Wanted: 7,000 construction workers for Intel chip plants

JOHNSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s largest-ever economic development project comes with a big employment challenge: how to find 7,000 construction workers in an already booming building environment when there's also a national shortage of people working in the trades.



At hand is the $20 billion semiconductor manufacturing operation near the state's capital, announced by Intel earlier this year. When the two factories, known as fabs, open in 2025, the facility will employ 3,000 people with an average salary of around $135,000.

Before that happens, the 1,000-acre site must be leveled and the semiconductor factories built.

“This project reverberated nationwide,” said Michael Engbert, an Ohio-based official with the Laborers’ International Union of North America.

“We don’t field calls every day from members hundreds or thousands of miles away asking about transferring into Columbus, Ohio,” he said. “It’s because they know Intel is coming.”

To win the project, Ohio offered Intel roughly $2 billion in incentives, including a 30-year tax break. Intel has outlined $150 million in educational funding aimed at growing the semiconductor industry regionally and nationally.

Construction is expected to accelerate following Congress' approval last month of a package boosting the semiconductor industry and scientific research in a bid to create more high-tech jobs in the United States and help it better compete with international rivals. It includes more than $52 billion in grants and other incentives for the semiconductor industry as well as a 25% tax credit for those companies that invest in chip plants in the U.S.

For the central Ohio project, all 7,000 workers aren't required right away. They're also only a portion of what will be needed as the Intel project transforms hundreds of largely rural acres about 30 minutes east of Columbus.

Just six months after Intel revealed the Ohio operation, for example, Missouri-based VanTrust Real Estate announced it was building a 500-acre (200-hectare) business park next door to house Intel suppliers. The site's 5 million square feet (464,515 square meters) is equivalent to nearly nine football fields. Other projects for additional suppliers are expected.

California-based Intel will rely on lessons learned in building previous semiconductor sites nationally and globally to ensure enough construction workers, the company said in a statement.

“One of Intel’s top reasons for choosing Ohio is access to the region’s robust workforce,” the company said. “It will not be without its challenges, but we are confident there is enough demand that these jobs will be filled.”

Labor leaders and state officials acknowledge there's not currently a pool of 7,000 extra workers in central Ohio, where other current projects include a 28-story Hilton near downtown Columbus, a $2 billion addition to The Ohio State University's medical center, and a $365 million Amgen biomanufacturing plant not far from the Intel plant.

And that's not counting at least three new Google and Amazon data centers, plans for a new $200 million municipal courthouse south of downtown Columbus and solar array projects that could require nearly 6,000 construction jobs by themselves.

Federal data shows about 45,000 home and commercial construction workers in central Ohio. That number increased by 1,800 from May 2021 to May 2022, meaning a future deficit given current and future demands.

"I don’t know of a single commercial construction company that’s not hiring," said Mary Tebeau, executive director of the Builders Exchange of Central Ohio, a construction industry trade association.

Offsetting the imbalance are training programs, a push to encourage more high school students to enter the trades, and pure economics. Including overtime, pay for skilled tradespeople could hit $125,000 annually, said Dorsey Hager, executive secretary-treasurer of the Columbus Building Trades Council.

Or as Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, the state's economic development point person, puts it, the Intel project is so big and lucrative it will create opportunities for people who didn't see construction jobs in their future.

“When you’re willing to pay people more to do something, you will find the talent,” he said.

In addition to new and out-of-state workers, some will likely be pulled from the residential construction industry, thinning out an already short supply of homebuilders, said Ed Brady, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Home Builders Institute.

That creates a housing shortage risk that could slow the very type of economic development that Intel is sparking, said Ed Dietz of the National Association of Home Builders.

“How do you attract those business investments if you can’t also provide additional housing available for the growth in the labor force?” he said.

Central Ohio is expected to reach 3 million residents by 2050, a rate that would require 11,000 to 14,000 housing units a year. That was before Intel was announced, said Jennifer Noll, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission's associate director for community development. Meanwhile, the closest the region came to hitting that goal was in 2020 with 11,000 units.

“We know we’ve got some work to do as a region,” Noll said.

Shortage or not, work is underway at and near the Intel site, where parades of trucks rumbled down country roads on a recent August morning as the beeping of multiple construction vehicles sounded in the distance.

It was just another day for pipe layer Taylor Purdy, who made his regular 30-minute drive from Bangs, Ohio, to his construction job helping widen a road running alongside the Intel plant.

Purdy, 28, spends his days in trenches helping position storm and sanitary sewers and waterlines. Overtime is plentiful as deadlines approach. The Intel construction work is in its earliest phases as earthmovers reshape the 1,000 acres (400 hectares) of former farm and residential land being transformed into an industrial site.

Purdy said he likes the job security of being involved on such a big project. He's also noticed that, unlike other jobs he has worked, he does not need to explain to people what he is up to.

“They all know what I’m talking about,” he said.

Andrew Welsh-huggins, The Associated Press

Putin reinstates Stalin-era decree


Russian President Vladimir Putin recently reinstated a Soviet-era award, giving women who have ten or more children a single payment of a million rubles (worth $16,747 USD, as of publishing).

The honorary title and certification of "Mother Heroine" are given to the mother once their tenth living child turns 1 year old.MORE: Russia-Ukraine live updates: Air raid sirens sound across Ukraine

According to Putin's decree, mothers will still be eligible for the award if their child dies as a result of war or from an act of terrorism, or in an emergency situation.

The Mother Heroine award was initially established by Josef Stalin in 1944 to encourage repopulation in wake of the country's high casualty count from World War II. At the time, the award was described as a "badge of special distinction" but was stopped in 1991 alongside the fall of the Soviet Union.


© Russian Look via ZUMA Press

A woman walks with a child, Aug. 20, 2022, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

With an average household size of 3.2 people, Russia's population has been declining at a rapid rate over the past 30 years, as reported by Statistica.MORE: Deadly car bomb detonates outside Moscow

Recent estimates state that between January and May of 2022, the population of the Russian Federation fell by over 430,000 people, 20% being those who have left the country, according to the Russian statistics agency Rosstat.

Though Russian authorities do not provide an official toll for the number of citizens who have been killed in the war in Ukraine, 5,256 deaths are estimated, according to independent news outlet, istories.

According to the data department of the Russian Database on Fertility and Mortality, the death rate of young people in Russia has increased by 18% due to war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother

Cross of Honour of the German Mother - Wikipedia 

ClassesEdit · 1st class, Gold Cross: eligible mothers with eight or more children · 2nd class, Silver Cross: eligible mothers with six or seven children · 3rd&...

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hitler-institutes-the-mothers-cross

Hitler encourages Germans to have multiple children with the ... 

One component of that ideal was fecundity. And so each year, in honor of his beloved mother, Klara, and in memory of her birthday, a gold medal was awarded to ...

How a Canadian coffee roaster is replacing container ships with sailboats to decarbonize its supply chain — and cutting costs in the process

htowey@insider.com (Hannah Towey) -

From left, Ib Bergström, the captain, Saga Bergström, the cook, Ergil Bergström, an owner, and Odd Bergström, an owner, on board the Vega cargo sailboat. Courtesy of Sail Cargo Inc.

Retailers are decarbonizing their supply chains by using sailboats instead of container ships.

Amid port congestion and pricey oil, "sail freight" is gaining traction as a shipping alternative.

This article is part of the "Making Net Zero Possible" series uncovering forward-thinking solutions that can make a net-zero future a reality.

The idea of sustainable transportation likely conjures images of futuristic technologies and electric cars, as well as scientific advances that have yet to be achieved.

But there's a burgeoning industry made up of sailors, coffee roasters, olive-oil companies, and wineries that's reverting to shipping practices of the past to move toward a net-zero future.

Instead of transporting products overseas on gas-guzzling container ships, some retailers are choosing to ship their products via sailboats.

The so-called sail freight movement is a proposed solution to the transportation industry's role as the world's largest contributor of greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. S&P Global Platts Analytics estimated that maritime shipping alone accounts for between 2% and 3% of global CO2 emissions — a number equal to, if not more than, the aviation sector's greenhouse gas emissions.

While it may sound idealistic — even "whimsical," as Bloomberg put it in May — cargo sailboats are currently cheaper and more efficient than container ships, according to Café William, a fair-trade-coffee company that's set use cargo sailboats to ship its coffee beans from South America to New Jersey in 2023.

As Russia's invasion of Ukraine sends the price of oil skyrocketing and the global supply chain continues to recover from COVID-19, cargo sailboats have managed to dodge the port backlogs and rising fuel costs plaguing the modern supply chain, Serge Picard, the owner of Café William, told Insider.

"We used to pay between seven to 10 cents to ship a pound of coffee on a container bunker-fuel cargo ship," Picard said. "Then, all of a sudden, the world goes completely berserk and the price of shipping by container quintupled for a good period."

He added: "It's slowly coming back down, but it's actually more expensive and takes more time to ship by container ship."


.SailCargo's ship "Vega" is being delivered from Sweden to the Caribbean and will start shipping cargo between Colombia and New Jersey in December of this year. Courtesy of SailCargo Inc.

On the other end of the supply chain, customers are demanding more sustainable products — and they're willing to pay a premium for it, too, Richard Blake, the founder of Yallah Coffee, a roaster in the UK that sells a 1-kilogram bag of coffee beans sailed from Colombia for $6o, told Bloomberg.

Picard, however, told Insider that "to the displeasure of" his chief financial officer, he planned to keep the price of Café William's sail-cargo coffee equal to the price of coffee shipped on board container ships.

"I know it's not as advantageous right now for the company," he said. "So we're kind of fighting a two-sided financial game here where when we ship on bunker-fuel cargo ships, there's no price attached to the pollution that goes per pound of coffee."


Felix Bergström Lundquist, the second mate, with the deckhands Logan McManus and Francini León, as well as Asma Arbaoui, a petty officer, on board the Vega. Courtesy of Sail Cargo Inc.

The financial viability of sail freight was the main goal of Danielle Doggett, the founder of SailCargo, Café William's shipping partner.

Doggett started sailing when she was 13 years old and was later introduced to the concept of sail freight while working on the ship Tres Hombres, which sails a sustainable trade route between Europe and the Caribbean. While the mission of Tres Hombres served as a major inspiration, she said the company struggled to prove its financial value, thus limiting its scalability.

"So I really took on the financial planning and working on business plans," Doggett told Insider. "And that's where SailCargo came from — to not only be socially and environmentally creating a return on investment, but also financially."

The cargo sailboat Ceiba under construction at the AstilleroVerde shipyard in Costa Rica. Courtesy of Sail Cargo Inc.

SailCargo has two wind-powered cargo ships in the works. The Vega, a three-mast cargo schooner, is being delivered from Sweden and is scheduled to ship coffee between Colombia and New Jersey this year.

The fleet's second boat, Ceiba, is a hybrid cargo vessel designed to carry 250 tons of goods. In addition to its three sails, Ceiba will have an electric engine to allow better navigation in ports and during low winds. The engine can either be charged using solar panels or through "regenerating energy" produced by the ship's propellers when sailing.

The Ceiba, which is scheduled to start sailing in 2023, "will be the world's largest active, clean ocean freight vessel," Doggett said.

When the cost of bunker fuel returns to normal, Ceiba's shipping services are expected to be "slightly more expensive than the cheapest forms of shipping," SailCargo told Insider. One kilo of coffee sailed from Costa Rica to British Columbia would have approximately $0.70 additional cost per kilo when compared to conventional container ships, according to the company's estimates.

