[Criminality] Problems Upholding Our Own Environmental Laws

Two of today's leading headlines on CBC News read as follows:

May Accuses Harper of Breaking Law Over Kyoto

Environment Canada Struggling to Enforce Law

The basic finding in the first article is that the Harper government is violating domestic law by withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol without any kind of parliamentary debate or discussion, since the Protocol was ratified by the House of Commons and later received royal assent. One of the dangers of Harper's unilateral withdrawal from Kyoto is that the Protocol requires good record keeping of GHG trends in Canada, so there is a worry that Harper now might scrap the budget of the GHG monitoring programs (just like he scrapped the long gun registry and the long form census). Of course, one major ramification of the Harper government's announcement of withdrawal from Kyoto is that Canada is now a complete embarrassment, an international pariah that is seen as a bully and selfish member of the global community that cares little about others and fails to come to grips with the severity of climate change. It really is a shame that the rest of the world is acquiring such a negative image of this country - a shame for which we can place blame squarely on the shoulders of the leaders of the Conservative Party.

The basic finding in the second article is that the Harper government is failing to uphold it's own environmental laws. But the second level of travesty in this news story is that the auditor who has been trying to improve the systems we have for regulating the environment is typically ignored by the Harper cohort. Reports by the federal environment commissioner - Scott Vaughan - have been repeatedly repudiated or simply brushed aside by members of the Harper caucus, in particular the Minister of Environment - Peter Kent. In his report, Vaughan noted how senior management at Environment Canada "refused to acknowledge the facts presented in this report."

My friends, we are in the ironic position of having a government which claims to be 'tough on crime', but whose own approach to environmental law is basically being labelled as criminal by two high-ranking members of the Canadian government (Member of Parliament Elizabeth May and the Federal Environment Commissioner). What does one do when their own government - claiming to be tough on crime and open to dialogue and democracy - somehow makes unilateral decisions that impact the entire planet without a minute of democratic debate, and which seems to violate national and international laws? It's time that our members of parliament act in the best interest their constituents: display your vote lack of confidence in Stephen Harper and his cronies, and bring in a new political leadership that cares about the future of the planet!

[Occupation] Rethinking Grotesque Inequality

I went out on Saturday to support the Occupy Ottawa movement. Notwithstanding the slow decision-making process of the protesters (in order to ensure all ideas were heard and to make the most of fairness and democratic order), it was interesting and inspiring to be taking part in a movement which is essentially about social and economic justice. Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric from Canadian politicians regarding how great this country is because it 'weathered the economic storm' much moreso than other nations; and despite the fact that the situation (both the financial situation and the picture of inequality) is not quite as severe in this country as it is in some others - Canada has some serious problems that make the protesters' cause a worthy one north of the 49th.

Inequality has grown in Canada since the 1970s. The rich have gotten richer while the incomes of poor and middle class families have not seen any considerable growth. In fact, one study by the Conference Board of Canada found that those in the top income bracket saw an income increase of over 16% between 1980 and 2005, while those in the middle income bracket saw no growth and those in the lowest income bracket witnessed a decrease of 20.6%!

An economist at the CCPA found that one third of all income growth in Canada went to the richest 1%. The average family in Canada earned $63,800 in 2009 – after tax. The average individual earned $31,500 after tax. Meanwhile, the 100 richest CEOs in Canada earned $6.6 million on average in 2009! 

Finally, people are entertaining the idea that such absurd income inequalities just shouldn't be allowed!

Now, there are lots of great articles out there written about wall street. Below I've pasted two that I've found particularly insightful - one by Jeffrey Sachs and the other by Justin Podur focussing more on the Canadian context. Enjoy!

Message to Wall Street

by Jeffrey Sachs 10/17/11

The Wall Street elite seems completely befuddled by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The demonstrators are called "unsophisticated," or misguided, or much worse (mobs, communists, and more). Here's a short note to the titans of Wall Street to help them understand what's happening.

Let me start with the Wall Street Journal, which seems to be the most confused of all. In its Friday edition, the Journal editorial board couldn't understand why the protestors would want to protest JP Morgan and hedge fund manager John Paulson. The Journal also couldn't understand why the protesters were failing to champion something as wonderful as the Keystone Pipeline, which the Journal assures us would create many jobs.

The Journal can be forgiven for this basic confusion. It must be hard work to channel Rupert Murdoch's cynicism, greed, and ideology every day, so here are some answers so that the editorial board doesn't have to knock itself out with fresh research.

The protesters are annoyed with JP Morgan because it, like its fellow institutions on the street, helped to bring the world economy to its knees through unprincipled and illegal actions. The Journal editorial board apparently missed the news carried in the Journal's own business pages that JP Morgan recently paid $153.6 million in fines for violating securities laws in the lead-up to the 2008 financial collapse. JP Morgan, like other Wall Street institutions, connived with hedge funds to peddle toxic assets to unsuspecting investors, allowing the hedge funds to make a killing at the expense of their "mark," and the world economy.

The protestors are not enamored of Mr. Paulson either, since he played this role together with Goldman Sachs. Paulson made a fortune by teaming up with Goldman to bundle failed mortgages, which Goldman then peddled to its customers, in this case some unsuspecting German banks. Paulson shorted these assets and thereby profited as the bank's investments collapsed. For this little maneuver, Goldman paid $560 million to the SEC in fines. Of course this is a small amount compared to the profits that Goldman reaped for years playing in toxic assets. On Wall Street, misbehavior pays, at least up until now.

Mr. Paulson actually made some extraordinary statements in the New York Times on Friday (hard even to believe the nonsensical quotations are correct, but there they are, in the paper of record). He too expressed befuddlement about the protests against his business dealings. Didn't the protestors know that he had created 100 high-paying jobs in NYC? 100?

What the protestors do know is that Mr. Paulson's success in shorting toxic assets bundled for gullible investors has netted him billions. In 2007, he reportedly took home $3.7 billion by betting against the U.S. mortgage market. And the protestors can also do their arithmetic. Paulson's take home pay was enough to cover not just 100 jobs at $50,000 per year but rather approximately 70,000 jobs at $50,000 per year. Nice try, Mr. Paulson, but the people in Liberty Plaza don't think your hedge-fund play is really worth the compensation of 70,000 people. Nor do they understand why hedge fund managers pay a top tax rate of 15% on their hedge-fund earnings.

The Journal, Paulson, and others who accuse the protestors of being "unsophisticated," somehow have forgotten a basic point. It's not just Paulson, or Goldman, or JP Morgan that parlayed their unethical behavior into vast fortunes at the expense of hapless investors. Just name a big name on Wall Street in the past decade, scratch the surface, and uncover a financial scandal. Bank of America, Goldman, JP Morgan, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide Financial, Lehman Brothers are only the start of the list.

Maybe the Journal forgot to mention this because it itself is enmeshed in a series of scandals, ranging from hacking phones in the U.K. that has created a full-fledged crisis for its parent News Corporation, to last week's resignation of the European publisher. Murdoch is not just running an organization of corporate propaganda, but a criminal enterprise, at least in the U.K.

The protestors are not envious of wealth, but sick of corporate lies, cheating, and unethical behavior. They are sick of corporate lobbying that led to the reckless deregulation of financial markets; they are sick of Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal asking for trillions of dollars of near-zero-interest loans and bailout money for the banks, but then fighting against unemployment insurance and health coverage for those drowning in the wake of the financial crisis; they are sick of absurdly low tax rates for hedge-fund managers; they are sick of Rupert Murdoch and his henchman David Koch trying to peddle the Canada-to-Gulf Keystone oil pipeline as an honest and environmentally sound business deal, when in fact it would unleash one of the world's dirtiest and most destructive energy sources, Canada's oil sands, so that Koch can profit while the world suffers. And they are sick of learning how many Republican politicians - the most recent news is about Herman Cain - are doing the bidding of the Koch brothers.

