By Ray Rivers

May 13, 2016

BURLINGTON, ON

Even deep ecologists, the folks who’ll tell you that fire is a natural part of a sustainable forest, cannot defend what has been happening at Fort McMurray, Alberta. The ‘Beast’, Fort McMurray’s runaway fire is not a controlled burn by any measure. This has been called the worst environmental disaster in Canadian history.

The fire, named the Beast bu he men and women who had to fight it day after day, moved into communities an wiped out everything in its path.

The Beast has gobbled up over 200,000 hectares of woodland so far. That is more acreage than foresters harvest in B.C.annually. And it is twice as much as gets taken down each year in Ontario, generating 13 billion dollars in revenues, including some five billion dollars in forest products exports for our province. Also, Ontario’s treasury gets $100 million in royalty payments, and of course there are all those spin off benefits.

Firefighters managed to save an estimated eighty to ninety percent of the building stock in the Fort McMurray, though some suburbs were virtually destroyed. And the entire city and surrounding communities, as many as 100,000 residents, had to be evacuated. In a show of national unity all Canadians and many of their provincial governments came forward contributing fire-fighters and money to help with the consequences and aftermath of this event.

Canada is no stranger to forest fires. As a country which has the world’s second largest land mass, much of it sparsely populated, we typically lose over 600,000 hectares to fire every year. But the fire season has barely started this year and the Beast has already claimed a third of that with the fire still burning. The exceptionally hot and dry spring, and possibly a careless human, are the likely causes. But authorities worry that Edmonton, also experiencing exceptionally dry conditions, may be next.

Is climate change to blame? This is exactly the kind of event that climatologists have been predicting. And that would make this the second time in only a couple years, that Alberta has been hit with a major climate related event – recall that monster flood in Calgary  a couple years ago. But few people are saying that in public. Well, Elizabeth May, the Green Party leader, is but then she’ll never be PM so she can say what is truly on her mind. Our new climate-change-fighting PM was reluctant to make the linkage, though he doesn’t really need to – it’s obvious.

Of course nobody wants to be accused of blaming the victims, including the oil sands operators who have had to suspend operations. Our hearts go out for the people who’ve lost their homes and possession, and have spent the last several days living in community centres, or with family somewhere else. And the truth is that leaping to shut down oil sands operations, in recognition of the reality before us, would hardly reverse the climate change we are experiencing in the short run anyway.

The Leap Manifesto should at last be read – Rivers has created a link to the document at the bottom of his column.

You may have heard about the Leap Manifesto, something which nearly tore the heart out of the recent NDP national convention in Edmonton. Avi Lewis, son of former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis presented it in the faint hope of obtaining an endorsement by that party. Its non-partisan sticker notwithstanding, the document was produced to influence last year’s federal election and presumably energy policy in Alberta, though even Mr. Mulcair seemed to have mis-interpreted it and Alberta’s Premier was deadly opposed.

Lewis and his wife; journalist, author and social activist Naomi Klein, initiated this project as an afterthought to her book “This Changes Everything” and his documentary of the same name. A number of aboriginal leaders, other social and environmental activists, and wannabes assembled to write the Manifesto which reads, as one would expect, like something written by a committee.

Still Leap has morphed into something of a movement with over 40,000 signatures of support in its call to leap beyond business as usual this leap year, including the call for a guaranteed annual income for all Canadians. And as one of its primary targets, it has raised the hackles of the oil industry by its not so veiled call for shutting down the oil sands and any more pipeline construction.

Fort McMurray, Alberta’s oldest European settlement dating back to 1788, started out as a lonely fur trading establishment. Today it is known as the city that services Canada’s oil sands industry and Canada’s most valued export industry, despite the collapse of oil prices last year. The city will rebuild and recover, the forests surrounding it will regrow and things will go back to normal, for a while anyway.

But the message of the Leap Manifesto is right about how and where we ultimately need to get our energy. Forty years ago we didn’t speak of climate change or global warming. Fossil fuels seemed like the future, energy independence seemed critical and Canada was running out of oil.

Alberta with the help of the federal government, then led by Mr. Trudeau’s father, supported the oil sands mega-project. But given what we know today, It may well take another Trudeau to help Albertans move away from producing the dirtiest oil on the planet.

Ray Rivers writes weekly on both federal and provincial politics, applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking.  Rivers was a candidate for provincial office in Burlington where he ran as a Liberal against Cam Jackson in 1995, the year Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution swept the province. Rivers is no longer active with any political party.

Background links:

The Beast – Fire Damage – Climate Change – Oil Exports – Forest Facts –

Canada’s Forests – Carbon in Forests – Still Burning – Leap – This Changes Everything –

Mulcair on Leap –

By Staff

May 11th, 2016

BURLINGTON, ON

Our colleagues at CATCH (Citizens at City Hall) published a piece on a meeting where the provincial Minister of the Environment and Climate Change spoke of the impact climate change is having on us – Now.  Burlington understands what he is talking about – he drives the point even further than the August 2014 flood did,

Ontario’s minister of the environment and climate change had some blunt advice when he spoke at the climate resilient cities conference in Hamilton recently. Glenn Murray offered detailed evidence that climate change already threatens our food and water security and it’s going to get much worse.

While he declared that “there’s nothing that Hamilton lacks to be the kick-ass city in Canada”, the former mayor of Winnipeg made clear that “fundamental transformation” in our urban form is required including intensification and no more suburban sprawl.

“I want to take you to the context of where I think we as a group of leaders have to understand and what the dynamics are,” he began. “And I will just offer the proposition that the two biggest crises that we face on the adaptation and resilience side are food security and water security.”

Glen Murray – Minister of the Environment and Climate Change

He pointed to a Toronto storm three years ago that dumped a month’s rain in one hour and tore out 80 metres of GO train track “that cost us $600 million which could basically pay for half of [Hamilton’s] LRT.” And he cited “false springs” that wiped out the local apple crop in 2012. He also explained the link of many extreme weather events to the melting arctic ice cap and its effect on the polar vortex.

“The jet stream has slowed down by about 20 percent which means that the periods which are wet last longer, the periods which are dry last longer and that causes us to have so many droughts as we saw in the prairies, fires, invasions of species – the beetles that are destroying our forests,” Minister Murray explained. “And then we have moisture levels on the prairies that we haven’t seen since the last ice age – and if we didn’t have the modern irrigation we have now we probably would be courting if not in the dust bowl, and for the first time Calgary and Regina had air quality warnings because of the level of smoke from fires on the prairies.”

The cost of repairing GO train tracks when Toronto experienced flooding would have paid for half of the LRT coming to Hamilton.

He spoke a week before a tinder dry forest and 32C temperatures helped fuel the catastrophic fire in Fort McMurray despite its near sub-arctic location at the same latitude as the northern tip of Ontario and lower Hudson’s Bay.

Murray reminded his audience that last year’s “disruptive spring” experiences included four to five metres of snow “on the streets of Halifax and St John’s” in the last week of April and asked what that would have done in Hamilton. “No one had much of a garden in Atlantic Canada last year. That was also the summer that we had fires on the Prairies the soft fruit crop blossomed in January in BC and died.”

Focusing particularly on food security, the Minister argued that the jet stream destabilization has “had some very bad impacts on our ability to produce food” and warned that “if you want to destabilize a government, all you have to do as a society is just have a food or water shortage for any period of time.”

As an example, he pointed to the extreme drought in the Middle East in 2006-2011 where there was “an 80 percent food crop loss in northern Syria and the fertile crescent about 1.6 million people lost their farms and became the underclass in Damascas, which was according to the Pentagon a swift threat multiplier in the destabilization of the region and the on-going war and then the insertion of terrorism.” Murray noted that “ISIS is hanging onto the three largest irrigation dams … so they’re obviously sophisticated in assessing the power of control of water.”

Fields of California broccoli – 95% of ours comes from here.

Bringing this closer to home, the Minister detailed the development of the California drought where “80 percent of water use is for agriculture” and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has found the description of extreme drought no longer adequate and has introduced “exceptional drought” into its terminology.

“You see the blood red stain in the middle of California ,” he said pointing to one of his slides. “That’s a piece of real estate that’s very important to your life and to my life because we import $4 billion worth of food as a northern community.”

California, he explained, provides “95 percent of all US broccoli, 92 percent of strawberries, 91% of grapes, 90 percent of tomatoes, 84 percent of all lettuce” and similar percentages to Ontario. While noting that almost all of this is grown in that blood red stained area, Murray warned he “could keep going with all the other things your mother told you to eat lots of when you were growing up.”

A particular “perversity” in the California situation is that nut and pistachio growers are “have now bought surplus drilling equipment from Alberta” and are “going down 2000 feet into the aquifers of California leading to collapse, whereas the vegetable farmers can only afford equipment that goes down about 200 feet.”

Burlington resident weren’t comfortable with a five storey project in the downtown core – developer cut it back to four. This is an absurdity,” Murray declared.

Murray also explained that the climate change we’re already seeing is certain to get significantly worse because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for 40 to 250 years.

“So looking back right now we are experiencing the full force of carbon dioxide levels from 1916, in the middle of the First World War, and we’re just now experiencing the initial impacts of carbon dioxide from 1976 when I graduated from high school.”

He underlined that “sobering” thought by noting that “the rapid explosion of the suburbs in the fifties – the great low density carbon intensive neighbourhoods – all the weight of all of that activity and change in urban form has not yet impacted.”

Burlington Hydro loaned electric BMW’s to city council members top record their driving habits – when will the wave of buying electric cars hit us?

Murray connected this to the province’s commitment to rapid transit by inviting the audience to look at the Yonge subway line in Toronto from the vantage point of the top of the CN tower. “You can clearly see where it is because at every subway stop there are spikes of large commercial and residential buildings all the way up to York,” he said.

He compared that to the Bloor line where city councillors and their residents fight intensification. “There’s a fight over a four-storey building in Etobicoke – they’re fighting it because it’s ‘too intense’. This is the absurdity,” Murray declared.

He didn’t suggest this might happen along Hamilton’s LRT line, but the link was obvious, and he underlined it by the results of a mapping study of taxes versus density that confirmed “all the neighbourhoods who use a lot of infrastructure for a very small tax base are well dispersed suburbs, big box formula subdivisions, and Hamilton.”

He ended with advice to individual Hamiltonians: “Drive less, get an electric vehicle, congratulations on getting a rapid transit line in Hamilton and please use it. Or walk, it’s a beautiful city to walk in.”