Quotulatiousness

June 10, 2020

“Gender critical” feminism

Barbara Kay finds herself in agreement with an academic who, having come from a Marxist and radical feminist background, she would not normally have much in common:

Kathleen Lowrey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, ascribes much of her intellectual formation to Marxism and radical feminism. Not, I think my regular readers would agree, someone with whom I would normally have a great deal in common. And yet, in this strange cultural moment, Prof. Lowrey and I find ourselves amicably united in the service of a mutually revered ideal. I write this column with ardent sympathy for her in her present predicament.

Academics’ time is generally split 40/40/20 amongst, respectively, research, teaching and “service” to their community — meaning committees, mainly. Until late March, Lowrey served as associate chair for undergraduate programs on behalf of the department of anthropology. Following anonymous complaints about her views from one or more students to the university’s office of safe disclosure and human rights, as well as to the dean of students, Lowrey was asked to resign. She was not given a precise reason, only told that because she holds “gender critical” opinions, she was making the learning environment “unsafe” for the anonymous complainants who felt that her views caused them “harm.” (It’s not clear — Lowrey believes it is doubtful — that the complainants were even taking her courses.)

“Gender critical” refers to what was shortly ago normative feminism doctrine in considering biological sex of primordial importance in fighting for women’s rights. Where the traditional rights of biological women collide with asserted rights of trans women — sport, intimate spaces, rape crisis centres, prisons — gender-critical feminists join with conservatives like me in insisting that biological women’s rights must prevail: for the sake of their safety, privacy and right to a level playing field.

Until what seems like a few minutes ago, there was nothing controversial about this opinion. But now there is. The only “correct” opinion to hold is that gender expression trumps biology in any rights-based claims. And in academic circles, Lowrey’s views, which she is at no pains to hide on campus and off, are a form of apostasy that cries out for punishment.

February 22, 2020

Buffexit NOW!

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The poor and downtrodden peons in the economically ravaged area of Buffalo are moving towards separation from their colonial imperialist masters in Toronto and Montreal:

I read yesterday’s “Buffalo Declaration” signed by four Alberta Members of Parliament with the serious and consuming interest natural to an Albertan. I see, however, that the revolution it is intended to provoke in my mind, and in the minds of my compatriots, is not yet complete. I am still instinctively using the outdated terminology imposed upon me by the black iron prison that is the Laurentian empire.

The declaration commences with a long explanation of how “Alberta” was created by central Canadian Liberals against the expressed political will of the residents. The territorial government would have preferred one great province called Buffalo to have been created on the soil which the Canadian wolf decided to cleave into “Alberta” and “Saskatchewan.” Divide and conquer: the oldest trick in the imperialist playbook!

The natural conclusion would seem to be that to make any use of “Alberta” as a conceptual category is to play the game by the empire’s rules. And, in fact, the third of the 17 (!) demands in the declaration is that prospective adherents (who may or may not be contenders for the leadership of the federal Conservative party, wink wink) “recognize Alberta — or Buffalo — as a culturally distinct region within Confederation.”

Alberta or Buffalo? Choose your own adventure? I suppose the revolution is still incomplete in the minds of the authors, too: they have begat a manifesto, but have not quite figured out on whose behalf, precisely, they are speaking. Forgive us, we’re all kind of new at this game of soft nationalism. (Or, rather, at the game of creating a Quebec-style spectrum of nationalisms, ranging from paranoid cranks to grouchy-but-devoted three-quarter federalists.)

It is definitely a logical problem that so much of the declaration is devoted to the proposition that Alberta is culturally distinct from its neighbours — so much so as to permit the sort of political claims and considerations that would ordinarily pertain to a nation. The East, we are told, is full of the descendants of “bankers, lawyers and other capitalists.” Meanwhile, Alberta was being peopled by the wretched of the Earth. “Settlers like the Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Chinese, and Icelanders immigrated to Alberta because of poverty, overpopulation and unemployment in their homelands.”

You have to admit that Quebec’s plan of “soft sovereignty” has worked very well to keep Quebec’s concerns fully front-and-centre no matter which party controls Ottawa. In some ways it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for anyone to consciously copy it.

