
This is not a well funded health care system.
We are heading into a period of austerity in Canada. The federal government is working on a budget that will provide a 15% cut to government services and spending and a tax cut primarily for the middle and upper classes along with legislation to fast track large resource development projects. The idea, I suppose, is that these large projects will stimulate the economy and protect us from the shocks of the destruction to the global trade system generated by the US’s arbitrary trade policies.
Some governments are quite excited about the construction of fossil fuel projects in Canada. We have a local one here in Squamish. A liquid natural gas facility and port called Woodfibre LNG. Woodfibre LNG is 70% owned 70% by LGE, which is a private company owned by Indonesian billionaire Sukanto Tanoto. His companies such as Asian Agri, Unibank and various logging firms have been convicted of tax evasion, fraud and environmental degradation, leaving local communities and people on the hook. Tanoto is a billionaire.
As with all large resource projects, this one was promised to bring jobs to the local community, a city that is struggling with housing affordability, a stretch on its public infrastructure and a generational transition from resource-based industries to tourism and recreation. Squamish needs services – health and education services for a growing population, housing, social services, public transportation infrastructure to serve its connections to greater Vancouver and Whistler. Back in the old days, with union jobs and local townsites created around the mines and mills of Howe Sound, you could count on these kinds of projects to bring in settlers who establish businesses, schools and local services. That is where resource towns gained their reputation for driving prosperity. They also destroyed First Nations cultures and degraded the local land and waters for 100 years too.
That picture has changed. These towns don’t drive local prosperity, they enrich non-local investors. As predicted, the WLNG project has brought in hundreds of workers from elsewhere in Canada and around the world to build the plant and the port. Hundreds are staying in two converted passenger ships known as “flotels” which house work camps for the project. Most workers are engaged in a two weeks on/one week off rotation. While they are living on the flotel they are not allowed to visit Squamish, and therefore do not support local businesses. Because they aren’t living in Squamish they aren’t paying local taxes either. There are about 51 local people out of more than 650 currently employed on the project. Some businesses are providing contract services.
Woodfibre LNG’s own report on socio-economic impacts begin rather ominously with the words “ Woodfibre LNG is committed to managing socioeconomic effects associated with the construction and operation of its liquid natural gas facility located in Squamish BC” which aren’t exactly the words of a company focused on becoming part of the local community. When it was announced WLNG promised 650 jobs during construction and 100 jobs over the 25 year operational life of the facility. As taxpayers we gifted them a reduced rate on their electrical bill, to the tune of about $23 million a year. They have yet to begin paying local property taxes to Squamish, and are currently negotiating a tax agreement with the local government. That has gone to court becasue Woodfibre thinks it’s too much. So now in addition to challenging the rate, WLNG is now costing local taxpayers money to fund a legal defence.
These companies do not want to pay taxes, but they are happy to get subsidies on energy costs, and a reduction of royalties until capital costs are paid off. Those costs by the way have doubled recently, much to the chagrin of LGE’s minority partner, Enbridge. These companies demand and receive the help and relief from financial pressures that citizens do not. We are bending over backwards in Canada to develop these kinds of projects, and we are cutting much needed health and education and social services to provide incentives for wealthy investors to do it.
These projects do not “build nations”. They are the fruits of a nation we have already built. They provide very few local jobs and when it comes to making a meaningful impact, by providing long term tax funding for services to give back for the resources we have freely provided to them, they do everything in their power to avoid, dodge and not pay.
This is not how to build a nation. We are in a place where we need to literally invest in the human and physical capital to sustain health care systems, public infrastructure, education, social services not to mention the public-good parts of industries like agriculture, energy generation, community development and manufacturing so that we are safe, fed and cared for. Without that there will not be a nation to invest in.
The market will not do this. Despite private mega projects like LNG plants convincing local governments that they are good for the economy, they do everything in their power to avoid paying taxes and royalties which is the ONLY way to get more doctors and nurses, more teachers and scientists, more public transportation and safer food and water. Government’s job is to pay for those things.
