Canada – Page 80 – a sibilant intake of breath

The monarchy and Canada’s citizenship oath

When my mother became a citizen of Canada, I remember noting the absurdity of the citizenship oath:

I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful
and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada,
Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully
observe the laws of Canada
and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.

The monarchy is a sad reminder of Canada’s imperial past, not something that should be at the heart of becoming a Canadian citizen. It would be far better to have those who are becoming citizens assert their support for the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law only, rather than giving such prominent treatment to an irrelevant legal hangover. To paraphrase Monty Python: supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical tradition of bloodline descent.

It is certainly an excellent thing that the monarchy has been pushed to the symbolic edge of Canadian law and society, represented by mere remnants like a titular governor general, the queen on currency, and legal conventions like Regina v. Whoever for legal cases. That being said, it makes sense in this day and age to finally eliminate the trappings of family-line rule and become a proper republic. Of course, there are those who disagree.

Harper on gas prices and carbon taxes

One thing for which you need to give Stephen Harper some credit: unlike the American presidential candidates, he is willing to admit that the government cannot do much to reduce gasoline prices. Unfortunately, he is also using those high prices to oppose carbon taxes, probably the most economically efficient economy-wide mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Brief Smoky Lake recap

After four days in the Ontario wilderness, Emily and I are safely back in Ottawa. All told, the trip was successful and a lot of fun. We spent two days traveling and two hanging around our serene camping area, largely while others fished (more on that later). Wildlife sightings were fairly limited – though we did manage to inadvertently terrify a Canada goose and her greenish goslings – though it was nonetheless refreshing to be immersed in nature. While the weekend did include some serious rain, thankfully none of it fell during times when we had to decamp or travel. The smell of campfire smoke will doubtless linger on our clothes and selves for some time yet.

Getting out into the wilderness was certainly a most welcome break from city life. Similarly, the time spent in Toronto was a nice break from relatively parochial Ottawa.

For the visually inclined, some photos are on Facebook.

Gone paddling

This weekend, Emily and I will be canoeing on Kawigamog, Noganosh, and Lost Lakes – near Sudbury. It should be a good opportunity to explore the Ontario wilderness, in the general area of Algonquin Park.

This will be my first big canoe trip since the second Bowron Lakes expedition in August 2004. Canoe-camping is an especially enjoyable sort. You can bring lots of gear, which means more comfort and better food. You also cover quite a bit of ground, which allows for variety and real expeditions.

We should get back to Ottawa on Tuesday.

Electric vehicles in Canada

Dynasty is a Canadian company that builds light, low speed, battery powered cars. Their Dynasty IT vehicle has a range of 50km and a top speed of 40 km/h. Because Transport Canada refused to follow the lead of 44 American states and authorize the vehicles for non-highway use on roads, the company has decided to relocate to Pakistan. There, they will manufacture cars for the American market. The ZENN is in a similar predicament.

There is a real trade-off between producing light vehicles and producing ones that do well in crash tests. That said, we do permit people to ride absurdly unsafe motorbikes – even on the highway. It is incoherent to ban one and permit the other.

Perhaps it would make sense to create a special legal category for small, light vehicles of limited range, intended primarily for urban use. By all means, those purchasing them should be informed that they will not fare as well in a crash with a huge truck as someone in a larger, steel-framed car. That said, the economic and environmental advantages may justify the risk in the eyes of many.

Ducks are distractions

The continuing furor over the 500 ducks that died in a toxic oil sands tailing pond seems like an excellent demonstration of the capacity of people to utterly miss the point. Oil sands extraction has converted a vaste swathe of boreal forest into toxic wasteland, speckled with tailings ponds up to 15 square kilometres. The Pembina Institute has asserted that: “Despite over 40 years of oil sands development, not a single hectare of land has been certified as reclaimed under Government of Alberta guidelines.” In addition to that, there is the water use and the greenhouse gas emissions.

To look at this and have your attention dominated by a few unlucky birds seems like the height of myopia.

Driving’s declining appeal

While they are generally an urban and environmentally aware bunch, it still seems notable that most of my friends who grew up in cities never chose to get driving licenses. With the notable exception of friends who live in rural areas or distant suburbs, driving seems to have become something that relatively few people find worthwhile. An article from The New York Times suggests that they are less unusual than one might think:

In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

While it would be better to have data extending up into people in their mid-20s, it does seem safe to guess that numbers there are also falling. I have personally never had a license that permitted me to drive a car alone. Even my learner’s license has been expired since December 2003.