Speed-wise, Ceiba will be able to attain top speeds of up to 14 knots, six knots slower than a conventional container ship. However, due to the rising cost of fuel, it's common for container vessels to intentionally slow down to half speed. Meanwhile, container ship bottlenecks at major ports around the world continue to lengthen average delivery times.


AstilleroVerde translates to "green shipyard" in Spanish. Courtesy of Sail Cargo Inc.

Ceiba is being built at the AstilleroVerde shipyard, SailCargo's headquarters in Costa Rica. Translating to "green shipyard" in Spanish, the eco-shipyard doubles as a nonprofit that runs educational programs for local residents, as well as an annual tree-planting program to offset the company's carbon emissions.

Julian Southcott, a timber framer and boatbuilder at the AstilleroVerde shipyard, said SailCargo's workers on the ground were "actively planting trees while we are harvesting timber as well."

"Sailing vessels are an incredible design that dates back hundreds of years, and now we're seeing this old technology coming back into this modern day," he told Insider. "I think it's really cool that you can still take something to the other side of the world with zero emissions on an ancient piece of technology."

Alberta RCMP members demoralized over proposal to form provincial police service


"Policing is far too important to be left to the police."


CALGARY — The head of Alberta's RCMP says a proposal by the provincial government to form its own police service has been a distraction and harmful to its members.


© Provided by The Canadian Press

Deputy Commissioner Curtis Zablocki said the potential move has been hanging over the organization's head for nearly two years and is having an impact.

"Quite frankly it's been very disruptive and distracting for all our employees. Our staff are concerned about their futures and the futures of their partners and their families," Zablocki said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"I'll say it's impacted the morale of the Alberta RCMP as well and I will say it has also impacted the trust and confidence that we see from our communities in those relationships, which is very critical."

The United Conservative Party government recently outlined its blueprint for more police in rural Alberta. Under the plan, 275 front-line police officers would be added to the 42 smallest detachments.

As it stands, said Justice Minister Tyler Shandro, there is no minimum number of officers at RCMP detachments. He said a made-in-Alberta police force would provide better policing for all regions, including improved response times with the use of community detachments and larger hubs.

But Zablocki said the Alberta government's proposed model is very close to what the RCMP already provides with its roughly 3,500 members.

He said support from the public, as well as from most municipalities, shows how well respected the RCMP is and he hopes Albertans will have a say in any final decision, but he stopped short of calling for a plebiscite.

"Their positions on this should be the most important consideration of any decision," Zablocki said.

Earlier this year, the Rural Municipalities of Alberta said it supported keeping the RCMP and opposed the idea of a provincial police force because the government has failed to demonstrate how it would increase service levels in rural areas.

Alberta Municipalities, formerly known as the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, also outlined concerns about the costs, whether there has been enough consultation and whether the idea has been driven by real public safety needs rather than by politics.

An Alberta government webinar Monday on the future of policing in the province featured experts supporting the idea of replacing the RCMP.

Richard Fadden, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and national security adviser to the prime minister, said he doesn't believe a long-standing organization like the RCMP can provide the full range of police services Canadians expect into the future.

He said the key problem is that, although the provinces are responsible for policing, the RCMP gets its orders from Ottawa.

"It doesn't matter who delivers the service — the province carries the can. I think the example of what's happening in Nova Scotia with regard to the inquiry regarding the mass shooting there is a good example of that," Fadden said, referring to the probe into the 13-hour shooting rampage in April 2020 that resulted in 22 murders.

"It confuses accountability in a time that such things are much more important than they were 30 or 40 years ago."

Former British Columbia attorney general Wally Oppal said the public is demanding police forces be more accountable, especially at a time when every major event is captured by cellphone video. He said that doesn't happen with the RCMP, which takes its orders from Ottawa.

"Policing is far too important to be left to the police. I think that the RCMP needs to become accountable to provincial oversight provisions, but we know that's not going to happen," Oppal said.

"For that reason, I think Alberta's on the right track of establishing its own police force."

The Alberta government is deciding its next steps after the release of a third-party analysis last fall of the proposal for an Alberta-run provincial police force to replace RCMP in rural areas and some smaller cities.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 22, 2022.

Bill Graveland, The Canadian Press

56% of Canadians say they can't keep pace with high cost of living, according to survey

Jenna Benchetrit - CBC


Over half of Canadians say they can't keep pace with the current cost of living, according to a survey released Monday by the Angus Reid Institute.

The polling firm surveyed 2,279 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum from Aug. 8-10 and found that 56 per cent of them are struggling to keep up as high inflation and interest rates force them to tighten their belts.

Four in five respondents, or 80 per cent, said they have reduced some kind of spending in the last few months, with 57 per cent reporting they have trimmed discretionary expenses.

Three quarters of Canadians say they are stressed about money. While July inflation decreased to 7.6 per cent from a 39-year high of 8.1 in June, indicating that inflation has slowed down for the first time in over a year, food prices have risen 10 per cent since last year.

If there's one thing that all Canadians agree on, as indicated by this survey, it's a belief that grocery chains are taking advantage of high inflation to hike prices and boost their profits — a phenomenon coined "greedflation." 

AKA FALLING RATE OF PROFIT

Seventy-eight per cent of Canadians were aligned in believing this is happening, regardless of demographics, though major grocery chains like Empire and Loblaws have denied it, saying they've become more efficient.


To help afford the necessities:

Over 40 per cent of Canadians say they are delaying a major purchase and driving less.
Thirty-two per cent cancelled or curtailed travel plans this year, while over a quarter opted to scale back on charitable donations as they adjust their budgets.
Nineteen per cent said they are deferring contributions to their tax-free savings accounts and retirement savings plans.

Canadians were given a scenario in which they would receive a non-conditional gift of $5,000 — and 10 per cent said they would use it to address immediate financial obligations, while 38 per cent would use it for long-term needs; 43 per cent would save the money while nine per cent would make a pricey purchase.

