Wild! Fires!

By the way, everyone, we’re not burning or anything. Thanks for the concern and all, but seriously. We’re not on fire.

Iris Evans Has Some Retarded Views on Mental Illness

"And to my right, you have GOOD parenting."

We haven’t had this level of foot-in-mouth comments from the conservative camp since last week.

Iris Evans, Alberta’s finance minister, told a Toronto audience yesterday that the proper way to raise a child is for one parent to sacrifice their job and stay home. No offence to daycare or single parents! Naturally.

They’ve understood perfectly well that when you’re raising children, you don’t both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise. This is not a statement against daycare. It’s a statement about their belief in the importance of raising children properly.

O.K.! So, that was weird. But after that she just went crazy. Evans told the audience that lack of education leads to, leads to, mental illness AND crime. Both, at once.

Evans has since apologized. Of course, everyone is outraged. I’m outraged!

This is certainly not a Raitt-level scandal – nobody else is implicated. If she had of said something like “Just look at Stelmach’s boy!” then we might have something to run with.

But seriously, guys. Get someone to read over your speech. You don’t want to come off sounding like a raving lunatic.

Fort Chipewyan’s Problems are, like, Raitt-Aide-Level Sexy

There are no negative effects stemming from oil sand development. Everybody knows that!

But some pesky residence of Fort Chipewyan, a community north (and downstream) of Fort McMurray are complaining that pretty much everyone there has cancer and that sort of thing.

Never fear, because your government knows how to handle this sort of thing. Environment minister Jim “I-can’t-believe-I’m-the-fucking-environment-minister” Prentice just refuses to believe their is any causal link between oil companies dumping waste into the Athabasca river and the spike in cancer in Fort Chip.

The residents of Fort Chip, along with envrionmental groups like the Sierra Club and Environmental Defence, are calling for a moratorium on expansion until the environmental and health impacts of the oil sands can be assessed.

But c’mon – you think just because there is a bunch of toxic waste in the river that is the only way in/out of Fort Chip, that people there will have elevated cancer levels? That living next to a polluted body of water could have any effect on your health? When has that ever happened before?

Now somebody pass the fish…

Sure, you think its gross. But just try it with tartare sauce...

Clean Energy Fund Examined… By Everyone Except Layton.

Jackie Boy was in the news today blasting environment, that’s right, environment  minister Jim Prentice about taking $1 billion earmarked for wind energy projects and redirecting it “more tar sands projects without control,” according to Halifax’s Chronicle Herald.

Layton is referring to the Clean Energy Fund, a $1 billion federal iniative for research and development into renewable and alternative energy sources. The Herald reported this week that natural resource minister Lisa Raitt insinuated that Prentice diverted funds from the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) to the oilsands here in McMurray.

That’s (sort of) just silly. The Clean Energy Fund was never supposed to be about wind energy – in fact, when Raitt announced the fund $650 million was explicitly going towards Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) research, with another $200 million going to alternative energy. The remaining $150 was slated to go to research on “clean technology.”

CanWEA was never supposed to receive $1 billion. The entire wind energy sector was never supposed to receive $1 billion. The wind energy sector was supposed to receive some of that money.

Which they should, considering that CanWEA is doing phenomenally well. Their president, Robert Hornung, told me today that projects slated to be completed in 2011 are already in operation. With the current funding push from the Obama administration down south, Canada cannot afford to leave this industry in the lurch.  

But Jack – seriously, Jack – don’t go on like this. Don’t make it any harder to be left of centre in Alberta. We’ve got our work cut out for us as it is.

Iraitt Pundits and A Good Reason to Pay Attention

There has been no shortage of coverage over the audio recordings released by Halifax’s Chronicle Herald this week. I even covered it! A lot of people are upset over it, and others are upset that people are upset over it.

While I hate to agree with Christie Blatchford (!), there is a big non-story feel to a minister calling a problem “sexy” if it could net her political gains. Leave the whole cancer part, with all of its tear-inducing appologies, and you’ve got yourself an A12 page for sure.

That's right, bite that lip.

But faux-outrage is the natural outcome concerning any politician speaking like anyone else. Off-colour jokes? I make them all the time! Even Letterman makes them! Poor choice of words? Sure!

