Caltech Researchers Read a Jellyfish’s Mind

By LORI DAJOSE, CALTECH NOVEMBER 27, 2021

Credit: B. Weissbourd

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections. Understanding the precise circuits of brain cells that orchestrate all of our day-to-day behaviors—such as moving our limbs, responding to fear and other emotions, and so on—is an incredibly complex puzzle for neuroscientists. But now, fundamental questions about the neuroscience of behavior may be answered through a new and much simpler model organism: tiny jellyfish.

With a new genetic toolbox, researchers can view jellyfish neurons as they light up in real time. Jellyfish do not have a centralized brain; rather, their brain cells (neurons) are distributed in a diffuse net throughout the body. As shown in this video, this study discovered that there is actually spatial organization to the way that neurons are activated when the animal is coordinating behavior. Credit: B. Weissbourd

Caltech researchers have now developed a kind of genetic toolbox tailored for tinkering with Clytia hemisphaerica, a type of jellyfish about 1 centimeter in diameter when fully grown. Using this toolkit, the tiny creatures have been genetically modified so that their neurons individually glow with fluorescent light when activated. Because a jellyfish is transparent, researchers can then watch the glow of the animal’s neural activity as it behaves naturally. In other words, the team can read a jellyfish’s mind as it feeds, swims, evades predators, and more, in order to understand how the animal’s relatively simple brain coordinates its behaviors.

A paper describing the new study appears in the journal Cell on November 24, 2021. The research was conducted primarily in the laboratory of David J. Anderson, Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience Leadership Chair, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience.

When it comes to model organisms used in laboratories, jellyfish are an extreme outlier. Worms, flies, fish, and mice—some of the most commonly used laboratory model organisms—are all more closely related, genetically speaking, to one another than any are to a jellyfish. In fact, worms are evolutionarily closer to humans than they are to jellyfish.

“Jellyfish are an important point of comparison because they’re so distantly related,” says Brady Weissbourd, postdoctoral scholar and first author on the study. “They let us ask questions like, are there principles of neuroscience shared across all nervous systems? Or, what might the first nervous systems have looked like? By exploring nature more broadly, we may also discover useful biological innovations. Importantly, many jellyfish are small and transparent, which makes them exciting platforms for systems neuroscience. That is because there are amazing new tools for imaging and manipulating neural activity using light, and you can put an entire living jellyfish under a microscope and have access to the whole nervous system at once.”

A jellyfish folds the right side of its body to bring a tiny brine shrimp to its mouth. Credit: B. Weissbourd

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal’s entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on “eating” even without the rest of the animal’s body.

This decentralized body plan seems to be a highly successful evolutionary strategy, as jellyfish have persisted throughout the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors?

After developing the genetic tools to work with Clytia, the researchers first examined the neural circuits underlying the animal’s feeding behaviors. When Clytia snags a brine shrimp in a tentacle, it folds its body in order to bring the tentacle to its mouth and bends its mouth toward the tentacle simultaneously. The team aimed to answer: How does the jellyfish brain, apparently unstructured and radially symmetric, coordinate this directional folding of the jellyfish body?

By examining the glowing chain reactions occurring in the animals’ neurons as they ate, the team determined that a subnetwork of neurons that produces a particular neuropeptide (a molecule produced by neurons) is responsible for the spatially localized inward folding of the body. Additionally, though the network of jellyfish neurons originally seemed diffuse and unstructured, the researchers found a surprising degree of organization that only became visible with their fluorescent system.

Clytia hemisphaerica from the side. Credit: B. Weissbourd

“Our experiments revealed that the seemingly diffuse network of neurons that underlies the circular jellyfish umbrella is actually subdivided into patches of active neurons, organized in wedges like slices of a pizza,” explains Anderson. “When a jellyfish snags a brine shrimp with a tentacle, the neurons in the ‘pizza slice’ nearest to that tentacle would first activate, which in turn caused that part of the umbrella to fold inward, bringing the shrimp to the mouth. Importantly, this level of neural organization is completely invisible if you look at the anatomy of a jellyfish, even with a microscope. You have to be able to visualize the active neurons in order to see it—which is what we can do with our new system.”

Weissbourd emphasizes that this is only scratching the surface of understanding the full repertoire of jellyfish behaviors. “In future work, we’d like to use this jellyfish as a tractable platform to understand precisely how behavior is generated by whole neural systems,” he says. “In the context of food passing, understanding how the tentacles, umbrella, and mouth all coordinate with each other lets us get at more general problems of the function of modularity within nervous systems and how such modules coordinate with each other. The ultimate goal is not only to understand the jellyfish nervous system but to use it as a springboard to understand more complex systems in the future.”

The new model system is straightforward for researchers anywhere to use. Jellyfish lineages can be maintained in artificial sea water in a lab environment and shipped to collaborators who are interested in answering questions using the little animals.

Reference: “A genetically tractable jellyfish model for systems and evolutionary neuroscience” by Brandon Weissbourd, Tsuyoshi Momose, Aditya Nair, Ann Kennedy, Bridgett Hunt and David J. Anderson, 24 November 2021, Cell.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.10.021

In addition to Weissbourd and Anderson, additional co-authors are Tsuyoshi Momose of Sorbonne Université in France, graduate student Aditya Nair, former postdoctoral scholar Ann Kennedy (now an assistant professor at Northwestern University), and former research technician Bridgett Hunt. Funding was provided by the Caltech Center for Evolutionary Science, the Whitman Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Life Sciences Research Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The Hopeful Message of ‘The Dawn of Everything’

Ancient humans had a flexible knack for reorganizing societies that weren’t working. 

We can, too.

Crawford Kilian 22 Nov 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

Anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, co-author of The Dawn of Everything, speaks at a protest occupation at the University of Amsterdam, 2015. To his right, political theorist Enzo Rossi. Photo via Wikimedia.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
By David Graeber and David Wengrow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2021)

This book is plain fun — an intellectual romp through 200,000 years of human history that overturns all the conventional wisdom about our ancestors. And it offers encouraging new directions for social change.

David Graeber, who died in 2020, was not only an anthropologist but an anarchist. Not a bomb-thrower, but a believer in people sorting out their problems, agreeing on the solutions, and carrying on — without coercion. He was a leading figure in the Occupy movement 10 years ago and is said to have coined the phrase “We are the 99 per cent.”

