Talking to Our Councillors

It’s always a challenge for our elected officials to engage with residents in meaningful ways.  This is especially important at the municipal level, where issues are community-based by nature, and our councillors need to know details of what’s happening in the community to do their jobs.

A number of efforts have been tried.  Public consultations are often organized in Gatineau, but to those in attendance they can often feel more like public information sessions, where the city gives details on decisions that have already been made.  Even when the structure of the consultation does give the impression that it’s to gauge opinions and get feedback from residents, it’s often hard to judge what the city does with the information that it collects.  An example is the tramway.  STO held public consultations shortly after plans for the tramway were announced, and the events were well structured, collecting opinions and feedback in an organized way from those in attendance.  Yet as the project solidified, there seemed to be no changes to the original preferred plans.

Going forward, it would help with public perception if the city published reports summarizing the information it collects at these public consultations, showing how it was taken into consideration, and justifying final decisions.  This would need to be well promoted and made easily available in a prominent place on the City of Gatineau’s website.  Transparency is key to avoiding a perception in our communities that public consultations are merely public relations exercises.  Clearly showing that attending these events is a productive use of residents’ time would also help to increase turnout, and help to grow trust and confidence between the community and the city’s government.

Another example of previous attempts at community outreach was how municipal council meetings would occasionally be held outside of Old Hull, to give residents in the east and west of the city easier access to proceedings.  This was a nice initiative, and usually had high turnout.  However, the city has decided to discontinue this practice going forward.  It is hard to tell if the council meetings held outside of downtown had a different audience than the regular council sessions.  Topics at the Aylmer meeting earlier this year focused mostly on the environment, with few questions focusing specifically on western regions of the city.  So if the meetings tend to be the same content regardless of where they’re held, the argument for having them in different parts of the city becomes somewhat less compelling.  Yet any such decisions should be evidence based, with justifications published and clearly accessible.

Perhaps there are more appropriate alternatives to holding council meetings in different neighbourhoods.  Do Aylmer councillors really need to be at meetings with residents in Buckingham, and vice-versa?  Town hall meetings with the mayor and councillors of specific neighbourhoods might be more appropriate.  These are common in the U.S., often used by senators and congressmen to interact with local communities.  They can be more specifically tailored to concerns of the neighbourhood where they’re held, making them more appealing for local residents.  

A Difficult Time for Restaurants and Bars

Over the last couple of weeks two pillars of the restaurant and bar scene in Gatineau have closed.

First was the British Pub, an anchor of Old Aylmer’s Rue Principale.  Although the hotel and café will remain open for the present, the restaurant and bar services will be converted into an on-demand space for large events.

The pub has been a central stop for many looking to have dinner and a drink on Aylmer’s main street.  The restoration of the building about 12 years ago also gave a dynamic energy to the commercial artery, allowing the development of many other interesting eateries and cafés.  The painstaking care taken by the owner, Mike Clemann, to retain the atmosphere of the hotel throughout its 185 year history made it a testament to Aylmer’s rich past.  Hopefully a way will be found to again make The British Public House a meeting place of choice for the community in the future.

The other major closure recently announced was the Brasseurs du Temps (aka BDT) in Hull.  This establishment had kick-started a renaissance of microbreweries in Gatineau, of which Aylmer has shared with L’Autre Oeil and more recently 5e Baron.  It was for years a favourite place for workers to go for a drink after leaving the office in Hull.  The challenges faced by many establishments in Old Hull following the shift to telework was quite painful for Brasseurs du Temps, and the diversification of downtown to an attractive place for young professionals to live hasn’t happened fast enough to allow them to remain in business.

Yet the closing of the British Pub shows that the challenges faced by bars and restaurants run much deeper than the rapid transformation of city centres.  Had Brasseurs du Temps moved to an area closer to where people live, such as Aylmer, Mont Bleu, or Pointe-Gatineau, it still would have been difficult to stay viable.  A number of difficulties are facing such businesses.  For BDT, one was staffing.  In a tight labour market, many of the young people who traditionally would have gone to work in restaurants can now find less demanding jobs elsewhere doing office work.  Increases in salaries, often necessary for workers given the explosion in the price of rent, have further squeezed the bottom lines of many bars and restaurants.  Add to this the steep rise in the price of supplies given current rates of inflation, particularly for food, and owners find themselves with very difficult choices.  They have to raise their own prices, but this encourages those who may have previously gone out for a meal to stay home and order a pizza instead, with the beer coming from the local convenience store.  Many people are generally eating out less.  High interest rates mean taking out short term loans is no longer viable, and high municipal tax rates on commercial real estate leave very little room to manoeuvre.  These factors weighed on the British.

Sadly, this could be a harbinger of what’s to come, with many other businesses buckling under current economic headwinds.

The Value of Nurses and Teachers

The provincial government is entering a tense phase of its negotiations with a number of public sector unions, notably those representing nurses and teachers.  Strikes are being scheduled and carried out, yet the government has repeatedly stated that it doesn’t have the means to meet the wage demands of workers, and is instead offering about 2% a year for the next five years, well below current levels of inflation.

Strikes by these workers will be very inconvenient for many citizens, and likely unpopular.  Yet we should also look at the value these workers offer to society.  

Let’s start with nurses and others working in the healthcare industry.  During the years of the pandemic, Quebecers had to endure stringent lockdowns, the harshest in the country.  Quebec was the only province to impose curfews on its citizens, forbidding them to leave their homes at night for non-essential tasks.  In terms of generalized lockdowns during the day, Quebec was usually the first province to enact them, and among the last to lift them.  It was the only province to require that stores like supermarkets close on Sundays for months at a time.  And yet, Quebec had among the highest Covid fatality rates in the country, something that was attributed to the inability of the Quebec healthcare system to support the increased pressure caused by Covid illnesses.  This was also used as justification for the province’s lockdown measures being stricter than elsewhere in the country.  Add the loss of life from the virus to the added economic and mental health costs of stricter restrictions, and the price of ensuring that workers in the healthcare industry earn wages that are comparable to other other provinces or the private sector becomes relatively small.  There will be other pandemics, and making sure that our healthcare system is up to the task and properly staffed is among the best ways we could spend our money. 

Turning to teachers, the situation is dire.  We’ve gotten to the point where the Quebec government now contents itself with seeking to have an “adult” in every classroom, regardless of qualifications, as stated during the summer by Education Minister Bernard Drainville.  The importance of the work of teachers is well understood - strong grade school education has been shown to raise the lifetime earnings of students by more than 25%.

Given the value that both of these types of workers provide to society, and the critical staffing crisis that the government is already facing in these areas, do we really want to impose real wage cuts on these workers, with raise offers significantly lagging inflation?  Or is this an area worth investing in to ensure that our society is ready for tomorrow’s challenges?  Being stingy in these negotiations will get us painful strikes now, and significant vulnerabilities in Quebec society down the road.  One of the reasons that nurses and teachers tend to earn far less than workers in other domains with similar levels of education is because they’ve traditionally avoided being confrontational in wage negotiations.  Perhaps that’s now changing.  

The High Price of Buying a Home

Housing is a source of financial stress that has had a very uneven impact on families’ budgets.  For renters, it’s largely meant staying put as much as possible, with financial misery ensuing for those who have to find a new apartment.  In terms of purchasing homes, many would-be home owners have simply been priced out of the market, and have given up on their dreams of owning property.  Prices continue to climb, and when combined with higher interest rates on mortgages, the situation often becomes impossible.

Yet there are bits of good news.  Construction of new housing units has picked up over the last couple of years, which should take at least some pressure off of prices.  Still, a number of factors could weigh this down.  Labour is ever harder to come by, and corresponding salary costs are substantially higher than in previous years.  But far more challenging are interest rates.  Developers usually borrow money from banks and investors to finance projects, repaying the loan and pocketing a profit after construction is completed and the homes are sold.  However, higher interest rates and tighter access to credit mean that it’s harder for developers to turn a profit, and hence there’s less incentive for them to build new housing.  Canada’s central bank, the Bank of Canada, has raised interest rates to slow down the economy, take pressure off of prices and thereby reduce inflation.  But for housing, these factors mean higher interest rates could instead put upward pressure on prices.

Another aspect of home sales where changes may come is regarding how realtors collect their fees.  A recent court verdict in the U.S. found that the National Association of Realtors and large brokerages conspired to keep the prices of home sales artificially high via locked-in commission rates even as home prices have exploded.  Although it’s not yet clear how things will change in the U.S. following this verdict, one possibility is that realtor fees could move to a fixed-fee structure from the current 5% to 6% of the sale of a home.  The current compensation structure has been hugely beneficial to realtors.  The prices of home sales have roughly doubled in the last several years in many communities, as have realtors' commissions, despite their work staying largely the same.  Currently in the U.S., the average home sale nets a realtor over $65,000.  It is predicted that this could now fall by as much as half.  How this could spill over into Canadian housing prices, where realtors' compensation structures are similar, remains to be seen.

What makes the price of housing such a tricky issue, though, is that current homeowners are quite happy to see the prices of their homes skyrocket.  Who doesn’t like feeling richer with little effort?  And this means that municipal politicians, those who have perhaps the most significant power to change the situation via permitting and approving regional development plans, have little incentive to act, as many voters are quite content with the current situation.  Younger generations are, sadly, left out in the cold.

Make the PublisSac better, don’t ban it

“Ad bags” are the poster-child for irresponsible marketing. Municipalities are BEING pressured to ban the bags to reduce waste. In Aylmer, the ad bags are too useful to get rid of. Why dismantle a system that works, when simple improvements can make a big difference.

The problems with the bag are that certain flyers are impossible to recycle or reuse if they are glossy. The bag itself is plastic, and thus is hard to recycle. Another problem is the mess caused in apartment building entrances when ad bags pile up in a disorderly way.

The Bulletin has been asking readers to reuse -- not recycle --  all the newsprint they receive at home. Reusing newsprint to wrap compost, for garden mulch, or to start fires is far more environmentally-responsible than pitching it into the blue bin. Blue bin contents get sorted and sent off to different countries for final treatment. Some recyclable waste is sold on a market (like newsprint), but some is treated as waste with no second life. All of this is an expense for our cities (read: taxpayers), which is supplemented by Quebec (pays back to cities a portion of the recycling deficit). Quebec City then requires paper producers, such as this newspaper, or companies that run flyers, to pay the Quebec government a flat rate on all newsprint that comes out of a print shop. So, the environmentally-responsible move on the part of cities and provinces would be merely to require all flyers to be easily compostable, as is newsprint.

It has been a long time since a tree was cut down to make newsprint, if that’s an issue for concerned readers. Newsprint is made of by-products from the lumber industry, which actually reduces waste in Quebec! And newspaper ink is vegetable-based, again environmentally less-damaging than the chemicals used in decades past. The bags themselves could BE vegetable-based, rather than plastic, and as for the messy entrance-ways, well some solution start at home.

In Outaouais, in Aylmer, folks are looking for more to read, not less. Around the Bulletin office, people can be seen reading flyers from front to back! They aren’t only looking for coupons or special deals. They are spending time reading something new. With newspapers inside, PubliSac is being used more for distributing information.

Knowing that many people wish to read more, but don’t have the habit -- or means -- to buy more magazines, books, and newspapers, promoting a ban on the ad bags borders on elitism.

How about putting the efforts to ban the bags towards improving them – and helping the Bulletin grow! -- by adding content to the ad bags?

A Supermarket for Old Hull

Gatineau’s downtown is a shell of what it should be.  Many of the houses are in deplorable condition, with a number completely burnt-out following fire.  Owners rent them out without maintaining them, waiting for prices to climb enough to make a substantial profit selling the land, which is then converted into condos.

Gatineau has been looking to revitalize downtown Hull for decades, with little success.  In some ways the situation has gotten worse in recent years.  The area was already largely a food desert, but the closing of Giant Tiger a few years ago removed one of the few options residents had for buying fresh produce.  Many called for targeted municipal tax policies to encourage the opening of a grocery store, but this would require coordination with provincial legislators as well, due to restrictions the provincial government places on cities creating targeted tax measures.  Yet there’s no shortage of options for junk food in Hull, from the many convenience stores to the McDonald’s, with a liquor store also in the area.

So, it’s certainly welcome news that a new grocery store is going to open in a central location in the area.  Although details are still emerging as of the writing of this editorial, a COOP supermarket will be included in the new WEII building on the corner of Wellington and Eddy.  This will be a major step forward in terms of normalizing Old Hull and making it a place where families and young professionals choose to live.  It will also help to prevent most of the new condos and apartments being built from ending up as short-term rentals for tourists.

Yet more will clearly need to be done.  Steve Moran, the councillor for the area, has a number of plans to help move things forward.  The city has already established a policy of favouring buildings of 2 to 7 storeys in the region and created a grant program to help meet targets for density.  There’s an argument that going higher than 7 floors isn’t possible due to infrastructure limitations.  Any such limitations will need to be addressed in the coming years, especially if the federal government lets go of some of the offices it currently owns in the area, opening substantial space for new residences.

A new bylaw put in place in late 2021 requires that any requests for demolition be accompanied by plans for the construction of the building which will come after.  This prevents owners from leaving lots vacant for long periods, but at the same time can mean that burnt out husks remain standing for longer.  The city is also considering a vacant house tax, though no date has yet been set for when that might be implemented.

Most importantly of all, the city is prioritizing the creation of markets, parks, and better public transit to accelerate the transition away from heavy reliance on federal workers to support Old Hull’s economy by dining out for their lunches.  The city’s success or failure will define Old Hull for generations to come.

Wasting Taxpayer Money

As taxpayers, we want money that we pay to our governments to be well spent, whether at the federal, provincial, or municipal levels.  The municipal is in ways the most critical, as sources of funding and ability to borrow are more limited, services maintaining infrastructure touch residents directly, and the media pays comparatively little attention to how cities spend money, meaning less oversight than at the provincial and federal levels.  An excellent example is Laval, where for almost 25 years Gilles Vaillancourt ran the city with next to no scrutiny, enriching himself freely in the process.  In 2012 he was finally charged, and in 2016 he was convicted of corruption and fraud, sentenced to 6 years in jail and ordered to repay more than $8M in ill-gotten gains.

This is not to say that cities come under zero scrutiny.  Recently a story ran in Le Droit showing that about $10M has been spent by Gatineau since 2016 on an accounting system that turned out to be largely ineffective.  Called PIVO, this system was originally meant to be operational in 2018.  Yet high staff turnover and unforeseen complexities of the project meant that this timeline proved to be completely unrealistic.  After a series of attempts to salvage the project, it was officially suspended last year.  Instead, an agreement was reached with the city of Levis to use the accounting software they had built, and where some of the work already done by Gatineau could be used to personalize Levis’ solution.  Still, this came with an additional bill of over $8M.

The city has been as transparent as possible on this file, which is to the credit of town hall.  And according to all indications everything was done in good faith.  Yet from the beginning there wasn’t enough oversight, and the city doesn’t have a calculation of how much of the original $10M spent on PIVO is truly lost, versus how much can be considered salvageable for other projects.

Given that economic conditions will likely worsen over the coming years, including ever higher costs, the importance of doing as much with the money the city has will be greater than ever.  Ensuring that the Office of the Auditor General of Gatineau has all of the tools necessary to thoroughly conduct its duties, and in a timely enough manner to head off waste before too much is lost, helps to substantially reduce risk.  Having a strong and well-funded media that is focused on local governance is also essential, whether via private news sources like Le Droit and the Bulletin or public entities like the CBC and Radio Canada.  Substantial cost overruns for the $100M Slush Puppy Arena were a reminder of how much is at stake.  This translates to about $300 for every resident of Gatineau, be they adult or child.  The cost estimates for the Lucy Faris library project in Aylmer are quickly rising from the previous calculations of about $50M.  Careful validation of the details of expenditures on this project can help to avoid nasty surprises down the road.

Deschenes Rapids

The Québec Transport Ministry (MTQ) recently made clear their final decision regarding the Deschênes Rapids, that demolition of the dam is the only viable option they see.  The government states that "too many accidents have happened at the site to continue to close their eyes”.

Built in 1880 to support the local sawmills, the dam generated electricity from 1893 that enabled the operation of a tramway, as well as providing lighting to both Aylmer and Hull.

The reasoning that they’re now too dangerous seems odd, as it's not clear what sort of accidents the government is referring to, and whether the removal of what's left of the rapids would have prevented these accidents.  As per documents published by the Association of Residents of Deschênes, during the period from 2005 and 2015 the MTQ has previously made reference to 21 incidents near the dam, and 6 fatalities.  Yet only a single incident from 2009 directly involved the dam site, and did not cause a fatality.  The other incidents were closer to Ottawa, so it's hard to assert that things would have turned out differently had the dam not been in place.

And even without the dam, the currents will continue to be strong, and the area will be by no means safe.  Opening it up to, say, kayaking may turn out to be a popular activity, but it will also almost certainly result in an increase in injuries and possibly even lead to fatalities.