Here, then, Wall Street and Big Oil, is what it comes down to. The protesters are no longer giving you a free ride, in which you can set the regulations, set your mega-pay, hide your money in tax havens, enjoy sweet tax rates at the hands of ever-willing politicians, and await your bailouts as needed. The days of lawlessness and greed are coming to an end. Just as the Gilded Age turned into the Progressive Era, just as the Roaring Twenties and its excesses turned into the New Deal, be sure that the era of mega-greed is going to turn into an era of renewed accountability, lawfulness, modest compensation, honest taxation, and government by the people rather than by the banks.

That, in short, is why Wall Street is filled with protesters and why you should wake up, respect the law rather than try to write it, and pay your taxes to a government that is ruled by people rather than by corporate power.

Jeffrey Sachs is Director, the Earth Institute, Columbia University; Author, 'The Price of Civilization'

[Hack Job] Conservatives Take Out The Knife

This is what happens when we allow the Conservatives to steal absolute power: Not only do they gut valuable public services, but through corporate tax cuts limit the government's revenue stream in the first place. It's the beginning of a downward spiral towards high unemployment, degraded public services, and minimal public revenues. A vote for the Conservatives is a vote for this triad of hell.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/08/05/pol-public-job-losses.html

[Sit In] Anti Tar Sands Demonstration

Last month thousands of social justice and environmental activists organized a sit-in in Washington DC in front of the White House to ask the Obama administration not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. A group of activists in Canada is now organizing a similar event here in Ottawa, scheduled for Monday, September 26th.

Check out the details at OttawaAction.ca

[Trickery] Turning a Minority of Votes into a Majority of Seats

Ma-jor-i-ty [muh-jawr-i-tee, -jor-]
–noun, plural -ties.

1. the greater part or number; the number larger than half the total (opposed to minority): the majority of the population.

2. a number of voters or votes, jurors, or others in agreement, constituting more than half of the total number.

Like any magic trick, it's based on deceiving and tricking the faculties of the audience's mind. The notion that the recent federal election in Canada resulted in a "Majority" for the Conservative Party is a sign of the extreme perversity and absurdity of this country's electoral system - a system that operates just like a magic trick to deceive the electorate into believing that one party has a majority of support. The fact is that a majority of Canadians voted against Stephen Harper and his right wing, scandal-ridden party. Here are some numbers which elucidate the trickery behind this most recent first-past-the-post fiasco:

1. 5.83 million people voted for the Conservatives. That's only 17.3% of the Canadian population.
2. The Conservatives received 39.62% of the vote. A majority of 60.38% of the votes went to other parties.
3. Despite having a minority of the vote share, the first-past-the-post system grants the Conservatives 54.22% of the seats in parliament, which gives them the ability to make political and economic changes that will affect the entire population without concern for oppositional voices.
4. The Conservatives received 8.9% more of the popular vote than the NDP (which received 30.63% of the vote). And yet, thanks to our corrupt system, the Conservatives will receive 21.1% more seats in the house.
5. 576, 221 people voted for the Green Party (that's 3.91% of the vote). Nevertheless, somehow the party only received 1 seat in parliament. That's 0.32% of the seats! 
6. The Conservative Party's vote share increased by 1.96% since the last election of 2008. However, their seat share increased by 16.8%!

What kind of shenanigans is this? And why do we accept this perverse excuse for 'democracy'? As far as I'm concerned, the Harper Conservatives did not receive a majority, and we Canadians should make this fact clear whenever they pass through legislation that affects all of us. There is a serious need for a political system that better reflects people's political beliefs in this country, and yet the irony of the recent election is that a Harper 'majority' (of seats) will likely solidify this undemocratic system.

[Dialogue] Advertorials and Objectivity

The following is from an exchange I've been having with Alternatives, a leading environmental magazine in Canada that brands itself as part popular mag, part academic journal. I initiated my first letter after discovering an 'advertorial' for Suncor in the November 2010 issue of the magazine. The magazine has published two shortened versions of my letters. My words in green.

Dear Editors,
I was thoroughly shocked and disappointed to discover that Alternatives has allowed the publication of a full-page Suncor advertisement, which misleads readers by presenting itself as a regular magazine article. In doing so, you have allowed one of the country’s largest corporations to use the journal’s reputation as an objective, insightful source of environmental reporting to sell itself as a ‘steward of nature’. The decision to publish this ad has now largely ruined that reputation in my view (and likely that of many others). Alternatives should have a strict policy forbidding adverts that dishonestly portray themselves as regular, edited components of the magazine.

Editor replies

The Suncor advertorial that you refer to exceeds the Canadian Magazine Industry's advertising-editorial guidelines. It is labelled as an "Advertorial," uses a different font and the company's logo is prominently displayed. In accepting this material, we retained editorial control, had it peer-reviewed and required that the company meet a number of requirements with regard to its approach to sustainability.
At Alternatives, we encourage dialogue among all interested parties. We recognize that achieving sustainability requires that industry improves its practices, while not supporting greenwashing(check out "Footprint" on page 4). In the series of advertorials that will be published in Alternatives and given our editorial line up, you will discover that we challenge Suncor and the oil sands while recognizing good practices.

My second response:

I really appreciate that Alternatives published my letter about the Suncor advertorial in the January issue, and I equally appreciate the time taken by the editorial board to respond to my complaint. So thank-you!

To be completely honest, I found the response surprising. It implies that Alternatives was closely involved in the production of the Suncor advertorial, and that advertorials are openly welcomed by the publication. I think this is problematic.

Clearly advertorials are nothing new; they are age-old marketing tricks. My point is that they should be seen (by Alternatives’ editorial board) for what they are – deceptive marketing tools profiting from the magazine’s respected reputation. They are deceptive because they attempt to portray an advertisement in the form of a written article. Sure the font may be slightly changed and the logo displayed, but this does not negate the fact that the advertiser (and it doesn’t really matter which firm is advertising) is trying to benefit from portraying their ad as a written piece in the magazine.

The accuracy of the material presented in the advertorial is not the point. Rather, the point is this: Suncor used the advertorial to sell something (their image, their brand, their shares, and their synthetic oil all come to mind as potential candidates), and the response to my earlier letter suggests to me that Alternatives has actually stepped in to help them sell it!

I am certain I am not the only reader of magazines who is frustrated by advertorials and finds their purpose somewhat insidious. I recall a 2008 ‘advertorial’ in Harper’s Magazine by British Airways which used the magazine’s famous ‘Annotation’ feature. The magazine was flooded with angry letters from readers who felt the editorship should have prevented the use of its own style as a marketing scheme.

My belief is that Alternatives’ advertising policy should forbid any form of advertorial…but I guess that is where we disagree!

Thanks for listening...

Following the publication of my second letter, Alternatives sent out the following call for questions by email and on-line:

Have a burning question about the tar sands?
Now is your chance to ask an expert.
Submit your questions about the tar sands and we will send a selection of them to Gord Lambert, vice president of sustainable development for Suncor Energy Inc. His responses will appear in our June issue of the magazine: In the Key of G – Music and the Environment.
At Alternatives, our goal is to engage readers in thoughtful dialogue about issues that matter. This Q&A with a vice president of Suncor Energy Inc. is a continuation of a year-long series of advertorials in which Suncor Energy is explaining its position with regard to the tar sands and energy policy in Canada, and hoping to better understand yours.
Please submit no more than two questions per person and include your name and address. Send your questions to editor (at) alternativesjournal.ca no later than Monday, May 2.