More interesting than aides being fired and opposition parties calling for resignations, however, are the smaller details of the case. For instance, the Herald reported that on the recordings Raitt suggests that environment minister John Prentice diverted funds earmarked for wind energy projects to a (mostly) oilsands research and development fund, the $1 billion Clean Energy Fund.

But Raitt is supposed to be in charge of defending the oilsands! And Prentice is supposed to be in charge of reducing our emmissions.

Right. Until you factor in that Prentice represents the riding of Calgary Centre-North. Now what major corporations interested in which natural resource would have offices in Calgary Centre-North…

Nobody at Syncrude, Suncor, Albian, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or the usually helpful Oil Sands Developers Group wanted to go near this story. Most refused to comment.

There are good reasons for that: first, the Clean Energy Fund was just announced in May, so even the media relations people at the oil companies know very little (or nothing, probably) about what they’ll be receiving in terms of research money.

Second, everyone who touches this story gets thrown into a media shit storm. Enough to make anyone to want to stay away.

Busting a Cap (and Trade)

ForestEthics, a Toronto based non-profit organization, has just released a report calling for a “fair cap and trade system in Canada” where “each economic sector and region is resposible for its fair share of emissions cuts.”

And how will Alberta respond? ForestEthics Gillian McEachern told VueWeekly:

“We know that Alberta is already in there trying to protect their interests and that the federal government has talked about needing to protect the tar sands in this [cap and trade] system.”

McEachern is referencing Harper’s suggestion of a “North American pact on… climate and energy” which calls for the protection of the tar sands under the pretence of U.S. and Canadian energy security.

While the “report” is certainly not politically neutral, ForestEthics has a point – a national cap and trade system, which by now seems inevitable, should be a national cap and trade system.

Giving special treatment to Alberta (and Saskatchewan) would damage industries in other provinces. Ontario and Quebec, the second and third largest emitters behind Alberta, would be forced to pick up the slack under a “hard cap.”

Check out the full report here.

Inconvenience and Finitude

Calgary-based journalist Chris Turner has an interesting piece in the June issue of The Walrus. It concerns geologist Dave Hughs, who tours Canada delivering a presentation on the end of fossil fuels, or “The Talk” as Hughs calls it.

Fort McMurray is not mentioned in the piece, but The Walrus has featured it before. Nevertheless, Turner’s recent piece should give everyone in this town pause. When an entire city’s economy is based on a single finite resource, what happens when that resource runs out?

[image via The Walrus]

Alberta, Alberta

My plane touched down around 2:30 a.m. for me, 11:30 p.m. for Alberta. As I waited to pick up my luggage, I became quite aware that the man standing to my left was a lobster fisherman. He smelled like he was wearing his fishing gear at that moment. After about 20 minutes of waiting, I finally found my bags and exited the arrivals area.
 
As I walked out into the parking lot, I thought I was hallucinating from a combination of jet lag and rye and ginger. Four men stood clapping in a circle, while a man in the middle butchered a set of bagpipes. I knew the song, and you do too, probably – it always seemed to me there was only one song for bagpipes that they played over and over again, at weddings, at funerals, at graduations, etc. Judging by their french they were from Cheticamp, Nova Scotia.
 
I shit you not. I almost asked the guy next to me if it was really happening. All I could think was “I fly how many goddamn hours, and I touch down to this?”

Welcome to Fat City, a “web log” concerning the goings-on and non-goings-on in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

In some ways, this is a very interesting place and time in Canada. Where and when else, in our nations history, have Cape Bretoners, Somalians, Newfoundlanders, and Iranians lived and worked together in (relative) harmony? When else have Cape Bretoners actually made money?

In other ways, Fort Mac is boring. Really boring. You need a car to get anywhere, there’s no real nightlife, and, despite the population, it has a distinctly small town feel.

SO for me, this is part serious undertaking and part time consumer. I’m going to try and publish some stories that you might not read in a provinical newspaper, and you certainly would never read in the Globe.

Don’t expect any “things-are-different-here, but-we-still-have-that-east-coast-spirit” type shit. I’ll leave that to the Cape Breton Post. Instead, I’ll try to speak to what its like living here – why people come here, why people stay, and what they do between shifts.