THE SHORT VERSION

Yesterday the CBC Halifax website asked, “With Nova Scotia’s reliance on coal, are electric vehicles the greenest option?   —  Environmental advocates say EVs are only as green as the power grid they charge from.”

Seasoned news hounds know that when a headline poses a question, the answer is almost always “no”.

This is unfortunate because the answer is “yes”. Despite our “reliance on coal”, EVs in Nova Scotian generate roughly half of the greenhouse gases emitted by clunky internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). EVs are also cheaper to drive, quiet and fee of foul odours. And they accelerate fast enough to snap your cranium back onto the headrest.

THE LONGER VERSION

The CBC didn’t answer its own question, even though Dalhousie’s Larry Hughes, one of the experts interviewed for the story, told them how to do it.

Hughes began with an obvious point: “When we talk about the electric vehicle, we have to take into account the emissions from the electricity provider.” 

The CBC then paraphrased him: “when discussing the emissions of electricity providers, the metric is grams per kilowatt hour. Just like an internal combustion vehicle consumes litres of gas per 100 kilometres, electric vehicles consume an amount of kilowatt hours of electricity per 100 kilometres.”

So, let’s answer the question.

My car, a typical EV, records its electricity use and advises that I consumed an average of 17.5 kWh per 100 km in 2021. 

According to Nova Scotia Power’s 2020 emission intensity report, the utility emitted 629.7 grams of carbon (strictly speaking, carbon dioxide) for each kilowatt-hour (kWh) it sold me. 

This means my car indirectly emits 11,020 grams of carbon per 100 km (17.5 X 629.7). 

How do cars fuelled by gasoline, the same fuel used in Molotov cocktails, compare?

On average, a Canadian car burns nine litres of gasoline per 100 km and each burned litre creates 2,300 grams of human habitat-killing carbon dioxide. This means the average fossil-burner directly emits 20,700 grams of carbon every 100 km (9 X 2,300). 

Put another way, my average EV emits just 53% of the carbon emitted by a fossil-burner. Yep, right here in Nova Scotia. And that number will get better as more hydro from Muskrat Falls gets into the energy mix. (Fingers crossed on that one, based on the flow we’ve seen so far.)

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE WHEN WE’RE HOOKED ON COAL?

There are two reasons. Nova Scotia Power has cut its emissions intensity by 30 per cent over the past 15 years and electric motors are about two and a half times more efficient than internal combustion engines. The same amount of energy that moves an ICEV 100 km drives my EV for 250 km.

In other words, EVs give you more bang for your buck. Literally. A litre of gasoline currently costs $1.73, so a 100 km trip in a gas-burner comes to $15.57. A kilowatt-hour of electricity costs about $0.20, taxes in, so a 100 km trip in my EV comes to a whopping $3.62. Volatile, odiferous gasoline will hit that benchmark when the cost drops to 40 cents per litre, a price unseen since the last dinosaur was killed by a rock from space.

Price stickers on new cars should include, prominently, grams of carbon emitted per 100 km.

PS: You may worry about the mining required to extract EV battery components. To that I say it’s possible to clean up mining sites when you’re done, battery components are recyclable (unlike gasoline) and, finally, let me just say “tar sands”.

PPS: I could use less electricity driving my EV, but there are few family-oriented fossil burners that can accelerate faster than an EV and, alas, boys will be boys. Sometimes when a traffic light turns green, I like to see them thar burners receding in my rear-view mirror and think: “Eat my electrons, CBC!”

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I feel a little sorry for the truckers besieging our capital and two vital trade routes. They appear to be unsophisticated and poorly educated people who bumbled their way into a no-win confrontation with the Canadian state. It cannot end well for them. Canada cannot bend to their will and expect to remain a country. The poison we are seeing now would seep across our geography and into the national fabric. 

An insurrection by the naïve is still an insurrection.

The prime minister should invoke the Emergencies Act and clear the trade barricades in Windsor, ON and Coutts, AB using all necessary force. Canada manages trade across its borders, not truck drivers. If you can’t or won’t defend your borders then you are not a state. If we need tanks to move those trucks, then so be it.

Perhaps that will concentrate the minds of the Ottawa group enough to negotiate their surrender. On those terms the prime minister could participate without weakening Canada’s position.

