Editorials
2024 Editorials
Municipal Elections - Distinct Ideas (1)
Ian Barrett
Despite the short notice upon which the current special election for mayor was launched, numerous candidates have put their names forward, each with important differences in what they propose.
Arguably the two most well known are Maude Marquis-Bissonnette and Yves Ducharme. Ms. Marquis-Bissonnette represents Action Gatineau and a likely continuation from the government of Maxime Pednault-Jobin, the former mayor. Mr. Ducharme is himself a former mayor, so voters have an idea of what a future government under his leadership would look like.
If we could describe the fundamental difference between the two, it would likely be development with some government intervention for Ms. Marquis-Bissonnette, or more of a reliance on free market principles for Mr. Ducharme.
Both recognize the urgency of addressing the housing crisis, and both see solutions as necessarily going through private developers. Ms. Marquis-Bissonnette proposes royalties for community development, something currently in place in various cities including Ottawa and Terrebonne. These royalties would help pay for further infrastructure in the immediate area of development, with a focus on more harmonious neighbourhoods as more construction projects are approved. A fear raised here, however, is that such extra costs could be passed on to buyers of properties, driving up prices even further.
Mr. Ducharme would leverage his connections with developers to move quickly with densification to address the housing crisis. His knowledge of the industry would clearly bring advantages, but has also raised questions about conflicts of interest, as he has been a lobbyist for Brigil in recent years. He has committed to addressing these conflicts of interest if elected, but exactly how much he would be hampered in partaking in decision making on these files is not known. Even competitors of Brigil may use his past employment experience to argue against decisions that they feel disadvantage them.
Mr. Ducharme has other market-based proposals to help resolve the housing crisis as well. One is encouraging the leasing of homes as an alternative to traditional purchases. He furthermore proposes that the city could give municipal tax breaks in exchange for equity in homes.
Mr. Durcharme also proposes seeking more funding from the provincial government as an alternative to implementing new municipal taxes or raising existing ones.
In terms of developing commercial arteries, Ms. Marquis-Bissonnette proposes both municipal tax breaks targeted at small businesses and additional parking lot taxes to encourage development of vacant lots. The former is allowed via Quebec’s Law Respecting Municipal Taxation (section 244.64.9). Action Gatineau argues that targeted tax breaks would also benefit business owners who rent their locales, as fees for municipal taxes are commonly passed on to commercial tenants separately from the normal rent components of what they pay to landlords.
Mr. Ducharme states that he would look to avoid raising taxes in general to help stimulate the local economy, and would offer information tools to businesses to help them in various aspects of their commercial activities, beyond simply easing their financial obligations.
The other candidates have also made interesting proposals, more on which will be presented next week in this space.
Municipal Elections - Distinct Ideas (2)
Ian Barrett
Having looked at the platforms of Maude Marquis-Bissonnette and Yves Ducharme last week, we can now take a look at the proposals of the five other candidates, all of whom have presented interesting ideas.
All candidates agree that densification is necessary to resolve the housing crisis. Stephane Bisson also sees densification allowing sufficient revenue to improve neighbourhood services. He proposes changing zoning laws to allow for higher buildings, yet designing neighbourhoods so as to maximize sunlight on streets and avoid wind tunnels. He predicts that the housing situation will only become worse as more residents of Ottawa are priced out of their own neighbourhoods and move to Gatineau. He plans more student housing, and will support small businesses with subsidies and no interest loans. He would diversify city revenue by renting out municipally owned land.
Both Daniel Feeny and Stephane Bisson feel that the tramway will be too expensive to justify the cost, preferring instead a Rapibus for the west.
Mr. Feeny also stresses a need for a complete regional plan on mobility, pointing to the lack of coordination between the governments of Gatineau and Quebec and the National Capital Commission. He has proposed twenty measures for affordable housing, all independently vetted for feasibility. He feels that more funding for social housing is needed, both public and private, and that over the past 15 years the city has put too much onus on the private sector to supply a limited number of affordable units in exchange for permission to increase the size of housing projects. He also proposes more affordable public transit, with educational institutes and employers being able to contribute to reduce costs for their students or staff.
Olive Kamanyana sees solutions to housing coming via the regulatory framework which is already in place. She would put an added focus on protecting green spaces and wetlands. She also points to her previous experience on the municipal council as giving her the necessary insights to ensure that the current mandate is completed successfully. She cites how other councillors have supported her proposals in the past, and stresses that she would negotiate in respectful ways, valuing each councillor’s opinions.
Mathieu Saint-Jean would focus on mini houses as a partial solution to the housing crisis. He would pursue a train service between Gatineau and Thurso, and would lobby for two new bridges across the Ottawa River. He would also look to follow a project launched in France to use non-recyclable trash as material in certain types of construction like roads, and look to generate electricity from aqueducts as is being done in Portland.
Remi Bergeron has many ideas for STO, including optimizing routes and more service-on-demand options. He would also eliminate executive committees at town hall, involving all councillors in more of the files the city is responsible for, with the mayor ultimately presiding over all major tasks.
Candidates have proposed many ways forward over the last few weeks. Regardless of who wins the election, hopefully these ideas will serve as inspiration over the coming months and years.
Making City Council Work
Ian Barrett
The results of the special election for mayor are still not known as this column is written. Yet regardless of who wins, how functional can the municipal council be - both for the remainder of this term and for years to come?
When France Bélisle won the last regular election in 2021, she came in as a complete outsider. Her lack of political experience was seen by many voters as an asset, those seeking change and who seized the chance to shake up the system. Fresh ideas are certainly welcome, and keep our governments from becoming sclerotic. Yet at times these newcomers aren’t familiar with how the system works, and can struggle to get things done.
Conversely, established opposition figures may see an opportunity to exploit the inexperience of rivals to score political points, having an eye on the next election. This is their job, and something which is so common as to be mundane at both the provincial and federal levels of government.
So exactly how the blame for the failure of the previous administration should be shared is open to debate. We don’t have all of the facts, but Ms. Bélisle's team and Action Gatineau have mutually accused each other of creating a toxic environment over the last three years. Representatives of the party have voiced frustration that they were largely sidelined in important decisions about the city, and Ms. Bélisle has made reference to actions on the part of some councillors that would likely qualify as harassment. However, she has yet to provide further details, making it impossible to make a full judgement on the situation. Ms. Bélisle had previously been accused of creating a toxic environment while serving as president of the regional tourism office, Tourisme Outaouais.
What we do know is that the council has been much more functional these last few months, under the care-taker administration of Daniel Champagne. Mr. Champagne is a veteran at town hall, currently in his third term and having previously served as president of the municipal council. He has significant experience finding ways to bring together enough council votes to get projects passed, and has worked extensively with Action Gatineau in his previous two terms. This experience has certainly helped him to get things done as Interim Mayor.
However, he was also a close confidant of Ms. Bélisle while she was mayor, so she almost certainly sought his advice often. What’s more, if Action Gatineau’s goal was to make it difficult for Ms. Bélisle to succeed, it would of course be in their interest to make the council as functional as possible following her departure. Positioning themselves as the most effective governors is what all political parties seek to do, at any level of government.
Seeing such political infighting at the municipal level is something to which Gatineau residents haven’t previously been exposed, but again, it’s commonplace at the provincial and federal levels. Whether mayors without political party affiliations will be able to effectively govern Gatineau in the future is an open question.
Government Coordination and Immigration
Ian Barrett
Housing has come to dominate most political debates, whether at the municipal, provincial or federal levels. Yet part of the challenge in addressing the housing crisis is that different levels of government don’t always work closely together when governing.
A major factor contributing to the housing crisis is immigration. Those arriving in Canada need a place to live, yet the number of houses being built has been far less than what is needed to accommodate these new Canadians.
Immigration is almost entirely under federal jurisdiction, and the federal government has been doing its job to address labour shortages. Employers have been sounding the alarm for years about skills shortages. Without workers they can’t expand their businesses to create the wealth that our cities and towns need to thrive. As businesses and the economy flourish, they create opportunities for their communities and provide revenue to our governments to offer services. With low birth rates, the only alternative to economic stagnation is to open our country to skilled new-comers so that our labour market can respond to the needs of our society.
However, these newcomers need homes. Yet housing is largely under municipal jurisdiction. It’s up to towns and cities to plan for the expansion of neighbourhoods and allow intelligent development. Cities have, however, been torn between conflicting priorities. Residents want green spaces preserved, and most people in established neighbourhoods are wary of densification, which can lead to increased pressure on local services and more traffic congestion. Municipal councillors across the country have been hesitant to push development, as the voters who elect them value quiet neighbourhoods.
This disconnect between the federal and municipal governments has had dire consequences, with an explosion of homelessness in recent years and a general impoverishing of tenants and those trying to break into the housing market. The federal government is trying to respond, but its options are generally limited to selling federal land and withholding federal funding from cities that don’t embrace densification. The ball is largely in cities’ courts.
Provincial governments don’t have a large role to play in the housing crisis, but there are major challenges that higher levels of immigration will cause that are the responsibility of provinces.
Many schools are bursting at the seams, and construction of new schools tends to lag the educational capacity that neighbourhoods need.
However, the massive danger is in health care. New immigrants are generally younger, and so don’t require much in the way of health care now. But they certainly will as they age. Without a forward looking plan for how to develop our health care system in the coming decades, the pressure on the system will become immense. Yet there is not enough political pressure to force provincial governments to begin planning now. Instead, our healthcare system is barely able to sustain itself under current conditions. This is a demographic time bomb that will cause substantial headaches and suffering in twenty to thirty years.
The housing crisis should teach us the consequences of insufficient planning. Sadly, it seems that we’re missing the lesson.
The Asticou Hospital
Ian Barrett
This week, the provincial government announced that the new CHAU (Centre hospitalier affilié universitaire) hospital would be at the site of the current Asticou Centre on Cité des Jeunes Boulevard near the Plateau.
Criticisms have been raised from a number of stakeholders, including Mayor Maude Marquis-Bissonnette, who worried about how the city could develop that artery to make it suitable for the large volume of vehicles that will come through to access the hospital, from both patients and workers. Others complained that it wouldn’t be centrally accessible for a majority of the city’s residents.
Still, this is very good news for Aylmer. The west of the city has been the focus of major development projects for years, many aimed at senior citizens. The area around Galleries Aylmer has been essentially transformed into a retirement community. Action Gatineau had largely driven this urbanization plan during the 8 years of the Pedneaud-Jobin administration, and now that they have returned to power, such projects near the Principale/Wilfrid Lavigne corridor may expand further.
A critical service for senior citizens is to have reasonably accessible health care. The new hospital means that the old one in Hull will close. The city had been pushing for a site close to the casino. Although it’s only slightly further from central Aylmer to the casino compared to Asticou, the major difference is that patients from Aylmer would have had to cross the congested downtown to get to the new hospital as compared to the current location in Hull, adding time and stress to their trips.
In terms of eastern Gatineau, no plans have been made public to close the hospital on Vérendrye, so health services should continue to be available in the east.
The casino location has been dropped from consideration due to high levels of contamination in the soil and the costs of expropriating land at the site. The federal government offered to sell the Asticou land to the province in order to facilitate the construction of the hospital, a nice example of the federal and provincial governments collaborating on a large file. It’s unfortunate that the municipal government wasn’t consulted, at least based on what the mayor’s office has stated so far, but hopefully collaboration with the city will also rise to the occasion going forward.
The next challenge will be preparing to staff the new hospital, plans which need to start now. Given the chronic shortage of health care staff already facing the region, creativity will definitely be needed to improve the region’s dire health care outcomes over the last few decades. These culminated in the sporadic closures of the emergency ward at the Gatineau Hospital in recent years due to staffing shortages.
It will again be necessary for the federal and provincial governments to collaborate closely to resolve these problems, perhaps by making it easier for immigrants with background in healthcare to have their credentials recognized in Canada. The new hospital is only a first step in giving the region healthcare in line with the rest of the country.
A second municipal party for Gatineau: Duggan and Goneau make a bid
Ian Barrett
Municipal political parties have substantial advantages over independents, with the most critical being funding. This comes from financial assistance from the provincial government, and funds raised year after year from comprehensive lists of supporters. Last month’s mayoral election was an excellent example - both the candidate for mayor and for the vacated municipal seat running for Action Gatineau had an immediate source of funds, something even more significant given that the election was called on short notice.
The party’s organizational structure is also a major benefit. Action Gatineau learned in 2021 the importance of getting supporters out to vote, having lost the race for mayor despite favourable polling numbers. The turnout for last month’s special election was comparable to that of a regular election, something unusual for by-elections. Action Gatineau’s efforts to get their supporters out to vote likely contributed to this surprisingly high overall voter turnout. Other candidates struggled to connect with their supporters, needing to organize their campaigns from scratch on short notice.
It’s also much easier to have influence as councillors when you know that you’ll have a block of colleagues voting with you.
Most cities in Quebec have multiple municipal political parties. Among Montreal, Laval, and Quebec City there are on average half a dozen municipal parties per city. Gatineau is an outlier with only one.
Yet a second party is now taking shape. Former municipal councillor Sylvie Goneau is teaming up with current councillor Mike Duggan to launch Evolution Gatineau. Thus far they haven’t said much about what the orientation of the party will be, but given both Ms. Goneau’s and Mr. Duggan’s past affiliations with the Conservative Party of Canada, it’s to be expected that it will be right-of-centre. Both were candidates for the Conservatives in the 2019 federal election, running in the ridings of Gatineau and Hull-Aylmer, with each finishing in 4th place.
How successful this party will be in the next election is anyone’s guess. Yet given that a number of independent councillors often take business-friendly stances, it’s curious that they have yet to rally behind this new party. There’s still more than a year before the next municipal elections - sufficient time for several of them to join the new party. For Evolution Gatineau to succeed they’ll need to field a strong selection of candidates.
Mr. Duggan has a complicated relationship with Aylmer. Heading into the 2021 municipal elections, he decided to move to the eastern part of Gatineau and run for election there rather than seek re-election in his riding of Deschenes. This followed a number of public disagreements that he had with residents and local associations in his riding. In early 2022, councillors unanimously voted to remove him from all committees and commissions after he defended the presence of the confederate flag at the anti-government protests happening in Ottawa at the time.
Without other members of the council joining Evolution Gatineau, it's unclear whether Mr. Duggan could successfully be the standard-bearer for the party in the municipal elections next year.
Realistic Solutions to the Housing Crisis (1)
Ian Barrett
Human nature is to look for simple solutions to the problems we face. However, this can make resolving complex problems more difficult than they should be.
The housing crisis is a great example of oversimplifying. Media has taken turns blaming various sources, with foreign buyers being the early cause cited, and more recently immigrants and temporary residents. A recent article in the CBC, quoting Quebec’s Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec (RCLALQ), instead says that solutions should come via government subsidies for social housing, and that increasing the supply of housing in general won’t work.
We need to differentiate between two very different aspects of the housing crisis. On the one hand, sky-rocketing rent costs are hitting the poorest members of society especially hard. On the other, we have the extremely high cost of buying a home, something that primarily impacts the middle class.
Although there are a number of common factors driving each of the two problems, there are also important differences. Solutions to the two are in many ways distinct.
In terms of renting, rising prices have indeed been driven by excess demand. It’s difficult to believe now, but at the height of the lockdowns in 2020 demand was collapsing, and landlords were offering signing bonuses to new tenants. As telework took hold, there was talk of city centres being abandoned for more rural regions with more space.
Since society moved back to what it had been, and employers began pushing for employees to spend time at their offices, demand for rental units in cities also quickly recovered. More immigrants and temporary foreign workers, needed to address labour shortages, pushed the demand for rental units higher than ever. Many units had been taken off the market for short term rentals, in essence driven by a shortage of hotels and a surge in tourists looking to explore the world after long periods of closed borders. Even before 2020, developers had focused on building condos for the middle class instead of large rental buildings.
To bring the price of rental units down, a number of approaches are needed. First, supply will indeed need to increase. Luckily, this is already happening, as high rents have many developers now focusing on building centrally owned apartment buildings. However, this will only take pressure off of rising prices, without offering a solution to those with fixed incomes who simply cannot afford current prices. More hotels are also needed to lower prices for short term accommodation and discourage using apartments for this purpose.
Social housing will also be key. This includes more social housing generally, but also optimally using the social housing that we already have. Many tenants in social housing units have held onto their apartments for many years, having arrived with small children who have moved out. Encouraging older tenants whose children have moved to downsize to free up much needed affordable housing for larger families would make much needed space available in the short term.
Next week's column will focus on purchasing a home.
Realistic Solutions to the Housing Crisis (2)
Ian Barrett
Often touted solutions to bring down the price of rent, such as subsidized housing and rent controls, do nothing to address the concerns of the middle class looking to purchase a first home. We see young families leveraging themselves to the max, becoming what’s known as “house poor” - living in a reasonably nice house, but with no money left over to cover any discretionary spending at the end of the month. Interest rates can literally make or break their ability to stay above water.
The causes of price spikes in the property market also have important distinctions from that of rental. Recent immigrants and temporary workers are much more likely to rent than to buy, so immigration levels don’t tend to have the same impact on property prices in the short term. Critically, most recent development has focused on multi-unit dwellings. Those houses that are available come with a stiff price premium as multiple bidders with dreams of having a yard make ever higher offers. Families are unlikely to give up on the dream of owning a home with green space for their children, and so will continue to put every last dime that they can into purchasing even a small house. At the same time, land for development of single-unit homes is ever scarcer. Either we need to give up local green spaces for development, or facilitate moving farther from urban centres. Telework could play an important role in the latter.
Empty house taxes can discourage speculators from flipping houses for a quick profit.
Creating attractive options for older owners to transition to smaller space would also increase supply in the short term. For those who bought at reasonable prices decades ago and have now paid off their mortgages, the cost of staying in their houses is negligible. What’s more, after decades of accumulating furniture and any number of other possessions, the prospect of moving can be daunting, especially if their health is ailing. In addition to having attractive options for downsizing into dynamic retirement communities, offering assistance with moving and transitioning would make downsizing much more attractive, thereby freeing up houses for families who need the space.
The other challenge facing developers is the skills shortage of labour necessary to build houses, and the high salary premiums that available workers are commanding. The answer here is a combination of steering young workers into skilled trades and increasing the number of immigrants that the country accepts who have skills related to carpentry and other construction trades. Our immigration system has previously been far more focused on engineers than on brick-layers.
In the end, there is no magic solution to either the challenges facing tenants or prospective homeowners. However, by leveraging all potential solutions that we have at our disposal, there’s no reason that as a society we can’t overcome these challenges. Unlike many other countries, one problem that Canada is certainly not facing is a lack of space. We are, after all, the second least densely populated country in the world.
A Carless Life
Ian Barrett
The environment is front and centre of much of our media coverage and government policy. A number of technological advances are helping to reduce our carbon footprints, most notably fuel efficiency in cars, as well as the transition to electric vehicles. But even electric vehicles have carbon footprints, mostly during the manufacturing process.
On another note, the cost of having a car has also become challenging. Prices for insurance and repairs at garages have shot up by double digit percentages since the start of 2023. A new municipal vehicle registration tax is also set to come into effect next year. Cars are becoming an ever greater strain on our budgets.
Few parts of the National Capital Region make living without a car possible. Pretty much every neighbourhood built in the last 50 years is designed around having your own vehicle. Yet there is one notable exception - central Aylmer.
First, a large part of the area has among the best services that STO offers. If you live within walking distance to a stop for the lines 59 or 55 you have reliable and frequent service to downtown. The 49 and 50 offer options for getting to CEGEPs in Hull, and the 58 gets you to Tunney’s Pasture.
We’re very fortunate to have a number of other conveniences too. Four grocery stores are within walking distance of much of the neighbourhood. Several offer online orders that can be delivered to our homes, with Laflamme delivering to your door in a matter of hours.
Having access to a car at times becomes necessary whenever you want to go outside of areas serviced by buses. Yet Aylmer has a good fleet of CommunAuto cars, available on short notice and which you can rent for very reasonable prices for a few hours. This is especially true in comparison to the prices charged by traditional car rental agencies these days.
When we’d like to go out for dinner or a coffee, we have one of the best selections of cafes and restaurants around, all either on or within walking distance of our Main Street. The marina is also just a few short blocks away.
And we have access to one of the best cycling networks imaginable, particularly the path along the river. Being able to bike all the way downtown without crossing a single stop light is incredible, not to mention the lovely scenery along the way.
Schools are also plentiful, and are usually within walking distance too.
For purchases of larger items, we of course have Amazon and Walmart that can get most products to our doors within a day or two. Yet stores like Rona and Lowe’s also offer good delivery options, as well as a growing number of smaller stores.
Obviously many of these advantages don’t apply to neighbourhoods like Deschenes and parts of Wychwood. Yet those of us in central Aylmer have options for going carless that are usually limited to large cities such as Montreal, New York or London. We’re very lucky.
Meta and the Media
Ian Barrett
It has now been about a year since Meta started blocking professional news articles from Canadian sources on its platforms, including Facebook. The federal government was preparing legislation to force major digital platforms like Facebook and Google to pay news outlets for their content that appeared on those sites. Google came to an agreement to pay $100M annually to news outlets for their material, but Meta refused any negotiations, and instead opted to block professional news outlets from posting on its sites. No exceptions were allowed, even during public emergencies like wildfires in Western Canada. It does not object to “citizen journalism”, however, or material prepared by individuals, leaving it up to users to determine the accuracy and quality of the news they consume.
Facebook had previously paid Australian news sites for the use of their material, but has decided to discontinue that arrangement.
Recent research by McGill and the University of Toronto shows that about a third of Canadians continue to get their news from Facebook, meaning that they’re getting their perspectives on the world from what could be very dubious sources. It’s an open question about how this impacts society. But it’s certainly plausible that the ever higher degrees of polarization in Canada and across much of the world could be caused by many people getting their news from “click bait”, or sensationalist material prepared by content creators to grab people’s attention, with little regard for accuracy or truth.
Social media was an important way for Canadian news outlets to reach audiences. Given the dire situation many traditional news outlets found themselves in, they were relying on quick growth over the coming years to make themselves financially sustainable. Although for many this growth has stagnated over the last year as they found themselves blocked from social media platforms, at least they in general haven’t experienced a sharp decline either. Users tend to seek out their material in other ways, such as via apps, their websites, newsletters sent by email, or on paper at supermarkets. Evidence for the health of the industry, in Gatineau and elsewhere, is hard to come by, but there are some positive indicators. In the months following Meta’s blocking of professional news, Le Droit saw an 8% increase in traffic on its website and apps. The Bulletin’s mayoral debate in the spring packed the British Pub, despite facing the added challenge of the end of the Publicsac service that had previously delivered copies of the paper to houses across Aylmer.
Professional news sources also face challenges regarding accuracy, and need to be forthcoming about both their successes and failures. Covid was a difficult time for the media, with much of what was presented as facts at one point being disproved months later. Evidence was shifting quickly, and many suggestions were presented as facts despite a lack of proof at the time. This may also have damaged people’s trust in the media.
Although traditional media outlets aren't perfect and make mistakes, they’re certainly better than click-bait. We need to ensure that enough still exist a generation from now.
Water Quality
Ian Barrett
Residents of Aylmer recently had to boil their water for well over a week due to an e.coli contamination. It’s worth asking about the overall quality of our drinking water.
A number of towns up river continue to pump their raw sewage into the Ottawa River, such as Pembroke, Renfrew, and Arnprior, as well as towns and villages in the Pontiac and farther north. During periods of intense rainfall, Gatineau also continues to release untreated sewage into the river. There were hundreds of such dumps of sewage water in 2021.
That said, the city tests its water supply dozens of times a week, and has been proactive about disclosures. But many times the beaches are closed for swimming due to contaminants, which makes it easy to feel uncomfortable about drinking the water, even after it’s been processed and cleaned prior to being distributed to homes.
Other factors also contribute to a general feeling of unease. The construction of a nuclear waste dump upstream from Gatineau is perhaps the largest. For those in older buildings, there’s also the possibility that the piping infrastructure might be made of lead.
A number of options are available to improve safety. The city offers the chance to sign up for updates on its website, meaning that you’ll receive notifications on your phone when there are any important events to be aware of. This covers a wide range of topics, including water boiling advisories. Also, you can get simple home testing kits for water to make sure that there aren’t dangerous levels of impurities. Boiling water helps to kill organics like e.coli, but will do little against lead contamination or other inorganics. This also holds for water to prepare food, boiled or otherwise. Filters on taps can help to reduce the presence of any metals or other impurities as well.
In the end, though, it comes down to tolerance for risk. Light consumption gives less exposure than heavier use. And we also need to look at the overall impacts in some of the worst scenarios. In the case of e.coli, it will make you sick, but is unlikely to cause severe problems for more than a day or two.
Many people enjoy going for a swim at the beach at the marina despite the water containing pollutants from communities up stream. Others eat fish that they catch in the river as well. We have to balance the exercise and pleasure that we get from such activities against the relatively mild dangers they pose in terms of contaminants.
Improving the situation would come at a cost that our society isn’t willing to pay - having wastewater treatment facilities in all towns along the river, and with a capacity to handle excess load during periods of heavy rainfall or melt in the spring.
As with many things in life, we need to put things into perspective. But if we keep seeing water boiling advisories for days on end, it’s likely time for our society to invest more in our water infrastructure.
Caring about Mental Health
Ian Barrett
Given everything that happened over the last four and half years, at the very least we should retain some important lessons going forward.
Perhaps the most critical area is mental health. Throughout the 2010s it seemed that we were coming around to the importance of mental health, seeing it as an integral part of our overall well-being. Yet when what can only be considered as the mental health apocalypse hit in 2020, we found ourselves with nowhere near the resources needed to truly tackle the impacts on our psychological well being. During lockdowns, when many people found themselves constrained to tiny apartments, and many others feared catching a deadly disease, we were essentially told to be calm and carry on, the same reaction given to mental health illnesses in generations past.
The complexity of the situation meant that there may have been no alternative, but can we honestly say that there’s nothing that could be done if another pandemic were to strike in a few years time? Capacity is less able to handle demand than it was before Covid. Waiting times to see a mental health specialist are worse than they were five years ago.
What’s even more concerning is the lack of attention severe anxiety receives, and how many people are suffering in silence. There are those who are still terrified to leave their homes, some of whom are immune compromised, some who aren’t. We see them venturing out early in the morning, wearing a mask while walking alone in a park. Some of these people are certainly exercising care due to underlying physical health issues, but others are simply suffering from severe anxiety and aren’t yet able to reintegrate into society.
Getting a handle on how widespread such severe anxiety is can be difficult, but the Census Bureau of the United States has found moderate to severe anxiety levels in 2024 to be twice what they were before the pandemic, afflicting about one person in five. But since these people suffer alone and in silence hidden in their homes, they don’t get much attention from society. And wait times to see a professional psychologist can easily be 6 months, possibly stretching out to 24 months for the less fortunate, assuming that they even seek help at all.
If we’re finally ready to view mental health as a critical aspect of our well-being then we need to ramp up capacity and have plans for how more people could get mental health care during a widespread crisis.
Not having experienced a pandemic in nearly one hundred years, our society could be excused for not being ready in 2020. However, having lived through a crisis where people were at times not even permitted to leave their homes, we have no excuse for being unprepared next time. Given how interconnected the world has become, how densely populated our cities are, and how little safeguards have changed, the next public health crisis is likely far less than 100 years away.
Maintaining Heritage Buildings - The McConnell Farm
Ian Barrett
Chemin d’Aylmer has many historic properties. Yet we’ve seen a number of these homes left to fall apart, owned by development companies who saw heritage houses as an obstacle to their plans to densify the sector. The idea was simple enough - if the house was in reasonable condition they couldn’t tear it down, so they left it empty for a few years, perhaps with the windows open, so that it would rot out. At that point they could say to the city that it couldn’t be saved, get the necessary permissions to tear it down, and build the multi-storey complex they had in mind when they originally purchased the property.
The best example of this is 485 Chemin d’Aylmer. Built in 1935, the house is listed in the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec and was formally recognized by the Ministère de la Culture in 1997. After being acquired by Richcraft, it was left in a state of advanced neglect since about 2013, culminating in a fire in 2022. The city then gave the developer permission to proceed with the demolition.
A similar scenario is playing out elsewhere, notably the John-Hamilton house at 771 boulevard Alexandre-Taché.
Although voices have been raised to protest this approach, it’s not just private developers that are letting our heritage houses fall apart.
The National Capital Commission also is the cause of a number of historic properties becoming eye sores. Perhaps the most high profile example is the McConnell farmhouse at 1055 Chemin d’Aylmer. Built in 1874, it was last in use as a craft shop and restaurant, Tea 'n' Tole, from 1995 to 2008. It’s stood empty ever since.
The problem is that maintenance hasn’t been a consideration. The farmhouse is in absolutely dilapidated condition. The structure is now leaning to one side, and most of the external walls and roof are rotten. The front garden of the building is completely overgrown, which may be by design to hide its sorry state. Oddly, though, the back yard’s lawn is maintained and cut.
It’s hard to see how the building can be salvaged. That the approach of the NCC has led to the same outcome as that of Richcraft is ironic, given that the NCC almost certainly wasn’t looking to rot the building out as an excuse to demolish it. There was enough will to retain the building that it wasn’t demolished outright years ago, but not enough will to keep it in a decent state. The NCC is responsible for a number of other heritage buildings around Gatineau, including the Moore Farm. Their approach to the McConnell Farm doesn’t instil confidence in their ability to maintain our built heritage. If no one can be found to care for these buildings, it would be better to simply tear them down than to let them rot, which is an insult to the region’s past. The McConnell Farm’s proximity to Allen Park makes it an ideal community space. The NCC and the city should work together to do something productive with the land at least.
Saving Agora
Ian Barrett
Agora was a very innovative project in Gatineau. Similar to the Quartier Dix-30 in Brossard but on a smaller scale, the idea was to create an outdoor environment focused on walking, where people explore, shop and dine.
