Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 07, 2013, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A9 V ANCOUVER - " Who'd ever want to do that?" said my board chairman with a quizzical look on his face. He was referring to running for political office, something I was quietly contemplating as an interesting career next- step after 21 years of leadership roles in not- for- profit organizations. " Why would anyone want to put any effort into that game?" I pondered his response and chose not to reply, but seven years later, I still think of his vehemence on the topic. He was no stranger to hard work and corporate service, and by Canadian standards, he was and is a governance superstar, destined to serve on major boards well into his 70s, long after retirement at the conventional age as a senior officer of a major corporation. For some reason, my brain next links this short verbal exchange before a board meeting to my political capitulation speech in 2008 to a room full of sad volunteers in Calgary's " Motel Village." By 9 p. m., it was clear I was going to lose by 1,000 votes in a field of approximately 12,000. I remember thinking to myself before making brief comments of consolation, " I guess I'm the kind of person who wants to do this..." No one who hasn't run for political office can really understand the emotions linked to winning or losing. And I think the same holds true for the basic concept of choosing to run. It all starts with making that simple yet complex choice. Today's plurality majority party in the Canadian Parliament is filled with MPs who chose politics early in life. Examining the political trajectories of Messrs. Harper, Baird, Moore and Kenney illustrates this point nicely. They are all individuals who chose early and planned or benefited from early entry to the political fray. The plus side of this earnest quest for political fire is early mastery of campaign strategy and tactics. The negative side is the paucity of non- political work experience in their resum�s. However, I think they have all been quick to master corporate mimicry. Their continuous haircuts, predominantly blue suits, Brooks Brothers rep ties and white shirts all telegraph an assumed corporate persona. Yet none of them have been true corporate employees, say in the guise of a Nigel Wright. The corporatist mimicry also carries over to speech patterns and word choice. There is not much fresh language. Theirs is a world of action plans, balanced budgets, fiscal probity and issue management. It is pointedly not a world of environmentalism, critical thinking, peer- reviewed science or admitted secularism in matters of faith. Their assumptions about implicit corporate endorsement of their world view in these matters are interesting. My experience of working in the Calgary oilpatch allows me to argue by counterexample. I wish to report that there are pronounced environmentalists in the sector, critical thinking is a required skill for corporate advancement, many peerreviewed papers emanate from ( and many more are read by) environmental- planning and engineering- design groups, and many employees rebel against the imposition of unchallengeable precepts. If you want to advance, you have to reason your arguments and deliver them with skill. Yelling for effect does not work. In truth, corporate environments are far more open to new ideas, ideologically varied and politically diverse than the Conservative caucus. But you have to have been there to notice this. That is why all Canadian political parties will benefit from new blood, from noncareer politicians and ideally from people who actually work in businesses, like the majority of Canadians. Sure a smattering of politicians will always be lawyers, but it is important that many parliamentarians actually be recruited from organizations that create intellectual capital, manufacture new products and employ people. Why will such people choose to run for office? Hopefully because public service that draws on life experience is intellectually and morally rewarding. Perhaps, too, because it can be fun. One of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi's most endearing qualities is his public smile. He actually seems to enjoy his work in the public realm. He looks like he is having fun on the job. We need a lot more of this political joie de vivre. My thesis is that the current atmosphere of dirty tricks, enemies lists, double dipping and attack ads would not last long in a caucus composed of mid- career entrepreneurs, NGO CEOs, environmental scientists and engineers. Let's find the courage to move in this direction. Mike Robinson has lived half his life in Alberta and half in B. C. In Calgary, he worked for eight years in the oilpatch, 14 in academia and eight years as a cultural CEO. - Troy Media 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Winnipeg Free Press Wednesday, August 7, 2013 A 9 POLL �� TODAY'S QUESTION Should it be legal to own snakes as pets? �� Vote online at winnipegfreepress. com �� PREVIOUS QUESTION Should the Canadian Museum for Human Rights agree to use the term ' genocide' to describe Canada's past treatment of aboriginals? YES 24% NO 76% TOTAL RESPONSES 6,030 Winnipeg