January 19, 2020

“… if the Constitution is a threat to killer whales, why, then, to hell with the Constitution”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh reviews the sad tale of the British Columbian government’s defeat before the Supreme Court of Canada over pipelines:

So … yeah, that didn’t go real well. On Thursday the province of British Columbia sent its chosen representative, lawyer Joseph Arvay, to the Supreme Court to plead the oral case for B.C.’s law regulating bitumen in pipelines. John Horgan’s government had attempted to establish its own permit regime for pipeline contents, which are, under accepted constitutional doctrine, a federal responsibility. The B.C. Court of Appeal had wiped out the provincial law unanimously last summer.

Arvay’s task was widely recognized as a Hail Mary pass. But things got even more awkward as the hearing commenced and the justices of the Supreme Court interrogated him on his province’s logical, environmental, and even economic premises. An appellate court’s disposition is sometimes hard to ferret out in its hearings, but this one was so rough that Arvay was reduced to grumbling “If I’m not going to win the appeal, then I don’t want to lose badly.” Alas, the judges did not even see the need to deliberate over their reasons: they at once, and as one, ruled against B.C.

Which is not to suggest that Mr. Arvay didn’t do the best possible job. If we’re sticking with the football metaphor, the problem all along was the game plan. Given the clear federal responsibility for interprovincial pipelines, as “Works and Undertakings connecting … Provinces,” the B.C. government had no choice but to downplay the conflict between the purpose of its proposed environmental permits and the purpose of the ones the federal government hands out. Arvay had to try to convince the ermine gang that a law applying exclusively to the contents of a pipeline wasn’t a regulation of the pipeline.

“The only concern the premier, the attorney general and the members of the government have had is the harm of bitumen,” Arvay protested. “It’s not about pipelines. They’re not anti-pipelines, they’re not anti-Alberta, they’re not anti-oilsands, they’re not anti-oil.”

It’s enough to almost make one sympathetic to the more radical strategy of argument pursued at the hearing by Harry Wruck, a lawyer for Ecojustice Canada who appeared as an intervener supporting B.C. Wruck put before the Supreme Court the same idea he had presented to the BCCA: if the Constitution is a threat to killer whales, why, then, to hell with the Constitution.

November 14, 2019

Albertan separatism – “we don’t want to become Newfoundland”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh discusses the hot topic in western Canada, separatism:

In trying to puzzle out the immediate future of Greater Alberta’s struggle with Confederation, one is naturally exposed to many varieties of the question “What are you blue-eyed sheiks complaining about?” Alberta is still a province with relatively high incomes despite a labour market that has been in the doldrums for years: why, people ask, is there separatist panic in a place that is still far wealthier than, say, Newfoundland? A good short answer to this would be “That’s why everybody here is going nuts: we don’t want to become Newfoundland.”

Newfoundland, unlike Alberta, was given the choice of joining Confederation on a bare majority vote; the result, in time, is that the province’s defining cod industry was permanently annihilated … thanks to expert, scientifically informed, completely well-intentioned centralized management from Ottawa. Hey, mistakes happen! One long-term consequence of this one is that a large fraction of the ethnic stock of Newfoundland now lives and works in Alberta. It might be that “Wexit” sentiment is especially strong in this expatriate community, though no one has any hard data to hand yet.

A crucial purpose of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s “Fair Deal Panel,” announced on the weekend, is to gather some. Kenney announced, in a speech which reaffirmed his own strong commitment to federalism, that Preston Manning will head a group of MLAs and academics whose job will be studying ideas for giving Alberta more autonomy within Confederation. The “Fair Deal Panel” is going to look at a number of concepts that have been swirling around for decades but which were ignored by Alberta’s Progressive Conservative governments. One notes, however, that the panel does have a mandate to sound out public opinion quantitatively, through polling and focus groups.

