pool, what do my actions matter?

At the same time, we all recognize the potential for any one of us to have impacts across scales spatial and temporal scales is remarkable. Certain individuals have had and will continue to have, a disproportionate impact on the history and shape of the planet. Sometimes it happens through chance discovery, other times through hard work and dedication. Some individuals change the world for the better, others for the worse, others for a mix of both. Some will have their names remembered by legions of other people in perpituity (like Charles Darwin), others will not (Alfred Wallace). Many of those who set out deliberately to change their neighbourhood or the world for the good do so knowing (or not caring if) their names will not go down in history. Others, like George Clooney's Matt King character in The Descendants, may have high-consequence decisions thrust upon them.

But I think most of us are in none of these camps. We are simply people who try to live by some basic ethical code and, if opportunity or chance should thrust us into positions of importance, we'll try our best not to mess things up too much. It is for us that the message of The Descendants has the most resonance. The answer to the question "what is my purpose in life?" is simple: to take good emotional care of the people closest to you. To do this is a decision from which all downstream actions and consequences are invariably positive, healthy and, when circumstances allow, will scale outwards in beneficial fashion. Through seeking to heal his family and atone for years of neglecting them, Matt King simultaneously appreciates his responsibility to the people and the land of Hawaii.

This mesage, that greater good is achieved through love of close family, is emphasized in another way in this movie. Unlike the story of how European settlers in other places stole the land from native peoples, Matt King's family acquired title to their Hawaiian land not through violence or theft, but through marriage. He is not simply Hawaiian by choice of residence but, at least in part, by blood (although it is evident that few of the descendants of that first union ever married anyone but non-native Hawaiians). Through caring for his daughters, Matt King remembers that he is native to this place, and that his decisions today should reflect not just his own immediate aspirations, but must pass on to his own descendants a legacy at least as good as the one he received from his ancestors. In first-year environmental science textbooks, this is referred to as "sustainability", but the film does a nicer job of illustrating it.

This posting has gone on much longer than I intended. If nothing else, take it to mean that The Descendants is worth seeing if you haven't already done so. Clooney is excellent. So, too, is the rest of the cast. Watch for Beau Bridges in a superb bit role.

Of pipelines and men

My paternal grandfather (actually, my father’s step-father, but we made no distinction) died a few years ago, having lived into his nineties. The life he lived is familiar to many Canadians of that generation. His childhood was spent on a Saskatchewan farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse. His family fled Saskatchewan during a severe drought in the late 1920s and resettled on a small, subsistence farm near Prince Rupert, British Columbia. I don’t think he finished high school. He did an apprenticeship and became a tradesman, working as a pipefitter and industrial plumber. He went wherever there was work, ending up on industrial sites all over BC and Alberta. He continued to work into his eighties, doing small jobs, one of the last being a large water-powered clock in a shopping mall in Nanaimo. He kept a small boat in his retirement, fishing for enough salmon to pot and freeze for his own use. He never had much money, but always lived within his means. He was a kind and gentle man, always thoughtful and never with a harsh word for anyone, the type of person we all want for our neighbour.

In the 1950s, he worked in what is now Kitimat, BC, where he and thousands of other workers helped build a hydroelectric dam and large aluminum smelter. Workers came from all over to work on the Kitimat project, which was carved out of the forest. I remember him showing me photos he took while hiking and fishing with an Australian co-worker on his days off. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he moved to Alberta and worked on the first tar sands development, the Syncrude facility. I deliberately use the term “tar sands” because that was what it was called, neither my grandfather nor anyone else called it anything different. “Oil sands” is a propaganda word, which was later created for the same reason those who spread waste-water treatment sludge on farmland call it “biosolids”, so that you get the impression it is something other than what it is.

Kitimat and the tar sands have consequently always had for me a connection through the memory of my grandfather. Recently, the energy company Enbridge has proposed to create a physical connection by building a pipeline between them, called the Northern Gateway. Tar sands companies would like to expand exports to the US and to Asia. A proposal to build a new pipeline from Alberta to refineries in the southern US, referred to as the Keystone XL project, is in limbo at the moment. There is considerable opposition to new pipelines in the US, especially among people living along the route who enjoy few economic benefits but must accept the risk of potential accidents. The state of Nebraska, where residents are heavily dependent on underground aquifers for water, had led opposition to Keystone XL. The US State Department, which must approve international pipelines, has required that TransCanada pipelines, the company that would build Keystone XL, provide alternative routing options. The proposal is a political hot potato. Despite a very undiplomatic amount of lobbying and pressure applied by the Canadian federal government,* the outcome remains uncertain.