To be negotiated:

• the charges the occupiers will face
• where they will be tried
• where federal sentences will be served
• the care and safety of their children until they are reunited with family

It’s harsh. In some ways the truckers are victims, but they are also the authors of their own misfortune.

When it’s done, Canada needs to urgently address the causes.

February 6, 2022

The chair of the Ottawa police board has said the supposed truckers occupying her city are “terrorists” and others acting-out like them across the country are engaged in “insurrection”.

She’s right. Much of the activity that alarms her is actually described in the Criminal Code under  “Terrorism”. In this case it boils down to three issues.

1. Have these people organized for a political or ideological purpose?

Yes, but perfectly legal.

2. Are they making the public fear for their personal safety or economic wellbeing? Well, in Ottawa we have endless horn honking, defecating on lawns, defacing public monuments, bullying passersby and etc. It’s all good fun for freedom truckers, but some citizens are frightened by it. Why? Because it’s lawless and they don’t know where it will stop.

Further, to be terrorists their objective must be to get something from government. Well, the freedom truckers have been explicit about forcing governments to eliminate vaccination requirements needed to protect public health. (Some protestors have said they want to bring the government down with the collusion of the Senate and the Governor-General. Pro tip to protesters: in your next life, don’t skip your social studies classes.)

So, not legal.

3. Are the protesters causing serious interference with an “essential service, facility or system”?Answer: they are paralyzing twenty square blocks of downtown Ottawa, just for starters.

Yes. So, not legal.

On the face of it, this means the freedom truckers are terrorists. They could spend the rest of their lives in jail.

Except for one thing: they live in a free country.

Because this is Canada, there are still more legal hurdles governments must clear before convicting these people of terrorism. Most relate to their intentions, or err on the side of unfettered public expression. This as it should be. In Canada we don’t jail people just for being loud, obnoxious, anti-social dissidents. That would be un-Canadian and the essence of a totalitarian state.

Sometimes the price of freedom is even doing something you don’t want to do, like getting a vaccination. Or not doing something you want to do, like hauling the freedom truckers out of their cabs and throwing them in a makeshift jail to await court appearances.

Obviously I am not a lawyer, but I have some advice for all you good buddies in Ottawa.

• It would be very expensive and likely fruitless to prosecute you as terrorist,
• But if prosecuted, it would be very expensive to defend yourself, even on a trumped up charge,
• The longer you keep this up, the greater the chance you’ll slip up and say or do something that legally makes you a terrorist,
• It’s possible your lawyer isn’t as smart as you think,
• People, such as those who set up a blockade to protest a pipeline near Houston, B.C., have been in held jail for much, much less than what you’re doing.

Now Ottawa has declared a state of emergency which, for me, means at least two things:

• The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has finished recording all your names and pictures, so good luck at your next border crossing.

• You’ve finally overstayed your welcome and there are now people tougher than you prepared to take you away.

You have all this and more coming to you, but there may still be time to go without being charged with any number of criminal offences unrelated to terrorism. Uttering threats and extortion come to mind.

You are not freedom fighters, so go home. Now.

H/T DCM, PD

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The real number of Covid-related patients in Nova Scotia hospitals is 207, not 59

When you went to bed Thursday night you might have thought just 59 people were in hospital with Covid-19; or you may have heard the number was closer to 200, but didn’t know if that was true.

The correct number, in my opinion, is in the table above and it is 207, not 59.

To arrive at that conclusion, you have to decode the following paragraphs from Wednesday’s release.

Paragraph two: “There are 59 people in hospital who were admitted due to COVID-19 and are receiving specialized care in a COVID-19 designated unit.”

That’s straightforward enough, and 59 is the number most of us watch.

But there’s trouble in Paragraph six: “There are ALSO two other groups of people in hospital with COVID-19 (emphasis added):

• 46 people who were identified as positive upon arrival to hospital but were admitted for another medical reason OR people who were admitted for COVID-19 but no longer require specialized care (emphasis added)
• 102 people who contracted COVID-19 after being admitted to hospital.”

Q: Are any of the 46 patients above needing special care? The release doesn’t say directly.

Q: Are any of the 102 above needing special care? The release doesn’t say directly.