David Wengrow is an archaeologist, and the two created this book over a decade as a kind of hobby, swapping the manuscript back and forth as it gained more documentation, and realizing it would need at least three sequels to cover the material properly. I hope Wengrow can provide at least some of those sequels, but this book is a feast in itself.

First all, it’s full of surprising and fascinating information about the societies of the past, especially since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. The information may be well known to experts, but it hasn’t reached the general public yet.


I was amazed to learn that the people who built Stonehenge had experimented with farming and rejected it; they built a new economy based on gathering hazelnuts. Similarly, the vast Toltec city of Teotihuacán, near modern Mexico City, supported a population of 100,000 — most of them living in excellent social housing.

Second, and more important, Graeber and Wengrow use this information to overturn the whole myth of “progress” from hunting and gathering to farming to cities, kings and bureaucracies, and then to the modern industrial state. That myth assumes our ancient ancestors lived in small groups for 200,000 years, rarely interacting with others. Then they invented farming and began to live in larger communities. Only then did social complexity and surplus food supply permit the rise of social institutions like monarchs who commanded great projects built by obedient subjects, with literate bureaucrats to collect taxes and record events.

Resources for centuries-long projects

On the contrary — the peoples of the Stone Age, this book contends, were as intelligent and rational as we were, and quite capable of projects requiring hundreds or thousands of workers, over very long periods of time. When they felt the need, they experimented with social models. Instead of living in a brutal Hobbesian war of all against all, they travelled and traded safely over great distances.

They also had the resources to support projects like Poverty Point, a huge system of earthworks in Louisiana started 6,000 years ago and continued for 600 years. We have no idea what the system’s purpose was, but it required co-operation and logistical support on a grand scale for many generations. Thousands of years later, another civilization we call Cahokia rose on the Mississippi near St. Louis. Graeber and Wengrow suggest it collapsed when it became totalitarian:

“For those who fell within its orbit, there was nothing much between domestic life — lived under constant surveillance from above — and the awesome spectacle of the city itself. That spectacle could be terrifying. Along with games and feasts, in the early decades of Cahokia’s expansion there were mass executions and burials carried out in public.”

Graeber and Wengrow argue that Cahokia fell thanks to three freedoms enjoyed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors: the freedom to walk away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to choose new kinds of social organization. Moreover, the horror of Cahokia traumatized the peoples of eastern North America into ever considering such a “civilized” society again.

So when French settlers arrived in what is now Canada, they found Indigenous peoples living in small communities, farming and foraging. But they lacked the great structures and institutions that the French defined as civilization. That meant the Indigenous peoples were “savages.”

The Mi’kmaq and Huron-Wendat thought no better of the newcomers. They had some useful gadgets like firearms, but they were always quarrelling, and always obeying someone else’s orders.

French Jesuit missionaries got a shock from the people they had come to convert. The “savages” could argue them point for point, and defeat them. Thousands of years of Indigenous spoken discourse had made reasoned debate a valued skill, beating even the Jesuits’ training.

‘They brand us for slaves’


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Graeber and Wengrow even argue that the Enlightenment itself was the result of reports that scandalized Jesuits sent home, describing the Indigenous critique of European culture. Perhaps the most influential was a book by a French explorer and official, Lahontan, relating his conversations with the Wendat Chief Kondiaronk.

As Lahontan put it, Indigenous people who had been to Europe, like Kondiaronk, “… were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There is no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society; they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the differences in ranks which are observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.”

Europeans were both titillated and scandalized by this critique. They liked the new idea of invoking outsiders who could safely criticize the European status quo, and many similar books soon appeared, reporting the views of fictitious foreigners; Gulliver’s Travels turned the foreign-critique genre into outright satire.

But Indigenous “savages” in North America didn’t quite fit their concept of serious thinkers and social analysts. The French economist Turgot and Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, invented a whole new system of social evolution: hunter-gatherers lived in small, egalitarian groups and became farmers who could support kings, bureaucrats and priests living in cities, which in turn became kingdoms and empires; these had climaxed in the European nation-states, and would soon clinch their superiority by inventing the industrial revolution.

This tidy system relegated Kondiaronk and other non-Europeans to irrelevant relics of a lost Eden of freedom and equality. Obedience and inequality were just the price to be paid for being part of an advanced society. Imperialism now had an intellectual foundation as the engine of progress. Those who resisted would be defeated, exploited and perhaps eventually raised to civilization in some distant future.

Living like rentiers, sustainably

Graeber and Wengrow demolish this myth of social evolution, citing decades of recent findings about ancient societies around the world. Societies did not evolve and progress; they improvised and experimented, arguably with more success than we modern Canadians. As managers of productive ecosystems, Indigenous peoples could live like rentiers on the interest from their living wealth. Like our own billionaires, they could afford to spend their excess wealth and leisure time on projects like Poverty Point and Cahokia.


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And when supporters of such projects lost interest, they walked away, talked things over, and built new societies depending on their situation. When those new societies ran into trouble, their members worked out something else.

The authors argue that we have become stuck in societies that rule their members through three principles: a monopoly on violence, control of information and personal charisma. Earlier societies ran on none, or just one or two, of these elements. It took the Enlightenment to pull them all together and turn freedom and equality into Orwellian parodies. Even Marxist revolutionaries accepted the three principles, and governments around the world of all political stripes endorse them as well.

I have plenty of quibbles with this or that example of Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments, and advocates of Big History will have more. But the authors make their key point irrefutably. We’ve walked away from bad societies for tens of thousands of years, or just said no, and then built better societies after long debate.

We can do it again.

What If Riding the Bus Were Free?

Saying ‘no fares’ could make public transit better and streets safer, while speeding up climate and justice progress. Who’s on board?

andrea bennett Today | TheTyee.ca
andrea bennett is an editor with The Tyee and the author of Like a Boy but Not a Boy, a CBC Books’ pick for the top Canadian non-fiction of the year and one of Autostraddle’s best queer books of 2020.

LONG READ

You won’t see this sign on TransLink buses or other public transit (yet). But a new Vancouver experiment does let 100 low-income people ride for free. 

Original image by Exp691 via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Art by Christopher Cheung.

100 YEARS AFTER THE WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE
In May 2019, Winnipeg public transit drivers held a fare strike. Members of ATU Local 1505 had been working without a contract since that January, and they decided to make a point. On a Monday, they left leaflets at bus stops and advertised the strike on social media. That Tuesday they let people ride for free.

The fare strike created a new and “visceral experience” for public transit users, says James Wilt, author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?. “Even just the ease of getting on board and not having to rummage for change. The feeling of being able to get on and off the bus at any point.”

