Canada-US trade, oil prices, and the minimum wage

Two things that seem to have been dropped from the conversation about how Canada's economy will fare as it tries to disentangle itself from the US.

First of all, I don't think it will disentangle itself. Geography is powerful, and our supply lines and habitation patterns are oriented toward trade with the US. Changing those things just to enable the same level of output as what we already had before does not seem like the "investment" we're told is forthcoming from the next federal budget (see: green transformation for another thing that did not make sense for the same reason, absent artificial taxes on the "non-green").

So, PM Mark Carney is doing the right thing in the way he is handling the US trade negotiations - preserve what we can, and reach out to other countries to backfill some of the trade losses where possible as a mitigation strategy (but not a trade replacement strategy).

But, what's not being talked about what should be, at least in the places I am looking?

1. Oil prices. They have dropped significantly in the past year, yet rather than talking about how we can put cheap energy to use to increase our value-add (which is what the US, EU, and Russia see when they see cheap energy) we seem to be focused on investing in how we can ship it offshore. Energy prices are a moving target, so you need to have a long-term vision, but it's been an ongoing issue in Canada that we are far more oriented toward shipping commodities offshore than we are with turning those commodities into things that are more valuable - adding value and economic capacity - and using plentiful energy as an accelerator in the endeavour.
   
   
2. Minimum wage. The EU and the US have low-wage districts that provide them with flexibility. In the EU it is Eastern Europe; in the US it is the southern states. Canada has no such districts anymore - all provincial minimum wages are in a narrow band of agreement - which essentially means it's illegal to hire people in Canada if the business you're running is labour-intensive and can't support the minimum wage as a result. The EU and US have the option to grow the economy by having lower-value work done domestically in those places where it's allowed by the minimum wage. There used to be regular discussion about minimum wage when it was poised to increase but that seems to have gone away, despite being important.

I'm interested to know how much #2 plays a part in the difficulty that so many Canadian students and citizens are having finding entry level jobs, tied to the concern that temporary workers and international students seem to have taken so many of those jobs. Perhaps the minimum wage is so high that unconventional deals (illegal wages, kickbacks, pay-to-work, etc) are in play in those positions because the business requires lower wages to persist. Just speculation, of course, but it's based on real hearsay.

If 20% of Ontario car owners drove electric cars to work every day...

If only 20% of Ontario cars owners drove electric cars to work every day, it would make such a difference in reducing our oil consumption and carbon footprint.

Great idea - I agree!

So, what would that look like?

• 1.6 million cars: Ontario has about 8 million registered cars. 20% = 1.6 million
• 6600W electricity to charge: Electric cars charge with a 6600W electricity supply (220V * 30A) at the fastest-available home charging rate. Nissan Leaf uses a 6600W charger
• 1,600,000 * 6600 watts = 10,560,000,000 watts

Unfortunately, Ontario only produced about 17,000,000,000 watts at its peak for the overnight period 8:00pm last night to match consumption.

So, to maintain current consumption and add the load of 20% of Ontario vehicles charging overnight, we'll need to bump overnight generation by 62% to support our goal. Ontario has that capacity, but would likely not generate it at current overnight rates as more expensive generation would need to be activated to get there, so it potentially turns the overnight period into "peak consumption" period.

Unless you think the world will never run out of affordable oil or gasoline (I don't know what you'd reference to support this), shouldn't this be enough to convince most people that we need to deal with this problem, and that it might be better to look at our living/working arrangements to remove the car from the equation as much as possible?

Japan's problems with nuclear have strengthened George Monbiot's positive opinion of it

In a Guardian column, environmental/green activist George Monbiot describes how the problems in Japan have strengthened his support for nuclear as a part of a power mix that includes renewables.

It is a balanced column that hits all the right notes.

Chernobyl wasn't as bad as most of us imagined it was

Chernobyl and Three Mile Island seem to be the benchmarks for measuring how bad the current Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor problem is, with Chernobyl being the worst-case and Three Mile Island being a best-case in popular assessment.

But, since there have been so few nuclear accidents and the meaning of the scale is therefore vague, it's worth asking how bad Chernobyl really was. Real Clear Science attempts an explanation:

It is worth putting even the UN’s low casualty figures in perspective. As the report notes, over 1,000 onsite reactor staff and emergency workers received heavy exposure to high levels of radiation on the first day of the accident, and some 200,000 workers were exposed in recovery operations from 1986-1987. But only 50 had died of cancer 20 years later.


Exposed children are more at risk from thyroid cancer, but the recovery rate – even in the Soviet Ukraine – was 99 percent. The health experts could find no evidence of increased rates of leukemia or other cancers among the affected residents.

A deficient reactor design, clear breach of operational protocol, possibly drunken operators... and this is the worst we have ever seen from nuclear.

Meanwhile, how many coal mining accidents do we have every year? How many people die protecting sources of oil? How many die from issues related to the fumes produced when we burn these things? How much carbon dioxide do we produce getting agitated and talking about carbon dioxide emissions?

That's why Seth Godin's graph that I posted yesterday has some merit.

Why can't the same people who criticize the imaginary fear of terrorist threat levels organize in the same way around the limp threat of nuclear energy? These fears come from the same place -- something that you can't see and don't understand that could attack you in ways you least expect.

And the people who say that the structural safety models of these plants are flawed and that the risks of failure are unknowable would also have to accept that the threat models that predict the consequences of such a failure are also flawed and vastly over-state the danger.

Nuclear energy: not only clean, but safe, too.

No doubt inspired by Japan's recent problems with their Fukushima nuclear plant, Seth Godin presents this interesting graph and accompanying post:

This type of thing is so difficult to measure, and he is a marketer, but having a bit of a think about it should lead you to believe that it's probably at least accurate in abstract and/or proportion.

Wind turbine propellers already kill a lot of birds. I doubt they kill many people (if any at all), but if one flying wind turbine propeller decapitated someone some day as a result of an earthquake, it'd be one more death than this Japanese issue has caused so far (but note that the wind energy installation in Japan survived the earthquake without any problems).