Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 26, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba AS I watched the Oval Office scene unfold between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful politician, Elon Musk’s kid was also in the room. “Take your kid to work day” apparently applies to billionaires, too. This scene, however, was orchestrated to drive home to us ordinary folks watching that the elites hold power and money beyond anything we can imagine, and despite anything we can do in oppo- sition or even in protest. It’s the bedtime story they need to tell each oth- er, and their children, to prevent the nightmares that reality (and history) inevitably supplies. “Let them eat cake!” no doubt sounded like clever elitist repartee to Queen Marie Antoinette, but it led to an outcome that she and others found hard to swallow. So, to offer a different narrative, one outside the Oval Office and over which you have some control, I want to talk about your clothes. And your laundry. In sketching the unsustainable society in which we live, we can identify things that have an observable impact on both local and global conditions. There are greenhouse gas emissions, growing every year when they need to drop, to keep us from frying our future selves. There are microplastics in the water that bioaccumulate in our brains, affecting our ability to think properly and increasing the likelihood of cancers we might otherwise have dodged. There is our overburdened planet, whose resources we overspend on lifestyles we can’t afford, watching our ecological debts to future generations (and our own economic debts) spiral upward, every day — seemingly without limit, but actually headed for disaster. So what has this got to do with my clothes and my laundry? Ten per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, according to UNEP data from 2023, come from the various dimensions of the fashion industry, worldwide. Did you know that much of the clothing we buy — estimated at 68 new items, per person, every year — ends up in landfill, to the annual tune of something like 92 million tons, in under 12 months from date of purchase? As for the water needed to produce all that clothing and then wash it, rough estimates are that it requires around 110 billion cubic metres of water per year, or about six per cent of total global water usage. Consider the microplastics that anything not cotton sheds into the water sys - tem when we wash it, and more of the ecological problem is revealed. We need to change our trajectory from disaster toward a sustainable future for our children and grandchildren. While we do not have the power to change everything right away, we can leverage significant social change anyway — one person, one choice at a time, regardless of whatever is said in the Oval Office. So here is a simple proposal: Wear it twice. It will be just as clean the next day. If we wore everything twice we would need half as much clothing, right? We could (in theory) cut in half all the resources used, all the greenhouse gas emissions, all the water required, to produce the clothes we wear. Did you know that the modern popular obses- sion with clean clothes (and new clothes) is fairly recent? It is a deliberate product of the adver- tising industry since the 1920s — more about conspicuous consumption than being clean. Doing the laundry isn’t anyone’s favourite ac- tivity. But just imagine if you had to scrub every piece of clothing on a washboard (or a rock), wringing it out by hand and then hanging it up somewhere to (eventually) dry. Back in the day, most people didn’t have (or need) many clothes, in part because washing the clothing they had was enough of a chore. You had Washday Mondays, because laundry literally took all day. One of the major changes in social technology was the widespread adoption of the washing ma- chine after 1918. Add indoor plumbing and water heaters to the wringer (and then automatic) wash- er, and advertising had a field day marketing the importance of personal hygiene and cleanliness in the home in the 1920s and 1930s. Scholars now talk about the “invention” of the household germ, and how supposed labour-sav- ing machines like the washing machine actually created “more work for mother,” not less. It’s now 2025, however. Wear your clothes twice. Make it a household decision, a classroom project, something your church, club or organiza- tion promotes. Our wealth, privilege and impact on a hurting planet is measured by the unneces- sary clothing in our closets. We have control over our clothes, and our laundry — how much we have and how often we wash it. We are constantly suckered into fast fashion, poor quality, fads and frauds, spawned by a cloth- ing industry on its own mad dash to climate obliv- ion. Change that thoughtless culture of over-con- sumption into a culture that reflects care for each other and the planet through wearing your clothes twice before washing