More on District Energy

I wasn’t able to attend the City’s open house last month on the potential District Energy Utility (DEU) system, tentatively proposed for the Sapperton area (it was the same night as the Royal City Curling Club AGM, and two or three other events I would have like to have attended. I need a clone). I have read a lot about DEUs, and have toured systems in a few different places. I have previously written at length about the many benefits of DEUs, so I was really interested to see what direction New Westminster was planning to go with the idea.

Based on what I read in the consultation materials, I like what I see.

The basic idea behind a DEU is that thermal energy systems can be more efficient if they are built larger. This is why there is commonly a single boiler in a large commercial or residential building, instead of having little boilers in each apartment or office. If a single energy source could supply heat energy (hot water or steam) to multiple buildings, it can be run as a utility to those buildings: a DEU.

Many large cities have had systems like this for decades. Downtown Vancouver has a gas-fired steam system that ties multiple buildings together. However, the modern resurgence of DEUs is coming out of Europe, and is being driven by low- or zero-carbon energy supplies. In the last decade, DEUs of different size and design have popped up in Victoria, Vancouver, Richmond, and other cities.

Although DEUs can be retro-fitted into existing buildings, the most cost-effective application is one where the buildings are constructed with the DEU in mind, around a development hub. Having an institutional or industrial user in the core to provide cost-buffering “baseline demand” makes the business case even stronger. A well-designed DEU will sell energy to the customers at similar rates as other energy sources (while buffering the customers from the volatility of gas or oil prices), pay for the infrastructure costs, and even turn a small profit for the utility owner. When a low- or zero-carbon energy source is part of the plan, there are spin-off environmental benefits for the entire community.

The New Westminster situation has many of the elements that could make for a very successful DEU. There is an institutional customer interested in reducing its carbon footprint for regulatory reasons, and there is relatively high density development (commercial, industrial, and residential) occurring nearby that will allow gradual scaling up for increased efficiency. There also happens to be a zero-carbon energy source right nearby.

The analysis provided by the City here shows that the sewer heat option is viable, at least in the preliminary analysis. This is really good news, because although the wood waste option would provide GHG and cost benefits over not having a DEU, the math when it comes to emissions related to a sewer heat recovery system are obviously order-of-magnitude better:

Emission estimates of different systems, click to enlarge.

Yes, scrubbers, filters and the such can improve the baseline particulate numbers, but you really can’t argue with the near-zero emissions of the sewer heat system.
 
As I said, I missed my chance to go to the open house, but I can still provide my feedback. So can you!

Read the materials here. And more here.

Then provide some feedback here.You can ask questions, let them know your concerns or ideas. Here is your chance to give them the feedback you want. But you better hurry, you have until this Friday!

On Enbridge, and editorial failures.

I haven’t said much about the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline semi-announcement. Frankly, there have been too many column inches wasted on this story already, as the project is a non-starter. After all is said and done, the millions of dollars wasted by Enbridge and our Federal Government to promote an ecologically and economically indefensible project will be just one of the sad legacies of the Harper years.

So this post isn’t about Enbridge, it is about another monumental failure: this “Editorial” in one of the local Post Media Serious Newspapers of Note (which itself has become the AM Sport Radio of Print Journalism). There is so much wrong in this very short 250 words that it needs to be addressed line-by-line:

“Setting aside, for the moment, the tremendous economic opportunities and wealth creation that resource extraction has always meant to B.C. and this country…”

Point 1: We cannot simply set aside the economic opportunities of the Northern Gateway, or other resource extraction activities in BC, because that is what this entire issue is about. From the start, the people up and down the coast of BC have been critical of this project specifically because of the risk it poses to their economic reality and the threat it poses to the very resources that their economy relies on, while providing almost no offsetting economic benefits to the communities most at risk.

Point 2: By lumping in an oil pipeline in with “resource extraction” is to be disingenuous to the real concerns here. Yes, BC and Canada were built on resource extraction: furs, mines, forests, fish, and energy. But not all resources are the same, and they do not contribute equally. Some are renewable, some are not. Some we extract high value with value-added industries, some we don’t. Some we balance against significant environmental harm, some we do not. By any measure, an oil pipeline transporting diluted bitumen for immediate export through our parks, watersheds, forests, shorelines and seas provides the least extracted value from a non-renewable resource with virtually no value added, few jobs, and a potentially huge environmental impact. When compared to Canada’s largest-value of exports (automobiles and machinery) Oil and all hydrocarbons pale in comparison, both in the GDP contribution to our economy, to the amount of trade dollars, and in the amount of employment income derived by the industries.

Canada’s exports by sector, a proportion of GDP. Click to enlarge.

“Resource Extraction” built Canada, but manufacturing and services are our future.

“…when it comes to the Northern Gateway pipeline Canadians had better start asking themselves a very fundamental question: Are we going to be a nation of citizens who respect the rule of law, due process and democratic governance or are we going to descend into anarchy and mob rule?”

Wow. I mean f***ing wow (sorry Mom). The false dichotomy and broad-brush idiocy of this statement is one thing, but it’s the inherent hubris that makes me want to swear. To be lectured by cheerleaders of this project about “due process” and the “rule of law” when the proponents had many of the laws that would have provided said due process stripped away, when the persons employed by the Government to provide the scientific basis for that process have been fired or silenced, when the scientific community comes out with a comprehensive list of the ways the process was not based on scientific review of its own criteria, is, I think, a little offensive to those who believe in democratic governance and science-based policy to be accused of being an anarchist mob.

To suggest that people in a democracy, standing up for injustice, speaking their minds, providing opinion, ideas, and (yes) criticism of the government is akin to “mob rule” or “anarchy” sounds like the hyperbole of a totalitarian state – or just the regular missives of a Petro-State, I suppose.

“The decision by the Harper government Tuesday to approve the pipeline — critical to unleashing vast wealth for Canada by allowing Alberta oil to be delivered safely to world markets — has been met by predictable opposition.”

The parts on the outside of the dashes read like a reasonable comment, and are about the only truthful part of this entire editorial. The part in the middle is just more Petro-State approved gibberish. Because it paints over the reasons the opposition exists. Some suggest this pipeline is not “critical” to the ongoing development of the Bitumen Sands, it only serves to accelerate their development and make the entire operation less sustainable. Some further suggest too much of the “vast wealth” is currently going to multi-national corporations and state-owned oil companies from Norway to Malaysia, and not to the people of Canada who own the resource being rapidly depleted and exported. Mostly, people are concerned that this project will not in fact get the product “safely to markets”, but will spread a little too much of it around valuable natural resource territories, and on lands never ceded by the aboriginal inhabitants.

“In a democracy, this is healthy. But the too-common rhetoric from some quarters of taking direct action against the decision of a democratically elected government is appalling, especially after years of public process into the merits of the project and the imposition of 209 conditions to ensure the environment is as protected as is possible.”

Read that again. A major newspaper is suggesting that the Majority of Canadians who didn’t vote for the Conservatives, or even those who are part of the plurality who voted for someone other than them, you should just shut the hell up and take whatever you are given. You may say the process never demonstrated the merits, and are not assured the conditions are sufficient or will be met, but it is “appalling” that you would question a duly elected government.

“Critics talk of the need for “social licence” for projects like the pipeline, a new term created by people who can’t win elections, but think they have some right to run the country. They don’t.”

Since I am one of the majority who did not Vote for Harper’s band of thieves, perhaps I should defer to their greatest shadow-organizers, the Fraser Institute on the topic of “Social License”. You see, according to the oft-quoted free-market “dink-tank”, that term was not a term “created by people who can’t win elections”, it was invented by a successful Canadian Mining Executive, and it is described very well in this Fraser Institute article under their ”MiningFacts.org.” astroturf organization:

Allow me to quote extensively: “[social license to operate (SLO)]…is an essential part of operating within democratic jurisdictions, as without sufficient popular support it is unlikely that agencies from elected governments will willingly grant operational permits or licenses. The SLO can be revoked and it should never be taken for granted. The Social License to Operate refers to the acceptance within local communities of both mining companies and their projects. Social acceptance is granted by all stakeholders that are or can be affected by mining projects (e.g. local communities, indigenous people) and other groups of interests (e.g. local governments, NGOs). The SLO does not refer to a formal agreement or document but to the real or current credibility, reliability, and acceptance of mining companies and projects. The SLO is granted by stakeholders based on the credibility of a mining company and the type of relationship that companies develop with the communities. Stakeholders tend to grant an SLO when they feel that their values and those of the company are aligned.”

