Category: Canadian Politics
A tale of two shipwrecks
One in Brittany, France, the other in Cape Breton, Canada. One cleaned up in a month, the other untouched after four, with no cleanup in sight.
Here’s the TK Bremen shortly after it grounded on Kerminihy Beach, near Erdeven, Brittany, France, on December 11. 2011.
And here’s the M/V Miner after it grounded on Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, after a towing cable parted on September 14, 2011.
The much larger Miner was under tow, bound for a scrapyard in Aliaga, Turkey. Here are the two ships’ specifications:
| M/V Miner | TK Bremen | |
| Launched | 1965 | 1982 |
| Type | Bulk carrier | General cargo & bulk carrier |
| Built in | Quebec, Canada | Pusan, South Korea |
| Length (LOA) | 222.5 m | 109 m |
| Beam | 23 m | 16 m |
| Draught | 8.2 m | 6.74 m |
| Gross tonnage | 17,831 | 3,992 |
| power | 8,000 bhp | 4,000 bhp |
| Shipwrecked on | Sept 20, 2011 | Dec 16, 2011 |
| Shipwrecked at | Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada | Kerminihy Beach, Erdeven, Brittany, France |
| Flag | * | Malta |
| Owner | Pella Shipping Co., Thessaloniki, Greece | Blue Atlantic Shipping Ltd., Malta |
The Bremen was much more accessible than the Miner, having grounded on a mainland beach, while the Miner fetched up on remote, unpopulated, forbidding Scatarie Island. Though very different, the two areas share one thing in common besides shipwrecks: The dunes adjacent to Kerminihy Beach are a nature preserve, and Scatarie is a provincially protected wilderness area.
There the similarities end. As detailed in a photo spread on TheAtlantic.com website, 40 men worked day and night for two weeks to dismantle the Bremen and clean up the beach, at a cost of nearly €10 million euros (CDN$13.2 million).
“One month after the wreck,” reports The Atlantic, “the cleanup process is nearly complete.”
The French cleanup began:
The work continued:
Here’s all that remained of the TK Bremen as of Monday:
I won’t attempt to draw any lessons. I’m no expert, and the Miner is a much larger vessel in a much dicier location. But it may be worth noting that three weeks after the Miner went aground, NS Premier Darrell Dexter hadn’t been able to get any federal agency to take charge of the disaster. And I can’t recall any Canadian shipwreck being cleaned up the way France cleaned up the Bremen, let alone in two weeks flat.
Makes you wonder.
The website Boatnerd.com details numerous collisions, groundings, and accidents experienced by the Miner its previous incarnations as the Canadian Miner, the LeMoyne, and the Maplecliffe Hall. More information about the Miner here and here, and about the Bremen here, here, and here.
* According to Boatnerd, the Miner’s Canadian registry was cancelled last June. I was unable to determine its registry for the aborted trip to Turkey.
Bluenosed Babbitts speak
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald and AllNovaScotia.com, ranking arbiters of mainstream opinion in Nova Scotia, lent editorial support Monday to Mayor Peter Kelly’s forcible police removal of peaceful Occupy Nova Scotia protesters.
The Herald, in a bracing throwback to its days as the fusty Old Lady of Argyle, approved the eviction in every detail: violence, secrecy, sneakiness, double-dealing, rights-violation, and even Remembrance Day timing. AllNS tried to have it both ways. A commentary* by former-Managing-Editor-turned-United-Church-minister Kevin Cox quibbled with Kelly’s timing and secretive decision-making, but endorsed His Worship’s position that a vague and rarely enforced municipal bylaw should trump Sections 2. (b), (c), and (d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In a letter AllNS published this morning, Halifax Filmmaker John Wesley Chisholm pointed out that Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi had reached the opposite conclusion, “saying the Charter of Rights prevented the city from arbitrarily forcing out the protesters — even if they’re breaking a city bylaw.”
