Northman's Fury

While I don’t expect anybody who doesn’t live up north to understand this, that headline had me quite excited for a few moments until I read that it didn’t apply to my neck of the woods.

Hill said there are no plans to add more new points of entry, such as Val-d'Or for the Baffin region.

Some context: The food mail program is designed to allow us Northerners access to cheap, southern-priced, nutritious food stuffs without having to pay the high cargo prices such things would normally incur. It is a Federal program and the Federal Government has mandated that all food mail orders must come out of the community of Val-d’Or in northern Quebec.

The reason this is such a piss-off is because Val-d’Or has no flight links to the Baffin Region. All the food mail orders must be trucked to Ottawa, (and guess who pays that expense,) and then flown up to the Baffin communities. If we try to order from Ottawa, where the food is much cheaper and no long-haul trucking is required, the order is ineligible for food mail and we have to pay full freight charges.

Add to that the fact that much longer lead times required to get food from Val-d’Or to Ottawa to the Baffin Region means that the food isn’t as fresh as it could (should) be.

The whole program is so inefficient that it’s only slightly more expensive to pay the full freight costs incurred by ordering directly from Ottawa, where you can get fresher food with few restrictions on what you can order.

Classic case of why people hate the government.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado in Boulder, using actual measurements, concluded Arctic sea ice has declined at an average rate of about 7.8 per cent a decade between 1953 and 2006.

By contrast, 18 computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored climate research group, estimated an average rate of decline of 2.5 per cent a decade over the same period, the researchers said.

. . .

The researchers said their observations indicate the retreat of summertime Arctic sea ice is about 30 years ahead of the pace projected by climate models.

Like the previous report about the ice around Baffin Island, this one isn’t too much of a surprise to me. I’ve read a large number of reports over the last couple of years saying that actual measurements are showing more rapid ice melt than expected, both here in the arctic and in the Antarctic. The International Panel on Climate Change uses the most conservative estimates, partly due to political pressure from countries like the US. That means that as bad as they say things are going to get, everything they’ve said is actually low-balling the crisis.

Anyway, given the arctic could be ice-free in as little as a 12 years, Canada really needs to start looking after the sovereignty issues up here. Slowing and reversing climate change will take a long time, even if we were to adopt really drastic measures, which we won’t. That means we have to assume we’ll have an ice-free Arctic in a very short time.

Canada needs a deep-water port and other docking facilities along with military posts to patrol and protect the waterways. There’s been talk of all these things, but so far no actions to make it happen.

The government was supposed to announce the location for the deep-water port last December. That announcement has been delayed at least twice. Basically a stall tactic for something they’re either not taking too seriously, or don’t want to do for some other reason.