So: what if transit was always free of charge? What if it was fully accessible? What if it properly served rural, remote and suburban riders? What if we had free, public, intercity transit, making it possible to get from Nelson to Victoria without owning a car? Would the benefits of all that be worth shifting the cost completely from riders to the public purse?

In 2007, Dave Olsen wrote a Tyee reader-funded series called “No Fares!”. Among the reasons he gave for not charging riders: offering “a barrier-free transportation option to every member of the community,” making service faster and more efficient, and ending the criminalization of citizens who for whatever reason duck paying fares. And he found other places in our region and the world already experimenting with letting people ride free.

Over a decade later, everything Olsen wrote is still true — free transit is a poverty justice issue, a disability justice issue and a racial justice issue. It’s also a climate issue — well-functioning, affordable transit empowers more people to shift from relying on private, polluting vehicles to get around.

And global fare-free experiments are gathering size and speed. Kansas City eliminated fares for all bus and light rail riders in 2019. Last year Luxembourg became the first country to make public transit — buses, trams and trains — free nationwide. Malta is set to be next and Germany is giving it a serious look.

Which is why it was time to revisit a cluster of questions related to making public transit fare-free in British Columbia. Interested? Hop in and ride along.

Why free for everyone?

While programs exist to make transit more affordable, these programs provide imperfect solutions. Winnipeg, for example, recently began to offer a low-income monthly bus pass for $62.40. But the cost was still too steep. Only 1,017 people applied for the low-income pass the first year it was launched — “about 15 per cent of the predicted demand,” according to the Winnipeg Free Press.

Heather McCain, the executive director of Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods and a former member of the Access Transit Users’ Advisory Committee, says recent changes to the B.C. bus pass program, which used to make bus passes available for $45 per year to British Columbians on income support for disability, have made it more difficult for these transit users to access passes.

“Within the last five years, it was changed to where it’s $45 a year for the administration fee, and now $52 per month for the pass,” McCain told The Tyee.

“The province did give us this transportation subsidy, which was meant to cover the cost of the bus pass,” they add. “But that’s not how poverty works. People don’t use it for transportation because they need medication more or they need therapy more, or they need clothing for their children more.”

B.C. provides up to $1,358.50 per month to a single person on disability assistance. This falls far short of the $2,000 a month the federal government provided as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, commonly referred to as CERB, for workers affected by COVID.

Keeping disabled people in poverty, McCain says, effectively removes the “choice” offered by the current transit subsidy program.

Moreover, McCain adds, getting on disability support in the first place presents another barrier. Many people are rejected on their first try and may not have the energy, time or wherewithal to reapply, even if they are eligible.

This is part of the reason McCain joined the #AllOnBoard campaign, which advocates for affordable and accessible transit across the province.

“While I think that disabled people who are in poverty should have free transit,” McCain adds, “I also think immigrants who are in poverty should have free transit, and unhoused people should have free transit.”

Author James Wilt researched public transit and concludes it all comes down to stable, strong funding. Dependency on rider fares invites a ‘vicious circle.’ If ridership dips, ‘transit service becomes less reliable, less affordable, less dignified,’ and people abandon it.


Wilt points out that free transit is a racial justice issue, too — transit and fare enforcement disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people. An independent review of 121,819 TTC fare enforcement incidents spanning a decade in Toronto, for example, found that Black and Indigenous riders were both more likely to be involved in fare enforcement incidents, and faced harsher consequences resulting from these incidents.

In some horrific cases, fare enforcement incidents have even led to the deaths of transit riders.

But how would we pay for it?

The same way we pay for roads and other public infrastructure: gathering taxes and investing that money in a social good. Offloading the costs from riders to the public purse also could change the tendency of transit to become progressively worse.

Most public transit is set up to collect somewhere between one third to two thirds of its revenue from fares, Wilt says. He points to several examples in his book where budgetary shortfalls have led to worsening service, leading to fewer regular riders — a “vicious cycle” where transit becomes less and less viable as a transportation option.

“Over time, as transit service becomes less reliable, less affordable and even just less dignified,” he says, “people will often, if they can afford to, move away to other modes of transportation, including private automobiles, ride hailing services, cabs and sometimes bikes and being a pedestrian.”

As ridership falls further, the budget crunch gets worse, and so does service.

In contrast, Wilt points to the idea of a “virtuous cycle”: when transit is well-funded and can be relied on to get people where they need to go on time, conveniently and affordably, ridership goes up. This has been the case in Vancouver, Seattle, Phoenix and Montreal.

Increasing access for people of all income levels could mean introducing sliding-scale bus passes where costs are tied to income level. But means testing tends to bog people down in bureaucracy and paperwork, and presents particular challenges for English language learners and anyone who struggles with literacy issues.

Free transit for everyone, by contrast, would ensure access for everyone without bureaucratic hoops and hassles.

So how much would that cost the government?

Public transit is already subsidized, of course. In Metro Vancouver, for example, TransLink’s forecasted expenditures for 2021 total over $1.95 billion, over $400 million of which comes from fares. In previous years, this amount was higher — TransLink expected to receive $700 million in fares in 2020 before COVID hit.

Removing fares would require drumming up revenue from other sources — taxation, or funding from the province or federal government, or both.

But as Olsen wrote in 2007, we wouldn’t need to replace the entire amount — the transit police expenditure for 2021 is forecasted at $44 million per year, and eliminating the need to enforce collect fares and police fare evasion could significantly reduce that budget line. And traffic congestion is estimated to cost somewhere between $500 million and $1.2 billion in Metro Vancouver; if the majority of people who drive were able to switch to taking transit, it’s possible the switch could pay for itself in congestion reduction alone.

But, yeah, $700 million can seem a big number. For reference, though, the province of B.C. spends at least that on fossil fuel subsidies and $700 million is about one per cent of the total provincial budget.

To be clear, what we’ve been discussing is just the operating budget for transit for B.C.’s most populous region. The price tags for building top-of-the-line public transit infrastructure can be eye-popping. The bill for the 5.7 kilometres of underground subway extending the Millennium Line from VCC-Clark to Broadway and Arbutus is currently estimated at $2.83 billion, which, if it’s like most other infrastructure projects, will almost certainly rise.

Still, such infrastructure triggers development that generates new tax revenue, and UBC sees so much benefit to its own future that the university is exploring the prospect of offering financial and land contributions to help make the project happen.

Who is pressing for fare-free transit?

In 2018, a group of organizations, community groups, advocates, unions and other stakeholders, including the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition and Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods, came together to create the #AllOnBoard campaign.

The campaign’s province-wide demands included free transit for all youth 18 and under, an income-based sliding scale fare system for adults, the end of ticketing of minors for fare evasion and the implementation of community service as an alternative to fare evasion fines for low-income adults. #AllOnBoard also wants to see a shift in provincial, regional and municipal transportation planning that would ensure public transportation is affordable, accessible and safe

.

Viveca Ellis, who co-organized the #AllOnBoard campaign, was happy to see the advocacy produce a win. Starting in September, children 12 and under began riding public transit for free across B.C. ‘Transit should not be commodified. Mobility is a universal need.’

Viveca Ellis, a current provincial organizer with the Single Mothers’ Alliance for Gender & Economic Justice and former community organizer for the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, says the campaign worked closely and tirelessly with municipalities, city councillors and a variety of other stakeholders to pass advocacy motions supporting campaign demands. This resulted in municipalities sending letters of support to different provincial ministers.

Which in turn resulted in a big win: on Sept. 1, 2021, children 12 and under began to ride public transit for free in municipalities across the province.

TransLink is also reviewing their fare evasion ticketing policy as a result of #AllOnBoard’s advocacy.

Why not run a small experiment and see how fare-free transit goes?

That’s happening. Also in September, Ellis says, the city began an affordable pilot program that will gather data on the impacts of free access to transit for low-income families in Vancouver.

The pilot is offering free transit passes to 100 people and is being administered by four different groups: the Single Mother’s Alliance, South Vancouver Neighbourhood House, Urban Native Youth Association and Eastside Works.

Ellis and the SMA are administering the passes for 30 participants. Their group chose to give transit passes to each member of a household; Ellis says many of the multigenerational family households she’s worked with have often been able to afford a single shared transit pass, if they’re able to afford one at all.

“So one day, mom gets on the bus, but the next day she doesn’t, and then her teen is able to take it,” Ellis says. “And then grandma, who’s also living there, gets it on certain days or at certain times.”

Austin Lui, a social planner with the City of Vancouver who was formerly with the low-barrier employment resource centre Eastside Works, says that while the pilot project is, at its core, about transit, it’s also about much more. “When we talk about work, food security, family, education, this is a key factor that comes up,” he says. “‘I don’t have money for transit, so I can’t access these opportunities,’ or, ‘if I did have a transit pass, it would be so much easier for me to access these opportunities.’”

Giving each member of the family transit passes, Ellis says, will allow for an understanding of how proper access to transit impacts a whole family’s health and well-being.

“What do they do together that they didn’t do before? What kind of savings does that mean for the total household?” she asks.

In the case of a teen playing organized sports, she says by way of example, transit passes for everyone may mean that their loved ones can come and see them play for the first time.

The other group the SMA recruited from, Ellis says, is women living in transitional shelters, who have escaped gender-based violence.

“Their mobility is fundamentally a matter of safety, and often life-or-death,” says Ellis. “How does unrestricted transit mobility impact them and their ability to accomplish what they need to accomplish in terms of getting on their feet with their children?”

‘When we talk about work, food security, family, education,’ says City of Vancouver social planner Austin Lui, low-income people often report: ‘“I don’t have money for transit, so I can’t access these opportunities,” or, “if I did have a transit pass, it would be so much easier for me to access these opportunities.”’

The pilot is already beginning to glean anecdotes from participants, Lui says. A single parent needed to go to the food bank monthly, for example, but the time slot they were allotted lined up with school pickups. Before receiving the transit pass, they had to choose to be late to pickup, risking a call to the Ministry of Children and Family Development, or skip the food bank. Their free transit pass gives them more flexibility: they can now reach more affordable grocery stores on their own schedule, allowing them to rely less on the food bank and make sure they arrive in time for school pickup.

The pilot is employing peer researchers who have lived experience with poverty and transit access to gather data for the pilot. This means the people gathering the data have a lived, on-the-ground experience that informs the kinds of questions and followup questions they’ll ask, Ellis says.

“We’re getting some more nuanced information that we wouldn’t have gotten if a bureaucrat like me went in and asked these questions,” Lui says.

The pilot project will run for six months, until March 2022. The final report is expected to be delivered to Vancouver City Council in May.

The next conversation, Lui says, will be how to turn the pilot’s findings into policies.

Why not electric cars instead?

One of the planks of B.C.’s recently released new climate plan is, alongside encouraging public transit use, “accelerating the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles.”

But you don’t have to be a hater to tweet #bancars.

It’s enough to dislike the fact that you’ve been struck by one. (Full disclosure, the writer has, while following the rules of the road, several times.) It stands to reason that if more people ride transit, and car use falls accordingly, there will be fewer car crashes, which kill around 2,000 people and seriously injure around 9,000 people in Canada every year.

If transit use becomes more widespread, and car use declines, that could open up more room on our paved landscapes for cyclists, pedestrians and other sidewalk users. Busses, too.

Street space is a “zero-sum game,” notes Wilt. “In the cases of buses and streetcars, we’ve seen that dedicated street space, whether it’s a lane or an entire street, results in massive increases in efficiency.

“What that means is, over time, people can rely on the bus to get them where they need to go on a scheduled time, and it shows up when they expect it to. It can create the virtuous cycle I was talking about, in which people want to use transit, because it’s more convenient, and hopefully more affordable, and it comes with many different benefits in terms of climate.”

If what we really want are fewer cars, aren’t there better approaches?

Neoliberal solutions to reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emissions related to cars are not working, Wilt asserts. HOV lanes have not worked; ride-sharing apps have not worked.

Congestion pricing, which uses tariffs, tolls or other fee structures to charge drivers for entering and staying in high-traffic areas, sometimes just during peak times, is a mixed bag. Victor Couture, an assistant professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at UBC, is in favour of congestion pricing in dense areas, like Vancouver, but doesn’t think it would be a “game changer” in B.C. in terms of encouraging transit use and lowering emissions

.
UBC assistant professor of economics Victor Couture has doubts about letting everyone ride public transit for free. ‘Removing the fare for people who take the skytrain to the airport and are already wealthy, it’s not clear that it’s a good use of provincial resources.’ Photo: UBC.

Wilt is more critical, writing in Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? that riding transit is already much more affordable than owning and using a car, so simply making driving more expensive won’t solve the problem. “The impediment to [transit] usage is overwhelming poor service,” he writes, “not the price of driving.”

Electric vehicles, while they offer some benefits, tend to be too expensive for most people — even with large government subsidies (up to $3,000 in B.C.) — and ultimately, won’t be environmentally satisfactory because they do not reduce traffic congestion, require resources to build and maintain, and take up as much parking space as standard cars. (Side note: if you trade in your car, you can also get up to a $1,050 rebate on an e-bike in B.C.)

UBC’s Couture, who moved to downtown Vancouver during the pandemic, has so far mostly commuted the 10 or so kilometres to the university by car. If you want get more people out of cars and riding buses or bikes or walking instead, he says, increasing housing density will probably have a bigger impact than further subsidizing transit.

Couture is not quick to embrace the free-for-all approach. Making transit fare-free for low-income users could be beneficial from an equity standpoint, Couture says, if the money wouldn’t be better used elsewhere. But “removing the fare for people who take the skytrain to the airport and are already wealthy, it’s not clear that it’s a good use of provincial resources.”

Still, Couture acknowledges that he would likely take transit to UBC instead of driving if the SkyTrain extension went ahead, or if there were a well-maintained bus moving in a dedicated bus lane.

But for people with accessibility issues, aren’t there barriers to using transit beyond fares?

Good point. McCain says that while transit in Metro Vancouver has done a relatively good job addressing certain physical accessibility issues, there is still a long way to go.

For example, not all bus stops are accessible. And it’s not always easy to tell. Bus stops are supposed to have signs saying whether or not they are accessible, according to McCain, but people with vision issues may have a hard time reading them.

Heather McCain, the head of Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods and former member of the Access Transit Users’ Advisory Committee, says people on low incomes or with disabilities are facing too many barriers — disability-related and financial — to riding public transit. Photo: CAN.

The Access Transit Committee succeeded in convincing TransLink to include audible stop announcements on transit, McCain adds, but didn’t manage to convince them to include information about whether the SkyTrain doors would be opening on the left or right for any given stop — a key detail for anyone attempting to get off a crowded SkyTrain using a mobility device.

In rural and suburban areas, sidewalk and crosswalk infrastructure will need to be greatly improved, routes will need to be significantly augmented, and stops will need to be frequent enough as well as physically accessible, to make transit viable as a transportation option. (Before you balk at the cost of installing extra kilometres of sidewalks with curb cuts, compare what your city spends on this infrastructure in comparison to road maintenance.)

What about intercity transit?

What if rural and intercity bus services were affordable, reliable and ran frequently? What if they were public services, rather than private enterprises — and what if, as public services, their funding model followed a virtuous cycle, rather than a vicious one?

In 2018, Greyhound announced it would cut all services in western Canada other than its Vancouver–Seattle route. It has since announced a permanent shutdown across Canada. While smaller private services still operate in parts of B.C., notably in high-tourist-traffic routes, many parts of northern and rural B.C. are extremely difficult to access or leave without a car.

Wilt points out that lack of reliable intercity transit tends to hit Indigenous and rural communities hardest, particularly targeting residents of these communities who are older, and who are disabled.

“It also is a major safety issue,” he adds. “As we saw on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, people who don’t have a means of transportation will resort to hitchhiking or travelling with people who they don’t know, which can be extremely dangerous.”

In June 2017, the province launched bus services running along Highway 16, connecting Smithers to Witset and Burns Lake, Burns Lake and Prince George, and Terrace and the Hazeltons. Last year, the routes saw a ridership of about 1,500 people a month.

In September of that year, the CBC spoke with riders who were using the new routes to visit family and go to medical clinics. While everyone they spoke with appreciated the routes, one man who’d bussed to his medical appointment was later seen trying to hitch a ride — the route’s service frequency meant he’d need to wait a few hours to catch the bus, and he wanted to get home faster if he could.


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In short, even this welcome new service could better service its riders.

Speaking from experience as a carless and able-bodied and middle-class person who lives on the northern Sunshine Coast, figuring out how to get from point A to point B is often a confusing puzzle, involving ferries and a bike, or ferries and a taxi and a bus, or ferries and a five-kilometre walk or two. If you’re living in poverty, have a physical disability, or face any other similar barriers, what I find challenging could make leaving your town — or even your home — next to impossible.

It’s here where disability justice, poverty justice, racial justice and climate justice intersect.


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It’s all well and good to say that more people in B.C. should choose greener options over driving personal vehicles and flying — but if transit routes are inconvenient, unreliable and confusing for trip-planning, most people with the ability to drive or fly will choose to drive or fly instead. This leaves everyone who can’t make those choices out in the cold.

Well-funded public transit and intercity transit that is accessible and free to users at their point of service and that runs on a convenient schedule would, with some patience, fundamentally change riders’ relationships to transit. This would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve access to ferries during the busy summer months (if more people opted for transit over personal vehicles), and, most importantly, allow people who currently face significant barriers leaving their home communities for medical appointments, family visits and other things, like vacations, that improve quality of life, more freedom and mobility.

We won’t arrive at that destination without fundamental changes to the way many of us conceive of public transit. Getting there will require significant investment. Transit advocates like Viveca Ellis believe the time has come.

“We would like to shift from this notion of a transit user as a consumer and a customer, to a citizen that has a right to access mobility within their city, or town, or region,” she says. “Transit should not be commodified. Mobility is a universal need.”

How to Destroy the Conservative Brand

Stephen Harper, Jason Kenney and Erin O’Toole are conducting a master class in mess making.

Michael Harris 25 Nov 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist. Author of Party of One, the bestselling exposé of the Harper government, his investigations have sparked four commissions of inquiry.
Cartoon by Greg Perry.

The Conservative Party of Canada’s slide into irrelevance has turned into a bobsled run.

There are many factors driving down the popularity of conservatism in Canada. Let’s unpack them.

Kenney’s calamities

Alberta United Conservative Party Premier Jason Kenney made two epic messes. Dealing with the pandemic by whistling past the graveyard. And pissing away millions of dollars trying to paint critics of the fossil fuel sector as enemies of Alberta (demonizing prophets in the name of profits).

When all was said and done, instead of being seen as the champion of Alberta, he’s come off looking like an uninformed clown on climate change and COVID-19. It’s just a question of who will get this former Stephen Harper cabinet star first: voters in the next election, or his own party.

Harper’s hay making

And then there are the comments and activities of former prime minister Stephen Harper, who clings to the public limelight like a fading movie star.

Recall that in the summer the persistent shadow he casts over the Conservative party intensified. He popped up in the news slamming “woke” culture and calling Justin Trudeau’s pandemic spending “overkill” — even as his consulting firm reportedly snapped up the available federal wage subsidy.

His rumblings so stirred Conservative imaginations that Maclean’s polled voters and concluded that his return to leadership might revive the party from its doldrums and make a race of the then looming fall election. Harper, intoned the magazine, would “attract support that’s not currently available to [Erin] O’Toole.”

This dream scenario failed to take into account Harper’s record since leaving office. First, he says he remains proud of selling $15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia when he was PM. Never mind that the kingdom is one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Who would boast about selling weapons to a region that is a precarious tinderbox? Jobs here, for repression somewhere else? Sound Canadian to you?

Harper also attended Davos in the Desert, hosted by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the leader who U.S. intelligence and the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions believe was involved in the slaughter of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Oct. 2, 2018. Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey by a 15-member hit squad that flew in from Riyadh for the job.

Who would want to be in an audience of business leaders who gave MBS a standing ovation?

Conservative saviour? In the harsh glare of an actual election, would not a significant number of voters be repelled by some of Harper’s business deals as a senior member of AWZ Ventures? The former PM heads up an advisory committee at AWZ trying to sell cutting edge surveillance technology to the United Arab Emirates, which also has a dreadful human rights record. AWZ also finances Israeli spy craft technology.

No wonder Harper had nothing to say when the Biden administration recently blacklisted one of the very Israeli spyware companies, NSO Group, whose goods the former PM was trying to hawk to dictators. The commerce department concluded that NSO’s phone-hacking tools were being used by foreign governments to “maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and embassy works.”

The decision by the U.S. commerce department means that all exports from the U.S. to NSO of any type of hardware or software are prohibited. Why? Because it is part of the Biden administration’s “efforts to put human rights at the centre of U.S. foreign policy, including by working to stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression.”

Erin’s reign of errors

Against that backdrop, it’s time to turn to Erin O’Toole, the man who has plunged the CPC into a leadership dilemma and a branding crisis.

O’Toole has flailed away at Trudeau with the obvious purpose of drawing attention away from his embattled leadership, dismal election results and uncertain relationship with party members.

O’Toole announced that the CPC will be voting against the speech from the throne, and all of its progressive measures. A few months ago, on the campaign trail, he often sounded more like Tommy Douglas than a former Harper cabinet minister. Which confused, because that was a reversal from the social-conservative face he presented to his own party to win the leadership.

And now with the 44th session of Parliament underway, O’Toole has apparently returned to Harperland, the place where one never regulates the energy sector, and climate change is a hoax. O’Toole again sounds like Jason Kenney on caffeine overload.

It comes down to this. The man is so politically flexible no one knows what he really stands for, including his own base. Or if he stands for anything at all, other than winning power.

O’Toole used the throne speech to rededicate his party to the fossil fuel industry and to putting everyone to work. How clever is that? Canadians just chose climate action, Indigenous reconciliation and the management of the pandemic over his plan by a wide margin. O’Toole has ignored their verdict.

Did this guy watch anything coming out of COP26? Did he miss the weather Armageddon in British Columbia? Or on the East Coast? Has he read a single report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Does he realize that teenagers across the country and around the world are more in touch with what is needed from our politicians than he is?

Hip-hip-hooray for the oil patch and jobs, jobs, jobs worked once upon a time, but planetary peril and a pandemic have changed all that. There is a reason that the CPC has lost three elections in a row and is setting itself up for a fourth. It’s time for them to stop following the oil money and start following the science.

It is also time for them to stop using U.S. Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s style of politics by demonizing everything the other side does.

That is O’Toole’s tactic. And so he tells us that the country is suffering from “Trudeau inflation.” Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner even implied the PM was responsible for the price of chicken. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that COVID-19 has led to inflation across the globe, based on the huge cost of fighting the pandemic as well as other factors.

The pandemic has played hell with the supply chain, with the result that too much money is chasing too few goods. That too drives up prices. Trudeau may drive Conservatives crazy, but he doesn’t drive inflation.

It is incompetent to say that Trudeau and his environment minister, Steven Guilbeault, want to deny the energy sector the “opportunity” to supply the world with Alberta oil. The Liberals are talking about capping emissions, not shutting down production.

It is beyond fiction to say, as O’Toole does, that such increased oil sales will lower CO2 emissions. This week, CNN gave the Bullshit Factory Employee of the Year Award to Fox News host Tucker Carlson. It’s a good thing for O’Toole no such award is offered in Canada.

And even at this late stage, the Conservative leader refuses to answer two simple, legitimate questions related to the ongoing pandemic: How many of his caucus members are vaccinated? And how many may be seeking medical exemptions?

O’Toole argues that he can’t answer on the grounds of medical confidentiality, but that is nonsense. No one is asking for their names and addresses, merely a number. More faux pandering to a base he deserted in the last election in an attempt to re-establish his social conservative credentials.

It is beginning to look like O’Toole is entering the spite and malice phase of a ruthless effort to save his leadership. Using his control, at least for now, of the Opposition leader’s office and the apparatus of the party, O’Toole has acted quickly against anyone who has questioned his authority.

Look what he did when member of the party’s national council Bert Chen started a petition to expeditiously review O’Toole’s leadership after his electoral flip-flop and flop. Chen was ostensibly thrown under the bus by the party, and O’Toole would have Canadians believe he had nothing to do with it. Right.

Look what O’Toole did when Saskatchewan Conservative Sen. Denise Batters also launched a petition calling for an early review of his leadership. He fired her by voicemail for having the audacity to suggest a course of action entirely consistent with the party’s constitution. Her public statement that led to her removal from the caucus may yet come back to haunt him:


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“O’Toole has reversed his own positions from his leadership campaign, betrayed Conservative principles, lost seats in the election, and cannot win the next election.”

Of course, O’Toole may yet hold on to his job with the help of his friends, Big Kahuna Tories like former Ontario premier Mike Harris, and a ready supply of caucus toadies hoping to turn loyalty to the current leader into benefits on the short term.

On Wednesday, just before O’Toole explained to the Conservative caucus why he culled Batters from their herd, B.C. MP Bob Zimmer gave him a present. It was a hockey jersey from fellow Tory MPs signalling that O’Toole remains “our captain.”

Captain of the Conservative team Erin O’Toole may still be. But mounting damage to the party’s brand means this dude will never be Captain Canada.