Q: Are hospital outbreaks under control or will they explode?

A CBC reporter tried to address this at Wednesday’s Covid newser, but the premier pivoted to a question he wasn’t asked and CBC’s coverage shows no sign of a follow-up.

In 2021, the number of Covid patients in hospital peaked on May 18 at 103, which is half of 207. That many Covid patients, no matter their status, have to be an enormous strain on health workers.

On Twitter, some people suspect deception is at the root of this but, given Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Strang’s excellent record of transparency so far, I think it’s just fatigue. Everybody must be tired, including the people who write news releases and prepare messaging. However, Nova Scotia’s relative success against Covid-19 owes something to the government’s consistent truth-telling. This is a bad time to undermine our confidence in that.

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Journalists in Canada don’t enjoy any special rights. They have the same right as the rest of us to go about our business, which in their case is getting information. Reporters and photographers are defined by what they do, not by job title. “Press passes” or jackets with the word “media” printed on the back are not symbols of privilege or authority, unlike the badges worn by police. 

They mean simply, “I’m here to report on what’s going on, not participate in it.” Any citizen has the right to do what journalists do, whether or not they are employed by news media.

In the 1970s, I was doing a feature story on a police department south of Montreal when my hosts offered to lock me in a holding cell for a while. Why not? So they took my ID, my camera and my notebook, clanged the door shut and walked out.

The view from the wrong side of the bars was entirely different from what you see on TV. Anxiety descended quickly once I realized how helpless I was. Could I really trust those cops? I barely knew them. What if there was a shift-change and they forgot about me? What if I needed to use the bathroom? What if they didn’t like reporters and wanted to scare the hell out of me? But these cops, like most, understood the experience and came back to get me reasonably soon.

“Not what you expected, eh?” they asked.

No, it was not.

Around the same time, an Ottawa cop told me the short ride on the station elevator could be very long for sex offenders: “It’s easy to trip in there, and if you’re wearing handcuffs, you could get hurt.” 

Some time later I was covering a demonstration in Peru when a soldier pointed his rifle at the centre of my chest while he yelled at me to join his buddies in a troop transport. I still see the worn muzzle of his weapon every time I think of that incident. (I had been warned: “Stay away from the army, but if they try to arrest you, stall as long as you can. Anything can happen once they’ve got you.” I stalled as long as I could before losing my nerve. Just as I was getting into the truck, the guy’s superior came over and freed me.)

Fortunately, in Canada the job description of a journalist does NOT include being arrested and held in police custody. I worked in a notably aggressive newsroom for 16 years without ever having to get a reporter out of lockup. I once interviewed a retiring Montreal cop who in a long career never took his gun out of its holster and delivered more than a dozen babies. He kept pictures of them on his desk. 

Amber Bracken and Michael Toledano encountered a different kind of cop last week. They were exercising their rights  — your rights  — when they were arrested by the RCMP while covering the blockade of Coastal GasLink near Houston, B.C. They were with a group of protesters in a small cabin, getting the inside story. At one point a Mountie pointed a rifle through a breach in the door as his colleagues broke it down. The cops ignored the pair when they identified themselves as journalists and held them for four days, along with the protesters, before transporting them about 300 km to Prince George. (In a statement, the RCMP later acknowledged they knew what the pair were doing there.)

Why? If the RCMP truly felt they had a case against the two, they could have issued an appearance notice — a legal requirement to appear in court on a certain date to answer charges. You don’t need a holding cell for that.

There is only one explanation: intimidation. 

Being in custody is frightening, even dangerous. The RCMP know that and we can assume didn’t want journalists watching them work. They wanted to put them in their place.

So they abducted them at gunpoint.

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Postscript

• From The Globe and Mail, November 22, 2021:

In a statement on Monday, RCMP said both journalists had been released.

“The RCMP does not question or dispute that the two individuals who identified themselves as journalists while being arrested, were in fact journalists or on assignment,” according to a statement from Eric Stubbs, an RCMP assistant commissioner in B.C.

• In Canada, timing counts. If the police put you in custody, they must bring you before a judge within 24 hours. But if your local judges take weekends off, they can arrest you on a Friday and bring you to court on the following Monday. Criminal Code Sec. 83.3 (6)