Category Archives: News and politics

Since our posting regarding the Duck-iness of the Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, things have unwound very quickly. Yesterday, noon-ish he admitted to smoking crack cocaine to a group of media.

Later that afternoon, in one of the most confusing pressers ever presented at Toronto City Hall (and we’re counting the Mel Lastman years) not only admitted it again, he apologized profusely, then said if voters want to judge him, they can judge him in October 2014 in the municipal election, but for now we go forward.  Mawkish, then contrite, then hard-ass business as usual with Rob leading the way.

After sitting for a few moments, letting it sink in, we came to the conclusion that the man is in his own special world.  You can search up all the video you want, including the commentary from Jay Leno, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, but the short form is that the man is now the butt of jokes from here to Absurdistan.

The gall of the man is on par with the apocryphal story of the teenager who slaughters his family, then begs for the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.  Of course, various pundits of the nattering class are demanding he resign, take a leave of absence, or that some legal way be found to kick Ford’s ass to the curb on Blue Box day. 

Except there is no legal way to show Ford the door under the Municipal Act.  He could be on live breakfast television, violating a giraffe, while drunk and higher than Jack The Bear and there is no provision to have him escorted out of the office of Mayor.  Ford knows the law and unless he is charged and convicted of a serious offense, the law can’t touch him. 

Ford knows that process would take at least a year, probably two, with appeals up the line and legal skee-ball from every angle possible, including the “Have pity on my client, as he is a confessed drunkard, drug abuser and giraffe fondler” defense.  Conceptually, he could sell Toronto to a Latvian oligarch as his personal theme park and there’s squat anyone can do.

There used to be what was called the Indiana Rule of Politics as codified by Hunter S. Thompson which we paraphrase thusly:  Never be caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman.

Of course, the first part of the Indiana Rule is gone now and the second half could be in danger of being eclipsed by events in Toronto.

The frightening part is that come October 2014, he might just get elected again.

Being in the business of blogging means that you sometimes have to make judgements without the full scope of evidence that would be available to a more august body, such as the cops, or a court of law.  Judging is at the root of forming an opinion and looking at as much evidence as you can before forming your opinion is part of the intellectual rigour of forming a sound opinion, backed with logical arguments and evidence for your stated position.  This is the heart of learned discourse, exchanging opinions and evidence for your thesis, defending your position. 

For example, if our stated position was “So and so is a douchebag” the bar of intellectual proof would be:  Has so and so engaged in behaviours in keeping with the generally held standards of douchebaggery?  (See any reality show featuring the menfolk of the Kardashian Klan, or Jersey Shore as a standard for douchebaggery)  If the individual exhibits a majority of the symptoms, then, intellectually, we can call them a douchebag.

We also use what is called the Duck Theorem.  The Duck Theorem is this:  If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, leaves feathers behind like a duck, shits like a duck, smells like a duck, then flies away like a duck, more than likely, it is a duck.

This ties to the construct of Occam’s razor which seeks the principle of parsimony, economy or succinctness in logic.  It states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  Again, an intellectual process for learned discourse, that we condense as The Simple Answer is Probably the Right Answer.

Which brings us to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.  The local cops have recovered  rumoured video of the Mayor engaging in certain practices that are not Mayor-like, unless you are Marion Barry.

Our predicament is that using the Duck Theorem and Occam’s razor, it looks like the Mayor was caught on the pipe with a couple of known, um, wholesalers, in the Toronto drug industry.  We will add the caveat, we have not seen the video, but enough people have that even the Police Chief has said that the video is substantially as reported in the media. 

Where we lack evidence, is the content of said pipe.  If it was a pinch of Sail or Borkum Riff pipe tobacco, then we have no substantive issue, aside from the Mayor of the biggest city in Canada chumming around with drug dealers.  That alone should be reason enough for Ford to take a sabbatical until these allegations are cleared up in a court of law.  If it turns out that Ford was using what looks like a crack pipe, in the presence of known dealers in crack, with evidence that the pipe contained residues of the combustion of Coc-H⁺Cl⁻ + NH₄HCO₃ → Coc + NH₄Cl + CO₂ + H₂O, then he should emphatically resign.

Leaving aside the evidence for the time being, is the existence of the video enough for Rob Ford to resign?  If the man had any shame at all, he would.  Obviously, he has no shame, as he has not resigned, or taken a sabbatical, or even sought to use up some vacation time away from the office and the pressures of the Office. 

Therefore, Rob Ford is a Duck.

We have some energy issues up here in Canada that we’re trying to sort out and get to the point of actually making decisions.  It’s difficult to understand the ramifications of all the potential decisions, so we’ve devised a rudimentary scorecard to help you get your head around it.

There are several issues.  One, our Oil Sands (or tar sands) contain the largest potential reserves of crude oil outside of Saudi Arabia.  Except the crude is mixed with mud, clay and sand in a bituminous mess that looks like, well, tar and sand.  We have managed to figure out reasonably effective ways of getting the oil out of the sand and making the crude usable for refining. 

There is an environmental cost, yes and it’s a steep one, but we also cannot uninvent petroleum products from our planet.  Too much of everyone’s life depends on oil, regardless of what the off-the-grid folks say.  That ASA tablet you took last night for your headache came from the petrochemical industry, so let’s agree that we need oil and will for the next several dozen generations.  The less we use, the better, is also agreed. 

Having oil, which Canada does, means we have two decisions to make.  First, who gets to turn the crude into things?  The KeystoneXL pipeline wants to move Canadian crude to Houston to refine it into things we need, essentially selling our stuff back to us at a monstrous profit.  There is significant blowback in the US about where the route will go. 

Line 9 is an older pipeline owned by Enbridge that runs more or less from Western Canada, eventually winding up in New Brunswick at a refinery there.  Enbridge wants to reverse the nearly 40 year old pipeline to work from the west to the east, instead of the other way round.  The line was engineered to do this and actually has been reversed once before, with no issues.  But Line 9 is nearly 40 years old and there is a risk of things going badly wrong.

Meanwhile a CN freight near Edmonton has derailed and thirteen oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) cars are now burning themselves out:  The fire department can’t safely get close enough to put the wet stuff on the red stuff.  We’ve been down that road earlier this year with the Lac Megantic derailment that destroyed the heart of the town and put the focus of safety on moving flammable goods by rail.

To simplify:  Moving crude by rail is not as safe as moving crude by pipeline.  Yes, Enbridge did have a pipeline break earlier this year in Kalamazoo that dumped a crapload of crude into the Kalamazoo River, which is also not good.  However, pipeline breaks tend not to explode and kill 47 people like Lac Megantic. 

The scorecard so far:  Move crude by pipeline is better than moving it by rail.  Both have an environmental cost, to be sure, but the first measure is safety for the majority of us.  Pipeline wins.

Now, where to move it to?  We’re very much in favour of not sending our raw materials out to be sold back to us.  Canada has been doing that for nearly 200 years and it has never worked to our advantage.

In a magic wand kind of way, we would punch two pipelines across Canada one going that way and the other going that way that Canada could use for their own interests.  This would lead to a handful of brand new Canadian refineries with the most modern technology and the smallest environmental footprint possible. 

Unfortunately, this is not going to happen.  Refineries have a seven to ten year lead time to engineer and build.  Pipelines, about a three to five year lead time, so we have to work with the infrastructure we have, which means Line 9 and a refinery in New Brunswick.  Not great, but not horrible either.

Getting our crude to a refinery in Canada means we make the gas, diesel, chemicals and goods out of it and sell it to the rest of the world at a significant profit.  We earn that profit by taking the risk of transporting it, refining it, selling it and taking the environmental hits that come from extracting the crude, using older pipelines and doing the grunt work to get the crude to the refinery with the infrastructure we have now. 

So here’s the scorecard now:

Still need oil

Pipeline safer than Rail

Line 9 better than KeystoneXL.

From the environmental perspective, only Line 9 can generate profits that can be used to improve and ensure the smallest possible environmental impact on the planet, including the extraction of the crude in the first place. 

Now, here’s the kicker:  Only government can put the conditions necessary in place to force the hand of private industry.  Private industry is not interested in funds being taken off the top to fund a clean-up of the oil sands. Private industry is not interested in building a new pair of pipelines with the most modern safety and environmental standards, to brand new refineries with the smallest environmental footprint.  Private industry is not interested in merely making offensive amounts of profit; they want grotesque, obscene amounts of profit.  And environmentalists hung from lamp posts.

Which is why government should step in..  Legislate the snot out of Line 9, as it is the most beneficial to the country as a whole, but also take 10% vig right off the top to fund the environmental clean-up of the oil sands and to ensure that the technology used in the next five to ten years is as safe and comprehensively monitored as possible.  Then take another 10% off the bottom to fund our own, new, safe, environmentally sane infrastructure to use Canadian resources for Canadian benefit. 

What this strategy means is we get the benefit of our oil and we dramatically increase the funding to fixing the environmental impact of the oil sands.  Both sides win.

Which is why it will never happen.