The uncertainty over Keystone has the federal government and the tar sands producers eager to get working on the Northern Gateway project. Construction is not going to happen anytime soon; the proposal must first go through public consultations organized by the National Energy Board. These started last week, and approximately 4,000 people and organizations have asked to speak. Most are opposed to the project, as are most First Nations along the proposed pipeline route. In response, the federal Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver, has engaged in name-calling and sowing conspiracy theories, publicly accused those opposing the pipeline of being radicals, and suggesting that wealthy Americans are behind the opposition. The heavy foreign ownership of tar sands producers or his own government’s deliberate meddling in US politics appears to have been lost on the minister. His rant caught me by surprise, and seems a bit beneath a bright, well-educated (McGill & Harvard) former investment banker like Mr Oliver.

I’d like to ignore the name-calling and look at some of the facts. Having access to Asian markets would be economically advantageous to the tar sands producers, and these companies create tens of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly in Alberta. The pension funds of many Canadians hold shares in tar sands companies, and governments receive royalties, so directly or indirectly, the economic benefits of the tar sands extend well beyond northern Alberta. Construction of the pipeline would create a large number of construction jobs in the short term, a smaller number of maintenance jobs over the longer term, and royalty payments for those along its route. Kitimat has received large, ocean-going freighters for decades, coming and going from the aluminum plant. The port already has a license to tranship liquid natural gas. Creating new port facilities to connect ocean-going oil tankers with the proposed pipeline would create additional jobs and income there.

Just as the economic benefits of the tar sands are well-known, so, too, are the environmental costs in terms of land degradation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions (click here and here for links to two of many peer-reviewed scientific studies). New pipelines to Kitimat and/or the US would expand tar sands production and the consequent environmental impacts. The pipeline will have environmental impacts for residents of BC; anyone who argues otherwise is selling something. The proposed Northern Gateway route is approximately the shortest distance from the tar sands to a deep-water port on the Pacific. There are other port options (e.g. Prince Rupert, Vancouver), but these would require a much longer pipeline. As it is, the proposed pipeline would need to traverse mountains, forests, and thousands of watercourses large and small to reach Kitimat. Pipelines can and do spring leaks; there is no such thing as a leak-proof or leak-free one. Materials fails, human error in construction or maintenance can occur, and natural events that can damage pipelines, like floods and landslides, happen. The impacts of pipeline failures depend on what’s being transported; natural gas and oil leaks present different risks, the latter being of greater concern. In the case of the northern gateway, the pipeline would be transporting bitumen – an oily sludge – to Kitimat, and returning chemical thinners that are imported and used to make tar sands material more viscous. Neither would be welcome in a salmon stream.

There will be an increase in the amount of hydrocarbons spilled into the ocean waters off Kitimat if this pipeline goes through; that is not a risk but an inevitability, as shown by established research. The loading and transporting of hydrocarbons to ocean-going vessels invariably leads to spills. A 2003 study by the US National Research Council states that in the decade of the 1990s, there were 48 oil spills into US coastal waters from pipelines and 335 from marine terminals, releasing a combined volume of over 3 million gallons of oil. Even without any catastrophic spills, an oil pipeline terminal to Kitimat will release oil into the environment cumulatively through small, multiple spills on an ongoing basis. I have no way of forecasting how much will be spilled and what harm it would cause; only that it won’t be zero.

The greatest concern expressed by residents of the BC coast so far is the increased possibility of a catastrophic tanker spill, like that of the Exxon Valdez, which spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Kitimat’s coastal environment is similar to that of Prince William Sound in terms of wildlife, but different in its morphology; ships must follow the long, narrow Wright Sound for over 30km before reaching open ocean. The ratio of open water to coastline means that any spill from a tanker would quickly reach shore, which is where it poses the greatest harm to wildlife. Post-Exxon Valdez studies show that animal populations can eventually recover from even large oil spills in this type of environment, but the long term ecosystem impacts persist for many, many years. This is particularly worrying for people whose diets, livelihoods and incomes depend on foods harvested from coastal areas, and there are many such families, First Nations and otherwise, along the BC coast.