My most recent response:

As you might expect, I was somewhat alarmed when I read that Alternatives is planning to provide Suncor Energy with yet another venue to market its product and brand directly to the magazine's readership. In my view, the idea of Alternatives having a corporate executive from the fossil fuel industry answer 'burning questions' about the environmental impacts of tar sands development is akin to a health magazine having a spokesperson from Philip Morris answer questions about lung cancer.

As David Suzuki has recently written, "the priority for people who run oil companies is to maximize profits. We know their words and actions are largely guided by a commitment to shareholders, and so we consider them in that context." It appears that Alternatives' editorial board is failing to adequately consider the context in question. Offering industry a mouth piece is not a way to achieve a 'balanced' discussion on the environmental impacts of bitumen development. It ignores the fact that Suncor's primary purpose is to sell oil and shares, not to enlighten Canadians about their 'noble' efforts in sustainability (any efforts in the latter should be exposed as an attempt to achieve the former); It further ignores the way that this 'debate' is highly unbalanced to begin with (given that the fossil fuel industry has millions of dollars at its disposal for public relations, marketing, lobbying, and research).

There are lots of informed academics and journalists out there who have the knowledge and skills to provide your readership with far more objective answers about the environmental impacts of bituminous sands development. I can't understand why a publication that "walks the line between a popular, but intelligent, consumer magazine and an academic journal" would instead seek answers about such a contested issue from someone who clearly has underlying motives (no offence to Mr. Labert, but that's just the nature of his positionality; a similar critique could be leveled against someone from an ENGO).

Somewhat dismayed, but still reading...

I'll be sure to post any responses I might get!

[Recommendation] Required Reading

With the Conservative budget likely to be brought down today by the opposition parties  it seems we are headed for a spring election. As we prepare for a new political reality in Ottawa, one required reading is a compilation of essays edited by Teresa Healy on behalf of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The 47 contributors detail Harper's numerous attacks on democratic governance, his shameful international record, and other negative spinoffs from his policy framework on energy, foreign investment, environment, safety, welfare, employment, etc.

I highly recommend this read - even a quick perusal will remind you of the many, many reasons why Harper is bad for Canada, and bad for Canadians. Recommend it to others too - it's the least you can do to ensure we don't experience another four years of Harperthoritarianism.

The best part is you don't even have to buy the book! It's FREE, and available online as a PDF document. Just click HERE to download.

[Strategizing] Fighting Sarah Palin's Conception of 'Sound Science'

In December 2009 Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled "Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference", where she basically argued that the USA should boycott the international climate change negotiations because the science on climate change wasn't 'credible' (she doesn't deny the existence of climate change; she merely doesn't believe humans play any role in exacerbating these changes). She claims that we now have 'proof' that the science isn't credible because of the so-called 'Climategate' email scandal at the University of East Anglia.

Now, there are a number of ways to respond to Palin, aside from just tuning out and avoiding her annoying hypocritical political diatribes. For one, it's not difficult to demonstrate how insignificant the East Anglia email 'scandal' is in the context of the overall global scientific effort to understand the human contribution to climatological change (see the Huffington Post's article about this here). Nor it it difficult to identify numerous problems of logic within Palin's reasoning about why Copenhagen should be boycotted (a good response to Palin's op-ed can be found in Marc Ambinder's annotated rebuttal in The Atlantic Monthly).

However, some might say that a more successful critique lies in exposing Palin's understanding of science as some totally objective, apolitical monolithic 'truth' that exists out there devoid from prevailing social relations and politico-economic realities. In other words, the response to Palin should not be to bombard her (and her throngs of misguided followers) with more of the very scientific evidence that she's bound to find faulty regardless of its 'prestige'; rather, the best response to Palin is to acknowledge the obvious nature of her statement that the science is in many ways political, while at the same time making efforts to exemplify how this 'knowledge' about the anthropogenic influence on climate change, while imperfect, is still pretty darn good! It's actually the best we've got. It's good enough, we might add, to do something about it (including sending our political leaders to international conferences).

I believe this is what the constructivist geographer David Demeritt would argue. In a 2001 article in the Annals titled "The Construction of Global Warming and the Politics of Science," Demeritt calls for "a more reflexive politics of climate change and of scientific knowledge based on active trust" (307). He makes quite a complicated argument; at first he comes across as a skeptic as he highlights numerous flaws with the way climatic models provide numerous venues for scientists to hide the complicated web of social politics and relations that shape their very models.  But then he comes around, showcasing his broader purpose in exposing the political nature of climate science, and how he believes we should respond to skeptics who view science as solid gold (I quote at length from p. 329):

The proper response to public doubts is not to increase the public's technical knowledge about and therefore belief in the scientific facts of global warming. Rather, it should be to increase public understanding and therefore trust in the social process through which those facts are scientifically determined. Science does not offer the final word, and its public authority should not be based on the myth that it does, because such an understanding of science ignores the ongoing process of organized skepticism that is, in fact, the secret of its epistemic success. Instead scientific knowledge should be presented more conditionally as the best that we can do for the moment. Though perhaps less authoritative, such a reflexive understanding of science in the making provides an answer to the climate skeptics and their attempts to refute global warming as merely a social construction.

Had this advice (which it should be noted was available a whole 8 years before the so-called 'climategate' scandal) been followed, it is possible that we could be a whole lot more productive at these international negotiations. The science is never going to be perfect, and the scientists need to be blatant about this fact. And yet, after four assessments by the IPCC and other research units, some absolutely impressive work has been done. In the face of this impressive work (despite all its flaws and imperfections) there lies plenty of good reason to confront the issue of climate change and tackle some of the ways in which we know* that human activities are exacerbating/influencing some of the processes of the Earth system - even if, through democratic political negotiation, we decide that our confrontation efforts should be more reactive (through adaptation) than preemptive (through mitigation).


* Of course we'll never 'know' anything with 100% certainty, but for all intent and purpose, the certainty we do have is enough to warrant action.

[Video] Making sense for more than four decades...

The makers of Mad Men weigh in on the future of high-speed rail in America. Enjoy the clip!

[Sympathy] A Very Sad Day for Wisconsin

It's an extremely sad day for Wisconsin. The Republicans have used slimy and insidious tricks to take away the rights of people to bargain collectively with their fellow workers. A very sad day indeed:

The New York Times article by Monica Davey is quite informative in this regard:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/us/10wisconsin.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Let's wish the people Wisconsin all the best on their uphill political struggle against reactionary tyranny.

Ryan

[Redefinition] Rethinking Resilience

The word 'resilience' sounded like a fluffy term the first time I heard it... and in fact it still has a cotton candy texture. But I've been rethinking resilience this last week, and now I'm wondering whether it's a concept that critical geographers and social nature theorists can use as an operative goal, perhaps even a replacement for the overused and increasingly meaningless "sustainable development".

It's an idea that I once argued against in The Leveller (Vol.2, No. 2, p. 12). I lamented the way that new terms such as "environmental responsibility" and "ecological resilience" were being employed by 'green' thinkers across the political spectrum as a replacement for "sustainability", mostly because they realized the genuine difficulties inherent in the latter concept. At a general level Brundtland's idea of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations is certainly an ideal toward which we should strive - how could anyone argue against the idea of forbidding future generations from achieving their needs?