Some of the political concepts recommended to the Fair Deal Panel for study appeared in what is remembered as the Alberta “Firewall Letter,” authored by Stephen Harper and a group of Calgary School fellow-travellers (not including Kenney); the letter was first published in this newspaper in 2001. The firewall had five components: Alberta withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, Alberta withdrawal from the federal Tax Collection Agreement, the revival of an Alberta Provincial Police force, a request for tax points from the federal government in place of cash transfers for health and welfare, and a provincial referendum on Senate reform, which was still a thing back then.

November 3, 2019

Alberta and the Liberals

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne summarizes the deep-seated anger in Alberta toward the federal Liberals … and the rest of Canada:

The point sometimes arrives in politics when a complex of different issues coalesce into one; when people stop listening to the arguments in favour of or against each, and instead allow their emotions to dictate a single response to the lot. We are at such a point in Alberta.

Pipelines, carbon taxes, equalization, the Canada Pension Plan — to which familiar litany we can now add the departure of Encana’s headquarters from Calgary — have become, not so much issues in themselves, but arguments in another, grander meta-controversy. All of the questions raised by each (is there a problem? if so, how is it to be solved? who pays? etc) have been pureed into a single narrative: of a Liberal government that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile to Alberta, whose re-election confirms the rest of Canada is as well.

There is, it should be said, some truth in this. Whether the Liberals have failed to win more than a handful of seats in Alberta in over a half a century because of their historic disdain for the province, or whether the causation runs the other way, the chicken is as malignant as the egg. There’s no doubt some people in some parts of the country would cheerfully shut down the oilsands tomorrow, nor is it impossible to detect a strain of anti-Albertanism in some of the rhetoric on the subject.

Albertans, for their part, are not just in a fight to defend their major industry today, but have been for decades. It is inconceivable, to take the most obvious example, that the National Energy Program, that vast attempt to expropriate Alberta’s oil wealth for the benefit of central-Canadian oil consumers, would have been visited upon either Ontario or Quebec, were the situations reversed.

August 28, 2019

QotD: The secret power of Quebec separatists that Western separatists lack

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even back in the day Western or Alberta separatism could never pass the Tebbit cricket test: Albertans have always kept cheering for Canadians at the Olympics or the hockey worlds, even at times when we were convinced intellectually that Confederation was a swindle. Much less would Westerners ever consider rooting against Canada, or hoping for its humiliation, or sabotaging it in a context of warfare or geopolitical struggle. Reform intellectuals like Hill have always wanted to create a sort of Western Canadian nationalism; that the necessary basis for nationalism is a nation, or something even slightly like one, has always escaped them. This is the super-secret advantage that Quebec has when using the blackmail tactics Hill and others are trying to imitate. Quebeckers have a genuine alternative loyalty to their extended Quebecois family, and Westerners have no equivalent. If we did, we wouldn’t have to advertise for secessionist generalissimos in the papers.

Colby Cosh, “Advice on Western separatism: don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself”, National Post, 2019-07-26.

May 30, 2019

Doug Ford versus the Ontario neo-prohibitionists, progressive temperance snobs and other social control freaks

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

During the last Ontario election, it was common to disparage Doug Ford as being “Trump-like”, and now that he’s the Premier, it turns out to be true in at least one aspect: Ford does have a Trump-like ability to induce a form of hysteria in his opponents. Ford’s crusade to liberalize Ontario’s alcohol market is a case in point. In the Toronto Star, all the old arguments against liberalization — usually portraying Alberta’s long-since liberalized market as a dystopian hell-hole of alcohol-shattered lives — are being dragged out again:

The key is that the Ford team doesn’t actually care about wine that will be sold in corner stores and more supermarkets. It’s a sop to tourists, which seems reasonable.

No, it cares about beer because beer is a social marker, a shorthand. Wine is considered urban but buck-a-beer is rural/semi-urban. Men drink it. Men with beerbellies drink it. To a government mysteriously seeking a vote that it already has, drinking beer is a signal that a man is a regular guy. But Ford is not a regular guy. He doesn’t drink. He’s not anxious. He’s not renting.

It is very much a problem that any government in power would believe this of the regular guy vote. Alcohol causes hospitalization, crime and early death. It destroys families and jobs, and eventually its victims drink to block out what they lost by drinking.