These ruins are a unique echo of Aylmer's past, and a beautiful spot to watch the sun rise and enjoy nature.  Although the impact of removing them isn't easy to fully grasp, the area is likely to lose some of its charm.

Yet more so, this seems like a waste of public money.  The ruins have been vastly reduced in recent decades by the currents and weather.  Comparing pictures from the 1990s and recent years, as shown below, makes it clear how little time nature is likely to allow the ruins to remain even if the government does nothing.  Yet to remove them in one fell swoop now will require blocking the flow of water into the site so that the workers can accomplish their tasks, something that will be a complicated undertaking.  Given the chronic underfunding of our health care and education systems, it's not hard to imagine a better use for this money.  And of course, the Ministry of Transport could simply use this funding for maintenance of our highways, something that certainly needs doing.

The Strength of Aylmer's Main Street

Aylmer is quite fortunate to have one of the best collections of restaurants on a single street in the National Capital Region - our Rue Principale.  From cafes to restaurants to specialty food shops, there’s a bit of everything dotted along our Main Street. 

A certain amount of turnover is to be expected, yet it was very sad to see such excellent restaurants as Bistro Vitalia and, several years earlier, Le Maçon Pub close their doors.  Now it’s the turn of L’Aubergiste.  Yet a number of fine establishments remain, such as L’Antonyme, Bistro Mexicana, Lanterne De Szechwan and Beurre Salé.  Establishments like the British Pub, L’Autre Oeil and Bambou also serve up creative and high quality meals.  Plus we have options that serve up quick but tasty food and have become Aylmer institutions, such as Aylmer BBQ and a number of pizza restaurants.  Add to that coffee shops like Mulligan, Sérénithé, Rio Açaí, La Femme à Marier and the British Café, and there’s no shortage of places to explore right here in our own neighbourhood.  Businesses like the Deux Frères bakery, Cassis ice cream or the 5e Baron microbrewery add further charm.

In order to keep our Main Street vibrant, it’s money well spent to go out locally instead of heading for Ottawa’s Byward Market, Chinatown or Little Italy.  Also, keeping in mind the proximity of shops like Béatrice et Chocolats, William J. Walter sausages and the Bouquinart bookstore when it comes time to buy a gift helps to ensure that our main commercial artery continues to thrive in the future. 

There are also a number of educational facilities with interesting programs on offer, such as Sonart music school, Aylmer Jiu Jitsu, and LoulArt Fine Arts, with a variety of activities for kids in particular.

Aylmer is very fortunate not to suffer from the same challenges that afflict other regions of Gatineau - a spattering of shops here and there, but not enough to create a lively commercial centre.  The vitality of Rue Principale has even spilled over further up Chemin d’Aylmer, offering even more nice places to visit like Chocolats Favoris, La Veille Alliance bakery, and Fleuriste Au Jardin De Sylvie among many others - even more impressive considering central Aylmer’s comparatively small population.

In addition to local residents, the municipal government has a role to play in maintaining the strength of Aylmer’s commercial artery.  Working with APICA to ensure festivals are of the highest caliber would remind potential clients of how interesting shopping and dining on Principale can be.  Recent editions of events like Festival du Vieux-Aylmer have had somewhat fewer tables and drawn smaller crowds than in previous years.  Blocking off the street to cars for the day so that those visiting tables can freely skip between stalls has increased turnout in years past.  Showing all of Gatineau and Ottawa how lovely it is to take in an evening at Aylmer’s marina and then walk over for supper at a nearby restaurant on Rue Principale would further help to ensure our local economy remains strong.

Life on the Street

Homelessness and drug abuse continue to surge in our downtown regions.  The area around the Byward Market is experiencing a crisis like never before.  Hull is also seeing a significant increase in the number of “tent cities”, especially close to the Ruisseau de la Brasserie.

The high cost of housing is often blamed for this, and it is certainly a major factor.  There’s no question that we need to build more housing, and to do so in strategic locations.  Old Hull is in major need of development, as large areas of it are still filled with dilapidated houses that, judging from the number that have burned out, are significant fire hazards.  Subsidized housing is certainly essential in the short term, as well as more apartments in general to reduce leverage that landlords have to raise rent prices.

A major obstacle to building more housing is labour shortages in the construction industry.  With many of the workers in this field set to retire in the coming years, this problem will only get worse.  We’ll need to rely on immigration to fill this skills gap, and adjust our immigration system accordingly.

Yet there’s another major factor at play in the crisis of homelessness - the severity of a drug epidemic facing countries all over the world.  Opioids like fentanyl are getting far more addictive each year, as nefarious innovations in chemistry make these drugs increasingly powerful.  And all signs point towards this trend continuing in the future.  As more people get hopelessly hooked on such powerful narcotics, it’s inevitable that they’ll end up living on the streets, as the drugs ravage both their bodies and minds.

The consequence is people barely holding on, living on the fringes of society, and dying on the streets.  King Edward Street in Ottawa feels like it’s under siege, littered with syringes and people having psychotic episodes, many times due to the drugs they’re taking, and with no help available.  The Chinese embassy’s office on that street has been occupied by the homeless, who have set up a camp on the roof of its garage.  Residents are complaining about being afraid to go outside their doors at night.  The shelters and other service centres concentrated in the area are completely overwhelmed, as are the police.

To address this huge challenge, we’ll need to look at housing and drug abuse as two factors contributing to the same crisis.

Coming up with specific solutions is a hugely complex problem.  We need to develop a pharmaceutical drug to reduce the symptoms of withdrawals.  This will not be easy, but as was demonstrated during the race for a Covid vaccine, with enough will, fast scientific progress is possible.  We also could discuss offering alternative treatment centres to those suffering from addiction, for instance in more rural areas.  Being treated in areas where drug use is rampant makes recovery that much more challenging for those seeking a way out.  Being removed from such influences could be quite appealing, at least to those who are truly looking to save themselves.  

An Adult in Every Classroom

The shortage of teachers facing Quebec is now excruciating.  Education Minister Bernard Drainville made this abundantly clear by announcing that he had simply succeeded in arranging for an “adult” in every classroom.  It’s incredible how much things have changed in recent years.  Until about a decade ago teachers felt extremely lucky to find a permanent position in regions where they wanted to work, and would spend many years working as substitute teachers, waiting to finally land some job security.

The current situation is in many ways a vicious cycle, similar to that faced by nurses.  The fewer teachers that there are, the greater the pressure and workload faced by those who are in the profession, and the higher the risk of burnout.  More teachers quit, and the situation becomes increasingly difficult.

The system needs new approaches.  The most obvious is making sure that those who Mr. Drainville refers to as simply “adults”, employees brought in to moderate classrooms and who don’t have a degree in education, get the support they need.  Paying them to take courses on at least the basics of teaching the subjects for which they’re now responsible cannot wait.  Having them figure out what to do while on the job and with very little training is a recipe for disaster.  This could impact children for many years, as they miss out on quality learning during prime years of their development.

Formal support networks to assist these “adults” with advice, ideas for activities, or simply when they need someone to confide in would be quite helpful.  These would also be very useful for newly graduated teachers in order to reduce burnout.

That said, the key component of any long term solution is salary.  Although the average salary for teachers is about $80,000 per year, to reach such a level requires more than a decade of experience.  Those starting out in the profession need to get by on about $50,000, the lowest pay for teachers in any province in the country.  

Given that a degree in education takes an average of four years to complete, and that for at least the first decade the expected earnings will be on par with many careers that don’t require a degree, convincing students to enter a program in education is a hard sell.

As a society, we’ll have to decide how much education is truly worth to us.  Educators from day care all the way to non-tenured professors at universities are paid substantially less than elsewhere.  Their salaries are also lower than many professions with similar educational requirements, such as finance and engineering.  Police and firefighters have fought hard for their pay, and now their salaries tend to also be significantly higher than those in education.   Yet those who shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders have an obvious value to society.  Given that teaching tends to be staffed by far more women than men, addressing this deficiency in pay would also help to reduce wage inequality based on gender.

(Thanks to Brian Rock for insightful comments on this subject.)

Best Before Dates

Expiration dates on food have long been relied on to ensure that what we purchase is fresh.  It’s often thought that eating food past its expiration date can make us sick as well.  Yet these dates are often quite arbitrary, and can cause us to throw out perfectly good food, leading to substantially more waste for society.  Even if portions of this waste are composted, there are substantial amounts that end up stuffing landfills and increasing methane emissions as they decompose, a powerful greenhouse gas.  And given the huge jump in prices at supermarkets in recent years, we’re doing whatever we can to cut down on our grocery bills.

These dates are generally fixed by the manufacturer, with no outside oversight or regulatory guidance.  According to researchers at Cornell University many foods don’t need expiration dates at all.

Expiration dates only became widespread in the 1970s, and were initially intended to signal to retailers when to rotate merchandise.  They’re better described as a manufacturer’s estimate of when the food is at peak quality.  Safety is only a factor for relatively few products such as meat and seafood.  In the U.S., the only food whose expiration dates are regulated is baby formula.

Risks of food poisoning come more from how food is stored and inadequate refrigeration, factors that are completely separate from expiration dates.  With the exception of meat and seafood, unless there’s mold forming, older food is unlikely to be dangerous even if it tastes bad.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that almost a third of food produced goes uneaten.  Retailers in the U.S. throw out more than 40 billion pounds of food every year, with consumers throwing out nearly twice that.  ReFED, a non-profit which aims to reduce food waste, estimates that about 7 billion pounds of food waste is due to discarding perfectly good food with expired best-before dates.

The U.K. has been working to reduce food waste for the last 15 years.  The British are one of the first governments in the world to standardize how expiration dates are calculated, and have pushed education campaigns to teach people how to know when it’s truly time to throw away food.  The largest grocery chains in Britain have also stopped allowing expiration dates for a variety of foods, in particular produce.  Studies have found that food waste in landfills dropped almost 20% following the implementation of this initiative.

Given recent spikes in poverty and homelessness, at the very least we could start a campaign to encourage stores to donate edible products with expired best-before dates to food banks and other charities.  As a society we’re producing more than enough food.  The idea that filling our cupboards and fridges is breaking bank accounts of many poorer families is completely unjustifiable, especially if almost a third of food is ending up in the garbage anyway.  Doing more with what we have benefits everyone, and cutting down on waste goes a long way in protecting the environment.

Predicting the Weather 

Weather forecasts are the type of news that people tend to check more than anything else.  Everyone wants to know if it will rain later in the day.  Yet forecasts are also often wrong, especially when it comes to predicting rain or snow.  Meteorologists are quite clear up front about the possibility for error - when it comes to precipitation, they talk about probabilities, not certainty.  Predicting a 30% chance of rain (i.e. likely dry weather) means they expect to be wrong one time in three.  And this is assuming that the likelihoods they publish are even accurate to start with. 

Yet given modern technological advances, it’s surprising that people are willing to put up with so much uncertainty.  Airlines would love it if flyers were so forgiving of errors on their parts.  Yet any airline that cancels a flight one time in three is unlikely to last the year.

In the end, weather forecasts are based on models that rely on large amounts of data.  This information is usually collected via ships, balloons and satellites, in addition to weather stations, often located near airports.

Forecasts have certainly improved over the decades.  According to the National Weather Service in the U.S., today’s two day forecast for heavy rain is as accurate as the same day forecast was thirty years ago.

Yet some forecasts are better than others.  European weather forecasting has consistently been shown to be more accurate than American versions.  The reason is simple - the Europeans use a better simulation system with more data.  They also use more powerful computing hardware.  In other words, the Europeans have invested more money to have higher quality forecasting.

In Canada, making accurate weather forecasts is more challenging than in other parts of the world.  Weather systems across the country are all interconnected, including those in the sparsely populated north.  Yet it’s more difficult and expensive to collect weather data in regions that are far from populated areas.  Canada’a weather stations are mostly concentrated in southern regions of the country, meaning that data quality farther north is more sparse and less detailed.  The U.S. and Europe have the advantage of denser populations, making it easier to collect data by leveraging pre-existing infrastructure like airports.

Still, improving our weather predictions is completely possible.  It just takes a push within society, and people showing that more accurate forecasts are important to them.  It’s certainly nice to be able to better plan an outdoor event, but the benefits are even more tangible for those running construction projects.  And most importantly of all, being able to better predict hurricanes and other extreme weather events would save lives.  Although Gatineau and Ottawa don’t have to face major tropical storms, we’ve been lucky that there have thus far not been any deaths from tornadoes and extreme winds.  Coastal regions are far more at risk.  Having a better handle on extreme weather conditions would give people more time to prepare, whether it’s securing their property or escaping from harm’s way.  This would certainly be money well spent.

Trusting Hydro Québec

Aylmer recently suffered yet another major wind storm, which ripped down a number of streets in the older part of the city, uprooting or snapping large trees along Foran and Broad street, among several others.

Extreme weather events are becoming very common, and this was the second time this year that residents were without power for a period of several days.  The wind damage was extensive, but many residents were left wondering if we’re properly prepared for such situations in the future.

Old growth trees make older parts of Aylmer quite beautiful, lining our streets and giving us welcome shade in our backyards.  Yet many of these trees lean heavily on power lines.  Even for Hydro Québec, it’s difficult to judge the extent of the risks caused by branches, since most power lines run out of sight through people’s backyards instead of along the streets.  This makes our streets much prettier and less cluttered, but when unkempt branches take out a main power line in someone’s backyard it can leave hundreds of neighbours in the dark.

The obvious solution to this is more maintenance.  At a minimum, Hydro Québec should come and remove any branches that residents notice are dangerously close to power lines on their property.  Yet they have a policy of only pruning a particular yard once every four to six years.  Concerned citizens are told that if they want branches removed more often, they have to contact a private contractor and foot the bill themselves.  Even if some virtuous members of our community do so, should a branch fall in one of their neighbours’ yards they could still find themselves in the dark plus feeling extremely frustrated.

Although trimming branches wouldn’t have saved the sections of power lines taken out by fallen trees in late July, it would surely have lightened the workload of the employees striving to get our power restored, and shortened the length of the power interruption.

Yet the response of Hydro Québec was frustrating on many other levels as well.  They had said that over 20 teams had been mobilized to restore power, yet by the end of the second day after the storm and with over 200 homes in a single grid still waiting for their electricity to come back on, only a single team was working.  It took 12 more hours for those 200 homes to get their lights back on.

Lastly, an important part of Quebec’s green strategy is to get more homes to switch from heating their homes with natural gas to using electricity.  With so many power interruptions and with them lasting for so long, this is becoming a tough sell.  At least with natural gas our homes won’t freeze during the next mid-winter ice storm, and we’ll be able to enjoy a hot shower even if we won’t have a warm dinner.  Hydro Québec will have to earn our trust for us to become so dependent on them.  At the very least, we should all give them a call to let them know they need to do better.  Their number is (888) 385-7252.

Climate Depression 

It’s been a wild year in terms of weather and natural disasters.  We’ve seen floods and fires across the country, record heat across the northern hemisphere, and tornados and major wind storms across the Ottawa valley.  The media is quick to point towards climate change as the cause, and an overwhelming body of evidence does of course point to our air pollutants raising the world’s temperatures and making extreme weather events more common.  The flip side to this is that our actions do have impacts, no matter how small.

What’s frustrating about media coverage of the natural disasters lately is that it really does feel like doom and gloom.  There’s often no mention of how we can each make a slight impact on the situation.  As we read about how challenging the future will be, it can be therapeutic to know that we’re at least doing our part, making a few small sacrifices along the way.

There are the commonly known solutions, such as switching to an electric car anywhere where electricity is not generated using fossil fuels, or just carpooling to work, driving less or driving a smaller vehicle.  We can take fewer flights, booking a single longer vacation instead of several short ones if possible.  And of course, we can try to reduce energy consumption in our homes by upgrading windows or making sure that any new appliances we buy have maximum energy efficiency.

Yet there are a number of other, less known solutions too.  We can make sure that air conditioners don’t contain hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs.  Such refrigerants cause far more global warming per kilo than carbon dioxide.  Sadly, only newer units have moved away from these HFCs.  Even more problematic, much of the electricity used to keep air conditioners around the world working comes from fossil fuels.  As the world heats up, people run their air conditioners more, and this in turn heats the world faster.  Given that air conditioners transfer heat from inside to outside, and that most people live in cities, this causes urban areas to experience even more stifling heat.  More subsidies could help people transition to modern and energy-efficient air conditioners, with less impact on the environment.  

Office buildings could also look to moderate their use of air conditioners.  On a hot day, many people can find it chilly in the office, something excessive to put it mildly.  Installing thermal curtains or even closing curtains when the sun is shining from that direction can also reduce the need to jack up the air conditioning.  Maintaining indoor temperatures at around 25 degrees makes for healthy living spaces that don’t consume excessive energy and create unnecessary impacts on the local environment.

