streetfestival

Export Development Canada (EDC) and other national crown corporations have provided $7.6 to $13.5 billion a year between 2020 and 2022 to support the domestic fossil fuel industry, as compared with just $147 million for in-country renewable energy production, number-crunching by the IISD revealed in June.

Canada was criticized in the new report for a “lack of transparency in reporting” that made it hard to ascertain whether finance was going to domestic or international markets. EDC data shows it has provided $88 billion to the oil and gas sector since 2016.

Today, the NDP sits in the shadow of the Liberal government, caught between criticizing those in power while also attempting to claim agency over bills being passed. Most peculiar of all has been Singh’s retreat from online spaces. In 2023, he deactivated his TikTok account citing privacy concerns, but the shift in the tone of his content went beyond that.

His once fresh, relatable, curtain-tearing content had been replaced by generic campaign videos of Singh reading scripts word-for-word that feel like they were copied directly from the platform section of the NDP website. It became boring, uninspired and — most importantly — ineffective. Polls now project a loss of seats for the NDP in the next election.

One thing is for certain: we are closer to a Singh exit than we are from his arrival. Come October, he will have been party leader for seven years — he will certainly not be leader in seven years. So, has his choice to abandon his online roots damaged the future of his party?

Whatever the future of the NDP holds and whoever its next leader will be, it is clear that it remains a party in desperate need of reimagination — the exact same issue that Singh was brought in to solve.

This is an aspect of the carbon capture greenwashing initiative I wasn't aware of. It will need another pipeline network that can be very costly to human and environmental health (and operated by an industry that our government is willfully blind to).

Carbon capture is becoming a linchpin of Canada’s plan to reduce emissions from its oil and gas sector, but to pull this plan off would require massive investments in necessary infrastructure: pipelines, pressurization stations, equipping carbon capture to bitumen upgraders and more, all of which could fail. In a carbon management strategy, released in 2023, the federal government says to support the country’s emission reduction efforts, carbon capture capacity must grow 270 per cent from current levels by 2030, with “significant further scaling required” to reach net-zero by 2050.

when carbon dioxide pipelines fail, they can fail catastrophically.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, there have been at least 76 reported safety incidents related to CO2 pipelines since 2010 in the United States. Some incidents are minor and others are disastrous, but all point to the risks of transporting and storing carbon dioxide as a way to manage greenhouse gas emissions.

Dodging a full assessment

By far the largest project would be the Pathways Alliance’s $16.5-billion flagship carbon capture project, which would include a carbon dioxide pipeline stretching 400 kilometres from the oilsands in northern Alberta to a storage hub about 300 kilometres east of Edmonton.

The Pathways Alliance is splitting its megaproject into 126 smaller segments, with multiple applications for various licences with the AER. As previously reported by Canada’s National Observer, that means the project won’t be subject to a full environmental assessment that examines what the impact of the project in its entirety would be. “The impacts are never being articulated to the public, and that includes impacts on the environment, the climate and Indigenous rights,” said Matt Hulse, a lawyer with Ecojustice collaborating with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to call for an impact assessment.

So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.

Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction.

Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.

In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.

It’s generally fair to wait for a policy to unfold, to leave some time to judge its effects, before we decide whether it will succeed or fail. The Ford government has done its critics a favour this week, however, with its announced changes to drug policy in Ontario, shutting more than half of the province’s safe consumption sites. The logic adopted by the government and its defenders is that because the province’s overall high rate of opioid deaths has continued, these safe consumption sites are a failure. This is despite the fact that no patient has died of an overdose at these sites precisely because they’ve been monitored and treated.

The bad news for the government, and the good news for its critics, is that if the benchmark for success is "reducing the rate of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario” then nothing announced this week will succeed. That’s not because an emphasis on treatment over harm reduction is itself indefensible. It’s because the scale of the problem that Ontario faces is so far beyond the resources that have so far been committed, and because addiction itself is such a wicked problem for health policy.

For nearly a century, the Beer Store has, in one form or another, operated arguably the best-performing recycling program in the province of Ontario. Its deposit-return system — which sees consumers get refunds of 10 or 20 cents per container returned to the stores — boasts a return rate of nearly 80 per cent overall, and for some specific types of containers, the number is higher still: 89 per cent of glass bottles were returned in 2022, according to the most recent environmental-stewardship report on the Beer Store’s website.

The success of the deposit-return scheme, which has been expanded to include wine bottles and other alcohol-beverage containers, stands in stark contrast to the middling diversion rates achieved by the blue-box program operated by many municipalities. The city of Toronto, for example, achieved an overall diversion rate of just 53.6 per cent in residential collection, and even single-family homes (which perform better than the city’s older apartment buildings) rate only 63.9 per cent. The numbers provincewide aren’t any better overall, and a report from the province’s Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority suggests Ontario’s diversion rates have actually fallen over the past decade.

So the closure of Beer Store locations in small northern communities poses a problem that, at least in some cases, is going to fall on the property-tax bill of local homeowners.