Halifax officials, Chisholm wrote, took a big gamble with taxpayers’ money, risking hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions on a possible court defence of
the notion that these protesters’ use of tents to camp out in a public park was so egregious, so outstandingly shocking to our community’s values, of such a danger to public safety, so offensive to our public interests, that it justified a police action to deny their rights and freedoms to assembly and protest under the federal law on which our civil society is based..
Even by the smug standards of Halifax’s establishment media, this was a shabby performance.
*Access to AllNS is by paid subscription, and its flash-based web structure makes it impossible to post accurate links.
A senseless and unnecessary use of power
Here are the events that led to today’s arrests in Halifax.
- A group of protesters exercised their right to assemble peacefully and petition their government for redress of grievances by camping out in the Halifax Parade ground.
City burghers found the demonstration unruly, distasteful, and inconvenient. Seizing on the central role the Parade Grounds traditionally plays in Halifax’s Remembrance Day observances, Mayor Peter Kelly demanded the protesters vacate the area before November 11.- Showing more strategic accumen than one might have been inclined to expect, the OccupyNS protesters negotiated respectfully with veterans’ groups and HRM officials, and voluntarily withdrew to Victoria Park, a few blocks away.
(A parenthetic note seems warranted here: For those unfamiliar with Halifax, Victoria Park scarcely merits the designation. It’s more of a grassy verge than a full-fledged park, a walkway whose round-the-clock use by protesters, however scruffy, should not have made any city official’s list of top-10 concerns. Peace, order, and good government-wise, it was a non-event.)
- On Tuesday, Mayor Kelly and HRM Council met behind closed doors and voted on… something. Maybe they voted to evict the protesters, as Kelly claimed. Maybe they voted to serve them with an eviction notice, as Dawn Sloane claimed Friday evening. Mere citizens cannot know who’s telling the truth and who’s confabulating because there was no mention of the protests on the council agenda, and the city’s elected officials acted, as is their wont on important and controversial matters, in secret and unaccountably. As the Coast’s Tim Bousquet reported, the vote, if it happened, was not confirmed in public session, as required by law.
- On Friday, having made so much of his reverence for the solemnity of Remembrance Day last week, Kelly ordered – or at the very least, allowed – the eviction to proceed, with only cursory warning. Police forced protesters out of Victoria “park,” arresting those who failed to co-operate, and confiscating their tents and paraphernalia.
What harm were the OccupyNS protesters doing that could conceivably justify their violent eviction? City officials made a few, feckless attempts to conjure up a rationale. Kelly claimed the protests had cost the city $25,000 extra police and trash removal services, then abruptly upped the estimate to $40,000. The roundness of the numbers suggests they were plucked from the mayoral navel with as much accounting acumen as Kelly applied in the past the the use of city parks for big name concerts.
City officials claimed an ordinance required city parks to be vacated overnight, but pedestrians routinely use the grassy walkway at all hours of the day and night. Critics were quick to point out that Kelly’s administration tolerated an encampment at Seaview Park for months on end, before eventually conceding that the protesters had a point and negotiating a settlement of their grievances.
Carrying out the forcible eviction on Remembrance Day was tactless, and added insult to injury, but it’s a side issue. The core principle here is the right to petition for redress by peaceful assembly. That’s what our vets fought for. The city has sacrificed these Constitutional pillars in the name of an obscure and petty municipal ordinance, and a stuffy concern for orderliness. Is it any wonder Halifax, which could be such a great city, wallows instead in mediocrity?
Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill
Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called “the indispensable (and highly controversial)” Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as “hazardous,” and warranting “health warnings of emergency conditions.”
What caught my attention was Fallows’s assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is “the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China.” That is astounding: one PM2.5 meter for a nation of 1.3 billion people. By contrast, Sydney, Nova Scotia, population ~27,000,* has seven instruments that monitor PM2.5.