There are technical requirements that can be implemented to reduce the risk of accidental spills from tankers – insisting on double-hulled tanker construction, restricting movements of ships during heavy weather, and so forth. But accidents still happen. Yesterday, a popular cruise ship struck rocks off the coast of Tuscany, along a route it has been following regularly for years, during calm weather. The BC Ferries corporation’s flagship ferry Queen of the North ran aground in 2006 along the BC coast; last year a different BC ferry crashed against the pier in Nanaimo. These are crashes involving vessels that routinely ply the same waters on an ongoing basis. The large oil tankers that would be coming to Kitimat would include vessels captained and crewed by people much less familiar with BC coastal waters. Those responsible for accidents – and the companies that employ them – always trot out a list of excuses after the fact why such events are exceptional; reality is that the risk of a shipping accident is never, ever zero. More ship traffic, more risk, it’s as simple as that.

In summary, the facts are fairly straightforward. If built, the Northern Gateway pipeline would result in greater development of the tar sands, higher levels of exports, and a corresponding increase in revenues to the oil and pipeline companies involved, to their shareholders, and to those owed royalties. There will be an increase in employment in BC and Alberta over the short and longer term. Economists will argue over exactly how much these benefits would amount to; they will be significant in any event. The costs and impacts are also significant. There will be increased extraction of oil sands, increasing the regional load of air and water pollution and land degradation, and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. There will be oil spilled into Kitimat’s Wright Sound and along the pipeline route from time-to-time on an ongoing basis. With luck and very careful construction and management, these spills will be small in volume, infrequent, and have relatively small long-term impacts on wildlife and critical resources. There already exists the chance of large oil spills in Wright Sound given the existing ship traffic; the chances of occurrence and scale of the potential impacts will be increased many-fold if Northern Gateway goes through. The pipeline creates a new risk of environmental contamination to lands and rivers of the BC interior that have not previously been traversed by pipelines. If luck and/or management practices fail, the worst-case scenario is many times worse than what happened with Exxon Valdez.

For residents along the pipeline route and in Kitimat, the decision of whether to support the Northern Gateway is a tremendously difficult one. The jobs and added income would be most welcome, even if the lion’s share of the new wealth created goes to the oil companies. However, this new revenue stream comes with a potentially very nasty downside, a risk residents would be accepting for themselves and for their children and their children. Once built, you can’t go back. My grandfather, who helped build the first tar sands project and the first industrial facility at Kitimat with, literally, his own two hands, would have understood the dilemma BC residents face, and would have respected their opinions, whatever those may be. Although his upbringing was as far from Harvard and Bay Street as one can get, he would never, ever, have called people names if they didn’t agree with him, especially when their families’ livelihoods and well-being were at stake. My grandfather was a man.


*Were the American government to pull the same stunt up here, the screams of self-righteous indignation would be deafening. The extent of the lobbying is quite astounding. For example, last year officials at Canadian consulates in the US were ordered to collect names of businesses that might benefit directly or indirectly from tar sands projects, exports, or the Keystone project, and transmit these names to a database created at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. Canadian officials would then contact these people and pressure them to pressure their own elected officials to support Keystone XL. I hear these things from living in Ottawa; here's Jeffrey Simpson's more detailed commentary on it.

The geography of Tebow

There's a lot of things in the news lately about which I've been meaning to blog: the Keystone XL pipeline project, Encana accused by the US EPA of having contaminated people's wells in Wyoming whilst fracking, Canadian & US airlines going to court to prevent the EU from charging a GHG emissions tax on flights in and out of Europe, PM Harper's long-standing dream of dismantling the Wheat Board finally coming true...

But instead I'll blog about a phenomenon that's been on a lot of minds lately: Tebowmania. If you haven't heard of Tim Tebow, you probably don't follow either sports media or US media generally. He's the quarterback of the resurgent Denver Broncos, and one of the most recognizable names in American sports, in part because of his strong religious beliefs. Tebow also has a knack for rallying his team in the final minutes of games, and has brought his team back from dead last in October to having the inside chance of winning its division in the NFL and earning a playoff home game.