But if the opposite happened — in which they incurred a surprise expense of $1,000 or more — half said they would not be able to shoulder the expense. Thirteen per cent say any unplanned expense would be "too much," the polling firm said in its report.

The Angus Reid Institute conducted its survey online. For comparison purposes only, a probability sample of this size would carry a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

Jasper National Park has almost 4 times the roadkill compared to Banff. Here's why

Liam Harrap - CBC

Neighbouring national parks Banff and Jasper are very similar – both are mountainous, UNESCO World Heritage sites with a major highway.

Yet they differ greatly when it comes to roadkill.

Between 2011 and 2021, Parks Canada reported 1,007 animals, coyote-sized and larger, were killed on roads in Jasper National Park.

That includes 425 white-tailed deer, 161 elk and 125 bighorn sheep that have been killed on roads in the national park.

The total is nearly four times the number in Banff, where 272 animals were killed, even though that park has more kilometres of highway.

"It's much higher than we would like to see," said David Argument, a resource conservation officer with Jasper National Park.

Most of the deaths are caused by commercial trucks, he said.

Jasper has a higher mortality rate because the main highway through the park is not twinned, fenced or equipped with wildlife overpasses, unlike its neighbour, Argument said.

And it's not just on highways where animals are dying.

Over the past decade, more than 600 animals have died on the railway in both national parks, according to Parks Canada. The tracks are not fenced and there are no wildlife overpasses.

Roadkill numbers in Jasper National Park
Banff's success story

In response to the high number of animal deaths in Banff National Park, work to twin Highway 1 began in the 1980s. By 2014, the fenced road had 38 wildlife underpasses and six overpasses.

Those moves reduced vehicle collisions with wildlife in the park by more than 80 per cent, according to Parks Canada.

Many biologists consider Banff a conservation success story.

"Whenever someone wants to implement wildlife crossing infrastructure somewhere else in the world, they often come to Banff to learn," said Adam Linnard, Alberta program manager for Yellowstone to Yukon, a non-profit conservation organization.

Why the same structures are not in Jasper National Park is partly due to geology, said Argument.

Highway 1 through Banff is largely straight. By comparison, Highway 16 in Jasper meanders. It snakes beside rivers and lakes, slithering beneath several cliffs.


© Parks Canada

Highway overpass wildlife crossings are expensive, costing up to $4 million each. There are six overpasses and 38 underpasses on Highway 1 in Banff National Park.

For example, when driving from Edmonton to Jasper, Disaster Point is the first rocky point where the highway gets pinched between rocky bluffs and the Athabasca River. The site is popular with bighorn sheep as it allows them to escape predation, said

 Argument.

"We have a fair bit of sheep mortality occurring at that site," he said.

Due to terrain, building an overpass would be difficult and dividing the highway almost impossible.

"We need to be careful about the placement of these things to make sure that they're in a place where the wildlife we're trying to help can actually use them," Argument said.
The trouble with roads

Animals are attracted to roads for many reasons.

Ditches are great for dandelions, which bears love to eat, said Seth Cherry, conservation manager for Banff National Park.

Recently bears in the park have learned to climb the fences along the highway to get the nutrient-rich flower.

"We're looking at ways to refine the design of the fencing, put in maybe an electric wire in certain locations," said Cherry.

In addition, salt added to roads in winter to make them passable acts as an attractant to wildlife.

"Roads are a major component of the human impact on earth's ecosystems," said Adam Ford, a biologist at UBC Okanagan.

Highways also slice through animal ranges.

In one study, Ford found chipmunks rarely cross roads.

"There is no forest canopy. The ground is different," he said.

"It doesn't matter on traffic."
'Something has to be done'

Chris Smith, parks co-ordinator for the northern chapter of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, a non-profit dedicated to conservation, said Jasper needs to do more more to reduce wildlife mortality on roads.

If Jasper maintains the status quo, Smith said, wildlife population numbers could be at risk.

At the moment, Parks Canada said roadkill in Jasper is not causing overall decline.

"It's an unfortunate source of loss, certainly, and we don't want to see them struck," said Argument.

Wildlife mortality on roads could be reduced dramatically, he said, by people driving alertly and slower, giving wildlife lots of space.

Since 2011, no caribou have been killed on Jasper roads. Three grizzly bears have died. Grizzlies are listed as threatened in Alberta while caribou are listed as a species at risk.

Earlier this summer a cub was orphaned after its mother was killed by a truck.

A 2016 Parks Canada report estimated up to 10 per cent of elk in Jasper die on roads and rails.

"We want wildlife to freely roam in our national park. That's why they exist," said Smith.

"Something has to be done in Jasper ... this is unacceptable."

There is also the human cost from roadkill.

In 2020, there were more than 35,000 collisions on Canada's roads between vehicles and wildlife, injuring almost 2,000 people and killing 17, according to Transport Canada.
Jasper's future

Fencing, twinning and adding wildlife overpasses in Jasper would significantly decrease roadkill, said Argument.

But he has concerns.

He said fencing alone isn't a solution as animals need to cross roads to find food and mate, making overpasses and underpasses important.

Another concern is that predators could use fences to herd prey, but in a followup email with Banff National Park, Parks Canada said it had no examples of that happening.

Linnard said reducing wildlife mortality in our national parks, needs to be a priority.

"We kind of have a higher expectation of Parks Canada than we do anywhere else," he said.

"We know they can do it."

The Big Four oilsands companies' influence threatens Alberta democracy, argues political scientist

This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.

___

Author: Robert (Bob) L. Ascah, Research Fellow, The Parkland Institute, University of Alberta

Over the past five years, ownership of oilsands production has become hyperconcentrated in four companies: Cenovus Energy, Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL), Imperial Oil Limited and Suncor Energy.