When construction began in 2018, representatives from the municipal council at the time hailed it as an opportunity to finally give an anchor to the Plateau, a place where local residents could come to enjoy dinner or a drink while taking in some fresh air. An adjacent library project helped to strengthen the concept further, along with a playground. Parking was available at about a 30 second walk, making it as accessible as possible. It included a public plaza where events could be held by residents’ associations or the city. Condos and office space were added all around the commercial area to provide shop owners with the largest number of potential customers.
Yet looking at it now, it’s a shadow of the potential it showed years ago. Even on a sunny weekend afternoon in the middle of summer hardly anyone ventures further in than Café Cognac at the entrance, though the recently opened Azta Taquéria, a Mexican taco restaurant, has been doing quite well a few doors further in. Only a very small fraction of the visitors to the library cross the street to explore the shops. L’As des Jeux game shop, which had moved there from Galleries d’Aylmer a few years ago, recently closed. A number of other very interesting shops, cafés and restaurants seem to be perpetually empty. Rio Açaí, specializing in a natural fruit-based dessert adored in Brazil, moved there from Rue Principale, but may suffer the same fate as L’As des Jeux. One of the flagship restaurants, Spritz, recently closed as well.
Why is business so slow at Agora? One likely reason is that Destination Vanier, which was approved by the municipal council at around the same time, is drawing away many potential customers. Located just a few kilometres west and with easier access from the highway, it is very car centric. People can park at one shop, then get back in the car and drive to another a few doors away. The city has said that the Plateau promotes active transport, but bus service is sporadic, and bike lanes go along a street with roundabouts in a way which confuses both drivers and cyclists. Urban planners at the city should have realized that Destination Vanier would not only make it difficult to reach a critical mass of shoppers at Agora, but that it would also siphon off customers from Aylmer’s rue Principale and other commercial areas. IGA’s recent move to Destination Vanier is the latest example.
It’s not too late to save Agora. Residents should come check it out. And the city needs to follow through with better promotion, where the most obvious way is by holding the types of events there that it had originally proposed. If the city doesn’t hurry, though, many of the shops may close and the project could fail.
Traffic Jams
Ian Barrett
Recently, traffic congestion in Toronto returned to pre-pandemic levels. Other cities will likely join as the fall comes to an end and more people commute to work or school. In Ottawa and Gatineau, as of this week federal employees are transitioning to three days a week at the office from the previous two, increasing the number of times they commute each week by 50%. Spending more time idling in traffic is a reminder of how we’ve gotten back to “normal”, with life much as it was before the years of sporadic lockdowns during the Covid pandemic.
Generally this is something for us all to celebrate. Yet in our haste to leave the era of lockdowns behind us, we’re missing a number of opportunities to improve our society with what we learned from our efforts to deal with the pandemic.
Working remotely or at the office has largely been framed solely in terms of productivity, with relatively little evidence cited when making decisions to call workers back to the office. Arguments usually centre around office culture and team building, but tend to come from the perceptions of management. These arguments could very well be legitimate, but without proof to back up assertions, the debate will continue. One-size-fits-all models frustrate workers, with those working on individual projects who require quiet areas to focus being required to be at the office as often as those working on more collaborative projects. The current trend of “hot desks”, or systems where workers book a different desk every day, makes creating a collaborative working environment even harder when employees aren’t sure where their co-workers are on any given day.
The debate over back-to-the-office should extend to the environmental impacts of having people commuting back and forth to the office if it isn’t necessary. Given that car emissions generate over 10% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions in general, having fewer cars on the road would certainly help to reduce our collective carbon footprint.
We should also consider the amount of time spent idling in traffic for those who don’t have the possibility of working from home. Although the average commute time in general is about 25 minutes, it’s much longer for those commuting from the suburbs to downtown, especially when traffic is heavy. Allowing teachers, police officers and sales clerks to get to their destinations faster makes their lives that much easier.
Lastly, reducing the amount of real estate used as office space gives us a welcome opportunity to address the housing crisis. Replacing office towers with apartment buildings would take pressure off of the rental market, reducing a significant source of financial pressure on those who are often of modest incomes. Having more people living in city centres would also provide a steadier customer base for downtown businesses than commuting workers who retreat to the suburbs by the early evening.
Leveraging the opportunities that technology now offers would make us all better off. The 2010s aren’t coming back, but the future will make our lives easier in many ways.
Democracy in Gatineau
Ian Barrett
Our democratic system in Gatineau is robust in numerous ways.
We have competitive elections, and candidates debate issues during their campaigns. Councillors are usually responsive to residents, and in the past those who were seen as missing in action didn’t win re-election.
Municipal council meetings are open to the public, and people can come to ask questions.
However, there are a number of areas with room for improvement.
Independent candidates are at a major disadvantage in terms of funding and organization compared to political parties, of which Action Gatineau is the only one which is sizable.
There are public consultations about directions for certain projects. However, it’s often not clear to people that their voices are heard. Unless elected representatives were originally of the same opinion as residents, oftentimes projects seem to proceed as they were planned from the start. Hence they're seen more as information sessions, with communication going only one way.
One example is the library building in old Aylmer. The previous building, which wasn’t even 40 years old, was said by the city to be in such a terrible state that it wasn’t worth repairing, and had to be torn down and replaced, with a price-tag of over $50M. Yet I had obtained reports that the city had commissioned from the engineering firm Genivar/WSP Global stating that the old building could be brought up to code for well less than half the price of demolition and reconstruction. These reports were provided to me by the local councillor Mike Duggan.
Along with Micheline Lemieux, the then-president of the Aylmer Heritage Association, and a local expert in heritage preservation, we brought these points directly to the council’s attention numerous times, as well as during a meeting with the mayor at the time, Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin. We also ran a petition asking for a better deal which got hundreds of physical signatures. However, we were simply told that we didn’t understand the complexities of the situation. Yet no specific evidence was ever shown to us explaining why the reports that had been commissioned by the city were wrong. We brought our questions to the council during question period, but never received any firm responses. When society entered lock-downs in 2020, the council began vetting questions before the virtual question periods that replaced those that had been in person, only addressing those that the council selected. The project was finalized, the old cinema at Galeries Aylmer was converted to a temporary library, and the old building at Place des Pionniers was quickly torn down. The site was left empty for years before construction of the new building began, but the hasty demolition ensured that the old building would not be saved, and likely caused a wall to collapse during the gutting of the interior.
The decision-making process for many large projects isn’t entirely transparent. Councillors often defer to city employees working behind the scenes. Although we have regular elections, transparency is a hallmark of a well-functioning democracy, and an essential way to maintain the public’s trust.
Trash Collection
Ian Barrett
It’s been a few weeks since rules around garbage pick-up have become more strict, following the implementation of the mechanized arms on garbage trucks in the spring. Although the motivation behind this change was a staff shortage of garbage collection workers, it feels like a significant reduction in the quality of our service.
Much more onus is put on residents, who now have to put their bins in a particular way, and can use only designated containers for excess compost or recycling that conform with the machines. For compost, we now have to unlatch our brown composting bins the night before pickup unless we’ll be up early enough to do so the next morning. This creates the obvious risk that a raccoon may tip them over during the night, making a substantial mess.
After a trial period when residents received warning stickers on their bins if they weren’t placed properly, the workers have now simply stopped collecting them. For recycling or trash if you make a mistake you now have to wait another two weeks to get the bins emptied, dealing with capacity issues when you have a month’s worth of trash at the one time.
If the drivers mistakenly leave your trash behind, you can call the city and complain, but waiting times on their phone lines can easily stretch past half an hour. The online option for submitting a complaint isn’t recommended, as the processing times can be more than a week, barely better than just waiting for the next pick-up. Following reception of a complaint, the request to make a supplemental run to get your trash is transferred to Derichebourg, the private contractor responsible for trash collection. Yet it’s up to residents to follow up yet again with 311 if Derichebourg doesn’t action your request. There’s no automatic tracking system set up at the city, something which generates more calls to 311 and lengthens wait times for everyone even further. With complaints for uncollected trash having doubled this year compared to last, we’re talking about thousands of extra calls to 311.
The driver of the truck takes pictures of the situations where trash is left behind for not conforming to the rules, and if you’re found to be in the wrong you have to wait for the next regular trash run. It would be nice if there was an option to pay a penalty and get your trash picked up earlier.
Even with this bumpy roll-out, the truly challenging months are yet to come. The major question is how these trucks will handle large amounts of snow. Do residents now have to clear all of the area in front of their houses of snow? And what happens if there’s a snow storm during or just before a trash pick-up? Previously garbage collectors found ways to work around the challenges of snow banks, and we left our bins as best we could near the street. Will we now be stuck with trash for an extra two weeks if we’re not able to shovel ourselves out fast enough?
Privacy and Safety
Ian Barrett
Technology dominates our lives. We’ve invited home assistants into our living rooms and kitchens, products that are always examining what we say by design. Most of us use free email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, which make profits by examining our emails to figure out what sort of ads we would like to see.
Our phones listen to everything said around them, although we can cut down on this by adjusting certain settings. The default option is for our phones to track our every step, and with an app like Google Maps you can then see where you were at any moment of any day years prior. Such features can provide a certain amount of safety, for instance by allowing family to keep an eye on where you are if you’re out late at night. Yet privacy seems to be a concept of the past.
Our phones also work as wallets, integrating payments for purchases and providing tech companies with even more information on our lives.
Even when adjusting security settings, we’re taking it on faith that tech companies will stop collecting our data. There has been debate as to what exactly they continue retaining once we’ve changed settings to no longer collect personal data.
Yet there has also been progress towards privacy. A few years ago Apple changed default settings on iPhones to require users to give their permission for Facebook to track their location and activity across all apps on their phones, which Facebook had been able to do even when its series of apps weren’t in use.
Still, we have generally come to accept that tech companies collect large amounts of our personal information in exchange for more convenient services.
People are more disturbed at the idea of governments collecting personal information or conducting surveillance. The idea of the all-knowing deep state is certainly a cause for worry, but it’s odd that we trust private companies more than those who run our society. Such companies are expected to be driven by the pursuit of profits instead of what’s best for everyone.
There are a number of ways that more surveillance by the government could make our society safer. Perhaps the most obvious is in terms of our roads. Radar could easily keep track of who’s speeding or driving dangerously, something that puts everyone else at risk. We accept that police wait discreetly behind signs and bushes to catch such dangerous behaviour, but they can only prevent so much. Yet the idea of a radar that catches everyone who is speeding or driving dangerously has been unpopular.
Still, the province is finally moving towards radar, even if the pace will be slow. There are plans to install 300 cameras across all of Quebec in the coming years. Yet this number is quite low. Every busy artery or place of risk would benefit from such speed reduction tools. If Google knows that a reckless driver was speeding through a school zone, shouldn't the police know too?
Densification in the Suburbs
Ian Barrett
Rental prices are sky-rocketing in Gatineau because we don’t have enough units. New buildings are going up, but it's only a fraction of what's needed. Yet as we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks, roads in the east and west struggle with the number of cars commuting downtown. Just ask people who have spent an hour commuting to the office from Aylmer to Ottawa, or two hours getting downtown from Masson-Angers or Buckingham. The solution to Gatineau’s growing population is clear - before densifying in the east or west, the city should densify in the downtown core of Hull. Why encourage people to live in apartments or condos far from the centre, meaning that they’ll spend many hours a week stuck in traffic during their commutes?
Yet it seems that the city has often done the opposite. A plan by the federal government to build several hundred apartment units, including affordable housing, along land that it owns at the Berges du ruisseau de la Brasserie in central Hull is being criticized by representatives of city council and local resident groups. These voices have said that they would prefer to keep the land as a municipal park. Yet central Hull already has more green spaces than many other city centres. What the area is missing is a critical mass of residents, enough to support businesses that do more than cater to civil servants during their lunch hours.
The number of dilapidated houses in Old Hull is striking. Many are abandoned. Several are burnt out husks. It’s difficult to attract new residents to an area that’s in many ways quite depressing. The city could start with an empty house tax to push speculative owners to sell now, instead of waiting for the value of the land to appreciate further and leaving their buildings to rot in the meantime. Also, current safety standards are almost certainly insufficient, given the number of burnt out buildings in the area. By raising standards to levels that would truly protect residents, many of the current buildings would need to be torn down, making room for a more optimal use of the space. Some of these may be offering affordable housing options to those of modest incomes. Yet given the federal government’s commitment to building new affordable housing units, there is a unique opportunity to push for these new buildings to offer subsidized rent. Those arguing against the current proposal should instead push for it to be 100% social housing. This would offer a dignified alternative to those currently living in glorified shacks, which could then be torn down to build apartments.
The city has continued densifying in suburban Aylmer. Witness the new condos going up on Samuel Eddy Street, where a number of trees were recently razed to make room for yet more development. Basic urban planning dictates that Old Hull should be fully densified before condos and apartments are considered elsewhere. It’s better for everyone if we don’t have to spend precious chunks of our days idling in traffic, all the while spewing carbon into the atmosphere.
Staying Healthy During Covid Season
Ian Barrett
A bit more than four years ago masks became a standard part of our approach to viruses, Covid or otherwise. Guidelines have come a long way since 2020, when people were simply encouraged to cover their faces with whatever fabric they had. Still, surgical masks, which are now the standard that most people wear when they cover their faces, offer limited protection to the wearer compared to respirators like N95 masks.
Yet most people seem to be unaware of the differences in efficiency. Generally, surgical masks are meant to prevent the wearer from infecting others. To prevent transmission of your germs, by far the best approach is to simply stay home when you’re ill. If you need to go out when sick, then at the very least avoid being in close contact with others in crowded areas and public transportation.
In terms of protecting yourself, a rough rule of thumb is that the less comfortable the mask, the more protection it offers. The discomfort comes from the reduction in the free flow of air, where viral particles are present. N95 masks are not enjoyable to wear, but they do as their name implies, filtering at least 95% of airborne viral particles. Still, since they fall short of 100%, even they don’t offer full protection.
Our society has also avoided talking about a very important aspect of wearing masks - how to put them on. Generally we simply take a mask from a dispenser and put it on our faces without first sterilizing our hands. But this can easily bring viral particles on your fingers into contact with your mouth, eyes or nose, increasing the odds that you’ll get sick. Masks should also be kept in a clean place between uses, instead of simply stuffed into our pockets. Health professionals are taught how to properly use masks. It’s unfortunate that there was never an educational campaign for the population at large regarding these important health tips.
Another area of public health where our society falls short is in terms of paid sick leave. Although those working for federally regulated employers such as airlines, banks and telecommunications are now entitled to 10 days of paid sick leave per year, they account for less than 10% of Canadian workers. Almost all others work for provincially regulated employers. Here, the requirements are far less generous. Quebec requires employers to offer two days of paid sick leave per year, British Columbia requires five, and PEI requires one. Other provinces require none at all. It’s only common sense that requiring employees to come into the office when they’re sick to avoid being docked pay isn’t doing anyone any favors. It leads to more employees catching the virus, thereby making it harder for others to work than if the original sick employee had just stayed home, and risks infecting customers too. For those on minimum wage, losing a few days pay can mean falling behind on rent. Our society should have at least retained this lesson from the strict lock downs during the last pandemic.
The Dangers of Massive Cars
Ian Barrett
The average size of vehicles we drive is getting bigger every year. Many drivers enjoy the added space in the interior, as well as the feeling of added safety that these SUVs and pick-ups provide. It’s proven that if you’re in an accident, you’re more likely to be killed if you’re driving a smaller car. The Economist news magazine recently estimated that drivers of compacts are twice as likely to be killed in a two car collision as those of heavy pick-ups. However, those numbers are in large part due to compacts being more likely to be in accidents with larger vehicles. The sheer quantity of large vehicles on the road makes driving a compact much more dangerous.
Yet what about the safety of pedestrians and cyclists? Larger cars come with more blind spots, making them more hazardous to those around them. Nighttime is particularly dangerous.
In years past, it was considered bad manners to drive at night with your high beams on around others. Now, pick-ups are so massive that smaller cars get the same effect of high beams whenever a larger vehicle passes them in the other direction, and get a very distracting glare in their rear view mirrors whenever such a vehicle is behind them. Those on foot are blinded as well.
In terms of outcomes in two-car accidents, what matters more than size is weight, which gives a car its momentum and determines the force of the impact with another vehicle. Electric vehicles are significantly heavier than gas powered versions due to the weight of their batteries, and so will only cause more damage when they crash. Given that most electric vehicles being sold are SUVs and pick-ups, our roads will become ever more hazardous. The heavier the vehicle, the more wear and tear it puts on our pavement as well.
What’s more, the largest pick-ups no longer fit in conventional parking spaces. As the fronts of these behemoths stick out, it leaves less space for other cars to move around, making fender benders more likely too.
Auto manufacturers continue to push large vehicles, though, due to economies of scale. Profit margins are higher on larger vehicles, as the cost of producing a model of larger size isn’t that much more than producing a sedan or compact car. Yet people are willing to pay substantially more for larger vehicles, meaning dealerships end up with fatter margins.
The Economist recommends taxing gasoline vehicles weighing more than 5,000 lbs. They show that such vehicles don’t tend to be safer for their drivers than cars that weigh in at slightly less than 5,000 lbs. But they do far more damage in accidents. The Ford F150 weighs about 4,500 lbs. Hence, any policies taxing excessive size beyond 5,000 would only focus on true monsters like the Ford F250 or GMC Sierra 2500HD. An extra allowance could be made for electric vehicles to compensate for their batteries.
Discouraging cars from becoming so big that they can no longer safely navigate our streets would make us all better off.
Instagram and Child Safety
Ian Barrett
In 2021, an internal Meta presentation estimated that 100,000 children were sexually harassed on Instagram each day, many times via photos of adult genitalia from complete strangers. Late last year, New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Meta, stating that Meta’s algorithms purposely promote underage accounts to predatory adult users, recommended sexual content to children and that Meta falsely reassured the public about the safety of its platform.
At least as early as 2021, Meta’s internal documents showed that they were aware that the “People You May Know” algorithm was connecting child users with potential predators, and was responsible for about three quarters of inappropriate adult-minor contact on the platform. However, the lawsuit states that executives at Meta were aware of this years prior to that, and had rejected recommendations to adjust the algorithm to better project minors despite impassioned pleas from employees.
Finally, after years of pressure, there’s some good news. Meta has begun making Instagram youth accounts private by default, assigning them the most restrictive settings. Meta states that it won’t be possible to get around these restrictions by lying about birth dates. These new restrictions for teens include only being able to direct message people whom they follow or with whom they are already connected, as well as a reduction in adult-oriented content, and automatic muting during nighttime hours.
These new restrictions will be applied to all accounts held by those with under-18 birth dates, though teens who are at least 16 can change their settings without the approval of their parents.
According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri and as reported in the Wall Street Journal, Instagram is expecting to lose “some meaningful amount of teen growth and teen engagement”. He adds that “earning some trust from parents and giving parents peace of mind will help business in the long run, but it will certainly hurt in the short term.”
Age verification has long been considered the obvious answer to many safety-related problems for teens on social media. Mosseri rightly states that Apple and Alphabet’s Google should provide age verification at the device level as the makers of operating systems for most phones.
Yet Apple has said that the onus is on social-media companies to verify age, and that sharing its users’ ages with third-party apps would go against privacy expectations. Still, simply flagging to social media companies those users who are minors at the beginning of each year would certainly do more good than harm.
Instead, starting next year Instagram will start using artificial intelligence to identify children who are lying about their age, automatically applying teen restrictions to their accounts. If teens try to skirt the changes by setting up new accounts with an older birth date, they will be required to either show an image of an ID or to upload a video of themselves for Instagram’s face-based age-prediction tool to validate. Still, given the ease with which new AI tools available on the internet can generate a fake ID, this safety measure may not be as foolproof as Meta makes it sound.
May Editorials
Fake Ontarians
Ian Barrett
A topic that comes up often in Gatineau is that of fake Ontarians, or those that move to Gatineau and keep a fake address in Ottawa in order to continue filing their taxes in Ontario and thereby pay less taxes.
The argument goes that they move to Gatineau because of the cheaper cost of buying property, and then take advantage of the numerous social programs here, including subsidized daycare and more generous benefits like those for children and solidarité, all the while keeping a fake address in Ontario and not paying Quebec taxes. They’re said to be easily identifiable via their Ontario license plates. Voices are raised advising us to report such rule breakers to Revenu Québec. Recently management at STO has focused on this topic as well, in light of their proposed new tax on vehicle registrations to fund public transit.
However, how accurate is the narrative of Ontarian tax cheats in Gatineau?
First, to be eligible for subsidized daycare or provincial benefit payments of any kind, you have to file a provincial tax return. So there’s no way to have access to these without paying Quebec taxes. Despite how easily this part of the claim is proven false, it’s still repeated surprisingly often.
Turning to straight-up income tax advantages, things get much trickier. It’s not enough to simply look at marginal tax rates, as the federal government refunds an extra 16.5% of your basic federal tax if you live in Quebec. Complicating the calculation even further are the various benefit payments that each province pays after you file, which tend to be more generous on the Quebec side. Generally single people see fewer benefits from the Quebec tax system, but substantial savings from filing in Ontario don’t start to kick in until someone is earning more than a modest income.
The various levels of government already have the tools they need to easily identify those who should be filing income tax in Quebec. The city knows who owns which property, and Revenue Quebec knows whether the owner in question has filed their taxes or rented out the property. It’s just a matter of them working together.
Using the method of spotting Ontario plates to identify tax cheats has major limitations. First, new residents of Quebec have six to nine months to switch their driver’s license and registration. So recent arrivals living in Gatineau with Ontario plates may not be breaking any rules at all. And perhaps those who are violating requirements aren’t doing so to cheat on their taxes, but more so out of laziness. Information online on changing license plates is challenging to navigate. For proof, simply try googling (in French) how much time you have to change your license plates after moving to Quebec. Navigating the system is even more challenging if you don’t speak French. And they may file Quebec taxes without updating their license plates. To cut down on the number of Ontario license plates in Gatineau, perhaps it would be better to suggest to the SAAQ to offer better guidance to new residents.
Image and the Municipal Election
Ian Barrett
The special election for mayor is picking up speed. Yet even during regular municipal elections, voter turnout rarely exceeds about a third. During a special election in the summer turnout may not even be a quarter of eligible voters. People are less likely to vote when the weather is nice. Hence every vote counts more than ever.
Each candidate brings quite a different profile to this year’s contest. Political experience is a good example. At the high end, there’s Yves Ducharme, who in addition to having been Mayor of Gatineau from 2001 to 2004 was also Mayor of Hull for nearly ten years before amalgamations in the early 2000s. This experience would certainly serve him well in terms of knowing how to work the various levers of municipal government. However, as with all political experience, his also comes with some baggage. Residents were quite unsatisfied with Mr. Ducharme’s performance as mayor heading into the elections of 2004. His opponent won with more than twice as many votes. One of the complaints being voiced at the time was that he was too confrontational and that he was absent from the city too often as he arranged numerous trips as part of his mandate. Regardless of whether these opinions were justified, residents complained that the operations of the city had become too bumpy. Given that turnout in municipal elections tends to tilt towards older age groups, many of those who will cast a ballot in June likely already have made up their minds about Mr. Ducharme, either positive or negative.
Another candidate bringing substantial experience to the campaign is the leader of Action Gatineau, Maude Marquis-Bissonnette. A councillor for 4 years from 2017 to 2021, she ran for mayor in the last campaign, finishing in second place with about 5 points less than the winner. She’s surely learned from that run, and also has the organization of Gatineau’s only political party behind her. Yet despite her experience, she is quite youthful, which may present challenges in convincing older voters that she’s up to the task. This is of course a type of discrimination, but as many politicians know, campaigns can be very superficial events. Witness the proliferation of campaign signs and posters that now line our streets. They present very little substantive content, and instead simply focus on the candidate’s picture. Ms. Marquis-Bissonnette will need to show voters that she’s seasoned enough to control what goes on at City Hall.
The other candidates are far less known to voters. Daniel Feeny was the communications director for France Belisle, whose unexpected resignation set off the current campaign in the first place. He’ll need to appeal to Ms. Belisle’s voters while also showing that he can differentiate himself enough from the last administration to overcome the obstacles that led Ms. Belisle to step down. The major challenge for the other four candidates will be simply achieving name recognition. More on these candidates in this column in the weeks to come.
Municipal Elections and Name Recognition
Ian Barrett
Two candidates running for mayor are reasonably well known to voters - Yves Ducharme and Maude Marquis-Bissonnette. The five others face the challenge of making an impression so people are familiar enough with their names to vote for them next month. This is hard even during a normal election campaign, when the media is focused on the contest. The former mayor, France Belisle, surprised many by being able to win the 2021 election despite being a relatively unknown figure when the campaign began. However, a special election during the early summer is much more difficult, when the minds of residents are focused elsewhere.
The pains to gain recognition were reflected in an election poll published by Segma last week. The two most well-known candidates enjoyed more than twice the support of any of the others. Almost a third of respondents were undecided.
Daniel Feeny has been very active in terms of putting up election posters, but surprisingly this didn’t even earn him double digit support. He no doubt is leveraging the successful strategies of Ms. Belisle, in whose administration he worked, but they have yet to translate to the same success for his campaign. It’s unclear at this point what else he can do to improve the fortunes of his bid for mayor.
Stéphane Bisson is looking to tap his experience leading the Gatineau Chamber of Commerce, and he is surely known to local business owners. However, he now must present a platform that goes beyond business interests and appeals to the population at large, and to do so in a way that reaches his target audience. Aside from a series of upcoming debates, it’s not clear what other options are available.
Olive Kamanyana currently sits as a councillor for Carrefour-de-l’Hôpital, and enjoys name recognition within her district. However, this does not provide a reliable path to broader support. We saw this during the last campaign, when Jean-François Leblanc, the sitting councillor for Lac Beauchamps, finished in third place. He significantly trailed the leading two candidates at the time, Ms. Bélisle and Ms. Marquis-Bissonnette. And this despite having a professional and well organized campaign.
Rounding out the list of candidates are two outsiders of the establishment, Rémi Bergeron and Mathieu St-Jean. This is Mr. Bergeron’s third attempt running for mayor, with campaigns largely based around his passion for STO and modernizing public transit. Mr. St-Jean is campaigning on law and order, and has in the past been involved with the People’s Party of Canada. Without significant budgets for campaign promotion and web site development, these candidates favour on-the-ground campaign techniques to reach as many people as they can given their resources. At the very least, they’re hoping to influence the direction of local politics in Gatineau.
Given the difficulties faced by all candidates to capture the public’s attention this time around, their best opportunities to get their messages across will likely be the debates. Hopefully voters will tune in.
Cycling in the National Capital Region
Ian Barrett
Gatineau and Ottawa have one of the best networks of bike paths anywhere. The Voyageurs in Gatineau that goes alongside the Ottawa River is perhaps the best known, and the paths through the Gatineau Park and along the Rideau Canal also offer beautiful scenery. Routes through Lac Leamy, Iron Side and along Jacques Cartier Street in Gatineau, and the paths through Bordeleau and Stanley Parks and along the Rideau River in Ottawa are certainly worth exploring too.
Cycling should be a default means of transportation for people in the region. And with the federal government calling its tens of thousands of workers back to the office at least three days a week as of the fall, we can expect traffic to spike. Anything we can do to lessen congestion makes everyone better off.
Yet as nice as the cycling network is, more could be done to further encourage people to take their bikes.
One example is traffic laws. Currently, bikes are expected to wait for pedestrian lights to cross the street, but cyclists don’t enjoy priority over cars at crosswalks. This is an odd contradiction. The cycling ‘cross-walk’ where du Cavreau Street meets Wilfrid Lavigne is perhaps the strangest of all. It’s for cyclists, as the signs beside it show bikes, not pedestrians. It connects the cycling path along du Cavreau to the one on Wilfrid Lavigne going south. Yet cars coming along Wilfrid Lavigne have the priority over cyclists crossing within the yellow lines. It certainly gives a false sense of security to those on bikes.
So if a driver were to hit a cyclist crossing Wilfrid Lavigne in those yellow lines, the cyclist would in fact be at fault. There are no indications to show this, and worst of all, the bike crossing is right next to a school. Changing municipal laws so that bikes at the very least have priority at bike ‘crosswalks’ would make that intersection much safer. In the meantime, putting up signs on du Caveau to explain to cyclists that cars in fact have the priority could save a child getting seriously hurt.
Another area that could use better planning is choosing when to close paths for maintenance work. The National Capital Commission recently closed a portion of the Voyageurs pathway, roughly between Vanier Road and the Champlain Bridge. The plan is to repave the asphalt, and work is expected to take up to 3 months. The asphalt on that particular section isn’t even in bad condition, but now one of the signature bike paths will be closed for the summer cycling season, with cyclists redirected along the road.
This bad timing goes much further, as a number of bike paths are currently all closed at the same time, in addition to along the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River: Behind Parliament, at Lac Leamy, along Westboro Beach, and out to the experimental farm. Staggering this work so that large parts of the cycling network are not off limits at the same time would do much to encourage people to stay on their bikes.
April Editorials
Old Aylmer residents exasperated by neglect
Lily Ryan
No one in Aylmer is happy about the news that the IGA grocery store next to the defunct Kentucky Fried Chicken shop is moving to Vanier and des Allumettières. The news spread like covid in late 2020.
Another piece of Old Aylmer bites the dust, and no one believes anything new will happen in that location. It is one owner of both the Grande-Rivière shopping centre and the smaller mini-shopping mall next door at 201 and 203 Principale Street.
Aylmerites are right to worry about what’s happening on this site. There has been a cascade of small businesses closing in Old Aylmer. The pull to that ‘smart centre’ shopping area at Vanier Road and Des Allumettières is strong for businesses. But for folks in Wychwood, Old Aylmer, Lucerne, Deschênes? No thanks, they say!
