Imperiled Ukrainian nuclear power plant has the world on edge – a safety expert explains what could go wrong

Published: August 26, 2022 8.19am EDT


The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine is being operated by Ukrainian technicians while occupied by Russian troops.

Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

Russian forces occupy Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar. Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting nearby, and shelling has damaged power and communication lines to the plant, prompting fears for the plant’s safety and evoking painful memories in a country still scarred by the world’s worst nuclear accident, at Chernobyl in 1986.

In addition, Russian authorities have developed plans to disconnect the plant from Ukraine’s power grid – in the event of damage to the plant, according to the Russians, as a prelude to switching the plant to the grid in Russian-occupied territory, according to the Ukrainians. Disconnecting the plant from the grid is a risky operation.

The Conversation asked Najmedin Meshkati, a professor and nuclear safety expert at the University of Southern California, to explain the risks of warfare taking place in and around nuclear power plants.
How safe was the Zaporizhzhia power plant before the Russian attack?

The facility at Zaporizhzhia is the largest nuclear plant in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It has six pressurized water reactors, which use water to both sustain the fission reaction and cool the reactor. These differ from the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl, which used graphite instead of water to sustain the fission reaction. RBMK reactors are not seen as very safe, and there are only eight remaining in use in the world, all in Russia.

The reactors at Zaporizhzhia are of moderately good design, and the plant has a decent safety record, with a good operating background.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant uses pressurized water reactors.

Ukrainian authorities tried to keep the war away from the site by asking Russia to observe a 30-kilometer (nearly 19-mile) safety buffer. But Russian troops surrounded the facility and seized it in March.
What are the risks to a nuclear plant in a conflict zone?

Nuclear power plants are built for peacetime operations, not wars.

The worst thing that could happen is if a site is deliberately or accidentally shelled. If a shell hit the plant’s spent fuel pool – which contains the still-radioactive spent fuel – or if fire spread to the spent fuel pool, it could release radiation. This spent fuel pool isn’t in the containment building, and as such is more vulnerable.

Containment buildings, which house nuclear reactors, are also not protected against deliberate shelling. They are built to withstand a minor internal explosion of, say, a pressurized water pipe. But they are not designed to withstand a huge explosion.

As to the reactors in the containment building, it depends on the weapons being used. The worst-case scenario is that a bunker-buster missile breaches the containment dome – consisting of a thick shell of reinforced concrete on top of the reactor – and explodes. That would badly damage the nuclear reactor and release radiation into the atmosphere, which would make it difficult to send in first responders to contain any resulting fire. It could be another Chernobyl.

Ukrainian Emergency Ministry personnel conducted a drill in the city of Zaporizhzhia on Aug. 17, 2022, to prepare for a possible radiation leak from the nuclear power plant near the city. Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
What are the concerns going forward?

The safety problems I see are twofold:

1) Human error

The workers at the facility are working under incredible stress, reportedly at gunpoint. Stress increases the chance of error and poor performance.

There is a human element in running a nuclear power plant – operators are the first and last layers of defense for the facility and the public. They are the first people to detect any anomaly and to stop any incident. Or if there’s an accident, they will be the first to heroically try to contain it.

2) Power failure

The second problem is that the nuclear plant needs constant electricity, and that is harder to maintain in wartime.

Even if you shut down the reactors, the plant will need off-site power to run the huge cooling system to remove the residual heat in the reactor and bring it to what is called a cold shutdown. Water circulation is always needed to make sure the spent fuel doesn’t overheat.

Spent fuel pools also need constant water circulation to keep them cool, and they need cooling for several years before they can be put in dry casks. One of the problems in the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan was the emergency generators intended to replace lost off-site power got inundated with water and failed. In situations like that, you get “station blackout” – and that is one of the worst things that could happen. It means no electricity to run the cooling system.

Spent nuclear fuel rods are stored at the bottom of this pool, which requires constant circulation. Guillaume Souvant/AFP via Getty Images

In that circumstance, the spent fuel overheats and its zirconium cladding can create hydrogen bubbles. If you can’t vent these bubbles, they will explode, spreading radiation.

If there is a loss of outside power, operators will have to rely on emergency generators. But emergency generators are huge machines – finicky, unreliable gas guzzlers. And you still need cooling waters for the generators themselves.

My biggest worry is that Ukraine suffers from a sustained power grid failure. The likelihood of this increases during a conflict because power line pylons may come down under shelling, or gas power plants might get damaged and cease to operate. And though Ukrainian intelligence services claim that the Russians intend to stockpile diesel fuel to keep these emergency generators going, it is unlikely that Russian troops will have excess fuel given their need to fuel their own vehicles.
How else does a war affect the safety of nuclear plants?

One of the overarching concerns about the effects of war on nuclear plants is that war degrades safety culture, which is crucial in running a plant. I believe that safety culture is analogous to the human body’s immune system, which protects against pathogens and diseases. Safety culture is pervasive and has a widespread impact. “It can affect all elements in a system for good or ill,” according to psychologist James Reason.

The tragic situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant violates every universally accepted tenet of healthy nuclear safety culture, especially the maintenance of an environment where personnel can raise safety concerns.

War adversely affects safety culture in a number of ways. Operators are stressed and fatigued and may be scared to death to speak out if something is going wrong. Then there is the maintenance of a plant, which may be compromised by lack of staff or unavailability of spare parts.

Governance, regulation and oversight – all crucial for the safe running of a nuclear industry – are also disrupted, as is local infrastructure, such as the capability of local firefighters. In war, everything is harder.
So what can be done to better protect Ukraine’s nuclear power plants?

The only solution is declaring a demilitarized zone around nuclear plants. However, Russia has so far rejected United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ plea for declaring a demilitarized zone around the plant.

I believe an optimal though not ideal solution is to bring the two operating reactors to a cold shutdown before any further loss of off-site power and risk of station blackout, store more fuel for emergency diesel generators at different locations at the plant site, and keep only a skeleton caretaker staff to look after the spent fuel pools.

Admittedly, this is only a stopgap measure. In parallel with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s effort under the leadership of its Director, General Rafael Mariano Grossi, I believe that the U.N. Security Council should immediately empower a special commission to mediate between the warring parties. It could be modeled after the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in 2000, and appoint a prominent, senior international statesman as its head.

I believe the person should be of the caliber and in the mold of the legendary former director general of the IAEA, Hans Blix of Sweden. Blix led the agency at the time of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and commands respect in today’s Russia and Ukraine.

War, in my opinion, is the worst enemy of nuclear safety. This is an unprecedented and volatile situation. Only through active, pragmatic engineering and nuclear diplomacy can an amenable and lasting solution to this vexing problem be found.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 4, 2022.

Author 

 

Najmedin Meshkati

Professor of Engineering and International Relations, University of Southern California
Disclosure statement

Najmedin Meshkati received research funding from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in mid-1990s.

 

Q&A: How Rural America’s Assets Have Been Systematically Stripped Away

by Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder
August 26, 2022

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

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Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. In his work, academic and otherwise, Edelman investigates what he terms the underdevelopment of rural America. In a 2021 paper entitled “Hollowed out Heartland, USA” he writes “Rural decline is not simply the result of deindustrialization spurred by free trade, the farm crisis, or automation and robotization. Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” In the wake of the fiscal austerity agenda enacted by financial and political elites in the late 20th century, the vast majority of the wealth created in America’s countryside “has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers.” The financialization of the American economy, especially in those places furthest from economic hubs, can be extremely opaque. But its repercussions – many of which are often seen as causes and effects of backwardness and small-town decline – are all around us.

We discuss the destabilizing effects of such uneven development, the parallels between rural and urban landscapes of decline, and the political choices that sacrificed rural prosperity to urban agglomeration, below.

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Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College, in New York City. (Photo provided.)

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: What are “sacrifice zones” and what are the institutions they lack?

Marc Edelman: The term isn’t used only one way. I think of it as referring to sites where capital came in, extracted wealth, and then left people worse off than they were before. This describes lots of places in the rural and small-town United States and in poor neighborhoods of big cities.

The more dramatic examples include communities where uranium tailings or other toxic waste surround abandoned mines, where fracking for gas contaminated drinking water, the “cancer alley” around the refineries and chemical plants of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, or the CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations – where ponds of hog or cattle manure cause horrendous rural air pollution and health problems. Years ago, I went to a forum in a church in New York to hear people from Appalachia affected by mountaintop removal. One middle-aged woman described living in a paradisiacal country environment of streams and meadows and then one day a coal company blasted the top off the mountain near her family’s home. “We got dusted out,” she said. Their water was polluted, their land ruined. There wasn’t much they could do about it apart from linking up and campaigning with other communities that suffered similar kinds of destruction.

Less dramatic sacrifice zones are even more common. We might think of cities and towns where redlining and predatory lending destroyed or prevented people from accumulating housing equity or starting small businesses. Or those thousands of places where people, especially men, used to have factory jobs that paid adequate wages and provided defined-benefit pensions. When factories closed or moved elsewhere those men and their sons often became marginally employed small entrepreneurs, guys with a pickup and some tools. I’ve been living the past few years in a rural county in Pennsylvania. There are people in the area for whom hunting and having a basement freezer full of venison is how they get through the year.

This kind of shift intensified long standing American ideas about self-reliance and hard work. It fueled resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites, who don’t work with their hands, don’t have “real” skills, and somehow seem to make money, nonetheless. It also vitiated any working-class consciousness that might have been there when people worked in factories and belonged to unions.

When communities go into decline, their tax bases suffer. Since public schools and so many services depend on local tax revenues, it becomes difficult to provide education, healthcare, elder care, recreation, and so on. The downward spiral affects people economically, emotionally, and politically. All the social and medical pathologies that people associate with inner cities – drugs, gun violence, domestic violence, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, depression, and suicide — are rampant in rural communities. Well-off urbanites rarely have any idea of how difficult things are in some rural areas and small towns.

DY: You write that current rural decline is rooted in the economic restructuring of the late 20th century, in which growth in the American economy shifted from blue- to white-collar sectors, and the influence of the finance industry expanded. By what mechanisms did these macro-level trends come to undermine the community institutions mentioned above?

ME: The so-called “free-market revolution” and the more cutthroat version of capitalism that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s have a lot to do with it. Trade and investment treaties, deregulation, privatization of public-sector services, and government retrenchment or downsizing are all key aspects. When the public sector is eviscerated, people stop believing that government can help them, because they see that it can’t or won’t. They then become easy targets for anti-government, anti-regulation, pro-business demagogues. Regulation is just law enforcement for corporations, but there’s this whole discourse that paints it as a drag on entrepreneurial energy and innovation. What’s really going on is that the government can’t manage capitalism anymore. It has been captured by forces that don’t want it to manage capitalism.

One of the big undermining mechanisms has to do with the free rein that the financial sector increasingly has. I’m talking about venture capital, private equity, investment banks, institutional investors like my pension fund. They’re under increasing pressure to generate big returns, sometimes because they need them to cover their risky bets. These investors acquire “troubled” companies, load them up with debt, dismember them and sell off pieces. If there’s a union, they figure out a way to crush it. Then they cash out. They have a short-term orientation, but the damage to communities is very long-term and hard to reverse. One of the insidious things about financialization is its invisibility to the people most negatively impacted by it.

DY: Can the desecration of rural communities be chalked up to technological and cultural progress, or were there choices along the way that could have spared the economies of sparsely populated places without sacrificing economic growth?

ME: There’s a lot of questioning of economic growth these days, mostly because people understand that the obsession with growth is one element that fuels the climate catastrophe and is killing the planet. But even if we imagine an economy that optimizes, say, people’s wellbeing rather than corporate or individual profits, or happiness, or some other desirable outcome, we can see that along the way other choices would have helped.

Progressives often bemoan the policies of the Reagan Administration, which are rightly seen as unleashing neoliberalism in the U.S. But Bill Clinton’s Administration also has a historic responsibility for policies that contributed to rural decline. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) sent many jobs to Mexico and created a perception that the Democratic Party didn’t care about rural people or the working class. It gave corporations rights to sue in dispute panels, alleging that environmental, labor and health standards were unfair, non-tariff barriers to trade. The repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall ban on investment banks offering everyday financial services spurred speculation and consolidation and led to the disappearance of many local savings banks that had lent to nearby businesses and kept wealth circulating in their communities. Banking deregulation led private equity and other investors to play games with leveraged buyouts that accelerated deindustrialization and with mortgage-based derivatives that ultimately produced a major economic crisis and millions of housing foreclosures. The 1996 Farm Bill ended most supply management and crop price floors, generating gluts that undermined farmers and constituted a handout to giant commodities brokers like Cargill and ADM.

Many other policy choices reflected the interests of powerful actors. Industrial agriculture is propped up with numerous upstream and downstream, direct and indirect subsidies. We taxpayers are covering that, and the externalized costs of industrial ag show up in our cancer rates, drinking water, novel zoonotic diseases, and myriad other negative effects. Much of the corn grown in the U.S. is for biofuel to “feed” vehicles. The productivist “we must feed a hungry world” narrative is mistaken and myopic, but big ag lobbies have deep pockets for promoting it and politicians know this, whether they buy the discourse or not.

It was a choice, or really many interlinked choices, to favor large-scale monocropping over the diversified small farm, with its synergies between livestock and crop production. It was a choice to favor investment banks over credit unions and mutual savings banks. The productivist approach has become so much a part of our commonsense that it requires real imagination to conceive of alternatives and political will to implement them. With an unfolding climate catastrophe and the imperative of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, those alternatives become ever more urgent.

DY: Is the main argument against the geographic sacrifice you describe the fact that it creates a noxious political culture, or is greater geographic equality virtuous in itself?

ME: Today’s noxious political culture is in part the result of sacrificing rural people and communities on the altar of capital. But it’s also important to recognize that many of those noxious aspects — violent nationalism, white supremacy, anti-immigrant sentiment, misogyny, anti-democratic ideologies — have deep historical roots and multiple causes.

Uneven development, whether that’s across social classes or regions, is inherently destabilizing. One of the weirdest aspects of contemporary U.S. uneven development is that it is precisely those regions where hatred for the federal government and exaggerated fantasies about self-sufficiency are most widespread which receive vastly more in federal support than they pay in taxes. But like invisible financialization, this federal support — Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment insurance, disability, social security for aging populations, childcare tax credits, SNAP, agricultural subsidies, highway and education programs, and so on — is mostly below people’s radar and isn’t appreciated.

Uneven development always implies an immense loss of human potential. Groups and individuals that suffer social exclusion — whether based on class, race, gender, or geography — can’t realize their full potential. This sacrifice has immense costs for any society — in scientific discoveries that don’t get made, in beautiful books that don’t get written, and so on. That’s one rather instrumental reason why greater equality is an ethical imperative. There are also, of course, rights-based arguments that are even more compelling.

DY: Placing the blame for rural decline at such a high level as the structure of the economy feels to me – someone from a struggling southern Illinois coal town – both vindicating and hopeless. What are the prospects for local, grassroots change if the forces which shrunk the high school and shuttered the churches are global and technocratic in nature?

ME: When we think about rural decline and sacrifice zones one of the biggest problems is the way multiple forces have drained wealth out of communities. The institutions that once facilitated wealth circulation within and around communities — producers’, consumers’ and service providers’ cooperatives, credit unions, mutual savings banks, locally owned businesses — have weakened over the years. People can organize to take back value-added that now gets taken away by far-off investors, though this requires a kind of local-level solidarity that isn’t always easy to muster. It’s the ongoing struggle of society against the market and it’s happening in a lot of places. Scaling up successful efforts and resisting pushback by self-interested powerful actors are among the most formidable challenges.

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This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.

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This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Education officials: Hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans could benefit from student loan debt relief

Peter Cox
August 26, 2022 

President Joe Biden speaks on student loan debt in the Roosevelt Room of the White House Wednesday in Washington, DC. Biden announced steps to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for borrowers who make less than $125,000 per year and cap payments at 5 percent of monthly income.
Alex Wong | Getty Images

For most current and former students, the Biden administration's proposals this week on student debt were good news. But now borrowers are in a scramble to find which proposals they qualify for.

Biden's announcement generated a huge amount of interest. Shortly after, the federal student aid website crashed and has since required a waiting room for people visiting the site because of the volume.

Student Henri Wingo said that her loans from four years at Minneapolis College already cause her anxiety as she gets ready to look for a job. She is carrying $5,500 in student debt, a number she expects to grow. Wingo plans to graduate with a graphic design degree in the spring.

Before Wednesday’s announcement, she worried she would have to jump at the first job offer just to pay off the loans.

"It it allows me so much freedom from this massive burden on my back that I've been carrying for the last four years," Wingo said.

Students from two-year technical or community colleges bear the biggest financial burden from loans, according the U.S. Department of Education. While their debts may be smaller than those who went to four year schools, the group sees loan defaults at the highest rate.

"This gives them some breathing room, that's going to allow them to, quite honestly buy groceries, allow them to maybe start thinking about moving from an apartment to a house, that's gonna allow them to have transportation freedom of buying a car," said Michael Dean, executive director, Lead MN, a group that represents community and technical college students across the state.

To qualify for relief, individuals have to earn less than $125,000 a year or less than $250,000 for households.

Loans must have been originated before July 1 of this year. The administration is proposing reducing minimum payments for people on income-based repayment plans and proposing forgiving those loans after ten years of regular payments rather than 20.

"We have close to 782,000 Minnesotans that hold an open federal loan right now. That total cumulative debt represents about $26.7 billion," said Dennis Olson, Minnesota's higher education commissioner.

But that relief is relative.

Daphne Berlin-Fish has more than $100,000 in loans for her degrees in archive management and public history — degrees she'd hoped to use to work in museums. But that hasn't panned out yet. She's working at a labor union and trying to pay down her debt.

Berlin-Fish was hoping for the $50,000 in debt relief some Democrats had been advocating for when Biden first announced his plan.

"This is a drop in the bucket for me. Personally, this knocks me down from basically $105,000 to $95,000. And then once interest kicks back in at the end of the year, that $105,000 is going to come back in no time,” she said.

Minnesota would have to change its tax code to prevent people from having to pay taxes on the loans that are forgiven, which could be up to $20,000.

The administration is expected to roll out more details and information on how to apply for loan forgiveness in the coming weeks.

MPR News Reporter Brian Bakst contributed to this story.

@NTI-PATENT/@NTI-COPYRITE

Moderna says it's suing Pfizer, BioNTech over COVID-19 shots

Angelica Peebles and Robert Langreth, Bloomberg News

Moderna Inc. sued Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, claiming the technology in their COVID-19 shot infringes on its patents, a move that sets the stage for a massive legal clash between the vaccine titans.

Moderna accused Pfizer and BioNTech of violating intellectual property rights on key elements of its messenger RNA technology in developing the Comirnaty vaccine. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna said it had patents from 2010 to 2016 on the mRNA technology that made its Spikevax shot possible but that the other two companies copied the technology without permission.

Pfizer and BioNTech “took four different candidates into clinical testing, including options that would have steered clear of Moderna’s innovative path by using unmodified mRNA,” according a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. “Ultimately, however, Pfizer and BioNTech discarded those alternatives and copied Moderna’s patented technology.”

Moderna said it’s also filing suit in Germany. That complaint couldn’t immediately be verified. Pfizer and BioNTech haven’t fully reviewed the U.S. complaint but are “surprised” by the litigation and will “vigorously defend” themselves, according to an emailed statement.

Pfizer shares fell 1.1 per cent at 10:31 a.m. in New York, while BioNTech’s American depositary receipts fell 2.3 per cent. Moderna shares lost 1.7 per cent.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says: 

Moderna’s lawsuit against Pfizer-BioNTech is unsurprising, given the broad U.S. patents directed toward its mRNA technology, though they may be vulnerable to invalidity under the current case-law trends on written description and enablement... Pfizer-BioNTech could be liable for at least mid-single-digit royalties on past and future Covid vaccine sales if Moderna is successful. 

-Bloomberg Intelligence analysts John Murphy and Sam Fazeli

Moderna said it’s not asking the courts to pull the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine from the market nor to block future sales. The company is seeking damages for the period starting March 8 of this year and says it will not seek damages for Pfizer’s sales to 92 lower- and middle-income countries. 

Early in the COVID crisis, Moderna promised not to enforce its intellectual property rights during the pandemic, but on March 7 it modified that pledge to apply only to lower-income countries, essentially making this litigation possible.

“We are filing these lawsuits to protect the innovative mRNA technology platform that we pioneered, invested billions of dollars in creating, and patented during the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic,” Moderna Chief Executive Officer Stephane Bancel said in a statement.

Pfizer and BioNTech made “the exact same chemical modification to their mRNA that Moderna scientists first developed years earlier, and which the company patented and uses in Spikevax,” the suit said. In addition, “the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine encoded for the exact same type of coronavirus protein (i.e., the full-length spike protein), which is the coronavirus vaccine design that Moderna had pioneered based off its earlier work on coronaviruses and which the company patented and uses in Spikevax.”

The mRNA vaccines have played a crucial role in the pandemic response, particularly in the US. Pfizer last year recorded almost $37 billion in sales from Comirnaty, while Moderna posted roughly $18 billion of revenue from Spikevax. 

 

PATENT PLEDGE

Moderna’s original pledge not to enforce its patent during the pandemic gives Pfizer and BioNTech a solid defense, since it hasn’t officially ended, said Jorge Contreras, a law professor at the University of Utah and an expert on patent pledges. Public promises are viewed as binding commitments under the law, he said, and the tweaking of the pledge that Moderna did earlier this year doesn’t negate the original one, he said. 

“This was a public, formal statement from a public company through a press release, so it’s reasonable for other companies to rely on it,” Contreras said. 

It’s possible Moderna is using the lawsuit to prod Pfizer and BioNTech into licensing Moderna’s technology, a “classic way” to pressure companies into making such agreements, he said.

Intellectual property battles over technology used in both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are proliferating. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. earlier this year sued Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech over the lipid nanoparticle technology used in both of their Covid vaccines. Moderna has sparred with the National Institutes of Health over whether to list the agency’s scientists as inventors on patents for Moderna’s Covid vaccine. 

The case is Moderna v. Pfizer, 22-cv-11378, US District Court, District of Massachusetts.

Jerome Powell's speech sets stage for Bank of Canada: Strategist

Hilary Punchard, BNN Bloomberg

U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell indicated Friday morning that the central bank isn’t done hiking, and it won’t be in any rush to cut rates after its tightening cycle.

In a speech at Jackson Hole, Wyo., Powell said the “U.S. will likely require restrictive policy for some time” and added “history cautions against ‘prematurely’ loosening policy.”

Philip Petursson, chief investment strategist at IG Wealth Management, said Powell’s speech was “perhaps more hawkish than what the market had hoped.”

“I think that [Powell’s speech] sets the stage for the Bank of Canada to continue to be as aggressive as they’ve been, even though I think the Canadian economy is potentially in a worse off situation than the U.S., because of the direct impact of the housing market,” Petursson said in a phone interview Friday.

“I think the Bank of Canada is going to follow the U.S. Fed for now.”

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem is set to deliver the next interest rate decision on September 7.

Petursson said hiking three-quarters of a point “is a certainty for the Bank of Canada,” but he added there’s a risk the central bank could increase by another full point.

 

PROTECTING YOUR INVESTMENTS 

Royce Mendes, managing director and head of macro strategy at Desjardins Group, said Powell’s speech indicates we could be heading for another “season of volatility.”

“Powell said there is more pain to come for businesses and households. Reading between the tea leaves, I think he's prepping markets and the public for the possibility of a recession,” Mendes said in a phone interview Friday.

“Heading into recession I think you want to be cautious of risk tolerance. You have risk assets contained in your portfolio, but you also want to be relatively diversified and have a long-term view of the market.”

With the chance of interest rates continuing to climb in both Canada and the U.S., Petursson said investors should think about inflation protection.

“Now, that's not real return bonds, I think it continues to mean that you should have a healthy exposure to commodities and other asset classes that tend to move higher with inflation,” Petursson said.

These Canadian tech companies have recently had layoffs

Hilary Punchard, BNN Bloomberg

Many North American technology companies have expressed issues with expanding too quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the U.S., major tech companies like Robinhood Markets, Inc. and Coinbase Global, Inc. have laid off hundreds of workers over the past few months and the same labour trend is being seen in Canada.

“We were building to match the growth of the economy and now face significant headwinds that simply didn’t exist six months ago,” said Michele Romanow, co-founder of Clearco, in a LinkedIn post after cutting around one-in-four jobs.

Here’s a look at Canadian technology companies that have announced job cuts over the past few months.

WEALTHSIMPLE

Wealthsimple Inc. CEO Michael Katchen said the tech company would be letting go of 159 staff members on June 15, which is about 13 per cent of its workforce.

“Our business grew at an unprecedented rate, and we have been aggressively building to meet the needs of a wave of new clients since then,” Katchen said in a press release on June 15.

“Of course volatility works both ways, and we’re seeing the other side of it now as the pandemic market conditions unwind.”

 

CLEARCO

Canadian venture capital company Clearco announced on July 29 that it was cutting 125 employees, or one-out-of-four workers.

Romanow cited rising interest rates, high inflation, swings in the Euro and a slowdown in e-commerce growth as some of the reasons behind this decision.

“We grew our headcount too quickly in anticipation of continued economic growth and that decision rests on us alone,” Romanow said.

 

SHOPIFY

On July 26, Ottawa-based tech giant Shopify Inc. laid off around 1,000 workers, which is about 10 per cent of its staff.

Tobias Lütke, chief executive officer of Shopify, said his team bet “the share of dollars that travel through e-commerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by five or even 10 years.”

“It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off,” Lütke said in a press release.

“What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-COVID data would have suggested it should be at this point. Still growing steadily, but it wasn’t a meaningful five-year leap ahead.”

 

HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite Inc. fired 30 per cent of its workforce on August 9, with the CEO Tom Keiser citing the need for a strategic change within the company.

“We need to refocus our strategies to drive efficiency, growth and financial sustainability,” Keiser said in a statement to BNN Bloomberg.

Job vacancies in Canada hit record high in June: StatsCan

Daniel Johnson , BNN Bloomberg  

Aug 25, 2022

Canadian employers were looking to fill an all-time high of 1,037,900 jobs in June, according to Statistics Canada.

It was the third straight month when vacant positions totalled more than one million, and a 3.2 per cent increase from May.

High job vacancies were seen in health care and social assistance, the data agency stated Thursday, as the sector looked to fill 149,700 positions in June. While that was roughly flat compared to May, it was a 40.8 per cent surge from June 2021.

StatsCan said vacant positions remained elevated in several other sectors including construction; manufacturing; professional, scientific and technical services; transportation and warehousing; and also finance and insurance. 

CANADA

Unifor president pushes for inflation-beating pay hikes

Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News

Canada’s largest private-sector union is trying to capitalize on a shortage of workers and high inflation to win bigger wage increases and grow its membership.

Unifor, which represents 315,000 workers in more than 20 sectors, has about 400 collective agreements to be concluded this year. It wants to attract new members in growing industries like warehousing and electric vehicles, according to the union’s new president. 

Average wages in Canada are rising at more than 5 per cent  a year, but workers’ purchasing power is still declining because of the highest inflation since the early 1980s. That issue is front and center in negotiations for unionized workers, Unifor President Lana Payne said.

“Inflation is top of mind and has spilled over into every collective bargaining table we have right now,” Payne, who became the first woman elected to the top job this month, said in an interview. “In some sectors, we’re getting historic collective agreements.”  

Her tough talk is a worrying sign for central bankers trying to stave off a wage-price spiral. Labor unions around the world are flexing their muscle, pushing hard for pay increases amid rising costs of living.

Among recent major wins, Unifor secured a 25 per cent  wage increase over four years for some classifications of casino workers, after an eight-day strike. Cleaning service providers won a 19 per cent  pay hike over the same period. 

The largest public-sector union, meanwhile, is demanding a 4.5 per cent  pay increase per year in talks with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government that have hit an impasse. So far this year, annual increases in major union wage settlements are averaging 3 per cent , according to employment ministry data.

Inflation, however, is still outpacing many of those pay increases. While annual consumer price gains slowed to 7.6 per cent  in July, inflationary pressures remain broad and continue to exceed the average year-over-year increase in hourly wages of 5.2 per cent , according to Statistics Canada. 

The Bank of Canada is in the midst of an aggressive series of interest-rate hikes to bring price pressures to heel and ensure expectations don’t become entrenched. When it increased borrowing costs by a full percentage point last month, it included a new risk scenario for a wage-price spiral in the accompanying monetary policy report. 

 

WORDS OF WARNING

Governor Tiff Macklem, speaking the next day at a Canadian Federation of Independent Business webinar, said businesses shouldn’t plan on inflation staying high. “Don’t build that into wage contracts,” he warned.

Those comments rankled Payne and other labor leaders, who see the inflation crisis as an opportunity to grow their membership and expand union coverage. Canada’s unionization rate is currently about 27 per cent , compared to 10 per cent  in the US and 24 per cent  in the UK.

“Workers are being attracted to unions again, partly because of the moment that we’re in and really needing to have clout in their workplace to make sure that they’re getting a decent income,” Payne said. 

Unifor is also trying to institute the cost-of-living-adjustment clauses into agreements, which would allow wages to increase as inflation rises, Payne said. The loss of those automatic adjustment requirements in contracts over the past few decades “almost coincided with real wage growth lagging behind for the majority of Canadian workers.”

Although a tight labor market with record high vacancies is helping in negotiations with businesses trying to retain workers, there have already been 14 work stoppages so far this year. A similar trend was observed in 2021, when Unifor had a record number of strikes or lockouts.

“There’s a real understanding that if you want to retain workers, you have to pay for it,” Payne said. “But we’re not saying this is easy because we’ve also had more disputes now than at any point. It really shows that workers are willing to fight back at the collective bargaining table.”

Payne’s predecessor, Jerry Dias, retired suddenly in March after eight years at Unifor’s helm, citing health issues. The next day, the union disclosed he was under investigation amid accusations he accepted money from a Covid-19 test producer in exchange for promoting the kits to employers.

Executive to take leave amid fallout from Lisa LaFlamme's departure from Bell Media

The Canadian Press

The logo for Bell Media, owned by BCE Inc., is displayed on a Toronto building in a handout photo. , The Canadian Press

TORONTO - A Bell Media executive is taking a leave from his job amid the fallout from the ousting of Lisa LaFlamme as anchor of the company's flagship newscast.

An internal Bell Media memo says Michael Melling, vice-president of news, is taking leave effective immediately to spend time with family.

Bell Media, the parent company of CTV News and BNN Bloomberg, has been facing criticism after LaFlamme announced last week in a video on social media that her contract had been terminated.

In the video, the longtime CTV National News anchor said she was blindsided by the company's decision.

Bell Media said terminating LaFlamme's contract after 35 years was a business decision and it wanted to move the chief news anchor role in a “different direction.”

The dismissal raised questions among media observers about whether sexism and ageism played a role in the shakeup.

Bell Media said in its statement it takes allegations of discrimination “very seriously” and is taking steps to initiate a third-party internal workplace review in the newsroom over the coming weeks.

The internal memo Friday said Melling's decision to take leave “reflects our desire to support the newsroom and do what's best to help the team move past the current circumstances.”

In a statement issued Friday night, BCE and Bell Canada President and CEO Mirko Bibic said, “There is certainly no denying that Lisa LaFlamme has made an important contribution to Canadian news for three decades. Since Bell Media’s decision to end her contract, there has been heavy criticism. The narrative has been that Lisa’s age, gender or grey hair played into the decision. I am satisfied that this is not the case and wanted to make sure you heard it from me. While I would like to say more on the Bell Media decision, we are bound by a mutual separation agreement negotiated with Lisa, which we will continue to honour.”

Richard Gray, currently regional general manager of the eastern region, will step in as acting vice-president of news, supported by Karine Moses, senior vice-president of content development and news, the memo said.

Since her departure, Wendy's, Dove and Sports Illustrated have shown their support on social media for LaFlamme, who has been open about not dyeing her grey hair.

Wendy's changed its signature red-headed mascot's hair to grey, while Dove announced it would donate $100,000 to Catalyst, a Canadian organization that helps build better workplaces for women.

Sports Illustrated retweeted its cover that features 74-year-old model Maye Musk.

LaFlamme's departure and her replacement were both announced on Aug. 15, frustrating viewers who felt she should have had a proper sign-off and career retrospective.

Bell Media has said it “regrets” the way in which LaFlamme's departure was handled, as it “may have left viewers with the wrong impression” that her storied career wasn't valued.

LaFlamme said in her video that she found out in June that Bell Media was ending her contract at CTV National News, but kept it under wraps until the details were finalized. Omar Sachedina has been named as her replacement.

At a town-hall meeting with staff last week, Moses said LaFlamme rejected the opportunity to bid farewell on air.

In a recording of the meeting obtained by The Canadian Press, she told employees that LaFlamme wasn't simply ousted from the company.

She “was offered many options to come back and to do many things, which she declined, and I respect that,” Moses said, without offering details on the other job opportunities Bell Media presented to LaFlamme.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 26, 2022.