His story is unusual. He was born to American missionary parents in the Philippines. Serious complications occurred prior to birth, and her doctors recommended she undergo an abortion to protect her own life. She refused, and both she and Tim survived, safe and sound. He grew up to be a star athlete at the University of Florida, QBing his team to a national championship. He has also been very public about his religious beliefs, praying often before, during and after games, and speaking publicly on behalf of the pro-life/anti-abortion movement. He is very giving of his time to charity, and appears to have a sound appreciation of the fact that, at the end of the days, sports are sports and there are more important things.

He was drafted in the first round by a Broncos coach who would be fired not long after, the popular belief being that Tebow was too unorthodox to be a professional quarterback. The template for an NFL QB is New England's Tom Brady: tall, handsome, a strong arm, able to scan the opposing defence quickly, stand firm as defenders rush at him, and launch a perfectly spiralling pass over the shoulders and into the arms of a receiver sprinting downfield. Tebow is in many ways the opposite: he is a runner first, willing to dive head-first into the line of scrimmage for three yards and a cloud of dust, or to run along the line of scrimmage, drawing the defenders toward him and then pitch a short "option" pass to one of his running backs. When Tebow does throw downfield, he rarely tosses a perfect spiral, often fails to spot a wide open receiver, and at the first sign of trouble he'll scramble for whatever yards he can get.

I got to see the beginning of Tebow-mania first-hand. I was on my way to a workshop at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and decided to pop in at Mile High Stadium in Denver to see if I could get a ticket for that day's home game against the San Diego Chargers, a big divisional rivalry. The fact I could walk up to the ticket booth and buy a great seat for 1/2 price tells a lot about the state of the Denver economy. But that's another story. The Broncos had gotten off to a poor start this season under starting QB Kyle Orton, who is a more traditional drop-back QB type. Orton was unpopular with the fans, and was booed resoundingly during the first quarter of the game. His receivers dropped some easy passes, his offensive line was doing a poor job of blocking for him, and Orton's body language showed he was defeated. San Diego got out to an early lead, and things were looking bleak.

The coach eventually put Tim Tebow into the game and the crowd went absolutely nuts. Seriously, you could hardly hear yourself think. And he immediately proceeded to play the worst football you could ever imagine. He fumbled snaps, he ran around looking lost, his passes clanged to the ground yards short of his receivers. It was painful to watch. He completely stunk, no way around it. And yet, something happened. His receivers continued to try hard to get open; his offensive linemen held their blocks as long as humanly possible, and the crowd continued to roar and cheer, and no one left. On the sidelines, every Bronco save Orton was visibly inflated with extra energy.

And then in the last few minutes of the game, Tebow finally made things happen. He started connecting on long passes, he made some nice runs, and the Broncos began a furious comeback. At one point in the 4th quarter, Tebow rallied them to within a missed 2-point conversion of tying the game. San Diego ended up kicking another field goal, so when the last possession of the game wound up in Tebow's hands, he had to try and get a touchdown to win it. He moved his team within striking distance, but a hail mary pass to the end zone as time ran out failed, and Denver lost. But the myth was born. Since then, Denver's won more games than they've lost, often in the final minutes, and they sure are fun to watch.

Why is Tebow so successful? Part of it is, in my view, geographical. With a traditional NFL QB like Orton or Brady, much of the action takes place near the line of scrimmage or around the pocket (where the QB stands and throws). The defensive players (with the exception of those covering receivers) are continually moving forward, typically covering short distances in straight lines. Meanwhile, the offensive linemen are spending half their time (which is the typical frequency of passing plays) moving backwards, trying to protect the QB. Over the course of the game, if the offence fails to connect on its passes, the advantage goes to the defence. In Tebow's style of game, the offensive players are the ones moving forward in straight lines most of the time, the defenders are the ones doing more of the chasing and getting back on their heals. Even if Tebow is only grinding out a few yards at a time for most of the game, it must wear down the defenders. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that if you asked defensive players after a game against Denver, they would say they're more tired than they are after playing other teams. Tired defences have trouble covering ground as the game goes on.

Of course, this advantage only goes so far, and if the opposing team is able to score lots of points (as Brady's Patriots did last weekend), it's hard for Denver to keep pace given Tebow's time consuming, grinding style of offence. As for Tebow's religion, I think it's great that he has strong beliefs and isn't embarrassed to be public about them, even if they aren't always my own. Too many pro athletes believe in nothing more than accumulating money and fame, and care little about anyone or anything beyond themselves. I doubt very much God pays attention to football, or that He takes much of an interest in how Tebow's team does. Faith probably isn't as great a factor in his success on the field as we might like to think. Just the same, it is nice to see a clean-living, God-fearing athlete becoming notorious; it's a pleasant change from the low standards we've become used to in superstar athletes of recent years.