The traffic mess at that intersection and the analgesic residential development around it is not a destination for folks who live in the older parts of Aylmer. There are new neighbourhoods there who provide plenty of clientele. And yet, what is happening to Old Aylmer? What is happening with the site on Aylmer Road where IGA is for another few weeks?
By all accounts, the owner of those two sites is comfortable letting the buildings sit empty. Residents have seen promises go un-met time and time again, so there is very little trust in any optimistic view of what will happen there, and even less confidence in city impact. Think of the Marina building, demolished and rebuilt to great dissatisfaction and the library building with an out-of-place modern design that gives the feel of No-where land in Any-country. Investments in making rue Principale more quaint and dynamic is undermined by the city’s focus on down town Hull as the main city hub. Having established just how alone in the wilderness Aylmer residents find themselves faced with the IGA move and that emptying site, the next question is: “what can we do?”.
What can we do? Wait until another apartment block is built at 201 and 203 Principale Street? Fight the inevitable apartment block idea and get neglected buildings instead? Do Aylmerites sit in traffic to shop at Bayshore, scrolling on social media where they can furiously type their ill-informed opinions into one or another closed group that just amplifies miss-information?
Here’s my hope: Aylmerites find three issues to rally around, like the future of 201 and 203 Principale. They go on the record with their vision of a better river-side community and help ensure that whatever replaces the IGA and the old Kentucky Fried Chicken sites add to the vitality that makes this community unique. This might be the last stand: get swallowed into the clone world of Quebec development. Or pull up our big-girl pants and push Old Aylmer using the legitimate channels at the city to influence community development.
Lessons from Covid (2) - Messaging
Ian Barrett
To learn from the Covid pandemic and prepare for the future, we need to look at the handling of messaging and rollout of Covid vaccines.
We were in very uncertain times, and a vaccine was urgently needed. In hindsight, however, the vaccines were presented as much more effective at preventing transmission than they actually were. Initially, the messaging was that if you got two doses of a Covid vaccine you were highly protected against not just severe outcomes, but also becoming infected at all. The messaging was changed shortly thereafter to a third dose being necessary for full protection, and then the need for routine boosters.
Although we now know that Covid vaccines don’t stop infection, they do protect against severe symptoms, particularly for groups that are at higher risk due to pre-existing health conditions - a major benefit for society. In that way, Covid shots are like flu shots, which, despite having varying efficacy across years, have saved millions of lives.
Yet because of the confusing and contradictory messaging about the Covid vaccines following their release, the public’s confidence in them has collapsed. Only 15% of Canadians old enough to receive a Covid booster in the fall got one, despite the proven benefits for groups such as seniors. Far fewer people are now getting Covid boosters than the flu shot. Lives could almost certainly be saved if the uptake were higher.
Would it have been more effective over the long term had public health officials and the media been more frank about the gaps in our knowledge of the effectiveness of Covid vaccines when they came out? The motivating factors for the messaging were again good, with the intention of encouraging as many people as possible to get the vaccine. However, the price of this approach was a loss of trust among segments of the population.
Signs of this mistrust are now starting to manifest themselves in very worrying ways. A poll published by Angus Reid shows that the percentage of parents planning to definitely give their children routine vaccinations has fallen from 88% in 2019 to 67% in 2024. To achieve so-called herd immunity, the target rate is 95%. And this trend is by no means restricted to Canada, but extends across the globe. Europe and the U.S. are both seeing much more frequent measles and mumps outbreaks, two illnesses that have very effective vaccines. As worrying as mumps and measles are, polio is far more concerning. It crippled millions of people, mostly children, until effective vaccines were rolled out between the 1950s and the 1970s. Polio was considered nearly wiped out in the world until a few years ago, but has been showing worrying signs of a comeback. An unvaccinated man was crippled by polio he contracted in the state of New York in 2022, and polio virus was detected in New York City sewage samples in August of that year.
A polio outbreak in Canada or the U.S. in the coming decades would be a huge setback for our health policies.
Creative Urban Planning
Ian Barrett
Recently, Ontario Premier Doug Ford joined Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe to urge the federal government to send its employees back to the office five days a week as a way to rescue downtown businesses.
Sadly, this gave the impression that after four years of widespread telework, the municipal government in Ottawa has come up with few innovative ideas to transform its city centre and prepare for the future.
Even if the federal government obliges this request, would it be enough to support a vibrant downtown? Even before the mass adoption of telework, downtown areas in Ottawa and Gatineau were strange places, with most shops, restaurants and cafes closing by 6 pm on Fridays, and many not even opening on weekends. Even the Tim Horton’s on Sparks Street is only open on weekdays.
More civil servants working downtown will not change this, as most will head back to the suburbs as soon as their work day is done, as they did in years past. And even if enough customers were available on weekdays to allow businesses to stay afloat, telework will always be an option going forward. With the substantial cost savings for the federal government of downsizing its real estate portfolio, do Ottawa and Gatineau want to be completely dependent on the federal governing party of the day to keep their downtowns from crumbling?
Ottawa is in many ways better positioned than Gatineau to transform its centre, as it has the lively Byward Market as an anchor. The Market is constantly bustling, and so the challenge is getting some of those shoppers and restaurant-goers to explore farther out. Currently, it’s easy enough to head over to the Rideau Centre from the Market, and the mall benefits accordingly. However, crossing Wellington and Elgin streets is more complicated, and for tourists downright confusing. Were the walk to Sparks Street more pleasant and convenient, more people would certainly make the trek to explore the rest of downtown Ottawa. This could be done via overhauling the intersections. They already handle relatively little traffic, especially in comparison to larger cities. Giving priority to pedestrians via more accommodating traffic lights would likely be enough, without going to further extremes like pedestrian crossing bridges. Another possibility is simply turning Wellington into a pedestrian artery, something that the City of Ottawa has vigorously lobbied against until now.
For at least the first few years it would be necessary for the city to give additional incentives to visit the downtown core on weekends, such as by holding vibrant festivals there to encourage people to explore. As residents develop the habit of visiting these streets outside of working hours, businesses would follow to make the area self-sustaining.
Lastly, the city needs to entice more people to live downtown. In an age of housing shortages, this should be reasonably straight-forward if the proper planning, building incentives, and conversion of office towers are undertaken.
Our downtowns need creativity, not a passing of the buck to future generations to solve problems that we’re already facing.
Floods and Riverside Views
Ian Barrett
April is a stressful time for many people in Gatineau who live close to the river, as they worry about flooding. This year has been relatively calm, as there was little snow. However, it’s still hard to predict, as the snow that matters is farther north, which after melting ends up in waterways to the south, swelling rivers and flooding low-lying areas.
We’ve had two “floods of the century” in the last ten years, in 2017 and 2019, as well as substantial flooding last year as well. With many competing priorities, governments can be slow to move on an issue when it isn’t causing damage in the moment. Thankfully, municipal and provincial governments are both considering options to prepare for future flooding, even if concrete action is likely years away.
For Gatineau, most of the conversation is around the Pointe-Gatineau neighbourhood, with Aylmer’s Fraser Street and Queen’s Park neighbourhoods getting consideration as well. Although building dykes and other barriers is being studied, the costs are being flagged as prohibitively expensive. A more likely option is to expropriate houses and build parks and nature reserves. Such a plan has a number of clear benefits, from making picturesque riverside views available for more people to creating a natural buffer zone that could absorb excess water and prevent flooding further inland.
Another interesting option being discussed is to require homes in flood-prone areas to be built on stilts to avoid severe damage when rivers swell.
Concerns over expropriation include the ethics of forcing people to change neighbourhoods and the cost for taxpayers. On the first point, a reasonable solution would be simply offering to buy out residents, with the understanding that if they choose to stay they would be charged for the costs of assistance provided by the city during periods of flooding. It hardly seems fair for residents further inland to see their tax dollars going to those who choose a lovely view of the river despite the fact that they will from time to time find themselves literally under water.
Residents who refuse buy-outs should also need to get a signed declaration from buyers when selling their houses later on. This document should make clear that the new buyer is aware of the risks of flooding, and understands that the city will pass on to the new owners any costs for assistance rendered during periods of flooding.
In terms of the cost to taxpayers of expropriations, offers made to current owners should be for the fair value of the land, with a cap on the value of the houses built on it. In a number of impacted areas homes are often valued at several million dollars. Owners of such properties have the financial resources to mitigate the risks of flooding by building their own dykes or paying for their own repairs. Full compensation for those who spent lavishly to build in areas known to have substantial risks of floods hardly seems fair to everyone else who foots the bill via our taxes.
Ian Barrett
March Editorials
Missed Opportunities to Boost Downtown
Ian Barrett
Downtown areas of Gatineau and Ottawa need to transform. More than a year after federal workers were mandated to come back to the office at least twice a week, our downtown areas are still far quieter than they were pre-Covid. Eddy Street in Hull is particularly dire. Yet there have been a number of lost chances to boost our city centres lately.
Given the nature of the National Capital Region, any revitalization will involve both municipal governments and the National Capital Commission.
On the Hull side, Winterlude was held relatively far from the centre core of Hull, at the north end of the Jacques Cartier Park instead of the south, where it had been in years prior. This year’s site had the advantage of offering tobogganing, but the festival had been quite successful in previous years when it was held in the south, and where it gave a boost to local businesses.
In Ottawa, supreme efforts were made to open the Rideau Canal to skating this year, despite the weather being less than cooperative. Despite temperatures routinely above freezing, the National Capital Commission managed to open a section of the canal for at least a few days, from Bank Street to the Pretoria Bridge. As welcome as this news was, would it have been possible to instead open a more central section that would have included the corner of Rideau Street and Colonel By Drive? This would also have helped bring more people into the city centre to support local shops and restaurants.
The Ottawa municipal council recently commissioned a report on the closure to cars of Wellington Street in front of Parliament. The findings were largely against the closure, talking about elevated stress for drivers, loss of parking, and further limitations on public transport if the artery isn’t left open to vehicles. According to the report, traffic flow on the street has been slowly recovering since Wellington was reopened, and has almost reached the levels seen before the pandemic. It did however discuss options for redesigning other streets should Wellington again be closed to traffic, with general cost estimates of up to $26M depending on how traffic grows over the coming years.
Yet is through-traffic along Wellington more likely to have a positive impact on Ottawa's core, or would a pedestrian path in front of the symbol of our democracy bring more people to spend time and money in the downtown area, particularly on weekends, when the city centre feels completely abandoned? The success of a pedestrian option would of course depend on the details of any such plan. During Wellington's closure in 2022 and the first part of 2023 it was quite underwhelming, with very little to attract visitors. More imagination would certainly be required. And any loss of parking could be addressed by converting some of the under-utilized office buildings of the neighbourhood to accommodate more public parking.
What’s clear is that the status quo for the region’s commercial centre isn’t working. After more than four years, it’s time to become more creative.
Daylight Savings Time
Ian Barrett
Yet again we’ve switched to daylight savings time. It’s been years since standard time was reduced to four months, and many find ourselves asking why we bother switching our clocks for such a short period, instead of simply leaving clocks on daylight savings time year-round.
In Canada both Saskatchewan and the Yukon don’t change the time. All other provinces have generally deferred to the U.S., saying that when Americans stop changing the time they will too. This was what happened in 2007, when Americans extended daylight savings time to include parts of March and November, and Canada followed suit. And in 2022, there were rumours that time changes would end the following year, as there was a bill put forth in the American senate to this effect. However, that bill quietly died, and we find ourselves continuing to adjust our clocks - and likely for many years to come.
Countries that change their clocks are in fact in the minority, mostly concentrated in North America and Europe. Even in the U.S., Arizona and Hawaii don’t change the time.
The arguments in favour of daylight savings time in the summer are that it allows people to have more daylight in the evenings to be more active. The advantage of standard time in the winter is to have more daylight in the morning, where it’s argued this increases safety for those commuting to work. Studies show energy use is largely unaffected.
The argument about safety in the winter seems odd, as any safety gained by driving to work in daylight in the morning is likely offset by corresponding risks caused by having to drive back home in the dark.
The lengths of days throughout the year get steadier the closer you go to the equator, so it’s hard to argue that tropical countries should switch their clocks. Yet even countries in the north or south such as Russia, Argentina, South Africa, large parts of Australia and all of Asia seem to do fine without adjusting the time in the spring and fall.
More than two thirds of Americans favour abolishing the switch in time. Apparently, the challenge is that those who want to keep the same time year-round can’t agree on whether to go with daylight savings time permanently, or instead to stay on standard time. Yet daylight savings time seems to be implicitly winning, as standard time has been reduced to just four months a year.
And for Québec kids the timing of switching to daylight savings time could hardly be worse, coming immediately after March break. Sleeping in for a week followed by getting up earlier than they have in months isn’t a nice way to ease them back into school. At least in Ontario putting clocks ahead comes at the beginning of March break.
For those who say that we have to follow Americans in terms of our clocks, it would be worth looking at the experiences of places like Saskatchewan, Arizona, Mexico and Japan. We might find that going our own way wouldn’t be so messy after all.
Politics and the Environment
Ian Barrett
Politics and environmental protection are often deeply entwined these days. A generation ago, environmental protection enjoyed largely bipartisan support. Brian Mulroney famously achieved international agreements on the reduction of pollutants responsible for acid rain and the thinning of the ozone. And he did this by working closely with Ronald Reagan.
Now politics seems to dictate stances on the environment, both for governments and for individuals. A case in point is electric vehicles, where the uptake has been much higher from those identifying as being on the left compared to those on the right. Potential cost savings of switching to an electric vehicle, often estimated at about $2,000 to $6,000 per year depending on the model and the distance travelled, often take a back seat.
Left-of-centre governments have offered thousands of dollars in rebates in recent years to encourage drivers to switch to EVs, with an eye to meeting carbon reduction targets.
Conversely, Alberta has recently joined Saskatchewan and other right-of-centre state governments in the U.S. in charging an annual EV registration tax, where the amount will be roughly $200, irrespective of how much you drive. The amount is minor compared to the overall cost of owning a vehicle, yet the government of Alberta has presented this as being on general principle. The argument goes that roads are maintained largely by fuel taxes, which EV owners don’t pay while still making use of roads, hence they should chip in for road maintenance too. Substantial increases in fuel efficiency for gas powered vehicles in recent years have also reduced the total amount of gas taxes collected, but this gets less attention.
Provinces pull in about $8B a year from fuel taxes, and certainly need ways to compensate for lost revenue as drivers use less gas. Yet at least gasoline taxes fall more on those who drive the most and who own the largest and heaviest gas-powered vehicles, which are also those that put the most wear and tear on our roads. The more gas you use, the more tax you pay. Alberta argues that inch for inch, EVs are heavier than gas powered vehicles, and hence do more damage to roads. Yet at least until recently EVs have also been more likely to be smaller vehicles. Why should smaller EVs cost the same for road maintenance when larger vehicles, electric or otherwise, are much harder on roads in general?
What's more, the Alberta and Saskatchewan registration regime will charge EV users more than the average amount gas powered vehicles cost via fuel taxes, which is about $140. Why charge about 50% more to EV drivers?
It would make more sense to levy a surcharge on excessive electricity consumption and at EV charging stations. At least this would mean that those EV owners who drive farther and in heavier vehicles would pay more for road maintenance.
Pollution impacts everyone, liberal and conservative alike. Attitudes towards social issues determining how we treat the environment will leave everyone worse off.
Lessons from Covid (1) - Being Prepared
Ian Barrett
As memories of Covid continue to fade into history, it’s worth asking what will happen when (and not if) the next pandemic strikes.
Luc Boileau, the director of public health policy for Québec, recently gave an interview to the CBC where he praised the province’s performance during the Covid pandemic, and stated that Québec is ready to face future health emergencies. He cited a comprehensive plan for viral pandemics that will be published in the near future, as well as far better stocks of N95 masks and surgical gloves. He also pointed to improved autonomy for the province in manufacturing key medical equipment, something that should avoid shortages like those seen in 2020 and 2021.
Although this is all good news, there haven’t been major independent studies done on the effectiveness of many of the approaches governments took during the pandemic. A number of policies differed substantially across provinces, meaning that mistakes were made, since an approach either works or it doesn’t. This is notably the case with curfews and vaccine passports, as well as approaches to school closures.
The latter is particularly critical. A study has recently been released in the U.S. by Monitoring the Future and the Pew Research Centre, showing attitudes of those now in their early twenties towards government, the media, and life in general. The results are extremely worrying. Over a third of respondents said they had hardly any confidence in government, and even more shockingly, over half said they had hardly any confidence in traditional media. This does not bode well for traditional media’s financial future. They’re also far more likely than Millennials at the same age to say that it’s hard to have hope for the world or to see a purpose to life.
This was of course the generation that was hit with lockdowns just as they were getting ready to enter adulthood and build their lives. We’re only starting to get an idea of the long term psychological and economic burdens they’ll have to bear for years to come. Was there a more efficient way to reduce these impacts? How effective were school closures at reducing death rates caused by Covid? If we notice that a particular group such as those with pre-existing health conditions are far more at risk during future pandemics, could we target our efforts more towards those people? Would we have had better outcomes in 2020 and 2021if we had put more resources into creating secure environments for the elderly, the group that was by far the hardest hit by Covid?
Mr. Boileau’s accolades for the performance of Québec during the pandemic should be somewhat tempered. Despite tremendous efforts by those on the front lines, Québec’s mortality rate from Covid was almost twice that of Ontario and of Canada as a whole. The province’s handling of nursing homes was particularly questionable. Learning from history in addition to focusing on what went right would show we’re positioning ourselves as best we can for the uncertainties of the future.
February Editorials
Alexandra Bridge (1) - Current Plans
The National Capital Region has been undergoing a series of major construction projects for many years. Much of this is catch-up, doing work that had been put off for far too long. The most well-known is likely the renovations to Parliament Hill, stretching over more than a decade. Just the efforts to transform the masonry work from the black that it had slowly become back to the original lighter tinge has made for a much less gothic feeling.
Bridges have also been a significant focus of recent work. The Chaudière Bridge was closed for more than a year as it was brought up to code, and the Champlain had reduced traffic for months as it was also upgraded and repaired.
The Alexandra Bridge has also seen its share of closures, and will be demolished and replaced in the coming years. In terms of bridges that are still in operation, it’s the region’s second oldest, dating to 1900, 20 years after the recently re-baptized Chief William Commanda. A source of regional pride at the time, the Alexandra Bridge relied on local architects and expertise instead of looking to American and British companies, as had been customary in the 19th century. Since its construction, it has become one of the most recognized landmarks in the Ottawa Valley, often appearing in photos of Parliament, and offering spectacular views for locals and tourists alike.
That said, the structure is showing its limits from the wear and tear of supporting cars going in both directions. In 2019, Public Services and Procurement Canada along with the National Capital Commission decided that it would be a better value to replace the bridge rather than maintain it. This replacement process would last from 2028 to 2032, but the decision only started to make headlines recently, having passed largely unnoticed previously.
Both the PSPC and the NCC agree that the replacement should remain emblematic of the region. Yet in an era of restrained budgets, fiscal prudence will also play an important role. One indication that they may opt for a conservative approach is that there will be no architectural competition. Such competitions are typical of large public building projects, and allow the public to have a say in the features and design of the structure. For the Alexandra Bridge replacement, however, the PSPC will instead refer to a panel of chosen experts. How communities are able to interact with this panel will be key to ensuring that the new bridge isn’t remembered as a missed opportunity.
Many are asking if it would truly be so difficult to retain the current structure, along with all of its local heritage and historical significance. The PSPC’s response is that, given current and future use patterns, the bridge as is would simply not be up to the task of supporting so much weight. To have it upgraded to be safe for the coming decades would cost too much. Yet could the current structure be salvaged if we instead rethought the needs of the region at that location?
Alexandra Bridge (2) - A Major Opportunity
Ian Barrett
The federal government has concluded that the Alexandra Bridge is no longer viable to sustain the levels of traffic that it sees, and will therefore be demolished in 2028, with a replacement opening in 2032. However, how important is it that cars continue to use the Alexandra Bridge?
It’s often been closed to vehicles as it undergoes upgrades and short-term repairs over the last 15 years, and impacts on traffic have been minor. Even with the reduced capacity of the Chaudière and Champlain bridges in recent years, when the Alexandra Bridge was open to traffic it still saw less than 10% of the region’s crossings by car, as per a report by Le Droit.
Many drivers favour other bridges such as the Portage or Macdonald-Cartier, which are far more optimized for traffic. Given the points that the Alexandra Bridge connects, Kìwekì point on one side, and Jacques Cartier Park on the other, should it instead be focused on active transport? With appropriate planning, a future tramway connection could run via the current structure as well. Having it geared towards active and public transportation could encourage tourism on both sides of the bridge, and give a much needed boost to businesses in Old Hull.
Moreover, the entrance on the Ottawa side of St. Patrick and Murray streets may not be capable of supporting much extra traffic. Traffic jams around the entrances to the Byward Market could hold back the tourism potential of that neighbourhood too.
If the bridge is replaced, drivers will still be completely deprived of an option to cross the river at that point for at least four years. The only substitute during construction will likely be a boat service for pedestrians and cyclists. A major part of the Jacques-Cartier Park would probably also be closed during those four years, and used as a storage area for the equipment necessary for the construction. Replacement will also generate about 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide, according to Le Droit.
The money saved by retaining the current Alexandra Bridge as an active and public transit crossing could certainly be put to good use elsewhere. One obvious option, and which would likely go much farther towards alleviating traffic congestion on both sides of the river, would be to build a new bridge further east. Gatineau MP Steven MacKinnon has long been pushing for such a project. By reducing the number of cars coming onto the Macdonald-Cartier bridge, commutes for many residents would be much lighter, and in particular those living in Buckingham and Masson-Angers. These two regions have great potential to take some of the pressure off of neighbourhoods like Aylmer in terms of housing development.
How we build up the core centre of our city will have wide ranging impacts on the region for decades, particularly in terms of neighbourhood housing development. And this is true from the west to the east. A global approach will ensure that we don’t miss an opportunity to significantly improve Gatineau’s urbanization for generations to come.
Instagram and Sexual Abuse of Children
Ian Barrett
Last year, this column featured a piece on sexual predators targeting children on Instagram. Since that time, New Mexico has sued Instagram’s parent company, Meta, for failing to protect minors using its services, with 40 other states filing similar lawsuits a few months later. A number of interesting, and very worrying, details have emerged throughout this legal process.
Meta has countered that New Mexico mischaracterizes their work with “selective quotas and cherry-picked documents”, and that it has long invested in both enforcement and child safety-focused tools for young users and their parents.
In 2021, an internal Meta presentation estimated that 100,000 children were sexually harassed on Instagram each day, many times via photos of adult genitalia from complete strangers. Most damningly, the basis for the lawsuit is that Meta’s algorithms purposely promote underage accounts to predatory adult users, as well as recommending sexual content to children and falsely reassuring the public about the safety of its platform.
At least as early as 2021, Meta’s internal documents showed that they were aware that the “People You May Know” algorithm was connecting child users with potential predators, and was responsible for about three quarters of inappropriate adult-minor contact on the platform. However, the lawsuit states that executives at Meta had been made aware of this years prior to that, and had rejected recommendations to adjust the algorithm to better project minors despite impassioned pleas from employees.
One such employee informed Meta’s leadership that an executive at Apple had complained that his 12 year old daughter had been solicited on Instagram. The employee stated that this sort of situation would anger Apple to the point that they would remove the Instagram app from Apple’s App Store, and asked if there was a timeline for when adults would no longer be allowed to contact children with whom they had no prior connections. More than two years later, no such change has been implemented.
How is it possible that these problems are so well known, and yet Meta is able to continue prioritizing growth, both of users and the time they spend on the platform, over preventing children from being contacted by predators? With its huge profits, Meta is likely to be able to simply shake off any monetary penalties that are levied, even if they’re hundreds of millions of dollars.
Perhaps Meta will implement a nominal safeguard, something like adults not being allowed to contact children that they don’t have direct connections with. Yet for predators to get around such rules, it would be as simple as lying about their (unverified) age.
Likely, the only way to truly get the attention of major social media players like Meta would be charges directly levied against their executives. But whether such charges would stick is an open question. Barring that, and given the amount of control and leverage social media has over so many aspects of our lives, such toxic attitudes in their board rooms are unlikely to change. All we can do as individuals is to unplug our social lives.
Chaos at Town Hall
Ian Barrett
The resignation of Gatineau Mayor France Bélisle has dominated headlines for the last week. Yet perhaps the more pressing issue is the chaos in which this leaves Gatineau’s municipal government.
It’s a sign of maturity when you realize that you’re simply not in a position to complete a job, and under certain circumstances it’s best to step aside. Still, it’s a shame that Ms. Bélisle felt she was unable to complete her term. Now, with only a year and half until the next round of regular elections, Gatineau will also face a special election for mayor, where the winner will only serve a bit more than a year before facing a second electoral contest. This is truly a gruelling image for anyone thinking of running. Plus, turnout for special elections is often anaemic, even by municipal election standards.
It will also be difficult for any interested candidates to raise enough money to mount an effective campaign. General estimates of the cost of a campaign for mayor are at least $200,000. Here, whoever runs on the Action Gatineau ticket will have a huge advantage. The party already has something of a war chest built up, as municipal parties receive regular funding from the provincial government, as well as having an established list of donors. Whether potential donors for an independent candidate can be mobilized on short notice is anyone’s guess. Ms. Bélisle has been very open about her frustration with Action Gatineau, but she has likely set in motion events that will be very favourable for the party.
It’s also of course worth looking at what brought us to this point. Politics is at times something of a blood sport, and civility tends to fade as you move from the municipal to the provincial to the federal level. Perhaps this is because municipal politics doesn’t enjoy so-called “parliamentary privilege”. This is a legal immunity in the House of Commons and provincial legislatures, where you cannot be pursued in a court of law for slander, among other protections. Or perhaps it’s just because people know each other better, are a smaller group, and have to work more closely together. Municipal politics is far from being civil all of the time, but you rarely get the rowdy sessions that we see in federal or provincial Question Periods. Yet in a system where representatives are looking to score political points with an eye to reelection, it seems unlikely for any level of government that we’ll ever see the courtesy shown in a typical boardroom.
Lastly and most worrying is harassment of elected officials. This is getting worse by the year, with perhaps the most extreme case being that of former federal minister Catherine McKenna, dubbed by media, both social and traditional, as the “Climate Barbie”. Such appalling treatment of any politician, and in particular when it's often reserved for women, should cause our society to seriously rethink how we view and treat our elected officials. At the very least, it’s in the self interest of other politicians to stop throwing kerosene on the fire.
January Editorials
Teleworking (1) - Facts and Feelings
We’ve seen over the last several years that most tasks involving a computer do not need to be done at the office. This is a major societal shift, yet it’s surprising how little research has been done on the topic. Many times the debate over the benefits and drawbacks of remote work are based on little more than feelings and intuition.
On the one side those in favour talk about how they’re still able to do just as much work from home as at the office. They say that at home there are fewer distractions and background noise, allowing them to concentrate more. They see technological advances like Zoom and Microsoft Teams allowing them to attend as many meetings as ever. It can even be easier to follow what’s going on in large meetings, where in-person it can be difficult to follow the conversation on the other side of the room.
Those who oppose working from home talk about shirking and laziness when workers aren’t being monitored, and less opportunities for mentoring, team building and developing a corporate culture. Many of these people enjoy being at the office and seeing colleagues in person, and feel it’s a natural part of working culture in general.
The few objective studies available on this topic are usually based on surveys, with unsurprising results. Remote employees claim that they’re more productive than ever, while managers tend to say that their teams are less productive based on general impressions. Yet there are more evidence-based reports emerging that highlight the number of emails sent or comments received on an employee’s work. Microsoft found that fully remote workers tend to be less productive per hour of work, while hybrid workers tend to have about the same level of productivity as those working on-site all of the time. However, hybrid workers may be a bit less productive per hour, compensating by spending the time they used to require to commute to the office on work tasks instead.
A Stanford study from 2015 already showed greater productivity when working from home when factoring in fewer sick days and breaks taken by remote workers. It has also been shown that feelings towards their employer are far more impactful on worker engagement than whether they work at home or at the office, and an option to work from home can be motivating. Working remotely also offers adjustable work schedules. Some people work better in the early morning, others work better late at night. Allowing people to work at their peak times lets them maximize their personal productivity.
Critically, when working from home we’ll need a profound shift in how managers approach their jobs. They’ll no longer be able to focus primarily on checking that employees are at their desks and look busy, complemented by performance evaluations every couple of months. To see if workers are able to keep up performance while outside the office, managers will need to shift to a task-based monitoring system paired with frequent individual check-ins.
To make the most of teleworking, everyone has to evolve.
Teleworking (2) - Adapting
As we shifted to telework in 2020, comparatively little was done to prepare workers and managers for this new environment. Generally there is no shortage of training tools for project management and handling interpersonal situations. Yet when it came to teleworking many employees and managers were handed a video conferencing system with little or no coaching on how to handle this new way of working.
Yet profound changes are required. Perhaps the most important is when pitching a collaboration. You can no longer wait until you simply bump into someone in the hall or kitchen. Instead, you need to reach out to the person directly. Large meetings are also less effective, as it’s easier for quieter employees to get lost in the shuffle when in a large virtual meeting. And whereas before a junior employee looking for advice could drop by the desk of someone more senior, now it’s up to the manager to assign mentors to junior team members and request that they touch base with each other on a regular basis.
In terms of how employees’ work is valued, The Harvard Business Review points out that leaders are trained to evaluate employees based on “face time.” Those who come early and leave late are considered more productive. Yet further research (such as that conducted by the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants) has shown that even at the office workers spend well less than half of their time on work tasks.
There is also a generational divide in terms of attitudes towards teleworking. As shown in recent studies (such as from Future Forum), those over about age 50 tend to put a lot more emphasis on the benefits of in-person collaboration. Leaders under this age are much more likely to support hybrid and remote work, and to focus on how to do it well. Senior managers and executives have of course been quite successful in traditional working environments to be where they are, and are best placed to see the benefits. The challenge they face is making these benefits clear to more junior employees who are more interested in completely different approaches and building their skill sets within a telework framework. All of this means that as today’s junior employees take on leadership roles telework is likely to increase further.