[…]

They may not know it, they may be doing it instinctively, but it is still madness. Alcoholics are costly to treat and they suffer terribly. Courting their vote comes courtesy of a report by a former health minister in Alberta where booze is sold in private liquor stores.

The problem, as Albertans know, is you’re too afraid to buy it. These stores are often shabby places that are magnets for violence. Watch out, Premier Ford, it’s Ontario and there’s going to be NIMBY.

I am aware that I’m writing like a preacher. Preach on, sister. Anyone over 30 learns to distinguish between people who drink for pleasure and those who cannot cope with it. We are horrified. We offer help.

Back in 2013, Colby Cosh neatly summarized the Ontario neo-prohibitionist rhetoric:

Albertans find it instructive to watch Ontario politicians debate the privatization of liquor retailing, which Klein’s cabinet bulldog, Dr. Stephen West, executed almost overnight in 1993. It was perhaps the representative policy move of the Klein era, the best symbol of his approach to government. Today one will hear Ontarians telling themselves the most bizarre things about Alberta in order to support the idiot belief that booze is a natural monopoly. “You can’t even get red wine there! All they have in the stores is various flavours of corn mash and antifreeze! The streets resound with the white canes of the blinded!” Talk to the saner residents and you rapidly discover the real root of Ontarians’ positive feeling for the LCBO, which is esthetic. It’s just nicer to buy a handle of Maker’s Mark from someone who makes a union wage and has a vague halo of officialdom. You leave the shop feeling okay about your vice.

Klein was liked by Albertans, not because of some mythic popular touch, but because there wasn’t an ounce of tolerance for this sort of thing in him. Alcohol was something he understood very well. (Too well.) People do not need liquor to be flogged to them any harder than the manufacturers already do; put a man in prison and he will make the stuff in the toilet starting on day two. What the old ALCB was really marketing to the public, and what the LCBO markets now, was itself — its own role as social protector/moral approver/tastemaker. Klein identified that part of the system as a parasitic growth, a vestige with no function but its own preservation; and he had West ectomize it with the swiftness of a medieval barber.

December 8, 2018

Will the West want in again this time?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The last time Albertan sensibilities were being regularly assaulted by federal politicians, the response was the Reform Party with their slogan “The West Wants In”. This time, Lawrence Solomon suggests, the Albertan response might not be so congenial:

Canadians don’t value our fossil fuel economy, which explains why so many are OK to trash pipelines and see Alberta tank. Only 19 per cent think it more important to pursue oil and gas development than to go green and regulate oil, according to EKOS polling. That 19 per cent figure shrinks to eight per cent for Canadians who consider themselves Liberals, six per cent for NDPers and two per cent for those who vote Green, meaning that politicians of most stripes have no interest in alienating their supporters to help Alberta’s energy economy recover.

Those figures also explain why Alberta’s sense of alienation is on the rise. According to Ipsos, fully 62 per cent believe Alberta “does not get its fair share from Confederation” (up from 45 per cent two decades ago), 46 per cent feel more attached to their province than to their country (up from 39 per cent) and 34 per cent “feel less committed to Canada than I did a few years ago” (up from 22 per cent). Just 18 per cent of Albertans believe “the views of western Canadians are adequately represented in Ottawa.”

One-quarter of Albertans now believe Alberta “would be better off if it separated from Canada,” a number that may well rise if the provincial economy founders, and would certainly rise if Albertans realized that they need Canada a lot less than Canada needs them. Without Alberta’s wealth and foreign-exchange earnings, the living standard of Canadians outside Alberta would drop and the Canadian dollar would plummet, likely leading to inflation as the cost of imports rose. Albertans, in contrast, would see their affluence rise and, because oil sales are denominated in U.S. dollars, Alberta would be largely insulated from the inflation to its east and west.

Those pooh-poohing independence claim Alberta, being land-locked, would be held hostage if it were an independent state. Those scoffers have it backwards. Alberta is today held hostage, its pipelines east and west kiboshed by its fellow Canadians. If Alberta were independent, its newfound bargaining power would certainly cause the Rest of Canada to capitulate, and speed to completion any and all pipelines Alberta needed to either ocean.