Typical Fraser Institute radical lefties. I wonder how Enbridge is doing on that Social Licence thing?

“Opponents will take heart from the demonstration in Vancouver that occurred Tuesday or from petitions with several thousand names criticizing the pipeline’s approval. But they need to remember that most British Columbians who support projects like the pipeline aren’t generally available mid-afternoon to express it. They’re working, but they do vote.”

What a load of bullshit. The Province was there, and should know that protest was held, and reached it peak, on a Friday evening – the largest numbers appeared well after the close of business Friday – and I know several people who went down there AFTER WORK to assure their voices were heard. And these people vote. And the unemployed and underemployed vote.

The best part of about that protest was the numbers that showed up after work on a Friday of a sunny weekend on very short notice – there were more people at that protest than there are jobs promised the people of BC for the entire Northern Gateway Project. To me, that is a sign of a healthy democracy, and the Province’s Editorial board is a demonstration of a failure of journalism in that democracy. Not because I disagree with them, and not just because of the specific problems above, but because of what their approach is to the entire topic, in light of the role of journalism in a functioning democracy.

What does it mean when the “Fourth Estate”- they who are meant to hold Government and Corporate feet to the fire and assure that oversight was provided outside of government in the service of the people – read too much from the government play sheet? Read this opinion piece above, and ask yourself who is being protected, and from whom? Here we have the media telling people who do not agree with the current federal government and the few corporate interests that are proposing this project not that they are wrong; not that they are factually incorrect; not that their concerns are misplaced; but to SHUT UP, YOU LOSERS!

Of course, we can’t be sure it is their editorial position at all. Considering the history of PostMedia newspapers selling advertising space to Enbridge proponents while making them look like editorials.

I used to think the dead-tree large corporate media were no longer relevant to our democracy, now I am starting to suspect they are actively trying to undermine it.

Green Drinks and Food Security!

I’ve mentioned the Southwest BC Bio-Regional Food System Design Project (SWBCBRFSDP – my acronym, not theirs!) on this blog before, but it was tied in with a bunch of bummer complaining about lack of government support for protecting the ALR, so the good news might have been buried in all that whining. So this is the “good news” follow-up post. Folks in the know are coming to New West on Tuesday to tell us about this really cool project.

Recognizing the need to support more robust local food systems, the researchers at Kwantlen’s Institute for Sustainable Food Systems are applying their significant expertise, and partnering with a diverse community of business, governance, and agricultural experts, to bring about change in how we source our food.

There are a lot of words in SWBCBRFSDP, but I like the idea of showing why every word is relevant:

SWBC: Southwest BC is defined by the project as the area from Hope to Powell River, and from Delta to Lillooet: an extensive area that ties the lower stretch of the Fraser River to the Sunshine Coast, and essentially comprises the mainland Canadian portions of the traditional lands of the Coast Salish People.

BR: A Bio-Region is and area defined by a common topography, climate, plant and animal life, and human cultural influence. In this sense, the watersheds of the Salish Sea from the desert of Lillooet to Howe Sound has a diversity of eco-zones, but are tied together by bio-cultural heritage and geography.

FS: This project is not just about farming and protecting the ALR. Yes, preserving farmland when we can will be an important part of the food security equation, but we also have to consider the other major food inputs, such as the salmon we catch from the river, and the traditional food-gathering that many of us are separated from, but are still an important part of the region’s culture. However, there is much more to food than having profitable local Agri-business farms (how many cranberries do you eat in the average year?). A Food System would support the regional economy by connecting together food sources with processors, warehousing and retail, delivery systems from Farmers’ Markets to restaurants and standard retail. A true system would even connect our disjointed organic waste stream, to bring the nutrients in our food waste back to the farms and better manage in the industrial-scale waste sometimes produced in Agri-business. Ultimately, every step in the food cycle should not just just feed British Columbians, but employ, include, and benefit British Columbians. That is how local economic resiliency is built.

Design Project: This project will start by performing an actual, science-based evaluation of what the food potential of the region is – can this region actually meet its own food needs? And if so, how? They will also be evaluating the critical needs and opportunities for our local food systems to get the food we produce to our local plates. The eventual plan is to create a series of science-based policy papers and best practices reviews that decision-makers in municipal, regional and provincial government can use to help bring a more sustainable local food system into existence.

This project hopes to realize that building a local food economy is about more than just Food Sovereignty (our ability to feed ourselves domestically and not being overly reliant on volatile global markets), but also supports economic development for the region. Every bit of food we import is a bleed on the local economy – it is a flow of our wealth to other places that we could instead use to fuel our local economy. If food is grown in BC, processed in BC, sold in BC, and the waste recycled in BC, we are creating jobs at every step, we are having a smaller environmental impact on the planet. It also brings our communities together by bringing us closer to the people who provide us our nourishment.

At a time when many of us feel bombarded by bad news and general malaise about the future of sustainability planning in our communities / province / country, this is a good news story – a positive look forward towards a better future.

At this point, the project is still being set up, and the proponents are trying to tie stakeholders together. The proponents are putting on a bit of a travelling discussion about the project and food security, which is why I am talking about this here and now – because Dr. Kent Mullinix and Sofia Fortin from the SW BC Bio-Regional Food System Design Project are coming to Green Drinks in New West!

The NWEP is moving it’s every-second-month-or-so Green Drinks to the Terminal Pub (where there is a new menu, many excellent choices at the taps, and a cool new room) on June 10. Green Drinks is always fun, casual, and no-stress. You get to chat with a wide diversity of New Westies and people from a little further afield. The formal program is kept short to give you lots of chat time, and there is no need to drink if that isn’t your thing. It’s mostly just a social gathering of folks concerned about sustainability issues, socializing, talking, and having some fun.

This time, you get a chance to talk to the folks from the above-raved-about project (and ask Kent about pruning your trees- I took a pruning course from him a few years ago and learned more than anyone should ever need to know- the guy is a font of knowledge on all things growing!)

Join us! It’s Free!

The future of farming or a future without farms?

I’ve been thinking about the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) and the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) a lot recently. For several reasons.

Caveat: Although dealing with ALR issues is a (very small) part of my job, nothing I write here is related to actual experiences on the job, nor do I does it relate whatsoever to the opinions of my employers.

We were out on our regular every-Sunday-morning-in-a-month-without-an-“r” Fraser River Fuggitivi ride to Steveston, and a friend starting asking me about farms in Richmond. Among the topics: “wow, farmers must be rich, these huge houses!” and (in response to some signs on a farm) “is illegal dumping a really an issue?”

A second reason it has been on my mind was my recent short tour of Urban Digs Farm in Burnaby. We were there to buy some locally-grown and humanely raised pork, but got an impromptu tour and learned a lot about the realities of small farming in the Urban ALR.

Thirdly, I recently saw a presentation by Kent Mullinix about the Southwest BC Bio-Regional Food System Design Project. This is a science-based collaborative investigation of the BC food system, with an emphasis on the sustainability of the inputs (soil, water, nutrients) and outputs (waste) of our local food supply.

All of these ideas were entering my already-addled head, because they entered in the context of the current discussion happening in Victoria about changes to the Agricultural Land Commission. The more I learn about this topic, the more concerned I am about the erosion of our ability, as a society, to feed ourselves, and the ripple effects that will have in our local and regional economy.

So let’s go back up to topic #1: The economics of farming in parts of the Lower Mainland. The reality is that some people are making money farming in the Lower Mainland, but they aren’t building mansions. Well, a few are building mansions because they are the very few large landowners and leaseholders growing cranberries or blueberries at a scale and scope that they can tie into the globalized agri-business model. Most of the mansions you see on agricultural land are not owned by the farmers of the land, but people who want to build a 20,000-sqft house, and a 10-acre piece of farmland is the most affordable way to do it. The farming that occurs on that land is not by them, but by someone else (usually the agri-business conglomerates) that lease the land, allowing the person who can afford the 20,000-sqft mansion to avoid paying too much tax.