However, I'm willing to admit that this definition of sustainability, as it's commonly interpreted, carries little context about what our present (or future) political economy constructs as a 'need'. Nor does it make the necessary normative commitment towards changing our conceptualization of needs and wants. The concept of sustainability does not reflect the real discrepancy between human needs (which are still not being met in many parts of the world) and social desires (those things that we rich people mislabel as 'needs' - e.g. "I need a snow blower" [Answer: No, you want a snow blower]). Perhaps this is why Marxists in the early 1980s considered sustainability to be a "bourgeois" concept - in some ways it's an ahistorical term that presumes our contemporary mode of production can be transformed into its less voracious sister - capitalism lite?

Resilience is a term that came out of the environmental change literature (see Peter Timmerman's Vulnerability, Resilience and the Collapse of Society, 1981). The idea of resilience, applied in a socio-ecological context, refers to the adaptive capacity of a system in the face of changes. As Carl Folke et. al. explained:

More resilient social-ecological systems are able to absorb larger shocks without changing in fundamental ways. When massive transformation is inevitable, resilient systems contain the components needed for renewal and reorganization. In other words, they can cope, adapt, or reorganize without sacrificing the provision of ecosystem services (Folke et al, 2002, 438).

There is something in this concept that evades the problems associated with "sustainability" by not making any assumptions about needs and wants, and by placing humans in a reactive role as opposed to positing them as an omnipotent shaping force. With a resilient system, the needs of future generations is up for discussion - we may have good guesses about what might be needed, but we always assume scenarios in which our ability to fulfill those needs are made vulnerable. Resilience causes us to dig down and prioritize our needs and wants.

However - and here's the fence-sitter in me - there's also something fundamentally conservative about resilience (and sustainability too). Both ideas stem conceptually from a fear of change. What exactly is it that we are trying to sustain in sustainability? Is it really worth trying to make a system resilient to external forces of change when the original system in itself is socially and ecologically corrupt in other multifaceted ways?

Let me use Easter Island as an example. We've all heard the story of how that civilization collapsed - ultimately resulting from excessive deforestation (see Jared Diamond's book Collapse). The downed trees were needed for firewood, but also to move the heavy stone statues that have now made the island famous. As a thought exercise, let us pretend that the people of Easter Island had adopted a 'sustainable development' model (a policy of trying to meet contemporary needs without compromising needs of the future). Would they have been able to foresee the role that deforestation played in their unsustainable political economy? Moving statues was a social need at the time. Even if they had understood the importance of trees to their long-term subsistence, would they have been able to curb their excessive levels of deforestation before irreversible runaway socio-ecological damage? In other words, would an understanding of sustainable development have enabled them to change their way of life, or would it have lulled them into a false sense of hope that their existing practices could somehow be made "sustainable"? The same could be said of resilience: Would the people of Easter Island have been building a straw house in trying to build adaptive capacity? Even if they had built a system that was temporarily resilient to the sudden and total lack of trees, would it have been worth it (or even possible) to pursue life on a treeless island in the long term?

I don't know the answers to these questions. It's just a thought exercise I'm employing to question the usefulness of resilience and sustainability to our present socio-ecological problems. On the one hand, the idea of building societies resilient to changing material realities (on account of climate change, pollution, ecosystem damage, etc.) just seems like common sense. On the other, I worry that we're trying to make the wrong system resilient - maybe we need social change before trying to improve our adaptive capacity, so that the system we try to sustain is worth sustaining?!

[Social Nature] The Hydrosocial Cycle

At the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Boston in 2008, a session was held on the "hydrosocial cycle". Not to be confused with the "hydrological cycle", the "hydrosocial cycle" was defined in the agenda as follows:

"The 'hydrosocial cycle' is a way of representing the deepening entanglement of flows of water and social power relations (e.g. Bakker, 2003; Swyngedouw, 2004).  Unlike the scientific 'hydrologic(al) cycle', consideration of the hydrosocial cycle makes it impossible to abstract water from the social conditions that give it meaning, and from the people and the societies through which it flows."

I have found this concept extremely compelling in the way it follows from recent explanations of 'social nature' (Castree & Braun 2001). The tendency to want to force a divide between 'humans' and 'nature' is one that has prevailed for hundreds of years, if not longer. One can see, for example, in the medieval Chain of Being, a rationalization of the presumed superiority of humans because of their ability to reason in ways (then) thought to be particular only to homo sapiens. 

The Enlightenment only furthered this 'rational' divide between humans and nature! The Copernican revolution, rather than questioning the very way 'subject' and 'object' have been cognitively divided, instead focused on inverting their relationship. Wikipedia actually puts it nicely:

"Kant's Copernican revolution was the inversion of the traditional relation between the subject of knowledge and the object of that knowledge. Instead of the observed objects affecting the observing subject, the subject's constitution affects the way that the objects are observed. Following this transcendental idealism theory, the possibility of knowledge was thus to be found in the structure of the subject itself, instead of in an objective reality from which nothing can be said."

However, with the rise of new understandings of humans within (and constitutive of) nature, in particular through the popularization of the concept of the Anthropocene, some have argued that we are entering into a new philosophical era and playing witness to the so-called 'Second Copernican Revolution' (Clark, Crutzen and Schellnhuber 2004). As Ignacio Ayestaran has written,

"The latter revolution is in a way a reversal of the first: it enables us to look back on our planet to perceive one single, complex, dissipative, dynamic entity, far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Such revolution strives to understand the Earth system as a whole and to develop, on this cognitive basis, concepts for global environmental management. From this new perspective, our planet is a global network of living information, provided by real, virtual, and global interfaces between the biosphere and the noosphere. In this geopolitical interplay toward a sustainable scenario, we, women and men, should not use the global (world-teletechnologies) to exploit the real (raw materials, environmental resources) to obtain the virtual (financial speculation). We must use the virtual (mathematics, software, biocomputering, Internet) to measure the real (biogeochemicalphysical) to obtain the global (ecological economics and human ecology in Gaia, our planet)" (Ayestaran 2005, 2006 and 2007).

What does this all have to do with water? Well, perhaps - as Jamie Linton has argued in "Hydrolectics" (Chapter 12 of What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction) - the entire way we've been thinking of water as some 'non-human' completely 'natural' element is problematic. As Linton shows so well, the entire idea of the hydrological cycle as we have come to learn about it in high school science classes has been conceived within the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of Enlightenment logic. Linton is worth quoting at length here:

“The case for the ontological relevance of the hydrosocial cycle is suggested in the fact that practically every body of water on the planet bears traces of human involvements in the form of minute quantities of anthropogenic substances such as chlorinated organic compounds. And almost everywhere it falls, snow is laden with particulates and other residues of human activity. The flows of water on the earth’s surface, moreover, are radically affected by people: In the Northern Hemisphere, some 80 percent of river discharge is regulated, or controlled, by dams. Combined with this vast scale of human diversion and regulation of streamflow on the earth’s surface, the systematic and global effects of anthropogenic climate change on hydrological processes mean that these processes are thoroughly and unavoidably involved with human ambition. The very nature of the circulation of water on earth, in other words, has to be described in social as well as hydrological terms” (229).

In our efforts to 'manage' environmental problems associated with water, it seems we need to recognize both that such systems are immutably complex (and thus we should proceed with extreme caution when influencing the flow or physical experience of any water body), but also that such flows and physical experiences are fundamentally connected to our social selves. Influencing social relations can thus have as much of an impact on the experience of water as can physical influences on what we know of the hydrological cycle.

[Geography in a Photograph] The End of the Line

A photograph of the train station (foreground, right) in St. Paul, Alberta; year unknown; taken by Ron Brown, and published in the 3rd Edition of The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: An Illustrated History of Railway Stations in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2008): p. 41.

Sometimes, ordinary photographs have an uncanny ability to capture our attention. This one (above) captured mine. I was leafing through Ron Brown's The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: An Illustrated History of Railway Stations in Canada, and came across this image, and my brain stumbled upon the caption: "The station skyline in St. Paul, Alberta, is typically dominated by the grain elevators. Photo by author." Grain elevators and a train station in St. Paul, Alberta!? I have been to St. Paul many times, yet I have never seen any grain elevators there. Nor had I ever seen or heard of a train station in town - this would imply passenger service. But here was a photograph of a typical prairie town, showcased in a book about abandoned train stations, chosen specifically because of its iconic prairie 'skyline' - dotted with not just one, but five of the multistory beasts! Was it possible that, despite the dozens of visits to the town, I had never come across the rail station and somehow failed to see the town's tallest edifices? Surely, a story was hiding behind this photograph, so I have spent some time trying to brush off some of the dust.

St. Paul, located about 200km Northeast of Edmonton, was settled by the Oblate missionaries in the late 19th Century as a mission for Métis peoples. The settlement was originally known as St. Paul des Métis (shortened to St. Paul in 1936, when the settlement gained 'village' status). In 1909 the settlement was opened up after the original mission project was abandoned, and the doors were opened for French-speaking families from throughout the region and Québec, as well as other European settlers (mostly from Ukraine and the United Kingdom) to move in and break ground. However, like many prairie locales, it was the arrival of the railway that really facilitated the growth of St. Paul into a town...

In the early decades of the 20th Century, even getting between Edmonton and St. Paul was a struggle. From St. Paul, one had to travel some 105 kilometers by horse and buggy to Vegreville, where one of the oldest railway lines in the province was situated, owned at the time by Canadian Northern Railways (CNoR). CNoR was started in 1895 in an attempt to compete with Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) - the company started building track in Manitoba and thereafter spread its network East and West. By 1905, CNoR tracks had reached Edmonton through a southern route (see Figure 1), offering an alternative to the CP's route. In 1914, CNoR began construction of a more Northern route to Saskatchewan, but as the Alberta Heritage Community Foundation notes, the war effort stalled progress:

"... railroad officials claimed there was a shortage of labour, and construction stopped at Spedden in 1919, 48 kilometres short of St. Paul. As did many communities on the Canadian Prairies, they banded together, and recognizing the importance of the railway to the town’s economic prosperity, the citizens of St. Paul volunteered to complete the last stretch of track that would join their town with North Edmonton. In 1920, the first regular service train arrived in St. Paul. J.A. Fortier was the first Station Master and lived with his family in the station building, which was to become an important economic and service centre. Trains not only allowed passenger travel, they also brought mail, equipment, and merchandise. The railway also meant farmers could transport cattle and crops to larger urban centres more easily." 

Figure 1: Map of Alberta Railways, from the Waghorn Guide, 1941

This railway map from the 1941 Waghorn Guide shows an extensive passenger (and freight) rail network, owned by a number of distinct railway companies. For emphasis, I have highlighted two sections of the CNoR lines in red, and one of the competing CP lines in green (the dark black line is the North Saskatchewan River). The town of St. Paul is highlighted in yellow; Vegreville in orange; and Lavoy in blue; Edmonton is at left. Today, the tracks of the more northerly CNoR route AND the highlighted CP route have been torn out, while the southern route is still maintained (now owned by CN) and used as a major trans-continental freight line. 

By 1918, CNoR and other railway companies were consolidated into the new crown corporation, Canadian National (CN). The roaring twenties were a time of prosperity in Northeastern Alberta.At the time, CN and CP rail lines criss-crossed the countryside like the arteries of the nation. Indeed, the growth of the railway network deeper into Canadian territory facilitated the growth of the nation long into the second half of the 20th Century. As Tom Murray's Rails Across Canada notes, "in the decades after the [Second World] war, Canada became a supplier of resources to the world - lumber, grain, sulfur, potash, petroleum products - and CN [and CP] carried them."

The first half of the 20th Century is perhaps the heyday of Canadian passenger rail service. With automobiles and fossil fuels still largely commodities of the elite, trains were a necessary aspect of keeping people and communities connected. The train line between Edmonton and St. Paul, which the community members had helped to complete, was by no means quick (see Figure 2), but it was nevertheless reliable and, arguably, the common person's primary connection to the outside world. In 1946, the train was upgraded to daily service, and was by then fast enough to allow those from small lineside communities such as Bonnyville to come to the service town of St. Paul for the day, and make it back home in time for early evening.

Figure 2: Passenger Rail schedule from Edmonton to St. Paul, 1925

The schedule, from the 1925 Waghorn Guide, tells us that four return trips per week connected St. Paul and Edmonton. The train took an astonishing 10 hours to traverse 200 kilometers!

Vehicular Homicide: Killing Passenger Rail
The 1950s and 1960s marks a dramatic decrease in rail passenger demand (and supply of services) in North America, notably correlating with the post-war boom and the rise of the family automobile as the primary means of mobility. With each successive decade from the 1920s to present, a map of Canada's passenger rail service would get thinner and thinner (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Canadian Passenger Rail in the 1920s and 2000s compared

Compare the images above and below: The above 1921 map [digitally stitched together] shows CN's passenger rail service lines stretching throughout much of the country and into the United States. The map does not even include the competing service by CP, which also provided passenger service in the first half of the 20th Century. The present-day map below shows VIA Rail's only passenger service lines. Today, passenger rail does not pass through many major Canadian cities such as Calgary, Fredericton, and Regina.

The passenger rail service between St. Paul and Edmonton continued to be offered by CN into the early 1970s, but it was then quietly discontinued; the age of cheap oil had facilitated the rise of the automobile - and today the automobile is the only functional means for people to get in or out of St. Paul (aside from the Greyhound bus, which travels twice a day).

From Tracks to Trucks
For the meantime, freight services would take over as the main function of the St. Paul railway. As Brown's photograph attests, freight played an extremely important role in this largely agricultural region's economy. It is only after speaking with my partner's uncle Wayne, a longtime farmer from St. Paul, that I have come to begin to understand the centrality of the freight rail service (and the corresponding grain elevators) to the rural way of life: First, the rail service provided an efficient and cheaper way of bringing important farm inputs, ranging from fertilizers to heavy equipment, to the region. Second, the local grain elevators (and the agglomerations of farmers who owned them) provided local farmers with a sense of ownership and control over their product. They had a say in the local wheat pools, or at least knew who was serving on the regional board, and could make important decisions about their produce based on the buyer, the going price, and it's final destination (farmers like Wayne were even involved in loading their own rail cars with their own goods, for which they were paid a higher share of the product). Third, the elevators served as a rallying/ meeting point for local farmers. As Wayne put it: "We would come together and meet there, share ideas, discuss and network with other farmers." But as the past tense tone used here suggests, these important socio-economic functions of the regional freight railroad (and the grain elevators) are no longer available... they are no longer available because, within the last two decades, CN began to discontinue its freight services in parts of the region. Today, the evidence of a former era has been removed: The grain elevators have been torn down; the rails have been ripped out.