An independent Alberta would control access to its land mass as well as the skies above it, requiring Canada’s federal government to negotiate rights for, say, Vancouver-to-Toronto flights over Alberta airspace. Canada would also need Alberta’s agreement to have trains and trucks cross its now-international borders. Threats of tolls and tariffs could abound as needed to chasten those perceived to be wronging Alberta, whether Quebec, which exports dairy to B.C., grain interests that now commandeer rail to the detriment of Alberta’s oil shippers, or the B.C. ports that depend on commodities going to and from points east. Anyone thinking that Alberta would be unable to police its borders needs to be reminded that, for the past 70 years, Alberta’s patrols have made it the continent’s only rat-free jurisdiction.

December 5, 2018

The Alberta government must be getting a heck of a deal on those tank cars and locomotives

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley grabbed headlines recently with her pledge to buy additional railway locomotives and tank cars to help move some of Alberta’s excess crude oil to market. Brian Zinchuk says those numbers don’t make sense, given the amount of money the province is to pay:

On Nov. 28, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced her province is going to be acquiring unit trains to get her province’s landlocked oil moving. Not only has she committed money to Trans Mountain Expansion, but now rail, too. This premier is serious.

However, there’s a big problem with her numbers. She spoke of $350 million to purchase up to 7,000 rail cars and 80 locomotives. That $350 million doesn’t come even close. It might be enough to lease those units for a few years. Her stated intention was this was a short-term solution, and the life expectancy of a locomotive and tanker cars is easily into three or four decades.

However, she said, “Alberta will buy rail cars ourselves in our fight to get top dollar for the resources that belong to every Albertan.”

I never saw “lease” mentioned once.

Notley spoke of 120,000 barrels per day (bpd) of capacity. Her initial statements weren’t very clear, as someone with little knowledge of the business might think she just meant two sets of 100 or 120 car trains. That wasn’t at all what she meant.

She meant enough trains to keep 120,000 barrels per day in motion, each and every day. That’s a lot of rail cars, and a lot of locomotives.

[…]

There’s a problem with her numbers, however. The current standard locomotives used by Canadian railways cost US$3 million each as of December 2017, when CN bought 200 locomotives for US$600 million. That’s $3.859 million Canadian, each, at the exchange rate at that time. Notley spoke of 80 locomotives – that’s $308.7 million. That only leaves $41.3 million for 7,000 rail cars, or $5,897 each. That’s obviously way too low. So either there’s some leasing considerations involved here, perhaps on the locomotives, or the $350 million is way too low. Remember they were asking the feds for half? Even if the feds coughed up an additional $350 million, that still leaves only $55,900 per car.

My math shows, on the low end, a price tag of $945 million for new rail cars alone. Coupled with ~$309 million for locomotives, and you come in at $1.254 billion. At the high end, it would be $1.484 billion for cars, totalling $1.793 billion including locomotives. Either way, it’s a heck of a lot more than the $350 million announced. Unless she’s leasing, Notley’s $350 million is only one-third to one-fifth of the money required to buy all these new trains, and no consideration has been given to staffing or operational costs.

H/T to Small Dead Animals for the link.

November 25, 2018

“They said Trudeau was going to be a uniter, but what an accomplishment”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Calgary this week, just as the city council officially buried its Olympic bid (but somehow decided to try to keep the subsidies from other levels of government for that event). His visit was the target of protests from both organized labour and Albertans angry about the federal government’s part in keeping Alberta oil from getting to market:

The prime minister flew into Calgary on Thursday to meet with Mayor Nenshi, chat with the Chamber of Commerce, and have photos taken at the site of new social housing being built partly on Ottawa’s dime. The PM left no word on what he thought of the whole “let’s buy Calgary an Olympics without going to the trouble of having one” concept. There were unexpected distractions at every turn in Calgary, the main one being a fierce protest outside his temporary headquarters at the downtown Hyatt.