There is also a fair amount of good farmland in the Lower Mainland that is sitting idle – not being farmed because it is owned as a long-term investment. Occasionally, someone decides the land has to be raised to grow crops (often, a dubious argument) and gets approval to bring fill onto the land from the ALC. That can be very lucrative, as it is surprisingly difficult to find somewhere to put all of the dirt you dig out of the ground when you build a high-rise tower in Burnaby or Surrey or New Westminster. Occasionally, this fill is contaminated or contains construction trash or debris. Since the ALC currently does not have an Enforcement Officer in the Lower Mainland, the chances of anyone getting in trouble for dumping this non-farm-use soil on ALR land are pretty slim. Very occasionally, unknown people dump large quantities of fill of unknown quality or origin on unoccupied farmland. See the part above about “Enforcement Officer”.

The third category of farmland use in the Lower Mainland is the small farmer trying to grow crops for local markets and maybe trying to latch onto the side of the global agri-business train. For them, the work is hard, and the economics dire.

Part one of the sketchy economics are land prices. Large tracts of ALR land in the Lower Mainland can be had for $100,000 acre, if you are buying a very large piece out in the far reaches of Langley or an unimproved piece of South Surrey. If you want to buy a smaller 5- or 10-acre ALR lot closer to urban areas, your land price can get up to $1,000,000 per acre. When the vast majority of BC Farms make less than $100,000 in annual revenue, there is simply no opportunity to support that land value.

So why is the land so valuable if it doesn’t deliver revenue? See the two examples of ALR land use above. If you want 40 acres upon which to build a 20,000-sqft mansion, $6 Million seems like a bargain, especially as you can lease 75% of the land to an agri-business and save on your taxes. Add to this the speculation that all ALR (especially the stuff near urban development) has the potential to turn into extremely valuable commercial or industrial land, if you can only convince the ALC to let it out of the ALR. The speculative value of the land is so much higher than its monetary value as farmland.

The second half of this sketchy economics discussion is the globalized agri-business industry in BC as a whole. According to Kent Mullinix, Food agriculture on BC made about $2.5 Billion in revenue last year, but the industry as a whole lost $87 Million. That is only a 3% loss on revenue – an industry can rebound from this type of temporary setback – except it is not temporary, it is systemic. The trend is downward, with no plan to recover.

The trend is going that way because the North American agriculture system is becoming less sustainable. It relies on uncertain hydrocarbon markets to fuel it, it is overtaxing the soil, in some places depleting the ground and surface water that sustains it, in other areas polluting the water running off from it. It is becoming more reliant on a few large Corporations that own all of the seeds and the pesticides that the seeds have been genetically modified to tolerate. The meat is overloaded with antibiotics that are creating a resistance problem, and grown in such concentrated conditions that the entire Fraser Valley has a “nutrient glut” – they can’t find anywhere to put all the shit they are generating. If, god forbid, there is a bumper crop, the Global Market, in all its invisible-hand wisdom, causes prices to dive and the farmer still struggles to break even. Margins are so tight that an entire industry of indentured servants temporary foreign workers had to be developed to allow the money-losing crops to get to export.

This contrasts completely with the approach the good people at Urban Digs are taking. They have leased a few acres of land in the last remnants of farm land in Burnaby, and use it to grow higher-value vegetable crops, organic free-run chickens (for eggs), ducks (for meat), and pigs. They may grow other things, but those what was on site when I visited.

I first met Julia from Urban Digs when we both presented at the same PechaKucha event at the River Market. I babbled on about rocks, but she gave a compelling talk about the farm that struck a nerve when she discussed the ethics of meat eating. She spoke of raising, nurturing, and caring for animals before you slaughter them for meat. Short of becoming an ethical vegan, this seems the least cruel way to manage our meat supply. Also, because they are not stressed, are free to roam, and have healthy balanced diets, the meat simply tastes better. Yes, this meat is a little more expensive than the foam-platter plastic-wrapped slab of flesh at Safeway… but I’ll address that issue later.

That’s MsNWimby meeting her meat at Urban Digs. 

Urban Digs are like pretty much every successful small-business owner I have met: They bust their ass every day to keep things running; They hire a local assistant when they can afford it and need arises to share in the hard work and they pay them for it; They rely on an integrated network of local supports for the bulk of their supplies; They are constantly reaching out to expand their local customer base and innovating to find new ways to serve their market. They contribute to their community, and every dollar they make is returned to the local economy. They are not getting rich, aren’t building a big house on their acreage, but they are getting by, doing good, honest work right here in our community.

This to me is the fundamental point that speaks to the real issue behind farming in BC: they can make enough revenue on a few acres of rich ALR farmland to make a (hard) living, but they can only dream of making enough to pay for the actual land they farm, hence the short-term lease.

So the big operators are scratching by, or losing money, riding the globalized agri-business  train, and the small operator is scratching by, but cannot afford to settle on a piece of land by providing better food to local people. At the same time that the majority of the food we grow, and the majority of the $2.5 Billion in annual revenue agriculture generates leaves BC, we in British Columbia spend more than $6.3 Billion on food, and watch our own farmland sit idle, or get redeveloped into tilt-up slab industrial land. Why?

A new crop of tilt-slab light industrial buildings in Burnaby.

Because agri-business food is cheaper.

That’s it – that is the only reason anyone can give for why that slab of antibiotic-laden, nutrient-reduced, potentially-diseased, tasteless flesh wrapped in plastic at Safeway is the better way to feed ourselves. However – and this is the important point – this is a false economy.

The compromises we need to make to our food security to save that little bit of money at the check-out counter are huge, and piling up, and they don’t represent real savings, they represent offsetting costs. The reliance on increased petrochemical inputs, on overtaxed soil and contaminated water systems, on increasing livestock influenza epidemics and moving food in gigantic steel boxes across the ocean when it can be grown in our own backyard. When almost all of the money we spend on that “cheaper” food leaves the Province, and the large agri-businesses operating in BC are losing money – is this really the cheaper option? Or are we being penny wise and pound foolish.

When the California Central Valley, where most of our vegetable crops come from, is seeing its third consecutive year of critical drought; when the Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 1/3 of grain crops in North America, is showing signs of failure; and when the world is moving past peak phosphorous (Cripes! That’s a thing!?), there are many signs that the era of all this “cheap food” is fleeting. The system is too big, too unyielding, and relies on too many critical paths. The globalized agri-business food industry in 2012 is starting to look like a Soviet corn or cotton plan from 1960, and it is just as doomed. The economics are shifting.

If this system is breaking, what will replace it? That is what the team from the Southwest BC Bio-Regional Food System Design Project are going to try to calculate. Now this post is running very long already, so I leave it to you to go to the website and get more detail about this very interesting program (and maybe I’ll Blog more about it later). Short version: A group of researchers from Kwantlen’s Institute for Sustainable Food Systems is working with a broad group of partners including Local Governments from Hope to the Sunshine Coast and groups as diverse as the ALC, Real Estate Foundation of BC, the New Westminster Community Food Action Committee, and the Surrey Board of Trade to study the food system that nourishes our community.

Here is a quote form their website:

“The team is using a bio-regional approach to design an integrated food system that respects the boundaries and leverages the opportunities of an ecological and cultural region beyond the conventional delineations of municipal and regional boundaries. Our planning horizon is 2050. What is the potential for a revived and re-localized food system in BC; how can we respect and incorporate Indigenous harvest and hunting practices in the food system; how many jobs can we create; how much can we contribute to the regional economy; what kinds of ancillary businesses can emerge and how can this kind of food system reduce GHG emissions and address serious environmental concerns? These are some of the questions the ISFS team is trying to answer”.

This is an interesting project, in its infancy, but inside here may well be found the systems that need to be developed that will allow businesses like Urban Digs to provide food in a sustainable way to our community, and pay themselves a living wage while doing it.

Our Provincial government is also aware the ALR system is broken, but instead of fixing it, they seem intent on scattering the pieces about to prevent it’s repair. I present to you Bill 24 – Amendments to the Agricultural Land Commission Act.