Covering Their Tracks
Now, it's one thing to discontinue passenger and freight rail service; it's quite another to rip out the tracks and dismantle the infrastructure! But this is precisely what would eventually happen in St. Paul, in a decision that Wayne describes as "beyond shortsighted". Today, the iconic prairie image captured by Brown's photograph is completely obliterated in St. Paul and many small agricultural towns like it. The previous landscape has literally been erased: The rails have been removed, buildings torn town, and power lines replaced (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: No more prairie skyline

It may be hard to believe - but this present-day photograph is taken from roughly the same vantage point as Ron Brown's original photograph above. The train station is gone; the five grain elevators are gone; the tracks have been uprooted and shipped away (by truck); new power lines have been put up to service the new housing developments; and as the photo shows, the municipality now piles excess snow where formerly there were train tracks. Photo by Laurie Krekoski, 2011.

How did this happen? Well, there are a myriad of reasons and forces which have come into play, some of which I will briefly touch on here. In some ways, the death of Brown's photograph is a parable of the local impacts of globalization. As mentioned above, the 1960s and 1970s saw the growth of automobile-based infrastructure. Similarly, by the 1980s, freight companies such as CP and CN began to feel competing pressure from the trucking industry. The rail companies began to discontinue service in more remote areas, in order to cut back on losses to the trucking companies.

The privatization of CN in 1995 didn't help either. Thereafter, CN began looking into ways of downsizing services and increasing profit margins. In 1993, as CN eyed its future fate as a private corporation requiring new sources of finance capital, it put up secondary lines like the St. Paul rail corridor for sale. The idea was to keep servicing the area, but to raise funds by selling the valuable property to municipal stakeholders. The corridor was purchased by the County of St. Paul. Nevertheless, thanks to heavy lobbying efforts by recreational snowmobile and all-terrain vehicle (ATV) groups, a plan was floated to consider turning the corridor into a 'linear park', a trail to be used for such recreational purposes. Meanwhile, the trains kept coming to St. Paul, collecting agricultural products and delivering various goods.

The final death-knell came in 1999, when CN announced it would abandon rail service in Northeastern Alberta. Two years later, the county held a referendum on the following question: "Do you support a municipally-regulated public trail on the soon to be abandoned CN railway right of way?" Three affected rural municipalities voted on the resolution, and a slight majority voted in favor - totaling the "Yes" vote to 54.1%. There was no legal requirement to obtain anything more than a simple majority, and thus the recreational park - later to be ironically dubbed the "Iron Horse Trail", began to be constructed shortly thereafter. Today, the trail is marketed as a tourist destination.

In St. Paul, the rails were removed and oddly, the grain elevators and historic station building were demolished (forget heritage status!). For Wayne, the decision to rid of the grain elevators was symbolic, and could be interpreted more sinisterly as a way to pit farmers against one another and consolidate the control of large multinational grain companies. Today, small-scale farmers do not have it easy - they are likely the ones who have lost the most from the disappearing railways and grain elevators. They have to arrange (and pay for) their own private transport of such inputs and their own agricultural output (by truck). Bringing in heavy equipment is extremely difficult and costly. Rather than have a say in coordinating the flow of their product with fellow collaborators at the regional wheat pools, they are all too often "told what to do" by the companies who own farmer's debts. This is the focus of Ingeborg Boyens' Another Seasons Promise.  As one review of Boyens' book notes:

Another Season's Promise explores the farm crisis not as a series of occasional individual losses caused by poor growing seasons, but rather as a perpetual structural phenomenon composed of many villains. Family farmers face down multinational agribusiness, pressure to grow genetically modified foods, the perils of factory farming, massive dependence on pesticides, and an increasingly distant federal government more interested in pleasing international trade bodies than supporting Canadian farmers.

The loss of the local elevators and railroad have played a small (but significant) role in this complicated process... but ironically, the way out of this mess would be much facilitated by the very infrastructure which helped build such farming communities in the first place. We must recognize that these hardships are being experienced in an era of relatively cheap oil. What will happen when the price of inputs and shipping skyrockets as a result of a higher oil prices? What will happen when we decide to take climate change seriously, and enact policies that limit the amount of fossil fuel use? How are small rural Canadian towns like St. Paul going to facilitate the mobility of people and goods when fossil fuel based automobiles and trucks are no longer a viable mode of transportation? It is thus clear why a local farmer and longtime community member like Wayne would see the dismantling of the rail infrastructure as shortsighted. This is not to suggest that a recreation trail is a bad thing (quite the contrary, publicly-owned recreation areas, and people coming together to have fun and be healthy is a good way to build community). The shortsighted aspect is that the replacement of rails and agricultural buildings clearly does not take into consideration the long-term community implications of losing such crucial infrastructure - the type of infrastructure that has played a pivotal role in the foundation of rural life in Canada.

[Urban Geography] Ottawa’s Spatial Crisis

The City of Ottawa is suffering from what I suppose we could call a ‘spatial crisis’. Yet the crisis is largely a manifestation of human decisions. The problem is partly of our own making – and as such, the solutions will partly have to come from us too.

What are the problems?

For one, getting around is a major problem in Ottawa. Traffic is a nightmare. Aside from the city’s world-renowned ‘transitway’ (special highways for buses only), getting around on public transit is extremely costly, inconvenient, and slow. The almost complete lack of incentives to take public transit has lead to an extreme overuse and reliance upon automobiles, which has the numerous consequences of further congestion, emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, traffic fatalities (a leading cause of death in Canada), inactive people, and continued dependence on a valuable but non-renewable resource (putting upward pressure on its price).

Another problem is sprawl. Ironically, the city’s (also world-renowned) greenbelt was designed for the very purposes of limiting sprawl. Jacques Greber – a ‘landscape architect’ who proposed many of the city’s ‘natural’ recreation areas now owned and managed by the National Capital Commission (NCC) – proposed the greenbelt in the 1950s and soon after land was expropriated for the urban containment project. Today, the greenbelt plays a very important (and beneficial) role in Ottawa, as a) an area of outdoor recreation; b) a source of some local agricultural production; and c) in a very limited sense – a protectorate for the functioning of certain ecosystemic processes (such as the conversion of carbon dioxide to oxygen and the provision of habitat areas for various species). The irony, however, is that the greenbelt (or more specifically the way in which city plans have unfolded around the greenbelt) has actually served to exacerbate the level of damage resulting from transportation and sprawl problems.

But traffic and sprawl and their socio-ecological consequences are just a taste of the problems that we can expect to come. Given the realities of climate change and peak oil, the procurement of healthy food, for example, is bound to become a challenge for the average citizen of Ottawa if these regional spatial patterns continue unchanged.

Originally, the city was contained to the area within the greenbelt. In 2001, however, the region of Ottawa-Carleton, including the municipalities of Nepean, Kanata, Gloucester, Vanier, Cumberland, and the townships of West Carleton, Goulburn, Rideau and Osgoode were all amalgamated into the City of Ottawa. Although this political transformation theoretically had the potential to offer the new city council the ability to block urban sprawl and focus on increasing density in the core and maintaing regional agricultural lands for such purposes, the opposite has occurred. It became the prerogative of councilors to provide transportation infrastructure to connect those areas outside the greenbelt with those on the inside – but rather than focusing on building public transit infrastructure, the city chose instead to prioritize automobile travel. Railway lines were ripped out or abandoned, and multi-lane highways from the city core to areas in the West (ie. Kanata) and East (ie. Orleans) facilitated the suburban lifestyle, with its required commute from the place of living in the ‘outskirts’ to the place of working in the ‘city centre’…

And who wouldn’t want to live in a large five-bedroom, five-bathroom house with a fenced-in backyard and a double-car garage and access to a nearby park and all for less because the house is located an hour’s drive from your place of work and, after all, in real estate, location, location, location is everything!?