Bear with me for a brief technical digression. PM2.5 is a measure of the concentration of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns (millionths of a metre)—tiny particles that can find their way deep inside people’s lungs. It’s the air quality scientist’s indicator of choice for air pollution most likely to damage health.
To confound matters further, Sydney’s closely monitored air quality appears to be quite good. Here is the most recent publicly available data, from a 24-hour sample collected on October 12.
Each column represents a different monitoring station, each of which has two types of monitors. The highest reading among them was less than 1/1ooth of that registered this week in Beijing. These monitors run for 24 hours once every six days, a schedule that coincides with Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) network. A seventh Sydney-based unit operates continuously and contributes data used to calculate Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI), but the PM2.5 results are not reported separately.
This appears to be a clear case of underkill in Beijing, where much better data is warranted, and I would argue, overkill in Sydney, where air quality has been unremarkable by North American standards for the last two decades. Over-measurement in Sydney reflects the public panic over the Tar Ponds cleanup in the late ’90s and early ‘oughts. A few environmental activists persuaded residents that air-quality impacts from the Tar Ponds were putting their health at risk, a falsehood Environment Canada has been loathe to correct. Ironically, back before Sydney’s coke ovens closed in 1988, the city’s air likely did pose a health hazard, but went largely unmonitored.
The relative hazards of air quality in China vs. Nova Scotia show up clearly in this NASA map compiled from satellite readings of average PM2.5 levels around the world between 2001 and 2006:
I would ascribe both conditions — Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill — to the politicization of environmental monitoring. Back when Sydney’s polluting steel mill and coke ovens were the largest employer in a region short of jobs, few people wanted to hear about associated environmental concerns, and government was content to turn a blind eye. Similarly, the Chinese government is reluctant to highlight the environmental costs of its spectacular economic growth (although, as Fallows often points out, its environmental record is not so indifferent as some in the west assume).
In subsequent posts on Beijing air monitoring, Fallows has subtly adjusted his claim about @Beijingair’s putative uniqueness in China. He now describes it as “the only public readings of PM 2.5.” The controversial feed is based on an air monitoring unit on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing. Official chinese annoyance over it was the subject of a Wikileaks cable, and may have contributed to the Chinese government decision to block access to Twitter in 2009. There are welcome early signs, here and here, that China may soon begin more appropriate monitoring. I would be surprised if they are not secretly monitoring PM2.5.
My point here is that citizens should take care to view environmental hazards in context, and always remain mindful that any chemical hazard is proportional to dose.
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*Sydney no longer exists as a municipal unit, having been amalgamated into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in 1995. Wikipedia puts the “Sydney area” population in the 2006 census at 33,012, but this is suspiciously high. I was unable to ferret out local population numbers from StatsCan’s online census information, but will be delighted if readers can steer me to them.
Chisholm for PM — feedback
To judge from my inbox today, something about the manner of Robert Chisholm’s departure from the provincial leadership pissed off a few New Democratic Party loyalists. But one party stalwart rejected these comments as, “old wounds and sour grapes.”
Don’t be too quick to put him in the Chisholm column though:
More to the point – how can a uni-lingual politician aspire to the leadership of a national political party in Canada in 2011? A party with over 50% of its caucus from Quebec? A party with official opposition status and its eye on the big prize?
Je ne comprends pas.
Moi non plus.
Chisholm for Prime Minister?
A failed Nova Scotia NDP leader for leader of the national NDP?
Hasn’t that been tried before?
I don’t know what he’s up to. Certainly not hoping to become leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. Raising his personal profile? For what? Consolidating regional delegates in case of a brokered convention? To what end? The whole thing strikes me as an exercise in misplaced vanity.
On addressing cabinet ministers – feedback
Bill Turpin, one of the few Nova Scotians who has both edited a daily newspaper editor and worked as a civil servant, disagrees with my criticism of Evan Solomon for addressing cabinet ministers as “Minister.”