The Herald’s agreed-upon estimate of the size of the anti-Trudeau protest was two thousand people. I am not sure I trust their math, but at any rate the crowd was large enough to snarl traffic and intimidate the police. I say “crowd,” but perhaps the word should be “crowds,” because the protest was actually twofold.

The striking Canadian Union of Postal Workers was there to discourage Trudeau from passing the back-to-work legislation his cabinet is cooking up. And there was also a coinciding protest over the landlocking of Alberta’s oil, which has widened the spread between world oil prices and local spot prices to surreal, unimagined heights. The sluggishness of pipeline construction has left Alberta hydrocarbons all but worthless. And now the world price is tottering from medium-high levels, ending a sunshiny global oil season from which the province got no advantage.

The posties’ chants of “Negotiate!” alternated with the militant oilpatch’s cries of “Build that pipe!” In a way the spectacle was touching. Here, in the streets of Calgary, you had one of the most internationalist and red-dyed corners of Canadian organized labour literally joining forces with its mostly non-union, mostly right-wing working-class brethren. They said Trudeau was going to be a uniter, but what an accomplishment.

This solidarity will, of course, be fleeting. CUPW, having played the Grinch successfully, will either cut a deal or take its medicine when the back-to-work law passes. But Calgary’s resentment of Trudeau will not be so quick to evaporate — nor, perhaps, will the images of our young prime minister facing a display of active mass public hostility for the first time.

October 13, 2018

On the cusp of legalization

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh finally gets to take a victory lap:

On Thursday the marijuana company Sundial Growers held a ribbon-cutting for its new grow-op in the Alberta town of Olds. I am not sure whether “grow-op” is an acceptable word in the new setting of giant legal cannabis cultivation facilities, but let’s stick with it, if only to call attention to the extraordinariness of what we are witnessing this month in Canada. The launch was held in a small office, and Sundial only received its cultivation licence from Health Canada on Sept. 14, but the first fruits of its pot business are already budding in a room nearby.

The company intends to have a 500,000-square-foot growing facility built in 2019, but its press release points out that it can add more space quickly. I might have been stopped short by the spectacle of the mayor and the (United Conservative) MLA rejoicing as a CEO explained the details of his craft weed business and remarked on plans for a “Sweet Jesus” varietal. But what really struck me is something the mayor said: When the company is up and fully running, he observed, it is going to hire 500 people in Olds, becoming the town’s largest single employer. Olds is, of course, home to Olds College, a century-old agriculture and food research institute: this was a major reason for the new marijuana industry to locate there.

How long ago would this scene — being played, as it is, in a naturally conservative part of the Alberta hinterland — have seemed like science fiction or parody? The Sundial facility is dwarfed by the 800,000-square-foot Aurora Sky factory, strategically located near Edmonton’s awkwardly remote international airport in the suburb of Nisku. Everyone who has ever tried to flee Edmonton or come to it through that airport has complained about its preposterous distance from the capital’s downtown, but this turns out to have an unimagined advantage. You can build a spacious agri-pharmaceutical facility at low cost practically next to the runway, establish an ultra-secure, ultra-short supply chain, and presto hemp-o: overnight response to a worldwide medical market for cannabis products becomes a snap.

I am someone who is entitled to a victory lap for having insisted years ago that we were not, as a country, properly imagining the dimensions of a legally unleashed cannabis industry. We had no idea how much economic activity was being annihilated by a perverse, illogical feature of criminal law. Maybe it is time, as Finally Doing The Obvious Thing Day nears, for me to take that victory lap.

October 10, 2018

Riding the Rocky Mountaineer

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fred Frailey just got back from a trip on the Rocky Mountaineer and he’s enthusiastic about the train and the experiences it offers (for a price):

I’m just back from railing from Banff, Alta., to Vancouver, B.C., aboard the Rocky Mountaineer … my first such trip in 23 years. Then, it was eight or nine Silver Leaf coaches and a single Gold Leaf bilevel first-class car. This time, it was two coaches and five packed Gold Leaf cars. From the rail trip alone, I figure that Armstrong Group grossed a minimum of $600,000.

The Rocky Mountaineer in the Rockies.
Photo by The Land via Wikimedia Commons.