The first step (and it can’t be the only one) to repair the disconnect between farm land value and its cost is to end the speculative investment in ALR land, which starts with a Government standing up and saying “This Government will not undo the ALR, and will not allow lands to be removed from the ALR”, like every other government of the last 40 years has done. Even showing the kind of commitment for the ALR that they demonstrated during the election last year would be nice. Look at their 2013 Campaign Platform, and the Agriculture section was 400 words with three strategies and 10 actions, and no mention of changes to the ALC. Actually, the platform suggests it will help with a Buy Local campaign and promote 50- and 100-mile diets, an idea that is best supported by strengthening the ALC.

This Act does quite the opposite, and opens up the door for exclusion on the whim of local politicians. The cost of farm land in the lower mainland will be going up when this bill passes, hand in hand with the pressure on local councils to open it for development.

With apologies to the most stunningly non-partisan of all Canadian scientists, this Government seems to never see a problem so bad that they can’t make worse.

Bill 24 is a potential disaster for BC food security, because it entrenches the unsustainable, failing business model that is our current globalized agri-business based food system. It not only fails to prop that business model up (as the land price equation change is going to hurt them as well!) it runs the risk of ending any hope we have of building the sustainable model that may replace it, at the very time when we are seeking to understand better what that system looks like.

Sustainable Spaces Dialogue

On Friday evening, more that 75 people showed up at Douglas College to talk about land use, sustainability, and the future or our public space in New Westminster. The event was the product of the remarkable young mind of New Westminster native Colin O’Neil and sponsored by the Rivershead Society of BC. I was honoured to be invited to provide one of the short talks that were intended to get the people in the room thinking about sustainable spaces.

I had 20 minutes, and wanted to talk about how New Westminster relates to the river (it being an event of the Rivershead Society) and about land use. These topics, during my research, kept pointing back at the history of the Port of New Westminster, and how its modern corollary Port Metro Vancouver impacts every part of our waterfront and the planning of our community.

As working on this talk took up much of my normal “blogging time” over the last little while, I figured I would repurpose my speaking notes into a blog post. So below are the notes I made, along with the photos that were projected during my talk. Note I tend to rift off on my notes during talks, but the framework is here. This is, more or less, what I meant to say, as opposed to what I actually said.


I want to talk about the pressures on land use on the riverfront, historically, and at present, and how that relates to sustainability of our community


The history of our City is tied to how we have used our waterfront, the geography of the waterfront, and the value we put on that place. In New Westminster, we are emerging from a long-term stagnation as the City waited for some form of renewal. That renewal only began with a re-imagining of how our waterfront is used. To understand how we address the Fraser River now, we need to look at some history.

The City is here because of the River. The Fraser has provided the City many things: water, food, transportation, a place to put our wastes. But mostly it gave us a reason to be here and a place to form our community.

Image source: New Westminster Archives Online

I became a geologist after studying geography, so when I look at land, I think about the physical forces that formed it, then about the human forces that shaped it. It was only 10,000 years ago that this place where we are today emerged from several millennia of ice cover, and the shoreline here was oceanfront. The Fraser River was choked with glacial sediments unlocked from melting ice, and the Fraser Delta grew westward from here. It was probably immediately after the ice left that the first people arrived here, no doubt using these shores for fishing, to hunt game, to gather food, to rest and gather. We don’t know who these first visitors were, but we know after several thousand years, their direct descendents, the Qayqayt had established villages here by the time that Europeans arrived by sea and down the river a mere 200 years ago.

Image source: New Westminster Archives Online

The European reasons for locating here was a simple military decision bred of ambitions of empire. Fort Langley was located in a swamp on the wrong side of the River, and when the inevitable American invasion came, the Brits would be overrun and driven in to the river. New Westminster had a steep shoreline on the correct side of the River to face down the invading hoards. It must have been a formidable position, as the hoards never actually arrived, and the invasion ended with the unfortunate death of one pig San Juan Island, but that is another story altogether.

The first boom for New Westminster came with the Fraser River, then Cariboo, gold rushes. Despite losing the status of Capital to politics a decade later, and the western terminus of the CPR two decades after that to more politics, New Westminster put some serious industrial roots down in those first decades… and it was all about the River.

Image source: New Westminster Archives Online

By 1887, Vancouver became the railhead, but New Westminster was home to Canada’s Pacific fishing fleet. There were already more than a dozen canneries on the Fraser River. There were also four sawmills, and ironworks and machine shops to support these primary resource industries. As the surrounding areas of Lulu Island and Southwestminster were cleared of trees and ploughed into farms, New Westminster became the centre for all agricultural trade in the new Province.

By the turn of the century (last one) a rail spur and the first bridge across the river were built – the same bridge that carries trains across the river today. The waterfront was remarkably diverse in its industrial function. As dredging increased and larger ships were permitted upriver, New Westminster became the most important Port on the west coast.

Image source: New Westminster Archives Online

It is hard for us younger folk here to envision how industrial New Westminster was around the time of World War 2. There were 15 lumber mills, a dozen fish canneries and places to can produce, a paper mill, a distillery, a brewery, meat packing, cold storage, fertilizer manufacturing, wood treatment, aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding, and a huge machine shop, metalworking and woodworking industry to support it all. Almost the entire waterfront was taken up by one of the 120 or so manufacturing plants. And they used the River, for transport, water, raw materials, and a place to put their waste.

At the time of the cleanup-up to the Pier Park, they discovered large piles of metal shavings full of cutting fluids in the shore sediments. Apparently these old machine shops would cut a hole in the floor of the pier to dispose of their shavings, and when the pile built up to the base of the pier, they simply nailed down some planks to cover the hole, and cut another one 20 feet over. The River was a great place to put your waste!

Image source: New Westminster Archives Online

Shipping from the Port of New West peaked in 1956, and along with this peak came the peak of retail commercial business- the “Golden Mile” era of Columbia Street. Then things changed.

How many manufacturing plants do we have now?

The Port declined in the early 70s, and closed shop completely in 1980.

Why? Where did they go?

A large part of the answer is globalization. International competition and the emergence of Asian manufacturing made it cheaper to import the important service equipment these primary manufacturers required. The primary manufacturing industries (and the waterfront was dominated by sawmilling) were seeing consolidation, and a movement from local control to external control. When economic stresses of volatile global markets hit the single-resource industries, the old technology in these New West facilities was easy to shut down first in favour of newer or less labour intensive plants elsewhere.

At the same time, the Port declined as its original fortuitous location became untenable for the new ways of moving freight. The ships started to get too large for the Fraser River, but more importantly, those steep defensible slopes did not allow enough room on the shore side of the dock for roll-on-roll-off and containerization methods. The old warehouses of the New Westminster waterfront were decrepit, and no-one was interested in investing in their renewal.

Image source: New Westminster Archives Online

Part of the story of our City’s interaction with the River is told in the history of our Port Authority. The Port of New Westminster – the piers and buildings where the freight was stored and moved during the peak – belonged to the City. The New Westminster Harbour Commission was formed in 1913, and worked with City and the Board of Trade to promote the Port and fought off competition from Port of Vancouver. The Port had a global reach, trading to the USA, through the Panama Canal to Europe, and to the emerging Asian markets. The NWHC promoted connections to all of these places, advertised globally in a competitive market to get the most of the ongoing growth. And for a little while, that worked.

Eventually, the geographic constraints and change of technology through the 50s and 60s led to expansion of port facilities to Fraser Surrey Docks and Annacis Island, and the NWHC became the Fraser River Harbour Commission in 1965, covering the entire area upriver from Steveston to the Pitt River and Kanaka Creek in Maple Ridge.

The FRPC eventually became the Fraser River Port Authority, and that latter entity ceased to exist in 2008, when the Federal Government decided to amalgamate all Port operations between Horseshoe Bay and the US border into one authority – ”Port Metro Vancouver”.

I’m not going to get too deep into the reasons for this, but the impact obvious: a further reduction in local control of the waterfront. Especially as we look at the “mandate” and “vision” of this new regional authority:

Note the word “Gateway” always appears with a capital “G”, like most deities.

This is the part of the talk where I delve into subjectivity and opinion, but you need to get subjective here, because this speaks directly to how we value our river, our waterfront, and our community. What do we want our river to be? How do we want to use our waterfront? Do we want a say in how our community develops?

