The News Rundown

Calgarians killed the bag bylaw not Calgary city council

This week Calgary repealed its single use plastics bylaw. Effective immediately businesses are no longer required to abide by the former bylaw.
The bylaw required businesses to not provide cutlery, straws, and other single use items unless they were asked for.
They were also required to charge 15 cents for a single use bag or $1 for a reusable bag. The prices would have risen to 25 cents and $2 starting in 2025.
The bylaw was contentious especially when it came to drive thru service. It was commonplace with the bylaw in place to see fast-food workers handing items one at a time to customers.
The single use bylaw combined with property tax hikes led to the Recall Gondek campaign but the mayor still seems to think there’s a path going forward for a similar bylaw.
This week she said, "I think behaviour change is an important component here. But how you drive that behaviour change is even more important.”
This response from the mayor highlights that it was about changing behaviour and that was the ultimate goal of council.
Let us be clear, behavioural change is a big part of what policies put forward by those like Gondek are aiming to strive for.
But for her part Gondek also said that the city should have consulted with Calgarians about what was expected and that they’ll do better next time.
Not only when it comes to garbage but many other things too.
Councillors Courtney Walcott, Kourtney Penner, and Gian-Carlo Carra voted to keep the bylaw.
Next year's municipal election will prove interesting to see if there are any consequences for these councillors.
One would primarily expect that this story is about plastics and other single-use items and that it was a decision made by council for a net positive.
In any case reducing the amount of garbage created is a good thing but as with any story there’s always another side to it and which side is getting their dues.
Before the vote to repeal there was an opportunity for speakers. One of those speakers was Dr. Joe Vipond.
Vipond was a frequent critic of the UCP government during the dark days of the pandemic.
Joe Vipond emerged as a continual source that the media in Alberta would talk to in the pandemic about masking, spread, and other issues. What they left out is that in the years leading up to the pandemic, Vipond was a prolific donor to the Alberta NDP donating up to the maximum.
This in itself shows where Vipond stands (and he’s allowed to have a stance) but the media did a poor job at highlighting this while presenting him as objective.
This continues today.
In his address he asked the council to “look beyond the outrage machine.”
Vipond also led a climate sanity protest this week as the Global Petroleum Congress was meeting in Calgary.
He also brought his 11 year old daughter to speak at the city council who “cares about the environment and climate change.”
The media coverage about Vipond’s daughter does not mention the link to her father (though the CBC is the only one who carried her remarks).
The media also does not highlight her father Joe’s political activities either.
The point at the end of the day is that decisions in government and at city council are made by people with their own narratives, goals, and ambitions.
Seldomly do we hear about those though in the reporting.
Which of course means that the needs and desires of the ordinary Albertans can be left at the sidelines, throwing away practicality for the need of the privileged politicians and elite to tell everyone else what to do.
After the single use bylaw or “Bag Bylaw” as Premier Danielle Smith called it was repealed she took to X saying: “Great to hear Calgary’s Bag Bylaw has been repealed. This will save Calgary families and businesses time and unnecessary cost. I’m absolutely confident Calgarians can be trusted to recycle and dispose of such items on a voluntary basis. In fact, all Albertans can. I hope a few other Alberta municipalities make the same change.”
The image on her post said “bye-bye bag fee” which is simple and to the point and where most Albertans are at.
And by council and others ignoring that and the media not reporting on that the divisions within Alberta increase.
Supplementals:

Before I begin this week's BC story, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the people of Fort Nelson in Northern BC, who are being threatened by a huge forest fire getting close to the town, which is now under an evacuation order. It's important to note the severe drought conditions that much of BC, and indeed, Western Canada have been under over the spring, and it's likely going to be a rough summer.
With that in mind, it's important to note that Canada's resource industry is still a drop in the bucket when it comes to global emissions, with over half of the world's emissions coming from just China, India, and the US. An easy way to reduce global emissions, especially from Asia, which features emerging economies like Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, which contribute a much larger share of pollution and global emissions than years ago, is to export cleaner sources of energy than the coal they currently use.
One such BC project that aims to do that, is the Woodfibre LNG project, which is being built at the site of the natural gas liquefaction and export terminal construction project that is already underway on the former site of the Woodfibre pulp mill (hence the name of the project).
The Woodfibre facility has approvals from the B.C. and federal governments, as well as the Squamish Nation which the LNG terminal site sits on. When complete, the facility will produce 2.1 million tonnes of LNG per year for overseas markets, according to the company's website.
Woodfibre LNG will source natural gas from Pacific Canbriam Energy in northeast BC, and will be powered by renewable hydroelectricity from BC Hydro, making it what the company calls "the world’s first net zero LNG export facility" when it comes online.
This is paramount because LNG facilities like this one will be critical to exporting LNG, which not only is a massive resource for the BC economy, but also for the countries relying on the LNG to transition away from coal which is far more polluting for the environment. If we can do this while relying on renewable energy to do so ourselves, that's even better.
With that, it's important to take note of curious phrasing on the Woodfibre LNG website about safety. The website says that: "Woodfibre LNG is committed to building the facility in a way that protects human health and safety, including the safety of Indigenous peoples, women and girls – both in the community and on our construction site."
Safety seems to be a key sticking point in the ongoing negotiation battle between Woodfibre LNG and the Squamish city council over where construction workers will be staying during the long construction process. As stated, Woodfibre has approvals from the B.C. and federal governments, as well as the Squamish Nation, but the Squamish city council still is not fully on board. The council previously rejected a plan that would house workers in a temporary camp onsite. Because of this, the company was forced to look at an alternative.
Enter the MV Isabelle X, a 555 feet long Croatian-built former cruise ship, retrofitted by Vancouver-based Bridgeman’s Services Group for the eye-watering total of $100-million, in order to house the 650 or so workers for the Woodfibre LNG project.
In its new role as a “floatel,” or a floating hotel, the vessel is completely self-sufficient, including sewage collection and shore power instead of diesel to run state-of-the-art industrial heat pumps and ship systems. On Thursday, Woodfibre opened the vessel to a media tour, showing off its dining room, games room, lounge and well-appointed cabins.
The floatel has earned the approval of both the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office and the Squamish Nation. Woodfibre LNG president Christine Kennedy said: “The floatel is a direct response to requests from the District of Squamish and the Squamish Nation and members of the community over a consultation process that went on for several years about housing our project workforce outside of the community. From the beginning [we have] been committed to minimizing impacts on the community of Squamish [including the top concerns [of] impacts on traffic, housing, impacts on community services.”