Planting more trees is also a very cost effective way to reduce hot spots in cities.  Many areas of new construction tend to tear down old growth trees and plant new ones, meaning it will be decades before residents can enjoy cooling effects from today’s saplings.

Hollywood and Old Men

Hollywood has never tried to be a true reflection of our societies and cultures.  It’s an escape, a way to enjoy a fanciful story for a few hours.  Although the shift to superhero movies has made this ever more true, it was always the case.

New trends in movies have made it harder for actors to establish themselves as superstars.  These days people go to the movies to see characters, as opposed to the star of the film.  Given that many of these characters wear masks, it makes it even harder for the leading actors to make a deep connection with the audience.

That’s not to say that there are no more names that draw large audiences.  It’s just that almost all of these actors made their names in the 20th century, and are now nearing or well past the age when most people retire.  This summer’s movie selection has shown this very clearly.  The biggest productions starred 60 year old Tom Cruise and 80 year old Harrison Ford.  Other seniors headlining major movies included Denzel Washington, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Pierce Brosnan.  Although the headline-grabbing leading man still exists, he is aging.

It’s also very accurate to describe these people as leading men.  Hollywood has always had a blatant double standard when it comes to men versus women.  The former become mature and distinguished, while the latter become yesterday’s news.  As the distinguished push 80, the hypocrisy is now a bit galling.  We often speak of gender equality, yet our entertainment industry still expects women to have youthful sex appeal, with the only option for staying in the spotlight being to undergo extensive plastic surgery.  

Yet the world created by Hollywood is not only devoid of older women.  Also missing are body types that fall outside of the mold they promote as attractive.  Seeing a movie set in New York gives a very different image of the city compared to what you'd see walking around its actual streets.  And this isn’t just limited to action movies, which are easily dismissible as shallow.  It extends into independent films as well, those that pride themselves on their creativity and artistic value.  

Ethnic minorities are faring better than they used to in terms of roles in the film industry, but they’re still far from a representation equal to their proportions in our society as a whole.  Yet the progress made on this front shows that change is indeed possible.  

In the end, Hollywood, like most industries, will follow the money.  As long as audiences turn out in sufficient numbers to take in the usual offerings, little will change.  Movies and television series are meant to be a relief from daily struggles and headaches, and if they deliver on this, they’re still serving their main purpose.  Yet we shouldn’t underestimate the potential for psychological damage that their warped visions of society present.  In particular to women, who may develop an irrational fear of aging, a risk that men aren’t as likely to run.

Lead Contamination

In the U.S., stories have recently broken about lead contamination in the environment caused by decaying telecommunication cables used by phone companies decades ago.  These were installed mostly by AT&T and Verizon from the late 1800s to the 1960s.  Hundreds run through bodies of water contributing to drinking water supply, and have contaminated soil near hundreds of schools.

A similar investigation has yet to be done in Canada, but it’s likely that practices in the U.S. were also used here.  Still, such cables, which haven’t been rigorously monitored previously, are far from being the most dangerous source of lead contamination.  A bigger concern is lead piping.  In theory tap water is fine to drink, but measurements of the quality of water are often taken at the source.  The problem is the piping infrastructure used to deliver it to our homes.  Lead wasn’t banned in pipes in Canada until 1975.  This means that houses built before that time likely have lead piping connecting them to the main water supply.  A study conducted by The Associated Press and Concordia University in 2019 found hundreds of thousands of Canadians have lead exposure in their drinking water that far exceeds normal safety standards.

People often avoid drinking directly from the tap by buying bottled water.  However, for older homes the problem doesn’t stop there.  What about brewing a coffee or making tea?  And boiling water for cooking pasta or rice?

Luckily, testing water is easy.  Home testing kits are readily available in hardware stores and online.

The question then becomes how much are we willing to spend to redo our cities’ water networks?  In Montreal, about a third of water flowing through the drinking water system is lost to leaks, showing that problems with pipes extend beyond health and into environmental impacts as well. 

Fixing the problem will bring substantial inconveniences as well as costs.  This will involve tearing up roads and yards all over our cities.  Yet the urgency of acting is only growing with time, as the pipes degrade further each year, releasing more lead and losing more water to leaking.  We rid ourselves of lead paint and gasoline decades ago, something relatively easy.  Lead pipes are more out of sight, and hence out of mind.  Still, what we don’t see can and is hurting us, especially our kids, as lead’s worst impacts are on children’s development.

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The editorial in this space from three weeks ago on the reliability of Hydro Québec is still getting feedback.  A number of people said that gas heating systems need electricity to operate, so they aren’t more reliable when the power goes out.  This is true for many set ups, but homeowners experiencing frequent blackouts can simply install a home generator to power their gas furnaces when the lights are out.  Gas heating stoves can work without electricity.  Also, the point was not that gas heating is preferable, but that until our electricity grid is more reliable, converting to electric heat can be a tough sell.

Google and Facebook's Media Boycott

The dire straits in which traditional media outlets find themselves are well known.  Many media outlets have been scaling down their operations for some time.

Across the world societies and governments are searching for a solution.  Canada has recently made headlines by passing a law that requires Google and Facebook to compensate media outlets when they share their content.  These internet giants responded by leveraging their substantial weight, announcing that going forward they will disallow the sharing of media news content in Canada.

Yet the Canadian initiative was modelled after a law passed in Australia in 2021.  There again, Facebook (briefly) disallowed the sharing of news items from media outlets, before reconsidering when they reached a deal with the Australian government allowing them to choose which news outlets were shared on their networks.  Facebook argued that this was a safeguard against abuse by predatory outlets looking to game the system by sharing what could be links to frivolous stories in order to extract payments from Facebook.  The deal with the Australian government also gave Facebook a transition period to work out compensation deals with news outlets before being sent for binding arbitration with a neutral third party.

Interestingly, Google, which has gone so far as to remove all links to Canadian news sites from its search results, never enacted such a boycott in Australia.  The details of how the Australian deal works in practice have been criticized as opaque, so it’s hard to determine why Google decided to live with the Australian rule but remove all news contents from Canadian media sources instead of abiding by our own regulations.  Google has, however, publicly argued that the Canadian law is broader than the Australian version.  They worry that it requires financially compensating news outlets for merely displaying their links in search results, requirements which they say can even extend to outlets that do not produce original content.  Yet at least on the surface the Australian regulations have the same requirements.  It will be interesting to see if further reasons are given by Google to explain their actions in Canada, or if this will simply be a double standard.

In the end, however, Canada and Australia are both minnows to the tech giants.  A true game changer would be the European Union, which accounts for about a quarter of their revenue.  And the EU has been exploring whether to enact similar legislation to that piloted by Australia.  For Facebook, the likely outcome of banning traditional news on their sites will be an even greater proliferation of fake news stories and gossip.  Yet if people continue to use their networks this may not cost them much in terms of revenue.  For Google, the stakes are far higher.  Most of their revenue comes from ads on their search engine, and people use it because it helps them to find what they need.  If that is no longer the case, people might start to switch to one of the numerous but often forgotten competitors.  They wouldn’t be the first monopoly to fall.

Urbanization Plan for the Long Term

Gatineau has become the most expensive city in Quebec in terms of renting an apartment.  At the beginning of 2023 it cost $1,721 on average to rent a place with a single bedroom, and $1,831 for two bedrooms, according to Rentals.ca.  With an average gross salary of about $54,000 in the region, this is about 40% of before-tax income, and almost two-thirds of take-home income.  To be in a stable financial position your rent shouldn’t exceed a third of your after-tax income.

Obviously, low income households find themselves in excruciating situations, and will likely be priced out of the region.  But the pain extends even to those who are lucky enough to have reasonably paying jobs.

One of the main reasons for Gatineau’s exceptionally high rental costs is its low vacancy rate.  The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that at the beginning of 2023 the percentage of apartments that were available to rent in Gatineau had fallen from 1.1% to 0.8%.  This compares with 2.1% for Ottawa, and is far lower than the 3% to 5% vacancy rates needed for a healthy rental market.

With such a shortage of housing, Gatineau finds itself with competing priorities that are very hard to reconcile.  

On the one hand, increasing the supply of housing, and especially rental units, is critical.  Some good news on this front is that developers seem to have switched from building condo units to instead focusing on rental complexes.  

On the other hand, infrastructure is stretched very thin, and residents are understandably uncomfortable to see yet more housing units being built in their neighbourhoods, with roads already jammed and schools bursting at the seams.

A first step should be further developing Old Hull.  There are a number of dilapidated or outright fire-ravaged buildings decaying in the core of the city, and implementing an empty house tax to force owners to make use of their properties would help to move things in the right direction.  Once Old Hull has reached its full potential, something not seen in many decades, it would be easier to justify development farther out in places like Aylmer.  This would also give the city time to develop the infrastructure needed to support a greater number of residents.

The city also needs to articulate a clear urbanization plan for the long term.  Action Gatineau has proposed a moratorium on new construction in the west of Gatineau until infrastructure is adequate.  They have also cited an IRIS study saying that Gatineau’s needs aren’t for rental units in general, but for low-rent subsidized units.  Given the rock-bottom vacancy rates and sky high costs of renting in Gatineau, they’ll need to give clear explanations of how their positions make sense.  They’ll also need to explain why they’ve now taken a position which goes so much against their approach of quickly developing the west of Gatineau during the eight years they held the mayor’s office.  Otherwise, their position could be seen as largely political, and given their influence, wouldn’t help us towards a coherent long term plan for the city.

The Price of Cars

The car industry has been in turmoil since the beginning of global lockdowns in 2020.  More than three years since supply chains were turned on their heads, dealer inventories are on average less than half what they were in 2019.  This has translated to much higher prices for consumers, up more than 30% over that same period.

Given a continuing shortage of components and much higher costs of materials compared to 4 years ago, manufacturers have doubled down on their most profitable models, such as large SUVs and trucks.  More economic models are produced less and harder to come by.  Higher interest rates also mean that taking out a loan when purchasing a vehicle adds even more to the total cost.  With many of the most popular models also requiring waiting periods that can stretch for years, buyers are often willing and even eager to pay thousands of dollars above the sticker price to get their preferred vehicle in the foreseeable future.  Electric vehicles tend to command the highest price premiums of all.

For the moment, the auto industry is enjoying fat margins and has shown little interest in flooding the market with vehicles and engaging in price wars as they did in the 2010s.  The used car market has followed suit, also raising prices substantially.  At times prices for second hand cars are even more than the recommended price for a new one, largely due to the new ones being so hard to come by.

One solution is to hold onto vehicles longer.  If fewer people are looking to upgrade, dealers will have less leverage to jack up prices.  At the very least cars could stop selling for amounts over sticker prices.

Yet many of these older vehicles run on gasoline, and transitioning to an electric vehicle is a key part of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Governments have already been offering subsidies and rebates to encourage people to drive EVs, but when subsidies end up simply compensating consumers for inflated prices they have fewer incentives to choose an electric car.

There are no easy solutions, but it’s worth accounting for the environmental impacts of producing electric vehicles.  Batteries alone require components that are difficult to mine and extract, such as lithium and cobalt.  Electric vehicles certainly present many environmental advantages over newly produced gas-powered SUVs and trucks, but the calculation becomes much more complicated when compared to scenarios where people hold onto their old vehicles for longer, eliminating the environmental costs of production.

If the auto industry continues to keep prices unreasonably high, the end result could be a switch away from our habits of upgrading our cars as often as we do.  Although the average age of a car in Canada is around 10 years, dealers rely on those customers who upgrade much more frequently.  If fewer people are eager to buy the latest models, the industry could find itself in a difficult position, needing to lower prices while still selling fewer vehicles than in the past.

Who Really Owns a Company

The world’s richest people have been finding ways around financial rules since financial rules have existed.  Although the playing field will likely never be completely levelled, at the very least the situation can be improved.  A key factor is transparency.  If we don’t know who’s doing what, we have very little chance of enforcing rules at all.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our country’s ensuing efforts to sanction and seize Russian assets showed Canadian regulators how little information they actually had on true ownership of companies and other property.  Beyond business ownership, these assets can include stocks and mansions in our poshest neighbourhoods.  Layers of front companies and accounting tricks made tracing true ownership extremely difficult.  This allows shadowy individuals to launder proceeds from crime or to simply avoid tax.

Such a lack of information on ownership is a serious problem on many levels.  Sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was found to be a non-controlling, minority shareholder in the Austrian parent firm Strabag SE.  This company is working on subway projects in Toronto which are in line to receive funding from the federal government as well as that of Ontario. Someone who is being sanctioned by the government while benefiting even indirectly from public money is a contradictory situation at best.

For governments, foreign investment is always tempting, even when its origins are murky.  Inflows of cash that lead to more job creation within Canada can be hard to see as anything but positive.  Yet efforts to sanction wealthy Russians have now led the federal government to work with provinces to require that companies supply accurate and timely corporate ownership information.  A federal registry mandating the disclosure of this information should be operational by the end of the year, described as a “public and searchable beneficial ownership registry”.  Although similar information was already available for publicly traded companies, this will extend the reach of such requirements to all federally regulated firms.

As with all regulations, the test of how effective rules are will be in the enforcement.  Penalties will have to be high enough to truly incentivize companies to provide the necessary information, especially those that have something to hide.  Provinces will also need to provide information on their side.  This is particularly important given that most businesses in Canada are provincially regulated, and hence fall outside of the federal government’s new requirements.  Quebec and British Columbia have already tabled similar requirements to the federal proposals.  For us to see widespread improvement Ontario must also get on board.  Provincial information should also be contained in the federal database to make life as easy as possible for regulators, investigators and researchers.  

Unfortunately, real estate registries will take longer to establish.  Given how overpriced real estate has become in Canada, extending regulation to include houses might take a bit of pressure off of skyrocketing prices for purchasing a home if it keeps shady foreign money out.  At the very least, it would be nice to know that houses in our neighbourhoods aren’t in fact owned by foreign warlords or drug traffickers.

Lucy Farris Library

The site of the previous Lucy Farris library has sat as a vacant pit for nearly two years.  The previous administration of Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin insisted on demolishing the old building before handing over power in 2021.  This demolition seemed rushed for several reasons.  

First and foremost, even at that time the earliest starting date foreseen for construction of the new building was several years away.  

Secondly, the firm responsible for the demolition seemed unprepared, with an incomplete understanding of the structure.  Reports commissioned by the city from Genivar/WSP Global in previous years showed that although the building was stable, care had to be taken with the structure until it was brought up to code at a cost of about $4M as of 2008.  Instead, the demolition proceeded without consideration for the building’s structural weaknesses, and as a consequence the front facade collapsed onto the sidewalk of Aylmer’s main street during high winds.  Only luck avoided someone being killed, as it happened at night when no one was walking past.

Additionally, the precipitous demolition meant that the city had to move the library over to Gallery Aylmer earlier, along with the associated additional costs.

Regardless of the reasons for how the previous administration handled the file, the current council is responsible for ensuring that the project is completed efficiently and in the best interests of taxpayers and residents.  A $42M contract was recently awarded to Pomerleau and is an important step in this direction, as it puts environmental concerns front and centre.  The objective is to achieve a silver designation according to the LEED v4 criteria for building design and construction, aiming to reduce energy consumption by about a quarter compared to traditional buildings.  Natural light and air quality will also be prioritized.  Outdoor spaces will be accessible from within the building, including rooftop patios.  Associated green spaces will also be of indigenous plants to avoid excess irrigation.

Important next steps include determining how the space in the library will be used.  Aylmer has a severe lack of community space, and the new building will bring the Lucy Farris library down from the previous 5 floors to 3.  Hopefully the new building will prioritize shared areas for community events or collaborative work spaces over rows of books.  In our modern age, books can easily be browsed using electronic devices, negating the need to have thousands of books available to peruse physically.  A requested book can then be ordered and brought to the borrower from a storage facility, a technique used by modern libraries around the world including the University of Chicago.  It will also be important to determine what will happen if the project goes significantly over budget, as was the case with the Slush Puppy Arena, and how accessible Parc commémoratif will be during the construction phase.  

Given the previous administration’s insistence on building a new library at a price nearly ten times what it would have cost to renovate the old structure, it’s good news that the current council is making this file a priority.

Being Proactive with Nature

We’re not even halfway through 2023, and it’s already been a wild ride.  After starting the spring with floods, we’ve now seen some of the worst wildfires in memory, especially this early in the season.  With climate change being identified as the reason, it gives critical momentum to spur changes in our behaviour, pushing us to further focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Still, as important as it is to reduce pollution, we also need to be far more proactive in preparing for the worst consequences of natural disasters.

In terms of flooding, we’ve now had three “floods of the century” in less than a decade.  The time of approving traditional housing projects in areas prone to floods must come to an end.  Canada has anything but a shortage of space, and building along waterways is not necessary.  However, for those who would like a view of a river, options certainly exist.  Around the world, houses have been built in flood zones since time immemorial.  The difference is that it’s done with a clear understanding of the risks and requirements.  A common approach is to build these houses on stilts.  Although such homes would look out of place here in Canada, those looking for a waterside view will need to ask themselves which they prefer - not having a basement, or dealing with substantial water damage every couple of years.