Surprisingly, some 80 percent of executive jobs are currently available remotely, according to executive search firm Cowen Partners, which helps companies fill senior management positions that are often not visible through regular job postings. That’s up from about 25 percent before 2020. Many of these executives state that they’re capable of working from home using tools like Zoom, Slack, and Teams, and that doing so enables them to work odd hours and have exchanges with colleagues in different time zones while maintaining work-life balance. As more companies require rank-and-file employees to spend more time in the office, it would obviously be tricky if the executives are working from home in other parts of the country, and only coming into the office on occasion.
Teleworking (3) - Challenges for Society
Society’s shift to telework will present a number of challenges for society, and in particular those who run office buildings or parking facilities, as well as downtown restaurants that rely on lunchtime crowds. Cities will need to adjust, yet the opportunities are immense. Society faces a housing crisis paired with pushback in the suburbs towards new condo developments. The huge land potential in our downtowns from replacing empty office buildings with housing developments could help stabilize the price of residential rent and real estate. Yet it will be up to cities to figure out ways to entice people to live downtown. This will require abundant opportunities for entertainment and active living, options that are often not available in the suburbs. A wider variety of festivals and street markets would be a start, along with projects to give dilapidated commercial arteries a makeover. Gatineau has recently made progress in improving the availability of fresh food in its downtown core with the long-awaited opening of a supermarket. Yet much remains to be done on both sides of the Ottawa river.
Another area that has suffered from remote work is public transit. We’ll need to decide what role it will play in a greener future. Our transit systems have traditionally relied on packed buses and subways during rush hour to finance service during off-peak hours. Less crowds in the early morning and evening will mean more public funding is needed to maintain service. The alternative is to cut back on routes to balance the budgets. However, potential riders may then opt for their own cars, increasing congestion on our roads. TomTom, a leader in geolocation and navigation software, recently showed that Ottawa is already fourth in terms of Canadian cities with the worst traffic.
The danger of offshoring office work is quite real. Simply requiring workers to come into the office won’t stop this unless in-person productivity is significantly higher, as companies will still see cost savings by looking to Asia for white collar workers. Cost reductions from getting rid of excess real estate and associated maintenance costs will only add to these temptations.
To counter this, we need to focus on ensuring Canadians are more skilled than workers from other countries. We have some of the top universities in the world, and Canadian children are among the top performers on international tests. Our education systems will be key to keeping us competitive over the coming decades. Investing in our schools and universities will allow Canada to strengthen this advantage even further. This is also our best defence against the loss of high quality jobs to Artificial Intelligence in the coming years.
That said, digital nomads have existed for decades, and they still command high salaries while usually living in western countries. These workers are able to compete based on skill sets that are harder to develop elsewhere in the world. It shows that Canada is still well placed to have its share of high quality jobs in the future.
Teleworking (4) - Benefits for Society
While remote work presents a number of challenges, it also provides a number of important benefits to employees, companies, and society at large.
The most obvious for workers is making it easier to balance professional and private commitments. Having a flexible schedule and the ability to make up for missed hours later in the day lets workers reduce stress, especially when caring for children or older relatives. Companies also benefit when employees require less time off from work, boosting productivity.
Since cultural mores mean that the responsibility of caring for young children often falls to the mother, this also enables women to avoid missing out on key years in their professional careers, prime time to advance and position themselves for promotions later on.
Environmentally, reducing commutes is certainly a net positive. Carbon emissions in our societies plummeted in 2020. Fewer commutes and business travel would help us to meet our emissions reduction targets in coming years. And this also reduces traffic congestion, benefiting even those who are unable to work remotely.
Allowing more workers to go fully remote would also relieve pressure on real estate prices in major cities, which are where most knowledge based jobs are currently located, and which tend to pay well. By allowing remote workers to move to smaller towns and villages, these families would be able to better afford a home, and the places that they move to would benefit from an influx of financially secure residents. Villages that have long been on the decline could see a net influx of young families for a change.
Plus, housing costs in larger cities might start to finally level off if some of these well-paid professionals are no longer in bidding wars for urban properties, allowing those who choose to live in larger cities to better afford a home.
Although some jobs may be outsourced overseas, we’ll have to address this problem either way if companies see a financial benefit to hiring knowledge workers in other countries. Switching tasks to AI-driven automated solutions may be even more likely. Requiring workers to go into the office is unlikely to change much.
If workers in Canada are able to live and work anywhere in the country, they could be willing to accept lower pay than if they’re having to scrape together enough money to afford a modest home with a 7 figure price tag in Toronto or Vancouver, and increasingly in Ottawa too. This would better position Canadian knowledge workers to compete with those from developing countries or with automated tools.
Companies open to telework will benefit from being able to hire the best talent. LinkedIn found that 9% of job listings were fully remote in July of 2023. However, those few listings received almost half of all applications. A 2023 Stanford study also found that quit rates and turnover costs were significantly reduced when a firm offered hybrid working arrangements.
Telework is here to stay, and may well expand over the long term. We should make the most of it.
If newspapers are dying, why is the phone ringing non-stop?
Lily Ryan
Newspapers are dead, huh? Says who? The phone has been ringing off the hook here at the Bulletin!
Readers will notice an ad in this edition that explains how to subscribe to the newspaper. Until now, most people get their local paper free in the mail or in PubliSac (depending on where they live). The PubliSac is shutting down completely soon, and so newspapers are scrambling to find an affordable way to get the paper in the hands of readers.
Yes, changes are happening. True, fake news on social media is frustrating, even distressful. This means the appetite for local news borders on ravenous at the moment. We are increasing our printing numbers all the time, and still, we can’t keep enough papers on the shelves.
Knowing this, that readers ask for more, more, more print news all the time, it is very difficult to understand why anyone would say that newspapers are dead. Unless it is because they are repeating verbal garbage heard on tv or on the radio? Local newspapers are not mega-corporations with dividends to be paying out to shareholders. Profit margins can be very low and still, the team puts out a newspaper. This is because we believe in community. The folks at the Bulletin feel buoyed by community organizers who thank us for covering their event. When a business owner calls to say the ad worked too well, they need to take a break, the publicity department feels they’ve done their job right.
And the reverse is true too. Folks regularly ask why the city doesn’t advertise their art shows, the winter festivals, classes and all the other local activities that readers want to know about. At the Bulletin, we shrug our shoulders and say, ask your city councillor. The same is true of other levels of government but it is harder to explain for the local.
However, the very fact that readers are asking is enough to motivate the team to keep going.
Yes, PubliSac is closing, and a new distribution system is being set up for the Gatineau Bulletin. Call us! We’ll explain everything – how to subscribe, where to pick it up and how to add your neighbourhood store to our distribution list.
We aim to serve the readers, we want to cover the stories readers care about, and this, for the long term. Long live local news – in print!
December Editorials
The Potential of Our Libraries
Last month, Le Portrait national 2023 des bibliothèques publiques québécoises was released, which ranked the Outaouais as one of the worst regions in the province in terms of the quality of its libraries. Factors evaluated included how many books were procured in the last year, the physical size of a region’s libraries along with opening hours, and the number of employees.
Libraries can be anything from cornerstones of a community to largely forgotten. Gatineau has made some progress in revitalizing its libraries, but approaches have at times seemed reactive, with a lack of vision. The Plateau now has the Donald Charron library. Although a welcome addition to the neighbourhood, it already seems small for the Plateau’s expanding population. To reduce costs the city chose to go with a single floor. Yet now it's hard to see how the neighbourhood will find the space sufficient even ten years from now, let alone over the long term.
The previous administration at town hall also insisted on demolishing the old library on Aylmer’s main street, preferring a three floor structure to replace the previous five storeys. The old building needed substantial renovations, but studies commissioned by the city had already shown that the cost of upgrading the old structure would have been well less than half the price of demolition and replacement. The tens of millions of dollars that make up this difference could have instead substantially improved the services that the library offers. Local community groups are well aware of the shortage of event spaces provided by the city. An extra two floors on rue Principale would have gone a long way to meeting local needs.
Still, it’s worth asking whether the factors used in this report on the quality of libraries are still pertinent. Should libraries continue to focus on paper copies of books, or on expanding their digital offerings, where many more digital books could be obtained for the same price? Having tablets readily available to view digital books, as well as allowing residents to download virtual copies onto their devices would be appealing to many readers, especially those of younger generations.
It’s important to take a wider view of what libraries can be. Although books are central to a library’s identity, for them to become anchors in a community they need to expand with other activities - those which require optimally using space. Focusing on digital books helps address this space issue, as does having less popular books stored elsewhere and delivered on demand. Instead of having shelves of books filling floors, it can be far more productive to have community space, activities such as group reading sessions for children and learning activities for adults. Examples of what such offerings could include are informal language training, technology workshops, or help for graduating students breaking into the job market. Library employees should be trained to provide far more services than simply checking out books.
The potential for libraries in the 21st century is substantial. A first step towards realizing it is to stop viewing them from a 20th century perspective.
The Value of Education
Over 25,000 provincial public sector employees are on strike in the Outaouais this week. Impacts will be felt across a range of services, with one of the largest being education. How much are schools worth to us as a society?
Salary is one issue for teachers. Those working in the public education system make significantly less than those in other industries with similar levels of post-secondary studies. The importance of their work for society isn’t in doubt. Yet the Legault government, led on this file by Education Minister Bernard Drainville, is offering a wage increase significantly below the rise in the cost of living.
Yet more than salary, education workers are striking because of a general lack of resources. Class sizes are large, and there are few options available for special needs children. Many people in the field put in extremely long hours to compensate for a shortage of colleagues, with few qualified candidates willing to take the positions given the pay and workload.
New schools are being built, but questions of quality and cost cutting have started to emerge. Complaints are being raised that new schools have gyms and cafeterias that are too small, and with parts of the infrastructure like sinks and separation curtains non-operational or which broke within a year of the opening of the school, as well as paint that is already peeling. The outside patio of the Nouvelle-Ère school has never been accessible to students due to concerns over its safety and stability. There’s also very little outside space reserved for Nouvelle-Ère, despite the area having been largely undeveloped at the time of the school’s planning.
The biggest losers from the current impasse are likely to be children. The COVID lockdowns and the resulting reduction in classroom instruction mean that many children were already falling behind. Although detailed evidence is hard to come by, standardized testing results for 15 year olds show that the current cohort is doing substantially worse in math and reading than the group from 4 years prior. Younger children are showing greater signs of learning disabilities. Although failure rates have stayed steady, many teachers have been lowering standards for children to pass. Kids will be paying for this lost learning for the rest of their lives. Now they’re again losing learning time, with negative impacts even if some of the time is recovered over the summer.
Mr. Drainville first became well known in Quebec as the champion of the Charte des Valeurs pushed by the PQ government of Pauline Marois ten years ago. It didn’t end well, as the resulting societal conflicts it created are often credited with the defeat of that government after less than two years in power. Mr. Drainville’s recent return to politics as a member of the CAQ came as a surprise to many. He now finds himself at the centre of yet another volatile situation shortly after his return. For the sake of our children’s education, hopefully he’s more effective at finding a solution this time around.
A Brighter Future?
Year after year, it’s easy to complain that the news is depressing and the future seems bleak. The last year was no exception. War continues to rage in Ukraine, and has now broken out in Gaza, with millions suffering and little hope for peace. The Israel-Palestinian conflict brings with it a rise in antisemitism and islamophobia. Although it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize the governments of a country or region, jumping from frustration with Hamas and Likud to criticizing entire religions and their followers is completely wrong and deeply dangerous.
Public discourse appears ever nastier, led by social media. It seems that we’re no longer able to even speak to those with differences in opinion on politics or other hot button topics like immigration, abortion, or even the environment. Many media outlets are teaching us that those on the other side of the argument are untrustworthy and dangers to society.
Add in news about the destruction of our planet and the soaring cost of living, and it’s not hard to believe that life is getting worse.
Yet look a little closer, and there’s quite a bit to be optimistic about. Life expectancy continues to climb, even if improvements have come a bit more slowly than in the past. Despite the opioid crisis, new advances in medical technology such as improved cancer treatments and new vaccines are on average keeping people healthy for longer. In terms of vaccines, Covid certainly took up all the headlines over the last few years, but others such as those for RSV and malaria are also very welcome news. Malaria in particular kills hundreds of thousands of people across the globe every year, particularly children. Yet these numbers have fallen drastically over the last several decades, largely due to improved basic health measures such as spraying for mosquitos in countries at elevated risk, and using mosquito nets when sleeping. With the new vaccine, fatalities should plummet even further. AIDS also has much more effective treatment than in the past.
A number of other conveniences are emerging as well. Telework is making the lives of many people easier, from those who have access to it and are enjoying better work/family balance, to others who at least can spend less time stuck in traffic and searching for parking.
A major change on the horizon is artificial intelligence. Although it can feel threatening and will likely disrupt many careers, it also offers the potential to greatly optimize the world’s information. It could help us to quickly find answers to questions that would otherwise require hours of research, guiding us as we do smaller repairs around the house, and getting a quick diagnosis for common health ailments. Reducing the frequency that we need to go to see a doctor could help unclog the healthcare system and allow those with more complicated issues to see a doctor more quickly.
Although it’s hard to say what the world will be like ten years from now, there are reasons to be optimistic.
News Accuracy and Public Perception
How we get our news is vitally important. Yet financial pressures on traditional media outlets aren’t showing any signs of letting up. Le Droit, like many local papers, continues to cut back on the amount of content it produces as it searches for a viable long-term financial solution. Public broadcasters like the CBC, the American NPR or Britain’s BBC are often criticized by political parties and see their funding reduced depending on the government of the day. Future generations will likely get their news from very different sources than in years past.
Yet what will those sources be? Facebook has been clear that it won’t be a news platform. Here in Canada, it has been blocking the sharing of news from any professional sources since the summer, but continues to allow the sharing of stories from dubious sources. This was likely Facebook’s way of making an example out of Canada for requiring it to pay media outlets for their content. In practice many Canadian Facebook users will now follow little else but conspiracy theories. In the U.K., France and Germany Facebook will continue to allow the sharing of content from traditional media, but will eliminate its dedicated news tab in those countries, further demonstrating its lack of interest in being a news platform.
Google’s reaction to that same new Canadian regulation on paying for content was even more worrying. It threatened to not only remove its Google News service in Canada, but to exclude content from professional media outlets in results from its main search engine. This would effectively cut off such outlets from reaching users over the internet. Although Google has since relented, that it would leverage its market dominance of search engines to engage in hardball negotiations with democratically elected governments is terrifying. This shows that it can’t be considered a reliable news tool over the long term either.
Despite Google’s settlement, Facebook is still unwilling to restart negotiations with Canada on news content. So for many users that rely on little else than its platform for their information, Facebook will continue to legitimize fake news and conspiracies.
Twitter, or X as it’s now called, has over the last year openly embraced the spreading of questionable content, as any attempts to fact check news material on its platform have been rolled back in the name of free speech. It’s become a free-for-all, where it’s extremely difficult to differentiate between fact and fiction. To be considered a “verified” source, the only requirement is that users pay a small monthly fee.
As political climates across the world become ever more toxic, how much of a role has social media played? When any degree of civility is absent from stories that people are consuming, are they more likely to become hyper-partisan? And are politicians likely to follow suit, as they go where they perceive the votes to be? Public discourse may become even nastier if the "news" content that people consume is ugly rants, largely devoid of truth or accuracy.
November Editorials
Talking to Our Councillors
It’s always a challenge for our elected officials to engage with residents in meaningful ways. This is especially important at the municipal level, where issues are community-based by nature, and our councillors need to know details of what’s happening in the community to do their jobs.
A number of efforts have been tried. Public consultations are often organized in Gatineau, but to those in attendance they can often feel more like public information sessions, where the city gives details on decisions that have already been made. Even when the structure of the consultation does give the impression that it’s to gauge opinions and get feedback from residents, it’s often hard to judge what the city does with the information that it collects. An example is the tramway. STO held public consultations shortly after plans for the tramway were announced, and the events were well structured, collecting opinions and feedback in an organized way from those in attendance. Yet as the project solidified, there seemed to be no changes to the original preferred plans.
Going forward, it would help with public perception if the city published reports summarizing the information it collects at these public consultations, showing how it was taken into consideration, and justifying final decisions. This would need to be well promoted and made easily available in a prominent place on the City of Gatineau’s website. Transparency is key to avoiding a perception in our communities that public consultations are merely public relations exercises. Clearly showing that attending these events is a productive use of residents’ time would also help to increase turnout, and help to grow trust and confidence between the community and the city’s government.
Another example of previous attempts at community outreach was how municipal council meetings would occasionally be held outside of Old Hull, to give residents in the east and west of the city easier access to proceedings. This was a nice initiative, and usually had high turnout. However, the city has decided to discontinue this practice going forward. It is hard to tell if the council meetings held outside of downtown had a different audience than the regular council sessions. Topics at the Aylmer meeting earlier this year focused mostly on the environment, with few questions focusing specifically on western regions of the city. So if the meetings tend to be the same content regardless of where they’re held, the argument for having them in different parts of the city becomes somewhat less compelling. Yet any such decisions should be evidence based, with justifications published and clearly accessible.
Perhaps there are more appropriate alternatives to holding council meetings in different neighbourhoods. Do Aylmer councillors really need to be at meetings with residents in Buckingham, and vice-versa? Town hall meetings with the mayor and councillors of specific neighbourhoods might be more appropriate. These are common in the U.S., often used by senators and congressmen to interact with local communities. They can be more specifically tailored to concerns of the neighbourhood where they’re held, making them more appealing for local residents.
A Difficult Time for Restaurants and Bars
Over the last couple of weeks two pillars of the restaurant and bar scene in Gatineau have closed.
First was the British Pub, an anchor of Old Aylmer’s Rue Principale. Although the hotel and café will remain open for the present, the restaurant and bar services will be converted into an on-demand space for large events.
The pub has been a central stop for many looking to have dinner and a drink on Aylmer’s main street. The restoration of the building about 12 years ago also gave a dynamic energy to the commercial artery, allowing the development of many other interesting eateries and cafés. The painstaking care taken by the owner, Mike Clemann, to retain the atmosphere of the hotel throughout its 185 year history made it a testament to Aylmer’s rich past. Hopefully a way will be found to again make The British Public House a meeting place of choice for the community in the future.
The other major closure recently announced was the Brasseurs du Temps (aka BDT) in Hull. This establishment had kick-started a renaissance of microbreweries in Gatineau, of which Aylmer has shared with L’Autre Oeil and more recently 5e Baron. It was for years a favourite place for workers to go for a drink after leaving the office in Hull. The challenges faced by many establishments in Old Hull following the shift to telework was quite painful for Brasseurs du Temps, and the diversification of downtown to an attractive place for young professionals to live hasn’t happened fast enough to allow them to remain in business.
Yet the closing of the British Pub shows that the challenges faced by bars and restaurants run much deeper than the rapid transformation of city centres. Had Brasseurs du Temps moved to an area closer to where people live, such as Aylmer, Mont Bleu, or Pointe-Gatineau, it still would have been difficult to stay viable. A number of difficulties are facing such businesses. For BDT, one was staffing. In a tight labour market, many of the young people who traditionally would have gone to work in restaurants can now find less demanding jobs elsewhere doing office work. Increases in salaries, often necessary for workers given the explosion in the price of rent, have further squeezed the bottom lines of many bars and restaurants. Add to this the steep rise in the price of supplies given current rates of inflation, particularly for food, and owners find themselves with very difficult choices. They have to raise their own prices, but this encourages those who may have previously gone out for a meal to stay home and order a pizza instead, with the beer coming from the local convenience store. Many people are generally eating out less. High interest rates mean taking out short term loans is no longer viable, and high municipal tax rates on commercial real estate leave very little room to manoeuvre. These factors weighed on the British.
Sadly, this could be a harbinger of what’s to come, with many other businesses buckling under current economic headwinds.
The Value of Nurses and Teachers
The provincial government is entering a tense phase of its negotiations with a number of public sector unions, notably those representing nurses and teachers. Strikes are being scheduled and carried out, yet the government has repeatedly stated that it doesn’t have the means to meet the wage demands of workers, and is instead offering about 2% a year for the next five years, well below current levels of inflation.
Strikes by these workers will be very inconvenient for many citizens, and likely unpopular. Yet we should also look at the value these workers offer to society.
Let’s start with nurses and others working in the healthcare industry. During the years of the pandemic, Quebecers had to endure stringent lockdowns, the harshest in the country. Quebec was the only province to impose curfews on its citizens, forbidding them to leave their homes at night for non-essential tasks. In terms of generalized lockdowns during the day, Quebec was usually the first province to enact them, and among the last to lift them. It was the only province to require that stores like supermarkets close on Sundays for months at a time. And yet, Quebec had among the highest Covid fatality rates in the country, something that was attributed to the inability of the Quebec healthcare system to support the increased pressure caused by Covid illnesses. This was also used as justification for the province’s lockdown measures being stricter than elsewhere in the country. Add the loss of life from the virus to the added economic and mental health costs of stricter restrictions, and the price of ensuring that workers in the healthcare industry earn wages that are comparable to other other provinces or the private sector becomes relatively small. There will be other pandemics, and making sure that our healthcare system is up to the task and properly staffed is among the best ways we could spend our money.
Turning to teachers, the situation is dire. We’ve gotten to the point where the Quebec government now contents itself with seeking to have an “adult” in every classroom, regardless of qualifications, as stated during the summer by Education Minister Bernard Drainville. The importance of the work of teachers is well understood - strong grade school education has been shown to raise the lifetime earnings of students by more than 25%.
Given the value that both of these types of workers provide to society, and the critical staffing crisis that the government is already facing in these areas, do we really want to impose real wage cuts on these workers, with raise offers significantly lagging inflation? Or is this an area worth investing in to ensure that our society is ready for tomorrow’s challenges? Being stingy in these negotiations will get us painful strikes now, and significant vulnerabilities in Quebec society down the road. One of the reasons that nurses and teachers tend to earn far less than workers in other domains with similar levels of education is because they’ve traditionally avoided being confrontational in wage negotiations. Perhaps that’s now changing.
The High Price of Buying a Home
Housing is a source of financial stress that has had a very uneven impact on families’ budgets. For renters, it’s largely meant staying put as much as possible, with financial misery ensuing for those who have to find a new apartment. In terms of purchasing homes, many would-be home owners have simply been priced out of the market, and have given up on their dreams of owning property. Prices continue to climb, and when combined with higher interest rates on mortgages, the situation often becomes impossible.
Yet there are bits of good news. Construction of new housing units has picked up over the last couple of years, which should take at least some pressure off of prices. Still, a number of factors could weigh this down. Labour is ever harder to come by, and corresponding salary costs are substantially higher than in previous years. But far more challenging are interest rates. Developers usually borrow money from banks and investors to finance projects, repaying the loan and pocketing a profit after construction is completed and the homes are sold. However, higher interest rates and tighter access to credit mean that it’s harder for developers to turn a profit, and hence there’s less incentive for them to build new housing. Canada’s central bank, the Bank of Canada, has raised interest rates to slow down the economy, take pressure off of prices and thereby reduce inflation. But for housing, these factors mean higher interest rates could instead put upward pressure on prices.
Another aspect of home sales where changes may come is regarding how realtors collect their fees. A recent court verdict in the U.S. found that the National Association of Realtors and large brokerages conspired to keep the prices of home sales artificially high via locked-in commission rates even as home prices have exploded. Although it’s not yet clear how things will change in the U.S. following this verdict, one possibility is that realtor fees could move to a fixed-fee structure from the current 5% to 6% of the sale of a home. The current compensation structure has been hugely beneficial to realtors. The prices of home sales have roughly doubled in the last several years in many communities, as have realtors' commissions, despite their work staying largely the same. Currently in the U.S., the average home sale nets a realtor over $65,000. It is predicted that this could now fall by as much as half. How this could spill over into Canadian housing prices, where realtors' compensation structures are similar, remains to be seen.
What makes the price of housing such a tricky issue, though, is that current homeowners are quite happy to see the prices of their homes skyrocket. Who doesn’t like feeling richer with little effort? And this means that municipal politicians, those who have perhaps the most significant power to change the situation via permitting and approving regional development plans, have little incentive to act, as many voters are quite content with the current situation. Younger generations are, sadly, left out in the cold.
Managing Viruses
Another virus season is ramping up, including the flu, RSV and Covid. Yet as a society, what have we learned over the last four years? Months-long lockdowns would seemingly have taught us important lessons about how to prepare for pandemics, or at least how to better manage an average flu season.
Sadly, little has changed since 2019. Paid sick days seemed like an obvious step forward. By encouraging workers to stay home when they’re sick, everyone benefits, as colds, flu and Covid are less likely to be passed on to co-workers. It’s also better for business owners, as they’re less likely to see large numbers of their staff out sick at the same time, even if it’s unpaid. The federal government has implemented two weeks of paid sick leave for those fortunate enough to work under federal jurisdiction, such as in banks, railroads, large trucking companies or airlines. However, this covers only about 10% of workers. British Columbia mandated one week of paid sick leave in early 2022. Yet there’s been little movement in other provinces. Quebec has stuck with the two days it offered before Covid disrupted all of our lives. Doug Ford’s government eliminated mandatory paid sick leave in Ontario after coming to power, and after requiring three days of paid sick leave during the pandemic, eliminated that provision as well in March of this year. It’s incredible that something so logical attracts so little popular support.
Ideally, provinces would also have a comprehensive, evidence-based game plan for how to approach pandemics. Throughout 2020 and 2021, we saw a hodgepodge of measures implemented throughout the country, with each province going its own way. Yet either these individual measures were worthwhile or they weren’t. Did Quebec’s curfews, where we weren’t allowed to leave our homes after 8 p.m., help to reduce Covid transmissions? No other province implemented them, so it’s certainly something to investigate. Ontario implemented social bubbles to allow people to continue to see friends. Did this approach work, or did it result in more transmissions than Quebec’s stricter social isolating rules? The Maritimes completely cut themselves off from the rest of the country, making it extremely difficult for anyone to enter, even those who were only living outside the region temporarily. Covid transmission was initially low in the Maritimes, but looking at how they fared over the long term would be very helpful. Were the costs of these measures worthwhile, and how feasible would such measures be elsewhere? Quebec tried something similar, but it was much less organized, and in practice entering and exiting the province was still quite feasible. Perhaps most importantly, what were the costs and benefits of shutting our schools? The impacts of these measures on our children could be felt for the rest of their lives.
Without taking lessons from the Covid lockdowns and being more prepared, during the next pandemic we’re likely to find ourselves with a confusing and contradictory mix of policies and a general feeling of improvisation. And we’ll have no excuse.
October Editorials
Make the PublisSac better, don’t ban it
“Ad bags” are the poster-child for irresponsible marketing. Municipalities are BEING pressured to ban the bags to reduce waste. In Aylmer, the ad bags are too useful to get rid of. Why dismantle a system that works, when simple improvements can make a big difference.
The problems with the bag are that certain flyers are impossible to recycle or reuse if they are glossy. The bag itself is plastic, and thus is hard to recycle. Another problem is the mess caused in apartment building entrances when ad bags pile up in a disorderly way.
The Bulletin has been asking readers to reuse -- not recycle -- all the newsprint they receive at home. Reusing newsprint to wrap compost, for garden mulch, or to start fires is far more environmentally-responsible than pitching it into the blue bin. Blue bin contents get sorted and sent off to different countries for final treatment. Some recyclable waste is sold on a market (like newsprint), but some is treated as waste with no second life. All of this is an expense for our cities (read: taxpayers), which is supplemented by Quebec (pays back to cities a portion of the recycling deficit). Quebec City then requires paper producers, such as this newspaper, or companies that run flyers, to pay the Quebec government a flat rate on all newsprint that comes out of a print shop. So, the environmentally-responsible move on the part of cities and provinces would be merely to require all flyers to be easily compostable, as is newsprint.
It has been a long time since a tree was cut down to make newsprint, if that’s an issue for concerned readers. Newsprint is made of by-products from the lumber industry, which actually reduces waste in Quebec! And newspaper ink is vegetable-based, again environmentally less-damaging than the chemicals used in decades past. The bags themselves could BE vegetable-based, rather than plastic, and as for the messy entrance-ways, well some solution start at home.
In Outaouais, in Aylmer, folks are looking for more to read, not less. Around the Bulletin office, people can be seen reading flyers from front to back! They aren’t only looking for coupons or special deals. They are spending time reading something new. With newspapers inside, PubliSac is being used more for distributing information.
Knowing that many people wish to read more, but don’t have the habit -- or means -- to buy more magazines, books, and newspapers, promoting a ban on the ad bags borders on elitism.
How about putting the efforts to ban the bags towards improving them – and helping the Bulletin grow! -- by adding content to the ad bags?
A Supermarket for Old Hull
Gatineau’s downtown is a shell of what it should be. Many of the houses are in deplorable condition, with a number completely burnt-out following fire. Owners rent them out without maintaining them, waiting for prices to climb enough to make a substantial profit selling the land, which is then converted into condos.
Gatineau has been looking to revitalize downtown Hull for decades, with little success. In some ways the situation has gotten worse in recent years. The area was already largely a food desert, but the closing of Giant Tiger a few years ago removed one of the few options residents had for buying fresh produce. Many called for targeted municipal tax policies to encourage the opening of a grocery store, but this would require coordination with provincial legislators as well, due to restrictions the provincial government places on cities creating targeted tax measures. Yet there’s no shortage of options for junk food in Hull, from the many convenience stores to the McDonald’s, with a liquor store also in the area.