The use of “Minister” by bureaucrats is not deferential. It’s good form used for good reason. The term is a reminder to both parties that they are engaged in a special relationship. It reminds the Minister that she is not merely a politician, but also someone whose job is to direct the civil service in the best interests of the people. It reminds bureaucrats their jobs are to provide their best advice on how the elected government can achieve its policy objectives, whether or not it suits the minister politically, and whether or not it suits the civil service. It’s known as speaking truth to power. The principle is highly valued by good civil servants, but it can be hard to live up to. The use of a seemingly archaic form in addressing elected officials makes it easier by establishing the right context before the conversation begins. Being on first-name basis with a minister is great for a bureaucrat’s ego, but that’s all.
For similar reasons, I cringe when I hear journalists addressing cabinet ministers by their first names. Reporters know they should keep a distance between themselves and the people they are covering. This is especially true in a legislature, where they report on the same cast of characters every day and where, in the long run, chummy relations work to the detriment of good reporting. So, a little formality is useful in this situation, too.
Evan Solomon’s got it right.
I have no problem with civil servants addressing cabinet ministers as ‘Minister.” Bill explains the basis for the convention well, and when I do work for a ministry, i adopt the habit myself. But journalists are a different matter. They do not work for ministers, and they should not don the mannerisms of those who do. It sounds obsequious, and obsequiousness is just as dangerous as chumminess. “Mr. Fast” and “Mr. MacKay” convey the appropriate level of formality and distance, without the odor of grovelling.
Why pols use talking points
Professors of journalism or public relations would do well to save a copy of today’s episode of CBC Radio’s “The House” for a classic example of how a politician can use talking points to hornswoggle an overly deferential interviewer.
At about 14 minutes into the program, Evan Solomon asks International Trade Minister Ed Fast an obvious question about the recent spate of US protectionist measures aimed at Canada:
Why are you being caught off guard by these sudden protectionist measures coming out of the US?
Fast responded with a set of talking points so scripted, you can almost hear him rhyming off the bullets:
- We’re focused on removing trade barriers rather than erecting new ones.
- Canada and the US have a strong, mature, longstanding trade relationship.
- It’s the biggest trade success story in the world.
- And when we see our cousins to the south introducing new barriers to trade, obviously that raises concerns with us.
- That’s why I’ve been engaging with my counterpart in the US, US trade representative Ron Kirk. I’ve spoken to him on a number of occasions. I’ve spoken to his deputy on a number of occasions.
- My colleagues in the house of commons have also been engaging with their counterparts in the house of representatives and the senate.
- We are impressing upon the Americans that trade barriers actually hurt both Canadian businesses and American businesses because out economies and our supply channels are so integrated.
The heavy-handed messaging couldn’t quite obscure one obvious fact: Fast never answered the question. So what did Solomon do? He ignored the omission and moved on to the next question. A better response would have been:
Excuse me but, I didn’t hear why you are being caught off guard by these sudden protectionist measures?
I don’t mean to gang up on Solomon, but I wish he and other press gallery habitues would curb their recent habit of addressing cabinet ministers as “Minister.” We expect this formal obsequiousness from the tribe of ministerial aides who populate The Hill, but when reporters adopt this style, it contributes to the deferential atmosphere that lets responsible cabinet ministers dodge questions and escape obvious follow-ups.
J-school profs will get a bonus from today’s House episode. In the show opener, Solomon questions Defence Minister Peter MacKay about the seemingly endless increases in the cost of those second-hand submarines Canada bought from Britain. Current estimates stand at $1 billion, and could triple before the subs are fully operational. In response, to his credit, MacKay passed up a chance to slang his Liberal predecessors for the buying the subs in the first place, but he couldn’t resist exploiting the recent death of a Canadian soldier for rhetorical effect.
Let’s not forget one important fact, and that is, we have men and women in uniform who literally put their lives on the line in service of Canada to protect our citizens. Men like the gentleman who gave his life, Janick Gilbert, who was a SAR-tech, who gave his life on a rescue mission this week near Hall Bay, Nunavut. These are exceptional citizens, to say the least, and they require extremely sophisticated and, yes, expensive equipment to do that work. When it comes to putting people in harm’s way, but giving them world class protection, and that’s the calculation and that is the measure that we have to make.