In terms of fires, they’re sadly nothing new.  Data going back more than a few decades are scarce, but some records do exist.  In 1825 the summer and fall were especially hot, and Canada saw one of the largest wildfires in history tear through New Brunswick, destroying 1/3 of Fredericton, and consuming about 20% of the province’s forests.

We’ve been lucky that in recent decades improved fire-fighting technology and techniques have made devastating wildfires relatively rare, but as we’ve seen this year, we can’t afford to be caught unprepared.  Although smokey air is certainly unpleasant and a health hazard, Quebec has been lucky in that the fires have burned mostly in the north and haven’t ravaged any large communities thus far.  We may not be so fortunate in the future.

There are again things that we can do to be prepared.  Reducing what’s known as the fuel load in areas around towns and cities is critical.  One way to do so is through “cultural burning” around populated areas during periods of low risk in terms of fires spreading.  Indigenous communities have been doing this for many centuries.  By eliminating potential fire fuel, the risk that an uncontrolled fire crosses over from a forest to a town is much lower.  A thirty metre band would likely be enough.  Using stucco, brick or concrete to build houses also makes them more fire resistant.  This would again be a departure from what’s considered a “normal” Canadian home design, but the benefits from being proactive could save many rural and suburban homes in the years to come.  

Instagram and the Dissemination of Child Sexual Abuse Content 

A recent exposé on how Instagram connects and even promotes vast pedophile networks, by Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt of the Wall Street Journal, is quite shocking.  Instagram accounts devoted to the creation and sale of child sexual abuse content are promoted by algorithms designed to show users whatever content will keep them perusing the app.

Many pedophile accounts make no secret about their intentions, using hashtags such as #preteensex and #pedobait.  These accounts claim to be run by the children themselves, using sexual expletives to describe themselves.  Although they usually don’t offer to sell child sexual abuse content material directly, they offer “menus” of content, and options to commission certain acts.  These menus offer prices for videos of children harming themselves, engaging in sexual activity, and for in-person “meet-ups”.  Most horrifically, depending on their history, Instagram has recommended certain users search for terms clearly associated with sexual abuse of minors, and that potentially pedophilic adults connect with each other.

Accounts with material sexually exploiting minors clearly violate both American and Canadian laws, as well as Meta’s own rules.  Meta has acknowledged problems with its enforcement, and has put together a task force to address the promotion of child sexual abuse content on its networks.  It has removed 27 pedophile networks in the last two years, and after questions were raised it has blocked thousands of hashtags that sexualize children, some with millions of posts.  It said that it has now restricted its systems from recommending searches for terms known to be linked to sex abuse, and that it is ending recommendations that potential pedophiles interact with each other.  Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, run by Alex Stamos, who was Meta’s chief security officer until 2018, is also pressuring Meta to be more proactive in cracking down on the sharing of child sexual abuse content.

Test accounts set up by researchers that viewed a single account in an identified pedophile network immediately received “suggested for you” recommendations leading to purported child sexual abuse content vendors, both on the Instagram platform and outside it.  Following a few of those recommendations resulted in the test account being flooded with material that sexualizes children.  

Millions of accounts are estimated to exist within pedophile networks on Instagram.  Yet Meta has throughout its history prioritized growth, lacking guardrails to keep the platform at least nominally safe.

Instagram has in the past allowed users to search for terms that it knew could be associated with illicit material.  Users would get a pop-up warning that “these results may contain images of child sexual abuse” that could cause “extreme harm” to children.  The screen offered two options for users: “Get resources” for confidential help, or damningly, “See results anyway”.  Following public outcries, Meta has said that the latter option was removed.

Given the culture of promoting growth above all else at Meta and other social media companies, it’s clear that they can’t be relied upon to police themselves.  At an absolute minimum, laws need to be passed to make those in charge of such companies criminally responsible for promoting child sexual abuse content on their networks.

Ian Barrett

Houses vs. Condos

As a society, we find ourselves at a crossroads.  On the one hand, we’re more aware than ever of our responsibility to live sustainably, not just in terms of reducing green house gases, but also creating less garbage and maintaining natural environments, among many other concerns.  On the other, improvements in productivity over the last several decades have allowed us to consume more than ever, to fly far more often, and to drive ever bigger cars.  Generally the economy has followed what consumers want, with environmental concerns taking a back seat.

There’s one area where policy makers and developers have quietly diverged from what people are looking for, however - housing.  And it’s a global phenomenon.  The speed of zoning to create housing projects has resulted in new home construction lagging far behind population growth in most Western cities, causing home prices to sky rocket.  And those being built tend to be condos, despite many younger families yearning for single-family homes with a back yard where they can more comfortably raise a family.

The reasons for the preference for condos by cities and developers are well known.  The cost per unit is obviously less than that of a single-family dwelling.  Yet the sale price for the entire development is much higher.  And cities collect more in total taxes from areas made up of condos than those of single family homes.

Yet in an age when the auto industry still encourages people to drive large vehicles and airlines push potential customers to take short vacations in the Caribbean, is it fair that we end up in a society where only the very well off can afford a spacious home with a back yard?  In some cities around the world this is inevitable, as space is in very short supply.  Here in Canada, however, this is hardly the case.

Building new houses will necessarily mean the destruction of natural environments.  Sadly, this is likely the price to pay for a growing population that will support our social safety nets in the decades to come.  We will also have to find ways to reduce the costs of building these new homes.  There’s a clear shortage of labour for less skilled positions in construction that causes costs to soar.  One solution would be partially shifting the immigration system, currently geared towards high-skilled applicants, to allow more people to come to Canada to build our homes as well.  

Modern technology offers us more agility than ever, especially in terms of telework.  Enabling more young families to move to villages where houses are cheaper would also help create a fairer society for future generations, giving them access to the same amount of space as was available to their parents and grandparents.

The challenge that we face is that current homeowners vote, which is clearly not the case for those who have been kept out of a community by the high prices of housing.  So housing concerns tend to be lower on the political agenda.  The status quo, although deeply unfair, will be hard to change.

Ian Barrett

The High Cost of Living

Inflation has long been a major concern for society, not only because of the obvious impacts it has on people’s well being, but also because of other distortionary impacts that are less direct. 

One such impact that we see from inflation is more discontent from workers as wages fail to keep pace with rising prices.  The last time that we saw long periods of high inflation was in the 1970s and the first part of the 1980s, and this coincided with periods of frequent strikes by a number of unions.  Workers get frustrated as their paychecks are stretched thinner each month.  Yet economists and pundits in the media often say that giving raises will only fuel inflation even further, so employers must toe the line and avoid giving wage hikes to workers that would then be passed on as price increases to consumers.

However, it’s also worth looking at what’s happening when employees’ raises significantly lag price increases.  If price increases are instead being used to increase profit margins, we are instead witnessing an increase in inequality.  And if workers obtain raises that are still modest enough to only cut into a portion of those increased profits, the money to fund those raises doesn’t need to come from price increases at all.

Years of high inflation in food and housing that aren’t accompanied by enough wage gains can leave us with ever greater inequality, which in turn leads to more pressure on social assistance programs such as subsidized housing and food banks.  And again, we’ll likely face additional strikes from workers who are fortunate enough to belong to a union.  Workers who are unrepresented and lack job security will mostly suffer in silence, with their only option to avoid becoming poorer being to switch jobs and work elsewhere.

In terms of public finances, different levels of government can face vastly different challenges.  Since early 2022, annual price increases have averaged anywhere from 5% to 8%, while salary increases were estimated to be a bit more than 4%.  Since the federal and provincial governments collect most of their revenue as percentages of salaries and purchases via income and sales taxes, these revenues tend to rise with inflation, reducing its impacts on public finances.  Municipal revenue is quite a different story, though.  Municipal tax increases are set each year.  In years of low inflation they generally tend to increase a bit faster than prices.  When inflation and increases in costs are high, however, it can be a very different story.  Increasing property taxes by 8% would be a very tough sell politically.

Moreover, newer residents will bear a higher tax burden than people who have been in their houses for years.  Valuations on properties don’t tend to change substantially until they’re sold, and usually match the selling price.  When house prices have been rising quickly, as in the last several years, a new resident could see their home valued at nearly twice their neighbour, even though the houses are very similar.  And they will then see a much higher property tax bill each year.

Remote Work (1)

Telework has again been a topic of conversation these last few weeks.  On the one hand, a number of unions have been fighting to have more protections against employers arbitrarily denying an employee’s telework request.  On the other, major employers like the Royal Bank of Canada have been speaking out against telework, saying that they feel employees are more productive in an office setting.

It’s been over three years since the Covid lockdowns caused widespread closure of offices, and since then some studies on the effectiveness of telework have emerged.  Many limited themselves to comparing working full time from the office to working completely remotely.  So the lessons aren’t easily applied to the current trend of hybrid proposals, where employees work about half their time from the office.  Still, there are a few points that are applicable across the board.

A study from the University of Stanford shows higher productivity working from home.  Yet this is mostly from surveying employees, who may be less likely to report lags in productivity when working remotely.  A study from Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when employees work from home they’re likely to spend the hours that they would have lost commuting on work instead, thereby upping productivity.  Employees also take fewer sick days when working from home.  When they have a flexible schedule they’re also less likely to take time off to run errands, instead making up the hours before or after their appointments.  This again increases productivity in a measurable way.  Flexible schedules also allow employees to take full advantage of bursts in energy and creativity.

Another factor in favour of working from home is a lower attrition rate.  When employees are forced back to the office they may well look for opportunities elsewhere.  Companies that offer the option to work remotely are in a good position to tempt employees away from competitors.  Having to frequently train new employees is a drag on productivity as it takes recent arrivals time to get up to speed on how to do their tasks.

Those in favour of hybrid working arrangements point to opportunities for mentoring and team building.  These are certainly valid points.  Yet the question becomes how easily employees can be mentored when their coworkers only come into the office a few days per week.  Time will need to be taken to schedule days at the office in such a way that the experienced employees are present at the same time as the junior colleagues they could mentor.  If care isn’t put into scheduling, and if sufficient mentoring doesn’t occur to justify coming into the office, employees could become frustrated and not see the point of working on site at all.

Past studies found reduced productivity working remotely because technology wasn’t yet available to streamline working from home.  Since then, we’ve seen the continued expansion of high speed internet coupled with more reliable software options like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.  These have largely solved technological limitations that were holding back productivity from outside the office.

Remote Work (2)

Working remotely is in some shape or form here to stay, given the number of associated tools now available.  Yet from a managerial perspective, transitioning to a scenario where workers log in remotely means adjusting in several ways, including evaluation approaches.  In the past, many managers focused on ensuring employees were present when required, and could rely on larger meetings to convey messages.  In a world of remote work, they’ll need to switch to task-based measures of whether an employee is performing as expected.  Having milestones laid out over a period of weeks and months, and checking that employees are meeting those milestones and staying on track is the surest way to guarantee the team’s overall success.  One-on-one bilateral meetings will also be much more important, as it’s easier for employees to get lost in the shuffle in larger virtual team meetings.  Still, the major advantage of a remote working environment is the ability to hire the best talent from anywhere in the country, thereby substantially upping productivity.

That said, there are concerns that white-collar jobs could be outsourced to countries where labour is cheaper as manufacturing jobs were outsourced over the last couple of decades.  However, if there are cost savings to be had, such outsourcing will happen regardless.  The best protection our domestic white collar workers will have is Canada’s education system.  If Canadian education continues to be of a high enough quality, very productive workers will continue to be found here, and employers will recognize this.  Besides, the biggest threat to many white collar jobs in Canada may well come from AI powered bots, and whether workers are on site or remote is unlikely to make much difference.

Most importantly, a one-size-fits-all model to telework is unlikely to succeed.  Teams that often collaborate closely could see more benefits to coming into the office.  Teams whose members tend to work on individual projects are far more suited to working off site.

For society, there will be benefits and costs to a permanent shift to remote work.  Downtowns will need to be rethought, which will incur financial pain for many businesses offering services to office workers in city centres.  Yet the advantages are substantial.  Traffic is the most obvious example.  In the National Capital Region the return to the office coincided with the full or partial closures of two major bridges, making commutes for many even more painful than they were before the pandemic.  Aside from the carbon emissions of cars largely idling as they inch their way towards the city centre, fewer vehicles on the road would make commutes far easier even for those who can’t work from home, including nurses, teachers and construction workers.  Lastly, housing shortages in major cities are causing the cost of living to sky rocket.  Allowing more people to work from anywhere in the country would enable these workers to revitalize villages that have long suffered from an exodus of younger people towards cities.  This would then ease demand for housing in larger urban centres - a very welcome development for everyone.

Ian Barrett

Municipal Finances

Pylon season is in full swing.  Yet how does the city decide where to put taxpayer dollars?

There are a number of new projects in the works, the largest of which is likely to be the replacement structure for the library at Place des Pionniers.  Yet this year, the city’s plans are focused on maintenance as well, with $53 million going into road maintenance alone.  Yet even this very large amount is only about 2/3 of the annual amount recommended by the auditor general to keep Gatineau roads at an average level for the province.

Another question is where municipal funds come from.  From a taxpayer’s perspective government funds come from the public, so how it’s divided up among the federal government, provinces and cities is less relevant.  But when it comes to governing, we see a large impact on the services we receive.  The city’s perspective is interesting, as explained by Mayor Belisle:

Eighty-two percent of our municipal income is associated with the taxes we collect.

One of the problems we have is the law. The Quebec government does not give us much flexibility to look elsewhere for other revenues. That's really a problem. The other problem is that the Quebec government does not even pay 100% of these taxes. Let's say hospitals, service centres, the courthouse, schools, it's about 70% that the government pays in taxes. It doesn't pay 100%. Why do we here pay 100% of our taxes? The government pays 70%. So, there is really a major inequity in municipal taxation. That's one of the things. We've been lobbying for a long time to change that, because the blue-collar workers, let's say, who pick up the snow there, they also pick up the snow in front of the schools. They don't pick up 70% of the snow, they pick up 100% of the snow. So there's a real inequity there. It's very frustrating when you're a mayor or a municipal councillor, to turn to the citizens and say that there will be a 2.9% increase in taxes and when you know that your provincial government doesn't pay that.  So this is a battle that has been going on for a very long time.

And the provincial government gives us other responsibilities. We have three schools coming up in the West, and the city has to provide the land. We're the ones paying for the land for education, which is under provincial jurisdiction. So we have the impression that we are like a parent after all, or a government line of credit. We just charge. And that's frustrating because we're the frontline, and the province always comes looking for money. So there's really something that's inequitable. The cities have a fiscal pact with the Quebec government that is like a financial deal with the Quebec government. Then we're going to be in renegotiation in 2024, and we'd like to be able to get other revenues as well. And if you want to give us other firm responsibilities, give us the money that comes with the responsibilities.

Ending Child Labour in Quebec

Child labour became illegal in Quebec last month.  Many people are shocked when they realize that until March 2023 there was no minimum age for a child to work in this province.  All that was required was parental consent, and even that rule was at times not enforced.

The Government of Quebec recently passed a law setting age 14 as the minimum to hold down a job, with exceptions for tasks long considered appropriate for younger children such as babysitting, mowing the lawn and acting.  Kids 14 to 16 will be restricted to at most 17 hours of work a week, with no more than 10 of those during the week.  This is certainly excellent news, as it will nip in the bud a worrying increase in the number of young children working at restaurants and small stores.  The former had come to depend on children for almost 0.5% of its workforce, and labour shortages had been pushing that number higher.  Given that the restaurant industry employs more than 180,000 people in Quebec, this translates to almost 1,000 children working as waiters or in kitchens.  Child labour should certainly not be part of the solution to a tight job market for employers.

Small businesses with under 10 employees can continue to receive exemptions, with the idea that kids can work at their family’s business.  This particular exception will need to be closely monitored and possibly updated if exploitation at small businesses occurs.  Bringing children on as regular employees shouldn't be necessary if the business can already afford 8 or 9 other employees.  The philosophy of the law is of a child helping out his or her parents selling produce at a local market or doing chores around the farm.  Unfortunately, a lobbying group called l’Association des détaillants en alimentation du Québec plans to argue the opposite, that stores even bigger than 10 employees should be able to hire minors, so that children of the owners of larger grocery stores can be employed by their parents.  This clearly misses the point - if a business can afford to hire more than a handful of people, it can afford to ensure that those people are adults.  Children can certainly shadow their parents around their stores, big or small, and help out in an informal way.  But a child’s first priority should be doing well at school, followed by simply having fun.

Critical to the success of the new law is making sure that it’s properly enforced.  If even lax laws like requiring parental permission for children to work weren’t consistently enforced in the past, application of this new law can’t be taken for granted.  Plus, the penalties for violations, at $12,000 for a repeat offender, may sound high.  Yet relative to payroll expenses these are not as dissuading as they could be, especially if continuing to employ children allows a business to up its revenue.