These statements don’t speak much to accountability to the local community, although the Port does seem interested in local benefits. But things actually get worse, because these statements changed in 2014  (which I write here over the old ones, to put the contrast in high relief):

Where they used to benefit us, they now wish to inspire us and fill us with national pride.

Maybe this is just a bit of Winter Olympic year hubris, we did, after all win a lot of gold metals this year, and everyone wants a piece of that…. but I’m having my doubts.

Here is visioning document put out by the Port a couple of years ago. This is meant to help the Port set plans for the coming decades – to envision the future they will need to plan towards. In this document, they set out 4 possible futures, and aside from the phallic symbolism, the colour scheme (green is good, red is bad) makes it clear what future the Port wants, and what it does not:

But look closely at how the Port, in their visioning, describes success:

Which in these uncertain times seems reasonable, I guess. The future is uncertain, the globe is headed to shit, but damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Contrast this to the vision of failure, the fate we must avoid:

Local resiliency? Well being? The horror…

Again I ask, what do you want your port to provide to your community?


Maybe we don’t want to go back to having heavy industry on our waterfront, maybe we value the space differently. We now provide different values to the River: we want to look at it, be cooled by it, be provided ecosystem services from it. We still rely on it for work, we still want it to provide us fish, and these uses are ultimately compatible with using it for transportation.

This is not to say the Port doesn’t use our waterfront for industry. However, it uses it in very different ways, mostly to store things and move things on and off of trucks. Today, the Port wants to take more of our farmland to convert it into industrial space, not for moving goods on and off of boats, or even for adding value to goods or undertaking manufacturing – but to put things on and off of trucks.

Don’t worry about the ALR, they say, we need an “Industrial Land Reserve”, and we can just truck in all of our food.

Look at this piece of Port land, almost 40 hectares of industrial land belonging to the Port, rapidly being filled with warehouses. What’s missing?

The piers. There is no-where for a boat to tie up. How will they move things on and off of boats? There is one old one, rarely used for moving wood pulp onto boats as break bulk. Instead of building piers to move all of those containers you can see, or all the good in all of those massive warehouses, the Port is investing in building an overpass to connect this access road to the East-west Connector, and to expanding road access to the area, to more rapidly get the trucks to your neighbourhood streets.

This is the Captial-G “Gateway” in those mission statements. No wonder Councillor Harold Steves in Richmond gets all ornery about the Port buying the 10 hectares of active farm land just to the north of this picture.

Now, why am I hitting the Port so hard? Any why doesn’t councillor Steeves do something about it?

Because the Port is making these decisions that will decide what our waterfront (and our river, and our community) will look like over the coming decades, whether you like it or not. They are completely unaccountable to local concerns.

Will our waterfront become a larger export site for thermal coal, eking small profits from the exacerbation of the largest man-made global catastrophe of all time? The Port approves, despite community concerns.


Will we allow the Port to buy up more ALR land, convert it to industrial land by fiat, and lease it out for profit to trucking companies? At the same time they don’t pay living wages to those truckers? The Port argues this is important, and we cannot allow “local well-being” to slow their growth.


We live in New Westminster where the #1 livability issue is traffic: trucks and through-commuters. The region has spent $5 Billion building freeways for trucks, that Capital-G “Gateway Program”, the support of which the Port has made their mandate and vision. And they are not done. Another $3 or $4 Billion of your money will be spent replacing the Pattullo and the Deas Tunnel – the Gateway marches on. Meanwhile our livability suffers as we need to cut bus routes in our community for lack of investment. If we dream of expanding public transit, we will need to hold some sort of referendum at some point off in the future.

All of these issues and more have one thing at the core – the Port.

Remember how the industry of New Westminster changed, the forces that restructured out waterfront and caused decades of decline in our City: lack of local ownership, multinationals taking over the businesses, reliance on volatile foreign markets for resource goods instead of concentration on building local resiliency and well being.

I’m not saying I want to go back to cutting metal shavings into the river, but we have to recognize that the river can still be our connection to a bigger world and at the same time provide us a better community.

It is still why we are here. But now, more than ever, we have very little say about what happens to it. Remember those vision statements: Who does the Port answer to?

I, for one, don’t think local resiliency, sustainability, and livability should be feared.

What I’m working on

Wow, I haven’t posted anything in a few days, so I thought I should just update folks on what I’m doing these days, just so my dedicated reader (Hi Mom!) doesn’t worry.

You know, I have been busy. But I am consciously trying not to say “busy” when people ask me how I’ve been or what I am up to, because it seems a bit of a dodge that doesn’t really say anything. And everyone I know is really busy. Busy is our generation, it is our age, it is maybe our life stage. I’ll rest later, there are things to get done. Whatever, we’re all busy. I’ll just shut up about it now.

With what am I currently busy? Among other things, I have been working on research for this:

Link Here

I hope you can make it, it should be interesting.

Rethinking the Region 2014

I really need to get a life. I spent most of Saturday in a classroom at SFU Surrey. I was not taking a course for which I would receive credit, nor was I paying or being paid to be there. Instead, I was attending a workshop for planning geeks (which I may someday aspire to be) that was addressing some of the Big Questions about the future of Metro Vancouver.

It was actually interesting, inspiring, and fun. See my opening sentence.

The event was called “Rethinking the Region”, and despite it’s revolutionary-sounding title, it was actually a more nuanced discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of our current local and regional governance systems. The crowd was mostly SFU Urban Systems graduate students (a room full of young, fresh faced, excited, interested, smart and fashionable students only a slightly depressing reminder of how long ago I was a University Student!), with a fair amount of faculty, and a number of representatives from various local governments and other agencies.

There were many different aspects of the program that piqued my interest, I met some interesting people, and lots of fun discussion ensued. However, for this post I just want to run through my impressions of the opening addresses by the panel of experts that opened the program. I didn’t take extensive notes, so my apologies to the presenters if I mischaracterize their points here a bit – these are my impressions, not transcripts, so I will be careful with actual quotation marks.

The Program was opened by a former senior planner for New Westminster Ken Cameron, who set the tone by encouraging us to not think of Metro Vancouver as 22 border-sharing municipalities, but as a single entity- he used the term “organic” to describe this entity, and it was apt. It has defined boundaries (the sea, the mountains, the US Border), we can talk about it’s inputs (resources, goods, energy) and it’s outputs (resources, goods, wastes), and we can think about different components (roads, houses, businesses, schools) as interacting organs that process those through-puts.

His talk was broad-reaching but brought some interesting insights. One was that we are fortunate to live in a region with well defined and immutable limits, as this forces us to view our resources (including physical space) as finite, and therefore worthy of careful planning to allow us to manage them better.

A second point made by Cameron was that “governance always happens”. Whenever people get together, from the smallest hunter-gatherer tribe to the largest nations, humans assemble a governance system to allow us to work together. It doesn’t always work well, but it has always worked better if the governance has a coherent plan and everyone being governed is on the same page about the goals.

This last point sounds idealistic on the surface when it seems we are always arguing about every decision our governments make. It becomes more obvious when you think about the things our modern governance systems deliver: an economic system to trade goods, a system of laws to protect the security of the person, infrastructure to support our movements and our communication, etc. It is the details around the edges of these things that we argue about, as the essential structures and ideas have pretty much been worked out, or we wouldn’t be currently enjoying all of those things.

The second speaker was Anita Huberman from the Surrey Board of Trade. She was there to speak for the need of the region’s business communities to work together with a regional vision. She spoke of the need to get out of our municipal- and industry-specific silos, and start proactively sharing resources and infrastructure, while cutting politics out of the equation (that said, it was a Board of Trade speech, so totally non-political phrases like “cutting red tape” were common).The central message was a good one: we don’t have a single regional economic planning group working together, nor do we have a regional economic strategy. However, those much-coveted “global markets” are not interested developing relationships with individual cities as much as with economic regions.

There was room to develop this thought that we didn’t get into at the meeting. Did someone in Mapo-gu, Minami, or Abu Hamour really care if the person she was doing business in was in New Westminster or Surrey or Port Moody? They would, dollars for donuts, just call the area “Vancouver”, just as we would call the above areas just parts of Seoul, Yokohama, and Doha respectively. In this sense, Surrey probably benefits more from Vancouver’s international economic development efforts than vice versa…

Anthony Perl spoke next on the topic of the regional transportation system, obviously a topic close to my heart.