Usually (but not this time) there’s a section of roughly equal length out of Jasper, Alta., that joins the Banff train at Kamloops, B.C., so this train can easily be a $2 million-dollar baby when the passenger count tops 1,000 (we had 350). But my sense is that Armstrong Group brings in a at least a much money booking people on pre-train and post-train tours and luxury hotel stays.

I’ve always sensed a lot of railfan resentment of Peter Armstrong. The beef is that he “stole” from VIA Rail Canada the idea of an all-daylight trip along the Rocky and Selkirk mountains and the Thompson and Fraser rivers. For sure, the man plays for keeps; he is forever wishing to axe VIA’s Toronto-Vancouver Canadian as a government-funded competitor west of Jasper or to have the train sold to his company to redo in some Rocky Mountaineer manner.

But give the man his due. He created something lasting by becoming one of the few people to run passenger trains more than a few miles and make money at it. Who knows where the Canadian will be in a decade; it keeps losing fingers and hands as frequencies are trimmed and schedules lengthened. But the Rocky earns its way commercially, having proven its durability by weathering 2008-2009’s Great Recession.

In the latest issue of Trains, my colleague Bob Johnston writes an excellent capsule history of this service: “One factor driving the decision to move the Canadian over to [the Canadian National] route was lobbying by Vancouver entrepreneur Peter Armstrong to privatize VIA’s summer excursions to Banff, Alta., introduced in 1988. This came with the understanding that his fledging operation would get route exclusivity and some initial financial assistance from VIA to ensure the venture’s success. After a few shaky early years, Armstrong invested heavily in specialty dome cars to make Rocky Mountaineer a financial and creative success in a way the public funded operator never could.”

August 17, 2018

“…when he asked her about [Jagmeet] Singh’s CBC appearance, ‘Notley laughed out loud'”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh is apparently fascinated by the internecine fight shaping up between the NDP Premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, and the federal NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

If I am being honest, the thing about the Singh-Notley quarrel that interests me most is not the range of possible political consequences. Nor is it the brute economics of Canadian oil. No, I am most interested in the rhetorical style of it. Last week, on CBC’s Power and Politics, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was discussing Saudi Arabia’s strange diplomatic meltdown and started speculating about Canada’s need to look for imported oil from other countries. Western viewers — no doubt the CBC technically has some — were well aware that Singh had opposed the controversial Energy East pipeline.

[…]

With Saudi Arabia acting like the cranky, unstable extended family it is, Energy East is looking a bit like a missed opportunity — not only for landlocked Alberta, which has a permanent stake in the multiplication of oil export options, but for the entire country. So it did not take long for people to start laughing at Singh’s musings about where, oh where on this great planet Earth, Canada might obtain some oil.

I am using the word “laughing” literally. On Friday, the Edmonton Journal’s politics columnist, Graham Thomson, had a sitdown with Alberta NDP Premier Notley, and when he asked her about Singh’s CBC appearance, “Notley laughed out loud … ‘It struck me that that was a thing that maybe he should have thought through before he said it.’ ”

The premier went on to add “What happened with Jagmeet is that he’s learning that things are not as simple as they sometimes seem” and insisted that “to throw (workers) under the bus as collateral damage in pursuit of some other high-level policy objective is a recipe for failure, and it’s also very elitist.” The e-word! For New Democrats, that’s rough talk.

[…]

Her rough treatment of Singh is unlikely to hurt his by-electoral cause in Burnaby, so the Notley-Singh fight can still be dismissed as mutually beneficial political theatre. Still, Singh tried to defend himself, sort of, in a Monday interview with our Maura Forrest. “I know that Premier Notley’s in a tough political fight,” he said, “but I’ve always felt, and I believe, that personal attacks are beneath her. That’s not my way and I think she’s better than that.”

I will never stop being confused and amused by the way politicians speak in these situations. Read for pure ostensive meaning, Singh is not accusing Notley of making a personal attack on him: in fact, he’s specifically saying that she is incapable of such a thing. But then why should she need the excuse of a tough political fight? Of course, we all know that saying someone is “better than that” is another way of calling them a jerk — perhaps the cruellest.

June 23, 2018

QotD: The protectionist two-step, Alberta craft-beer variant

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Economic protectionism has two classic rationales. Sometimes, as in the case of Alberta’s clumsy attempt at an interprovincial tariff on craft beer, it is undertaken in the name of defending small, emerging “infant industries” that a government wishes to give time to establish themselves in its territory. And sometimes, as in the case of Canadian dairy supply management, it is done to defend “strategic” industries that have existed forever and that allegedly create an irreplaceable quantity of employment and profits.

Give yourself a gold star if you spotted that these canonical pretexts for trade barriers are contradictory. The inherent promise of protection for “infant industries” is that they will grow up and leave the nest. But, oops: by the time they reach adulthood, they may have become too “strategic” to expose to market forces. Heads, the favoured firms win; tails, the consumer loses.

Of course, on the level of fine detail, the arguments for trade barriers are manifold and complicated. (If you get into a quarrel about dairy, and take the free-trade side, you will find them being changed by your interlocutor every 30 seconds.) Alberta’s program for supporting small brewers has an unclear, touchy-feely small-is-beautiful justification. By design, the tariff applies only to businesses that have no intention of attaining industrial scale. It’s right there in the term “craft brewing,” isn’t it? Whatever the esthetic merits of craft beer, this is surely the deliberate encouragement of what the urbane left likes to calls “precarious” jobs that could be flung into disarray by a bad season, a shift in fashions, or a supply problem.

And, also, it’s illegal.

Colby Cosh, “A court refuses to swallow Alberta’s thinly disguised craft-beer tariff”, National Post, 2018-06-22.

April 17, 2018

The trap Trudeau carefully laid for himself

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Coyne on the interminable “negotiations” for the Kinder Morgan pipeline:

Whatever anyone’s concerns — economic, environmental, Aboriginal or other — that is the process by which those concerns are adjudicated. And that is the process that approved the pipeline: the NEB, the cabinet and the courts, all ruling in its favour (though not every legal appeal has been exhausted: a case is still before the Federal Court of Appeal on behalf of seven First Nations arguing they were not adequately consulted).

Why, then, do so many feel entitled, not merely to disagree, or to protest, as is their democratic right, but to substitute their own authority for that prescribed by law: to defy the courts, to threaten disorder, and to deny federal jurisdiction?

Much of the blame should be attached to the current custodians of lawful authority, the governments of Canada and British Columbia. It was Justin Trudeau who, campaigning for office, gave his imprimatur to the extralegal, anti-democratic doctrine of “social licence,” telling pipeline opponents that “governments might grant permits, but only communities can grant permission.”

It was Trudeau, too, who lent support to the notion that Aboriginal communities have, not merely a constitutional right to be consulted on projects affecting lands to which they have title, as the courts have found they have, but an absolute veto. And it was Trudeau who legitimized those who, because they did not like the NEB’s decision, had dismissed it as biased or negligent, with his promise of a special panel to review the project.

Likewise it was John Horgan who, campaigning for office, famously promised to “use every tool in the toolbox” to stop the pipeline from being built. We know now that his government has known since at least the time it took office that it had no constitutional authority to do so. But if Horgan had hoped to walk back the promise, in the grand tradition of Canadian politics, after he was elected, he finds his way blocked by his partners in power, the Green Party.

So he has instead opted to stall for time, delaying permits, threatening legislation, and — someday, maybe — referring the whole business to the courts, hoping the project’s sponsor, Kinder Morgan, will give up in frustration. As, at length, it has declared it will do if Horgan’s government is not brought to heel, with spectacular effect: it has spurred the Trudeau government to state, in terms that allow no retreat, that “the pipeline will be built.”

But reasserting lawful authority, after so many years of disuse, will not be as easy as all that. It is not only the Trudeau or Horgan governments, after all, that have played this game: before Horgan, there was Christy Clark and her constitutionally odious “five conditions” for “approving” the Northern Gateway pipeline, and before Trudeau there were decades of federal governments that allowed the provinces to run the jurisdictional table against them, in the name of “co-operative federalism.”

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