them. Be a WIT (Wear It Twice), not a twit. Peter Denton writes (and does occasional laundry) in his rural Manitoba home. THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 26, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Moving from the Oval Office to your laundry room Economic security for now and our future U.S. PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s talk of tariffs, trade and what’s best for Canada has driven Canadians to think about what we can do, as a nation and individuals, to protect our country, our economy and our jobs. Where this all ends is deep in a rabbit hole of conjecture. It would be dangerous, however, to underesti- mate the potential impact that a tariff war with our largest-by-far trading partner can cause to Canada’s health, wealth and security. Here’s why: Canada’s economy is tied tightly to the U.S. because of the integration of many sec- tors of production. Canada is America’s largest buyer of goods (above 17 per cent); 76 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S. More than 65 per cent of Canada’s GDP — the generation of revenues that fund our social programs and core services — flows from trade. More than half of Manitoba’s GDP is tied to trade; 72 per cent ($18 billion) of our annual exports go to the U.S. Caught in this firm geopolitical grip, how can we protect our economic and national security? The answer is not simply to “buy Canadian.” We produce far more than we could ever consume ourselves. There is no quick and easy fix but as we all now see a big part of the solution starts with easing our reliance on one customer. We have to diversi- fy, expand and develop new global markets. That’ll take some work. Canada has been a bit lazy in seizing global trade opportunities; we’ve fallen complacent hav- ing the world’s largest economy next door. We have signed numerous multi-nation trade agreements, yet we’ve not done nearly enough to chase those markets or to ensure we can move product quickly, cheaply and reliably. Predictability is everything in business. That reliability requires seamless, efficient and con- nected trade gateways and corridors because if you can’t move it, you can’t sell it. But Canada has neglected its trade infrastruc- ture. As a result, our reputation around the world has suffered. In 2009, a World Economic Forum survey of global transportation network quality ranked Canada in the top 10; a decade later we had fallen to 32nd in rank, below Azerbaijan. Surveys of buyers and sellers, here and abroad, indicate Canada is regarded as a country that can’t be depended upon for the efficient move- ment of goods and commodities across borders. The Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis points out that Canada’s trade transportation investment programs have come in fits and starts. That “volatility” damages our reputation and hobbles the potential return on investment to GDP. We are leaving billions on the table for lack of strategic investment thinking. Meanwhile, countries we compete with in the global arena — targeting the same markets where we have signed trade agreements — have secured those ties and adopted trade infrastructure strat- egies that look 20 and 30 years out to prioritize and co-ordinate nation-building infrastructure projects offering the highest return on investment to GDP. Canada’s trade corridors and gateways need a lot of love. As we’ve seen in the supply-chain troubles during the pandemic or the sudden, cat- aclysmic impact of “weather bombs” on the West Coast, our country is vulnerable to big economic pain when trade is severely disrupted. More than two million jobs, countrywide, rely on the health of our trade. Provincial premiers know this. That’s why the Council of the Federation unan- imously endorsed the principles of a proposed Canada Trade Infrastructure Plan (CTIP) — a roadmap through public-private collaboration to map out a strategy like those other countries are using to amplify trade relations and market returns. At its core, CTIP, proposed by leading nation- al business organizations, offers a “how to” for building an investment strategy, using recom- mendations in the Canada West Foundation’s 2020 report From Shovel Ready to Shovel Worthy. It’s the start of a solution. Its time is right. And it’s sitting on the desks of federal and provincial leaders. Canada is being held hostage to the fever dreams of an American president intent on unravelling the rational, rules-based order which historically has supported our mutual prosperity. Canada needs a plan that supports our country’s economic, social and national security. We need to expand or connect to new trade routes. CTIP would get us started on that path. Buying Canadian is good. But better still, tell your MP you want to see the next federal budget lay out the first steps to a long-term trade infrastructure investment strate- gy, to help Canada protect its economy, diversify and compete globally for