These four producers — known as the Big Four — account for about 84 per cent of Alberta’s daily production of 3.3 million barrels of bitumen, a type of crude oil found in oilsands deposits.

Not only that, but it is the oilsands that have driven Alberta’s economy and finances for the past two decades. According to Alberta’s 2022 budget, oilsands production will make up 87 per cent of the province’s total oil production, as conventional fields empty.

In the face of growing environmental concerns and regulatory requirements, some international companies have decided to exit the oilsands. Between 2016 and 2019, foreign oil companies Chevron, Shell, BP and Statoil sold their oilsands holdings.

But other major Canadian producers, like CNRL and Cenovus Energy, have doubled down. They see the emission-intensive extraction operation as a golden opportunity to dominate an increasingly single-industry province.

As a political scientist who has worked in a large Alberta-based financial institution and the provincial treasury department, I am familiar with the booms and busts of Alberta’s economy and its correlation to provincial finances. The financial dependence of the Alberta government on bitumen royalties has increased enormously over the past several years.

An industry flush with cash

By comparing the amount of bitumen royalties and corporate income taxes from the Big Four to Alberta’s total revenue, it is possible to estimate the province’s fiscal dependency on these companies.

The numbers show that no province, other than perhaps New Brunswick with its dominant Irving family, comes near Alberta’s level of corporate fiscal dependency.

The revenue expected from the Big Four oilsands producers in 2022, assuming an average per barrel price of $115, will be a staggering $116 billion — about 25 per cent of Alberta’s GDP.

During the first half of 2022, Imperial Oil, Cenovus Energy, CNRL and Suncor Energy have reported net income of $17.1 billion.

What is less understood is what this vast increase in revenue means for the Alberta treasury and, to a lesser extent, the federal government.

During the first six months of 2022, the Big Four paid an estimated $8 billion in royalties to the Alberta government. Most of their $6.8 billion in income tax expenses went to the federal government, with the remaining 30 per cent going to the Alberta government.

Since Alberta has the lowest corporate tax rate in the country, this creates an enormous incentive for these companies to create as much taxable income as possible. The taxes and royalties so far this year amount to about $10 billion, which would easily pay for Alberta’s K-12 education system.

Lining the government’s pockets

The concentration of economic and financial power in the Big Four means Alberta’s next premier must heed the needs of these massive oilsands players. As oil prices rise, the financial dependency of the provincial treasury on the Big Four will grow.

Alberta’s 2022 budget adopted a very conservative oil price estimate of US$70 per barrel, which deliberately understated the expected surplus. It estimated bitumen royalties would return $10.3 billion during the fiscal year.

For every dollar above this US$70 per barrel estimate, an additional $500 million in oil royalties will flow to the government. At US$100 a barrel, an additional $9 billion in bitumen royalties would be paid, but with oil prices averaging US$116 since April 1, an additional $23 billion in oil and gas royalties could roll in.

Using this conservative oil price forecast, Alberta’s budget estimated its total revenue will be $52 billion. In reality, its revenue will likely be much higher.

The Big Four contribute about 20 per cent of Alberta’s total revenue. At US$100 per barrel, the Big Four contribute about 30 per cent of the province’s revenue and, at US$116 per barrel, the contribution exceeds 30 per cent. This gives these companies an enormous amount of control over Alberta’s finances and, by extension, politics.

Pathways Alliance

The Big Four’s political influence has most recently manifested in its dominant position in the Pathways Alliance. This lobbying consortium — known as COSIA — consists of the Big Four, ConocoPhillips and MEG Energy.

According to their website, COSIA’s purpose is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from oilsands production and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. The Pathways Alliance sees oilsands production carrying on for nearly three decades and beyond.

Central to this lobby effort has been successfully convincing Ottawa to give the firms a tax credit in the 2022 federal budget. This sets a dangerous precedent — if Ottawa itself is willing to grant the wishes of the Big Four, what chance will the Alberta premier have in refusing similar requests?

The fiscally dependent Alberta government will continue its battles against Ottawa on behalf of the Big Four. Whether or not this is good for Alberta’s democracy, its residents and the planet is another matter entirely.

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Robert (Bob) L. Ascah does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article: https://theconversation.com/the-big-four-oilsands-companies-influence-threatens-alberta-democracy-argues-political-scientist-188567

Robert (Bob) L. Ascah, Research Fellow, The Parkland Institute, University of Alberta, The Conversation

James Joyce’s Humanism

On its centenary, the classic Irish novel promotes tolerance over violent extremism.

Brendan Ruberry
Jun 16, 2022

Visitors sit on the base of a statue of James Joyce in Dublin. (Fran Caffrey/AFP via Getty Images)

As part of our Persuasion Classics series, we look back on timeless writings from long ago. Our previous installments have included reviews of works by Milton and Hume. Today, Brendan Ruberry guides us through James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses.

by Brendan Ruberry

James Joyce wrote his classic novel Ulysses—eventually published in 1922—over the course of seven years. It was composed in three different cities, in innumerable tongues, and entirely outside of his native Ireland, which he left in 1912 and whose stifling intellectual and artistic environment, he maintained, forced him into exile. With his novel, he aimed to give the world a picture of Dublin “so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.” Today, as celebrants around the world mark the 100th “Bloomsday” (after the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom), Joyce’s opus offers timely lessons in forming a humanist bulwark against cruelty, bigotry, and political extremism.

A work renowned, perhaps unfairly, for its difficulty, Ulysses unfolds over the course of a single day: June 16, 1904. With the novel, Joyce was responding to the Dublin in which he was reared: the so-called “second city” of the British empire, where Joyce chafed at an Irish cultural revival whose most radical political element manifested itself in malice, violence, and hate. Often hectored by the bigots of his day, and having seen friends seduced by militancy (some were killed in the conflicts following the 1916 Easter Rising), Joyce in his work offers us an invaluable tool for identifying and pushing back against the toxic extremism of our own time.

