The last time I posted to this blog, it was May of 2009. There was a lot of positive rhetoric floating around. Canada, they said, was not quite so bad as our G7 counterparts. Our country had shown relatively cautious and restrained fiscal practices and, resultantly, our public and private sectors had come out looking much more intact than those in the United States, the United Kingdom, etcetera and so on.

Back then this was a blog about infrastructure. Swept up in the gold-toned, postwar-esque rhetoric of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, I was anxious to chronicle and comment on such issues as student transportation, electrical grid mechanization, and scientific research facilities.

Over the past year – a period in which university and work demanded far too much of my time to update this web page routinely – we have seen that hopeful discourse, rife with terminology like “Rebuilding” and “Stronger,” become imbued with a kind of cynicism I never thought I would see myself beginning to display.

April’s edition of the Statistics Canada Economic Observer was released very recently, and contained news with serious implications for my demographic of young service professionals leaving university to enter the white-collar labour market. While it did announce that March showed promise, economically – employment overall rose by 0.1 per cent – that small growth was embittered, somewhat, by a couple of related figures:

• Employment within service industries (which constitute the vast majority of Ottawa’s job opportunities) actually fell during March, losing one-third of the upward gains it achieved over the course of the two previous months.
• This slight positive gain can be attributed entirely to increases in part-time employment. Full-time employment fell – again, after March growth, ironically mirroring the service industry’s discouraging reversal over the same period of time.

Yesterday evening I was speaking with a long-graduated acquaintance who said he had heard that this year is “even worse than last year” for Generation-Y professionals seeking entry-level positions. He was saying that this could, perhaps, be accredited to some sort of economic ripple effect in which a company is first hit by financial difficulties and then, only after a period of attempting to cope, decides it must scale back employment and staffing measures.

Had an excellent conversation today with some colleagues about some long-term doubtful, short-term optimistic energy demand figures & estimates from the IESO.

At a time when unplanned additional millions are being poured into assets serving large-scale electricity nodes (in order to increase capacity, no less; e.g. the recent tunnel debacle in Niagara), it’s important to consider the question of why the energy demand in Ontario is currently decreasing – and, notably, expected to kind of even out towards 2011, according the the IESO’s messaging.

I suggested to a friend that this might be a sign that the “culture of conservation” is really taking hold in Ontario. After some discussion we agreed – though I still cling to my optimisms – that an awfully large part of this short-term “successful” demand management we’re seeing is due to the auto industry’s series of lapses. Across the province we’re seeing the last of this truck roll off such and such an assembly line. Workers, ashen-faced, kiss goodbye to their securities.

What’s the connection here? (no pun intended…) Two truths are relevant to the dilemma at hand:

• An auto assembly plant requires insane amounts of energy and much of this is electric.
• By virtue of path dependency, environmental/efficiency retrofits are  an arduous process and economically a hard hit for a manufacturing firm operating heavy industrial sites like the assembly plants we see run by car companies here in the province.

So auto plants are closing their doors, and resultantly their gargantuan electricity consumption levels have declined, having a serious impact on provincial demand figures. What happens when the plants reopen those doors? (Some would say what happens “if” those doors reopen…)

The answers are certain to vary. The IESO boss has faith that there is some sort of restructuring going on. Some are a bit more skeptical – it’s tough for a big auto plant to “become green” as, say, a commercial printers or a Shopper’s Drug Mart might.

Me, personally? I agree with him. I think that if auto makers are going to survive, they’re going to need to endure the pain of making facilities more demand-conscious, if only to optimize their bottom line to keep these firms out of the red.

Best to read over the facts in that release and maybe check out some of the articles from today and yesterday – there was an excellent one in the Toronto Star if I correctly recall. What’s your call – recessionary desperation, or conservation ingenuity?

[Before we begin, I apologize for the long posting hiatus. I started this when there was still snow on the ground and now it's a beautiful 22C day in the Canadian capital. Now I've settled into a summer work routine and have a lot more time to update.]

John Raulston Saul was at Carleton University yesterday speaking on the topic of the Canadian Arctic. While I would have liked to have gone, I didn’t particularly want to spring for a “community pass” allowing me admission into events at this ridiculously overblown Social Sciences convention my university is hosting.