Regardless, this new law is a big step in the right direction, and finally brings Quebec in line with the rest of Canada in discouraging child labour. 

Tech - The Next Big Thing

From the mid 1990s to the early 2010s we were accustomed to a steady stream of innovation from tech companies, with Google leading the way.  It seemed like a year didn’t go by without the introduction of a game changing tool like Gmail, Chrome, Google Earth, Android, or Google Maps, along with many other more niche tools.  Apple took many hardware advances from the fringes to the mainstream.  Facebook changed how we socialize.

Yet about the only notable major advance in the last ten years has been cloud computing, where you remotely use a company’s hardware instead of your own.  Still, this hasn’t impacted our daily lives to such a degree as the advances of previous years.

Attempts have, however, been made.  One of the most high profile in recent years was the Metaverse, a virtual reality world where you would interact with others via headsets designed to immerse you in something like a sophisticated video game.  This was considered the hot thing just two years ago, with Facebook even changing its name in preparation.  But now Disney and Microsoft are shutting down their Metaverse operations, and prices of the Metaverse’s virtual real estate (an oxymoron to be sure) have dropped by 90% in the last year.  Hardware to access the Metaverse is also expensive, bulky and glitchy.  

Still, we are now looking at the next big game changer - generative AI.  This new technology no longer simply processes text and images but creates them, and has been all over the media lately.  However, many people aren’t aware of what’s coming over the next year.  First, it will be incorporated into search engines.  Functional prototypes already exist.  In the very near future search engines like Bing will provide answers to our questions in full text and paragraphs, and not just links with information for us to base decisions upon.  

This new way of interacting with search engines will require putting a lot more faith in them.  References will be provided, but most people are unlikely to check them, and will simply accept the answer they’re given.

Moreover, because creating a reliable generative AI program requires many resources in terms of money, computing power and the human talent behind them, big companies will likely remain dominant.  Microsoft and Google have positioned themselves well to take the lead for decades to come.  The former is incorporating many new AI tools into its web browser, including the ability for you to ask their AI tool to write an email for you, where you choose the style of the email, from funny to professional.  Microsoft Office software like Word will also have these tools incorporated in the years to come.

It will be tough to stop cheating on things from school assignments to job applications to tasks at work.  Assignments will need to be more collaborative and based on a series of steps, or may need to be done under supervision.  Yet learning to effectively use these tools in permitted ways will likely be an essential skill in the job market of tomorrow.

Power Outages

After the derecho of last summer, April brought us an ice storm.  For most, the biggest impact of both of these events was a loss of power, which even in urban areas lasted for many days for some households.

Older neighbourhoods are more at risk of prolonged power outages, largely because of old growth trees.  Although they make streets and yards much prettier, help local wildlife to thrive, and offer welcome respite on hot days, they are also likely to suffer the worst of wind storms. With enough bad luck even the largest trees can be blown over, taking power lines with them.  Looking to the long term, new neighbourhoods like the Plateau have built their power lines underground, eliminating most of the risk caused by falling branches and trees.  However, this hardly seems practical for older neighbourhoods.  Even if we were willing to shoulder the substantial cost of transferring power lines underground, many people would be hesitant to see their gardens and patios torn up for the work.  

In the end, our best option going forward is to make sure that the services provided by our hydro companies are up to the task of cleaning up messes quickly, and ensuring that maintenance of infrastructure is well organized and up to date.  Hydro Québec admitted that they had fallen behind in recent years in terms of trimming branches near power lines.  And although the interactive maps offered by Hydro Québec showing which neighbourhoods are without power are very useful, during major outages residents also need more information on how long an outage on their block is likely to last.  Information needn’t be perfect - simply sharing what Hydro workers are aware of would be a great help.  If it’s likely that your power will be out for a week, knowing this on day one or two would allow you to plan accordingly.

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Two weeks ago, this column spoke of child labour and how a new law being drafted by the Québec government would finally make it illegal for most businesses to hire kids under 14.

Sadly, businesses that rely on child labour have started a counter-attack, and have been receiving bafflingly favourable coverage in various major news outlets.  L’association restauration Québec has raised concerns that they’ll be deprived of “good workers”, and that this will possibly impact their ability to serve clients.  Similar concerns have been raised by farmers employing young children to pick strawberries and other produce.  Their main argument is that there are relatively few accidents involving children on the job.  Yet this misses the point entirely.  Children shouldn’t need to work, full stop. Canada has one of the most generous child benefits in the world, and Québec tops it up even more.  Kids should focus on school and enjoying their childhood.  The government of Québec has shown openness to the demands of these employers, and a public consultation is going on this week.  We can only hope that common sense wins the day, and that Québec doesn’t gut last month’s proposal.  Businesses that aren’t viable without child labour should close.

Power Outages

While having universal healthcare is a source of pride for Canadians, we’re all acutely aware that the system needs improvements.  Every province tends to handle health care a bit differently.  Yet there are no provinces that offer comprehensive dental care.  A number allow free check-ups for kids, but programs are so ad-hoc and poorly understood that many families don’t take advantage of them.  Canada’s universal health coverage for other types of care is simple enough for patients across the country - show up at the doctor’s office or hospital and you won’t be billed.  So patients know what to expect.

It’s hard to understand the logic of why dental care has been excluded from general health coverage.  If you have pain walking and need a hip or knee replacement the system is there to cover you, even if you’ll likely have to wait for months before treatment.  Yet if you have a rotten or broken tooth that prevents you from being able to eat properly, you’re told that you have to find the financial means yourself to pay to get it fixed.  The impacts of rotten teeth or gum disease can be extremely painful and have other impacts on our health, preventing us from eating properly, and making it harder to work or enjoy ourselves.  Our system looks to relieve most physical pain through medications and other alternative treatments, but when the pain comes from your teeth, financially you’re on your own.

There is, however, hope for progress.  The federal government is introducing a plan to at least partially refund dental work for families making less than $90,000 a year and who don’t have private coverage.  Children are already eligible, with coverage expanding to teenagers and seniors by the end of the year.  Full coverage for all adults in the targeted income range is planned by 2025.

Although this is certainly an improvement over the status quo, it would be far more efficient simply to show your health card at the dentist’s office and not be billed.  Instead, the proposed program requires that you pay the amounts out of pocket and then apply for a refund from the federal government.  It adds an extra layer of complexity that may prevent society’s most vulnerable from taking advantage of the plan.

For people to simply be able to use their health cards, provinces will need to get on board.   Here, there’s political wrangling that the federal government is infringing on provincial jurisdiction.  Provinces can certainly negotiate to get the best arrangements possible, but Quebec in particular is looking to opt out of the program and get no-strings-attached financial compensation instead.  All we can do is hope that the Quebec government would use this money for dental care, and not leave Quebecers behind in this key area of health.  It would truly be a shame if politics gets in the way of what’s best for the people.  Both sides negotiating in good faith would be much more likely to lead to the best outcomes for everyone.

Inflation (1) - Food and Energy

Soaring prices and high interest rates are causing widespread economic pain.  High inflation allows businesses to raise prices even when their own costs haven’t risen as fast, as customers aren’t as suspicious of quick price hikes.  Although inflation averaged about 6.8% in 2022, wage growth was only 5.2%.  This implies that workers are not benefiting from the rise in prices, as their real wage growth was in fact negative. 

The rising prices of groceries are among the most devastating, as it impacts everyone, from the richest to those who are on such a fixed income that they don’t own a car and are less impacted by other painful hikes like that of gas.  With price increases of groceries in 2022 having been around 10% and holding strong, it’s worth looking at where the extra money that we’re being charged is going.  Large grocery store chains like Loblaws, which also owns Provigo and Maxi, say that they are simply passing on rising supply costs to consumers.  Yet their profits have surged in recent years, and at the end of 2022 were 20% higher than a year earlier.  Dissecting this is difficult, because grocery store chains generally don’t provide detailed breakdowns on what’s driving those profits, often claiming that a big chunk comes from non-food items like cosmetics.  Moreover, during tough financial times people tend to switch to generic brand names of food products.  Although they carry lower price tags, these brands often have fatter margins for the stores selling them.

Given that groceries are among the most essential products on the market, and since that industry is dominated by 5 national chains that collectively control about three quarters of market share, there is a strong case for more regulation in this area.  It could be as simple as requiring them to provide a breakdown of revenue and profit that separates groceries from pharmaceutical items.  More transparency would show whether a lack of competition is leading to price gouging.

Another area where prices have been increasing sharply is energy.  Here as well, a lack of competition can leave companies with ample opportunities to raise prices without losing sales.  The oil industry has at least some competition, but many homes in the region are heated by natural gas, and we don’t have an option of switching providers to get better prices.  Profits are up substantially across the sector.  Large oil companies like Exxon recorded profits for 2022 that were almost double those of the year before.  

Due to the extremely volatile nature of the prices of natural resources, regulation in this area is quite challenging.  Still, the European Union is experimenting with a windfall tax on surges in profits that are much higher than the average of the prior three years.  Companies like Exxon are fighting it in court, and it will take several years to quantify the impacts of this levy, but it’s certainly worth exploring as a way to reclaim at least some of the very substantial profits of key industries that lack high levels of competition.

Inflation (2) - Services

Banking is an industry that has been doing very well in these difficult times of high inflation.  Of the large Canadian banks, profits over the last year have been up across the board, by as much as 20%.  The key to profits in this area is rising interest rates.  Banks are quick to pass on rate hikes to borrowers, as anyone with a variable rate mortgage can attest.  However, interest rates paid on savings accounts have remained essentially flat, having held steady at a small fraction of 1%.  In past periods of high inflation higher rates were more quickly passed on to savers, with the returns on savings accounts topping 10% a year in the early 1980s.  Hence banks have been reaping the benefits of higher interest rates without readily sharing the proceeds with savers.  This could be due to the increasing difficulty of switching banks, complicated by our ever greater reliance on credit cards and investment vehicles like mutual funds and online stock trading.  As it becomes more difficult for banks’ most valuable clients to switch to a competitor, all savers suffer as banks take them for granted.

Still, more competition is always good for consumers.  Yet many people are sceptical about putting their savings with a small and unknown institution.  One option would be allowing more foreign banking institutions to enter the Canadian market.  However, with the recent sale of HSBC to Royal Bank, we’re seeing movement in the opposite direction.  The most effective way to give consumers more power might be requiring banks to make it easier for clients to switch from one financial institution to another, even if they use many credit cards or other banking tools.  

Another industry that has been profiting handsomely in inflationary times is cargo shipping, used by merchants and manufacturers.  These costs are finally starting to come down again, but major players in the shipping market such as Canadian National and Canadian Pacific for rail, as well as Maersk for ocean shipping, have all been posting record profits over the last couple of years.  More competition is unlikely to emerge given the prohibitive costs to enter this market, such as building more rail lines or obtaining a large fleet of shipping vessels.  Unless it was coordinated with large economies like the U.S. and the E.U., a windfall tax is likely unworkable for international shipping, as it would probably reduce services to Canada and result in shortages.  About the only hope here is to foster more domestic production so that we’re less reliant on international shipping generally, although manufacturing things here might cost more than imports, eliminating any savings for consumers.

The Bank of Canada has warned that if businesses don’t stop raising prices it will need to raise interest rates in order to reduce demand, such rates being the main lever that central banks have to control rising prices.  It’s depressing to think that the only way to slow price hikes is to cause even more pain to consumers, already spread thin as they are.  

Fraud Protection

Fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, as are measures to counter them.  Whereas we used to rely mostly on passwords, the last couple of years have seen a shift to security linked to a phone number or device, commonly referred to as two-stage authentication. 

Yet despite the focus on protecting our online accounts, comparatively little attention is paid to how to protect our identities when our personal information such as social insurance numbers are stolen.  One of the most notorious examples of this was Desjardins.  In 2019 social insurance numbers and full personal details of over 4,000,000 Quebecers were stolen by a rogue employee, who apparently copied the data onto a USB device.  After literally walking out the door with this information, he proceeded to attempt to sell it on the dark web.  How such personal information could so easily be stolen is shocking, as is the fact that charges have yet to be laid against anyone, despite the likely identity of the thief being known.  Said person was fired by Desjardins, and two vice presidents resigned, although the president at that time was reelected later that year and continues in his role to this day.

All the personal information of a large majority of Quebecers necessary for identity theft continues to circulate widely on the darknet.  Desjardins offered complimentary credit monitoring for those impacted by the leak.  This same service is offered at a monthly fee of ten to forty dollars per month by both of the credit bureaus in Canada, Equifax and TransUnion.  You receive alerts when a new account is opened in your name or when a late payment is associated with your credit score.  But most major banks let you see this same information for free when you log in to online banking, so by investing a minute or two of your time per week you achieve the same results.  Yet this is likely to be too little too late - you see the damage after it’s already done.

However, in February Quebec became the first province in Canada to require credit bureaus to offer a proactive solution - allowing you to freeze your profile with them, refusing to let lenders check your credit score until you choose to unfreeze it.  This prevents fraudsters from being able to pose as you with your stolen personal information, taking out loans in your name and then vanishing with the money they take out.  An administrative nightmare follows, trying to convince the lender that you shouldn’t be on the hook for repayments.  Such a situation can also destroy your credit score for years.

This new legislation has gone almost completely unreported in the media.  Yet it’s a game changer in many ways.  Freezing and unfreezing your profile is simple and free of charge, and takes about 5 minutes on the websites of Equifax and TransUnion.  Once done, no one can easily impersonate you and destroy your credit.  As we spend ever more time protecting our online accounts, it’s nice to finally have effective protection for our credit profiles as well.

The Dangers of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is largely seen as the cornerstone of the cryptocurrency world.  The total value of the world’s bitcoin is estimated to be in excess of half a trillion U.S. dollars.  Yet it’s shocking how little is truly understood about how bitcoin works.

Bitcoin’s foundation is known as Bitcoin Core, an open source program that updates the data spread across a network of thousands of computers that allows bitcoin trading to work.  

Amazingly, only about half a dozen people act as maintainers to keep this critical infrastructure working, by ensuring that it remains compatible with Windows and Mac operating systems, and that it keeps up with transaction volumes.  

These bitcoin maintainers are chosen by their peers, and it’s not always known where they reside.  Their salaries are paid by a loose network of donors, as no formal employer exists.  These tend to be crypto companies or wealthy investors.  Even some donors admit that how funds are allocated is very subjective.

Maintainers have no managers, job descriptions, or performance reviews.  In the last 18 months four of the six maintainers have left their positions, citing burnout or legal risk, as they could be sued, for instance by people looking to regain lost or stolen bitcoin.

How maintainers are paid also raises questions of conflict of interest, real or potential.  With such an opaque structure, it’s unclear whether donors attempt to exert control on maintainers, or look to get preferential access to information.  The reply to these questions is that maintainers are bound by their reputations, where anyone who did harm to the unpinning software would suffer reputational damage, and would have their access revoked. 

High priority code tweaks are discussed in a public chat once a week.  Code updates to Bitcoin Core become effective once users download software updates.  This chatroom is also where new maintainers are chosen, in ad hoc votes following what can be heated debates.  Developers eligible to vote type ACK, short for acknowledge, to vote in favour or a candidate, or NACK to vote against.

These maintainers have saved bitcoin from collapse a number of times by fixing bugs in the underlying architecture before they were widely known and could be exploited.  One would have allowed people to spend their bitcoin holdings multiple times.  To patch a vulnerability, a majority of the computers or nodes in the network must proactively update their software.  If word of the vulnerability gets out before this happens the vulnerability could still be exploited.

With so many billions of dollars of people’s savings tied up in bitcoin, the idea that such a small number of people could break the entire system is terrifying.  Worse still, many of these people remain in the shadows, with relatively little known about them by the public.  One serious mistake and the infrastructure supporting bitcoin could collapse, with no recourse available to those who would be burned.  Even more worrying, other forms of crypto are even more opaque.  Those buying crypto should be aware of how little protection they have.

1 February 2023

Good Service

This is true both from public departments or private companies.

The most notorious examples are when calling to speak to an agent.  At times people end up lost in a maze of automated menus, unable to get the information they need.  Material is usually available online, but it's easy to forget that segments of the population are unable to easily use the internet.  They require live assistance from an agent for essential services such as public pensions and other financial benefits, or information on property or income taxes.  

On the private side, telecommunications and banking are critical for everyone.  Governments have a responsibility to ensure the public has access to timely assistance, not only to their own services, but mandating the private sector to offer timely help from agents to clients as well.  Spain is taking the lead in this area by requiring companies to clearly offer an option to speak to a person before sending callers through mazes of automated menus.
 
Important community services obviously go beyond call centres.  Our local pools have reduced hours due to how challenging it is to find staff.  