The Squamish Nation also worked with the company to draft a comprehensive gender-based violence training program. Kalkalilh of the Squamish Gender Safety Advisory Committee said: “We have trained over 1,000 people on site. And this was a quote from some of the workers themselves: that they’d never had this kind of training before”.
And still, the Squamish council last week voted to reject a temporary one-year permit for the vessel. That decision followed concerns from speakers about the safety of women and girls, traffic issues and waste management issues. This has left the project, along with the floatel, listlessly adrift, with the former not able to be constructed, and the latter sitting in Howe Sound in Vancouver, unused.
In a bid for positive press, on Thursday the MV Isabelle X welcomed media aboard for a tour of the facilities, where Kennedy made it clear they don’t have a Plan B. Thursday’s tour was designed to both show off the floatel’s deluxe features and demonstrate how Woodfibre intends to use it to allay concerns about potential impacts of the workforce on housing and public safety in the community.
Bridgemans CEO Brian Grange led the tour showing off the floatel’s attributes for workers including 652 individual cabins with their own bathrooms, a dining room that seats 450, a three-bed medical clinic, a state-of-the-art 8,000-square-foot gym and three separate lounges to accommodate the diverse recreational needs of more than 650 workers.
Kennedy added that the floatel concept was devised to make sure that the project workforce wouldn’t put any additional pressure on Squamish’s existing, limited housing, or create potential safety issues, particularly for Indigenous women and girls. Human rights impacts, the potential for gender violence, and human trafficking were among community concerns raised. Kennedy said those should be answered by the floatel, which are to be the only accommodations for its non-local workforce, and there should be a detailed gender and cultural safety plan.
Kennedy said their site is water-access-only with workers brought in directly from Vancouver by boat then back at the end of 14-day rotations. “Workers are not to have non-emergency access to the community of Squamish. There’s not going to be leisure-time transportation services over to Squamish.” In the meantime, Woodfibre is housing workers at a land-based camp at Port Mellon, which is also only accessible by water, and doesn’t have any of floatel’s many amenities.
Squamish council is stalling because they say that community concerns haven't been met. But from someone looking in from the outside, it looks as though every concern was met, through great care and expense. And yet, the rejection still happened. Squamish Mayor Armand Hurford proposed a motion to approve a one-year temporary use permit with the possibility of one three-year renewal, rather than an initial term of three years. He said the floatel's performance over the first year would provide clarity for the renewal discussion, but the motion was rejected.
About 200 people attended a public meeting last week and hundreds more submitted comments online, with the majority voicing opposition to the floatel. Tracey Saxby, executive director of the advocacy group My Sea to Sky, was pleased with the council's decision.
Saxby in an interview with CBC said: "Last night was the first time that a government regulatory body actually listened to the community. The provincial and federal regulatory processes have failed us and it was left to [the] local government to stand up and listen to the community. I'm really grateful for the local leadership that was shown."
Regardless, it seems like the stalling will just increase costs of the project, and provide less benefit to the Squamish First Nation who are willing and enthusiastic partners in the project, and say they are happy with the proposed solutions from Woodfibre.
At the end of the day, it's crazy that a municipal government and a few hundred NIMBY residents can hold up a massively important project that the federal government, BC government and local First Nations have all signed off on, agreed to, and want to proceed with. If we want the world to be a better place to live in, it's time that BC does its part in exporting cleaner energy that the world desperately needs.
Supplementals:

Canada's foreign student push 'mismatched' job market, data shows

Immigration has been an issue for Canada for a number of years now and the question how at what point it becomes too many has been hotly contested.
The Liberal government increased the already generous amount of immigration laid out by the Harper government and Chretien government before them.
Now we see increased numbers of permanent residents year over year and international students.
A new report out of CBC’s investigative journalism branch found that our immigration program has tilted towards filling spots in business programs while little is done to target and fill gaps for workers in healthcare and the trades.
One shouldn’t need a doctorate to know that despite being told immigration was for the workforce, that hasn’t panned out.
Canada has brought in north of 800,000 students to study business this is far more than anything else.
According to information received from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada 776,779 students came in to study business and commerce, business, or management and related support services.
316,000 came in to study computing or IT, and 254,000 came in to study the arts.
Meanwhile 36,208 came for the trades and 6,266 came for medicine.
Rupa Banerjee, an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, said, “students are graduating from programs that are not particularly valuable in the labour market, that are not allowing them to get the jobs that will then allow them to transition and become productive Canadian permanent residents.”
Business and the Arts programs are typically catch-alls for folks who go to universities and may not have an idea of where they want to land. If they do have an idea they’ll pursue the bachelors degree and then go to grad school.
If we also examine the rate at which student numbers are increasing, business is still by far the highest with the sciences, trades, and medicine being flat.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller put the issue on the provinces. "There is a responsibility of provinces in this ... to make sure that the programs that [colleges and universities] are offering to international students are the ones that fit the job market," Miller said Tuesday on Parliament Hill.
It has become a past time of sorts for the Trudeau government to push issues back to the provinces because a 2022 report from RBC questioned whether Canada was doing enough to match its recruitment of international students with demand in the labour force.
The report described a "misalignment between the study programs pursued by international students and labour market needs" and called for numbers to rise in health care, some trades and services and education.
The reaction to this story and where we’ve gone since paints a picture of a federal government that made the decision to increase immigration numbers but didn’t follow through and ensure they were the right kind of immigrants.
Economist Armine Yalnizyan, the Atkinson Foundation's fellow on the future of workers, says there appears to have been "no rhyme or reason" to the pattern of international student recruitment.
And this also then sells false promises to the students because they believe they may be able to get jobs but aren’t which in turn puts an increased load on already strained programs.
Looking at some of the students who moved through the program, Akash Singh paid $34,000 for a two year business program through St. Clair College, one of Ontario’s 24 public colleges. Since graduation though he has only managed to find jobs as a security guard and at McDonald’s.
Singh says that recruiters for the college told him that finding a job in finance would be easy but that didn’t happen and Singh believes that none of the people in his student cohort actually ended up in that field.
At the end of the day it comes down to money.
It appears as though that colleges and universities capitalized on this selling programs that had little to do with labour market use and instead made money off these international students.
It appears as though the provinces who run Advanced Education didn’t have in place guardrails to prevent universities and colleges from recruiting to programs that are less than useful to our economic needs.
Meanwhile the federal government provided no oversight and effectively greenlit the program.
What has been discovered is a complicated issue and needs to be fixed by the provinces coming down on universities and other institutes while the federal government needs to ensure our labour force demands are being met.
This is perhaps the best discussion of the foreign student angle of our immigration problem and it needs to be fixed before the sentiment towards Canada’s immigrants is ruined permanently.