He started with an anecdote about Greater Toronto of the 1980’s, when it was described as “Vienna surrounded by Phoenix” – a region that had squared the circle of providing a compact, walkable and public-transit oriented downtown core based on smart growth principles surrounded by endless car-oriented suburban sprawl. This best-of-both-worlds scenario only hit its pre-Rob Ford crash when it became apparent that having two parallel and disparate transportation systems cost twice the money to move the same number of people. Arguably, it was this unaffordable path that led to the faux-taxpayer-revolt that is Ford Nation.

The object lesson is that Metro Vancouver appears to be, 30 years later, heading down this same economically perilous path. However, Perl outlined three potential ways we could design our regional transportation system, using symbolism from the 2010 Olympics (a time when, as he noted, Vancouver had the third highest transit mode share in North America, only after the two largest Cities: New York and Mexico City).

The “Gold Standard” is epitomized in Greater Zurich. They have a similar population and physical constraints as Metro Vancouver, and have a system where the automobile is secondary to a multi-mode and integrated transportation system. They share our limited top-down planning, and little senior government investment, and make many decisions via referenda (!). The two big differences are that they never ripped up the rail infrastructure they installed in the early 20th century, and they do not have a natural resource extraction economy that requires large-scale movement of bulk goods. “Going for Gold” in Greater Vancouver will require and organized regional coalition of stakeholders, not unlike the Gateway Council but with a broader mandate than the building of roads to move freight.

The “Silver Standard” would look like Lyon, France. This would require the following of strong global trends towards shifting to post-carbon mobility. Unlike Vancouver or Zurich, Lyon benefits from significant Federal investment in moving away from fossil fuels, and has a top-down approach that has brought high-speed rail between cities and Metro within them. They also have a carbon-tax like structure that provided incentives away from burning fuel, even if it isn’t called a carbon tax. This approach in Greater Vancouver would require significant investment by senior governments, not something that seems likely in today’s political climate.

The “Bronze Standard” is what we have seen work in New York City and London, England. In both cases, it was the actions of a single strong leader having the courage to make a bold change, though not breaking completely from traditional motor vehicles. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Livingston took concrete steps to end what Dr. Perl (tongue on slightly in cheek) calls “Road Socialism” – the idea that road use should be free, regardless of the cost to maintain those roads or greater costs to society. This Bronze approach, however, relies on a strong and visionary regional leader, something Greater Vancouver seems bereft of.

Dr. Tim Takaro then took the floor, ostensibly to talk about health policy in the region. Right from the start it was clear what he saw as our major public health issue: the “wicked problem” of climate change. He showed us a few familiar hockey-stick shaped graphs, and did a quick and extremely gloomy run-down of the storms, pestilence, drought and war that are in our future unless we leave 2/3 of our hydrocarbon reserves in the ground.

I loved this summary, and will talk more on this topic in an upcoming blog post:

The final panelist was the one who surprised me the most. Vicky Huntington is a two-term Independent MLA from South Delta, and she spoke frankly and compellingly about the struggles of regional governance, in the context of current threats to Democracy in out nation today. It was stunning.

She began by talking a bit about the struggle to get where we are today as a nation, and the importance of protecting our “strange, difficult, and messy democracy”. Not to put too fine a point on it, she made a case that this is the fight we must have right now in BC and in Canada, or we risk losing our voice, and our representation. There is a real and present risk of a “Plutocracy” developing through the slow and inexorable growth of influence on decision makers made by what can only be described as “wealth”. This is tipping the balance towards a certain economic point of view, and it may not be the one that serves our community or the globe best.

Our Democracy needs accountability, responsiveness, and clarity of purpose. Unfortunately, we are increasingly ruled by the needs of Corporations, who have no requirement to be accountable to the people. Although there is much current talk of “social licence” by Corporations who want to re-draw our region, that very licence is increasingly defined by them, not us.

They create these new consultation structures where they tell us what they are going to do, instead of having a conversation with us about what we will allow them to do. The conversation is narrowly defined and expertly directed by public relations professionals. We can see this with the recent Environmental Assessments (VAFFC, Northern Gateway, Kinder Morgan, Fraser Surrey Docks, etc.), with Port Metro Vancouver expansion plans, with the expansion of the Gateway and projects like the Pattullo Bridge. Quasi-government agencies (the Port, TransLink, BC Ferries, etc.) that ostensibly belong to us and work for us are leveraged by Corporate interests, and when the people try to speak up and challenge their intention, they have the power to shut that debate down. Through tightly-structured “consultations”, people cannot hear each others’ questions, cannot speak outside of the pre-designed debate. If they get too loud, they are marginalized and bullied.

Huntington spoke about the contrast between government and corporations, and how they impact environmental assessments, putting context into the “red tape” complaints of business. We live in a Confederation that is slow and methodical. Developing consensus and true consultation to assure the public interest is served is a deliberately cautious and organic process. That is the reality of a parliamentary system, and is an unfortunate (?) byproduct of our desire for “Peace, order, and good governance”. Corporations, in contrast, need to react quickly – this year, or preferably this quarter. They cannot afford to wait. They need their social licence, and they need it right now, because the anonymous shareholders demand it. Democracy just gets in the way. However, what Corporations see as the “inefficiency” of democracy is the only protection we have.

These were just the opening panel talks. They were followed by Q&A, and a long program of small-group dialogue and workshopping around the bigger themes, and maybe I will talk about those in future blog posts. Overall, it was a great program, and I learned a lot. Makes me want to go back to University…although I suspect I now lack the fresh face or vitality.

On Fort Mac and Dr. No

A short post related to my last one on Neil Young, Fort Mac, and Integrity.

For people who like to read long-format journalism as opposed to Maclean’s style photo-caption writing on the latest “hot trend story”, Canada has the Walrus. It is usually interesting, often brilliant, always worth reading. The NWimby household has been a subscriber since the first edition.

I raise it now because an article about Fort McMurray in the November edition should be read by everyone in Canada. The author clearly brings his anti-tar sand biases into the discussion, but the best parts of the article are not his writing, but the quotes of the Mayor of Fort Mac, Melissa Blake.

It all starts out friendly enough, the Mayor tries to dispel some negative impressions about the City and its livability, and talks about the big plans to build an integrated, sustainable, and full-service community. It only gets weird when the author questions the Mayor about the potential disconnect between building a low-carbon sustainable City fueled completely by the carbon-intensive and unsustainable extraction of oil from bitumen.

“Blake doesn’t miss a beat. ‘I’m a big believer that, yes, the climate is changing. If the climate goes up by two, three, four degrees in the future, we’re lucky to be here in Fort McMurray. We’re lucky not to be in California or BC. They’re going to fall in the ocean. In a place like this, we’re going to survive a lot better.’

You mean digging up bitumen is a good thing, because it will make Fort McMurray’s winters milder?

With a nervous laugh, she assents: ‘And that means my real estate becomes a very important asset in the future, so I’m not selling my house anytime soon.’ “

OK, let’s get something straight. This young person with a young family clearly believes in anthropogenic climate change, and she is talking liltingly about a time in the near future when California and Vancouver will “fall in the ocean”. That is no doubt a bit of fanciful hyperbole, but it has to be put into perspective. With no check on our greenhouse gas emissions, we could see, in her lifetime, global sea levels rise enough to displace hundreds of millions of people from low-lying cities like Miami and Shanghai, Osaka and New Orleans, Bangkok and Mumbai. California and Vancouver don’t need to “fall”, the ocean is coming up to meet them. Climate disruption at this scale will also cause widespread crop failures, mass migrations, unprecedented famines and unimaginable human suffering.

It takes a certain kind of sociopathy to think about the death and suffering of hundreds of millions of humans and say “Wow, that’s going to be good for my real estate value”, nervous laughter notwithstanding, if you are not the one causing these events to take place.

However, when you say that with a giggle at the same time as you are leading a community of people hell-bent on accelerating the very activity that will cause all of those bad things to happen for a little short-term profit?

That is a level of truly evil sociopathy usually reserved for Bond Villains.

I’m with Neil

Canada is trading integrity for money” – Neil Young.