So it was that the rural areas of the Ottawa-Carleton region, which had for many decades produced much of the food consumed by those inside the greenbelt, were re-zoned along residential purposes. The agricultural lands were razed –literally flattened, bulldozed, erased – and converted into new communities where thousands of similar-looking pre-fabricated houses were placed along winding dead-end streets. The suburbs were filled, and for the most part the localized economies of former independent municipalities were integrated (and thus became dependent on) the jobs, services, and sources of goods procurement found in the urban core (reversing the traditional dependence of the core upon the periphery for agricultural products).

The people we elected into office allowed this to happen, but the influences of global capitalism played a role too: The opening of borders, the construction of global trade networks and free trade agreements, the intensification of large-scale industrial agriculture, the extraction of global supplies of hydrocarbons, and the belief in the neoliberal imperative for economic growth have temporarily facilitated this process. While it has been hard to get around, it has nevertheless still been possible to do so; and while the food of Ottawa’s citizens now comes from other climates, the main barrier to putting food on the table has thus far been one’s income, not one’s physical distance to the source of production. The high output of agricultural products from industrial farms put downward pressure on many crop prices, which in turn put pressure on small scale farmers to either go big, or get out of the business altogether.

Yet here’s the rub – while this entire structure relies on cheap fossil fuels, global supplies are beyond their peak (which happened in 2006 according to the conservative estimates of the International Energy Agency), meaning the age of cheap oil is over. What's worse, the very fossil fuels we've been consuming in ever larger quantities each year up until now have definitively to altered the biogeochemical processes of the Earth, forcing us to adapt to new weather patterns and ecosystemic realities. Numerous popular intellectuals from both the left and the right have made the point in some way or another, from George Monbiot to Al Gore to David Suzuki. Bill McKibben put it starkly, when he noted that “the entire industrial food system essentially insures that your food is marinated in crude oil before you eat it.” Or as Toronto filmmaker Gregory Greene has implied in his film The End of Suburbia, the reality of peak oil and gas means that the cost of fossil fuels can be expected to skyrocket, and thus getting around and feeding oneself (not only because of the transportation of food, but also the reliance upon natural gas for the production of agricultural fertilizers) are going to become increasingly difficult for the average citizen as a result.

The spatial configuration of the Ottawa area has been continually transformed since the beginning of this planet's history. Long before human settlement, natural climatic changes, tectonic shifts and celestial movements caused changes in the land and its surrounding conditions. Undoubtedly, the indigenous peoples who lived and subsisted for thousands of years in what is now known as the region of ‘Ottawa’ (so named after the Algonquian ‘Odawa’ nation that lived here at the time of European colonization) also influenced the space around them. Yet it has been settlers and their descendents who in the last sixty years have overseen a radical and high-paced transition of the spatial reality of the city to its present configuration – a set-up which shows signs of extreme vulnerability to the expected changes in climate and the declining global supply of oil and gas. Those of us who make decisions affecting Ottawa’s spatiality – including not just city councillors and civil servants but us everyday common citizens as well – arguably have a responsibility to take the future seriously, and that means thinking about the ways we shape and produce the spaces around us.

[Cultural Geography] On The Canadian

PART I (Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Travelling ‘Comfort’ Class on VIA Rail’s Cross-Country ‘Land Cruise’, and More…)

Welcome to The Canadian

VIA Rail is a crown corporation that owns and operates Canada’s only national-level passenger rail service. It is possible to travel across the country, on ten core route lines, which stretch from West Coast to East Coast, and as far north as Churchill, Manitoba. The majority of VIA’s passenger traffic occurs within the busy  ‘corridor’ between Québec City and Windsor, where journeys take place within a few hours and the trains (at present) offer free wireless internet service. The corridor sees multiple trips per day, and covers a region which serves as home to over half of Canada’s population.

However, it is quite a different experience to travel the multiple-overnight journey between Toronto and Vancouver. This cross-country journey is one of 4,466 kilometers, and is typically completed in over 82 hours (more below on why it takes so long). The Toronto-Vancouver line is called The Canadian, and it travels through numerous small towns and some bigger cities along the route, with planned rest stops in Capreol (near Sudbury), Hornepayne, Sioux Lookout, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Jasper and Kamloops (and sometimes other smaller towns if the train is ahead of schedule). The Canadian departs three times a week (leaving from Toronto at 10:00pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; and leaving Vancouver at 8:30pm on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.

 Figure 1: VIA Rail Route Map

I have travelled on The Canadian four times (one trip between Toronto and Edmonton at the end of 2009, returning in the beginning of 2010; and the other between Toronto and Vancouver at the end of 2010, returning in the beginning of 2011). By no means does this make me an ‘expert’ – if you travel on The Canadian you are bound to meet others on board who regularly travel on this line (though typically not the entire length of the journey). However, having spent nearly two weeks of my life on this line, having spoken with other cross-country travelers, and having done a bit of additional research, I’ve learned a thing or two about this specific passenger rail experience. If you are considering taking the Canadian you may find some of this information useful (I encourage skipping the boring parts by using the subheadings below). 

Why do they take the train?

There are many reasons why one may decide to take the train between various towns or cities along The Canadian route, as opposed to driving, taking the bus, or flying, even though the latter three options are typically quicker. I’ve encountered many reasons when asking fellow passengers why they decided to take the Canadian, and classified these reasons into six archetypes:

• The Tourists: VIA’s corporate strategy is to make The Canadian a ‘land cruise’ – a quaint, early 20^th Century style, romantic journey across the country, enabling those on board to view the impressive vistas of Canada’s diverse landscapes. As such, the train, which is typically made up of just over 10 cars, is extremely ‘classed’ – with the tourism-focused elite class passengers in one section of the train, and the ‘lower class’ regular passengers in the other. One gets the impression that VIA makes the most profit from those ‘elite class’ travelers, many of whom – it seemed to me – were wealthy international or domestic tourists hoping to see the Rockies or the vast Canadian prairies. While the line typically carries two cars for economy class (ironically called ‘comfort class’) – which each hold up to 62 seats – the majority of the train’s cars are designated for the elite ‘Silver and Blue Class’ only [there is actually a sign on the door to the dining car which reminds comfort class passengers they are only allowed through if they have reservations for the dining car]. There are different types of Silver and Blue cars, also known as the ‘sleeper cars’ (which may give you a hint as to what you’re not reasonably expected to do in the economy class cars). Both the Manor Cars (each individual car is named after an influential Canadian of British origin) and the Chateau Cars (each named after an influential Canadian of French origin) typically hold up to 20 passengers. These elite cars provide different types of sleeping arrangements, ranging from private single, double and triple bedrooms, and less private berths (which are separated from the hallway by curtains). The sleeper car passengers have access to on-board showers and typically have all their meals included in their fare. They also have a private ‘dome car’ known as the Park Car (each car is named after a Canadian National Park), which offers an upper-level scenic dome. While economy passengers also have access to a dome car, the elite Park Car is located at the rear of the train and contains a bar and a rounded panoramic ‘bullet’ lounge, where passengers are treated to free coffee, wine and cheese tastings and other entertainment. This is about all I will say about travelling first class (which I have not yet had the luxury of doing)… such elite class tickets typically cost many thousands of dollars per passenger. Of course, some tourists with smaller budgets may opt for the comfort class. I have met a number of younger ‘backpacker’ types wanting to see Canada who have not had the budget for a sleeper car. 
•   Hassle Free Travelers: The next type of passenger I would call the ‘hassle free traveler’. This includes a number of different types of people. In some cases they may hate the extreme busyness and claustrophobic character of airports, or the sardine-packed nature of buses and planes; or perhaps they are not keen on having to ‘think’ about their travel, as one has to do in a vehicle. They like the idea of being able to sit back and relax, drink, walk around, not be bound by seatbelts and directions. I have met some hassle free travelers are genuinely afraid of flying or even driving long distances (especially in winter). While automobile and air travel is harrowing during a winter storm, the train seems to do just fine in a snowfall.
  