The Republican Party Is Having an Identity Crisis

Mario Parker, Bloomberg News

G DeSantis, governor of Florida, speaks during the 2022 Victory Dinner in Hollywood, Florida, US, on Saturday, July 23, 2022. Governor Ron DeSantis emerged as a top rival to former President Donald Trump in GOP primary contest should Trump decide to run again. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- The GOP is now acting like a party in search of itself with less than three months before US elections that once favored Republicans to retake both chambers of Congress and set them up for 2024. 

Should the party fumble, as polls increasingly suggest, August will have been a pivotal month. It began with the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Florida home and the party’s bellicose defense of the former president that belied its pro-law enforcement image. The weaknesses of Senate candidates Trump personally picked became glaring as the cycle moves from the primary season, where the focus is on a small number of party-faithful voters, to the general election, which requires a broader appeal to a varied electorate.   

There are also two high-profile Republicans uncomfortably dominating the spotlight and who put the party’s schisms in full view.One is Liz Cheney, who led the Jan. 6 hearings into Trump’s role inciting a mob to attack the Capitol only to lose the nomination for a third term in a landslide to a pro-Trump candidate. The other is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, gaining momentum as an alternative to the former president, who embodies some of his pugnacity without the baggage.

Trump has shown no inclination for passing the torch and his allies used the FBI investigation to encourage him to make a third White House bid, setting up a potential clash between he and his would-be heir apparent. 

This is a defining moment for Republicans who were counting on a strong midterm showing to launch themselves back into the White House in 2024. But the party’s identity crisis is evident in the uneven performances of Senate candidates in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Ohio, among others, that jeopardizes its prospects for a congressional majority. 

“You’ve got a lot of factions within the party,” Robert Blizzard, a Republican strategist, said in an interview. “It looks convoluted. Are we the Trump party? Are we at the point where we’re DeSantis’ party?”

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and Democrats are feeling buoyant. In August, they notched wins with legislation on veterans health, bipartisan passage of a bill to boost semiconductor chip manufacturing and a sweeping bill to address climate change and lower prescription drug costs. Biden also oversaw the killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and this week fulfilled a campaign promise to forgive student debt. 

An early August defeat of a Kansas referendum to ban abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade added to Democrats’ renewed optimism about the midterms. And Democrat Pat Ryan narrowly beat Republican Marc Molinaro this week in a New York swing district race. 

The Senate is currently deadlocked at 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris wielding the deciding vote. Democrats are now favored to expand their majority in the upper chamber, according to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. But Republicans are still favored to win the House, given how those races are decided in carefully gerrymandered districts in favor of the party that controls the state’s legislature.  

The danger for the GOP was made publicly clear when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said last week that “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome” of the Senate. It was an implicit acknowledgment that in competitive states a Trump-endorsed candidate faces a strong Democrat and could lose. 

It also sparked the latest public war of words between the one-time allies, whose seminal achievement was the reshaping of the Supreme Court. Trump took obvious umbrage with McConnell’s remarks, issuing a statement that said “a new Republican Leader in the Senate should be picked immediately!”

“If you can’t win as a Republican in this cycle then you have some real issues,” said Terry Sullivan, a strategist who ran US Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

But there is a palpable and vocal base still enthralled with the 76-year-old Trump and want him back. Yale and Harvard Law-educated DeSantis, 43, offers a more methodical take on the Make America Great Again mantra. Cheney, 56, represents a party that might not exist anymore and has been refashioned in Trump’s image. 

Occupying space between DeSantis and Cheney are Republicans trying to win public attention on other issues.That includes Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton presenting themselves as the anti-China hawks; Texas Senator Ted Cruz and his governor, Greg Abbott, focusing on immigration and Florida Senator Rick Scott lining up culture war issues to entice conservative voters.Scott, who has a second job as head of the committee to ensure Republican Senate victories, drew fire from his own party earlier this year for a proposal that would require Congress to reauthorize popular programs like Medicare and Social Security every five years. 

Republicans are increasingly worried that they squandered a winning hand in the form of Biden’s poor approval rating and anger over decades-high inflation and crime. The tide there is already turning too. Biden’s popularity is rebounding, gasoline prices are receding, inflation is showing signs of cooling and unemployment remains low.  

To Republican political consultants like Sullivan, the very fabric of the GOP has changed. By its wholesale adoption of a more populist identity, they sacrificed highly educated, upper-middle-class suburbanites who became the independent voters.

That slice of the population is now up for grabs for both parties, but it’s more challenging for Republicans in places like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania to square the circle.

“It’s a real patch-work,” Sullivan said.

Republican strategist John Thomas said that the GOP’s identity was now fully cemented in Trump’s image with the August FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago resort. Up to that point Thomas had been working on a pro-Desantis political action committee, with donor commitments in the “mid-seven-figures,” he said.

“That was a pivotal, hinge moment in the Republican party,” Thomas said. “To be the man, you’ve got to beat the man. Right now, no Republican has beaten Trump. Ron has to take it from Trump and right now I just don’t see it.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.