Protests and power
By Ken Waddell
When the Greenpeace activists breached security at Parliament Hill in Ottawa this past week they should have been offering prayers of thanks. As they scaled the green copper roofs of the West Block of Canada’s parliament buildings they should have known that they can be thankful they pulled off that stunt in Canada and not in China for example. In some countries they would have been picked off with bullets, not fire department ladder trucks.
Personally I think the fire department sent in the wrong truck. They should have sent in the water cannon and told the protestors that they had 10 minutes to get off the roof or be washed off with a water cannon.
The protest was staged to draw attention to the Copenhagen climate conference. Prime Minister Harper is going to attend but he has been quite clear that Canada will not be signing on to another Kyoto type agreement and as Harper said, “wearing it like badge” and not doing anything with it. Harper is correct. Kyoto was a dumb agreement that achieved nothing except spark many debates and conferences.
Climate change is undisputed. The idea that the world is warming is open to debate, and especially so every winter in Canada. A study of history in the Scandinavian counties and Greenland shows that the climate has changed drastically every 1,000 years or so. The last “little” ice age around 1150 AD was certainly not caused by industrialization but it did in fact occur. Neither was the subsequent warming that took place 3-400 years later caused by industrialization as it was pre-indistrial age. Add to that the fact that one volcano can add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all of man’s industrial spewing and any logical person would have to ask, “Does it really matter what we do?”

Well, yes, it does matter on a local basis. We should try to keep our air as clean as possible. I’m personally grateful that I never had to use my inhalers when I visited Korea. That country is much cleaner than I thought it would be. Seoul is cleaner than it used to be because of constructed green spaces and construction of buildings, creeks and green spaces in such a way that air circulation and quality is improved.

In Manitoba there’s a cruel irony. We have Manitoba Hydro,whose source of power is electrical generators powered by water held behind large dams. It’s relatively clean but very expensive to construct. Manitoba Hydro has a monopoly on grid power and a monopoly on sourcing other power. That is to say if a company wants to generate wind power or solar power, they have to sell it to Manitoba Hydro. And they have to sell it at a price that Hydro dictates. It’s no wonder there are no alternate power sources in Manitoba. The desire for cheap power, and the fact that we have cheap power means, we waste a lot of power. With a low and wasteful price on our power, no alternate sources will ever be developed.

It’s even more ironic in that cheap hydro power was supposed to bring huge economic benefits to Manitoba. Businesses were expected to flock to Manitoba so they could benefit from cheap power. It didn’t happen and that’s at least in part due to the fact that we have such high taxation that businesses can easily pass us by for better business climates. Why do we have such high taxation? It’s in part to finance the huge debt for Manitoba Hydro.

If we had competition in power production, or if somehow Manitoba Hydro could be more open or receptive to alternative energy, we might see some changes. We can’t sell Manitoba Hydro because it is so resource based and it’s a monopoly. Taxpayers can’t tolerate selling Hydro because it’s so tied to utilizing our water resources and you never place a monopoly into private hands. It’s bad enough that we have Hydro as a monopoly only barely subject to the legislature and the Public Utilities Board. In private hands, with no ties to the legislature or PUB it could be a disaster.

The final turn of irony is that with its hands tied by politics and its extremely high debt load Manitoba Hydro is close to being a disaster already.