Randal O'Toole

Recently I have had a chance to take a look at the work of Randal O'Toole. I am impressed with the work that he has done looking at urban growth management and rapid transit projects.

In reading his work he has finally twigged with me what has been bugging me about a lot of local government approaches to the communities we live in. Local governments are still working within a statist top down imposed model of planning.

Light rail is declared to be good and something we must pay for out of our taxes, though no private operators will be allowed. Why is it good? In my mind because there is a body of people in urban planning that like big projects and dislike people living in single family homes and driving cars. If light rail makes sense, buses make more sense because they are faster, cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate and more flexible.

There has been a huge expansion in light rail in the last generation in North America and what is interesting from O'Toole's work is that light rail systems produce more CO2 than bus transit and even tend to produce more CO2 than vehicle travel.

O'Toole has also produced the research to show that growth management strategies tend to increase the cost of housing by slowing down the number of housing units being built or adding costs to housing construction. I have tried to say the same sort of stuff, but did not have the data to back it up, now I have one more source of data.

I was really fascinated to read about the reason why LA suffers from so much congestion - it has less miles of freeway per million people than any other urban area in the US. Also, LA is not the sprawl it is portrayed as, it in fact has among the highest population densities in the US.

His work is very thought provoking.

The Evironmental Movement

The environmental movement is based on two main issues, fear and aesthetics (ie clearcuts are ugly and so is garbage) There is also a biases against business, a feeling that making money is an inherently bad thing.

At a certain point one must realize that the Registered Professional Foresters do know what they are doing and understand what they are doing. What seems to so often happen is that the environmental movement says they are all wrong and people that have not studied forestry and have no knowledge of the woods are right?

British Columbia forest companies get crapped on for cutting (which temporarily reduces biodiversity) but farmers who reduce the biodeversity dramatically and for long periods are not seen as culprits. Farming is seen as some sort of a salt of the earth thing. And worse than this is the fact that the government subsidizes this farming. Fields of wheat and canola are considered beautiful and clear cuts are not therefore the ugly must be removed. The worst clearcut is still better for the world than any grain farm out there.

If I were to write a book, I would call it neither right nor left but ahead. A politics of rationality and scale, a politics without emotionality. A politics without fear, a politics of sense and not stupidity. The rise and fall and sovereignty and why this is a good thing. The time of the nation state has to come to an end. The concentrated power must be redistributed. The idea of the sovereignty of the nation does not flow from democracy, but from the minds of the dictators of the past. The sovereignty of the nation state is nationalist and is therefore fundamentally wrong.

What is wrong with taking the sov from the nation state? It only gets by taking it from people and groups of people. Every level of government and every group of people has a degree of sov, why do we worry about the nation state having any?

So the anti-globalisation protests are about fear and emotion and reduction of the nation states sov. Funny thing is that in the past the anti nationalism was a left wing idea and all moves towards world government were strongly supported by the left - now the left seems to fear global institutions and powers and want to protect their nations - are we seeing a new national socialism?

Ah yes, the Ethyl corp case, a blatant case of discrimination and use of unfair govt power has become a case for how sov has been attacked. Talk about a strawman argument.

Occasionally one has an epiphany in life when one realises one is on the wrong side of an argument Problem is that everyone you know and like are now on the wrong side of the debate and you are agreeing with the enemy

Could I do an article for this about the environmental movement is elitist and anti worker/poor and anti union

Fear and conspiracy aspect of the enviro movement = reports suppressed, cabals working together

Is there some human need to see conspiracies??? Is there a human need to have fear or have a Cassandra like reaction to things?

In the late 1980s David Suzuki said we had ten years to turn things around, well as far as I can see it has happened, the dire predictions are not happening.

What is the role and purpose of E-groups of they achieve their target?

The Egroups can not act from an interest base or set an agenda because then it can be met and answered and then they have no reason to be.

If I chose to write this, I will be accused of every terrible thing by the people in the e-groups side - the attacks will all be ad-hominem (witness Patrick Moore)

Why does the public allow itself to be lead by people without the facts? There is creation of tribes of Us versus them, you gain an ownership of hte group that you cna betray it.

It is amazing the stories that people believe, that large old growth trees are cut to make pulp - this is insane as the value of the tree as pulp is 1/4 of what it could be otherwise, no one would allowed to throw away money like this.

The problem is that I can go hike in a magical place and then have it cut down a week later and then it will never look the same in my lifetime - human life is shorter than the cycles of the forest.

It is the responsibility of the state to look after people who can not do it themselves, but then it is also the responsibility of people to provide for themselves and their family and friends and community as much as they can.

The world of modernity was heavily hit by the work of Rachel Carson - silent spring revealed how little we did know about the world and how world worked. But now some 40 years into the future and the modernists are the environmentalists. The people that see the world as black and white are the environmentalists.

The Economy of Canada

The US is sliding into a bad place with respect to the economy. They are not yet in recession, but the way the macro economic situation looks, things do not look good. The parts of the Canadian economy that depend on the US are going to have a difficult few years coming up.

Meanwhile Quebec and Ontario see the writing on the wall and may actually be in a recession, but they are not all of Canada, no matter what the national media says.

BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan are all generally doing well and seem to be on the path to more success over the next few years. Yes, the forest sector is in trouble, but that is not surprising as it depends on the US but it is the only significant sector that seems to be in trouble.

The west still has a huge amount of natural resources that are in high demand in Asia. BC ports are going to be shipping more and more bulk commodities to Asia as there is no sign China will be slowing down anytime soon.

The west is also a huge global food source, with the rising global prices for food prairie grain will be a popular commodity and more lands will come into production.

Finally, BC and Alberta have an amazing new source of future global success, the youth coming out of our schools are the best in the world. There is no place in the English speaking world as well poised to own the new knowledge based world as BC and Alberta.

The next three years will also see a boom in construction in the west as the rate of population increase will speed up. BC and Alberta are likely to see a net inter-provincial migration of 200 000 to 300 000 per year for the next three years. Saskatchewan will see spill over as well and is likely to finally sustainably rise above one million people.

This shift of people in Canada will also bring BC and Alberta the brightest, best and hardest working people in Canada - and they will be younger. In the next ten years this means the west will also see a higher rate of births.

Meanwhile, if the economy of Canada is defined by the needs of Ontario, we will see lower interest rates in the whole nation and the west will even more gas poured on the heated housing market.