Free Press est 1872 / Winnipeg Tribune est 1890 VOL 141 NO 261 2013 Winnipeg Free Press, a division of FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. Published seven days a week at 1355 Mountain Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 3B6, PH: 204- 697- 7000 BOB COX / Publisher PAUL SAMYN / Editor JULIE CARL / Deputy Editor G OVERNMENT borrowing has limits. These are reflected through credit ratings and interest charged. As debt servicing takes bigger slices of annual budgets, all government services are affected. When this segment of budgets gets hit with higher interest rates, as is going to happen in the future, further cuts to programs and capital projects will become necessary. It's time to consider Manitoba's long- term debt priorities. Manitoba Hydro has proposed borrowing some $ 22 billion over the next decade. But when were their estimates ever correct? This threatens Manitoba's debt capacity, especially when loans will be required for other unavoidable expenditures. This competition for increased debt is actually going to happen. The cost of weather- related catastrophes and the long- term adaptation to a changing climate, combined with aging infrastructure are going to place huge demands on public debt. In the last two years, major weather events have caused deadly and stunning damage all over the world. Southeast Asia has been hit with savage floods, Africa with devastating droughts, Western Europe with unusual winters and all of North America with both droughts and flooding in the same year in different places, on top of hurricanes and tornadoes. Major flooding recently devastated Calgary and nearby communities. Vancouver, hard as it is to believe, just experienced 34 days without any rain, the longest dry period since 1937, when data began to be collected. Fredericton, on the other hand, had the wettest July on record, a total of 226 millimetres. At home, two serious tornadoes and a heavy rain event in the Pipestone area this year is testing the endurance of residents. Flooding along the Souris and Assiniboine rivers in recent years affected both Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg. Lake Winnipeg is the recipient of nutrients that " normally" remain in farm fields or are absorbed in marshes. Heavy runoff has changed this pattern. Individual major storms passing through the midwest parts of North America are now carrying a volume of water equivalent to some of the continent's largest rivers. They're like an airborne stream suspended above us, ready to dump. Although reduction in greenhouse- gas emissions will dampen warming over the long run, there will be little impact in the next few decades. Society will need to find ways to avoid, mitigate or adapt to this inevitability. In the case of Manitoba ( at the bottom of the catch basin), the outlook is more fluctuation in climate, particularly in the form of increases in the frequency of drought as well as excess precipitation, topped off with severe weather events. Avoidance, adaptation and mitigation will be costly and involve virtually everyone. Homeowners, businesses, local governments, provincial governments and the federal government will all have to become involved. Some of the projects will be expensive, such as construction of new holding basins, reconstruction of old marshes, returning some portion of farmlands to a riparian state and moving some homes and facilities to higher ground or building higher ground for them to sit upon. Initially, as is now the case in Alberta, governments need to take the lead, but after compensation is paid for either relocation or floodproofing, individuals who have defied both nature and the warnings of governments will have to be on their own, as governments cannot afford to subsidize in perpetuity their inability to see reality. Rightly, Alberta has made this very clear. Taxpayers will have enough on their plate without rewarding the obstinate. Funding these projects, whatever they may turn out to be, will cost considerably in excess of annual government revenues. That means going into debt. The extent to which the Manitoba government, in particular, can move in this direction will be a direct function of how much debt it already has. Increased debt from proposed Hydro projects alone could affect its credit rating. Given recent acknowledgements by insurance companies that weather events have hit them hard, why would lenders readily accommodate governments who have not been able to take long- run factors beyond energy into account? Some 15 years after the fact, Ontario hydro users are still being billed for " stranded debt." These are the debt costs incurred by Ontario Hydro ( a utility now divided into three entities in an effort to sort out immense debt problems) that exceeded the utility's ability to pay. Hopefully, Manitoba's Public Utilities Board will consider some of these long- term factors when reviewing the viability and need for alternatives in the case of Keyask and Conawapa. The late Dr. Clay Gilson used to describe a cash- and debt- strapped farmer's dilemma as having to choose between false teeth and a new boar for the hog enterprise. Manitoba may not be far from a similar dilemma. Imagine