So, it’s certainly welcome news that a new grocery store is going to open in a central location in the area. Although details are still emerging as of the writing of this editorial, a COOP supermarket will be included in the new WEII building on the corner of Wellington and Eddy. This will be a major step forward in terms of normalizing Old Hull and making it a place where families and young professionals choose to live. It will also help to prevent most of the new condos and apartments being built from ending up as short-term rentals for tourists.
Yet more will clearly need to be done. Steve Moran, the councillor for the area, has a number of plans to help move things forward. The city has already established a policy of favouring buildings of 2 to 7 storeys in the region and created a grant program to help meet targets for density. There’s an argument that going higher than 7 floors isn’t possible due to infrastructure limitations. Any such limitations will need to be addressed in the coming years, especially if the federal government lets go of some of the offices it currently owns in the area, opening substantial space for new residences.
A new bylaw put in place in late 2021 requires that any requests for demolition be accompanied by plans for the construction of the building which will come after. This prevents owners from leaving lots vacant for long periods, but at the same time can mean that burnt out husks remain standing for longer. The city is also considering a vacant house tax, though no date has yet been set for when that might be implemented.
Most importantly of all, the city is prioritizing the creation of markets, parks, and better public transit to accelerate the transition away from heavy reliance on federal workers to support Old Hull’s economy by dining out for their lunches. The city’s success or failure will define Old Hull for generations to come.
Wasting Taxpayer Money
As taxpayers, we want money that we pay to our governments to be well spent, whether at the federal, provincial, or municipal levels. The municipal is in ways the most critical, as sources of funding and ability to borrow are more limited, services maintaining infrastructure touch residents directly, and the media pays comparatively little attention to how cities spend money, meaning less oversight than at the provincial and federal levels. An excellent example is Laval, where for almost 25 years Gilles Vaillancourt ran the city with next to no scrutiny, enriching himself freely in the process. In 2012 he was finally charged, and in 2016 he was convicted of corruption and fraud, sentenced to 6 years in jail and ordered to repay more than $8M in ill-gotten gains.
This is not to say that cities come under zero scrutiny. Recently a story ran in Le Droit showing that about $10M has been spent by Gatineau since 2016 on an accounting system that turned out to be largely ineffective. Called PIVO, this system was originally meant to be operational in 2018. Yet high staff turnover and unforeseen complexities of the project meant that this timeline proved to be completely unrealistic. After a series of attempts to salvage the project, it was officially suspended last year. Instead, an agreement was reached with the city of Levis to use the accounting software they had built, and where some of the work already done by Gatineau could be used to personalize Levis’ solution. Still, this came with an additional bill of over $8M.
The city has been as transparent as possible on this file, which is to the credit of town hall. And according to all indications everything was done in good faith. Yet from the beginning there wasn’t enough oversight, and the city doesn’t have a calculation of how much of the original $10M spent on PIVO is truly lost, versus how much can be considered salvageable for other projects.
Given that economic conditions will likely worsen over the coming years, including ever higher costs, the importance of doing as much with the money the city has will be greater than ever. Ensuring that the Office of the Auditor General of Gatineau has all of the tools necessary to thoroughly conduct its duties, and in a timely enough manner to head off waste before too much is lost, helps to substantially reduce risk. Having a strong and well-funded media that is focused on local governance is also essential, whether via private news sources like Le Droit and the Bulletin or public entities like the CBC and Radio Canada. Substantial cost overruns for the $100M Slush Puppy Arena were a reminder of how much is at stake. This translates to about $300 for every resident of Gatineau, be they adult or child. The cost estimates for the Lucy Faris library project in Aylmer are quickly rising from the previous calculations of about $50M. Careful validation of the details of expenditures on this project can help to avoid nasty surprises down the road.
Deschenes Rapids
The Québec Transport Ministry (MTQ) recently made clear their final decision regarding the Deschênes Rapids, that demolition of the dam is the only viable option they see. The government states that "too many accidents have happened at the site to continue to close their eyes”.
Built in 1880 to support the local sawmills, the dam generated electricity from 1893 that enabled the operation of a tramway, as well as providing lighting to both Aylmer and Hull.
The reasoning that they’re now too dangerous seems odd, as it's not clear what sort of accidents the government is referring to, and whether the removal of what's left of the rapids would have prevented these accidents. As per documents published by the Association of Residents of Deschênes, during the period from 2005 and 2015 the MTQ has previously made reference to 21 incidents near the dam, and 6 fatalities. Yet only a single incident from 2009 directly involved the dam site, and did not cause a fatality. The other incidents were closer to Ottawa, so it's hard to assert that things would have turned out differently had the dam not been in place.
And even without the dam, the currents will continue to be strong, and the area will be by no means safe. Opening it up to, say, kayaking may turn out to be a popular activity, but it will also almost certainly result in an increase in injuries and possibly even lead to fatalities.
These ruins are a unique echo of Aylmer's past, and a beautiful spot to watch the sun rise and enjoy nature. Although the impact of removing them isn't easy to fully grasp, the area is likely to lose some of its charm.
Yet more so, this seems like a waste of public money. The ruins have been vastly reduced in recent decades by the currents and weather. Comparing pictures from the 1990s and recent years, as shown below, makes it clear how little time nature is likely to allow the ruins to remain even if the government does nothing. Yet to remove them in one fell swoop now will require blocking the flow of water into the site so that the workers can accomplish their tasks, something that will be a complicated undertaking. Given the chronic underfunding of our health care and education systems, it's not hard to imagine a better use for this money. And of course, the Ministry of Transport could simply use this funding for maintenance of our highways, something that certainly needs doing.
The Strength of Aylmer's Main Street
Aylmer is quite fortunate to have one of the best collections of restaurants on a single street in the National Capital Region - our Rue Principale. From cafes to restaurants to specialty food shops, there’s a bit of everything dotted along our Main Street.
A certain amount of turnover is to be expected, yet it was very sad to see such excellent restaurants as Bistro Vitalia and, several years earlier, Le Maçon Pub close their doors. Now it’s the turn of L’Aubergiste. Yet a number of fine establishments remain, such as L’Antonyme, Bistro Mexicana, Lanterne De Szechwan and Beurre Salé. Establishments like the British Pub, L’Autre Oeil and Bambou also serve up creative and high quality meals. Plus we have options that serve up quick but tasty food and have become Aylmer institutions, such as Aylmer BBQ and a number of pizza restaurants. Add to that coffee shops like Mulligan, Sérénithé, Rio Açaí, La Femme à Marier and the British Café, and there’s no shortage of places to explore right here in our own neighbourhood. Businesses like the Deux Frères bakery, Cassis ice cream or the 5e Baron microbrewery add further charm.
In order to keep our Main Street vibrant, it’s money well spent to go out locally instead of heading for Ottawa’s Byward Market, Chinatown or Little Italy. Also, keeping in mind the proximity of shops like Béatrice et Chocolats, William J. Walter sausages and the Bouquinart bookstore when it comes time to buy a gift helps to ensure that our main commercial artery continues to thrive in the future.
There are also a number of educational facilities with interesting programs on offer, such as Sonart music school, Aylmer Jiu Jitsu, and LoulArt Fine Arts, with a variety of activities for kids in particular.
Aylmer is very fortunate not to suffer from the same challenges that afflict other regions of Gatineau - a spattering of shops here and there, but not enough to create a lively commercial centre. The vitality of Rue Principale has even spilled over further up Chemin d’Aylmer, offering even more nice places to visit like Chocolats Favoris, La Veille Alliance bakery, and Fleuriste Au Jardin De Sylvie among many others - even more impressive considering central Aylmer’s comparatively small population.
In addition to local residents, the municipal government has a role to play in maintaining the strength of Aylmer’s commercial artery. Working with APICA to ensure festivals are of the highest caliber would remind potential clients of how interesting shopping and dining on Principale can be. Recent editions of events like Festival du Vieux-Aylmer have had somewhat fewer tables and drawn smaller crowds than in previous years. Blocking off the street to cars for the day so that those visiting tables can freely skip between stalls has increased turnout in years past. Showing all of Gatineau and Ottawa how lovely it is to take in an evening at Aylmer’s marina and then walk over for supper at a nearby restaurant on Rue Principale would further help to ensure our local economy remains strong.
September Editorials
Life on the Street
Homelessness and drug abuse continue to surge in our downtown regions. The area around the Byward Market is experiencing a crisis like never before. Hull is also seeing a significant increase in the number of “tent cities”, especially close to the Ruisseau de la Brasserie.
The high cost of housing is often blamed for this, and it is certainly a major factor. There’s no question that we need to build more housing, and to do so in strategic locations. Old Hull is in major need of development, as large areas of it are still filled with dilapidated houses that, judging from the number that have burned out, are significant fire hazards. Subsidized housing is certainly essential in the short term, as well as more apartments in general to reduce leverage that landlords have to raise rent prices.
A major obstacle to building more housing is labour shortages in the construction industry. With many of the workers in this field set to retire in the coming years, this problem will only get worse. We’ll need to rely on immigration to fill this skills gap, and adjust our immigration system accordingly.
Yet there’s another major factor at play in the crisis of homelessness - the severity of a drug epidemic facing countries all over the world. Opioids like fentanyl are getting far more addictive each year, as nefarious innovations in chemistry make these drugs increasingly powerful. And all signs point towards this trend continuing in the future. As more people get hopelessly hooked on such powerful narcotics, it’s inevitable that they’ll end up living on the streets, as the drugs ravage both their bodies and minds.
The consequence is people barely holding on, living on the fringes of society, and dying on the streets. King Edward Street in Ottawa feels like it’s under siege, littered with syringes and people having psychotic episodes, many times due to the drugs they’re taking, and with no help available. The Chinese embassy’s office on that street has been occupied by the homeless, who have set up a camp on the roof of its garage. Residents are complaining about being afraid to go outside their doors at night. The shelters and other service centres concentrated in the area are completely overwhelmed, as are the police.
To address this huge challenge, we’ll need to look at housing and drug abuse as two factors contributing to the same crisis.
Coming up with specific solutions is a hugely complex problem. We need to develop a pharmaceutical drug to reduce the symptoms of withdrawals. This will not be easy, but as was demonstrated during the race for a Covid vaccine, with enough will, fast scientific progress is possible. We also could discuss offering alternative treatment centres to those suffering from addiction, for instance in more rural areas. Being treated in areas where drug use is rampant makes recovery that much more challenging for those seeking a way out. Being removed from such influences could be quite appealing, at least to those who are truly looking to save themselves.
An Adult in Every Classroom
The shortage of teachers facing Quebec is now excruciating. Education Minister Bernard Drainville made this abundantly clear by announcing that he had simply succeeded in arranging for an “adult” in every classroom. It’s incredible how much things have changed in recent years. Until about a decade ago teachers felt extremely lucky to find a permanent position in regions where they wanted to work, and would spend many years working as substitute teachers, waiting to finally land some job security.
The current situation is in many ways a vicious cycle, similar to that faced by nurses. The fewer teachers that there are, the greater the pressure and workload faced by those who are in the profession, and the higher the risk of burnout. More teachers quit, and the situation becomes increasingly difficult.
The system needs new approaches. The most obvious is making sure that those who Mr. Drainville refers to as simply “adults”, employees brought in to moderate classrooms and who don’t have a degree in education, get the support they need. Paying them to take courses on at least the basics of teaching the subjects for which they’re now responsible cannot wait. Having them figure out what to do while on the job and with very little training is a recipe for disaster. This could impact children for many years, as they miss out on quality learning during prime years of their development.
Formal support networks to assist these “adults” with advice, ideas for activities, or simply when they need someone to confide in would be quite helpful. These would also be very useful for newly graduated teachers in order to reduce burnout.
That said, the key component of any long term solution is salary. Although the average salary for teachers is about $80,000 per year, to reach such a level requires more than a decade of experience. Those starting out in the profession need to get by on about $50,000, the lowest pay for teachers in any province in the country.
Given that a degree in education takes an average of four years to complete, and that for at least the first decade the expected earnings will be on par with many careers that don’t require a degree, convincing students to enter a program in education is a hard sell.
As a society, we’ll have to decide how much education is truly worth to us. Educators from day care all the way to non-tenured professors at universities are paid substantially less than elsewhere. Their salaries are also lower than many professions with similar educational requirements, such as finance and engineering. Police and firefighters have fought hard for their pay, and now their salaries tend to also be significantly higher than those in education. Yet those who shape the minds of tomorrow’s leaders have an obvious value to society. Given that teaching tends to be staffed by far more women than men, addressing this deficiency in pay would also help to reduce wage inequality based on gender.
(Thanks to Brian Rock for insightful comments on this subject.)
Best Before Dates
Expiration dates on food have long been relied on to ensure that what we purchase is fresh. It’s often thought that eating food past its expiration date can make us sick as well. Yet these dates are often quite arbitrary, and can cause us to throw out perfectly good food, leading to substantially more waste for society. Even if portions of this waste are composted, there are substantial amounts that end up stuffing landfills and increasing methane emissions as they decompose, a powerful greenhouse gas. And given the huge jump in prices at supermarkets in recent years, we’re doing whatever we can to cut down on our grocery bills.
These dates are generally fixed by the manufacturer, with no outside oversight or regulatory guidance. According to researchers at Cornell University many foods don’t need expiration dates at all.
Expiration dates only became widespread in the 1970s, and were initially intended to signal to retailers when to rotate merchandise. They’re better described as a manufacturer’s estimate of when the food is at peak quality. Safety is only a factor for relatively few products such as meat and seafood. In the U.S., the only food whose expiration dates are regulated is baby formula.
Risks of food poisoning come more from how food is stored and inadequate refrigeration, factors that are completely separate from expiration dates. With the exception of meat and seafood, unless there’s mold forming, older food is unlikely to be dangerous even if it tastes bad.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that almost a third of food produced goes uneaten. Retailers in the U.S. throw out more than 40 billion pounds of food every year, with consumers throwing out nearly twice that. ReFED, a non-profit which aims to reduce food waste, estimates that about 7 billion pounds of food waste is due to discarding perfectly good food with expired best-before dates.
The U.K. has been working to reduce food waste for the last 15 years. The British are one of the first governments in the world to standardize how expiration dates are calculated, and have pushed education campaigns to teach people how to know when it’s truly time to throw away food. The largest grocery chains in Britain have also stopped allowing expiration dates for a variety of foods, in particular produce. Studies have found that food waste in landfills dropped almost 20% following the implementation of this initiative.
Given recent spikes in poverty and homelessness, at the very least we could start a campaign to encourage stores to donate edible products with expired best-before dates to food banks and other charities. As a society we’re producing more than enough food. The idea that filling our cupboards and fridges is breaking bank accounts of many poorer families is completely unjustifiable, especially if almost a third of food is ending up in the garbage anyway. Doing more with what we have benefits everyone, and cutting down on waste goes a long way in protecting the environment.
Predicting the Weather
Weather forecasts are the type of news that people tend to check more than anything else. Everyone wants to know if it will rain later in the day. Yet forecasts are also often wrong, especially when it comes to predicting rain or snow. Meteorologists are quite clear up front about the possibility for error - when it comes to precipitation, they talk about probabilities, not certainty. Predicting a 30% chance of rain (i.e. likely dry weather) means they expect to be wrong one time in three. And this is assuming that the likelihoods they publish are even accurate to start with.
Yet given modern technological advances, it’s surprising that people are willing to put up with so much uncertainty. Airlines would love it if flyers were so forgiving of errors on their parts. Yet any airline that cancels a flight one time in three is unlikely to last the year.
In the end, weather forecasts are based on models that rely on large amounts of data. This information is usually collected via ships, balloons and satellites, in addition to weather stations, often located near airports.
Forecasts have certainly improved over the decades. According to the National Weather Service in the U.S., today’s two day forecast for heavy rain is as accurate as the same day forecast was thirty years ago.
Yet some forecasts are better than others. European weather forecasting has consistently been shown to be more accurate than American versions. The reason is simple - the Europeans use a better simulation system with more data. They also use more powerful computing hardware. In other words, the Europeans have invested more money to have higher quality forecasting.
In Canada, making accurate weather forecasts is more challenging than in other parts of the world. Weather systems across the country are all interconnected, including those in the sparsely populated north. Yet it’s more difficult and expensive to collect weather data in regions that are far from populated areas. Canada’a weather stations are mostly concentrated in southern regions of the country, meaning that data quality farther north is more sparse and less detailed. The U.S. and Europe have the advantage of denser populations, making it easier to collect data by leveraging pre-existing infrastructure like airports.
Still, improving our weather predictions is completely possible. It just takes a push within society, and people showing that more accurate forecasts are important to them. It’s certainly nice to be able to better plan an outdoor event, but the benefits are even more tangible for those running construction projects. And most importantly of all, being able to better predict hurricanes and other extreme weather events would save lives. Although Gatineau and Ottawa don’t have to face major tropical storms, we’ve been lucky that there have thus far not been any deaths from tornadoes and extreme winds. Coastal regions are far more at risk. Having a better handle on extreme weather conditions would give people more time to prepare, whether it’s securing their property or escaping from harm’s way. This would certainly be money well spent.
August Editorials
Trusting Hydro Québec
Aylmer recently suffered yet another major wind storm, which ripped down a number of streets in the older part of the city, uprooting or snapping large trees along Foran and Broad street, among several others.
Extreme weather events are becoming very common, and this was the second time this year that residents were without power for a period of several days. The wind damage was extensive, but many residents were left wondering if we’re properly prepared for such situations in the future.
Old growth trees make older parts of Aylmer quite beautiful, lining our streets and giving us welcome shade in our backyards. Yet many of these trees lean heavily on power lines. Even for Hydro Québec, it’s difficult to judge the extent of the risks caused by branches, since most power lines run out of sight through people’s backyards instead of along the streets. This makes our streets much prettier and less cluttered, but when unkempt branches take out a main power line in someone’s backyard it can leave hundreds of neighbours in the dark.
The obvious solution to this is more maintenance. At a minimum, Hydro Québec should come and remove any branches that residents notice are dangerously close to power lines on their property. Yet they have a policy of only pruning a particular yard once every four to six years. Concerned citizens are told that if they want branches removed more often, they have to contact a private contractor and foot the bill themselves. Even if some virtuous members of our community do so, should a branch fall in one of their neighbours’ yards they could still find themselves in the dark plus feeling extremely frustrated.
Although trimming branches wouldn’t have saved the sections of power lines taken out by fallen trees in late July, it would surely have lightened the workload of the employees striving to get our power restored, and shortened the length of the power interruption.
Yet the response of Hydro Québec was frustrating on many other levels as well. They had said that over 20 teams had been mobilized to restore power, yet by the end of the second day after the storm and with over 200 homes in a single grid still waiting for their electricity to come back on, only a single team was working. It took 12 more hours for those 200 homes to get their lights back on.
Lastly, an important part of Quebec’s green strategy is to get more homes to switch from heating their homes with natural gas to using electricity. With so many power interruptions and with them lasting for so long, this is becoming a tough sell. At least with natural gas our homes won’t freeze during the next mid-winter ice storm, and we’ll be able to enjoy a hot shower even if we won’t have a warm dinner. Hydro Québec will have to earn our trust for us to become so dependent on them. At the very least, we should all give them a call to let them know they need to do better. Their number is (888) 385-7252.
Climate Depression
It’s been a wild year in terms of weather and natural disasters. We’ve seen floods and fires across the country, record heat across the northern hemisphere, and tornados and major wind storms across the Ottawa valley. The media is quick to point towards climate change as the cause, and an overwhelming body of evidence does of course point to our air pollutants raising the world’s temperatures and making extreme weather events more common. The flip side to this is that our actions do have impacts, no matter how small.
What’s frustrating about media coverage of the natural disasters lately is that it really does feel like doom and gloom. There’s often no mention of how we can each make a slight impact on the situation. As we read about how challenging the future will be, it can be therapeutic to know that we’re at least doing our part, making a few small sacrifices along the way.
There are the commonly known solutions, such as switching to an electric car anywhere where electricity is not generated using fossil fuels, or just carpooling to work, driving less or driving a smaller vehicle. We can take fewer flights, booking a single longer vacation instead of several short ones if possible. And of course, we can try to reduce energy consumption in our homes by upgrading windows or making sure that any new appliances we buy have maximum energy efficiency.
Yet there are a number of other, less known solutions too. We can make sure that air conditioners don’t contain hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. Such refrigerants cause far more global warming per kilo than carbon dioxide. Sadly, only newer units have moved away from these HFCs. Even more problematic, much of the electricity used to keep air conditioners around the world working comes from fossil fuels. As the world heats up, people run their air conditioners more, and this in turn heats the world faster. Given that air conditioners transfer heat from inside to outside, and that most people live in cities, this causes urban areas to experience even more stifling heat. More subsidies could help people transition to modern and energy-efficient air conditioners, with less impact on the environment.
Office buildings could also look to moderate their use of air conditioners. On a hot day, many people can find it chilly in the office, something excessive to put it mildly. Installing thermal curtains or even closing curtains when the sun is shining from that direction can also reduce the need to jack up the air conditioning. Maintaining indoor temperatures at around 25 degrees makes for healthy living spaces that don’t consume excessive energy and create unnecessary impacts on the local environment.
Planting more trees is also a very cost effective way to reduce hot spots in cities. Many areas of new construction tend to tear down old growth trees and plant new ones, meaning it will be decades before residents can enjoy cooling effects from today’s saplings.
Hollywood and Old Men
Hollywood has never tried to be a true reflection of our societies and cultures. It’s an escape, a way to enjoy a fanciful story for a few hours. Although the shift to superhero movies has made this ever more true, it was always the case.
New trends in movies have made it harder for actors to establish themselves as superstars. These days people go to the movies to see characters, as opposed to the star of the film. Given that many of these characters wear masks, it makes it even harder for the leading actors to make a deep connection with the audience.
That’s not to say that there are no more names that draw large audiences. It’s just that almost all of these actors made their names in the 20th century, and are now nearing or well past the age when most people retire. This summer’s movie selection has shown this very clearly. The biggest productions starred 60 year old Tom Cruise and 80 year old Harrison Ford. Other seniors headlining major movies included Denzel Washington, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Pierce Brosnan. Although the headline-grabbing leading man still exists, he is aging.
It’s also very accurate to describe these people as leading men. Hollywood has always had a blatant double standard when it comes to men versus women. The former become mature and distinguished, while the latter become yesterday’s news. As the distinguished push 80, the hypocrisy is now a bit galling. We often speak of gender equality, yet our entertainment industry still expects women to have youthful sex appeal, with the only option for staying in the spotlight being to undergo extensive plastic surgery.
Yet the world created by Hollywood is not only devoid of older women. Also missing are body types that fall outside of the mold they promote as attractive. Seeing a movie set in New York gives a very different image of the city compared to what you'd see walking around its actual streets. And this isn’t just limited to action movies, which are easily dismissible as shallow. It extends into independent films as well, those that pride themselves on their creativity and artistic value.
Ethnic minorities are faring better than they used to in terms of roles in the film industry, but they’re still far from a representation equal to their proportions in our society as a whole. Yet the progress made on this front shows that change is indeed possible.
In the end, Hollywood, like most industries, will follow the money. As long as audiences turn out in sufficient numbers to take in the usual offerings, little will change. Movies and television series are meant to be a relief from daily struggles and headaches, and if they deliver on this, they’re still serving their main purpose. Yet we shouldn’t underestimate the potential for psychological damage that their warped visions of society present. In particular to women, who may develop an irrational fear of aging, a risk that men aren’t as likely to run.
Lead Contamination
In the U.S., stories have recently broken about lead contamination in the environment caused by decaying telecommunication cables used by phone companies decades ago. These were installed mostly by AT&T and Verizon from the late 1800s to the 1960s. Hundreds run through bodies of water contributing to drinking water supply, and have contaminated soil near hundreds of schools.
A similar investigation has yet to be done in Canada, but it’s likely that practices in the U.S. were also used here. Still, such cables, which haven’t been rigorously monitored previously, are far from being the most dangerous source of lead contamination. A bigger concern is lead piping. In theory tap water is fine to drink, but measurements of the quality of water are often taken at the source. The problem is the piping infrastructure used to deliver it to our homes. Lead wasn’t banned in pipes in Canada until 1975. This means that houses built before that time likely have lead piping connecting them to the main water supply. A study conducted by The Associated Press and Concordia University in 2019 found hundreds of thousands of Canadians have lead exposure in their drinking water that far exceeds normal safety standards.
People often avoid drinking directly from the tap by buying bottled water. However, for older homes the problem doesn’t stop there. What about brewing a coffee or making tea? And boiling water for cooking pasta or rice?
Luckily, testing water is easy. Home testing kits are readily available in hardware stores and online.
The question then becomes how much are we willing to spend to redo our cities’ water networks? In Montreal, about a third of water flowing through the drinking water system is lost to leaks, showing that problems with pipes extend beyond health and into environmental impacts as well.
Fixing the problem will bring substantial inconveniences as well as costs. This will involve tearing up roads and yards all over our cities. Yet the urgency of acting is only growing with time, as the pipes degrade further each year, releasing more lead and losing more water to leaking. We rid ourselves of lead paint and gasoline decades ago, something relatively easy. Lead pipes are more out of sight, and hence out of mind. Still, what we don’t see can and is hurting us, especially our kids, as lead’s worst impacts are on children’s development.
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The editorial in this space from three weeks ago on the reliability of Hydro Québec is still getting feedback. A number of people said that gas heating systems need electricity to operate, so they aren’t more reliable when the power goes out. This is true for many set ups, but homeowners experiencing frequent blackouts can simply install a home generator to power their gas furnaces when the lights are out. Gas heating stoves can work without electricity. Also, the point was not that gas heating is preferable, but that until our electricity grid is more reliable, converting to electric heat can be a tough sell.
July Editorials
Google and Facebook's Media Boycott
The dire straits in which traditional media outlets find themselves are well known. Many media outlets have been scaling down their operations for some time.
Across the world societies and governments are searching for a solution. Canada has recently made headlines by passing a law that requires Google and Facebook to compensate media outlets when they share their content. These internet giants responded by leveraging their substantial weight, announcing that going forward they will disallow the sharing of media news content in Canada.
Yet the Canadian initiative was modelled after a law passed in Australia in 2021. There again, Facebook (briefly) disallowed the sharing of news items from media outlets, before reconsidering when they reached a deal with the Australian government allowing them to choose which news outlets were shared on their networks. Facebook argued that this was a safeguard against abuse by predatory outlets looking to game the system by sharing what could be links to frivolous stories in order to extract payments from Facebook. The deal with the Australian government also gave Facebook a transition period to work out compensation deals with news outlets before being sent for binding arbitration with a neutral third party.
Interestingly, Google, which has gone so far as to remove all links to Canadian news sites from its search results, never enacted such a boycott in Australia. The details of how the Australian deal works in practice have been criticized as opaque, so it’s hard to determine why Google decided to live with the Australian rule but remove all news contents from Canadian media sources instead of abiding by our own regulations. Google has, however, publicly argued that the Canadian law is broader than the Australian version. They worry that it requires financially compensating news outlets for merely displaying their links in search results, requirements which they say can even extend to outlets that do not produce original content. Yet at least on the surface the Australian regulations have the same requirements. It will be interesting to see if further reasons are given by Google to explain their actions in Canada, or if this will simply be a double standard.
In the end, however, Canada and Australia are both minnows to the tech giants. A true game changer would be the European Union, which accounts for about a quarter of their revenue. And the EU has been exploring whether to enact similar legislation to that piloted by Australia. For Facebook, the likely outcome of banning traditional news on their sites will be an even greater proliferation of fake news stories and gossip. Yet if people continue to use their networks this may not cost them much in terms of revenue. For Google, the stakes are far higher. Most of their revenue comes from ads on their search engine, and people use it because it helps them to find what they need. If that is no longer the case, people might start to switch to one of the numerous but often forgotten competitors. They wouldn’t be the first monopoly to fall.
Urbanization Plan for the Long Term
Gatineau has become the most expensive city in Quebec in terms of renting an apartment. At the beginning of 2023 it cost $1,721 on average to rent a place with a single bedroom, and $1,831 for two bedrooms, according to Rentals.ca. With an average gross salary of about $54,000 in the region, this is about 40% of before-tax income, and almost two-thirds of take-home income. To be in a stable financial position your rent shouldn’t exceed a third of your after-tax income.
Obviously, low income households find themselves in excruciating situations, and will likely be priced out of the region. But the pain extends even to those who are lucky enough to have reasonably paying jobs.
One of the main reasons for Gatineau’s exceptionally high rental costs is its low vacancy rate. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that at the beginning of 2023 the percentage of apartments that were available to rent in Gatineau had fallen from 1.1% to 0.8%. This compares with 2.1% for Ottawa, and is far lower than the 3% to 5% vacancy rates needed for a healthy rental market.
With such a shortage of housing, Gatineau finds itself with competing priorities that are very hard to reconcile.
On the one hand, increasing the supply of housing, and especially rental units, is critical. Some good news on this front is that developers seem to have switched from building condo units to instead focusing on rental complexes.
On the other hand, infrastructure is stretched very thin, and residents are understandably uncomfortable to see yet more housing units being built in their neighbourhoods, with roads already jammed and schools bursting at the seams.
A first step should be further developing Old Hull. There are a number of dilapidated or outright fire-ravaged buildings decaying in the core of the city, and implementing an empty house tax to force owners to make use of their properties would help to move things in the right direction. Once Old Hull has reached its full potential, something not seen in many decades, it would be easier to justify development farther out in places like Aylmer. This would also give the city time to develop the infrastructure needed to support a greater number of residents.
The city also needs to articulate a clear urbanization plan for the long term. Action Gatineau has proposed a moratorium on new construction in the west of Gatineau until infrastructure is adequate. They have also cited an IRIS study saying that Gatineau’s needs aren’t for rental units in general, but for low-rent subsidized units. Given the rock-bottom vacancy rates and sky high costs of renting in Gatineau, they’ll need to give clear explanations of how their positions make sense. They’ll also need to explain why they’ve now taken a position which goes so much against their approach of quickly developing the west of Gatineau during the eight years they held the mayor’s office. Otherwise, their position could be seen as largely political, and given their influence, wouldn’t help us towards a coherent long term plan for the city.