Let’s start with disclosure: I am a Neil Young fan, to the point where being a Neil Young fan has done much to shape my taste in music. To explain that, I need to go back to the late 80’s when I was sharing an apartment on Royal Ave with my brother.

I was raised in the Kootenays on a healthy diet of classic rock (although at the time we just called it Rock) and “Metal” (in quotes, because at the time that referred to a strange amalgamation of Zeppelin and Glam that went by names like Poison, Ratt, Quiet Riot, et al. my god.) because that was the playlist of the only real FM Rock station we could hear – “ROCK 106! KEZE!” out of Spokane, Washington.

When I moved to New West, CFMI was still Top-40, and one of the AM stations (CHRK 600) decided to go Classic Rock (probably the first time I heard that phrase in the context of 60s and 70s Rock music). Despite the hopeful WKRP-feeling of the whole enterprise, it was risky. AM came with questionable sound quality and more onerous Canadian content rules. This last requirement made for some difficult programming choices. All that BTO and Guess Who was bad enough, but the seemingly hourly appearance of the Whiner in D Minor caused me to turn Classic rock off. So safe to say Neil Young entered my consciousness in a pretty negative way.

A year or two later, I was sitting in the Quad at college and “Rocking in the Free World” came on the TV (tuned to MuchMusic, of course), and my opinion changed.

Looking back, it is a hard to understand how powerful that song was. Perhaps this has something to do with “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” by Milli Vanilli being #1 on the charts the day that Young’s Freedom was released. Here was this old rocker, screaming angry lyrics about the fate of the world as America was plundering the depths of Bush I Conservatism. Between scenes of LA viewed through the eyes of a homeless man, we see Young standing in a dystopian junkyard beating the living shit out of his guitar – a solo so angry and violent that the strings were stripped off the instrument. The feedback and distortion are perfect for the angry chaos of the song. It might have been a Rock anthem, but it was more punk than Punk. The lyrics of the bridge (edited out of the video for MTV) lay the blame for the ills of the world on no-one but us:

We got a thousand points of light, for the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand.
Got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says ‘keep hope alive’
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.

A quarter-Century later, in a post-grunge era, the distortion and chaos of the song sound pretty tame. At the time, it was stunning in mainstream rock, and this album was my (admittedly late) gateway drug to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur (Jr.), Fugazi, and the Pixies. But that’s a whole different story.

I bought Freedom on cassette, and became a pretty big Young fan at that point. Such that I can look back at where I was and what I was doing by Neil Young concerts: Solo acoustic at the Spokane Coliseum (I was working at a ski shop in Trail); with Crazy Horse at the Pacific Coliseum (undergrad at SFU); with Booker T and the MGs (around my Brother’s wedding, working in a bike shop, living on Hastings street); etc. His album “Harvest Moon” even played a significant role in my courting (or being courted by) Ms.NWimby.

The question is why am I such a fan? His rock music is pretty straight-forward, even derivative. His ballads are simple – 3 verses and chorus. His vocal style is distinct, but not particularly elegant. He is pretty good at the guitar (if you like extended one-note guitar solos), ok on the piano, and probably should avoid future banjo work. His styles change like the wind, and for every work of genius like “After the Goldrush” there is a “Trans” or an “Everybody’s Rockin”. However, with all the ups and downs of his discography, there is one thread that runs through: integrity.

He has spent a life surrounded with chaos (broken childhood home, 60s folk scene, 70s drug scene, etc.), and, when he occasionally found himself flirting with middle-of-the-road success, he once famously said:

Traveling there was really boring so I headed for the ditch“.

Every seemingly-strange fork he took in his long career (Trans, Shocking Pinks, Greendale), he did with purpose, and because he felt it served his creative drive. He has never been afraid of being unpopular – he was once sued by David Geffen for making records that didn’t sound enough like Neil Young (Geffen lost). He seems to have limited interest in the machine that feeds him – rock and roll stardom. A lesser-known song on “Freedom” talks about the state of the music business at the time when Milli Vanilli was #1 on the charts:

“The artist looked at the producer, The producer sat back
He said ‘What we have got here, is a perfect track
‘But we don’t have a vocal, so we don’t have a song
‘If we could get these things accomplished,
‘nothing else could go wrong.’
So he balanced the ashtray, as he picked up the phone:
Said ‘Send me a songwriter, who’s drifted far from home
‘Make sure that he’s hungry, make sure he’s alone
‘Send me a cheeseburger, and a new Rolling Stone.'”
                            -Crime in the City (Sixty to zero)

He more famously (clumsily, unkindly) lampooned corporate ownership of music and using music to shill products:

Young’s integrity doesn’t stop at his music, though. He has, for more than 20 years, run an annual benefit for the Bridge School– a school for kids with communications challenges related to various disabilities (his own son is non-verbal with cerebral palsy). He worked with Willie Nelson to develop the Farm Aid movement. Just as he has never shied away from musical experiments, he has never been bashful about his political opinions, from “Ohio” to “Living with War”. I don’t know if he is right in his opinions, I’m sure we can all pick opinions of Young’s that we don’t agree with. However, when he speaks about something politically, we can be sure it is coming from him. You cannot doubt his sincerity, or his integrity.

So why Tar Sands? Why now?

Hearing his interviews since this whole thing started, the answer is easy to find. Young is a tinkerer, and has always expressed ideas around sustainability. Exploring his film-making side, he decided to drive his electric car to Fort McMurray and see what all the fuss was about. I take him completely at face value when he describes getting out of his (electric) car, smelling the air in Fort Mac, and recognizing something was amiss with the boreal forest. Being a life-long advocate for aboriginal rights, he connected with local first nations, and was told of their concerns. Clearly they made an impression, because he made a commitment to help them out if he could. Turns out he could.

Did Young then contact the Canadian Association of Petroleum producers to get the “other side of the story”? Did he surf over to Suncor’s website to see the myriad benefits of oil extraction? Did he read the most recent International Energy Agency forecasts for recoverable reserves and cross reference against human rights abuses in other petroleum producing nations? Possibly. More likely, he looked in the eyes of his Athabasca Chipewyan hosts, smelled the bitumen in the air, and said something along the lines of “this shit ain’t right”. Then he set about doing what he could to help raise the profile of the issue, and maybe raise money to help people he saw as needing some help.

The reaction from the Oil Industry and their shills was predictable, alternating between obscuring the point he was making to ad hominem attack on him as a “Rock Star”, “Aging Rocker” or a “Bad Canadian”. Perhaps the most ham-fisted rebuke of Young’s statements was made by Harper Government spokes-flaks. A response easily and compellingly retorted by Young. Watching that exchange, it is clear which side is speaking with integrity.

To Ezra Levant and his astro-turf shills behind “Ethical Oil”, who have started an anti-Neil Young website, I ask: Where is your integrity? They call Young a “drug lifestyle icon” after the man has been public about his sobriety, and some of his most poignant songs are about the friends he lost to drugs. But if the quality of Young’s “lifestyle” is to be questioned, we should start by looking at his 40-year body of work, his commercial, artistic, and critical success. One might conclude that we all would benefit from a little more of whatever Neil is on.

They further criticize Young for not protesting against OPEC dictatorships, while also suggesting he shouldn’t meddle in Canada’s politics, as he doesn’t live here (try to square that circle). They never address the actual points that Neil Young is making, and the entire issue of the Constitutional rights of First Nations – the centre of all of Young’s arguments – is conveniently ignored by those interested in “Ethical Oil”. Instead, they then call Young a hypocrite for fueling his “rock star lifestyle” with oil, not realizing that they are making his point. They are correct that Neil Young is reliant on fossil fuels; We are all reliant on fossil fuels. That is the fucking problem!

Um… sorry, got a little heated there. I know I should be used to it but now, but I’m still surprised when it is suggested that our society may need to think about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and critics react by arguing “but we NEED fossil fuels, we can’t live without them”, as if that is a counter-argument, and not just begging the question. If this isn’t addiction, what is?