Firing Line

Polyamorous relationships are on the rise in Canada. The law is still catching up

This week, a pair of unusual headlines caught our interest, among the usual throng of headlines that highlight problems that we've been talking about for what seems like years now. While so much of the news that the media are talking about have already been talked to death, mainly because of the failure of differing levels of government, mostly the Trudeau federal government to fix the myriad of problems that have cropped up in Canada.
So instead, it's always refreshing and interesting to see and talk about something new that has crossed our paths, this time an odd headline from CBC that has interesting implications and even a tie in to social commentary about the state of the population of Canada, and where we may be headed in the future.
The title of the article at CBC reads that "Polyamorous relationships are on the rise in Canada [and t]he law is still catching up". On first glance, to many Canadians the first part may be not only odd, but surprising. As for the second part, it shows the part of the mainstream media that is not only content with opinionizing issues to the masses but to try to actually affect political and legal change.
The article's intro states that you can have more than one friend at a time, and love multiple family members equally, and asks, hey, what's the difference between those cases and being in a consensual romantic relationship with multiple people at a time?
The article defines polyamory as "a deliberate relationship structure where everyone can have as many romantic partners as they want [including] knowledge and consent with everyone involved, and people may live with one partner, multiple partners or no partners".
It also takes great pains to differentiate polyamory from polygamy, where someone is married to multiple people, which is illegal in Canada, and most famously practiced by Winston Blackmore, the leader of a polygamous Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint religious group in Bountiful, BC. Polygamy is also practiced amongst those in Canada's Muslim community, but convictions seem to be very rare, unless they are well publicized. Blackmore, for instance, is only the 3rd of 4 convictions of polygamy in Canada, and only was sentenced to house arrest.
Despite the often taboo nature of polyamory, the number of polyamorous couples in Canada is on the rise, according to a report released last week from the Vanier Institute of the Family, an independent think-tank, which is dedicated to understanding families and family life in Canada. That report cites a 2019 study from the Journal of Sex Research that says about one in five people in this country have practised consensual non-monogamy.
The Vanier Institute also notes that people who identify as 2SLGBTQ+ are more likely to have practised consensual non-monogamy than people who identify as heterosexual. That's echoed by Egale Canada, a 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy organization, which explains that people in polyamorous relationships "are free to express their sexuality regardless of gender."
Despite clear acceptance amongst the non-heterosexual community, the Vanier Institute notes that there's a "data gap" on polyamorous relationships since they're not included in the census. And here's where the CBC shows its activism.
The article notes that Canadian law doesn't recognize intimate relationships between more than two people, and this leaves people to "navigate and interact with systems and institutions that were not designed to support them." It also notes that laws are responsive to social trends and changes, such as adapting to the rise of common-law marriages, but there's still a significant lag. Clearly society is not progressing fast enough for some.
What's interesting about this rising alternative relationship style is that it comes at a time when Canada's fertility rate is at an all time low. Of course, since the proliferation of contraceptives and the decriminalization of abortions in the 1960s the fertility rate has sharply dropped and has been lower than replacement level, 2.1 children per woman, for over 50 years. And yet, since then it had been steady near 1.6 until Trudeau's administration, where it has sharply dropped even before the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a new low in 2022 of 1.33.
Why has Canada's fertility rate dropped so far? Well, quite simply, many Canadians can't afford to have kids. Indeed, these articles actually loop back to the many problems that we so far have not talked about, like housing, healthcare and inflation. Many Canadians who want to start a family cannot, because before that they need to afford housing and basic necessities, and can't. So, in part because of Trudeau's policies that have destroyed the prosperity of the middle class, Canadians cannot start families.
Instead, the government imports new Canadians from abroad, mostly at working age to make up for the ones that aren't creating new Canadians domestically, and at drastically higher and higher rates, exacerbating the issues just discussed, and creating a vicious cycle that will become harder and harder to break the more time goes on.
So to pivot back to the CBC article, while society's laws and the Canadian census aren't moving quick enough to properly recognize alternative relationship styles like polyamory, perhaps the creators of laws should be focused on making sure that all Canadians can prosper in the future, regardless of who you choose to love. Right now, that's not happening, and Canada's future population in 10, 20 or 50 years will look very different from now, or even 10 years ago.
It's also important to look at other studies that have shown the benefits of the traditional nuclear family that is on the decline in Canada as a result. An adult aged 25 to 34 in a couple has a standard of living one-third higher than a single person. A child in a two-parent family has a standard of living 50 percent higher than a child in a one-parent family. Married adults have higher longevity and better overall mental and physical health than single adults. Children raised by two biological parents do better than those raised in one-parent families or in families with a step-parent.
However, despite these advantages, young people in Canada are less likely to form couples and have children, and when they do, a significant proportion of children will see the break up of their family. The data is clear that:
- One-fifth of adults (and one-quarter of men) aged 25 to 34 live with their parents, and this proportion has been growing over the past 20 years and is significantly higher than in the U.S. or the U.K.
- Almost 60 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds, and a third of 30- to 34-year-olds, are single and have never been married. This proportion has been growing over the past twenty years and is higher than in the U.S. or the U.K.
- Because of a rapid decline in fertility among women under 30, Canada now has the third-lowest fertility rate in the G7, close to Italy and Japan.
- A third of Canadian children will see their original families break up by the time they are 14. More than a quarter of Canada’s children live in a one-parent family.
The stats don't lie. Canada's demographics are changing, and not for the good. It's time the government and media start recognizing that.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“The floatel is a direct response to requests from the District of Squamish and the Squamish Nation and members of the community over a consultation process that went on for several years about housing our project workforce outside of the community. From the beginning [we have] been committed to minimizing impacts on the community of Squamish [including the top concerns [of] impacts on traffic, housing, impacts on community services.” - Woodfibre LNG President Christine Kennedy on addressing the concerns the project would have on Squamish

Word of the Week

Floatel - a ‘floating hotel’ that provides housing for workers usually on offshore oil rigs or other projects

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Show Data

Episode Title: Staying Afloat

Teaser: Calgary repeals the single-use plastic ban, the Woodfibre LNG ‘floatel’ is rejected by Squamish council, and immigration is not filling the industries it needs to. Also, the CBC talks about polyamory while Canada’s fertility rate plummets.

Recorded Date: May 11, 2024

Release Date: May 12, 2024

Duration: 1:02:02

Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX