Braid: Premier Smith blasts David Parker of TBA for attacks on Poilievre and wife

This is the first time Smith has uttered a word of criticism about Parker

Don Braid  •  Calgary Herald

Published Feb 27, 2024  • 

Premier Danielle Smith. Darren Makowichuk/Postmedia

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Well, finally.

Premier Danielle Smith tore into Take Back Alberta Leader David Parker Tuesday, urging him to “get some help.”

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She condemned his “bullying” comments about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his wife Anaida.

“I just don’t want to be associated with that kind of commentary and I don’t want to be associated with that kind of personal attack and bullying,” she said at a news conference.

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“Yes, I told him to delete his X (formerly Twitter) account and get some help.

“I want nothing to do with any kind of comments that are personal in nature, that are bullying in nature. We just should not be putting up with that in the public square.”

This is the first time Smith has uttered a word of criticism about Parker. She knows him well and attended his wedding.

But politically, Parker has worried Smith and her people for a long time. Now he’s gone too far even for the libertarian premier.

Appearing to respond to public comments that Parker controls her, Smith said, “I have to be absolutely clear that nobody tells me what to do as premier. The people I take my marching orders from are Albertans.

Parker says Smith urged him not to appear on a podcast Monday (available on Dean Blundell’s YouTube channel).

Many other people told him the same thing, but he went on anyway — and escalated his earlier remarks.

Parker continued to insult Conservative consultant Jenni Byrne, one of Poilievre’s key strategists, calling her an incompetent loser.

In the initial tweet that started this bonfire, Parker said Poilievre and Byrne were once in a relationship (hardly a secret in Ottawa).

Professing sympathy for Anaida, Parker said the leader should not be working today with somebody he used to sleep with.

On the podcast Parker revealed a motive far beyond sympathy.

“That (tweet) could be construed as me attacking Anaida to get to Pierre, but that’s not happening,” he said.

“What’s happening is that Anaida is a ruthless political operative in her own right.

“Which is part of why she married Pierre Poilievre, and she has been actively going around blackballing me and telling people not to work with me.

“The reason I sent that tweet is to send a message to Anaida that I punch back, and if you continue going around trying to hurt me and the people I care about, punch back again.”

Byrne and Poilievre’s office both say there will be no comment for now.

In the end, this uproar seems to be about complaints that he was pushed into junior roles during his years in Ottawa.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his wife Anaida wave to delegates at the Conservative Party Convention on Friday, September 8, 2023 in Quebec City. Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press

Parker built the Take Back Alberta movement that is often said to have great influence over the governing UCP.

Delegates sympathetic to his causes completely ruled policy decisions at last November’s UCP convention.

Now he spews political poison that makes many loyalists hope he vanishes down some remote gopher hole. The nearly universal outrage shows he has alienated his own base.

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Parker said everyone he knows tried to steer him away from the podcast — friends, adherents, colleagues, even his wife and parents.

“Nobody in my life is currently supportive of me appearing on this show,” Parker said.

“In fact, I’ve had old mentors send texts that I should never contact them again. There’s been a lot of pushback on me doing this.

“But I feel that it is absolutely the right thing to do. And I’m following my conviction in that regard, despite the intense pressure to do otherwise.”

That makes it easier for Smith to finally criticize him despite his lavish praise for her actions in government.

“She actively asked me to not do this interview,” he said.

“She told me she thinks I need to seek help for doing this interview, that I’ve gone insane.

“She’s not the first premier to say I’m insane . . . but I really feel like I need to do this. It’s my moral duty.”

David Parker is shown at the UCP Annual General Meeting in Calgary on Saturday, November 4, 2023. Jim Wells/Postmedia

Parker also claimed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau watched the podcast.

“I’ve been told by a number of people, actually dozens of people, that (he) will be watching this episode.”

Parker praised Trudeau’s campaigning skills — “genius,” he called them — and then graciously forgave his sins.

“I have a very specific message that I’d like to convey to Justin Trudeau before I continue this interview, and it’s that I forgive you,” Parker said.

Trudeau’s actions are still wrong, Parker continued, “but I want you to know that the hate in my heart is gone. I have forgiven you.

“And I hope that the people of Canada will also forgive you, because I believe that it’s actually their hate that fuels you to keep going.”

For Poilievre’s Conservatives, some good may yet come of this. Trudeau could die laughing.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald

X: @DonBraid

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Danielle Smith Plans to Stick Taxpayers with Fossil Fuel Risks

Alberta premier says she’s for free enterprise — except when she’s not

Premier Danielle Smith at a black-tie dinner at the Ranchmen’s Club in Calgary, where she boasted that sweeps of Edmonton homeless camps had made the left’s heads 'explode.' 

Photo via Alberta government.