The Price of Cars
The car industry has been in turmoil since the beginning of global lockdowns in 2020. More than three years since supply chains were turned on their heads, dealer inventories are on average less than half what they were in 2019. This has translated to much higher prices for consumers, up more than 30% over that same period.
Given a continuing shortage of components and much higher costs of materials compared to 4 years ago, manufacturers have doubled down on their most profitable models, such as large SUVs and trucks. More economic models are produced less and harder to come by. Higher interest rates also mean that taking out a loan when purchasing a vehicle adds even more to the total cost. With many of the most popular models also requiring waiting periods that can stretch for years, buyers are often willing and even eager to pay thousands of dollars above the sticker price to get their preferred vehicle in the foreseeable future. Electric vehicles tend to command the highest price premiums of all.
For the moment, the auto industry is enjoying fat margins and has shown little interest in flooding the market with vehicles and engaging in price wars as they did in the 2010s. The used car market has followed suit, also raising prices substantially. At times prices for second hand cars are even more than the recommended price for a new one, largely due to the new ones being so hard to come by.
One solution is to hold onto vehicles longer. If fewer people are looking to upgrade, dealers will have less leverage to jack up prices. At the very least cars could stop selling for amounts over sticker prices.
Yet many of these older vehicles run on gasoline, and transitioning to an electric vehicle is a key part of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Governments have already been offering subsidies and rebates to encourage people to drive EVs, but when subsidies end up simply compensating consumers for inflated prices they have fewer incentives to choose an electric car.
There are no easy solutions, but it’s worth accounting for the environmental impacts of producing electric vehicles. Batteries alone require components that are difficult to mine and extract, such as lithium and cobalt. Electric vehicles certainly present many environmental advantages over newly produced gas-powered SUVs and trucks, but the calculation becomes much more complicated when compared to scenarios where people hold onto their old vehicles for longer, eliminating the environmental costs of production.
If the auto industry continues to keep prices unreasonably high, the end result could be a switch away from our habits of upgrading our cars as often as we do. Although the average age of a car in Canada is around 10 years, dealers rely on those customers who upgrade much more frequently. If fewer people are eager to buy the latest models, the industry could find itself in a difficult position, needing to lower prices while still selling fewer vehicles than in the past.
Who Really Owns a Company
The world’s richest people have been finding ways around financial rules since financial rules have existed. Although the playing field will likely never be completely levelled, at the very least the situation can be improved. A key factor is transparency. If we don’t know who’s doing what, we have very little chance of enforcing rules at all.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our country’s ensuing efforts to sanction and seize Russian assets showed Canadian regulators how little information they actually had on true ownership of companies and other property. Beyond business ownership, these assets can include stocks and mansions in our poshest neighbourhoods. Layers of front companies and accounting tricks made tracing true ownership extremely difficult. This allows shadowy individuals to launder proceeds from crime or to simply avoid tax.
Such a lack of information on ownership is a serious problem on many levels. Sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was found to be a non-controlling, minority shareholder in the Austrian parent firm Strabag SE. This company is working on subway projects in Toronto which are in line to receive funding from the federal government as well as that of Ontario. Someone who is being sanctioned by the government while benefiting even indirectly from public money is a contradictory situation at best.
For governments, foreign investment is always tempting, even when its origins are murky. Inflows of cash that lead to more job creation within Canada can be hard to see as anything but positive. Yet efforts to sanction wealthy Russians have now led the federal government to work with provinces to require that companies supply accurate and timely corporate ownership information. A federal registry mandating the disclosure of this information should be operational by the end of the year, described as a “public and searchable beneficial ownership registry”. Although similar information was already available for publicly traded companies, this will extend the reach of such requirements to all federally regulated firms.
As with all regulations, the test of how effective rules are will be in the enforcement. Penalties will have to be high enough to truly incentivize companies to provide the necessary information, especially those that have something to hide. Provinces will also need to provide information on their side. This is particularly important given that most businesses in Canada are provincially regulated, and hence fall outside of the federal government’s new requirements. Quebec and British Columbia have already tabled similar requirements to the federal proposals. For us to see widespread improvement Ontario must also get on board. Provincial information should also be contained in the federal database to make life as easy as possible for regulators, investigators and researchers.
Unfortunately, real estate registries will take longer to establish. Given how overpriced real estate has become in Canada, extending regulation to include houses might take a bit of pressure off of skyrocketing prices for purchasing a home if it keeps shady foreign money out. At the very least, it would be nice to know that houses in our neighbourhoods aren’t in fact owned by foreign warlords or drug traffickers.
June Editorials
Lucy Farris Library
The site of the previous Lucy Farris library has sat as a vacant pit for nearly two years. The previous administration of Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin insisted on demolishing the old building before handing over power in 2021. This demolition seemed rushed for several reasons.
First and foremost, even at that time the earliest starting date foreseen for construction of the new building was several years away.
Secondly, the firm responsible for the demolition seemed unprepared, with an incomplete understanding of the structure. Reports commissioned by the city from Genivar/WSP Global in previous years showed that although the building was stable, care had to be taken with the structure until it was brought up to code at a cost of about $4M as of 2008. Instead, the demolition proceeded without consideration for the building’s structural weaknesses, and as a consequence the front facade collapsed onto the sidewalk of Aylmer’s main street during high winds. Only luck avoided someone being killed, as it happened at night when no one was walking past.
Additionally, the precipitous demolition meant that the city had to move the library over to Gallery Aylmer earlier, along with the associated additional costs.
Regardless of the reasons for how the previous administration handled the file, the current council is responsible for ensuring that the project is completed efficiently and in the best interests of taxpayers and residents. A $42M contract was recently awarded to Pomerleau and is an important step in this direction, as it puts environmental concerns front and centre. The objective is to achieve a silver designation according to the LEED v4 criteria for building design and construction, aiming to reduce energy consumption by about a quarter compared to traditional buildings. Natural light and air quality will also be prioritized. Outdoor spaces will be accessible from within the building, including rooftop patios. Associated green spaces will also be of indigenous plants to avoid excess irrigation.
Important next steps include determining how the space in the library will be used. Aylmer has a severe lack of community space, and the new building will bring the Lucy Farris library down from the previous 5 floors to 3. Hopefully the new building will prioritize shared areas for community events or collaborative work spaces over rows of books. In our modern age, books can easily be browsed using electronic devices, negating the need to have thousands of books available to peruse physically. A requested book can then be ordered and brought to the borrower from a storage facility, a technique used by modern libraries around the world including the University of Chicago. It will also be important to determine what will happen if the project goes significantly over budget, as was the case with the Slush Puppy Arena, and how accessible Parc commémoratif will be during the construction phase.
Given the previous administration’s insistence on building a new library at a price nearly ten times what it would have cost to renovate the old structure, it’s good news that the current council is making this file a priority.
Being Proactive with Nature
We’re not even halfway through 2023, and it’s already been a wild ride. After starting the spring with floods, we’ve now seen some of the worst wildfires in memory, especially this early in the season. With climate change being identified as the reason, it gives critical momentum to spur changes in our behaviour, pushing us to further focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Still, as important as it is to reduce pollution, we also need to be far more proactive in preparing for the worst consequences of natural disasters.
In terms of flooding, we’ve now had three “floods of the century” in less than a decade. The time of approving traditional housing projects in areas prone to floods must come to an end. Canada has anything but a shortage of space, and building along waterways is not necessary. However, for those who would like a view of a river, options certainly exist. Around the world, houses have been built in flood zones since time immemorial. The difference is that it’s done with a clear understanding of the risks and requirements. A common approach is to build these houses on stilts. Although such homes would look out of place here in Canada, those looking for a waterside view will need to ask themselves which they prefer - not having a basement, or dealing with substantial water damage every couple of years.
In terms of fires, they’re sadly nothing new. Data going back more than a few decades are scarce, but some records do exist. In 1825 the summer and fall were especially hot, and Canada saw one of the largest wildfires in history tear through New Brunswick, destroying 1/3 of Fredericton, and consuming about 20% of the province’s forests.
We’ve been lucky that in recent decades improved fire-fighting technology and techniques have made devastating wildfires relatively rare, but as we’ve seen this year, we can’t afford to be caught unprepared. Although smokey air is certainly unpleasant and a health hazard, Quebec has been lucky in that the fires have burned mostly in the north and haven’t ravaged any large communities thus far. We may not be so fortunate in the future.
There are again things that we can do to be prepared. Reducing what’s known as the fuel load in areas around towns and cities is critical. One way to do so is through “cultural burning” around populated areas during periods of low risk in terms of fires spreading. Indigenous communities have been doing this for many centuries. By eliminating potential fire fuel, the risk that an uncontrolled fire crosses over from a forest to a town is much lower. A thirty metre band would likely be enough. Using stucco, brick or concrete to build houses also makes them more fire resistant. This would again be a departure from what’s considered a “normal” Canadian home design, but the benefits from being proactive could save many rural and suburban homes in the years to come.
Instagram and the Dissemination of Child Sexual Abuse Content
A recent exposé on how Instagram connects and even promotes vast pedophile networks, by Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt of the Wall Street Journal, is quite shocking. Instagram accounts devoted to the creation and sale of child sexual abuse content are promoted by algorithms designed to show users whatever content will keep them perusing the app.
Many pedophile accounts make no secret about their intentions, using hashtags such as #preteensex and #pedobait. These accounts claim to be run by the children themselves, using sexual expletives to describe themselves. Although they usually don’t offer to sell child sexual abuse content material directly, they offer “menus” of content, and options to commission certain acts. These menus offer prices for videos of children harming themselves, engaging in sexual activity, and for in-person “meet-ups”. Most horrifically, depending on their history, Instagram has recommended certain users search for terms clearly associated with sexual abuse of minors, and that potentially pedophilic adults connect with each other.
Accounts with material sexually exploiting minors clearly violate both American and Canadian laws, as well as Meta’s own rules. Meta has acknowledged problems with its enforcement, and has put together a task force to address the promotion of child sexual abuse content on its networks. It has removed 27 pedophile networks in the last two years, and after questions were raised it has blocked thousands of hashtags that sexualize children, some with millions of posts. It said that it has now restricted its systems from recommending searches for terms known to be linked to sex abuse, and that it is ending recommendations that potential pedophiles interact with each other. Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, run by Alex Stamos, who was Meta’s chief security officer until 2018, is also pressuring Meta to be more proactive in cracking down on the sharing of child sexual abuse content.
Test accounts set up by researchers that viewed a single account in an identified pedophile network immediately received “suggested for you” recommendations leading to purported child sexual abuse content vendors, both on the Instagram platform and outside it. Following a few of those recommendations resulted in the test account being flooded with material that sexualizes children.
Millions of accounts are estimated to exist within pedophile networks on Instagram. Yet Meta has throughout its history prioritized growth, lacking guardrails to keep the platform at least nominally safe.
Instagram has in the past allowed users to search for terms that it knew could be associated with illicit material. Users would get a pop-up warning that “these results may contain images of child sexual abuse” that could cause “extreme harm” to children. The screen offered two options for users: “Get resources” for confidential help, or damningly, “See results anyway”. Following public outcries, Meta has said that the latter option was removed.
Given the culture of promoting growth above all else at Meta and other social media companies, it’s clear that they can’t be relied upon to police themselves. At an absolute minimum, laws need to be passed to make those in charge of such companies criminally responsible for promoting child sexual abuse content on their networks.
Ian Barrett
Houses vs. Condos
As a society, we find ourselves at a crossroads. On the one hand, we’re more aware than ever of our responsibility to live sustainably, not just in terms of reducing green house gases, but also creating less garbage and maintaining natural environments, among many other concerns. On the other, improvements in productivity over the last several decades have allowed us to consume more than ever, to fly far more often, and to drive ever bigger cars. Generally the economy has followed what consumers want, with environmental concerns taking a back seat.
There’s one area where policy makers and developers have quietly diverged from what people are looking for, however - housing. And it’s a global phenomenon. The speed of zoning to create housing projects has resulted in new home construction lagging far behind population growth in most Western cities, causing home prices to sky rocket. And those being built tend to be condos, despite many younger families yearning for single-family homes with a back yard where they can more comfortably raise a family.
The reasons for the preference for condos by cities and developers are well known. The cost per unit is obviously less than that of a single-family dwelling. Yet the sale price for the entire development is much higher. And cities collect more in total taxes from areas made up of condos than those of single family homes.
Yet in an age when the auto industry still encourages people to drive large vehicles and airlines push potential customers to take short vacations in the Caribbean, is it fair that we end up in a society where only the very well off can afford a spacious home with a back yard? In some cities around the world this is inevitable, as space is in very short supply. Here in Canada, however, this is hardly the case.
Building new houses will necessarily mean the destruction of natural environments. Sadly, this is likely the price to pay for a growing population that will support our social safety nets in the decades to come. We will also have to find ways to reduce the costs of building these new homes. There’s a clear shortage of labour for less skilled positions in construction that causes costs to soar. One solution would be partially shifting the immigration system, currently geared towards high-skilled applicants, to allow more people to come to Canada to build our homes as well.
Modern technology offers us more agility than ever, especially in terms of telework. Enabling more young families to move to villages where houses are cheaper would also help create a fairer society for future generations, giving them access to the same amount of space as was available to their parents and grandparents.
The challenge that we face is that current homeowners vote, which is clearly not the case for those who have been kept out of a community by the high prices of housing. So housing concerns tend to be lower on the political agenda. The status quo, although deeply unfair, will be hard to change.
Ian Barrett
May Editorials
The High Cost of Living
Inflation has long been a major concern for society, not only because of the obvious impacts it has on people’s well being, but also because of other distortionary impacts that are less direct.
One such impact that we see from inflation is more discontent from workers as wages fail to keep pace with rising prices. The last time that we saw long periods of high inflation was in the 1970s and the first part of the 1980s, and this coincided with periods of frequent strikes by a number of unions. Workers get frustrated as their paychecks are stretched thinner each month. Yet economists and pundits in the media often say that giving raises will only fuel inflation even further, so employers must toe the line and avoid giving wage hikes to workers that would then be passed on as price increases to consumers.
However, it’s also worth looking at what’s happening when employees’ raises significantly lag price increases. If price increases are instead being used to increase profit margins, we are instead witnessing an increase in inequality. And if workers obtain raises that are still modest enough to only cut into a portion of those increased profits, the money to fund those raises doesn’t need to come from price increases at all.
Years of high inflation in food and housing that aren’t accompanied by enough wage gains can leave us with ever greater inequality, which in turn leads to more pressure on social assistance programs such as subsidized housing and food banks. And again, we’ll likely face additional strikes from workers who are fortunate enough to belong to a union. Workers who are unrepresented and lack job security will mostly suffer in silence, with their only option to avoid becoming poorer being to switch jobs and work elsewhere.
In terms of public finances, different levels of government can face vastly different challenges. Since early 2022, annual price increases have averaged anywhere from 5% to 8%, while salary increases were estimated to be a bit more than 4%. Since the federal and provincial governments collect most of their revenue as percentages of salaries and purchases via income and sales taxes, these revenues tend to rise with inflation, reducing its impacts on public finances. Municipal revenue is quite a different story, though. Municipal tax increases are set each year. In years of low inflation they generally tend to increase a bit faster than prices. When inflation and increases in costs are high, however, it can be a very different story. Increasing property taxes by 8% would be a very tough sell politically.
Moreover, newer residents will bear a higher tax burden than people who have been in their houses for years. Valuations on properties don’t tend to change substantially until they’re sold, and usually match the selling price. When house prices have been rising quickly, as in the last several years, a new resident could see their home valued at nearly twice their neighbour, even though the houses are very similar. And they will then see a much higher property tax bill each year.
Remote Work (1)
Telework has again been a topic of conversation these last few weeks. On the one hand, a number of unions have been fighting to have more protections against employers arbitrarily denying an employee’s telework request. On the other, major employers like the Royal Bank of Canada have been speaking out against telework, saying that they feel employees are more productive in an office setting.
It’s been over three years since the Covid lockdowns caused widespread closure of offices, and since then some studies on the effectiveness of telework have emerged. Many limited themselves to comparing working full time from the office to working completely remotely. So the lessons aren’t easily applied to the current trend of hybrid proposals, where employees work about half their time from the office. Still, there are a few points that are applicable across the board.
A study from the University of Stanford shows higher productivity working from home. Yet this is mostly from surveying employees, who may be less likely to report lags in productivity when working remotely. A study from Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when employees work from home they’re likely to spend the hours that they would have lost commuting on work instead, thereby upping productivity. Employees also take fewer sick days when working from home. When they have a flexible schedule they’re also less likely to take time off to run errands, instead making up the hours before or after their appointments. This again increases productivity in a measurable way. Flexible schedules also allow employees to take full advantage of bursts in energy and creativity.
Another factor in favour of working from home is a lower attrition rate. When employees are forced back to the office they may well look for opportunities elsewhere. Companies that offer the option to work remotely are in a good position to tempt employees away from competitors. Having to frequently train new employees is a drag on productivity as it takes recent arrivals time to get up to speed on how to do their tasks.
Those in favour of hybrid working arrangements point to opportunities for mentoring and team building. These are certainly valid points. Yet the question becomes how easily employees can be mentored when their coworkers only come into the office a few days per week. Time will need to be taken to schedule days at the office in such a way that the experienced employees are present at the same time as the junior colleagues they could mentor. If care isn’t put into scheduling, and if sufficient mentoring doesn’t occur to justify coming into the office, employees could become frustrated and not see the point of working on site at all.
Past studies found reduced productivity working remotely because technology wasn’t yet available to streamline working from home. Since then, we’ve seen the continued expansion of high speed internet coupled with more reliable software options like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. These have largely solved technological limitations that were holding back productivity from outside the office.
Remote Work (2)
Working remotely is in some shape or form here to stay, given the number of associated tools now available. Yet from a managerial perspective, transitioning to a scenario where workers log in remotely means adjusting in several ways, including evaluation approaches. In the past, many managers focused on ensuring employees were present when required, and could rely on larger meetings to convey messages. In a world of remote work, they’ll need to switch to task-based measures of whether an employee is performing as expected. Having milestones laid out over a period of weeks and months, and checking that employees are meeting those milestones and staying on track is the surest way to guarantee the team’s overall success. One-on-one bilateral meetings will also be much more important, as it’s easier for employees to get lost in the shuffle in larger virtual team meetings. Still, the major advantage of a remote working environment is the ability to hire the best talent from anywhere in the country, thereby substantially upping productivity.
That said, there are concerns that white-collar jobs could be outsourced to countries where labour is cheaper as manufacturing jobs were outsourced over the last couple of decades. However, if there are cost savings to be had, such outsourcing will happen regardless. The best protection our domestic white collar workers will have is Canada’s education system. If Canadian education continues to be of a high enough quality, very productive workers will continue to be found here, and employers will recognize this. Besides, the biggest threat to many white collar jobs in Canada may well come from AI powered bots, and whether workers are on site or remote is unlikely to make much difference.
Most importantly, a one-size-fits-all model to telework is unlikely to succeed. Teams that often collaborate closely could see more benefits to coming into the office. Teams whose members tend to work on individual projects are far more suited to working off site.
For society, there will be benefits and costs to a permanent shift to remote work. Downtowns will need to be rethought, which will incur financial pain for many businesses offering services to office workers in city centres. Yet the advantages are substantial. Traffic is the most obvious example. In the National Capital Region the return to the office coincided with the full or partial closures of two major bridges, making commutes for many even more painful than they were before the pandemic. Aside from the carbon emissions of cars largely idling as they inch their way towards the city centre, fewer vehicles on the road would make commutes far easier even for those who can’t work from home, including nurses, teachers and construction workers. Lastly, housing shortages in major cities are causing the cost of living to sky rocket. Allowing more people to work from anywhere in the country would enable these workers to revitalize villages that have long suffered from an exodus of younger people towards cities. This would then ease demand for housing in larger urban centres - a very welcome development for everyone.
Ian Barrett
Municipal Finances
Pylon season is in full swing. Yet how does the city decide where to put taxpayer dollars?
There are a number of new projects in the works, the largest of which is likely to be the replacement structure for the library at Place des Pionniers. Yet this year, the city’s plans are focused on maintenance as well, with $53 million going into road maintenance alone. Yet even this very large amount is only about 2/3 of the annual amount recommended by the auditor general to keep Gatineau roads at an average level for the province.
Another question is where municipal funds come from. From a taxpayer’s perspective government funds come from the public, so how it’s divided up among the federal government, provinces and cities is less relevant. But when it comes to governing, we see a large impact on the services we receive. The city’s perspective is interesting, as explained by Mayor Belisle:
Eighty-two percent of our municipal income is associated with the taxes we collect.
One of the problems we have is the law. The Quebec government does not give us much flexibility to look elsewhere for other revenues. That's really a problem. The other problem is that the Quebec government does not even pay 100% of these taxes. Let's say hospitals, service centres, the courthouse, schools, it's about 70% that the government pays in taxes. It doesn't pay 100%. Why do we here pay 100% of our taxes? The government pays 70%. So, there is really a major inequity in municipal taxation. That's one of the things. We've been lobbying for a long time to change that, because the blue-collar workers, let's say, who pick up the snow there, they also pick up the snow in front of the schools. They don't pick up 70% of the snow, they pick up 100% of the snow. So there's a real inequity there. It's very frustrating when you're a mayor or a municipal councillor, to turn to the citizens and say that there will be a 2.9% increase in taxes and when you know that your provincial government doesn't pay that. So this is a battle that has been going on for a very long time.
And the provincial government gives us other responsibilities. We have three schools coming up in the West, and the city has to provide the land. We're the ones paying for the land for education, which is under provincial jurisdiction. So we have the impression that we are like a parent after all, or a government line of credit. We just charge. And that's frustrating because we're the frontline, and the province always comes looking for money. So there's really something that's inequitable. The cities have a fiscal pact with the Quebec government that is like a financial deal with the Quebec government. Then we're going to be in renegotiation in 2024, and we'd like to be able to get other revenues as well. And if you want to give us other firm responsibilities, give us the money that comes with the responsibilities.
April Editorials
Ending Child Labour in Quebec
Child labour became illegal in Quebec last month. Many people are shocked when they realize that until March 2023 there was no minimum age for a child to work in this province. All that was required was parental consent, and even that rule was at times not enforced.
The Government of Quebec recently passed a law setting age 14 as the minimum to hold down a job, with exceptions for tasks long considered appropriate for younger children such as babysitting, mowing the lawn and acting. Kids 14 to 16 will be restricted to at most 17 hours of work a week, with no more than 10 of those during the week. This is certainly excellent news, as it will nip in the bud a worrying increase in the number of young children working at restaurants and small stores. The former had come to depend on children for almost 0.5% of its workforce, and labour shortages had been pushing that number higher. Given that the restaurant industry employs more than 180,000 people in Quebec, this translates to almost 1,000 children working as waiters or in kitchens. Child labour should certainly not be part of the solution to a tight job market for employers.
Small businesses with under 10 employees can continue to receive exemptions, with the idea that kids can work at their family’s business. This particular exception will need to be closely monitored and possibly updated if exploitation at small businesses occurs. Bringing children on as regular employees shouldn't be necessary if the business can already afford 8 or 9 other employees. The philosophy of the law is of a child helping out his or her parents selling produce at a local market or doing chores around the farm. Unfortunately, a lobbying group called l’Association des détaillants en alimentation du Québec plans to argue the opposite, that stores even bigger than 10 employees should be able to hire minors, so that children of the owners of larger grocery stores can be employed by their parents. This clearly misses the point - if a business can afford to hire more than a handful of people, it can afford to ensure that those people are adults. Children can certainly shadow their parents around their stores, big or small, and help out in an informal way. But a child’s first priority should be doing well at school, followed by simply having fun.
Critical to the success of the new law is making sure that it’s properly enforced. If even lax laws like requiring parental permission for children to work weren’t consistently enforced in the past, application of this new law can’t be taken for granted. Plus, the penalties for violations, at $12,000 for a repeat offender, may sound high. Yet relative to payroll expenses these are not as dissuading as they could be, especially if continuing to employ children allows a business to up its revenue.
Regardless, this new law is a big step in the right direction, and finally brings Quebec in line with the rest of Canada in discouraging child labour.
Tech - The Next Big Thing
From the mid 1990s to the early 2010s we were accustomed to a steady stream of innovation from tech companies, with Google leading the way. It seemed like a year didn’t go by without the introduction of a game changing tool like Gmail, Chrome, Google Earth, Android, or Google Maps, along with many other more niche tools. Apple took many hardware advances from the fringes to the mainstream. Facebook changed how we socialize.
Yet about the only notable major advance in the last ten years has been cloud computing, where you remotely use a company’s hardware instead of your own. Still, this hasn’t impacted our daily lives to such a degree as the advances of previous years.
Attempts have, however, been made. One of the most high profile in recent years was the Metaverse, a virtual reality world where you would interact with others via headsets designed to immerse you in something like a sophisticated video game. This was considered the hot thing just two years ago, with Facebook even changing its name in preparation. But now Disney and Microsoft are shutting down their Metaverse operations, and prices of the Metaverse’s virtual real estate (an oxymoron to be sure) have dropped by 90% in the last year. Hardware to access the Metaverse is also expensive, bulky and glitchy.
Still, we are now looking at the next big game changer - generative AI. This new technology no longer simply processes text and images but creates them, and has been all over the media lately. However, many people aren’t aware of what’s coming over the next year. First, it will be incorporated into search engines. Functional prototypes already exist. In the very near future search engines like Bing will provide answers to our questions in full text and paragraphs, and not just links with information for us to base decisions upon.
This new way of interacting with search engines will require putting a lot more faith in them. References will be provided, but most people are unlikely to check them, and will simply accept the answer they’re given.
Moreover, because creating a reliable generative AI program requires many resources in terms of money, computing power and the human talent behind them, big companies will likely remain dominant. Microsoft and Google have positioned themselves well to take the lead for decades to come. The former is incorporating many new AI tools into its web browser, including the ability for you to ask their AI tool to write an email for you, where you choose the style of the email, from funny to professional. Microsoft Office software like Word will also have these tools incorporated in the years to come.
It will be tough to stop cheating on things from school assignments to job applications to tasks at work. Assignments will need to be more collaborative and based on a series of steps, or may need to be done under supervision. Yet learning to effectively use these tools in permitted ways will likely be an essential skill in the job market of tomorrow.
Power Outages
After the derecho of last summer, April brought us an ice storm. For most, the biggest impact of both of these events was a loss of power, which even in urban areas lasted for many days for some households.
Older neighbourhoods are more at risk of prolonged power outages, largely because of old growth trees. Although they make streets and yards much prettier, help local wildlife to thrive, and offer welcome respite on hot days, they are also likely to suffer the worst of wind storms. With enough bad luck even the largest trees can be blown over, taking power lines with them. Looking to the long term, new neighbourhoods like the Plateau have built their power lines underground, eliminating most of the risk caused by falling branches and trees. However, this hardly seems practical for older neighbourhoods. Even if we were willing to shoulder the substantial cost of transferring power lines underground, many people would be hesitant to see their gardens and patios torn up for the work.
In the end, our best option going forward is to make sure that the services provided by our hydro companies are up to the task of cleaning up messes quickly, and ensuring that maintenance of infrastructure is well organized and up to date. Hydro Québec admitted that they had fallen behind in recent years in terms of trimming branches near power lines. And although the interactive maps offered by Hydro Québec showing which neighbourhoods are without power are very useful, during major outages residents also need more information on how long an outage on their block is likely to last. Information needn’t be perfect - simply sharing what Hydro workers are aware of would be a great help. If it’s likely that your power will be out for a week, knowing this on day one or two would allow you to plan accordingly.
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Two weeks ago, this column spoke of child labour and how a new law being drafted by the Québec government would finally make it illegal for most businesses to hire kids under 14.
Sadly, businesses that rely on child labour have started a counter-attack, and have been receiving bafflingly favourable coverage in various major news outlets. L’association restauration Québec has raised concerns that they’ll be deprived of “good workers”, and that this will possibly impact their ability to serve clients. Similar concerns have been raised by farmers employing young children to pick strawberries and other produce. Their main argument is that there are relatively few accidents involving children on the job. Yet this misses the point entirely. Children shouldn’t need to work, full stop. Canada has one of the most generous child benefits in the world, and Québec tops it up even more. Kids should focus on school and enjoying their childhood. The government of Québec has shown openness to the demands of these employers, and a public consultation is going on this week. We can only hope that common sense wins the day, and that Québec doesn’t gut last month’s proposal. Businesses that aren’t viable without child labour should close.
Power Outages
While having universal healthcare is a source of pride for Canadians, we’re all acutely aware that the system needs improvements. Every province tends to handle health care a bit differently. Yet there are no provinces that offer comprehensive dental care. A number allow free check-ups for kids, but programs are so ad-hoc and poorly understood that many families don’t take advantage of them. Canada’s universal health coverage for other types of care is simple enough for patients across the country - show up at the doctor’s office or hospital and you won’t be billed. So patients know what to expect.
It’s hard to understand the logic of why dental care has been excluded from general health coverage. If you have pain walking and need a hip or knee replacement the system is there to cover you, even if you’ll likely have to wait for months before treatment. Yet if you have a rotten or broken tooth that prevents you from being able to eat properly, you’re told that you have to find the financial means yourself to pay to get it fixed. The impacts of rotten teeth or gum disease can be extremely painful and have other impacts on our health, preventing us from eating properly, and making it harder to work or enjoy ourselves. Our system looks to relieve most physical pain through medications and other alternative treatments, but when the pain comes from your teeth, financially you’re on your own.
There is, however, hope for progress. The federal government is introducing a plan to at least partially refund dental work for families making less than $90,000 a year and who don’t have private coverage. Children are already eligible, with coverage expanding to teenagers and seniors by the end of the year. Full coverage for all adults in the targeted income range is planned by 2025.