I’ve seen Neil Young talk, and I’ve heard his critics. I’ve seen Neil Young walk the walk and put his time and money where his mouth is. I see a person raising a conversation about the largest industrial development in the history of Canada’s hinterland, and I hear critics telling him to shut up. I see a person standing next to First Nations leaders and trying to help a community who feel powerless against global Multinationals and the government that covers for them. I see the Government trying to reassure an increasingly suspicious public that everything is fine: “Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive”, indeed. I see an aging rocker legendary artist, humanitarian, and Officer of the Order of Canada using his name not to fill his crib, but to raise a conversation about an issue that is important to the future of the planet, important to the nation of his birth, and important to a small community in eastern Alberta that touched him. I see one man acting with integrity, and taking the slings and arrows that often follow those that choose that path.

I’m with Neil.

Short Sea Shipping Dreams

I loved this opinion piece in the News Leader last week. I’m just sorry it took me a week to pen this retort.

If I can paraphrase the rhetorical question by Ms. Ouellet-Martin, it is “Can short sea shipping help us manage increased Port activity while protecting the livability of our Cities?”

The answer can be found in this report, which is more than a decade old now, with no sign that any action has come out of it. But first, a bit of background.

This study was commissioned back in the heady days of 2005, when there were still three port authorities in Greater Vancouver. The Vancouver Port Authority was responsible for the Ports around Burrard Inlet, the Fraser River Port Authority for those on the main part of the Fraser River and the North Fraser Port authority for the few remaining port activities along the north and middle arms.

All three Ports were running fine and were financially self-sufficient despite the downloading of many responsibilities (environmental protection of the shorelines, dredging costs) from the federal agencies that used to do them (DFO, Coast Guard, etc.) to the local authorities. Perhaps most importantly, they were run by local authorities who had experience with Port Operations (mostly people who had spent their carrers either operating the Port, or Captaining ships). It was during these times that Fraser Surrey Dock built a container facility, spending $190 Million to attract container ships that instead decided to go to Burrard Inlet after some Merger and Acquisition action hit their main customer. So in 2008, the Federal Government decided to amalgamate all three ports in to a single entity, allegedly to prevent this type of competition. They were so proud of the change that they announced it less than a week before Christmas 2007, and it came into effect two weeks later on January 1. Christmas news releases are a sure way to let you know even the government thinks what it is doing might be a bad idea.

With the amalgamation came another change. The Port People and Ships Captains were out. The Port Authority is now going to be run by business types. The CEO is not a former stevedore, he is a former jet turbine engineer who instead worked his way up the corporate ladder through Mergers and Acquisitions, for businesses that make chemicals and steel or developing real estate. The only thing he knows about Ports is he bought one once. Makes sense, though, as his job is not to facilitate the movement of goods on and off of ships, but to “leverage positions” and “deliver value” for his “capital-intensive, asset- and service-focused large corporate customers”.

His job is not to move goods. It is to use the movement of goods as the tool to create a high return on investment for his shareholder. But I digress…

The important point of the study is that it looked at the economics of moving containers through our region not by road, but on barges. They went so far as to do an economic analysis of 5 potential node sites where short-sea shipping infrastructure could suit the local goods movement market and the existing supply chains to the distant hinterlands that are the Port’s real customers. They evaluated the practicality, infrastructure requirements (with cost estimates), efficiency of goods movement, and even the air emissions related to the changeover.

The conclusions? Allow me to quote:

  • Intra-regional short-sea container shipping in Greater Vancouver offers promising, commercially viable, private sector opportunities in the short to medium-term for specific short-sea container terminal locations on the Fraser River.
  • Short-sea container shipping, for selected terminal locations and routes and with sufficient volume, offers price competitiveness with trucking and some competitive advantages (likely to expand dramatically over time) in the areas of delivery time and delivery time reliability. These advantages occur because of road network congestion as well as deep-sea terminal flow issues, gate congestion, reservation limitations and operating hour limitations. All of these factors impact on truck transfer delivery time and costs but do not affect a short-sea operation with on-dock marshalling areas.
  • Expected increases in environmental emissions from the intra-regional transfer of containers by truck will be moderated to the extent that short-sea operations absorb some of the future growth.
  • It will be critical for short-sea service investors and proponents to invest the capital and make the long-term commitment necessary to establish reliability and confidence in the market place. The Consulting Team is aware of a number of regional operators and external investors who are seriously interested in this opportunity.

There is more, but you get the drift. Short-sea shipping could work based on 2005 container movement levels and density, and the economics improved as container volumes increased along with road congestion. Note the growth in container demand up to 2013 has almost caught up to match the projections from this 2005 study despite the significant blip caused by the recession that started in 2008. The Port is clearly bully on containers, considering their development plans at Roberts Bank.

Now, about that road congestion. The report outlines the major road movement plans that were starting to come to light as part of the Gateway Strategy, all delivered, remember, “On Time and On Budget”:

  • Golden Ears Bridge (promised by 2008, opened in 2009)
  • North Fraser Perimeter Road (promised by 2011, now cancelled)
  • Twin Port Mann, 6-lane Highway 1 (promised by 2011, over-delivered in 2013)
  • South Fraser Perimeter Road (promised by 2011, delivered 2014)

The study proved that short-sea shipping was economically feasible, and would result in cleaner air and less congested roads, all we needed to do was invest in a little infrastructure on Port lands. So let’s look at the 5 highlighted sites from the study and see what type of infrastructure development is happening:

Coast 2000 (Richmond): Since 2005, the Port have bought adjacent farmland with an eye on future expansion, they have built no less than 23 new warehouse buildings for leasing to trucking and logistics companies, and not a single dock to the adjacent river has been built. The only dock facility on the entire 300 hectare site with 2.5km of deep river waterfront is one that has been there since before 2005, and is (rarely) used to move small break-bulk.

Fraser Surrey Docks (Surrey/Delta): Now deciding that importing dirty thermal coal from Wyoming that no port on the west coast of the USA will take is their only economic salvation.

Port Kells (Surrey/Langley): Has seen huge growth in the last decade – of truck-serviced warehouses. The entire area between the Trans Canada Highway and the River, from the Golden Ears Bridge to 190th, is over 630 hectares with more than 3 km of prime Fraser River waterfront, direct connections to two major freeways and a major rail line, and literally hundreds of warehouses, yet the only thing that moves on and off of boats is woodchips onto barges.

Tilbury (Delta): Tilbury is the long industrial strip along the north shore of Delta between the Alex Fraser Bridge and Deas Island. Used to be it was the industrial area you could never get to; now with the SFPR complete, it is becoming the industrial area you can’t get out of. The SFPR has facilitated expanded growth here, more warehouses and industrial land, but of course no new docks. The good news here is the location of SeaSpan – about the only place where a quasi-short-sea shipping mode happens in BC. They have a series of dedicated barges that move rail cars and truck trailer to Vancouver Island and back every day, as they have for the best part of a century.

Pitt Meadows Airport (Pitt Meadows): This area was ripe for development in 2005, but apparently the Port lost interest, and the municipality decided former farmland in the floodplain of the Fraser River was better utilized as residential development. There is essentially no industrial use of the waterfront in this area, despite proximity to the massive CP Intermodal Yard where every container that does not come or go by train must, alas, go on the back of a truck, because the river is way over there – across the street.

I could go on with other industrial waterfront areas that are not even evaluated in this report, the Mary Hill Bypass area of Port Coquitlam, Albion Flats, even the Mission waterfront. They have what you need – navigable river access, rail lines, and relatively direct freeway access far from commercial centres and their traffic hassles. Except for that last point, you could include Queensborough and Annacis Island. All they need (according to the report) is for the Port to invest in some waterfront infrastructure, or create economic incentives for private industry to do the same.

Instead, after amalgamation, this report was shelved, as the Port decided to go the other direction, to fit with the new business plan. They will continue to build warehouses that can quickly return lease money, and rely on infrastructure built by others (after all, you and I pay for those roads and bridges, the Port doesn’t even have to pay property tax). Instead of using their infrastructure investment money to improve the livability of our community and the efficiency of goods movement through the Port, they continue to buy up farmland (or create new land in the sea) so that they can lease that out to logistics and operations companies for a handsome profit. This is why I say the Port is no longer in the goods movement business, they are in the real estate development business.

Is it time for Short-sea shipping? Can it help with traffic congestion on our streets, and still provide efficient movement of goods? Can it reduce emissions, improve air quality, and improve the livability of our cities? The answers to all of those questions appear to be “yes”.

Is it in the business interest of the Port? That is the question we should be asking.