Given how expensive it is to heat and keep water clean it’s a shame that the public has less access to these facilities, both from a convenience perspective and because the fewer times when they are open tend to be very crowded.  The way to entice more people to take up the necessary jobs is both obvious and difficult to implement - raising salaries.  Governments at all levels have limited funds, and hard decisions need to be made in terms of the creation of new services vs optimizing the use of the infrastructure we already have.  

Tough questions will need to be asked before undertaking another project like the $100M Slush Puppie Arena, or the more than $70M that will be spent building a new library on Aylmer’s main street following the demolition of the previous structure last year.Yet among the most crucial services that people rely on from governments are health care, police, and fire fighting.  None of these have managed to keep up with growing populations, especially in western parts of Gatineau.  

Long-time residents have been largely silent on these shortcomings as ever more housing developments crop up across our neighbourhoods.  Yet delays in improving these essential services can leave us extremely vulnerable as a society.  Covid and generalized lock-downs over the last three years showed us the cost of having a health care system that is always in a precarious position, with among the most shocking outcomes being the temporary closing of the emergency department at the Gatineau hospital.  Recent crime waves in many of our largest cities show us what happens when law enforcement is spread too thin.  As the population of cities and the country as a whole continues to grow, we’ll need to prioritize carefully over the coming years.

7 February 2023

A Normal Downtown 

As public servants are mandated to return to the office at least two days a week, the main reason being cited is team building.  Yet business representatives and chambers of commerce on both sides of the river have been pushing hard for this return for some time and likely impacted the debate in some way.



Will having civil servants work from downtown a few days a week be enough to sustain businesses in the area?  Even before the pandemic, shops and restaurants in downtown Ottawa and Hull were often in shaky financial situations.  Many stores and restaurants on Sparks Street always closed by 4 p.m. on weekdays, and many were also closed on weekends.  

Downtown Hull outside of Laval Street was similar.  Large parts of a city centre being ghost towns on Friday evenings or Saturday afternoons is neither normal nor desirable.  It makes the region as a whole less appealing to tourists, and creates a vicious cycle where people are less likely to live downtown, which in turn reduces incentives for local businesses to be open outside of regular office hours.

With many other challenges facing Ottawa and Gatineau, it is certainly tempting for their city councils to stick with the status quo for how their downtowns are designed.  

But leaving businesses reliant on public servants’ lunch time activities is quite dangerous.  Even if federal workers will spend enough time and money downtown to keep businesses afloat, we’ve already seen that much government work can be done remotely.  During future federal budgetary squeezes, reducing the number of pricey downtown buildings for which the federal government is responsible will be a very tempting cost cutting measure.  

Moreover, transitioning to a more conventional downtown structure will take many years for Gatineau and Ottawa to implement.  This will require building a community culture where little currently exists.  

Old Hull is a food desert, and downtown Ottawa isn’t much better.  A proposal to build a grocery store at the site of the old Robert Guertin arena is a step in the right direction, but would still be far from central parts of the island of Hull.  Condos are quickly springing up, but without incentives for people to live downtown, many of these will likely end up as short term rentals for tourists - something that doesn’t help build a community.  Both cities have until now favoured building new housing far from downtown areas, prioritizing places like the Plateau in Gatineau and Barrhaven or Stittsville in Ottawa.  Focusing on organizing more events downtown would help attract new residents, as well as encouraging the opening of more services like gyms and cinemas.  

The most important thing, however, is for Gatineau to clean up the dilapidated houses that dot the landscape in Old Hull, and for Ottawa to find ways to cut down on the high levels of crime throughout its downtown, and in particular on and around King Edward Street.

Tackling these challenges will not be easy.  Further inaction in the coming years will only make things worse, especially in the long term.  

14 February 2023

Public Trust (1)

Both in Canada and globally, trust in institutions is lower than ever.  According to various surveys from Ipsos and Reuters, less than half of Canadians have high levels of trust in government or media, showing marked decreases over the last several years.  Although this is a global phenomenon, the idea that over half the population has largely tuned out of society at large is quite concerning.

There is of course no single reason for this erosion of trust, but a major factor has been errors in messaging.  It’s impossible to be right all of the time, and even the most reputable sources will sometimes make mistakes.  The key is owning up to these errors.  Too often as people, we have the tendency to practice out of sight, out of mind, and government and media at times reflect this.  Our institutions often convince themselves that their mistakes have quickly been forgotten.  Yet this is seldom the case.  Covid laid bare how fragile our understanding of breaking events can be.  We went from saying that masks were not useful for the general public to a message that masks provided such good protection that going out in public when sick is okay as long as you wear a face covering.  The provincial government of Quebec’s current guidelines even state that you only need to stay home when you have a fever.  With a sore throat or cough, the guidelines are simply that when going out you should wear a mask, with no advice to stay home at all.  Meanwhile, Ontario instructs people to stay home in general when they are sick.  On the other hand, Ontario recommends a Covid vaccine booster every six months while Quebec recommends ongoing boosters only for the immunocompromised or those who have never previously had Covid, which at this point is quite a small segment of the population.

Harmonizing messages is important, as is simply saying when we are unsure of what is best in a given situation.  The media should also be clear when evidence is not yet available.  On the topic of Covid vaccines, the original message was that everyone getting two doses would end the pandemic.  After it became apparent that this was not accurate, a similar case was made for a third dose.  Despite most traditional vaccine testing periods being at least two years, the urgency of Covid meant that society had little choice but to move fast.  Now, several years in, we’ve seen that at least the first couple of doses substantially reduce hospitalizations in vulnerable groups, something certainly worth celebrating.  But because what was called authoritative messaging around Covid vaccines changed so often over the last few years, vaccine hesitancy in general is on the rise.  There are regions in Canada and the U.S. where standard vaccination rates have fallen below 80%, far below the level needed for herd immunity.  And as a consequence, we’re now seeing outbreaks of measles, mumps, and most worrying of all, polio, diseases that we’d long since stopped associating with developed countries.

21 February 2023

Public Trust (2) - Economics

As the public’s trust towards public institutions like government and media erodes, social media is often cited as the main culprit.  Misleading stories on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter certainly can undermine people’s confidence in traditional sources of information.  However, those traditional sources of information must also be very accurate, and reasonable debate shouldn’t be stifled in mainstream media.

One hot topic which is often oversimplified in media outlets is inflation.  In a globalized world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to control inflation within our own borders.  From the beginning of the pandemic, supply chains broadly broke down.  China, the world’s factory, was at times largely closed.  By mid 2022 and thanks largely to the war in Ukraine, oil was trading at twice the price seen in 2019, while lumber peaked in 2021 at about 4 times its average price over the preceding decade.  Shipping costs also exploded.

Financial benefits during the pandemic were quickly blamed for having stoked demand to the point where inflation surged.  Yet supply bottlenecks certainly played a large part.  Trying to disentangle the impacts of increased demand vs reduced supply is quite difficult.  Most developed countries provided their citizens with generous support payments when they shut their entire economies, so there was little with which to compare.  One of the few countries offering a contrast is Sweden, which declined to lock down its economy and hence felt less pressure to provide additional funds to the unemployed.  Yet inflation there still topped 12% towards the end of 2022.  This raises doubts as to whether pandemic support payments can be blamed as the main culprit for the high rates of inflation we’ve seen over the last year. 

As the debate in the media over central bank interest rates heats up, a key factor is often overlooked.  The Bank of Canada has to be very careful when interest rates rise in the U.S.  If interest rates in Canada fall significantly below those of the U.S., the value of the Canadian dollar falls -  fewer people choose to keep their savings in Canada when they could earn better returns south of the border.  And if the Canadian dollar loses value, it becomes more expensive to import goods, a fact which will in turn drive inflation up significantly.  Hence when voices in the media complain about the choices of the Bank of Canada, they need to realize that our central bank can’t sharply diverge from the Federal Reserve in the U.S., and in some ways has its hands tied in terms of when to raise or lower interest rates.

Another aspect of the debate about inflation that deserves closer scrutiny is that low unemployment rates necessarily drive inflation higher.  This is predicted by classical economic theory, but we just finished a decade where this relationship largely broke down.  During the 2010s, unemployment was quite low, especially in the U.S.  Yet inflation over that period was also less than central banks would have liked.  So saying that unemployment necessarily has to rise to reduce inflation may be oversimplifying the argument.

27 February 2023

Public Trust (3) - Health

The last several years have seen an erosion of trust in government and the media.  With health having dominated public messaging, society’s approach to such coverage may have impacted people’s confidence in the information they were receiving.

Covid fatigue certainly set in for many people, who may have then started to tune out from government guidelines and media messaging.  It’s interesting to compare our reactions to Covid with previous waves of flu-like viruses.  Luckily, for the past two generations there were no major pandemics causing widespread death.  The last pandemic with comparable death rates to Covid was the so-called Hong Kong flu of 1968.  It’s interesting to contrast Covid reactions to how the flu from that period was handled.  There was also a quick vaccination campaign during the 1968 flu that likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  On the whole, life carried on as usual during that time.  The flu of 1957 was a similar story.  It’s worth asking if our much stronger reaction to Covid was because, unlike our grandparents and great grandparents, current generations haven’t had to see friends and family ravaged by polio or smallpox, or experiencing widespread outbreaks of mumps, measles or tuberculosis.  Perhaps such diseases left previous generations somewhat jaded to pandemics.

Certain Covid responses certainly helped to slow deaths from the virus in the early months of 2020, such as reducing large indoor crowds and securing our nursing homes.  Yet the benefits of other measures, such as curfews and forbidding people from different households from meeting in small groups outside are far less clear.  Likewise for preventing people in the National Capital Region from crossing our bridges.  And the price in terms of lost learning from closing our schools for many months almost certainly exceeded the health benefits from doing so. Perhaps our collective unfamiliarity with devastating illness was part of the reason our society proposed and quickly accepted these measures, even when other provinces weren’t doing so.  

We can’t afford to take such ad hoc approaches in the future.  Public confidence is already low enough as it is.  We should now take the time to properly study the efficacy of the measures we used, noting what worked well and explicitly excluding from future pandemic response plans any measures that didn’t.  

There are other areas where we need to gain better scientific knowledge as well.  A good example is working from the office.  The current approach of returning to the office a few days a week offers us an excellent opportunity to study both how easily viruses circulate in the workplace and how productive workers are at the office compared to when working from home.  This likely varies by profession, but we have no excuse for making decisions that aren’t based on scientific evidence.  Now that the urgency of Covid has passed, we should make sure that all of our decisions and messaging are based on proven facts.  It’s by far the best way to reverse the slide in public confidence that we’ve seen over the last several years.

25 January 2023

Prescription Painkillers

Illicit fentanyl, the subject of last week’s column, is the major driving force in the opioid crisis facing the world.  However, another significant factor behind this global emergency is the overprescribing of prescription painkillers.

Such medications are usually given to patients for legitimate reasons following operations or injuries.  

Giving them up, however, can be easier said than done.  Many of these drugs are based on fentanyl, making them worryingly similar to what is being sold on the street.  Beyond the risk of overdosing on the prescription painkillers by taking too many too quickly, when prescriptions run out patients may well turn to street dealers to feed their new addictions.

Pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies have been found criminally responsible for feeding opioid addictions.  The highest profile case so far was Purdue Pharma, which pleaded guilty in the U.S. to charges of fraud and providing kickbacks to doctors for prescribing painkillers, as well as conducting deceptive marketing practices in Canada.  

Several other pharmaceutical companies as well as pharmacy chains have also reached settlements, and litigation against many more continues.

The claims centre around pharmaceutical companies knowingly understating how addictive the painkillers could be, and paying doctors more if they prescribed enough painkillers to meet sales targets.  That such a scenario could develop within our healthcare system is shocking.

Treating chronic or severe pain is of course extremely difficult.  

Doctors are faced with hard choices.  Prescribe too few painkillers and the patient could suffer unnecessarily.  Yet prescribe too many and the patient is at risk of developing a devastating addiction.  Alternatives such as Advil and other over-the-counter medications, ointments, exercise, weight loss and massage therapy are becoming more popular, but still lag far behind more powerful medications.

Beyond offering them options, the pharmaceutical industry should certainly not influence doctors’ decisions.  Pharmaceutical companies, whether privately held or publicly traded, are profit driven.  

The owner or shareholders have powerful incentives to sell as much of their products as possible, and executives who don’t share this vision are unlikely to last long.  

Moreover, many pharmaceutical products have unquestionably done tremendous good for our society.  This has resulted in a large amount of public goodwill towards the industry, something that was on clear display during the pandemic.  The pharmaceutical industry was quick to step up with life saving tools and vaccines.  



Still, the opioid crisis has shown that goodwill and trust can only go so far.  More transparency is clearly needed.  Disclosures of payments from pharmaceutical companies to doctors have thus far been voluntary.  In 2017 Ontario became the first province to pass legislation that would have forced disclosure of such payments and where they would have been publicly available in an online database.  

Yet when the Ford government came to power a year later they delayed the implementation of this legislation, and it has languished on the back burner ever since.  When dealing with such a powerful, influential and profitable industry, we need to make sure that society’s best interests trump those of corporations.

18 January 2023

Fentanyl: naloxone kits needed everywhere 

Opioid deaths are a massive problem across the world.  Approximately 20 Canadians die of opioid overdoses each day, more than half the rate of Covid.  Even more worryingly, opioid deaths have been steadily increasing for years, as these chemicals become ever more potent and addictive.

Fentanyl is far more powerful and difficult to control than yesterday’s heroin.  Synthetic opioids are similar or identical to prescription drugs.  In fact, until about four years ago drug users were able to order fentanyl and other powerful narcotics through the mail directly from China, home to the world’s second largest pharmaceutical industry.  Making these drugs illegal was extremely difficult, as a slight change to the chemical composition allowed the sellers to brand it as an entirely new drug, one that was not on western governments’ lists of controlled substances.  The Chinese government had been very slow to increase oversight of drug manufacturing, fearing that doing so would hamper their very profitable pharmaceutical sector.  Yet following intense diplomatic pressure applied by the U.S., China finally cracked down on all Fentanyl-class drugs in 2019.  Sadly, this simply resulted in Chinese labs switching to exporting precursors and components of fentanyl to Mexican drug cartels, who took over the task of creating the finished product.  Such ingredients are also used in legal pharmaceutical products, and hence are much harder to crack down on.

Adding to the difficulties of reducing the global narcotics trade, Chinese counternarcotics cooperation with western nations has become closely tied to trade in general.  As Chinese diplomatic relationships with the U.S. and its allies have become strained, joint law enforcement activities have essentially ground to halt.  Politics has sadly become deeply intertwined with the enforcement of global anti-narcotics laws.  Western countries point the blame for the opioid crisis on Chinese supply, while China blames Western demand.  Moreover, sophisticated laboratory networks for producing components of fentanyl have now formed in India, Nigeria and South Africa, among other countries.

The outcomes of these policing stalemates are all too clear - seeing young people roaming the streets looking like little more than zombies, with hard crusty or blue patches all over their skin and living on borrowed time.  Vancouver is at the forefront of this disaster, but Ottawa and Gatineau are hardly immune.  Taking a walk around the Glebe is enough to see the opioid crisis’ devastation.  Depressingly, there is no end in sight, as chemical “innovations” mean that there’s a steady stream of slightly different and ever more potent drugs for law enforcement officials to chase after.  And given that trace amounts of these powdered drugs can have staggering effects, it’s becoming ever harder to protect our teenage children from any number of ways they can be contaminated.  Overdose stories span all classes, from poorest to richest.  Improving law enforcement and treatment for overdoses is extremely important, but in the end the most effective tool we have is probably making our children understand how dangerous the world into which they’re entering has become.  And that it’s unlikely to get better.

11 January 2023

Reducing the Spread of Germs

Our society has decided to turn the page on the pandemic, with our governments and news outlets sensing people’s understandable fatigue with anything related to viruses.  Still, the last three years have provided us with valuable lessons.  We’d be foolish to simply discard them in the interest of getting back to our old ways, something somewhat romanticized by certain members of our society.

With the push to go back to the office in the name of collaboration, socializing with colleagues and team building, the only health guidelines that many people have been retaining lately is to rely on face masks when in close proximity to others.  Yet our approach to masks could in fact be doing more harm than good.  People have come to assume that when they’re sick it’s fine to go out and be around others as long as they’re wearing a mask at least most of the time.  Nowhere has this been more damaging than in our schools.  We all know that it’s hard to juggle work responsibilities with caring for sick children, and dismissing their illnesses as mild and sending them to class makes life that much easier.  But this approach is a major driving force in the number of illnesses children are facing this year, from Covid to the flu to RSV.  Even if kids can use a mask properly, something which is far from certain, they take off their masks to eat and drink, often in close proximity to their classmates.

The problem is compounded by how little we know about the exact effectiveness of masks at preventing transmission of viruses.  Masks help reduce Covid transmission, but published studies put that reduction at anywhere from 15% to 85%.  The reason for this confusion is that conducting a rigorous study to isolate the benefits of mask wearing is very difficult.  And there hasn’t been enough of a push to do so, with governments across the world simply saying that masks work, end of story.  We know even less about how effective masks are at preventing transmission of flu and RSV.