Although this is certainly an improvement over the status quo, it would be far more efficient simply to show your health card at the dentist’s office and not be billed. Instead, the proposed program requires that you pay the amounts out of pocket and then apply for a refund from the federal government. It adds an extra layer of complexity that may prevent society’s most vulnerable from taking advantage of the plan.
For people to simply be able to use their health cards, provinces will need to get on board. Here, there’s political wrangling that the federal government is infringing on provincial jurisdiction. Provinces can certainly negotiate to get the best arrangements possible, but Quebec in particular is looking to opt out of the program and get no-strings-attached financial compensation instead. All we can do is hope that the Quebec government would use this money for dental care, and not leave Quebecers behind in this key area of health. It would truly be a shame if politics gets in the way of what’s best for the people. Both sides negotiating in good faith would be much more likely to lead to the best outcomes for everyone.
March Editorials
Inflation (1) - Food and Energy
Soaring prices and high interest rates are causing widespread economic pain. High inflation allows businesses to raise prices even when their own costs haven’t risen as fast, as customers aren’t as suspicious of quick price hikes. Although inflation averaged about 6.8% in 2022, wage growth was only 5.2%. This implies that workers are not benefiting from the rise in prices, as their real wage growth was in fact negative.
The rising prices of groceries are among the most devastating, as it impacts everyone, from the richest to those who are on such a fixed income that they don’t own a car and are less impacted by other painful hikes like that of gas. With price increases of groceries in 2022 having been around 10% and holding strong, it’s worth looking at where the extra money that we’re being charged is going. Large grocery store chains like Loblaws, which also owns Provigo and Maxi, say that they are simply passing on rising supply costs to consumers. Yet their profits have surged in recent years, and at the end of 2022 were 20% higher than a year earlier. Dissecting this is difficult, because grocery store chains generally don’t provide detailed breakdowns on what’s driving those profits, often claiming that a big chunk comes from non-food items like cosmetics. Moreover, during tough financial times people tend to switch to generic brand names of food products. Although they carry lower price tags, these brands often have fatter margins for the stores selling them.
Given that groceries are among the most essential products on the market, and since that industry is dominated by 5 national chains that collectively control about three quarters of market share, there is a strong case for more regulation in this area. It could be as simple as requiring them to provide a breakdown of revenue and profit that separates groceries from pharmaceutical items. More transparency would show whether a lack of competition is leading to price gouging.
Another area where prices have been increasing sharply is energy. Here as well, a lack of competition can leave companies with ample opportunities to raise prices without losing sales. The oil industry has at least some competition, but many homes in the region are heated by natural gas, and we don’t have an option of switching providers to get better prices. Profits are up substantially across the sector. Large oil companies like Exxon recorded profits for 2022 that were almost double those of the year before.
Due to the extremely volatile nature of the prices of natural resources, regulation in this area is quite challenging. Still, the European Union is experimenting with a windfall tax on surges in profits that are much higher than the average of the prior three years. Companies like Exxon are fighting it in court, and it will take several years to quantify the impacts of this levy, but it’s certainly worth exploring as a way to reclaim at least some of the very substantial profits of key industries that lack high levels of competition.
Inflation (2) - Services
Banking is an industry that has been doing very well in these difficult times of high inflation. Of the large Canadian banks, profits over the last year have been up across the board, by as much as 20%. The key to profits in this area is rising interest rates. Banks are quick to pass on rate hikes to borrowers, as anyone with a variable rate mortgage can attest. However, interest rates paid on savings accounts have remained essentially flat, having held steady at a small fraction of 1%. In past periods of high inflation higher rates were more quickly passed on to savers, with the returns on savings accounts topping 10% a year in the early 1980s. Hence banks have been reaping the benefits of higher interest rates without readily sharing the proceeds with savers. This could be due to the increasing difficulty of switching banks, complicated by our ever greater reliance on credit cards and investment vehicles like mutual funds and online stock trading. As it becomes more difficult for banks’ most valuable clients to switch to a competitor, all savers suffer as banks take them for granted.
Still, more competition is always good for consumers. Yet many people are sceptical about putting their savings with a small and unknown institution. One option would be allowing more foreign banking institutions to enter the Canadian market. However, with the recent sale of HSBC to Royal Bank, we’re seeing movement in the opposite direction. The most effective way to give consumers more power might be requiring banks to make it easier for clients to switch from one financial institution to another, even if they use many credit cards or other banking tools.
Another industry that has been profiting handsomely in inflationary times is cargo shipping, used by merchants and manufacturers. These costs are finally starting to come down again, but major players in the shipping market such as Canadian National and Canadian Pacific for rail, as well as Maersk for ocean shipping, have all been posting record profits over the last couple of years. More competition is unlikely to emerge given the prohibitive costs to enter this market, such as building more rail lines or obtaining a large fleet of shipping vessels. Unless it was coordinated with large economies like the U.S. and the E.U., a windfall tax is likely unworkable for international shipping, as it would probably reduce services to Canada and result in shortages. About the only hope here is to foster more domestic production so that we’re less reliant on international shipping generally, although manufacturing things here might cost more than imports, eliminating any savings for consumers.
The Bank of Canada has warned that if businesses don’t stop raising prices it will need to raise interest rates in order to reduce demand, such rates being the main lever that central banks have to control rising prices. It’s depressing to think that the only way to slow price hikes is to cause even more pain to consumers, already spread thin as they are.
Fraud Protection
Fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated, as are measures to counter them. Whereas we used to rely mostly on passwords, the last couple of years have seen a shift to security linked to a phone number or device, commonly referred to as two-stage authentication.
Yet despite the focus on protecting our online accounts, comparatively little attention is paid to how to protect our identities when our personal information such as social insurance numbers are stolen. One of the most notorious examples of this was Desjardins. In 2019 social insurance numbers and full personal details of over 4,000,000 Quebecers were stolen by a rogue employee, who apparently copied the data onto a USB device. After literally walking out the door with this information, he proceeded to attempt to sell it on the dark web. How such personal information could so easily be stolen is shocking, as is the fact that charges have yet to be laid against anyone, despite the likely identity of the thief being known. Said person was fired by Desjardins, and two vice presidents resigned, although the president at that time was reelected later that year and continues in his role to this day.
All the personal information of a large majority of Quebecers necessary for identity theft continues to circulate widely on the darknet. Desjardins offered complimentary credit monitoring for those impacted by the leak. This same service is offered at a monthly fee of ten to forty dollars per month by both of the credit bureaus in Canada, Equifax and TransUnion. You receive alerts when a new account is opened in your name or when a late payment is associated with your credit score. But most major banks let you see this same information for free when you log in to online banking, so by investing a minute or two of your time per week you achieve the same results. Yet this is likely to be too little too late - you see the damage after it’s already done.
However, in February Quebec became the first province in Canada to require credit bureaus to offer a proactive solution - allowing you to freeze your profile with them, refusing to let lenders check your credit score until you choose to unfreeze it. This prevents fraudsters from being able to pose as you with your stolen personal information, taking out loans in your name and then vanishing with the money they take out. An administrative nightmare follows, trying to convince the lender that you shouldn’t be on the hook for repayments. Such a situation can also destroy your credit score for years.
This new legislation has gone almost completely unreported in the media. Yet it’s a game changer in many ways. Freezing and unfreezing your profile is simple and free of charge, and takes about 5 minutes on the websites of Equifax and TransUnion. Once done, no one can easily impersonate you and destroy your credit. As we spend ever more time protecting our online accounts, it’s nice to finally have effective protection for our credit profiles as well.
The Dangers of Bitcoin
Bitcoin is largely seen as the cornerstone of the cryptocurrency world. The total value of the world’s bitcoin is estimated to be in excess of half a trillion U.S. dollars. Yet it’s shocking how little is truly understood about how bitcoin works.
Bitcoin’s foundation is known as Bitcoin Core, an open source program that updates the data spread across a network of thousands of computers that allows bitcoin trading to work.
Amazingly, only about half a dozen people act as maintainers to keep this critical infrastructure working, by ensuring that it remains compatible with Windows and Mac operating systems, and that it keeps up with transaction volumes.
These bitcoin maintainers are chosen by their peers, and it’s not always known where they reside. Their salaries are paid by a loose network of donors, as no formal employer exists. These tend to be crypto companies or wealthy investors. Even some donors admit that how funds are allocated is very subjective.
Maintainers have no managers, job descriptions, or performance reviews. In the last 18 months four of the six maintainers have left their positions, citing burnout or legal risk, as they could be sued, for instance by people looking to regain lost or stolen bitcoin.
How maintainers are paid also raises questions of conflict of interest, real or potential. With such an opaque structure, it’s unclear whether donors attempt to exert control on maintainers, or look to get preferential access to information. The reply to these questions is that maintainers are bound by their reputations, where anyone who did harm to the unpinning software would suffer reputational damage, and would have their access revoked.
High priority code tweaks are discussed in a public chat once a week. Code updates to Bitcoin Core become effective once users download software updates. This chatroom is also where new maintainers are chosen, in ad hoc votes following what can be heated debates. Developers eligible to vote type ACK, short for acknowledge, to vote in favour or a candidate, or NACK to vote against.
These maintainers have saved bitcoin from collapse a number of times by fixing bugs in the underlying architecture before they were widely known and could be exploited. One would have allowed people to spend their bitcoin holdings multiple times. To patch a vulnerability, a majority of the computers or nodes in the network must proactively update their software. If word of the vulnerability gets out before this happens the vulnerability could still be exploited.
With so many billions of dollars of people’s savings tied up in bitcoin, the idea that such a small number of people could break the entire system is terrifying. Worse still, many of these people remain in the shadows, with relatively little known about them by the public. One serious mistake and the infrastructure supporting bitcoin could collapse, with no recourse available to those who would be burned. Even more worrying, other forms of crypto are even more opaque. Those buying crypto should be aware of how little protection they have.
February Editorials
1 February 2023
Good Service
This is true both from public departments or private companies.
The most notorious examples are when calling to speak to an agent. At times people end up lost in a maze of automated menus, unable to get the information they need. Material is usually available online, but it's easy to forget that segments of the population are unable to easily use the internet. They require live assistance from an agent for essential services such as public pensions and other financial benefits, or information on property or income taxes.
On the private side, telecommunications and banking are critical for everyone. Governments have a responsibility to ensure the public has access to timely assistance, not only to their own services, but mandating the private sector to offer timely help from agents to clients as well. Spain is taking the lead in this area by requiring companies to clearly offer an option to speak to a person before sending callers through mazes of automated menus. Important community services obviously go beyond call centres. Our local pools have reduced hours due to how challenging it is to find staff.
Given how expensive it is to heat and keep water clean it’s a shame that the public has less access to these facilities, both from a convenience perspective and because the fewer times when they are open tend to be very crowded. The way to entice more people to take up the necessary jobs is both obvious and difficult to implement - raising salaries. Governments at all levels have limited funds, and hard decisions need to be made in terms of the creation of new services vs optimizing the use of the infrastructure we already have.
Tough questions will need to be asked before undertaking another project like the $100M Slush Puppie Arena, or the more than $70M that will be spent building a new library on Aylmer’s main street following the demolition of the previous structure last year.Yet among the most crucial services that people rely on from governments are health care, police, and fire fighting. None of these have managed to keep up with growing populations, especially in western parts of Gatineau.
Long-time residents have been largely silent on these shortcomings as ever more housing developments crop up across our neighbourhoods. Yet delays in improving these essential services can leave us extremely vulnerable as a society. Covid and generalized lock-downs over the last three years showed us the cost of having a health care system that is always in a precarious position, with among the most shocking outcomes being the temporary closing of the emergency department at the Gatineau hospital. Recent crime waves in many of our largest cities show us what happens when law enforcement is spread too thin. As the population of cities and the country as a whole continues to grow, we’ll need to prioritize carefully over the coming years.
7 February 2023
A Normal Downtown
As public servants are mandated to return to the office at least two days a week, the main reason being cited is team building. Yet business representatives and chambers of commerce on both sides of the river have been pushing hard for this return for some time and likely impacted the debate in some way.
Will having civil servants work from downtown a few days a week be enough to sustain businesses in the area? Even before the pandemic, shops and restaurants in downtown Ottawa and Hull were often in shaky financial situations. Many stores and restaurants on Sparks Street always closed by 4 p.m. on weekdays, and many were also closed on weekends.
Downtown Hull outside of Laval Street was similar. Large parts of a city centre being ghost towns on Friday evenings or Saturday afternoons is neither normal nor desirable. It makes the region as a whole less appealing to tourists, and creates a vicious cycle where people are less likely to live downtown, which in turn reduces incentives for local businesses to be open outside of regular office hours. With many other challenges facing Ottawa and Gatineau, it is certainly tempting for their city councils to stick with the status quo for how their downtowns are designed.
But leaving businesses reliant on public servants’ lunch time activities is quite dangerous. Even if federal workers will spend enough time and money downtown to keep businesses afloat, we’ve already seen that much government work can be done remotely. During future federal budgetary squeezes, reducing the number of pricey downtown buildings for which the federal government is responsible will be a very tempting cost cutting measure. Moreover, transitioning to a more conventional downtown structure will take many years for Gatineau and Ottawa to implement. This will require building a community culture where little currently exists.
Old Hull is a food desert, and downtown Ottawa isn’t much better. A proposal to build a grocery store at the site of the old Robert Guertin arena is a step in the right direction, but would still be far from central parts of the island of Hull. Condos are quickly springing up, but without incentives for people to live downtown, many of these will likely end up as short term rentals for tourists - something that doesn’t help build a community. Both cities have until now favoured building new housing far from downtown areas, prioritizing places like the Plateau in Gatineau and Barrhaven or Stittsville in Ottawa. Focusing on organizing more events downtown would help attract new residents, as well as encouraging the opening of more services like gyms and cinemas.
The most important thing, however, is for Gatineau to clean up the dilapidated houses that dot the landscape in Old Hull, and for Ottawa to find ways to cut down on the high levels of crime throughout its downtown, and in particular on and around King Edward Street.
Tackling these challenges will not be easy. Further inaction in the coming years will only make things worse, especially in the long term.
14 February 2023
Public Trust (1)
Both in Canada and globally, trust in institutions is lower than ever. According to various surveys from Ipsos and Reuters, less than half of Canadians have high levels of trust in government or media, showing marked decreases over the last several years. Although this is a global phenomenon, the idea that over half the population has largely tuned out of society at large is quite concerning.
There is of course no single reason for this erosion of trust, but a major factor has been errors in messaging. It’s impossible to be right all of the time, and even the most reputable sources will sometimes make mistakes. The key is owning up to these errors. Too often as people, we have the tendency to practice out of sight, out of mind, and government and media at times reflect this. Our institutions often convince themselves that their mistakes have quickly been forgotten. Yet this is seldom the case. Covid laid bare how fragile our understanding of breaking events can be. We went from saying that masks were not useful for the general public to a message that masks provided such good protection that going out in public when sick is okay as long as you wear a face covering. The provincial government of Quebec’s current guidelines even state that you only need to stay home when you have a fever. With a sore throat or cough, the guidelines are simply that when going out you should wear a mask, with no advice to stay home at all. Meanwhile, Ontario instructs people to stay home in general when they are sick. On the other hand, Ontario recommends a Covid vaccine booster every six months while Quebec recommends ongoing boosters only for the immunocompromised or those who have never previously had Covid, which at this point is quite a small segment of the population.
Harmonizing messages is important, as is simply saying when we are unsure of what is best in a given situation. The media should also be clear when evidence is not yet available. On the topic of Covid vaccines, the original message was that everyone getting two doses would end the pandemic. After it became apparent that this was not accurate, a similar case was made for a third dose. Despite most traditional vaccine testing periods being at least two years, the urgency of Covid meant that society had little choice but to move fast. Now, several years in, we’ve seen that at least the first couple of doses substantially reduce hospitalizations in vulnerable groups, something certainly worth celebrating. But because what was called authoritative messaging around Covid vaccines changed so often over the last few years, vaccine hesitancy in general is on the rise. There are regions in Canada and the U.S. where standard vaccination rates have fallen below 80%, far below the level needed for herd immunity. And as a consequence, we’re now seeing outbreaks of measles, mumps, and most worrying of all, polio, diseases that we’d long since stopped associating with developed countries.
21 February 2023
Public Trust (2) - Economics
As the public’s trust towards public institutions like government and media erodes, social media is often cited as the main culprit. Misleading stories on Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter certainly can undermine people’s confidence in traditional sources of information. However, those traditional sources of information must also be very accurate, and reasonable debate shouldn’t be stifled in mainstream media.
One hot topic which is often oversimplified in media outlets is inflation. In a globalized world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to control inflation within our own borders. From the beginning of the pandemic, supply chains broadly broke down. China, the world’s factory, was at times largely closed. By mid 2022 and thanks largely to the war in Ukraine, oil was trading at twice the price seen in 2019, while lumber peaked in 2021 at about 4 times its average price over the preceding decade. Shipping costs also exploded.
Financial benefits during the pandemic were quickly blamed for having stoked demand to the point where inflation surged. Yet supply bottlenecks certainly played a large part. Trying to disentangle the impacts of increased demand vs reduced supply is quite difficult. Most developed countries provided their citizens with generous support payments when they shut their entire economies, so there was little with which to compare. One of the few countries offering a contrast is Sweden, which declined to lock down its economy and hence felt less pressure to provide additional funds to the unemployed. Yet inflation there still topped 12% towards the end of 2022. This raises doubts as to whether pandemic support payments can be blamed as the main culprit for the high rates of inflation we’ve seen over the last year.
As the debate in the media over central bank interest rates heats up, a key factor is often overlooked. The Bank of Canada has to be very careful when interest rates rise in the U.S. If interest rates in Canada fall significantly below those of the U.S., the value of the Canadian dollar falls - fewer people choose to keep their savings in Canada when they could earn better returns south of the border. And if the Canadian dollar loses value, it becomes more expensive to import goods, a fact which will in turn drive inflation up significantly. Hence when voices in the media complain about the choices of the Bank of Canada, they need to realize that our central bank can’t sharply diverge from the Federal Reserve in the U.S., and in some ways has its hands tied in terms of when to raise or lower interest rates.
Another aspect of the debate about inflation that deserves closer scrutiny is that low unemployment rates necessarily drive inflation higher. This is predicted by classical economic theory, but we just finished a decade where this relationship largely broke down. During the 2010s, unemployment was quite low, especially in the U.S. Yet inflation over that period was also less than central banks would have liked. So saying that unemployment necessarily has to rise to reduce inflation may be oversimplifying the argument.
27 February 2023
Public Trust (3) - Health
The last several years have seen an erosion of trust in government and the media. With health having dominated public messaging, society’s approach to such coverage may have impacted people’s confidence in the information they were receiving.
Covid fatigue certainly set in for many people, who may have then started to tune out from government guidelines and media messaging. It’s interesting to compare our reactions to Covid with previous waves of flu-like viruses. Luckily, for the past two generations there were no major pandemics causing widespread death. The last pandemic with comparable death rates to Covid was the so-called Hong Kong flu of 1968. It’s interesting to contrast Covid reactions to how the flu from that period was handled. There was also a quick vaccination campaign during the 1968 flu that likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives. On the whole, life carried on as usual during that time. The flu of 1957 was a similar story. It’s worth asking if our much stronger reaction to Covid was because, unlike our grandparents and great grandparents, current generations haven’t had to see friends and family ravaged by polio or smallpox, or experiencing widespread outbreaks of mumps, measles or tuberculosis. Perhaps such diseases left previous generations somewhat jaded to pandemics.
Certain Covid responses certainly helped to slow deaths from the virus in the early months of 2020, such as reducing large indoor crowds and securing our nursing homes. Yet the benefits of other measures, such as curfews and forbidding people from different households from meeting in small groups outside are far less clear. Likewise for preventing people in the National Capital Region from crossing our bridges. And the price in terms of lost learning from closing our schools for many months almost certainly exceeded the health benefits from doing so. Perhaps our collective unfamiliarity with devastating illness was part of the reason our society proposed and quickly accepted these measures, even when other provinces weren’t doing so.
We can’t afford to take such ad hoc approaches in the future. Public confidence is already low enough as it is. We should now take the time to properly study the efficacy of the measures we used, noting what worked well and explicitly excluding from future pandemic response plans any measures that didn’t.
There are other areas where we need to gain better scientific knowledge as well. A good example is working from the office. The current approach of returning to the office a few days a week offers us an excellent opportunity to study both how easily viruses circulate in the workplace and how productive workers are at the office compared to when working from home. This likely varies by profession, but we have no excuse for making decisions that aren’t based on scientific evidence. Now that the urgency of Covid has passed, we should make sure that all of our decisions and messaging are based on proven facts. It’s by far the best way to reverse the slide in public confidence that we’ve seen over the last several years.
January Editorials
25 January 2023
Prescription Painkillers
Illicit fentanyl, the subject of last week’s column, is the major driving force in the opioid crisis facing the world. However, another significant factor behind this global emergency is the overprescribing of prescription painkillers. Such medications are usually given to patients for legitimate reasons following operations or injuries.
Giving them up, however, can be easier said than done. Many of these drugs are based on fentanyl, making them worryingly similar to what is being sold on the street. Beyond the risk of overdosing on the prescription painkillers by taking too many too quickly, when prescriptions run out patients may well turn to street dealers to feed their new addictions. Pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies have been found criminally responsible for feeding opioid addictions. The highest profile case so far was Purdue Pharma, which pleaded guilty in the U.S. to charges of fraud and providing kickbacks to doctors for prescribing painkillers, as well as conducting deceptive marketing practices in Canada.
Several other pharmaceutical companies as well as pharmacy chains have also reached settlements, and litigation against many more continues. The claims centre around pharmaceutical companies knowingly understating how addictive the painkillers could be, and paying doctors more if they prescribed enough painkillers to meet sales targets. That such a scenario could develop within our healthcare system is shocking. Treating chronic or severe pain is of course extremely difficult.
Doctors are faced with hard choices. Prescribe too few painkillers and the patient could suffer unnecessarily. Yet prescribe too many and the patient is at risk of developing a devastating addiction. Alternatives such as Advil and other over-the-counter medications, ointments, exercise, weight loss and massage therapy are becoming more popular, but still lag far behind more powerful medications. Beyond offering them options, the pharmaceutical industry should certainly not influence doctors’ decisions. Pharmaceutical companies, whether privately held or publicly traded, are profit driven.
The owner or shareholders have powerful incentives to sell as much of their products as possible, and executives who don’t share this vision are unlikely to last long. Moreover, many pharmaceutical products have unquestionably done tremendous good for our society. This has resulted in a large amount of public goodwill towards the industry, something that was on clear display during the pandemic. The pharmaceutical industry was quick to step up with life saving tools and vaccines.
Still, the opioid crisis has shown that goodwill and trust can only go so far. More transparency is clearly needed. Disclosures of payments from pharmaceutical companies to doctors have thus far been voluntary. In 2017 Ontario became the first province to pass legislation that would have forced disclosure of such payments and where they would have been publicly available in an online database.
Yet when the Ford government came to power a year later they delayed the implementation of this legislation, and it has languished on the back burner ever since. When dealing with such a powerful, influential and profitable industry, we need to make sure that society’s best interests trump those of corporations.
18 January 2023
Fentanyl: naloxone kits needed everywhere
Opioid deaths are a massive problem across the world. Approximately 20 Canadians die of opioid overdoses each day, more than half the rate of Covid. Even more worryingly, opioid deaths have been steadily increasing for years, as these chemicals become ever more potent and addictive.
Fentanyl is far more powerful and difficult to control than yesterday’s heroin. Synthetic opioids are similar or identical to prescription drugs. In fact, until about four years ago drug users were able to order fentanyl and other powerful narcotics through the mail directly from China, home to the world’s second largest pharmaceutical industry. Making these drugs illegal was extremely difficult, as a slight change to the chemical composition allowed the sellers to brand it as an entirely new drug, one that was not on western governments’ lists of controlled substances. The Chinese government had been very slow to increase oversight of drug manufacturing, fearing that doing so would hamper their very profitable pharmaceutical sector. Yet following intense diplomatic pressure applied by the U.S., China finally cracked down on all Fentanyl-class drugs in 2019. Sadly, this simply resulted in Chinese labs switching to exporting precursors and components of fentanyl to Mexican drug cartels, who took over the task of creating the finished product. Such ingredients are also used in legal pharmaceutical products, and hence are much harder to crack down on.
Adding to the difficulties of reducing the global narcotics trade, Chinese counternarcotics cooperation with western nations has become closely tied to trade in general. As Chinese diplomatic relationships with the U.S. and its allies have become strained, joint law enforcement activities have essentially ground to halt. Politics has sadly become deeply intertwined with the enforcement of global anti-narcotics laws. Western countries point the blame for the opioid crisis on Chinese supply, while China blames Western demand. Moreover, sophisticated laboratory networks for producing components of fentanyl have now formed in India, Nigeria and South Africa, among other countries.
The outcomes of these policing stalemates are all too clear - seeing young people roaming the streets looking like little more than zombies, with hard crusty or blue patches all over their skin and living on borrowed time. Vancouver is at the forefront of this disaster, but Ottawa and Gatineau are hardly immune. Taking a walk around the Glebe is enough to see the opioid crisis’ devastation. Depressingly, there is no end in sight, as chemical “innovations” mean that there’s a steady stream of slightly different and ever more potent drugs for law enforcement officials to chase after. And given that trace amounts of these powdered drugs can have staggering effects, it’s becoming ever harder to protect our teenage children from any number of ways they can be contaminated. Overdose stories span all classes, from poorest to richest. Improving law enforcement and treatment for overdoses is extremely important, but in the end the most effective tool we have is probably making our children understand how dangerous the world into which they’re entering has become. And that it’s unlikely to get better.
11 January 2023
Reducing the Spread of Germs
Our society has decided to turn the page on the pandemic, with our governments and news outlets sensing people’s understandable fatigue with anything related to viruses. Still, the last three years have provided us with valuable lessons. We’d be foolish to simply discard them in the interest of getting back to our old ways, something somewhat romanticized by certain members of our society.
With the push to go back to the office in the name of collaboration, socializing with colleagues and team building, the only health guidelines that many people have been retaining lately is to rely on face masks when in close proximity to others. Yet our approach to masks could in fact be doing more harm than good. People have come to assume that when they’re sick it’s fine to go out and be around others as long as they’re wearing a mask at least most of the time. Nowhere has this been more damaging than in our schools. We all know that it’s hard to juggle work responsibilities with caring for sick children, and dismissing their illnesses as mild and sending them to class makes life that much easier. But this approach is a major driving force in the number of illnesses children are facing this year, from Covid to the flu to RSV. Even if kids can use a mask properly, something which is far from certain, they take off their masks to eat and drink, often in close proximity to their classmates.
The problem is compounded by how little we know about the exact effectiveness of masks at preventing transmission of viruses. Masks help reduce Covid transmission, but published studies put that reduction at anywhere from 15% to 85%. The reason for this confusion is that conducting a rigorous study to isolate the benefits of mask wearing is very difficult. And there hasn’t been enough of a push to do so, with governments across the world simply saying that masks work, end of story. We know even less about how effective masks are at preventing transmission of flu and RSV.
More important than wearing masks is to stay home when you’re ill. It has some similarities to the old adage of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. At the individual level, recycling required much less sacrifice and personal work. Hence reducing and reusing what we consume was largely forgotten, despite being more environmentally effective than simply throwing everything in the recycling bin. Our governments need to help us to be able to stay home when we’re ill. A recent requirement that federal-jurisdiction employers start offering employees 2 weeks of paid sick leave is a big step in the right direction. Yet parents also need to be able to take paid leave to care for sick kids, and our schools need ways to isolate sick children from their groups when parents insist on sending them to class when they’re ill.
If we lose sight of the importance of staying home when sick, we’ll have learned far too little from a very difficult three years.
4 January 2023
Child Labour in Canada
We’ve long heard about the horrors of child labour, usually associated with poorer regions of the world - children slaving away in factories for very low wages. Yet it's shocking to realize that 12 year olds can legally work in many businesses in Canada.
Provinces have different rules in place, with Quebec being among the most permissive in Canada, not specifying a minimum age to hold a job at all. Most of us don’t notice that child labour is legal in our own neighbourhoods, since most young people don’t take a first job until they’re at least 16. Certain low stress jobs have long been associated with younger children, seen as ways to gently transition into the labour market.
Babysitting, delivering newspapers, and mowing the lawn are traditional examples. Yet these are either casual or require little time commitment, providing ways for kids to learn about earning, saving and spending money. The idea that children could find themselves with adult responsibilities such as dealing with angry customers as a cashier or waiter is something else entirely.
Children are of course much more vulnerable to exploitation, and are unlikely to understand their rights. Plus, school combined with homework is very much a full time task. Adding hours of extra paid work to their schedules means that kids have precious little time to enjoy being a child, discovering what they truly like to do in life, and building the social skills necessary to have a happy and fulfilling adulthood. The idea that certain businesses, particularly restaurants, have structured themselves around hiring children is also quite concerning.
It’s hard to get a handle on exactly how common this problem is, as workers aged 14 to 18 are often lumped together in public records on employment. However, there’s a substantial difference in the level of maturity of an 18 year old compared to a 14 year old. And businesses with a majority of employees underage usually means that adults are unwilling to take on that work, either because of low pay or the working environment itself. These hardly seem like the sorts of places where children should come of age.
Even Walmart, a company not usually associated with social justice campaigns, requires employees to be at least 16 years old. The idea that children should at a minimum be old enough to drive before attempting to hold down a steady job is certainly reasonable. Legislation in this area should be quite natural and easy.
We already have generous child benefit payments in place so that children shouldn’t need to work. Steady traditional jobs that target children under 16 need to be rethought. They either require higher pay or better working conditions to entice older workers to take them up. Parents could continue to involve their children in their family businesses, so long as it’s a learning experience and not overly burdensome to the point of making a child less focused on school.