This time Solomon did not disappoint:
Well you mentioned, speaking of world class equipment, that the ideal piece of equipment would be a nuclear submarine, not the diesel-electric submarine. Therefore if you want to be committed to the best equipment for the men and women serving, are you considering purchasing nuclear submarines?
MacKay:
No we’re not….We don’t live in an ideal world. My grandmother had a saying that, “If wishes were horses, beggars could ride.” We don’t have unlimited resources and we’re not contemplating nuclear submarines.
Ah, so it turns out that protecting men and women in uniform who “literally put their lives on the line in service of Canada to protect our citizens” is, like everything else in life and government, subject to financial limits and budgetary constraints.
Lastly, points to Solomon for knowing how to pronounce the word “nuclear,” unlike the Minister of National Defence.
Canada’s equivalent of “real Americans” — #gag #spoon
I won’t presume that Conservative MP Candice Hoeppner, poster child for the Harper government’s plan to kill the long gun registry, was purposely being nasty when she referred to citizens who oppose the registry as “good salt-of-the-earth people,” “upstanding citizens who work hard,” and parents whose children “probably aren’t involved in gangs in the streets.” But I wish she would take a moment to consider how offensive her characterizations are.
They’re upstanding citizens who work hard. They take their kids and grandkids out hunting and shooting and those kids, by the way, probably aren’t involved in gangs in the streets.
These are good salt-of-the-earth people and for so long they have had really nobody in government who has been able to make any changes on their behalf. So it really was very gratifying to know how thankful they were and how much it meant to them to have someone who was going to be promoting good policy, policy that was fair and wasn’t targeting them.
By dividing Canadians into “good salt-of-the-earth people” vs. unnamed others, the Harperites are borrowing yet another unwelcome page from the US Republican Party’s noisome playbook.
Personally, I find guns creepy, and I believe the danger of having them around far outweighs the good some people see in them. But I feel no great stake in the long gun registry, which was a badly conceived and atrociously implemented indirect attack at a problem politicians lacked the gumption to tackle head on. I’m ambivalent about ending it, but it’s a repulsive lie to suggest that one side of the debate has a lock on worthy citizenship — or even that some citizens are intrinsically more worthy than others.
There are plenty of good people, and no shortage of arseholes, on both sides of this issue.
By the same token I won’t be joining the chorus of indignation that has greeted the “it gets better” video cobbled together, somewhat ineptly, by a group of Conservative MPs in response to the suicide of a gay Ottawa teen.
Yes, some Conservatives have been slow to shed bigoted ideas about homosexuality that were the norm in Canada only a few short years ago. Yes, as MP Scott Brison pointed out, the Conservative caucus has fought against such advancements in gay rights in Canada as pension benefits and the right to marry.
But the fact they are now climbing aboard the “it gets better” bandwagon marks a remarkable political watershed. The generous interpretation would be that the MPs were simply moved by the human tragedy of a promising teenager taking his own life because of the cruel treatment he faced as a gay boy. In the cynical view, this was a cold Conservative Party calculation that Canadian public opinion has fetched up firmly on one side of this issue, and the party had best get on board.
I incline to the former, but either way, it shows that those least inclined to accept equal treatment for people of all sexual orientation have now realized the debate is over in Canada. Tolerance won.
It’s about time.
(The National Post’s Chris Selley goes overboard with the argument, and lets his CPC partisanship show, but on the basic point, I find myself in rare agreement: “The fact its supporters cut across political lines is a benefit, not a drawback.”)
H/T:BT
Ships start singing here
The Canadian Beaver Band offers a jaundiced musical view of Halifax’s spankin’ new ship contract [possibly NSW].
H/T: Charlie Phillips