BC FLOODS

Living Through a Mudslide in Harrison Hot Springs

Resident Mervyn Thomas shares his story of narrowly escaping disaster: ‘It was like a freight train.’

Mervyn Thomas, as told to Katie Hyslop 23 Nov 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Mervyn Thomas is a resident of Harrison Hot Springs.

‘It felt like the whole mountain was rushing down onto the house,’ said resident Mervyn Thomas. All images courtesy of Mervyn Thomas.

[Editor’s note: Mervyn and Sabena Thomas live in the District of Kent at the base of Bear Mountain, just outside Harrison Hot Springs. A massive rainfall of 127 millimetres on Sunday, Nov. 14, caused a mudslide down the mountain that cut off access to their street, Rockwell Drive, and severely damaged the home they moved into last year. The following is Mervyn Thomas’s account of that night, as told to reporter Katie Hyslop. For more stories of the deluge that hit B.C. last week, go here.]


Stories from the Deluge

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Around 5:30 on Sunday evening, I was watching football in the living room of our home just outside Sasquatch Provincial Park in Harrison Hot Springs. My wife Sabena was still at work in town but was set to come home soon.

Suddenly a noise came that was so loud it was like a freight train was rushing through the living room. I ran to the back door to try to see what was happening, but it was too dark to see. The noise grew even louder, now accompanied by the sounds of massive trees snapping and cracking, and boulders tumbling down the mountain. It felt like the whole mountain was rushing down onto the house.

Frightened, I ran upstairs to our bedroom on the other side of the house. With my back to the window, I waited for boulders and trees to smash through the walls. The thundering noise kept going for another 10 to 30 seconds, I’m not sure how long I was standing there. But then, other than the pouring rain outside, it was silent.

Not fully dressed, I jumped into a pair of jeans, grabbed a sweater, pulled on my runners and headed out the front door. I don’t know how, but I managed to call 911 on my way out to alert them to the mudslide.

Despite the dark I could see broken tree branches, giant rocks, logs piled against our truck, and a tree lying against the house. We would later find out the pump house in our backyard, as well as our truck, had diverted the worst of the slide away from our house, saving it from destruction.

But there was seven feet of debris on our property, another one of our vehicles was pushed down an adjacent ravine, our driveway had collapsed, and the front of the house was destroyed.

I headed on foot for our neighbours’ house roughly 100 yards away. The slide had missed their house entirely, flowing into Harrison Lake after washing out the only access road to the area.

My neighbour was so scared by the noise, she looked like a ghost when she opened the door. Together we hopped in her car to head into town, but the road was blocked by the mudslide. So we turned around and hung out in her house while we waited for rescue; luckily the power was still on. I was even able to return briefly to our house to pack some essentials and turn off the heat.

We got word that we would be picked up by a rescue boat on Harrison Lake. So around 10 p.m. we headed down to the water along with three women who were vacationing in the area for the weekend with their two dogs. We arrived in Harrison Hot Springs, normally less than a 10-minute drive from our house, at 1:15 a.m.

Sabena, who met me at the dock in the pouring rain, had spent two hours on the phone earlier that evening before she was able to secure us a hotel room for the night. Local flooding and the mudslide meant most of the accommodations in town were fully booked.

Since that night we have been able to return to our home for an hour, again by boat, to pick up some more essentials. We have applied for provincial emergency funding as we have learned our insurance doesn’t cover mudslides. Insurance will cover the apartment we’re renting in Chilliwack, however, while we wait for the state of emergency to lift and to receive word that it is safe to return home.

BC MORE FLOODING EXPECTED
When Surging Floods Meet Expanding Pipelines

The impact of last week’s deluge sends a sobering message, say engineers and activists.

Zoe Yunker 23 Nov 2021 | TheTyee.ca
Zoë Yunker is a Vancouver-based journalist writing about energy and environmental politics. She works with The Tyee as a Tula Foundation Immersive Journalism fellow. Follow her on Twitter @zoeyunker.

Construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline near Hope, BC, in October. The pipeline is currently shut down due to massive floods and landslides that hit the province last week. Photo by Jonathan Hayward, the Canadian Press.


Romilly Cavanaugh stood at the edge of the Coquihalla River north of Hope, watching big trees snap off the bank like blades of grass in a lawn mower. Some of those not swept away held dead fish in their branches three metres off the ground — a reminder of what came before.

Cavanaugh and her fellow engineers had been sent into the chaos for a sole purpose: to watch the Trans Mountain pipeline through the flood of 1995.

Over that week they held vigil in torrential rain because the pipe, usually buried in a thick blanket of soil and rock, was bare and moving up and down in the river “like a piece of cooked spaghetti.”

That was new to her. “You don’t expect metal structures to be moving.”

On the other side of the river was a less visible danger. Enbridge’s Westcoast gas pipeline also had escaped its casing, leaving it at the mercy of rushing water.

Cavanaugh left her job at the company decades ago and now works as an independent environmental engineer. But such memories worry her. “I’ve been watching the news for the last couple days, just praying that we don’t see an oil spill on top of everything else we’ve already seen.”

“It was chaos. And it’s even worse now.”

After massive floods and landslides hit the province last week, the Trans Mountain and one of three Enbridge pipelines were shut down, although oil and gas continued to sit in the pipes.

So far, neither company has reported a leak, but Trans Mountain confirmed in a statement yesterday that the pipeline has sustained damage.

“There are some areas where Trans Mountain will need to restore or cover over the pipe or make other repairs to ensure integrity of the line where it has been exposed due to flooding,” the company said in a statement.

It added that in some areas, rivers began flowing over the pipeline right of way. Workers are now attempting to redirect rivers into their normal channels.

“If all planning and work continues to progress and no further issues with the pipeline are assessed, Trans Mountain is optimistic that we can restart the pipeline, in some capacity, by the end of the week,” the company stated on Monday.

The restart would depend on access to equipment, weather and there being no new “findings of concern,” it added.

The Enbridge pipeline affected by flooding resumed operations yesterday.

Trans Mountain has said its pipeline expansion now being constructed is designed to withstand a 10-per-cent increase in flood activity to account for climate change. Research suggests that will likely be insufficient.

The Trans Mountain pipeline that is being twinned traverses one of the country’s main drainage basins — and flooding hotspots — in the Fraser-Lower Mainland region.

The Coquihalla and Coldwater rivers, which Trans Mountain follows, “are the most dangerous spots for a potential spill from a flood like this,” said Cavanaugh.