Joyce’s antipathy to extremism is apparent from his central character. Leopold Bloom is an odd hero because he is not at all conventionally heroic: he is a middle-class and soft-spoken advertising agent. In Bloom, Joyce promotes a portrait of mundane benevolence—the life of a secular saint whose benefaction to readers of every creed is an unceasing call to discover the sublime in daily life.

This is Joyce’s riposte against the totalizing worldview of politically radical Dublin, clearest in the novel’s twelfth chapter, where Bloom alights in a pub and spars verbally with a “broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed” Irish nationalist, a Sinn Fein man. It is into this character, known only as “the citizen,” that Joyce pours his full contempt for the chauvinism of Ireland’s bilious nationalist movement and the Gaelic revival more broadly. The citizen’s superficial identification with cultural pride and high ideals like political self-determination quickly devolves, over the course of Bloom’s encounter, into base, backwards thinking. Like other nationalisms, the citizen’s Irish nationalism promotes a vision of the nation which, needless to say, never really existed.

The citizen’s devotion to his particular vision of Irishness colors everything “foreign” as shoddy and dubious, and everything “Irish” as pure, just, and good. In response, Bloom raises “moderation” and “civilisation” as praiseworthy aspects of the British. “Their syphilisation,” the citizen bellows back. “To hell with them!...No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us.” The French, meanwhile, are a “set of dancing masters!…They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland.” The citizen, spewing his self-assured hate in between sips of porter and surrounded by his cronies, sounds remarkably like the kind of person George Orwell, an enthusiastic Joycean, had in mind when he condemned nationalism as “power hunger tempered by self-deception.”

Joyce demonstrates how in this perverse worldview, even things that are worthy on their own terms are shoehorned into a nationalist lens: the Spanish are interesting, in part, because they made common cause with the Irish against their Protestant colonizers. Antiquity is interesting because “[Irish] wool…was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal.” Sir Roger Casement, the Edwardian gentleman whose muckraking uncovered the vast system of Belgian torture in the Congo? Of course he’s interesting! “Casement…” the citizen grumbles approvingly. “He’s an Irishman.”

Toward Bloom, born in Ireland to a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother, the citizen is openly hateful. Bloom is talked over, ignored, and at times plainly derided as a Jewish interloper:

—A wolf in sheep’s clothing, says the citizen. That’s what he is. Virag from Hungary! Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God…Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us, says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our shores…

The citizen, persistently dragging the conversation back to his pet enemies, serves as the archetype for petty narcissism in ideological garb. The world, to such figures, exists only as confirmation of dogma. All knowledge is degraded for its polemical use. We have no shortage of such partisans today, and they seem to populate the entire political spectrum. Every possible topic discussion can neatly be fit into their pet grievances.

Joyce, who later mined the rich deposits of Irish myth and folklore for his final novel Finnegan’s Wake, was not anti-Irish. But he knew the attitudes of the Irish people, and shone light on the ugliest bits. In this, he was a patriot rather than a nationalist, proving that honest chronicling and critique is as much a part of a love of one’s land and people as, say, participating in hagiography of the dead martyrs for the cause of a free Ireland. Against the citizen’s attitude, Joyce argues that the world affords us endless opportunities to apprehend beauty, which exists for its own sake and not in the service of an agenda.

Although Joyce is writing about politics, he also deals in more universal dichotomies: the provincial and cloistered mind versus the mind that is omnivorous and epicurean; the ideological zealot versus the questioning wanderer; the impersonal nation versus the human individual. “Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women,” says Bloom. “It’s the very opposite of that that is really life…Love.”

Few take Bloom’s side of things, preferring to give their assent to the citizen’s views. The bullies often have the influence, or even, in the citizen’s case, the brawn. But to gaze hopefully upon the dreary everyday, as the scholar Hugh Kenner writes, “is one conceivable form of sanctity.” In Bloom, the mere act of standing up to toxic nationalisms in a pub does cosmic good. Joyce recognized that the proper work of one’s life is locating the exquisite in the commonplace, and that this expansive project is opposed to narrowness of all kinds. Power fantasies, ideological self-indulgence, rote sectarianism—what are these things, Joyce asks, compared with the true stuff of life? Ulysses first posed the question a century ago.

Brendan Ruberry is an editorial assistant and podcast producer at Persuasion.

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The Forgotten Philosopher Who Can Fix Our Economy

Henry George has much to teach us about power and privilege today.


Joseph Addington
Writes Progress and Poverty ·
Jul 25,2022


Postcard featuring a quote from Henry George, 1900. From the New York Public Library. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).

We live in tumultuous times. Rampant social unrest, political instability, and rising populist anger have combined to create a particularly difficult cultural moment. Much of this is motivated by an increase in economic inequality, which in recent years has reached levels not seen since before the Great Depression. Social mobility has decreased. Housing—or, more specifically, land for housing—has become so expensive that many young people wonder if they will ever be able to afford a home at all. Many people have begun to feel that the American dream is dying, that the system is rigged, and that a better life is out of reach.

In many ways, our situation resembles the Gilded Age, a period during the late 19th century in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. One Gilded Age figure who has important lessons for today is Henry George. A journalist and political economist, George is now mostly forgotten, but during his own time he was a ubiquitous public figure. Through a careful examination of privilege, rights, and the sources of economic inequality, he has inspired millions worldwide to fight for a freer and more just society.

Henry George. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

By the time of his death in 1897, Henry George was one of the most influential men in the Western world. He was the best selling American economist ever published, and an estimated 200,000 people attended his funeral. Yet despite his immense popularity, he had humble beginnings. Growing up the son of working-class parents, he settled in San Francisco and began working in the newspaper business, although financial hardship left his family near starvation. Eventually he worked his way up through the printing industry and became a well-regarded editor and journalist.