  
  Remote Small Town Travelers: Sometimes The Canadian is literally the easiest way to get to or from a remote town. Many travelers from small towns in Northern Ontario or the Prairies seem to fit this description. For example, I met two travelers (siblings) who were taking the train from Toronto back home to a small town located two hours North of Sioux Lookout, simply because it was the easiest option. Another common short stint includes the leg between Edmonton and Jasper. By law, the train is required to stop anywhere along the route that a passenger desires (as long as the request is made in advance), so sometimes travelers wanting to go into the remote deep woods might take the train. 
• Discount Travelers: In Canada, the train is typically an expensive mode of travel. However, in some circumstances it can be relatively economical. VIA’s CanRail pass, for example, offers 7 trips within a span of 21 days for under $600 [$520 for students; $590 for adults; NOTE: these were the conditions at the time of writing – they have changed since 2009 and are apt to change again in 2011]. This can make a cross-country open-jaw trip much cheaper than air travel. Other discount travelers include those with special discount rights (such as CN employees – the relationship between VIA and CN is described below). I met one traveler who had worked for CN for decades, and when he retired acquired an impressive full discount travel pass with VIA. Finally, there are the lucky passengers who have got last minute discounts on the web. VIA posts its express deals online every Thursday morning between midnight and 3am. Deals are typically offered for various travel routes in the ensuing three weeks (so if you’re flexible this is likely the cheapest and best way to travel). The deals aren’t only for economy tickets; they also often include berths in the off-season (which I have seen for exceptionally low prices – in one instance as little as $300 per passenger, including two berths and all meals included!). The train is also an affordable option for families – and there seem to be quite a few parents with younger children willing to brave the comfort class accommodations over long distances. Parties of three or more are seated in two facing seat pairs (see ‘sleeping’ section below), which can offer two parents a space to put up their feet. 
• Outside the Box Travelers: There are always those travelers with particular quirks – there are some who take the train because it offers a rare opportunity to ‘disconnect’ from the humdrum of busy every-day life in society for four days. This disconnection offers time to sit and think, or do other time-consuming projects that just wouldn’t get done otherwise (there are a lot of knitters on the Canadian); this category of traveler also includes train fanatics, as well as adventurous types who like the idea of trying something new. Here I might also include travelers with pets: Although it costs $50 per trip to bring a dog on The Canadian, many travelers seem to prefer this option to airplane baggage compartments. At any train stop dog owners are allowed to take their dogs for a brief walk to get some exercise (though see the warning about bringing dogs below). Finally, some people take The Canadian when they are moving to another city, because the train offers each passenger to carry up to 6 bags (I met a woman who was moving all of her closest possessions, which included her bike, from a small town in Saskatchewan to Vancouver).
• Environmentalists: A small sample of the people I’ve talked to on The Canadian turned out to be taking it for the same reason as me – to yield a lower carbon footprint than the alternatives of air and automobile travel. Typically train travel is far more efficient than taking the train or driving. There is no doubt that rail travel in VIA’s corridor is more efficient (in terms of emissions) than automobile or air travel. This may be why VIA Rail has recently picked up the tagline “A Green Choice”. However, there can be exceptions, and I have been wary lately of whether The Canadian is actually as efficient as it is made out to be. At least once along the trans-continental journey you can see a large fuel truck pull up to the two locomotive engines to pump them full of diesel. This is reminiscent of a fuel truck filling up an airplane while docked at the airport. The Canadian typically uses two locomotives – one to haul and one to provide power and as a back-up – each locomotive is (usually) carrying a General Motors F40PH-2D engine – a 16 cylinder, 3000 horsepower, diesel-electric locomotive. These motors consume a lot of diesel, especially considering that they produce power for electric heating, air conditioning, cab lighting and power outlets for the entire train. Another woman I met on the train informed me that the train ‘idled’ for the full four hours while it was parked in Winnipeg’s Union Station. I’ve yet to do the calculations, but because the majority of the train’s cars are designated for elite passenger (and therefore less passengers are carried per overall train weight) it is very possible that the per passenger emissions on The Canadian, at present, are as high (if not higher) than bus travel [when I finally do the calculations I’ll be sure to post them here]. 

Figure 2: The Canadian with Three Locomotives

Think of the diesel! Photo from Cal Murray's Flickr Account

(Lack of) Speed

As mentioned above, the train travels at a slow average speed. While the F40PH-2D locomotive can reach speeds of 145 kilometers per hour, The Canadian typically does not travel that fast. Often (approximately once every few hours during the entire four day trip), the train will come to a complete stop alongside the tracks and wait. “Wait for what?” you might ask… and herein lies the story of VIA Rail’s present sad state of affairs (of which I will discuss in more detail in a future post)…. We wait for freight trains to go by. As VIA Rail’s travel guide, Canada by Train, written by Chris Hanus and John Shaske, suggests, some freights are “up to two miles long. Usually their size exceeds the length of siding tracks enabling trains to pass each other. Inevitably, the mammoth freights are given priority and passenger trains must wait on siding tracks until it is clear to continue” (120). However, there is a simpler reason why VIA is required to wait on the side of the tracks – it doesn’t own them! The freight companies own the tracks. As a CN employee told me, VIA currently rents track time from CN, thanks to a 3-year contract worth $60 million (this is obscene considering the legacy of CN as a nationally owned rail enterprise, now bilking money from the Canadian taxpayer for VIA’s mediated rail access).  This is one of the main reasons why The Canadian is so slow. Given the 82 hour journey and the distance of 4,466 km, the train travels at an average speed of 54.5 km/h (this, of course, includes stops). Freight shipments, meanwhile, are guaranteed to travel from Vancouver’s port to Chicago in no more than 48 hours – it just goes to show how much of a priority is passenger rail in Canada!

Sleeping

For the so-called comfort class, VIA’s sleeping arrangements are, by far, the WORST part of the journey. The seats recline to about 45 degrees, and an angled stool unfolds from under the seat. Light sleepers out there will have trouble getting some shut-eye! When the train is full, sleeping is difficult and at best uncomfortable. When the train is not full, however, a somewhat restless sleep can be attained by finding one’s own pair of seats and folding the body into various configurations. I never sleep well the first night of a journey on The Canadian, but luckily, because I am so exhausted and tired on the second night, sleep comes easier, regardless of the uncomfortable arrangements and all the stimuli (shaking cars, the loud humdrum of the train, the constants overhead lights, etc.). On my most recent journey I asked one of the attendants if she’d every seen passengers sleep in the main isle. She answered that she has seen just about every possible inch of the train taken for a sleeping location. After a few days on the train, many travelers are just pining for a flat place to lie down… a few odd places may provide such a space, aside from the main isle: The large overhead baggage shelves, the rectangular baggage storage area at the back of each economy car, the café car, and the dome car (by lying across the dividing aisle) – the VIA attendant confirmed she had seen passengers trying to sleep in all of these locations.

END OF PART I (Stay tuned for Part II)