having surplus power and not enough borrowing capacity to fight a flood, let alone mitigate future threats. Manitoba needs to give high priority to longterm debt planning, while avoiding the seductive aspects of current low interest rates. Are Bipole III and other proposed Hydro projects really needed at this time? Will Manitoba electricity users accept a " stranded debt" line on their hydro bills while paying increased taxes for past excesses and current emergencies? Jim Collinson is a management consultant specializing in the complexities surrounding energy, economic and environmental issues. For two terms, he was president of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. T HE most important hamburger in the history of the world was cooked ( but only half- eaten) in London on Monday. It was grown in a lab, not cut from a cow, and it tasted, well, not quite good enough to fool the experts, but then they forgot the ketchup, mustard, cheese, onion, bacon, tomato and lettuce. Not to mention the fries. " I miss the fat. There's a leanness to it," said food writer Josh Schonwald, " but the general bite feels like a hamburger." Austrian food critic Hanni Ruetzler agreed: " It's not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect. This is meat to me. It's not falling apart; it's really something to bite on." Even in a blind tasting, she added, she would say it was real meat and not a soya copy. Of course she would. It WAS real meat, grown from a cow's stem cells just like the flesh of its own body. It tasted lean because the stem cells the experimenters used were only programmed to make muscle tissue, not fat. ( They're working on that). The real test was whether tens of billions of lab- grown muscle cells could be organized into something with the consistency of proper meat, not mush, and the lab- burger passed that test with flying colours. But why would anybody want to pass that test? What's wrong with just eating cows - and sheep and pigs and chickens? Far beyond the objections of vegetarians and animal- rights activists, what's wrong with eating " natural" meat is there are too many of us eating too much of it, and we're running out of land to grow it on. " Right now, we are using 70 per cent of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock," Professor Mark Post, the lead researcher, told The Independent at a conference in Vancouver last year. " You are going to need alternatives. If we don't do anything, meat will become a luxury food and will become very expensive... " Livestock also contributes a lot to greenhousegas emissions, more so than our entire transport system," explained Post, a medical physiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. " Livestock produces 39 per cent of global methane, five per cent of the CO2 and 40 per cent of the nitrous oxide. Eventually, we will have an eco- tax on meat." On meat raised in the open air, that is, whereas meat grown in the lab is a potentially inexhaustible resource, and it does far less environmental damage. According to an Oxford University study published in 2011, a tonne of " cultured" beef would require 99 per cent less land and between 82 and 96 per cent less water than its " natural" rival, and would produce between 78 and 95 per cent less greenhouse gas. It would also use 45 per cent less energy. These are seriously impressive numbers. If Post's process can scale up successfully, then in 10 or 20 years we could be producing enough meat for a growing global population even though many people are eating more meat per capita as their incomes rise. Moreover, we would be able to turn most of that 70 per cent of agricultural land back into forest and prairie or switch it to growing grain for human consumption. " There are basically three things that can happen going forward," said Google co- founder Sergey Brin, who bankrolled Post's research. " One is that we can all become vegetarian. I don't think that's really likely. The second is we ignore the issues, and that leads to continued environmental harm. The third option is we do something new." So let's assume you can produce this beef in industrial quantities, complete with fat cells so it tastes just like the meat that comes from the slaughterhouse. Could you get people to buy it? No problem. Just price it about 20 per cent cheaper than the " real thing." Those of us who are keeping up with the Joneses will buy the premium product; the rest of us will buy the one that's just as good but costs less. Oh, and why didn't they eat the whole hamburger on Monday? Because there was no way you could share what was left equally between so many journalists, and they sometimes get quite nasty if they're thwarted. So Mark Post said he'd take it home to his children. Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. GWYNNE DYER MIKE ROBINSON JIM COLLINSON How to end dirty tricks, attack ads The world's most important hamburger Debt pinch Manitoba Hydro borrowing puts pressure on future spending TIM SMITH / BRANDON SUN Roger and Kathy Swanson clean belongings out of their home in Pipestone, Man., in mid- July after a powerful storm ripped the roof off. A_ 09_ Aug- 07- 13_ FP_ 01. indd A9 8/ 6/ 13 8: 43: 20 PM ;