His time in poverty left George contemplating the great questions that bedeviled the Gilded Age. If technology was improving and productivity increasing—if more wealth was being generated faster than ever before—why was there so much abject poverty? Why were the cities, where new manufacturing technology and economies of scale were concentrated, deep in the refuse of tenements?

George realized that the problem lay in the monopolization of the Earth. The value of urbanization and technological progress was being captured by private land ownership. As technology improved and urbanization increased, the value of the land also increased. The result was soaring land rents, which soaked up the gains in productivity, leaving workers impoverished. (“Rent” here refers to the wealth and advantages derived from control over a scarce resource, as opposed to the colloquial use of “rent” meaning money paid to lease housing.) The primary beneficiaries of this process were landowners, who could extract more value from both workers and businesses who needed access to the land to live or set up shop, without the landowners providing any positive contribution to the economy themselves.

In 1879, George published a book titled Progress and Poverty, in which he built on the work of earlier liberals to argue that the Earth and its natural resources belong to mankind in common. Simply put, George believed that people own what they create with their labor. Because no-one created the land, the land belongs to everyone in common. But the absolute necessity of land for human life, both to live and to work, allows landowners to extract immense amounts of wealth from workers and business owners by charging for access. This activity incentivizes speculation, prices people out of their homes, makes it more difficult to operate a business, and creates decaying cities and urban sprawl. When land is monopolized in this way, the rents it produces enrich the landowners at the expense of society and cause seemingly intractable poverty.

The remedy George suggested was simple: replacing other taxes with a Land Value Tax (LVT). LTV is a tax on the unimproved value of land. It is premised on the idea that taxing the value of land prevents rent-seeking and speculation while unleashing the productive capacities of the economy. Unlike property taxes, which punish development, LVT incentivizes landowners to put land to productive use because the tax remains the same no matter how the land is used. Productive use can include using the land for commercial purposes, building housing on it, or selling it to others who will use it.

Furthermore, land value taxes fall solely on the owners of the land, who find it much harder to pass the burden of the tax onto their tenants. This is because landlords charge the highest price the rental market can bear, which is determined by supply and demand. Because an LVT doesn’t impact the supply of land, and doesn’t cause any rise in rental demand, the market for rents does not shift in response to the introduction of an LVT. Landlords who try to raise their rents will find that their tenants eventually move out and switch to landlords charging lower prices (the existence of low-value land that is taxed at small or zero rates guarantees cheaper options). Landlords cannot afford to lose tenants in this way, given the cost LVT imposes on people who hold land without using it.


Henry George and the “Single Taxers,” as his followers called themselves, were not advocating for anything novel. In fact, they drew on a rich tradition of American and English liberalism to make their case.

Liberalism was born in the shadows of feudalism, where the aristocracy was characterized by privilege and exclusive rights. The most fundamental of these was the right to land, from which aristocrats extracted rent that funded their lavish lifestyle and freed them from the necessity of labor. Accordingly, liberals and proto-liberals from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill fought against concentrated land ownership. In the U.S., Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine advocated for a taxation of land values.

In fact, George wrote in Progress and Poverty that his ideas were “the carrying out in letter and spirit of the truth enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.” George argued that the rights promised by the Founders are “denied when the equal right to land—on which and by which men alone can live—is denied. Equality of political rights will not compensate for the denial of the equal right to the bounty of nature.”

His argument, then, was that classical liberalism was incomplete. It had managed to break the political power of the aristocracy by stripping them of their unique political privileges—but it had left intact the economic privileges of landlordism and monopolies which had allowed them to accumulate that power in the first place.


As a philosophy which provides a fresh perspective on building a free and fair society, Georgism provides solutions to the increasing economic unfairness that is beginning to chip away at the stability of Western liberal democracies. It can revitalize a liberalism that seems impotent to address the angry calumnies of populists and demagogues.

The most obvious area is taxation. Land remains one of the biggest sources of rent extraction in the modern economy. A modern LVT would replace inefficient sales, property, income, and capital gains taxes, eliminating the penalties that the state levies on people who create a successful business or build a home.

And Georgism does not stop at LVT. In order to guarantee equality of opportunity, all the various forms of monopolistic rent-seeking need to be addressed. America’s mineral and oil industries are worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, much of which takes the form of revenue made by companies who have the right to access natural energy resources. 21st century Georgism would mean moving to a model more like Norway’s, which heavily taxes profits from the extraction of oil, while offering deductions when companies engage in technological improvements and exploration. In other areas, it would mean reducing the unfairness inherent in many intellectual property laws—for example by allowing public buyout of patents for lifesaving drugs, while appropriately compensating researchers, inventors, and companies.

The completion of the American liberal project that began at Lexington and Concord requires the abolition of privilege and the extension of opportunity to all. By proving that free markets can be reconciled with passionate egalitarianism, and efficiency with justice and solidarity, Georgism can help heal our fractured republic and appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. It provides an alternative to the scarcity mindset by unleashing the productive forces of the economy, unburdened by punitive taxation. Most importantly, it can help treat the poison of populism at its root: the feeling that America doesn’t work for the average American anymore.

As George wrote in 1879:

Liberty calls to us again…Either we must wholly accept her or she will not stay. It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with reference to the bounty of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light…Unless its foundations be laid in justice, the social structure cannot stand.  

—Henry George, Progress and Poverty.

Joseph Addington is the managing editor of the Substack Progress & Poverty and president of Young Georgists of America.

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The F.D.A.’s Misguided War on Vaping

The government is putting stricter restrictions on vaping than on smoking. That’s bad for public health.


Clive Bates
Writes The Counterfactual by Clive Bates ·
Aug 8,2022


(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

While the boiling controversy over the use of e-cigarettes—popularly known as vaping—can seem like a quirky but noisy sideshow, in reality, millions of lives are at stake. E-cigarettes were first commercialized around 2006 and work by heating a nicotine liquid to create an inhalable mist, rather than by burning tobacco to create smoke. Though not completely safe, vaping is far less dangerous than smoking combustible cigarettes, the dominant product for nicotine use.