More important than wearing masks is to stay home when you’re ill.  It has some similarities to the old adage of “reduce, reuse, recycle”.  At the individual level, recycling required much less sacrifice and personal work.  Hence reducing and reusing what we consume was largely forgotten, despite being more environmentally effective than simply throwing everything in the recycling bin.  Our governments need to help us to be able to stay home when we’re ill.  A recent requirement that federal-jurisdiction employers start offering employees 2 weeks of paid sick leave is a big step in the right direction.  Yet parents also need to be able to take paid leave to care for sick kids, and our schools need ways to isolate sick children from their groups when parents insist on sending them to class when they’re ill.

If we lose sight of the importance of staying home when sick, we’ll have learned far too little from a very difficult three years.

4 January 2023

Child Labour in Canada 

We’ve long heard about the horrors of child labour, usually associated with poorer regions of the world - children slaving away in factories for very low wages.  Yet it's shocking to realize that 12 year olds can legally work in many businesses in Canada.  

Provinces have different rules in place, with Quebec being among the most permissive in Canada, not specifying a minimum age to hold a job at all.

Most of us don’t notice that child labour is legal in our own neighbourhoods, since most young people don’t take a first job until they’re at least 16.  Certain low stress jobs have long been associated with younger children, seen as ways to gently transition into the labour market.  

Babysitting, delivering newspapers, and mowing the lawn are traditional examples.  Yet these are either casual or require little time commitment, providing ways for kids to learn about earning, saving and spending money.  

The idea that children could find themselves with adult responsibilities such as dealing with angry customers as a cashier or waiter is something else entirely.  

Children are of course much more vulnerable to exploitation, and are unlikely to understand their rights.  Plus, school combined with homework is very much a full time task.  Adding hours of extra paid work to their schedules means that kids have precious little time to enjoy being a child, discovering what they truly like to do in life, and building the social skills necessary to have a happy and fulfilling adulthood.  

The idea that certain businesses, particularly restaurants, have structured themselves around hiring children is also quite concerning.  

It’s hard to get a handle on exactly how common this problem is, as workers aged 14 to 18 are often lumped together in public records on employment.  However, there’s a substantial difference in the level of maturity of an 18 year old compared to a 14 year old.  And businesses with a majority of employees underage usually means that adults are unwilling to take on that work, either because of low pay or the working environment itself.  These hardly seem like the sorts of places where children should come of age.  

Even Walmart, a company not usually associated with social justice campaigns, requires employees to be at least 16 years old.  The idea that children should at a minimum be old enough to drive before attempting to hold down a steady job is certainly reasonable.

Legislation in this area should be quite natural and easy.  

We already have generous child benefit payments in place so that children shouldn’t need to work.  Steady traditional jobs that target children under 16 need to be rethought.  They either require higher pay or better working conditions to entice older workers to take them up.  Parents could continue to involve their children in their family businesses, so long as it’s a learning experience and not overly burdensome to the point of making a child less focused on school.  



After decades of criticizing developing countries for allowing children to spend their childhoods working, we should certainly ensure that such situations don’t continue to happen here.

How the Court Challenges Program Helps Safeguard Anglophone Rights in Québec?

The objective of the Court Challenges Program of Canada (C.P.C.) is to provide individuals and groups in Canada with financial support to access the courts for the litigation of test cases of national significance. This support is also intended to clarify and assert certain constitutional and quasiconstitutional official language rights and human rights in Canada.

The Government of Canada has allocated an annual investment of five million dollars ($5,000,000.00) for the Court Challenges Program. Each year, a minimum of $1,500.000.00 is dedicated to the clarification of official language rights.

Two independent expert panels, an Official Language Rights Expert Panel and a Human Rights Expert Panel, are responsible for rendering decisions regarding the Court Challenges Program funding. The Panels are composed of experts who report to the University of Ottawa. They receive administrative support from this independent organization.

Grist for the mill has been provided by the Coalition Avenir Québec Government over its first four years in office. On the floor of the National Assembly of Québec, Simon Jolin-Barrette, then Minister of Immigration, Diversity, and Inclusiveness of Québec, was the sponsor of the government Bill 21, An Act respecting the laicity of the State. Law 21 was passed, received royal assent, and came into force on June 16, 2019.

Jean-François Roberge, then Minister of Education and Higher Education of Québec, was the sponsor of the government Bill 40, An Act to amend mainly the Education Act with regard to school organization and governance.  Law 40 was passed on February 7, 2020, and received royal assent on February 8, 2020.  Law 40 came into force on February 8, 2020, turning les commissions scolaires into les centres de services scolaires. The nine English-language school boards have not become school service centres as of yet.

And no doubt, the most controversial of all, Simon Jolin-Barrette, then Minister Responsible for the French Language of Québec, was the sponsor of Bill 96, An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec. Law 96 was passed on May 24, 2022.  Law 96 received royal assent and came into force on June 1, 2022, with some exceptions.

Law 96 attempts to unilaterally amend the Constitution Act of 1867 in the following manner: CONSTITUTION ACT, 1867  166. The Constitution Act, 1867 (30 & 31 Victoria, c. 3 (U.K.); 1982, c. 11 (U.K.)) is amended by inserting the following after section 90: “FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF QUEBEC  “90Q.1. Quebecers form a nation. “90Q.2. French shall be the only official language of Quebec. It is also the common language of the Quebec nation.”

And flying under the radar and receiving by far the least attention, Jean-François Roberge, then Minister of Education of Québec, was the sponsor of the government Bill 9, An Act respecting the National Student Ombudsman. Law 9 was passed on May 31, 2022, and received royal assent on June 3, 2022. Law 9 came into force by decree with exceptions.

And let us not leave the federal government out of this mess of pieces of legislation. The Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, M. P., the Minister of Official Languages of Canada, tabled in the House of Commons of Canada on April 5, 2022: the government Bill C-13: An Act to amend the Official Languages Act, to enact the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act and to make related amendments to other Acts.

The members of the Standing Committees on Official Languages of both the House of Commons as well as the Senate of Canada are completing the process of receiving briefs regarding Bill C-!3.

And now we play the waiting game as we observe these pieces of legislation meander their way along through the lower-level courts to eventually arrive at the Supreme Court of Canada.  This is when the Court Challenges Program of Canada will help to safeguard Anglophone rights in Québec.

21 December 2022

Conservation

The COP15 conference on biodiversity is currently taking place in Montreal.  In United Nations jargon, COP simply stands for Conference of Parties.  Hence we need to be careful not to confuse it with COP27, a conference in Egypt from earlier in the fall which focused on climate change.

We’ve come far as a society in terms of concern for biodiversity.  

Teddy Roosevelt was a pioneer in conservation, creating hundreds of national parks and nature reserves during his tenure as American President at the beginning of the 20th century.  He built on the momentum of naturalists and conservationists such as John Muir, Galen Clark, and Ferdinand Hayden, who were instrumental in creating the Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks.  Banff was the first national park designated in Canada, in the year 1885.  Although conservation progressed in Canada over the decades that followed, it did so at a slower pace than that of our southern neighbours.  Protection of natural spaces began to receive more attention here starting in the second half of the 20th century, with the crafting of policies to ensure conservation efforts across the country.  

Conservation became a priority for many governments around that time.  The U.K. designated its first national park in 1951.  France followed in 1963, and Germany in 1970.  

Although there is certainly much work still to be done to protect the environment in developed countries, the world’s focus has now shifted to developing regions.  Achieving progress here will be challenging in many ways.  Not least is the argument that richer countries didn’t start to prioritize conservation until they had already developed their economies.  It’s hard to believe that a thousand years ago much of Europe was covered in forests.  

Between 1750 and 1850 there were even reports of desert-like conditions in central Europe before more sustainable approaches to forestry were adopted.  Reforestation efforts were started in the late 1800s, but the ecosystems of Europe are far different today than they were before societies in those regions industrialized.  

Hence developing nations are now asking for financial compensation from wealthier countries to allow them to undertake conservation efforts while also reducing poverty within their societies.  This certainly seems like a reasonable request.  The challenge is how to deliver the compensation.  

Lower and middle income countries often have fewer checks and balances to ensure that the money is well spent and not diverted to graft and corruption.  Yet if donor nations attempt to deliver the money directly to impacted people or run conservation projects in developing countries themselves, they’re likely to be accused of colonialism and infringing on national sovereignty.  

Of those lobbing such complaints, some will have good intentions and be looking out for the best interests of those living in developing countries.  Others will, unfortunately, be eager to skim as much as they can off the top.  Perhaps the best solution would be to provide impacted nations with technology and equipment instead of cash transfers, in order to cut these arguments off at the source.

14 December 2022

Electric Car Charging Stations

More than ever, society is banking on electric vehicles as the future of transportation.  Uptake by drivers has progressed greatly in recent years, encouraged by generous government subsidies.  Yet one major obstacle remains - having enough charging stations to make longer trips viable, and being able to charge quickly enough to make electric vehicles as convenient as traditional gas models.  

Currently, it can take 20 minutes to an hour to charge a vehicle at commercial charging stations, still much longer than filling a tank with gas.

Governments have been offering generous subsidies to encourage businesses to install electric charging stations, most commonly at malls and gas stations.  

There are now almost half as many electric vehicle charging stations as gas stations in Canada.  This is a similar approach by governments to how they have worked to ensure good national cell phone coverage and internet access.

Yet many challenges persist.  After all, our network of gas stations developed over a hundred years.  Electric charging stations need to do so in a small fraction of that time.

An obvious difficulty we face is how to make electric charging stations profitable in rural areas where there isn’t much traffic.  

Although most drivers don’t pass through such areas often, they still want peace of mind when taking a road trip.  Generous subsidies are likely the only way for charging stations to make financial sense to rural businesses, and thereby to eliminate a major cause of hesitation for drivers thinking of switching to electric vehicles.  Yet some rural areas also have limited capacity in terms of electricity, and charging stations will put more strain on their power networks, possibly also inconveniencing local residents with brown-outs.  This is of particular concern near national parks.

In some regions, gas stations and utility companies argue over who owns the charging stations.  

Utility companies see them as an interesting future source of revenue, while owners of gas stations want full control over what’s offered on their property.  Even if the business owns the charging station, power bills can vary widely from one month to the next, especially in areas where electricity is expensive and surcharges are applied during peak periods.

Charging stations can also be unreliable.  Sometimes communication between a charging station breaks down, either with the car or the payment system.  

Other issues can range from wasps building nests in the gears to vandals breaking the machines or sticking gum in the credit card readers.  Charging stations at malls are, after all, less protected than pumps at gas stations.  

Studies in the U.S. have shown that over a quarter of charging stations don’t work when they should.

It’s up to society to figure out how to make electric charging stations work properly, and be plentiful enough to cover drivers regardless of where they are in Canada and the United States.  Looking at how far battery technology has come in the last 50 years, it’s entirely possible that within a generation battery capacity will leave combustion engines in the dust.



7 December 2022

The Dangers of Crypto

Cryptocurrencies and the platforms they’re traded on are very difficult to understand.  Even those who call themselves experts were shocked when one of the largest crypto-exchanges in the world, FTX, recently collapsed in the span of just a few days.

At their base, cryptocurrencies are a collection of records which are limited in number, and this limited supply combined with strong enough demand gives them value.  

To generate a bitcoin amounts to solving a very complicated mathematical problem, which in turn requires substantial computing power and consumes large amounts of electricity.  Global bitcoin “mining” consumes more electricity each year than the total amount used by countries such as Austria or Israel.

Despite the vast environmental footprint often associated with cryptocurrencies, there have been many enthusiasts promoting the potential of this type of money, described by some as a way to opt out of inflation.  

Yet the lack of transparency and understanding in the world of cryptocurrencies makes them inherently unsafe.  Those who believe in crypto cite independence from government oversight and regulations as one of its great virtues.  Yet now we’re seeing the downside to that type of freedom.  

Traditional banks are required to have deposit insurance in case they have insufficient cash to allow customers to withdraw their savings.  Crypto-exchanges, which are to cryptocurrencies what banks are to traditional money, offer no true protections to those who deposited their crypto-money on their platforms.  

It often seemed that savings were safe with exchanges like FTX, but when such platforms run out of liquidity, depositors are left holding the (empty) bag.

Those looking to purchase cryptocurrencies can avoid leaving their digital savings on such unregulated platforms and instead keep their holdings on a physical hard drive, but this too comes with risks, mainly that the computer or external hard drive being used becomes inoperational or breaks.



Cryptocurrencies have certainly pushed innovation in the financial sector.  Still, more so than a type of money which is free from government oversight, the true potential is as a means of making electronic purchases without involving traditional banks.  This matters most in poorer countries, where many people don’t have access to traditional banking, and financial institutions in such countries often have little more oversight than crypto-exchange companies here.  Allowing an option which is more secure than holding wads of cash under a mattress could help countless people in developing nations.  

But for digital currencies to reach their true potential they need to be integrated into the global financial system, which includes adding layers of transparency and oversight.  Much more likely than bitcoin to transform people’s lives are digital currencies issued by stable governments.  The U.S. dollar is already the international currency.  It’s only a matter of time until cryptocurrencies push governments in the U.S. and elsewhere to create digital currencies that people can exchange directly with each other.  If these regulated digital dollars are widely available across the world, we’ll truly be stepping into a new age of how people across the globe handle their savings.

16 November 2022

Cybersecurity

How companies handle our data was for many years quite lax.  Examples like the Desjardins data leak, which resulted in the social insurance numbers and other personal details of a large majority of Quebecers ending up on the dark web, as well as a similar situation faced by Americans due to the Equifax leak, showed this quite clearly.  The Equifax leak was the most galling imaginable, as at least with Desjardins people had chosen to do business with them and afterwards could show their disapproval by taking their business elsewhere.  

With Equifax, as soon as we request credit from any financial institution we automatically have a file there, and have no option to stop doing business with them afterwards.

The most common reason for these leaks was that every customer’s complete information was contained in a single set of files that was stolen with a single USB device.  

The idea that this could be possible is quite stunning.  Yet now we see things swinging to the other extreme, as security becomes onerous and at times excessive.

Certain accounts clearly need strong security, such as bank accounts and accounts with the government, specifically the Canada Revenue Agency and Revenue Quebec.  

Other organizations may be taking things a bit far given the importance of the data they hold.  In the end, if passwords become complicated to the point that no one can remember them, especially for accounts we access very infrequently, many people end up writing down the passwords on a piece of paper and keeping it in their drawers.  

At that point, it’s hard to see how information is more secure.

Two-stage authentication is becoming more popular and offers an interesting alternative, using a phone number or tying authentication to a particular device.  However, there are problems here too.  For phone numbers, many of us don’t use our domestic numbers when travelling internationally, given the high cost of roaming fees.  If, when outside the country, you’re asked to receive a text message on your Canadian number to access your banking information or email account, you’ll need to figure out how to access that Canadian number and pay corresponding roaming fees.

When access requires validation on a specific device or phone number, you’re also vulnerable to that device dying or being lost.  

Worse still, theft of your phone becomes quite devastating.  

Finding yourself unable to access your personal information or banking until you’ve been able to reach customer service to update your security options can leave you in a very difficult position.

We need a balance between personal security and ease of use.  Reasonable password requirements, with numbers and capitalizations, combined with personal questions afterward are sufficient for most accounts for most people.  Although banks need strong security, they have been dealing with credit card fraud for decades.  

They should be able to obtain insurance to fill the gap between risks of fraudulent activity and making life overly frustrating for their customers, finding a good balance.  Zero risk doesn’t exist, for online access or anything else in life.


16 November 2022

Valuing Workers 

Inflation hits those with modest employment income hardest.  Pensions have some protection due to indexing, but those earning salaries close to or at minimum wage take the full brunt of price increases.  As a society, we have to ask whether such people’s contributions are being valued as they should.

In Ontario, public education workers aside from teachers saw the ugly side of inflation.  Already earning modest wages, they saw the provincial government offer annual raises of between 1.5% to 2.5% for a four year period, amounts that made sense in the low-inflation 2010s, but that are largely insulting when inflation is running at 7% and could stay high for years to come.  Even more worrying, the government of Ontario barred them from being able to strike, taking away a fundamental right of organized labour.  If those who conduct administrative and janitorial duties in schools are deemed essential workers in the same way as nurses or police officers, which groups would be allowed to strike?

The question becomes do those who keep our schools operational deserve a living wage?  It’s hard to imagine these people being able to raise a family in the Toronto region if their salaries are barely above minimum.  And if the people holding these roles cannot afford to work and live in Toronto, the city may see its neighbourhoods become shells of their former selves as maintaining schools becomes nearly impossible.