“As a municipality, we now are going to be stuck having to pick up everyone’s empties, and it’s going to impact our landfill space. It’s going to end up in the pile at the front of everyone’s driveway on garbage day,” McPherson says. “We are in the process right now of applying for an environmental assessment for new waste management because the Geraldton landfill is full. This is absolutely the wrong time for us to have excess material going into the landfill.”

Greenstone isn’t alone: Beer Store locations in Nipigon and Cochrane are also reportedly closing in September. In at least some cases, the Beer Store’s former customers will still be able to get beer at an LCBO or a new outlet such as a corner store or gas station — but locals will have nowhere to return empties.

New research finds that access to the surgery has increased since an Ontario government funding change — “but only for one group”

A new study adds weight to such suspicions. Analyzing six years of patient data, it has found that a disproportionate number of surgeries performed by private clinics since the province’s new funding allocation have gone to the wealthiest Ontarians.

“You can’t actually charge patients for cataract surgery, because of OHIP,” says Campbell. “But [these clinics] would have OHIP pay for the cataract surgeries and charge patients for other services in a way that would cover their costs and left a profit.”

“What we did is divide people into five different strata by socioeconomic status and compare their rates of surgery before and after this policy change,” Campbell says. “To put it bluntly, access did go up, but only for one group — and that was the group that could afford to pay extra.” In fact, the team found that surgeries for those in the highest socioeconomic strata went up by nearly 25 per cent in private clinics. For those in the lowest, however, they fell by 8.5 per cent.

While it is difficult to say what precisely is driving this change, Campbell says it likely comes down to two major factors. “The first is the continued request for payment from patients who are seeking care in private centres … The second is these clinics keeping separate wait-lists for people who are willing to pay extra versus those who aren’t,” he says. “That allows them to sell, essentially, the ability to jump the line. Extra lenses and whatnot might have some value to them, but the real value is in jumping what is perceived as a really long queue.”

“The whole thing was equal parts unnerving and a miracle,” he says. “The most terrifying thing was seeing them interacting with 80-year-olds who were confused, worried, and just wanted their vision back so they could see their grandkids. These people were accepting those fees left and right.”

#ALTtext: A screenshot capture shows the cookies settings popup window of a current website. The first sentence of the popup starts: "We and our 843 partners store and access personal data..." The screenshot is annotated. "843 partners" is highlighted with "Is that all?" written beside it

4 months old but new to me and pretty funny.

~

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=epvLrK6Mhd4

https://newsie.social/@Geewhizpat/113028457198325540

#ALTtext: Parody video of video footage of various 1-on-1 interviews with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin combined with closed captioning of lyrics related to a Trump scandal(s) and to the tune of Shaggy's hit (2000) "It wasn't me." There's a music backing track as well. There are Trump-like and Putin-like voices singing their respective parts. Trump lists things he's done like "dabbling in election fraud" to his confidant, Putin, who elaborates on his general advice, to say "it wasn't me."

On Monday, the Blue Jays and Red Sox have a doubleheader. The first game of that doubleheader is the resumption of a suspended game from 2 months ago. Since then, Danny Jansen has been traded between teams. From what I've heard on the Jays TV broadcast, it's been confirmed that Jansen will play for the Sox in the resumption of the suspended game that he started as a Blue Jays 2 months ago, thus making baseball history.

This is a new development.

At 10:00 a.m. eastern today, the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference served CN with a strike notice effective Monday, August 26, at 10:00 a.m.

As meetings with the CIRB continue, the Board has yet to make a ruling that would force binding arbitration or end any work stoppage.

To protect workers’ right to collectively bargain and frustrate CN’s attempt to force arbitration, the union will take strike action to pressure CN into negotiating an agreement.

“By sidestepping the collective bargaining process and ordering binding arbitration, the federal government has undermined the foundation on which labour unions work to improve wages and working conditions for all Canadians. Bargaining is also the primary way our union fights for rail safety—all considerations that outweigh short-term economic concerns,” said Paul Boucher, President of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference.

The parties held a case management conference with the CIRB last night, and hearings are currently underway today to address preliminary issues. The timeline for a decision from the CIRB regarding the Minister’s referrals is still unclear at this time. The union is prepared to appeal to the federal court if necessary.

Context from CN and CPKC Begin Lockout

The main obstacles to reaching an agreement remain the companies’ demands, not union proposals.

Neither CN nor CPKC has relented on their push to weaken protections around rest periods and scheduling, increasing the risk of fatigue-related safety issues. CN also continues to demand a forced relocation scheme, which could see workers ordered to move across the country, tearing families apart in the process.

The main obstacles to reaching an agreement remain the companies’ demands, not union proposals.

Neither CN nor CPKC has relented on their push to weaken protections around rest periods and scheduling, increasing the risk of fatigue-related safety issues. CN also continues to demand a forced relocation scheme, which could see workers ordered to move across the country, tearing families apart in the process.