After decades of criticizing developing countries for allowing children to spend their childhoods working, we should certainly ensure that such situations don’t continue to happen here.
December Editorials
How the Court Challenges Program Helps Safeguard Anglophone Rights in Québec?
The objective of the Court Challenges Program of Canada (C.P.C.) is to provide individuals and groups in Canada with financial support to access the courts for the litigation of test cases of national significance. This support is also intended to clarify and assert certain constitutional and quasiconstitutional official language rights and human rights in Canada.
The Government of Canada has allocated an annual investment of five million dollars ($5,000,000.00) for the Court Challenges Program. Each year, a minimum of $1,500.000.00 is dedicated to the clarification of official language rights.
Two independent expert panels, an Official Language Rights Expert Panel and a Human Rights Expert Panel, are responsible for rendering decisions regarding the Court Challenges Program funding. The Panels are composed of experts who report to the University of Ottawa. They receive administrative support from this independent organization.
Grist for the mill has been provided by the Coalition Avenir Québec Government over its first four years in office. On the floor of the National Assembly of Québec, Simon Jolin-Barrette, then Minister of Immigration, Diversity, and Inclusiveness of Québec, was the sponsor of the government Bill 21, An Act respecting the laicity of the State. Law 21 was passed, received royal assent, and came into force on June 16, 2019.
Jean-François Roberge, then Minister of Education and Higher Education of Québec, was the sponsor of the government Bill 40, An Act to amend mainly the Education Act with regard to school organization and governance. Law 40 was passed on February 7, 2020, and received royal assent on February 8, 2020. Law 40 came into force on February 8, 2020, turning les commissions scolaires into les centres de services scolaires. The nine English-language school boards have not become school service centres as of yet.
And no doubt, the most controversial of all, Simon Jolin-Barrette, then Minister Responsible for the French Language of Québec, was the sponsor of Bill 96, An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec. Law 96 was passed on May 24, 2022. Law 96 received royal assent and came into force on June 1, 2022, with some exceptions.
Law 96 attempts to unilaterally amend the Constitution Act of 1867 in the following manner: CONSTITUTION ACT, 1867 166. The Constitution Act, 1867 (30 & 31 Victoria, c. 3 (U.K.); 1982, c. 11 (U.K.)) is amended by inserting the following after section 90: “FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF QUEBEC “90Q.1. Quebecers form a nation. “90Q.2. French shall be the only official language of Quebec. It is also the common language of the Quebec nation.”
And flying under the radar and receiving by far the least attention, Jean-François Roberge, then Minister of Education of Québec, was the sponsor of the government Bill 9, An Act respecting the National Student Ombudsman. Law 9 was passed on May 31, 2022, and received royal assent on June 3, 2022. Law 9 came into force by decree with exceptions.
And let us not leave the federal government out of this mess of pieces of legislation. The Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, M. P., the Minister of Official Languages of Canada, tabled in the House of Commons of Canada on April 5, 2022: the government Bill C-13: An Act to amend the Official Languages Act, to enact the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act and to make related amendments to other Acts.
The members of the Standing Committees on Official Languages of both the House of Commons as well as the Senate of Canada are completing the process of receiving briefs regarding Bill C-!3.
And now we play the waiting game as we observe these pieces of legislation meander their way along through the lower-level courts to eventually arrive at the Supreme Court of Canada. This is when the Court Challenges Program of Canada will help to safeguard Anglophone rights in Québec.
21 December 2022
Conservation
The COP15 conference on biodiversity is currently taking place in Montreal. In United Nations jargon, COP simply stands for Conference of Parties. Hence we need to be careful not to confuse it with COP27, a conference in Egypt from earlier in the fall which focused on climate change. We’ve come far as a society in terms of concern for biodiversity.
Teddy Roosevelt was a pioneer in conservation, creating hundreds of national parks and nature reserves during his tenure as American President at the beginning of the 20th century. He built on the momentum of naturalists and conservationists such as John Muir, Galen Clark, and Ferdinand Hayden, who were instrumental in creating the Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. Banff was the first national park designated in Canada, in the year 1885. Although conservation progressed in Canada over the decades that followed, it did so at a slower pace than that of our southern neighbours. Protection of natural spaces began to receive more attention here starting in the second half of the 20th century, with the crafting of policies to ensure conservation efforts across the country.
Conservation became a priority for many governments around that time. The U.K. designated its first national park in 1951. France followed in 1963, and Germany in 1970. Although there is certainly much work still to be done to protect the environment in developed countries, the world’s focus has now shifted to developing regions. Achieving progress here will be challenging in many ways. Not least is the argument that richer countries didn’t start to prioritize conservation until they had already developed their economies. It’s hard to believe that a thousand years ago much of Europe was covered in forests.
Between 1750 and 1850 there were even reports of desert-like conditions in central Europe before more sustainable approaches to forestry were adopted. Reforestation efforts were started in the late 1800s, but the ecosystems of Europe are far different today than they were before societies in those regions industrialized. Hence developing nations are now asking for financial compensation from wealthier countries to allow them to undertake conservation efforts while also reducing poverty within their societies. This certainly seems like a reasonable request. The challenge is how to deliver the compensation.
Lower and middle income countries often have fewer checks and balances to ensure that the money is well spent and not diverted to graft and corruption. Yet if donor nations attempt to deliver the money directly to impacted people or run conservation projects in developing countries themselves, they’re likely to be accused of colonialism and infringing on national sovereignty.
Of those lobbing such complaints, some will have good intentions and be looking out for the best interests of those living in developing countries. Others will, unfortunately, be eager to skim as much as they can off the top. Perhaps the best solution would be to provide impacted nations with technology and equipment instead of cash transfers, in order to cut these arguments off at the source.
14 December 2022
Electric Car Charging Stations
More than ever, society is banking on electric vehicles as the future of transportation. Uptake by drivers has progressed greatly in recent years, encouraged by generous government subsidies. Yet one major obstacle remains - having enough charging stations to make longer trips viable, and being able to charge quickly enough to make electric vehicles as convenient as traditional gas models.
Currently, it can take 20 minutes to an hour to charge a vehicle at commercial charging stations, still much longer than filling a tank with gas. Governments have been offering generous subsidies to encourage businesses to install electric charging stations, most commonly at malls and gas stations.
There are now almost half as many electric vehicle charging stations as gas stations in Canada. This is a similar approach by governments to how they have worked to ensure good national cell phone coverage and internet access. Yet many challenges persist. After all, our network of gas stations developed over a hundred years. Electric charging stations need to do so in a small fraction of that time. An obvious difficulty we face is how to make electric charging stations profitable in rural areas where there isn’t much traffic.
Although most drivers don’t pass through such areas often, they still want peace of mind when taking a road trip. Generous subsidies are likely the only way for charging stations to make financial sense to rural businesses, and thereby to eliminate a major cause of hesitation for drivers thinking of switching to electric vehicles. Yet some rural areas also have limited capacity in terms of electricity, and charging stations will put more strain on their power networks, possibly also inconveniencing local residents with brown-outs. This is of particular concern near national parks. In some regions, gas stations and utility companies argue over who owns the charging stations.
Utility companies see them as an interesting future source of revenue, while owners of gas stations want full control over what’s offered on their property. Even if the business owns the charging station, power bills can vary widely from one month to the next, especially in areas where electricity is expensive and surcharges are applied during peak periods. Charging stations can also be unreliable. Sometimes communication between a charging station breaks down, either with the car or the payment system.
Other issues can range from wasps building nests in the gears to vandals breaking the machines or sticking gum in the credit card readers. Charging stations at malls are, after all, less protected than pumps at gas stations.
Studies in the U.S. have shown that over a quarter of charging stations don’t work when they should. It’s up to society to figure out how to make electric charging stations work properly, and be plentiful enough to cover drivers regardless of where they are in Canada and the United States. Looking at how far battery technology has come in the last 50 years, it’s entirely possible that within a generation battery capacity will leave combustion engines in the dust.
7 December 2022
The Dangers of Crypto
Cryptocurrencies and the platforms they’re traded on are very difficult to understand. Even those who call themselves experts were shocked when one of the largest crypto-exchanges in the world, FTX, recently collapsed in the span of just a few days. At their base, cryptocurrencies are a collection of records which are limited in number, and this limited supply combined with strong enough demand gives them value.
To generate a bitcoin amounts to solving a very complicated mathematical problem, which in turn requires substantial computing power and consumes large amounts of electricity. Global bitcoin “mining” consumes more electricity each year than the total amount used by countries such as Austria or Israel. Despite the vast environmental footprint often associated with cryptocurrencies, there have been many enthusiasts promoting the potential of this type of money, described by some as a way to opt out of inflation.
Yet the lack of transparency and understanding in the world of cryptocurrencies makes them inherently unsafe. Those who believe in crypto cite independence from government oversight and regulations as one of its great virtues. Yet now we’re seeing the downside to that type of freedom.
Traditional banks are required to have deposit insurance in case they have insufficient cash to allow customers to withdraw their savings. Crypto-exchanges, which are to cryptocurrencies what banks are to traditional money, offer no true protections to those who deposited their crypto-money on their platforms.
It often seemed that savings were safe with exchanges like FTX, but when such platforms run out of liquidity, depositors are left holding the (empty) bag. Those looking to purchase cryptocurrencies can avoid leaving their digital savings on such unregulated platforms and instead keep their holdings on a physical hard drive, but this too comes with risks, mainly that the computer or external hard drive being used becomes inoperational or breaks.
Cryptocurrencies have certainly pushed innovation in the financial sector. Still, more so than a type of money which is free from government oversight, the true potential is as a means of making electronic purchases without involving traditional banks. This matters most in poorer countries, where many people don’t have access to traditional banking, and financial institutions in such countries often have little more oversight than crypto-exchange companies here. Allowing an option which is more secure than holding wads of cash under a mattress could help countless people in developing nations.
But for digital currencies to reach their true potential they need to be integrated into the global financial system, which includes adding layers of transparency and oversight. Much more likely than bitcoin to transform people’s lives are digital currencies issued by stable governments. The U.S. dollar is already the international currency. It’s only a matter of time until cryptocurrencies push governments in the U.S. and elsewhere to create digital currencies that people can exchange directly with each other. If these regulated digital dollars are widely available across the world, we’ll truly be stepping into a new age of how people across the globe handle their savings.
November Editorials
16 November 2022
Cybersecurity
How companies handle our data was for many years quite lax. Examples like the Desjardins data leak, which resulted in the social insurance numbers and other personal details of a large majority of Quebecers ending up on the dark web, as well as a similar situation faced by Americans due to the Equifax leak, showed this quite clearly. The Equifax leak was the most galling imaginable, as at least with Desjardins people had chosen to do business with them and afterwards could show their disapproval by taking their business elsewhere.
With Equifax, as soon as we request credit from any financial institution we automatically have a file there, and have no option to stop doing business with them afterwards. The most common reason for these leaks was that every customer’s complete information was contained in a single set of files that was stolen with a single USB device.
The idea that this could be possible is quite stunning. Yet now we see things swinging to the other extreme, as security becomes onerous and at times excessive. Certain accounts clearly need strong security, such as bank accounts and accounts with the government, specifically the Canada Revenue Agency and Revenue Quebec.
Other organizations may be taking things a bit far given the importance of the data they hold. In the end, if passwords become complicated to the point that no one can remember them, especially for accounts we access very infrequently, many people end up writing down the passwords on a piece of paper and keeping it in their drawers.
At that point, it’s hard to see how information is more secure. Two-stage authentication is becoming more popular and offers an interesting alternative, using a phone number or tying authentication to a particular device. However, there are problems here too. For phone numbers, many of us don’t use our domestic numbers when travelling internationally, given the high cost of roaming fees. If, when outside the country, you’re asked to receive a text message on your Canadian number to access your banking information or email account, you’ll need to figure out how to access that Canadian number and pay corresponding roaming fees. When access requires validation on a specific device or phone number, you’re also vulnerable to that device dying or being lost.
Worse still, theft of your phone becomes quite devastating.
Finding yourself unable to access your personal information or banking until you’ve been able to reach customer service to update your security options can leave you in a very difficult position. We need a balance between personal security and ease of use. Reasonable password requirements, with numbers and capitalizations, combined with personal questions afterward are sufficient for most accounts for most people. Although banks need strong security, they have been dealing with credit card fraud for decades.
They should be able to obtain insurance to fill the gap between risks of fraudulent activity and making life overly frustrating for their customers, finding a good balance. Zero risk doesn’t exist, for online access or anything else in life.
16 November 2022
Valuing Workers
Inflation hits those with modest employment income hardest. Pensions have some protection due to indexing, but those earning salaries close to or at minimum wage take the full brunt of price increases. As a society, we have to ask whether such people’s contributions are being valued as they should.
In Ontario, public education workers aside from teachers saw the ugly side of inflation. Already earning modest wages, they saw the provincial government offer annual raises of between 1.5% to 2.5% for a four year period, amounts that made sense in the low-inflation 2010s, but that are largely insulting when inflation is running at 7% and could stay high for years to come. Even more worrying, the government of Ontario barred them from being able to strike, taking away a fundamental right of organized labour. If those who conduct administrative and janitorial duties in schools are deemed essential workers in the same way as nurses or police officers, which groups would be allowed to strike?
The question becomes do those who keep our schools operational deserve a living wage? It’s hard to imagine these people being able to raise a family in the Toronto region if their salaries are barely above minimum. And if the people holding these roles cannot afford to work and live in Toronto, the city may see its neighbourhoods become shells of their former selves as maintaining schools becomes nearly impossible.
But the question of the value of important services goes well beyond this example, and certainly extends into Quebec. Those working in daycares also earn only slightly above minimum wage. It’s hard to think of a more important task than caring for and teaching society’s youngest children. We also see people frequently complain about the front line service offered by governments and large corporations such as banks and telecom companies. Yet we accept that workers in call centres are paid low wages, have no job security, and in the case of the private sector, see their positions outsourced to countries on the other side of the world. The workers in Asia filling these positions often have very little idea about the country they’re serving or the service they’re offering.
In order to allow people filling these roles to earn a living wage we will need to pay more. In the case of government call centres, the solution to the extremely high turnover rates and corresponding lack of knowledge of the people working there is simple - make those positions attractive as long-term career options. This includes both higher salaries and guaranteeing employees year-round work. For private corporations, we as customers need to show these companies that we value good service. Governments can also legislate to force private companies who are dominant in an industry to offer a minimum level of service. In addition to higher prices, part of the amount to cover these higher costs can come from less money spent on executive compensation and stock buy-backs. It all comes down to what companies feel they have to do to keep their customers.
2 November 2022
Pay Equity
Laws preventing pay discrimination based on gender have been in place since the 1970s. Yet women still earn more than 10% less than men. Progress has been made, with that gap decreasing from about 20% at the turn of the century.
How to finally close the gap is of course notoriously hard. Women may be likely to work in more modestly paying jobs such as nursing or teaching, whereas men are more likely to work in very well paying jobs such as finance. Still, this is more of an aspect to correct than an excuse for the status quo. And this does nothing to explain pay inequities faced by ethnic minorities.
One thing that everyone agrees on is that there should be equal pay for equal work in the same type of position. Here, a powerful tool is forcing companies to disclose salary ranges for positions on job postings. This gives women a great assist in negotiating fair wages devoid of gender bias. In the U.S., New York City, Colorado, California and Washington State are all enacting such legislation. In Canada, many companies now list salary ranges on their job postings, although some decline to do so. Ontario passed a law to require companies to post wages towards the end of the last Liberal government, but it hasn’t been enforced.
Beyond similar pay for similar work, the other major part of the problem of pay inequity is ensuring that women and ethnic minorities are not disadvantaged for promotions. This is much harder to resolve. Affirmative action policies can help, but work is also sorely needed to address disadvantages in access to quality education often faced by ethnic minorities.
One disadvantage faced by women earlier in their careers is the unspoken perception that they may need to take maternity leave over the coming years. In Quebec, fathers only tend to take a bit more than 5 weeks of parental leave, and this falls to an anaemic 2 weeks in other provinces. Yet this can certainly make promoting a young man feel like the safer option for an employer than promoting a young woman who may take off 18 weeks or more.
Again, progress is being made. EI legislation was updated in 2019 to specifically include five weeks of paternity leave. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but employers may still see an advantage to having young men in higher roles given that EI provides for 18 weeks of maternity leave.
Countries that lead in terms of paternity leave uptake, such as Sweden and Norway, tend to have similar systems to Canada, only more generous. In the case of Sweden - 90 days of paternity leave. In order to reduce discrimination in promoting young women, increasing paternity leave would likely be quite effective. It would also need to be accompanied by legislation specifically barring discrimination against fathers who take their full leave. Reducing perceived disadvantages to promoting young women is critical, as missing promotions early on will likely have a ripple effect on their entire careers.
October Editorials
26 October 2022
Strategic Environmental Policies
Many environmental policies have been designed over the years to better safeguard our environment, including better fuel efficiency standards for vehicles and banning many forms of plastic. These policies have often done tremendous good for both our environment and our health. Smelling the fumes of cars that are 30 or more years old tells us how much vehicle emission standards have done to give us clean air to breathe. It’s hard for younger generations to imagine what it smelled like walking along a busy street in the 1970s.
Yet there have also been failures in our attempts to regulate pollution. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Obama administration wanted to significantly tighten emission standards over the following 15 years. Yet the motor vehicle industry complained that such standards would make it impossible to sell larger vehicles without incurring losses, and that these vehicles were necessary for people in rural areas or who work in construction. As a compromise, it was agreed that larger vehicles would have less stringent requirements in terms of vehicle emission standards. Yet the effects of this exception were perverse - it created a significant incentive for car manufacturers to focus on selling ever larger vehicles, as traditional cars required pricey new technologies to reduce emissions. This made larger vehicles comparatively cheap. The result was that the share of vehicles sold which were pick-ups and SUVs shot up sharply over the last decade, and overall reductions in total vehicle emissions since the more stringent rules were put in place have been mostly flat for several years.
Another front in our drive to reduce our societies’ environmental impact is plastics. This impacts us in many different ways, some more noticeable than others. Plastic straws will soon be largely illegal, leading restaurants and cafes to roll out alternatives, from cardboard straws to metal variants. Disposable plastic bags will also be phased out in the near future. When these individual measures are taken together the potential benefits are significant, but to optimize the results a variety of factors need to be considered. Switching to non-disposable bags can seem like a positive way forward, but these types of bags need to be used many times to produce net benefits for the environment. Of critical importance is the technology used to produce them. Early cotton non-disposable bags had to be used thousands of times to have less impact than the equivalent number of disposable bags they were meant to replace. Advances in technology have brought that number down to about a dozen for the current non-disposable variety. Further improvements to the manufacturing process will be needed if people tend to forget their bags at home and pick up new non-disposable ones frequently at stores or supermarkets.
In the end, the best approach is reducing our use of all types of disposable materials whenever possible. An excellent starting point is packaging, something that offers comparatively little added value. Biodegradable packaging could go much farther towards reducing waste than many other approaches that we’ve considered so far.
n-disposable bags can seem like a positive way forward, but these types of bags need to be used many times to produce net benefits for the environment. Of critical importance is the technology used to produce them. Early cotton non-disposable bags had to be used thousands of times to have less impact than the equivalent number of disposable bags they were meant to replace. Advances in technology have brought that number down to about a dozen for the current non-disposable variety. Further improvements to the manufacturing process will be needed if people tend to forget their bags at home and pick up new non-disposable ones frequently at stores or supermarkets.
In the end, the best approach is reducing our use of all types of disposable materials whenever possible. An excellent starting point is packaging, something that offers comparatively little added value. Biodegradable packaging could go much farther towards reducing waste than many other approaches that we’ve considered so far.
Why the Next Minister of Education Must Learn What the Definition of Meaningful Consultation Really Means!
con·sul·ta·tion
[ˌkänsəlˈtāSH(ə)n]
NOUN: the action or process of formally consulting or discussing
"They improved standards in consultation with educational representatives." ·
synonyms: discussion · dialogue · discourse · debate · negotiation · conference · deliberation
The following is an appeal to whomever is the appointee for the important portfolio of Minister of Education of Québec in the next Provincial Cabinet following the general election of Monday, October 3rd, 2022:
Following your memorization of the definition of consultation above, your first formal action as Minister should be the convoking of an Estates General of Education in the province. I do understand that an Estates General necessitates an enormous task of organization. Therefore, let us suggest Montréal as the location, and the dates to be Wednesday, January 25th, Thursday, January 26th, and Friday, January 27th, 2023.
“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply what other generations have done.” - Jean Piaget
The following is the wish list of the serious challenges in the field of education that should be discussed and solutions discovered at the 2023 Estates
General on Education:
# 1: On graduation from Secondary V, every student in this province should be bilingual and bicultural with a balanced view of history, the necessary skills in mathematics, science, and technologies, and the critical thinking skills necessary to be an involved member of the society of the twenty-first (21st) century.
How can we accomplish this linguistic-cultural dream? We already have the means within the present system to put in place what would be the envy of every other educational jurisdiction.
# 2: In every school across the province, starting in Elementary Cycle III, Year I, (Grade 5), half the classes receive instruction in French, the other half in English, in all subjects for five (5) straight months - Francophone teachers teaching in French, and Anglophone teachers teaching in English. Teachers swap classes for the last five (5) months of the school year. This also continues through Elementary Cycle III, Year 2, (Grade 6).
# 3: We also promote la culture Québécoise by making available grants for cultural outings in the language of instruction. It is the ideal opportunity to showcase our talented Québécois artists – both Francophone and Anglophone – in the fields of song, music, dance, theatre, comedy, crafts, and related disciplines.
# 4: It is time to raise the age for compulsory education to eighteen (18) years of age. It will allow our graduating students to be on an equal footing with those of surrounding educational jurisdictions.
It will be necessary to expand the quality and offerings of technical vocational programs at the senior secondary and collegial levels of instruction across the province.
# 5: How are we going to solve the shortage of qualified teachers in our classrooms?
a/ Improve the working conditions of teachers.
b/ Ensure teachers receive fair salaries that are not near the bottom of the provincial and territorial averages.
c/ Install a meaningful system of consultation that actually provides for meetings with teachers and discussing and debating the important issues underlying the principles of what is actually being taught to students.
d/ Allow for the creation of a teaching regulator similar to the successful Ontario College of Teachers.
e/ Finance more spaces in the Bachelor of Education degree programs in all universities in Québec.
f/ Allow for the return of a one-year pedagogical certificate for the holders of Bachelor degrees of teachable subjects to the faculties of education for pre-school, elementary, secondary, and C.E.G.E.P. teachers, as well as university professors.
# 6. Improve the delivery of special education services. Provide additional adequate financial resources to hire more professional employees to reduce the time of delivery from the initial diagnosis to the delivery of services to students with learning disabilities.
# 7: Tackle the issues of bullying, violence, racism, and discrimination in our educational institutions head on. Put in place the financial resources necessary to hire more professional personnel to address the issues and provide the necessary effective follow-up.
AND finally: # 8: Seek more input from student representatives at the senior secondary, C. E. G. E. P., and university levels. On the boards of directors of the educational institutions, school boards, and school service centers, ensure seats for elected student representatives with full voting rights and the privileges of proposing and seconding motions and engaging in meaningful participation in discussions and debates.
Dear Minister of Education of Québec:
Please take the above suggestions under advisement, and consider implementing them as soon as possible for an improved system of education for the students of Québec.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”– Nelson Mandela
19 October 2022
The Benefits of Reading
In an age of TikTok, when videos are how many get information about the world, it’s worth looking at what’s being lost as we transition ever more to entertainment-on-demand.
The benefits of reading are well known. Yet in addition to developing your brain’s general activity and preventing age-related cognitive decline, reading can also reduce stress and increase your ability to empathize. Reading is also a great way to unwind at the end of the day and get a good night’s sleep.
And despite many depressing headlines, there is quite a bit of good news in terms of literacy. Although sales of traditional novels have been declining, children’s books are selling better than they have in many years. Having such exposure to reading from an early age is certainly a major advantage for younger generations. Also, illiteracy rates have continued their decline over the last decades as universal education becomes ever more the norm compared to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Equally critical, the gap in illiteracy rates between anglophones and francophones has been greatly reduced, reflecting improvements in francophone education of the last decades.
Yet as important as functional literacy is, people everywhere are losing their ability to sit and concentrate on longer texts and novels. This is natural given that we live in a world of distractions. On the one hand, information has never been as readily available. On the other, we find ourselves with ever less time to simply relax and unwind. Although we read more than ever with text messages and other forms of short communication, the quality of our reading has certainly declined. Taking the time to rediscover the joys of sitting in the shade reading a book or newspaper during the summer, or next to a fireplace in the winter would help many of us unwind and reduce our stress levels.
Also, here in Aylmer we have another major advantage in terms of literacy. Living in a community with both French and English means that we have the opportunity to learn to read in two of the world’s main literary languages, opening windows into much of the world’s great literature and news sources. For Anglophones, this can go from experiencing this year’s Nobel prize laureate in literature, Annie Ernaux, to reading Tintin or Asterix in the language in which they were written. For Francophones, the benefits from becoming comfortable reading in English include the huge selection of information sources to choose from, and the wealth of literary classics published in English over the years, from Dickens to Harry Potter. Although translations allow us to experience other languages in ways we often wouldn’t be able to otherwise, there are inevitably subtleties that are lost from the authors’ original works. And as an added bonus, bilingualism has been shown to further improve our memories as well as our abilities to multitask and stave off dementia and Alzheimers in old age.
Improving our linguistic skills in our first and second languages is certainly time well spent.
12 October 2022
Dairy Prices
In a year of high inflation, the price of dairy has been among the fastest rising at the supermarket. Milk prices rose by around 20% in six months. Although many families don’t drink enough dairy for this to significantly impact budgets, restaurants have been feeling the pinch at a time when labour shortages already have many owners reeling.
Canadians already pay among the highest prices in the world for dairy. On average, a litre of milk costs twice the price as in the U.S., and over 50% more than in the U.K., France and Australia. The reason for high prices in Canada is a system called supply management, where the number of producers is tightly controlled and Canadian farmers have much more influence in setting prices compared to those in competitive markets elsewhere in the world. In return, dairy farmers receive fewer subsidies and grants from the government than in other countries.
While Canadian consumers frequently grumble about the prices of milk and cheese, even farmers complain that supply management isn’t working. Many dairy farms are small and haven’t been able to innovate to reduce costs, meaning profits for many farm owners are low and the work is hard. Licences to milk a cow, which were granted for free in the 1970s, now fetch upwards of $24,000 per cow, making many farmers well off on paper, but only able to cash in when they exit the industry. This also makes it very hard for younger generations to get a start in dairy farming, as well as current dairy farmers looking to take advantage of economies of scale by increasing the size of their operations.
Prices are set in a very opaque way by the Canadian Dairy Commission. They use a survey of roughly 200 farmers in which they give information on their costs, much of which is considered confidential and not shared with the public. At a time when dairy price hikes far exceed inflation elsewhere, transparency should be of the utmost importance.
Farmers are also required to make mandatory contributions to marketing funds which are used to advertise dairy products, but again there is little transparency. The Toronto Maple Leafs will sport a “milk” patch on their jerseys for the next couple of years, but the costs of this deal have not been shared even with dairy farmers. We do know that tens of millions of dollars are spent on marketing dairy products each year.
Also unclear is how grocery stores set price increases on their end. Over the last year, supermarkets have increased dairy prices by twice the amount mandated by the Canadian Dairy Commission.
With so few happy with the status quo, changes would certainly be welcome. Helping more dairy farmers to innovate and invest in robotics to milk cows instead of using manual labour would help reduce costs over the long term, along with justification for raising prices. The question is why dairy can’t exist in a similar system as the rest of agriculture, with subsidies instead of high prices.
5 October 2022
Relative Extremism in Politics
At the time of writing this column, the provincial election is just winding down, and the CAQ are romping towards victory. Such continuity has not always been the case elsewhere. In many cases, local parties referred to as being on the extreme right have come to power in countries that have usually steered clear of their approaches in the past.
An interesting example is Sweden. The party considered to be on the extreme right by Swedish standards is called, ambiguously, the Swedish Democrats. They claim that past immigration policies in Sweden have been a failure, but they do support receiving immigrants who will work and contribute to Swedish society, and assimilate culturally. A fundamental aspect of their platform is that immigrants need to become more proficient in Swedish. Those who do not wish to assimilate culturally and learn Swedish would be encouraged to leave Sweden. They feel that multiculturalism is not compatible with maintaining Swedish culture, and propose a values test for immigrants before they could receive citizenship. They are at the same time supportive of Sweden’s social safety net, and of gay marriage (though not of adoption for same-sex couples).
Many other European countries have extreme right parties with far more radical positions, such as in Italy where the party that recently won the right to form government supports explicitly stopping Muslim immigration. And the above is only a partial list of their positions. But it’s interesting that so many of their policies on immigration are shared by the mainstream governing party of Quebec. Clearly what is considered extreme in Sweden is seen as being reasonable in many other parts of the world, Quebec included.
On the flip side, policy proposals by Republicans in the U.S., by any measure a mainstream party there, are seen as extreme and non-starters across most of the political spectrum here, both in Quebec and across Canada generally. This certainly includes the CAQ. A few examples include separating migrants from their children at the border, stopping immigration from certain countries entirely, allowing seemingly limitless access to arms, and severe or complete restrictions on abortion. The idea that the American groups proposing such ideas have governed and will likely do so again is striking. Such policies that are by many measures mainstream in the U.S. are touched by almost none of the extreme right parties in Europe, and have no uptake in Canada at all. Even the People’s Party of Canada, which tends to represent the extreme right here, goes nowhere near many proposals that Republicans have been making for years.
Noteworthy in terms of extreme positions within Quebec is that Québec Solidaire, which absorbed Option Nationale in 2017, proposes to declare Quebec an independent country during a first mandate without calling a referendum on the matter. This somehow attracts little attention.