But the question of the value of important services goes well beyond this example, and certainly extends into Quebec.  Those working in daycares also earn only slightly above minimum wage.  It’s hard to think of a more important task than caring for and teaching society’s youngest children.  We also see people frequently complain about the front line service offered by governments and large corporations such as banks and telecom companies.  Yet we accept that workers in call centres are paid low wages, have no job security, and in the case of the private sector, see their positions outsourced to countries on the other side of the world.  The workers in Asia filling these positions often have very little idea about the country they’re serving or the service they’re offering.

In order to allow people filling these roles to earn a living wage we will need to pay more.  In the case of government call centres, the solution to the extremely high turnover rates and corresponding lack of knowledge of the people working there is simple - make those positions attractive as long-term career options.  This includes both higher salaries and guaranteeing employees year-round work.  For private corporations, we as customers need to show these companies that we value good service.  Governments can also legislate to force private companies who are dominant in an industry to offer a minimum level of service.  In addition to higher prices, part of the amount to cover these higher costs can come from less money spent on executive compensation and stock buy-backs.  It all comes down to what companies feel they have to do to keep their customers.

2 November 2022

Pay Equity

Laws preventing pay discrimination based on gender have been in place since the 1970s.  Yet women still earn more than 10% less than men.  Progress has been made, with that gap decreasing from about 20% at the turn of the century.

How to finally close the gap is of course notoriously hard.  Women may be likely to work in more modestly paying jobs such as nursing or teaching, whereas men are more likely to work in very well paying jobs such as finance.  Still, this is more of an aspect to correct than an excuse for the status quo.  And this does nothing to explain pay inequities faced by ethnic minorities.

One thing that everyone agrees on is that there should be equal pay for equal work in the same type of position.  Here, a powerful tool is forcing companies to disclose salary ranges for positions on job postings.  This gives women a great assist in negotiating fair wages devoid of gender bias.  In the U.S., New York City, Colorado, California and Washington State are all enacting such legislation.  In Canada, many companies now list salary ranges on their job postings, although some decline to do so.  Ontario passed a law to require companies to post wages towards the end of the last Liberal government, but it hasn’t been enforced.

Beyond similar pay for similar work, the other major part of the problem of pay inequity is ensuring that women and ethnic minorities are not disadvantaged for promotions.  This is much harder to resolve.  Affirmative action policies can help, but work is also sorely needed to address disadvantages in access to quality education often faced by ethnic minorities.

One disadvantage faced by women earlier in their careers is the unspoken perception that they may need to take maternity leave over the coming years.  In Quebec, fathers only tend to take a bit more than 5 weeks of parental leave, and this falls to an anaemic 2 weeks in other provinces.  Yet this can certainly make promoting a young man feel like the safer option for an employer than promoting a young woman who may take off 18 weeks or more.   

Again, progress is being made.  EI legislation was updated in 2019 to specifically include five weeks of paternity leave.  This is certainly a step in the right direction, but employers may still see an advantage to having young men in higher roles given that EI provides for 18 weeks of maternity leave.

Countries that lead in terms of paternity leave uptake, such as Sweden and Norway, tend to have similar systems to Canada, only more generous.  In the case of Sweden - 90 days of paternity leave.  In order to reduce discrimination in promoting young women, increasing paternity leave would likely be quite effective.  It would also need to be accompanied by legislation specifically barring discrimination against fathers who take their full leave.  Reducing perceived disadvantages to promoting young women is critical, as missing promotions early on will likely have a ripple effect on their entire careers.

26 October 2022

Strategic Environmental Policies

Many environmental policies have been designed over the years to better safeguard our environment, including better fuel efficiency standards for vehicles and banning many forms of plastic.  These policies have often done tremendous good for both our environment and our health.  Smelling the fumes of cars that are 30 or more years old tells us how much vehicle emission standards have done to give us clean air to breathe.  It’s hard for younger generations to imagine what it smelled like walking along a busy street in the 1970s.

Yet there have also been failures in our attempts to regulate pollution.  In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Obama administration wanted to significantly tighten emission standards over the following 15 years.  Yet the motor vehicle industry complained that such standards would make it impossible to sell larger vehicles without incurring losses, and that these vehicles were necessary for people in rural areas or who work in construction.  As a compromise, it was agreed that larger vehicles would have less stringent requirements in terms of vehicle emission standards.  Yet the effects of this exception were perverse - it created a significant incentive for car manufacturers to focus on selling ever larger vehicles, as traditional cars required pricey new technologies to reduce emissions.  This made larger vehicles comparatively cheap.  The result was that the share of vehicles sold which were pick-ups and SUVs shot up sharply over the last decade, and overall reductions in total vehicle emissions since the more stringent rules were put in place have been mostly flat for several years.  

Another front in our drive to reduce our societies’ environmental impact is plastics.  This impacts us in many different ways, some more noticeable than others. Plastic straws will soon be largely illegal, leading restaurants and cafes to roll out alternatives, from cardboard straws to metal variants.  Disposable plastic bags will also be phased out in the near future.  When these individual measures are taken together the potential benefits are significant, but to optimize the results a variety of factors need to be considered.  Switching to non-disposable bags can seem like a positive way forward, but these types of bags need to be used many times to produce net benefits for the environment.  Of critical importance is the technology used to produce them.  Early cotton non-disposable bags had to be used thousands of times to have less impact than the equivalent number of disposable bags they were meant to replace.  Advances in technology have brought that number down to about a dozen for the current non-disposable variety.  Further improvements to the manufacturing process will be needed if people tend to forget their bags at home and pick up new non-disposable ones frequently at stores or supermarkets. 

In the end, the best approach is reducing our use of all types of disposable materials whenever possible.  An excellent starting point is packaging, something that offers comparatively little added value.  Biodegradable packaging could go much farther towards reducing waste than many other approaches that we’ve considered so far.  

n-disposable bags can seem like a positive way forward, but these types of bags need to be used many times to produce net benefits for the environment.  Of critical importance is the technology used to produce them.  Early cotton non-disposable bags had to be used thousands of times to have less impact than the equivalent number of disposable bags they were meant to replace.  Advances in technology have brought that number down to about a dozen for the current non-disposable variety.  Further improvements to the manufacturing process will be needed if people tend to forget their bags at home and pick up new non-disposable ones frequently at stores or supermarkets. 

In the end, the best approach is reducing our use of all types of disposable materials whenever possible.  An excellent starting point is packaging, something that offers comparatively little added value.  Biodegradable packaging could go much farther towards reducing waste than many other approaches that we’ve considered so far.  

Why the Next Minister of Education Must Learn What the Definition of Meaningful Consultation Really Means!    

con·sul·ta·tion
[ˌkänsəlˈtāSH(ə)n]

NOUN: the action or process of formally consulting or discussing

"They improved standards in consultation with educational representatives." ·
synonyms: discussion · dialogue · discourse · debate · negotiation · conference · deliberation

The following is an appeal to whomever is the appointee for the important portfolio of Minister of Education of Québec in the next Provincial Cabinet following the general election of Monday, October 3rd, 2022:

Following your memorization of the definition of consultation above, your first formal action as Minister should be the convoking of an Estates General of Education in the province.  I do understand that an Estates General necessitates an enormous task of organization.  Therefore, let us suggest Montréal as the location, and the dates to be Wednesday, January 25th, Thursday, January 26th, and Friday, January 27th, 2023.

“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply what other generations have done.”     - Jean Piaget

The following is the wish list of the serious challenges in the field of education that should be discussed and solutions discovered at the 2023 Estates

General on Education:

# 1: On graduation from Secondary V, every student in this province should be bilingual and bicultural with a balanced view of history, the necessary skills in mathematics, science, and technologies, and the critical thinking skills necessary to be an involved member of the society of the twenty-first (21st) century.   
How can we accomplish this linguistic-cultural dream? We already have the means within the present system to put in place what would be the envy of every other educational jurisdiction.

# 2: In every school across the province, starting in Elementary Cycle III, Year I, (Grade 5), half the classes receive instruction in French, the other half in English, in all subjects for five (5) straight months - Francophone teachers teaching in French, and Anglophone teachers teaching in English.  Teachers swap classes for the last five (5) months of the school year. This also continues through Elementary Cycle III, Year 2, (Grade 6).   

# 3: We also promote la culture Québécoise by making available grants for cultural outings in the language of instruction.  It is the ideal opportunity to showcase our talented Québécois artists – both Francophone and Anglophone – in the fields of song, music, dance, theatre, comedy, crafts, and related disciplines.  

# 4: It is time to raise the age for compulsory education to eighteen (18) years of age.  It will allow our graduating students to be on an equal footing with those of surrounding educational jurisdictions.
It will be necessary to expand the quality and offerings of technical vocational programs at the senior secondary and collegial levels of instruction across the province.

# 5: How are we going to solve the shortage of qualified teachers in our classrooms?
a/ Improve the working conditions of teachers.
b/ Ensure teachers receive fair salaries that are not   near the bottom of the provincial and territorial averages.
c/ Install a meaningful system of consultation that actually provides for meetings with teachers and discussing and debating the important issues underlying the principles of what is actually being taught to students.  
d/ Allow for the creation of a teaching regulator similar to the successful Ontario College of Teachers.
e/ Finance more spaces in the Bachelor of Education degree programs in all universities in Québec.
f/ Allow for the return of a one-year pedagogical certificate for the holders of Bachelor degrees of teachable subjects to the faculties of education for pre-school, elementary, secondary, and C.E.G.E.P. teachers, as well as university professors.

# 6. Improve the delivery of special education services. Provide additional adequate financial resources to hire more professional employees to reduce the time of delivery from the initial diagnosis to the delivery of services to students with learning disabilities.

# 7: Tackle the issues of bullying, violence, racism, and discrimination in our educational institutions head on. Put in place the financial resources necessary to hire more professional personnel to address the issues and provide the necessary effective follow-up.

AND finally: # 8:  Seek more input from student representatives at the senior secondary, C. E. G. E. P., and university levels.  On the boards of directors of the educational institutions, school boards, and school service centers, ensure seats for elected student  representatives with full voting rights and the privileges of proposing and seconding motions and engaging in meaningful participation in discussions and debates.   

Dear Minister of Education of Québec:                            

Please take the above suggestions under advisement, and consider implementing them as soon as possible for an improved system of education for the students of Québec.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”– Nelson Mandela

19 October 2022

The Benefits of Reading

In an age of TikTok, when videos are how many get information about the world, it’s worth looking at what’s being lost as we transition ever more to entertainment-on-demand.

The benefits of reading are well known.  Yet in addition to developing your brain’s general activity and preventing age-related cognitive decline, reading can also reduce stress and increase your ability to empathize.  Reading is also a great way to unwind at the end of the day and get a good night’s sleep.

And despite many depressing headlines, there is quite a bit of good news in terms of literacy.  Although sales of traditional novels have been declining, children’s books are selling better than they have in many years.  Having such exposure to reading from an early age is certainly a major advantage for younger generations.  Also, illiteracy rates have continued their decline over the last decades as universal education becomes ever more the norm compared to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.  Equally critical, the gap in illiteracy rates between anglophones and francophones has been greatly reduced, reflecting improvements in francophone education of the last decades.

Yet as important as functional literacy is, people everywhere are losing their ability to sit and concentrate on longer texts and novels.  This is natural given that we live in a world of distractions.  On the one hand, information has never been as readily available.  On the other, we find ourselves with ever less time to simply relax and unwind.  Although we read more than ever with text messages and other forms of short communication, the quality of our reading has certainly declined.  Taking the time to rediscover the joys of sitting in the shade reading a book or newspaper during the summer, or next to a fireplace in the winter would help many of us unwind and reduce our stress levels.

Also, here in Aylmer we have another major advantage in terms of literacy.  Living in a community with both French and English means that we have the opportunity to learn to read in two of the world’s main literary languages, opening windows into much of the world’s great literature and news sources.  For Anglophones, this can go from experiencing this year’s Nobel prize laureate in literature, Annie Ernaux, to reading Tintin or Asterix in the language in which they were written.  For Francophones, the benefits from becoming comfortable reading in English include the huge selection of information sources to choose from, and the wealth of literary classics published in English over the years, from Dickens to Harry Potter.  Although translations allow us to experience other languages in ways we often wouldn’t be able to otherwise, there are inevitably subtleties that are lost from the authors’ original works.  And as an added bonus, bilingualism has been shown to further improve our memories as well as our abilities to multitask and stave off dementia and Alzheimers in old age.

Improving our linguistic skills in our first and second languages is certainly time well spent.

12 October 2022

Dairy Prices

In a year of high inflation, the price of dairy has been among the fastest rising at the supermarket.  Milk prices rose by around 20% in six months.  Although many families don’t drink enough dairy for this to significantly impact budgets, restaurants have been feeling the pinch at a time when labour shortages already have many owners reeling. 

Canadians already pay among the highest prices in the world for dairy.  On average, a litre of milk costs twice the price as in the U.S., and over 50% more than in the U.K., France and Australia.  The reason for high prices in Canada is a system called supply management, where the number of producers is tightly controlled and Canadian farmers have much more influence in setting prices compared to those in competitive markets elsewhere in the world.  In return, dairy farmers receive fewer subsidies and grants from the government than in other countries.

While Canadian consumers frequently grumble about the prices of milk and cheese, even farmers complain that supply management isn’t working.  Many dairy farms are small and haven’t been able to innovate to reduce costs, meaning profits for many farm owners are low and the work is hard.  Licences to milk a cow, which were granted for free in the 1970s, now fetch upwards of $24,000 per cow, making many farmers well off on paper, but only able to cash in when they exit the industry.  This also makes it very hard for younger generations to get a start in dairy farming, as well as current dairy farmers looking to take advantage of economies of scale by increasing the size of their operations.

Prices are set in a very opaque way by the Canadian Dairy Commission.  They use a survey of roughly 200 farmers in which they give information on their costs, much of which is considered confidential and not shared with the public.  At a time when dairy price hikes far exceed inflation elsewhere, transparency should be of the utmost importance.

Farmers are also required to make mandatory contributions to marketing funds which are used to advertise dairy products, but again there is little transparency.  The Toronto Maple Leafs will sport a “milk” patch on their jerseys for the next couple of years, but the costs of this deal have not been shared even with dairy farmers.  We do know that tens of millions of dollars are spent on marketing dairy products each year.

Also unclear is how grocery stores set price increases on their end.  Over the last year, supermarkets have increased dairy prices by twice the amount mandated by the Canadian Dairy Commission.

With so few happy with the status quo, changes would certainly be welcome.  Helping more dairy farmers to innovate and invest in robotics to milk cows instead of using manual labour would help reduce costs over the long term, along with justification for raising prices.  The question is why dairy can’t exist in a similar system as the rest of agriculture, with subsidies instead of high prices.

5 October 2022

Relative Extremism in Politics

At the time of writing this column, the provincial election is just winding down, and the CAQ are romping towards victory.  Such continuity has not always been the case elsewhere.  In many cases, local parties referred to as being on the extreme right have come to power in countries that have usually steered clear of their approaches in the past.

An interesting example is Sweden.  The party considered to be on the extreme right by Swedish standards is called, ambiguously, the Swedish Democrats.  They claim that past immigration policies in Sweden have been a failure, but they do support receiving immigrants who will work and contribute to Swedish society, and assimilate culturally.  A fundamental aspect of their platform is that immigrants need to become more proficient in Swedish.  Those who do not wish to assimilate culturally and learn Swedish would be encouraged to leave Sweden.  They feel that multiculturalism is not compatible with maintaining Swedish culture, and propose a values test for immigrants before they could receive citizenship.  They are at the same time supportive of Sweden’s social safety net, and of gay marriage (though not of adoption for same-sex couples).

Many other European countries have extreme right parties with far more radical positions, such as in Italy where the party that recently won the right to form government supports explicitly stopping Muslim immigration.  And the above is only a partial list of their positions.  But it’s interesting that so many of their policies on immigration are shared by the mainstream governing party of Quebec.  Clearly what is considered extreme in Sweden is seen as being reasonable in many other parts of the world, Quebec included.

On the flip side, policy proposals by Republicans in the U.S., by any measure a mainstream party there, are seen as extreme and non-starters across most of the political spectrum here, both in Quebec and across Canada generally.  This certainly includes the CAQ.  A few examples include separating migrants from their children at the border, stopping immigration from certain countries entirely, allowing seemingly limitless access to arms, and severe or complete restrictions on abortion.  The idea that the American groups proposing such ideas have governed and will likely do so again is striking.  Such policies that are by many measures mainstream in the U.S. are touched by almost none of the extreme right parties in Europe, and have no uptake in Canada at all.  Even the People’s Party of Canada, which tends to represent the extreme right here, goes nowhere near many proposals that Republicans have been making for years.

Noteworthy in terms of extreme positions within Quebec is that Québec Solidaire, which absorbed Option Nationale in 2017, proposes to declare Quebec an independent country during a first mandate without calling a referendum on the matter.  This somehow attracts little attention.