Despite this, the Food and Drug Administration has been cracking down on vaping—often claiming that vaping poses a health risk and is a threat to young people. This overly cautious approach is hindering a technology that will help eliminate the burden of disease, death, and suffering caused by smoking.

People smoke primarily to experience the effects of nicotine—for stimulation and pleasure; to reduce stress and anxiety; and to improve concentration, reaction time, and cognitive performance. For some people, these effects improve their quality of life. But on the dark side, nicotine use can lead to dependence.

Crucially, however, it is smoke, not nicotine, that causes the overwhelming burden of disease and death. Inhaling the toxic particles and gases from the burning tip of a cigarette exposes the body to thousands of chemicals, of which hundreds are known to be hazardous. The result is widespread death and disease, with cigarettes killing 480,000 Americans annually and leaving around 16 million suffering from a smoking-induced disease. Without the harmful effects of smoking, nicotine use starts to look more like moderate alcohol consumption—a modest substance use that fits within the normal risk appetites of modern society.

With vaping, we have a solution to two related problems. First, millions of American smokers have the option of switching from smoking to vaping, greatly improving their health prospects. Second, people in the future who want to use nicotine will be able to do so with considerably reduced consequences.

In a liberal society, we should not prohibit or aim to eliminate drug use or pretend that it can be risk-free, but we should try to limit the risks to the extent possible. Vaping is the best opportunity we have to do that for nicotine.

Critics of vaping typically rely on three main arguments.

First, we do not know the long-term consequences of e-cigarette use. This is true, as it is for any new product. We will have to wait another 50 years to know the full story. But what we do know today is that cigarettes are very dangerous. Additionally, all the available evidence suggests that vaping is much less harmful than smoking.

Second, vaping skeptics point to the outbreak of lung injuries in 2019 in the United States—which caused 2,800 hospitalizations and 68 deaths—as evidence that vaping is potentially extremely dangerous. But while this outbreak was initially attributed to e-cigarettes, it turned out to be caused by illegal and unregulated cannabis vaping products that included a dangerous cutting agent, Vitamin E Acetate, which is not added to nicotine liquids.

Third, opponents will claim that there is a “youth vaping epidemic,” pointing out that high school-age vaping reached 27.5% in 2019. While there has been a considerable uptick in youth e-cigarette use in recent years as the technology developed, the high 2019 numbers are an outlier. The headline number of the study measured any vaping in the past 30 days, and around two-thirds of users said they were making infrequent use of these products. Additionally, those vaping frequently were likely to have smoked previously, and it is possible that their vaping was a diversion from lifelong smoking. Furthermore, by 2021, the number of high-schoolers who had used a vape in the last 30 days had fallen to 11.3%, suggesting that claims of an “epidemic” were likely premature.

Together, these concerns have gained so much purchase among the general public that most Americans wrongly believe that vaping is just as harmful or more harmful than smoking. Even worse, the visceral politics around vaping, in particular the idea of the youth vaping epidemic, have driven the F.D.A. to apply overly burdensome and restrictive regulations on vaping products.

As a result, over one million vaping products have been denied access to the U.S. market, and the great diversity of flavors and device types have been cut down to a handful of uninspiring tobacco-flavored products. In stark contrast, no public health test applies to the 3,000 cigarette products that have been on the market for years throughout America. They were grandfathered in under the 2009 Tobacco Control Act.

In June, the F.D.A. announced that it had denied marketing applications made by Juul Lab Inc., one of the world’s biggest vaping companies with around three million adult users of its products. The F.D.A.’s case against Juul was very weak—it did not rely on youth vaping or any identified risk to health with the product but on some “inconsistent and conflicting data” in Juul’s 125,000-page application. These should have been addressed through discussions between the applicant and the regulator, but Juul argued in court that the F.D.A.’s “scientific” reasons were a feeble pretext for a politically-motivated attack. The F.D.A. withdrew from the legal proceedings and will review its approach internally.

Despite this recent victory for Juul, the F.D.A.’s interventions have resulted in an anarchic market of a few authorized vaping products, thousands of products either under review or pending legal challenge, and an emerging black market for unregulated vape products.

If the F.D.A. is taking a tough stance on safer alternatives, what is it doing about cigarettes, the product that causes the most harm? In 2023, it plans to publish a plan to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes to very low levels. The F.D.A. argues that this would make the products minimally addictive, help smokers quit, and prevent youth uptake.

The problem with this approach is that it amounts, in practice, to a prohibition of cigarettes in their traditional form. But most smokers won’t just quit as the F.D.A. hopes. Some will buy cigarettes on a black market while others will hand-roll their own or switch to cigars. And though it would be good if some smokers responded by switching from smoking to vaping, the F.D.A. seems to be working hard to make that option more difficult.

Ultimately, the most likely fate of this poorly constructed proposal is that it will be debated until it is no longer needed. Many consumers who wish to use nicotine will switch to products such as e-cigarettes that cause them much less harm but still allow them to experience mild psychoactive effects of nicotine.

This transition is already underway and likely to continue because it is highly beneficial to those directly involved, both consumers and suppliers. The question is the extent to which misguided, highly risk-averse regulators and prohibitionist activists slow the pace of change. Every day of delay will mean more avoidable death and disease.

Clive Bates is Director of Counterfactual Consulting a public and sustainability practice. He is a former civil servant and former Director of Action on Smoking and Health (UK), a leading anti-smoking non-profit.

[The author has no conflicts of interest with respect to the industries discussed in this article. He has filed an amici curiae brief in support of Juul’s motion for a stay pending substantive review on public health grounds after the FDA denied Juul’s applications to market its products in the United States.]