Looking for a roadmap in Durban

It's that time of year again where the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meet, this time in Durban, South Africa. Mother Nature provided delegates with an appropriate welcome, striking the Durban area with severe storms and floods that killed 8 people on the eve of the conference. There are two main issues on the table this year: what to do when the Kyoto Protocol expires at the end of next year, and what to do about a promise made in Copenhagen two years ago to create a Green Climate Fund of US$100 billion by 2020, which developing countries could access to finance clean energy projects and adaptation initiatives. Both promise to be contentious.

First to the topic of what follows Kyoto. The answer is, probably nothing for the time being. There are essentially two blocs of countries on this issue. One includes the states most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (e.g. small island states like the Maldives) plus European nations who are sympathetic and likely to meet their existing Kyoto targets (like Germany, Sweden and the UK (although Scottish emissions are up, English not)). The Europeans account for less than 15% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions last time I checked, the most vulnerable states an even tinier fraction. This bloc is ready to go ahead with a new round of emisisons reductions targets, with the vulnerable states pushing for heavy reductions ASAP. The other bloc consists of the big developed country emitters, like Canada, the US, Japan, plus Russia and several large emitters who have no Kyoto targets, such as India and Brazil. This much larger bloc would prefer to wait before until at elast 2020 to start a new Kyoto, and would be happy to wait until 2015 before even discussing what 2020 targets might look like. I don't see much happening on this front as a result. There's been some talk of Durban producing a "road map" to the next Kyoto; this is possible, these COPs always result in some face-saving document of one sort of another.

The Green Climate Fund is going to be interesting. At this point in time, it's not clear where the money would come from, how it would be administered, etc. If the delegates expect that it will be funded as direct transfers from rich governments to some central administrator like the Global Environment Facility or the World Bank itself, I don't see it getting off the ground. Since the onset of the current European and US economic problems, deep-pocketed nations have become scarce. If there's room for private sector involvement in the proposed fund, I think we will see more progress, since the US and others are likely to hop on board. The devil is, of course, always in the details, so I wouldn't bet my mortgage on seeing the $100 billion in place on 1 January 2020.

Where does Canada fit into Durban? We're about as welcome as bedbugs. It's not enough that our government signed Kyoto but did little to actually try and meet our targets; now a rumour is circulating Ottawa that our government will announce it is formally withdrawing from it. I hope this is just someone in the PMO floating a trial balloon to gauge where the Canadian public stands on the issue, and is not actually being seriously considered. It's one thing to leave a restaurant without paying your share of the check, another to flip the finger to the other people at your table as you walk out the door. Because really, that's the symbolic equivalent of it. Wiser minds will hopefully prevail.

China has scolded the Canadian government over it's anti-Kyoto stance (can you blame them - we're telling them they should have targets when we refuse to meet our own). China seems to me to be the real wildcard in international climate politics these days. On one hand, it's one of the biggest emitters of GHGs, although China is making better efforts to control emissions and invest in cleaner technologies than many give them credit for doing. On the other hand, China is rapidly becoming a major player on the alternative energy technology scene, and stand to be key beneficiaries of any global push for GHG emissions reduction and clean energy. So it will be interesting to see what they end up doing.

All this to say, I'm glad that these annual meetings still take place, even if it is more an exercise in political science than environmental science. After all, there are many other environmental issues that receive little international attention, much less a high-profile annual conference with particular objectives being negotiated. But, at the same time, I sometimes worry that enthusiasm and momentum may eventually become lost if roadmaps and not results are all we can expect.

UPDATE: The Durban talks concluded Sunday. The Europeans have agreed to continue with emissions targets for the period between the end of Kyoto next year and 2020. The US, India and China, among others, have agreed to ongoing negotiations towards an emissions-reduction agreement by 2020 that would include all countries. A little progress was made on the Green Climate Fund to be set up in 2020, but it still remains to be seen where the money will come from. Click here for a useful summary of what transpired. The Canadian delegation was described as irrelevant or irritating, depending on which media you read.