trade. Chris Lorenc is president and CEO of the Manitoba Heavy Construc- tion Association and of the Western Canada Roadbuilders & Heavy Construction Association. Comparing rankings to reality on hospital quality OFTEN when hearing a spokesperson tell us what we “deserve” — better service, lower taxes, stronger representation — we argu- ably do not. Rather, it’s a populist gimmick intended to imbue the wielder’s agenda with entitlement — the last thing we need. With no such angle in play, then, comes the following contention: Manitoba hospitals deserve better treatment than the sentence “Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre has earned the dismal distinction of being the worst-performing hospital in Canada,” (HSC Canada’s worst-performing hospital, some Manitoba health care no better under NDP: nurses union report, Free Press, Feb. 12), and than the title of the Manitoba Nurses Union’s (MNU) white paper Healthcare in Manitoba is in Crisis, along with its claim of “deep systemic issues.” That the ranking of a single measure — standardized mortality ratio, in this case — of the multi-faceted, multi-functional services of public health yields such a com- prehensive indictment, is one issue. Another is that ranks always include a first and a last, including when all entities being compared are very good at what they do. Despite this, ranks are generally interpret- ed in absolute terms, ranging from function- ing well to being deeply flawed or in crisis, such as the case in point, without justifica- tion for the interpretive leap. The same happens with large-scale assess- ments of student academic performance. We’ll likely see it again this fall when results from the spring 2023 administration of the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program’s — PCAP — assessment of Grade 8 students’ achievement in science (the focus this time around), reading and mathematics, are ex- pected to be released. Ranks will be exploited to create a sense of panic and to buttress calls for more test- ing, more students failing, more stringent teacher training and qualifications, or insert your cause here. Meanwhile, as with health care, exogenous factors (that is, out of scope or control) that plausibly explain the ranks receive short, if any, shrift in terms of analysis and inter- pretation. The considerable effort needed to do this is easily overlooked when eager to capitalize on a chance to make a splash for a favoured cause. In the Manitoba context, be it education or health care, Manitoba’s documented high levels of socio-economic distress (see Doing the math, Free Press, Dec. 15, 2023) mean that street drugs, mental health issues, lack of affordable and safe housing, food insecu- rity and unlivable income are among factors that stand as compelling explanations for low ranks and signal strategies to improve outcomes. In addition to exogenous factors, any absolute judgments based on ranks must be preceded by interpreting the measures in understandable, absolute terms. For exam- ple, crisis-mongering about how mathemat- ics is taught based on Manitoba’s bottom rank in PCAP 2019 should be attenuated by the fact that the difference between Manito- ba’s score and that of most other provinces equates to within about five percentage points on a final examination. This is despite the lowest levels of youth socio-economic status across provinces. The burden is on the authors of reports, such as the MNU’s white paper, to undertake these analyses, with their own credibility and the valid interpretation and use of the results at stake. Ranking is useful. An anomalous rank (considering contextual factors such as socio-economic status, for example) is in- triguing and calls for interrogation leading to further insight and to more appropriate diagnoses and treatments. Nurses (and other health-care profes- sions) apply deft skills, in-depth knowledge, discretion, empathy, and patience, and do so under pressure and often, unfortunately, when exhausted. The MNU’s white paper recommendations are important and reflect the nature and needs of the profession. They are clear and reasonable in terms of their likely effect on nurses’ ability to perform at their best, for our best. The paper’s claim of “deep systemic issues” and “crisis” in hospitals remains to be established, however, as real or central to what ails hospital urgent care and emergen- cy care outcomes. The MNU’s recommen- dations stand well on their own as systemic antidotes, without the need for this tactic of broad disparagement of the public hospital system. Ken Clark, retired in Winnipeg, spent most of his time while in the field of education specializing in large-scale assessments of student learning, which included interpreting results such as ranks. CHRIS LORENC KEN CLARK KEVORK DJANSEZIAN / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Washing machines do more than just clean your clothes — and not all of it is good. PETER DENTON ;