We need energy. Maybe we even need LNG and certainly people need jobs. That doesn’t mean that energy companies are the most important sector in our country, nor is their success the only way to fund a functioning society. Individuals benefitting from development is not the same as a community or a province or a nation benefitting from it. We have been sold a pile of garbage for 45 years about how the market will solve all our problems, how creating investment opportunities for very wealthy people will return resources to the rest of us, and despite ample evidence to the contrary, people STILL believe it.
Canada is entering into a dangerous time. Not because the economy and the climate is tanking. But because our current governments are disinvesting in our social infrastructure just at a time when we need to increase it. This will load individuals up with debt, forcing them to borrow for things that government should be borrowing for, at better rates. It will increase the costs for families and small businesses and property owners as municipalities struggle to absorb the costs that provinces pass on to them.
I’m not optimistic. Emails to my MP Patrick Weiler have gone unanswered. The current federal government budget consultation is clearly just window dressing because we have been discussing this budget for weeks now. It’s already made and Departments are already looking for cost reductions. No one is going to pay attention to folks who say “hey, we need to substantially increase tax revenue and do a wholesale reinvestment in our citizens.” It might be decades before we can have that conversation again, and by then the game might be fully rigged in favour of it never happening.
Share:

Anchored at Ruxton Island, peering into the Trincomali Channel across a submerged shoal.
As we cruise through these islands I am travelling with David Rozen’s 1985 Master’s thesis, Place-Names of the Islands Halkomelem Indian People. It’s a useful collection of knowledge he recorded with Elders from the Halkomelem communities in these territories and records the many dialects and names of places and some of their stories in these islands. We anchored last night at Ruxton Island, a place that doesn’t show up in Rozen’s study so I don’t know the original name for it. Ruxton is one of the islands in this archipelago that shows off the tectonic forces at play here, tracing long thin reefs and shoals along the direction of geological uplift. We anchored in a narrow bay at the north end of the island with all kinds of little reefs and shoals upon which rest seals and oystercatchers until the tide flows in and washes them away.
We are near the original village site of the Lyackson people which lies across the channel on Valdes Island. There is a great story in Indiginews about how this community has finally found land for their village.
Last night a tsunami advisory was issued for nearly the entire coast of BC except for this part of the Salish Sea, where these islands and shallow channels protect us from damaging effects of most trans-oceanic tsunami waves. Damaging tsunamis can happen here, but only from local earthquakes or landslides. Trans-oceanic waves do enter this region (the linked paper has some great examples) but not in any damaging way. Thankfully this morning I’m not hearing of damage or injuries here, and only a little in Kamchatka and Kuril Islands and Hokkaido and Hawaii where these quake took place. The advisories have all been cancelled.
One of the things I love about my adult son is that he works a job he is good at and fills the rest of his time by what he calls “doing fun stuff.” When we traveled together in England back in April, he was up for anything. Museums, visiting the places I lived as a child, meeting cousins. All these ideas were met with “sure! sounds good!” and truly not the dismissive “whatever” that one sometimes worries about. He was able to find the fun stuff even between the six football matches we went to in ten days. For him, in his life, “fun stuff” might be downhill mountain biking or skiing or going out with friends or ripping around in a small boat or getting into all manner of mischief. He is capable of enjoying himself almost anywhere. He’s nailed it. Brian Klaas would approve:
“To me, the good life has more aimless wandering, less frantic racing, more spontaneity, less scurrying. It comes with a slower pace that allows us to catch our breath, to soak up wonderful moments, to savor what we have. It gives us the space to do one of the most important things a human can do: to notice and relish the joyful, the fulfilling, or even the merely pleasant bits of life.”
Philip Meters writes a very thoughtful meditation on Chekov, happiness and misery and the need for the contented among us to be reminded that people elsewhere are struggling. As Ivan Ivanich says in “Gooseberries:”
“At the door of every contented, happy man,” Ivan says, as if appending a moral to the end of his story, “somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however unhappy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer.”
Meters also quotes from Martin Luther King Jr’s Christmas Sermon for Peace about the interconnectedness of the contentment and suffering of humans and how even before we have finished our breakfast we have become dependant on the people of the world.
Here in Canada the federal Liberal austerity program will go ahead. The CCPA published a piece based on this study which shows that austerity generally increases populism because it affects folks who are already disenfranchised to begin with. It is amazing the lengths that to which neoliberal politicians will go to ensure that rich folks aren’t taxed at the expense of a broad program of social welfare and decent services that can look after literally everybody in a society.
Our TSS Rovers men’s team had a brutal end to the season, having our title snatched away with a last minute penalty. I haven’t been able to write about it yet, but in the meantime my fellow Rovers owner Will Cromack has penned a beautiful piece on Socrates and the 1982 Brazilian side that hoped to deliver both politically and in footballing terms the revolution that Corinthians began in Sao Paolo.
Share:
The golfer Scotty Scheffler, who just won The Open Championship, has made some waves recently with the interview he gave before that tournament where he talks about what is fulfilling in life. It’s not winning golf tournaments. In fact he expresses a little astonishment and confusion about why he does what he does, even though he is one of the best in the world at it. “You work all your life for two minutes of euphoria…” As a musician I can relate. We puts hundreds of hours of practice into learning a piece, only to perform it once, perhaps, for a couple of minutes of interesting music. And that’s not even counting the lifetime of work that goes into the training the voice, the fingers, the ear, and the heart to be able to perform competently enough to even be on a stage in the first place.
I was struck by the moment in his press conference where he says “am I making sense?” At that moment, I nodded, but clearly the golf and sports press gallery didn’t. And that is what separates artists from those who value the end line. As Alan Watts once said, if the result was everything people would only go to hear the final chord of a composition, or dancers would head to one spot on the stage and stay there. It’s a cultural error, which is what makes Scheffler’s comments seem so confusing, in a culture that worships the final result.
More patterns that are everywhere. Last week I shared a link about how the Golden Ration is over represented in our ideas about the universe. Today comes a beautiful article from Aeon which talks about the prevalence of the branching network (like a river valley or a bronchial passage) and the web (like neural networks or cosmic galactic clusters) and how they operate across scales. Interestingly in the article, the author Mark Neyrinck doesn’t seem to distinguish between networks with ends and those without. Networks where things arrive at certain places, and networks where they don’t.
I wonder if we are losing our ability to organize and work in networks at scale for social good. Here in North America we are very individual focused in terms of meeting needs and our current governments are most focused on creating the conditions for an efficient return on capital investments and concentration of wealth, following the long discredited trickle down theory of Neo-liberal economics. We are probably going to need networks of care, becasue the federal government is about to gut a number of public facing service personnel to pay for national defence spending and tax cuts. Most of these jobs are the liaison people that help folks with their federal pension plans, employment insurance, and federal taxation issues. The Department that serves First Nations communities and maintains Canada’s end of the bargain in terms of treaty benefits, stands to have substantial program cuts. This is one journey that is going to result in some dire destinations for vulnerable folks, newcomers, and Indigenous communities
Share:
Restorative justice is the promising pathway to restoring community, and my friend Sally Swarthout Wolf is in the final stages of finishing a book on the topic. This is a collection of stories from the field, and having had a first peek at the galleys, it is a promising illustrative collection to show and inspire what is possible when we put relationship at the heart of conflict resolution. Pre-order it now.
If you don’t live in Manitoba, PEI, British Columbia or Yukon, your provincial government has not yet enrolled in the national Pharmacare program and you are being left out of funding to support drugs and medications you are otherwise paying more for. All Canadians fund this program. All Canadians should have access to it, but it requires provincial governments to get on board. (Most of the provinces not yet enrolled are led by conservative and populist parties, who are not good on public health stuff, PEI being the refreshing exception).
My enduring curiosity about complexity and constraints extends every day to public policy realms. Looking through a complexity lens helps me to understand governance and how we might address public policy challenges (and why we get it wrong, so often). Brian Klass today has a really fascinating read on dictators, central bankers, decision-making and constraints.
My enduring curiosity also extends to the night sky, and I’m not the only one who looks up, obviously. What I didn’t know until now is that a species of endangered moth uses the Milky Way to guide its migration to a place it has never been before. They have been determined to be the first invertebrate discovered to use celestial navigation.
Growing little brain avatars by reversing time in skin cells to create the building blocks of neural networks sounds – possible? It’s being done right now at Stanford University. This is where complexity takes us, pure experimental research into living systems, and watching how self organization can enable researchers to discover new treatments for brain issues.
Share:

Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.