“The rivers are really fast moving, and the pipeline is super close to the river — it goes under it in several locations.”

When completed, Trans Mountain’s expansion project will triple the amount of oil flowing through its pipes to over 890,000 barrels per day.

Mayuk Manuel, a member of the Tiny House Warriors, a movement resisting the Trans Mountain expansion project, reports seeing Trans Mountain construction sites abandoned on the highway driving up to Hope.

In some regions, empty pipeline trenches had been turned into muddy rivers.

“There was so much erosion from how fast the water was moving,” she said. “How risky is this? Are we willing to take that risk?”

Kai Nagata, energy and democracy director at the Dogwood Initiative, said the construction zone has sustained damage. “The path of construction has been just hammered by debris slides and covered in mud in a bunch of different places, and the access roads are washed out.”

The government-owned project has faced three delays in just over a year, pausing for safety incidents, COVID and wildfires. That’s upped an already-dubious investment, said Nagata.

“The whole equation around using public money to build Trans Mountain deteriorates every time the project encounters a delay, and this is a significant delay with no end date in sight.”

Crews working on the project in the Coquihalla and Merritt regions have been redeployed to get the existing line back into operation, said Trans Mountain in an emailed statement, adding that it had not evacuated any of its work camps.

‘We account for this’

Dharma Wijewickreme, a professor in geotechnical engineering at the University of British Columbia and founder of the Pipeline Integrity Institute, is firm in stating, “Based on the available information, I think it’s fair to say pipelines are one of the safest ways of transporting fluid over long distances.”

But Wijewickreme also acknowledges the risks that floods pose to pipeline infrastructure.

Key among those issues is the power of soil, which under landslide and flood conditions can push the pipeline in different directions from underground.

“When that happens, the pipelines will be subjected to deformations,” he said. Such pressures can cause the pipe to pop up or bend.

The type of soil also presents a risk factor, said Wijewickreme. Areas with soft sedimentary soils, like the Fraser Valley, can increase risks to the line.

And when buried underneath rivers, pipelines are at risk of “scouring,” as fast-moving rivers scrape off the rock and topsoil meant to keep pipelines buried underground.

Concrete river weights were placed above Trans Mountain pipeline exposed in the Coquihalla River after flooding in 1995.

None of these dangers are new, said Wijewickreme. “When you design pipelines, normally as engineers, we account for this.”

He described a number of new methods he and colleagues use, including burying pipes deeper underneath waterways and reinforcing pipeline walls. Engineers also design pipelines so that they’re thicker in areas where the pipe has to withstand greater pressure, like under river crossings.

Still, flood-related spills happen.

In June 2013, Alberta suffered a major flood, triggering two spills linked directly to the disaster. That included a sour gas leak on Legacy Oil and Gas’s company’s line, caused by a puncture from floating debris to an exposed pipeline. The leak led to evacuation of 2,100 residents living nearby.

Later, a spill in northeast Alberta on Enbridge’s Wood Buffalo pipeline system spilled around 750 barrels of crude oil. At the time, the company pointed to heavy rainfall that led to the kind of underground soil movement that Wijewickreme highlighted.

When floods block access

Back at the riverbed during the flooding of 1995, Cavanaugh and her team watched with trepidation. If they did witness a leak, there would be little to do but warn those downstream.

That’s the danger of compound disasters like oil spills and floods happening simultaneously, she said. Clean up crews are subject to safety precautions and won’t be sent into a disaster zone to quell an oil spill.

“If there’s a spill, an evacuation, or if the spill occurs in a fast-moving river, no amount of equipment will help you if you can’t get there,” she said.

Road access presents another issue. Although Trans Mountain has access to networks of back country roads and bridges leading to the pipeline right of way, those roads can easily become obstructed.

In the 1995 flood, Cavanaugh said damage to roads and bridges “took years for them to recover.”

During the National Energy Board hearings for Trans Mountain expansion project, the Sto:lo Collective raised concerns about the risks of natural hazards such as flooding and landslides in the Fraser Valley, citing incidents like the floods on the Fraser over the decades.

Trans Mountain responded saying that the project was designed to withstand hazards and would “implement mitigation measures where avoidance was not possible.”

But Cavanaugh questions the power of cleanup measures. An effort that managed to salvage 10 to 15 per cent of leaked bitumen mixed with toxic diluting agents would be considered “successful spill response in a river,” she said.

So far, B.C.’s devastating flood hasn’t triggered any pipeline ruptures, but the climate crisis promises to make floods more severe, and more frequent.

As Tara Troy, associate professor in hydrology at the University of Victoria, puts it, “If a flood is bad luck, then climate change increases your probability of bad luck.”

In seeking approval of its pipeline expansion, Trans Mountain committed to meeting provincial requirements that the pipeline be designed to withstand a level of flooding at one-in-200-year levels on water crossings, with higher standards on three individual rivers.

Flooding in the Merritt region last week likely surpassed that level, said Brett Eaton, a fluvial geomorphologist at the University of British Columbia.

It’s also unclear whether those design standards apply to sections of pipeline that don’t cross water bodies, but may run alongside them, and became inundated by water in the floods Cavanaugh witnessed, and last week.

Trans Mountain was not able to provide clarification by press time.

And the company’s proposed design fix to account for a 10-per-cent increase in flood activity from climate change might not be sufficient.

A 2021 study of the climate impacts of flooding in Canada found that the Fraser-Lower Mainland region would see a 20-per-cent increase in 200-year floods in the near future, and a 30-per-cent increase in such floods from 2061 to the end of the century.

Nagata says there’s an obvious need to reassess risks posed by the Trans Mountain pipeline and expansion.


What’s at Stake with the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion?

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“Nobody expected the Coquihalla to just melt,” he said, “All of the concerns that have been raised by critics of the project over the last 10 years I think have to be looked at again and taken seriously.”

Wijewickreme remains optimistic that pipelines can be the safest way to transport fossil fuels and other chemicals, as long as those who design and build them pay attention to climate science.

The way weather is trending, he said, damages “could be more than anticipated at the time of design.”

Cavanaugh is less sanguine. The engineer watches the current devastation and reflects back to the flood of 1995 that left her shaken. Last week’s deluge is “on a completely different scale,” she said, not only in terms of levels but areas affected.

“Instead of funding the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion we should be reinforcing infrastructure and planting trees and looking for jobs and things for people to do,” she said. “It’s very frustrating.”