There are a number of causes I would attribute to the trend, at least among those I know:

Graduated licensing schemes make it more and more annoying to get a license. In British Columbia, it now takes more than a year before you can get a license that is useful for anything other than practicing with a fully-licensed adult driver.
Partly due to longer licensing processes, a good number of people now head off to university before they can get through to a license they can use alone. By the time they are at school, they have more pressing uses for their time and reduced access to adults willing to serve as observers.
Cars, gas, and insurance are expensive. Also, people are choosing to spend longer in school and spend more in total on tuition. Twenty or thirty years ago, a fair number of 25 year-olds had probably been on the job and debt free for a while. Among my friends, there is a good chance they will be in grad school and still collecting student debt.
People are more mobile. They don’t stay in one place long enough for it to be worth getting a car or license.
People are more environmentally aware. Whereas once cars were symbols of wealth and freedom, they are increasingly symbols of greed and an anti-social willingness to harm those around you.

What other reasons would people give for the trend away from driving? Personally, I think the trend is a positive one – comparable to the increasing rareness and social unacceptability of smoking.

Standardizing cell phone chargers

Forgetting my cell phone charger in Toronto has already resulted in a week of weak connectivity. It need not be so. While it must be a gold mine for cell phone shops and manufacturers, the absurd proliferation of charger types is clearly an anti-competitive practice.

A government keen to protect consumers and boost overall economic efficiency would do the following:

Require that all cellular phones be rechargeable using a standard connector.
Ideally, that connector should be mini-USB (second from the left), capable of transferring both power and data.
Require that adapters be sold for all phones made in the past five years, and that the cost of the adapters equal just the cost of shipping and manufacture.

As long as any charger could be plugged into any phone and provide power, firms would be free to compete in designing and building chargers that connect to electrical outlets, car cigarette lighters, or whatever other source of power seems fitting.

The intervention in the market is justified for the same reason as with all standards: it produces societal welfare without adverse effects. It replaces self-serving confusion generated by private firms with an ordered approach that makes sense for everyone. It is not as though there is any major innovation which can occur with cell phone chargers. At root, they are just plastic-wrapped wires that run from a socket to a circuit board. Having fewer types – and making them go obsolete less frequently – would also reduce the usage of energy and materials in manufacturing, as well as the number of (potentially toxic) plastic trinkets populating landfills worldwide. A standard would allow people to share chargers, as well as permit buses and trains to have universal charging stations available.

Something similar could be done for laptop computers. Cell phones and laptops are both ubiquitous elements of modern life and commerce. Just think how many productive hours are needlessly lost because each manufacturer wants to ensure that last year’s charger cannot be sold to someone buying this year’s phone.

Embassy artwork

The city of Ottawa is quite well provisioned with public art. Some pieces, like the wooden spiral in the park near the mint, are quite charming. The piece above, located in the US embassy compound, is probably the worst of the lot.

As you can see, the sculpture looks a bit like a balloon animal where the balloons have been replaced by black steel beams and the angles have been randomly altered by twenty or thirty degrees. Sitting within a perimeter fence that never contains a visible human, the statue also symbolizes how faceless and harsh the whole compound is.

While concerns about security are obviously of enormous importance for an American diplomatic facility, nothing about them seems fundamentally at odds with good taste. A less ghastly bit of art, and an embassy that somehow demonstrates that the United States is a nation full of people basically just like Canadians rather than an imposing neo-military facade, might be a start along that road.

P.S. In the spirit of fairness, it should be noted that the British High Commission is equally externally unpopulated and far more lacking in architectural virtue.

P.P.S Two other statues notably for their oddness and lack of aesthetic appeal are the strange rocket ship / polar bear statue at the building formerly intended to become city hall and the giant evil spider outside the National Gallery.

Beetle-kill and carbon dioxide

Positive feedbacks are one of the most worrisome aspects of climate change. Viscious spirals could make controlling the problem far more difficult and, if we wait too long to act, potentially impossible to deal with. A new article in Nature suggests that the pine beetle epidemic in British Columbia has turned the forests there into net carbon emitters:

In the team’s model, a pine forest untouched by beetles but with a normal amount of logging is a slight carbon sink, sucking up more carbon (as carbon dioxide) than it loses (either as carbon dioxide or as timber). The only exception to this is when forest fires convert the forest to a net source, as they did in 2003. The beetles have an even bigger effect — in their worst year releasing 50% more carbon than the 2003 fires — and act over longer time scales, with additional logging making things even worse.

According to Werner Kurz, Natural Resources Canada’s senior research scientist, the total emissions associated with the outbreak will be about 990 megatonnes by 2020 – about 1.5 years worth of total Canadian emissions at present levels.

Eventually, the pine beetles will find themselves in the position of having nothing left to eat and the epidemic will taper off. What is nevertheless suggested by this situation is the possibility that climate change can lead to degraded ecosystems which hold less carbon dioxide, thus further contributing to climate change.