That having been said, my inclination would be to guess that his speech dealt with the topic of Arctic futures and, inevitably, ensuring Arctic sovereignty as the widening Northwest Passage presents a complicated diplomatic scenario between Canada and our partner nations.

My roommate who is working to help with the conference said yes, yes the speech did deal with these things.

We do a lot of talk about the Arctic down here, but we rarely go up to consult people who live and work in it. That’s why on this blog it might be nice to look at an interview I did back in March with a man named Michael Goodyear. He runs show at a scientific and geological research facility in Churchill, Manitoba.

Interestingly, on the front page of that site they’ve got info about a redesign participation process, of sorts. He and the Churchill team got their hands on Arctic research station infrastructure funding that was announced earlier this year when I did the whole assignment. At the time Goodyear planned to expand classroom space at the facility to try and faciliate more interaction with the populace of Churchill and visiting academics.

“One of the goals of Northern research, as we head into the next few decades, is to ensure that work can happen in the North,” he told me over the phone from the Churchill facility.

Expanding the facilities, he predicted, would enable more scientists to stay year-round, hopefully allowing the station to become more prolific and efficient with research undertakings.

Now back to the sovereignty stuff.

What’s Harper’s take in this, probably? The answer is so thinly veiled that even his comms people at INAC whom I spoke with were rather blunt about the economic motives: science research stations can be used to conduct geological surveying in the interest of ultimately locating new stashes of resources (diamonds have become the most lucrative area of the provincial economy in NWT) as the ice subsides due to global warming.

At the time I interviewed him, Goodyear and his staff had just finished facilitating a resources-speculation-intensive survey job in cooperation with the Manitoba Geological Survey.

“I wouldn’t describe ourselves as being on board with the mineral excavation companies,” he said, but ultimately the Arctic research companies know that this kind of speculation is very likely to lead to FDI-fuelled megaprojects to extract formerly ice-bound minerals.

Essentially, whether we like it or not, if policy continues the way it’s going we as Canadians are likely to all find ourselves on board with international extraction and harvesting operations. It’s a dark side of Arctic sovereignty/development that has yet to fully surface as a concern for us, and it will be interesting to see what developments happen next as these research stations apply infrastructure funding to become more resource-intensive and expedient in project completion.

A few years ago, school boards and the “yellow bus” student transportation firms to whom they contracted work, were all called upon (er, ordered) by the Ontario government to coordinate their efforts a little bit more.

The results: we saw the formation of many organizations with the same mandate as the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority.

OSTA is trying to implement some efficiency measures which, by making students from multiple schools ride the same bus, will ultimately result in 34 school buses off the road and more than $1.2 million in savings.

Roy Wierenga, a representative of the Authority, said money not spent on ensuring the safety of the transportation network will go to the school boards and  spent on better education Ottawa’s elementary school students.

“The days of a single school bus going to a single school are gone.” – Wierenga

The merits of improving school bus system efficiency are both environmental and economic – yellow buses haven’t been converted to biodiesel or hybrid like a lot of city buses are these days. An added bonus is an amelioration, sort of, for the already strained school bus work force.

Some issues raised by parents in the Carleton Heights/Meadowlands area:

• Change in bell times will mean that, in some cases, dismissal bell is even timing-separate from the dismissal bell of their older siblings.
• Multiple students on one bus means earlier pickup for some of the students on the new combined route. This will result in less sleep time, which for children in the grades of JK-6 is a legitimate concern for parents.
• Though drivers, we’re assured, will be given student lists, younger students at the outset of their elementary-school career may make the mistake of disembarking at the wrong school altogether.
• Disciplinary issues on buses are dealt with as per the final say of that school’s principal. Two schools’ students on one bus means a split jurisdiction over misbehaviour-related problems on a single bus.

These concerns are valid from a parenting perspective but they are unlikely to get in the way of hampering these efficiency proposals, set for implementation in April if all goes well with the consultations.

Ottawa’s not the first place this has happened, which is a good sign. Similar elimination of redundant routes has been taking place all over the province, and the gentlemen at the Authority with whom I spoke indicated that if they don’t eliminate these buses, the province is auditing them anyway and the money is going to have to come from somewhere.

In any case, it’s pretty fascinating to see what goes into organizing and maintaining this sort of network, which is actually pretty vital to Canadian cities. I wonder what these guys did work-wise before they worked for OSTA.