According to the Council of Europe, “de-risking” means “the phenomenon of financial institutions terminating or restricting business relationships with clients or categories of clients to avoid, rather than manage, risk.”

But when Alberta Premier Danielle Smith uses the term, as she has been doing frequently lately, she obviously has something quite different in mind.

We’re going to have to wait a little longer to discover exactly what she’s planning, but it’s pretty clear that “de-risking,” Alberta style, is likely to involve providing public subsidies to either the electricity generation industry or the natural-gas extraction industry or both to overcome reluctance by bankers to invest in fossil fuels.

For example, Saturday on the free 45-minute advertisement that Global News provides Smith in the guise of a radio program called Your Province. Your Premier, she delivered a windy lecture on how you can’t develop wind and solar power without having an identical amount of natural-gas-powered electricity generation as backup.

Now, some experts might tell you the premier’s version of the facts is not precisely factual, but it’s the version she is peddling with her trademark mix of confidence, anecdotes that may or may not have actually happened and claims about technology that may or may not be true, with the blame for any problems always placed squarely on the Trudeau government.

To give Smith her due, she is very good at this. This is especially so on radio, where she long worked as a right-wing talk show host. She sounds very convincing if you don’t carefully parse the tales she tells.

So Saturday she described someone she talked to (unidentified, naturally) bringing forward “a perfect project” for a natural-gas electricity plant.

She continued, in tones implying she was letting her listeners in on a secret, that her contact “went to three different banks, and the banks said, ‘No, because of the federal uncertainty that you might shut this in, it might be stranded. We’re not prepared to fund that. But if it was a solar or a wind project, we would.’”

Did this really happen? Did it happen just as Smith described? It’s impossible to say.

“So that’s the problem that we’re facing,” she continued. “If I have to step in and de-risk those kinds of projects, so that they get built, so that we do have reliable power, we’re going to have to do that.”

“I don’t wanna do it! I’d rather solve this dispute that we have with the federal government so that they understand natural gas is an important transition fuel,” she went on.

After all, as she’d said in the lead-up to this yarn, which she also cited as a reason she “had to invoke” the Sovereignty Act last fall, “we believe in the market. We do!”

Indeed, it is true. The UCP does believe in the market. Except, of course, when it doesn’t.

Smith said much the same thing on Feb. 15 at that now-notorious black-tie dinner at the Ranchmen’s Club in Calgary where she bragged about homeless encampment rousts in Edmonton and boasted that the “left has their head explode almost every other day” as a result, to the cheers and chuckles of her well-heeled hosts.

In the said in Ottawa last fall. “This fabrication is not designed to inform, it is designed to inflame. But while factcheckers play whack-a-mole with misinformation and insults around climate change, the cost of inaction keeps rising.”


The Ghost of Heritage Funds Past Comes to Haunt Alberta

READ MORE

Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped Smith. “They’re just not going to be investing in those projects,” she told the sympathetic Ranchmen’s crowd. “So don’t be surprised if we have to step in to de-risk this market. I don’t want to do it, I’m a free enterpriser.”

So you’ve heard it from the lips of the premier: Don’t be surprised if she steps in, Jason Kenney style, to “de-risk” natural gas development.

One way or another, though, you can be pretty confident Alberta taxpayers are going to end up having to pay the freight while the UCP tries to pick economic winners and losers.

Maybe it’ll cost as much as it did when Kenney, her UCP premier predecessor, gave away $1.5 billion for that pipeline to nowhere the last time Donald Trump was running for president. Maybe it won’t.

Meantime, though, as Smith explained on the radio this weekend, the rest of us are just going to have to live with “a little bit of belt-tightening.”

“I just didn’t want to run a deficit,” she explained.

David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca. Follow him on X at @djclimenhaga.

 

Alberta hitting pause on South Edmonton Hospital, health minister says

Thursday's budget to include $20M over 3 years for standalone Stollery Children's Hospital

Nishat Chowdhury · CBC News · Posted: Feb 27, 2024 

Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said Tuesday the province will invest $20 million over three years on a new standalone Stollery Children's Hospital, but is pausing the South Edmonton Hospital project. (Richard Marion/CBC)

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The Alberta government is hitting pause on the South Edmonton Hospital project as it plans to create a standalone Stollery Children's Hospital facility, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said Tuesday.

Moving children out of the University of Alberta Hospital, where the Stollery is situated, will free up more than 200 adult spaces, LaGrange told a news conference.

"On the South Edmonton Hospital, we are pausing to have a more comprehensive look at how we can better serve the needs of Edmontonians and all of the north of Alberta that utilizes facilities within Edmonton," LaGrange said.

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  Alberta announces new 'state-of-the-art' hospital in southwest Edmonton

LaGrange didn't provide a timeline of how long the province plans to pause the project. The hospital would be built on a 320-acre site in the Rutherford area near Ellerslie Road and 127th Street S.W.

The NDP government of the time announced the hospital in 2017 to serve the city's rapidly expanding southwest neighbourhoods. It planned to start construction in 2020.

After the United Conservative Party formed government in 2019, it said the opening of the new hospital for south Edmonton would be delayed by three years, from 2027 to 2030. 

As recently as last year's capital budget, the government had set a target of spending $634 million on the project by 2025-26.

'Outrageous,' NDP critic says

Alberta NDP health critic Luanne Metz said Tuesday the South Edmonton Hospital is crucial to serve the city's fast growing population, especially since primary care in the province is in critical condition.

"We're pushing more and more people to need hospital care. It is outrageous that this is happening, especially when we know that these hospitals are needed now and they take years to build and we're not even going to continue with the planning of them," Metz said. 

"We're just making the backlog and the stress on the system worse for more years into the future."

Finance Minister Nate Horner will introduce Alberta's 2024 budget on Thursday.

In the pre-budget announcement Tuesday, which committed $20 million over three years to the standalone Stollery Children's Hospital project, the government said the new facility will offer more beds, larger clinical spaces, more private rooms and dedicated areas for children and their families.

Pierre Poilievre’s freedom isn’t very free

By Max Fawcett | Opinion, Politics | February 27th 2024

NATIONAL OBSERVER

Pierre Poilievre outlines his "freedom, except for public bathrooms" policy at a recent press conference in Kitchener, Ont. Screencap from CPAC video

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Just over two years ago, Pierre Poilievre kicked off his campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada with a video that hung his candidacy on one simple word: freedom. “Together,” he said, “we will make Canadians the freest people on Earth.” To him, that meant “freedom to raise your kids with your own values. Freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices. Freedom to speak without fear. And freedom to worship God in your own way.”

But with more than a year to go until the next federal election, it’s become increasingly clear that Poilievre’s vision of freedom is much narrower than he first let on. He has already signalled he plans to intrude on the jurisdiction of provincial governments and the freedom of municipal ones when it comes to homebuilding, while his supposed support for freedom of the press seems to be heavily informed by the partisan affiliations of said journalists.

His recent suggestion that access to online pornography should be mediated by government interference was equally telling. As the co-editors at The Line wrote, “There is no way to effectively age-gate porn without relying on intrusive and risky measures that would present the risk of — at a minimum — significant government overreach and, at worst, a high probability of identity theft and blackmail.”

As digital privacy expert Michael Geist noted, “The party that has championed Internet freedoms suddenly now finds itself supporting a bill that features website blocking of lawful content, subjects millions of Canadians to privacy-invasive age verification technology requirements overseen by a government agency such as the CRTC, and institutes regulations that apply to broadly used search and social media services.”

But these are mere appetizers to the main course — Poilievre’s unwillingness to grant people the freedom to choose what to do with their own bodies. That begins with his apparent interest in which bathrooms and changing rooms are being used by transgender women. "Female spaces should be exclusively for females, not for biological males," he said last week. How, exactly, he proposes to enforce that standard is not clear. Should all bathrooms and changing rooms have government-appointed gender inspectors posted at the doors? That doesn’t sound very free to me.

Instead, it sounds an awful lot like what’s happening in some of the most freedom-obsessed portions of America, where fears about transgender people have been used to advance a whole host of restrictive legislative measures. As writer Rebecca Solnit argued, “It’s no coincidence the American right is obsessed with border walls and with airtight gender definitions and racial discrimination to keep others in their places.”

And then there’s Canada’s medical assistance in dying legislation, which continues to draw the ire of otherwise freedom-focused conservatives. As freedom convoy leader Tamara Lich asked on social media, “Can someone please explain to me how we went from locking down everyone, everywhere in order to save every life on the planet to MAID, so our ‘public health’ can help our most vulnerable populations die?”

Gladly, Tamara.

In one situation, we were trying to prevent the spread of a dangerous virus and avoid more widespread human and economic casualties, all while balancing the complex architecture of freedoms that make up a society. In the other, we’re giving seriously ill people the freedom to decide how and when they want to die rather than subjecting them to the small mercies of fate, at no cost to anyone else’s constitutionally protected freedoms. Simple, isn’t it?

Pierre Trudeau famously said, "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." Now, more than half a century later, why does the otherwise freedom-obsessed Pierre Poilievre keep promising to insert it into our private lives?

Poilievre has already said he would restrict access to MAID to those with “irremediable health conditions, physical health conditions,” even though that would prevent those suffering from long-term mental illness from having the same freedoms as other Canadians. It’s fair to wonder what other fetters he would put on our personal freedoms in the name of his own political priorities. And yes, that does include access to abortion.

In Pierre Poilievre’s Canada, then, you’ll be free to decline a vaccine that’s in the best interests of your fellow citizens and worship God without fear of being judged by the non-believers in your midst. But when it comes to everything from public washrooms to private Internet searches, the government is going to monitor your every move — all in the name of your own protection. That’s the sort of freedom you might expect in Gilead, not Canada.

It’s also an inversion of the freedom-oriented formulation that Pierre Trudeau coined on his path to becoming a political rock star. “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” he said when, as Canada’s justice minister, he announced the decriminalization of previously taboo things like homosexuality and abortion. Now, more than half a century later, another politician on his way to becoming Canada’s next prime minister seems determined to insert the state in the bathrooms of the nation. If he gets his way, maybe the bedrooms will be next.

February 27th 2024

Max Fawcett
Lead Columnist
@maxfawcett

'Furious': Critics question Microsoft's deal with Mistral AI, as EU set to look into it

Pascale Davies
Tue, February 27, 2024 


Microsoft’s new “strategic partnership” with French artificial intelligence company Mistral AI faces scrutiny in Europe, with some critics in the parliament saying they are “furious” about it as the EU AI Act was changed to meet the demands of companies such as Mistral.

The French AI champion unveiled its new large language model (LLM) on Monday, with it set to become available to Microsoft’s Azure cloud customers in a dramatic shake-up for the start-up.

“On a technical level and a political level in the [European] Parliament, we are extremely furious because the French government for months was making this argument of European leadership, meaning that those companies should be able to scale up without help from Chinese or US companies,” said Kai Zenner, head of office and digital policy adviser for Axel Voss, an MEP from the European People’s Party (EPP).

“They were always blaming the Parliament that we are making it kind of impossible, for those national champions, unicorns to try to compete with their global competitors,” he told Euronews Next.

EU countries recently agreed on the technical details of the EU’s AI Act, but only after mammoth negotiations during which France in particular pushed for concessions for open source companies like Mistral.

Zenner also said Mistral AI was making the argument that if their wishes were not fulfilled they would be forced to cooperate with companies like Microsoft.

“Now they got all their wishes, and they do it anyway and I find this is just ridiculous”.

In the [European] Parliament, we are extremely furious because the French government for months was making this argument of European leadership.

He claims that the EU AI Act’s final version was rushed and the rules will be “attacked in front of courts” due to the concessions.

The partnership is also set to be looked into by the European Union’s competition watchdog, which also last month began looking into Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI.

"The Commission is looking into agreements that have been concluded between large digital market players and generative AI developers and providers," a European Commission spokesperson told Euronews Next in an email.

"In this context, we have received the mentioned agreement, which we will analyse".

'Potentially disastrous' for innovation: Tech sector reacts to the EU AI Act saying it goes too far

The fight for the AI Act is a clear case of defending the public good

Fair play and blurred government lines?

Mistral AI could also come under scrutiny as it is unclear if they were in talks with Microsoft as the EU AI Act was being written.

“If this is the case and then certain lobbying happened or certain things were said by the French government, then of course certain things could indeed be further evaluated,” said Zenner.

“There are certain red lines when it comes to how you do lobbying or how as a member state, how you are trying to push forward your narrative or a certain policy,” he said.

Mistral founders- Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lampe, Timothee Lacroix - Mistral- Renauld Khan

Euronews Next has reached out to Microsoft and Mistral AI for comment but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.

Another point of interest is the line between governments and tech. France’s former digital secretary of state Cedric O now serves on the board of Mistral.

“I think actually the French government was surprised. I think Cedric was maybe not telling them that this will happen, or maybe not everyone,” said Zenner.

“We also had this feeling that the French government is not really well coordinated right now, because there were a lot of different players speaking very differently and having also very different views and perspectives”.

A spokesperson from France's economy, finance and digital ministry said that they had only found out about the deal on Monday but that it did not come as a shock as Mistral was always transparent about its business model.

"Mistral is a source of pride for France and Europe and it aims to be a global leader in the AI sector," the spokesperson told Euronews Next, adding that Microsoft's investment in the company is a small amount and Mistral would remain independent.

Asked about if it was frustrating for French negotiators in the EU AI Act, the spokesperson said the country did not favour Mistral during the negotiations.
Big Tech takeover

Central to France's arguments was that the EU AI Act in its earliest form could stifle innovation, forcing European companies to look for foreign investment.

“It's just another example of this general trend that we've seen in AI, where essentially all the kind of smaller independent startups are signing deals with the Big Tech companies, primarily because of all the concentration that you have when it comes to computing power, especially cloud computing,” said Max von Thun, Europe director of the non-profit Open Markets Institute.

“And if you want to develop a cutting-edge AI model, you basically need access to that,” he added.

If you try and buy someone outright, it's going to be really difficult. Whereas, these partnerships are a lot more nebulous.

Von Thun said the partnership is “ironic and concerning” as what makes Mistral's case more interesting is that the company is “supposedly Europe’s best hope when it comes to AI”.

The EU has made a push to level the playing field when it comes to its technology companies, creating regulations such as the Digital Services Act.

But the issue of keeping Europe’s tech talent is largely down to funding and not the rules and regulations, because Europe cannot compete with the venture capital scene in the US or the Big Tech giants.

“You can do what you want in regulation, but what really determines whether you have companies that can compete and succeed at the European level is whether you have companies that have the infrastructure and the investment that they need at the European level,” said von Thun.

“And that's not the case right now”.

Mistral’s deal with Microsoft is not a merger, which is probably intentional, von Thun said.

“If you try and buy someone outright, it's going to be really difficult. Whereas, these partnerships are a lot more nebulous,” he said, explaining that it is a way for Microsoft to still compete with Mistral while avoiding antitrust scrutiny through these deals.

Despite Microsoft announcing on Monday it is opening access to its AI models for programmers to develop them, von Thun argues it is unlikely Microsoft is allowing open source models for the greater good or fairer competition.

“If you open up these models, you allow different people to experiment with them. But I think when it's on the Big Tech platform’s terms that raises questions about what the access looks like.

“Can you trust these companies to maintain their open access over time if that company actually starts to lead and challenge them?

“I would say no”.

This article was updated to add a response from the French government.

Leap of imagination: how February 29 reminds us of our mysterious relationship with time and space

THE CONVERSATION

Published: February 27, 2024 

If you find it intriguing that February 28 will be followed this week by February 29, rather than March 1 as it usually is, spare a thought for those alive in 1582. Back then, Thursday October 4 was followed by Friday October 15.

Ten whole days were snatched from the present when Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull to “restore” the calendar from discrepancies that had crept into the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE.

The new Gregorian calendar returned the northern hemisphere’s vernal equinox to its “proper” place, around March 21. (The equinox is when the Earth’s axis is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun, and is used to determine the date of Easter.)

The Julian calendar had observed a leap year every four years, but this meant time had drifted out of alignment with the dates of celestial events and astronomical seasons.


In the Gregorian calendar, leap days were added only to years that were a multiple of four – like 2024 – with an exception for years that were evenly divisible by 100, but not 400 – like 1700.

Simply put, leap days exist because it doesn’t take a neat 365 days for Earth to orbit the Sun. It takes 365.2422 days. Tracking the movement of celestial objects through space in an orderly pattern doesn’t quite work, which is why we have February – time’s great mop.

Father Time: statue of Pope Gregory XIII in Bologna, Italy. Getty Images

Time and space

This is just part of the history of how February – the shortest month, and originally the last month in the Roman calendar – came to have the job of absorbing those inconsistencies in the temporal calculations of the world’s most commonly used calendar.

There is plenty of science, maths and astrophysics explaining the relationship between time and the planet we live on. But I like to think leap years and days offer something even more interesting to consider: why do we have calendars anyway?

And what have they got to do with how we understand the wonder and strangeness of our existence in the universe? Because calendars tell a story, not just about time, but also about space.

Our reckoning of time on Earth is through our spatial relationship to the Sun, Moon and stars. Time, and its place in our lives, sits somewhere between the scientific, the celestial and the spiritual.

Read more: Why does a leap year have 366 days?

It is notoriously slippery, subjective and experiential. It is also marked, tracked and determined in myriad ways across different cultures, from tropical to solar to lunar calendars.

It is the Sun that measures a day and gives us our first reference point for understanding time. But it is the Moon, as a major celestial body, that extends our perception of time. By stretching a span of one day into something longer, it offers us a chance for philosophical reflection.

The Sun (or its effect at least) is either present or not present. The Moon, however, goes through phases of transformation. It appears and disappears, changing shape and hinting that one night is not exactly like the one before or after.

The Moon also has a distinct rhythm that can be tracked and understood as a pattern, giving us another sense of duration. Time is just that – overlapping durations: instants, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, lifetimes, centuries, ages.

Rhythm of the night: the Moon is central to our perception of time passing. Getty Images

The elusive Moon

It is almost impossible to imagine how time might feel in the absence of all the tools and gadgets we use to track, control and corral it. But it’s also hard to know what we might do in the absence of time as a unit of productivity – a measurable, dispensable resource.

The closest we might come is simply to imagine what life might feel like in the absence of the Moon. Each day would rise and fall, in a rhythm of its own, but without visible reference to anything else. Just endless shifts from light to dark.

Nights would be almost completely dark without the light of the Moon. Only stars at a much further distance would puncture the inky sky. The world around us would change – trees would grow, mammals would age and die, land masses would shift and change – but all would happen in an endless cycle of sunrise to sunset.

Read more: Scientists are hoping to redefine the second – here's why

The light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth, so the sunlight we see is always eight minutes in the past.

I remember sitting outside when I first learned this, and wondering what the temporal delay might be between me and other objects: a plum tree, trees at the end of the street, hills in the distance, light on the horizon when looking out over the ocean, stars in the night sky.

Moonlight, for reference, takes about 1.3 seconds to get to Earth. Light always travels at the same speed, it is entirely constant. The differing duration between how long it takes for sunlight or moonlight to reach the Earth is determined by the space in between.

Time on the other hand, is anything but constant. There are countless ways we characterise it. The mere fact we have so many calendars and ways of describing perceptual time hints at our inability to pin it down.

Calendars give us the impression we can, and have, made time predictable and understandable. Leap years, days and seconds serve as a periodic reminder that we haven’t.

Author

Emily O'Hara
Senior Lecturer, Spatial Design + Temporary Practices, Auckland University of Technology

Tsunami on the plains: Researchers find that sea waves once swept Canadian Prairie Provinces

by Chris Putnam, University of Saskatchewan

USask assistant professor Colin Sproat stands by a wall of a quarry north of The Pas, 

Manitoba, one of the sites where the researchers found evidence of an ancient tsunami.

 Credit: Brian Pratt

Hundreds of millions of years ago, an earthquake sent a series of massive waves across the ancient sea that covered part of Western Canada and the northern United States.

That is the conclusion of a new paper by two University of Saskatchewan (USask) researchers, who have found the strongest-ever evidence of a tsunami in a shallow inland sea.

The research by Dr. Brian Pratt (Ph.D.) and Dr. Colin Sproat (Ph.D.) of USask's College of Arts and Science is published in Sedimentary Geology.

Saskatchewan and its neighboring areas are not known for their coastal views—or for their seismic activity. But 445 million years ago, in the period called the Ordovician, the region looked very different. Much of what is now Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada, along with Montana and the Dakotas in the U.S., was covered by a sea known as the Williston Basin.

"It was a completely different environment, completely different geography. Back then, we were much closer to the equator than we are today and the sea level was high, so we would have been in a tropical, shallow inland sea rather than a temperate grassland like today," said Sproat, an assistant professor in the USask Department of Geological Sciences.

Pratt and Sproat visited three sites north of The Pas, Manitoba, where they found evidence of a short, high-energy event in this ancient sea, which had gone unnoticed by geologists until now.

Certain beds of sediment at the locations had been torn into pebbles and mixed with clay. The floor beneath the deeper waters of the basin contained no clay, so it could only have come from the land.

"We realized we needed an event that rips up the sea bottom and then somehow comes back again with all this clay, and does it a few times," said Pratt, a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences.

The answer could only be a tsunami. No animal life and almost no plant life existed on land to witness that day nearly half a billion years ago, but if an observer had been around, they would have seen a dramatic event.

Faults in the region's crust, quiet now for thousands of millennia, were then still active. One of these faults somewhere in the northern half of the Williston Basin suddenly slipped, sending violent shockwaves through the sea.

The water at the shore would have briefly dropped, then rushed back in a relentless surge. The wave might have pushed a kilometer or more across the gently sloping land, scouring the rocky surface. When it finally receded, it washed clay back into the sea. More waves followed.

A tsunami is a "radical interpretation" of the evidence, acknowledges Pratt, but the USask researchers had an advantage. The strata of the Williston Basin in Canada are almost entirely hidden under Manitoba's and Saskatchewan's flat landscapes, which limited past geologists to studying only a few natural outcrops, core samples and roadway cuts.

An outline of the Williston Basin in the Late Ordovician period. 

Credit: Brian Pratt / Colin Sproat

In the last decade, several new quarries have been dug in Northern Manitoba and revealed more of the basin's secrets.

"It was checking out the quarries that opened our eyes. We go into these quarries and we can see the layering extending laterally for 100 meters or more, and we can find the same bed in more than one place. And so that gave us sort of the 3D perspective that nobody had before," said Pratt.

Similar deposits can be made by major storms, but Sproat and Pratt ruled out a storm as the cause due to a lack of other telltale signs of regular storm activity. Furthermore, the region was too close to the ancient equator to have experienced hurricanes.

The new paper gives a clearer picture of the forces that shaped an environment lost to history: one in which early marine life flourished and diversified.

"The Williston Basin was covered by this really unusual sea on top of the continent, an environment we don't have a good modern analog for. Given that, we have a unique opportunity here to study geological processes and their impact on ancient ecosystems in a setting unlike anywhere on the planet today," said Sproat.

The USask researchers plan to visit sites elsewhere in Canada to see if other beds show overlooked evidence of seismic sea waves—and whether tsunamis might have been a bigger part of Earth's history than is commonly believed.

"It's a subject you won't find in the geology textbooks," said Pratt. "I think it's time for a paradigm shift."

More information: Brian R. Pratt et al, A tsunami deposit in the Stonewall Formation (Upper Ordovician), northeastern margin of the Williston Basin, Canada, and its tectonic and stratigraphic implications, Sedimentary Geology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.sedgeo.2023.106518

Provided by University of Saskatchewan 500-million-year-old worm 'superhighway' discovered in Canada

WORKERS CAPITAL

CPPIB's $1 office tower deal uncovers anxiety among longtime buyers

Canada's largest pension fund taking steps to limit exposure to most-beleaguered property type — office buildings

Author of the article:
Bloomberg News
Ari Altstedter and Paula Sambo
Published Feb 27, 2024 •

Anxiety over office buildings has swept the financial world as the persistence of both remote work and higher borrowing costs undercuts the economic fundamentals that made the properties good investments in the first place. 

PHOTO BY AZIN GHAFFARI/POSTMEDIA

Canadian pension funds have been among the world’s most prolific buyers of real estate, starting a revolution that inspired retirement plans around the globe to emulate them. Now the largest of them is taking steps to limit its exposure to the most-beleaguered property type — office buildings.

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has done three deals at discounted prices, selling its interests in a pair of Vancouver towers, a business park in Southern California and a redevelopment project in Manhattan, with the New York stake offloaded for the eyebrow-raising price of just US$1. The worry is those deals may set an example for other major investors seeking a way out of the turmoil too.

“It’s the opposite of a vote of confidence for office,” said John Kim, an analyst tracking real estate companies for BMO Capital Markets. “My question is, who could be next?”

Anxiety over office buildings has swept the financial world as the persistence of both remote work and higher borrowing costs undercuts the economic fundamentals that made the properties good investments in the first place. A wave of banks from New York to Tokyo recently conceded that loans they made against offices may never be fully repaid, sending their share prices plunging and prompting fears of a broader credit crunch.

But the real test will be what price office buildings actually trade for, and there have been precious few examples since interest rates started rising. That’s why industry watchers see discounted deals like CPPIB’s as an ominous sign for the market.


Redeploying cash

The pension fund isn’t actively backing away from offices, but it’s not looking to increase its office holdings either, according to a person with knowledge of its strategy. And where a property requires additional investment, CPPIB might simply look to sell so it can put that cash somewhere it can get higher returns instead, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing a private matter.

Peter Ballon, CPPIB’s global head of real estate, declined to comment on the recent deals, but said the fund has continued to invest in office buildings, including a recently completed, 37-story tower in Vancouver.

“Selling is an integral part of our investment process,” Ballon said in an emailed statement. “We exit when the asset has maximized its value and we are able to redeploy proceeds into higher and better returns in other assets, sectors and markets, including office buildings.”

CPPIB’s $590.8-billion fund is one of the world’s largest pools of capital, and its $41.4-billion portfolio of real estate — stretching from Stockholm to Bengaluru — includes almost every property type, from warehouses, to life sciences complexes, to apartment blocks. While that scale would mitigate any potential losses from individual transactions, it also means even a small shift in CPPIB’s office appetite has the power to cause ripple effects in the market.


Manhattan tower

At the end of last year, the fund sold its 29 per cent stake in Manhattan’s 360 Park Avenue South for US$1 to one of its partners, Boston Properties Inc., which also agreed to assume CPPIB’s share of the project’s debt. The investors, along with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte., bought the 20-story building in 2021 with plans to redevelop it into a modern workspace.

Boston Properties said last month that the selling partner — which the company didn’t name — had already spent US$71 million on the project, but severing its ties released it from an obligation to commit an additional US$46 million to the effort.

Around the same time, CPPIB sold its 45 per cent stake in Santa Monica Business Park, which the fund also owned with Boston Properties, for US$38 million. That’s a discount of almost 75 per cent to what CPPIB paid for its share of the property in 2018. The deal came just after the landlords signed a lease with social media company Snap Inc. that required they spend additional capital to improve the campus, Boston Properties chief executive Owen Thomas said on a conference call.

The two Vancouver towers, co-owned with another Canadian pension fund, were different in that they didn’t need substantial new investment and had Amazon.com Inc. already in place as the major tenant. But last month’s sale price of about $300 million was down more than 20 per cent from where the property’s value was assessed at in 2023, data from Altus Group shows.

That sale coincided with the completion last year of a new office tower in Vancouver that CPPIB developed with the same pension fund, and the partners wanted to keep their overall exposure to the city’s office market from increasing, a person familiar with their thinking said.

Pension funds sell 2 Vancouver office towers in $300-million deal

Amazon’s Vancouver office building, second tower for sale

Allied Properties REIT takes $500M writedown on offices

With hybrid work schedules set to depress demand for office space in the long term, and higher interest rates increasing the cost of the constant upgrades needed to attract and keep tenants, even the best office buildings may not be able to compete with investment opportunities elsewhere.

“To get even better returns in your office investment you’re going to have to modernize, you’re going to have to put a lot more money into that office,” said Matt Hershey, a partner at real estate capital advisory firm Hodes Weill & Associates. “Sometimes it’s better to just take your losses and reinvest in something that’s going to perform much better.”

Bloomberg.com

Canadian pension plan dumps stake in NYC commercial real estate project for just $1 in ‘opposite of a vote of confidence for office’

BYARI ALTSTEDTER, PAULA SAMBO AND BLOOMBERG
February 27, 2024 

New York's commercial real estate scene is wobbling.

Canadian pension funds have been among the world’s most prolific buyers of real estate, starting a revolution that inspired retirement plans around the globe to emulate them. Now the largest of them is taking steps to limit its exposure to the most-beleaguered property type — office buildings.

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has done three deals at discounted prices, selling its interests in a pair of Vancouver towers, a business park in Southern California and a redevelopment project in Manhattan, with the New York stake offloaded for the eyebrow-raising price of just $1. The worry is those deals may set an example for other major investors seeking a way out of the turmoil too.

“It’s the opposite of a vote of confidence for office,” said John Kim, an analyst tracking real estate companies for BMO Capital Markets. “My question is, who could be next?”

Anxiety over office buildings has swept the financial world as the persistence of both remote work and higher borrowing costs undercuts the economic fundamentals that made the properties good investments in the first place. A wave of banks from New York to Tokyo recently conceded that loans they made against offices may never be fully repaid, sending their share prices plunging and prompting fears of a broader credit crunch.

But the real test will be what price office buildings actually trade for, and there have been precious few examples since interest rates started rising. That’s why industry-watchers see discounted deals like CPPIB’s as an ominous sign for the market.

The pension fund isn’t actively backing away from offices, but it’s not looking to increase its office holdings either, according to a person with knowledge of its strategy. And where a property requires additional investment, CPPIB might simply look to sell so it can put that cash somewhere it can get higher returns instead, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing a private matter.

Peter Ballon, CPPIB’s global head of real estate, declined to comment on the recent deals, but said the fund has continued to invest in office buildings, including a recently completed, 37-story tower in Vancouver.

“Selling is an integral part of our investment process,” Ballon said in an emailed statement. “We exit when the asset has maximized its value and we are able to redeploy proceeds into higher and better returns in other assets, sectors and markets, including office buildings.”

CPPIB’s C$590.8 billion ($436.9 billion) fund is one of the world’s largest pools of capital, and its C$41.4 billion portfolio of real estate — stretching from Stockholm to Bengaluru — includes almost every property type, from warehouses, to life sciences complexes, to apartment blocks. While that scale would mitigate any potential losses from individual transactions, it also means even a small shift in CPPIB’s office appetite has the power to cause ripple effects in the market.
Manhattan Tower

At the end of last year, the fund sold its 29% stake in Manhattan’s 360 Park Avenue South for $1 to one of its partners, Boston Properties Inc., which also agreed to assume CPPIB’s share of the project’s debt. The investors, along with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte., bought the 20-story building in 2021 with plans to redevelop it into a modern workspace.

Boston Properties said last month that the selling partner — which the company didn’t name — had already spent $71 million on the project, but severing its ties released it from an obligation to commit an additional $46 million to the effort.

Around the same time, CPPIB sold its 45% stake in Santa Monica Business Park, which the fund also owned with Boston Properties, for $38 million. That’s a discount of almost 75% to what CPPIB paid for its share of the property in 2018. The deal came just after the landlords signed a lease with social media company Snap Inc. that required they spend additional capital to improve the campus, Boston Properties Chief Executive Officer Owen Thomas said on a conference call.

The two Vancouver towers, co-owned with another Canadian pension fund, were different in that they didn’t need substantial new investment and had Amazon.com Inc. already in place as the major tenant. But last month’s sale price of about C$300 million was down more than 20% from where the property’s value was assessed at in 2023, data from Altus Group shows.

That sale coincided with the completion last year of a new office tower in Vancouver that CPPIB developed with the same pension fund, and the partners wanted to keep their overall exposure to the city’s office market from increasing, a person familiar with their thinking said.

With hybrid work schedules set to depress demand for office space in the long term, and higher interest rates increasing the cost of the constant upgrades needed to attract and keep tenants, even the best office buildings may not be able to compete with investment opportunities elsewhere.

“To get even better returns in your office investment you’re going to have to modernize, you’re going to have to put a lot more money into that office,” said Matt Hershey, a partner at real estate capital advisory firm Hodes Weill & Associates. “Sometimes it’s better to just take your losses and reinvest in something that’s going to perform much better.”