This Janet Holder, the face of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline project. I wrote a post  a week ago or so before disappearing into the wilds of Southern Ontario for a family occasion, lots of schmoozing without song or strong drink, a ton of humidity and heat, but mostly pretty relaxed and in good company. I haven’t published the post because it might be too inflammatory a thing for pure opinion. Who knows? The gist of it was that Holder and all the other mucky-mucks at Enbridge, the NEB, the Conservative caucuses in both Alberta and Ottawa need to be issued hazmat suits and put on standby for the rest of their natural lives in preparation for working in the trenches of the world-class clean-up contingency crew when the inevitable eventually comes to pass. A big part of the problems  we face stems from the lack of personal responsibility for decisions that affect us all.

Then I get home to learn that we’re shipping yet another round of shipbuilding contracts for BC Ferries to Europe, specifically Poland. The curtain of deception makes it hard to see how they selected this group to do the building, but this is surely the forerunner of the whole procurement process inherent in the Free Trade agreements we seem to be signing without debate or even being allowed to see what benefits and constraints might be under that polished silver dome awaiting the unveiling of the main course. Do we need ferries? Build the suckers here, and, in the process, build capacity and skills to similar work in the future. I din’t particularly like Glen Clark, but his fast ferry fiasco included a lot of training for metal work, welding, fabrication, machining and what have you. Are there enough of these trained people around to work on new ferries and whatever the Royal Canadian Navy might need? Or have they all drifted into the Athabaska tar pits?

Australian solar power is already competitive with coal for generating electricity. I have a nephew who has a contract to place a couple of solar arrays on his “farm” for which he is paid $0.80/kw/hr. Go figure, I guess it’s a free market solution, now that Ontario Hydro has gone the same privatization route that BC Hydro suffered under the Campbell régime.

S.T., a member of our local Transitions initiative, sent this link to a TED talk that rings a responsive chord to thoughts over the last couple of decades.

…a recent brush with an updating of ancient history: