With the 1959 opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway linking Montreal’s ports to Lake Ontario, the lakes opened to the rest of the globe. Today, annual shipping exceeds 200 million net tonnes; almost a quarter of that travels to and from overseas ports.

As a result, the region is now the world’s fourth-largest economy. With a GDP of $4.7 trillion, the Great Lakes account for 28 per cent of combined Canadian and U.S. economic activity, according to a 2013 report from BMO Nesbitt Burns. Manufacturing is the top industry.

That makes the region particularly vulnerable to global economic volatility, but it also faces a more insidious risk: climate change. The symptoms – low water levels, extreme weather conditions and invasive species – threaten not only the Great Lakes, but also its businesses and people.

Lower lakes, lower revenues

Huron and Michigan’s levels have been below average for the past 14 years, and in January 2013 both lakes reached record lows. Ontario, Erie and Superior also face persistent low levels.

Gail Krantzberg, professor of civil engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, says climate change is part of the reason. “There’s less ice cover in winter, and you get evaporation in the winter months that is not compensated for by [rain] in the summer months. You also get snow packs that melt in the middle of winter, so there’s no spring meltwater, and that lowers levels even more.”

These conditions “are a direct threat to manufacturing in the Great Lakes,” says Ed Wolking, president of the Great Lakes Manufacturing Council in Detroit. He says they also challenge the $33.5 billion commercial navigation industry.

That’s because there is now less clearance at key transit points on the lakes, forcing ships to reduce the amount of cargo they carry. This is concerning in part because shipping is more fuel-efficient than rail and truck delivery per tonne of cargo.

The Lake Carriers’ Association (LCA) estimates for every inch of water drop, its 57 ships have to leave behind 8,000 tonnes of cargo – enough iron ore to produce steel for 6,000 cars. What’s more, “Vessels are reducing loads by an average of 15 per cent per trip to avoid scraping the bottoms of harbours and channels,” says the LCA.

Wolking adds, “A ship that would make 50 trips a year would incur extra costs of $2 million a year from operating at a depth shortfall of 24 inches. Consumers and manufacturers will pay for it in the end.”

Manufacturing operations also suffer. “If a [factory] has a near-shore water intake, [it could be] high and dry now,” says Stephen Carpenter, director of the Center for Limnology (a term for freshwater science) at the University of Wisconsin. “They’d have to build the pipe out further or deeper, and that costs money.”

Lower lake levels also threaten local tourism, which rakes in $12 billion annually, and fisheries, a $7 billion industry. A consortium of Georgian Bay mayors in Ontario says cottagers will have to spend $500 million to extend and repair docks and water systems. Marinas have to dig up sediment, or dredge, to maintain enough clearance for boats. And businesses that rely on a thriving waterfront suffer when harbours dry up.

Commercial and recreational fishers can’t go as close to shore as they used to, which reduces the types and number of fish they can catch. Those who risk it can damage their boats when bottoms hit shore.

Flooding the supply

Not only are the Great Lakes now chronically low, but when rainfall comes, too much comes down on water systems too quickly. In June 2012, about 10 inches of rain fell over northeastern Minnesota in less than 24 hours, causing more than $100 million in damage. Then, in July 2013, a record-breaking five inches fell on Toronto in seven hours, cutting power to 500,000 people.

According to reinsurer Munich Re, such extreme weather events aren’t going away. From 1980 to 2011, they became more frequent in the United States. Such storms cause massive flooding, and are exacerbated in major cities because asphalt surfaces don’t absorb water. Instead, rain must flow into storm drains, further overwhelming infrastructure. “That releases sewage back into the lakes,” says Krantzberg. “There’s economic burden for municipalities, households, businesses and insurance companies when basements get backed up with sewage, for example, or when entire bridges get washed away.”

And in rural areas, heavy rains wash soil and fertilizer into lakes. Trouble is, that runoff includes phosphorus, which boosts algal growth. Too much algae clogs water intakes, imbalances fish populations and irritates people’s skin. That drives away tourists, and challenges recreational and commercial fishers.

“Storm events are going to transport more nutrients into the lakes and lead to more algal bloom, coastal pollution and water quality problems,” says Carpenter. “That means the water drawn needs to be [more heavily] treated, which is expensive.”

In 2011, Lake Erie experienced its worst bloom in decades – it covered a fifth of the lake. Boats had to slow down when driving through the toxic, neon-green scum, reports news service EcoWatch.

Unwelcome guests

Climate change and carelessness have caused more than 180 non-native species to settle in the Great Lakes. “As the lakes warm, some species that couldn’t handle the deep cold waters now can,” says Krantzberg. And as global trade increases, so do the number of international ships and the number of foreign species hitching rides.

These species have caused declines in almost 46 per cent of local endangered plants and animals. One invader, the common reed, has grown so densely on shorelines that birds can’t nest and fish can’t move, says Mary Muter, chair of Sierra Club Ontario’s Great Lakes section.

And invasive fish and animals disrupt the food chain, meaning native species may not get enough to eat. Recreational and commercial fisheries suffer if their usual catch disappears.

“Salmon are valuable both for sport and commercial fishing, but the entire [Chinook salmon] fishery is now dwindling” in Lake Huron, says Carpenter. “To some extent that’s being replaced by inshore fishing of walleye and yellow perch, but that means the industry [has to] retool.”

Invaders can also cause problems for municipalities and manufacturers. Zebra mussels arrived in Lake St. Clair in the late 1980s via transoceanic ships. The crustaceans like to colonize intake pipes, clogging them. Controlling this costs $250 million each year, according to the University of Wisconsin. Worse, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the mussels cause “billions in damage annually to boats, docks, hydroelectric systems and other vital infrastructure.”

And scientists are concerned about a potential invader: Asian carp. The carp make up 95 per cent of fish in some parts of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. They breed quickly and eat voraciously. Silver carp can leap as high as 10 feet out of the water when disturbed, damaging property and injuring people.

The carp haven’t yet reproduced in the Great Lakes system, but if they do, they could devastate native fish populations, and thus the combined $23 billion fishing and recreation boating industries. Recognizing that, in 2002 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built electronic barriers in the Chicago Area Waterway System to prevent migration of the carp from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan.

Such initiatives aren’t cheap. The barrier cost $9 million to erect and $47 million to maintain in 2011. In total, the U.S. government has invested more than $200 million over four years in anti-carp measures. As part of that, in July 2013, the government will spend $51.2 million to upgrade existing barriers and construct new ones.

Completely dividing the two waterways could cost up to $9.5 billion, finds a 2012 report from the Great Lakes Commission and the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative.

Solutions: mitigation, adaptation

The threats facing the Great Lakes magnify each other, so mitigation requires broad action. Slowing climate change should be an industry priority, says Carpenter. “Their livelihoods depend on the climate, so they should be activists in climate improvement.”

He recommends removing U.S. and Canadian biofuel subsidies. “It’s driven a huge increase in corn acreage, which is the most harmful crop for water quality,” he says. “Corn is not good at intercepting runoff, and the land sits vacant for nine months of the year. There’s a short line between the subsidy and harm to water resources.”

Agriculture can also stem fertilizer runoff to help reduce algal bloom. “Increase the amount of cover by year-round vegetation so we don’t have a lot of bare soil,” he suggests. “Use less phosphorus fertilizer.”

Saad Jasim, an environmental consultant and former director with the International Joint Commission (IJC), agrees. “If you used to put fertilizer down in September, but now the heavy rains come in September, wait another month because you don’t want to waste money,” he says.

Improving infrastructure can also help reduce severe storm damage and prevent sewage from getting into the lakes. “Our wastewater infrastructure isn’t designed for the 100-year storm, which is now happening a few times a year,” says Krantzberg. She says to adapt, municipalities should upsize pipes when it’s time for repairs. Cities can also redevelop brownfields and leave greenfields to absorb rainwater.

To compensate for impervious city surfaces, Krantzberg says local businesses can “use porous pavement, [construct] green roofs and put bioswales [grassy gutters that let water percolate down] on the sides of parking lots.”

Industry players should also track and manage their water impact. The Council of Great Lakes Industries is creating a region-specific water footprinting tool based on the Alliance for Water Stewardship model and set to launch in 2014.

To prevent new invaders, ships must follow water intake and discharge regulations. Ships are required to: take on water when floating high to avoid sucking bottom-feeders, minimize the amount of water drawn, treat water prior to discharge, and only discharge in designated areas.

To combat low lake levels, many industries have advocated dredging. But it can displace marine life and disrupt water flows. “From an environmental perspective, dredging is a pretty horrible activity,” says Muter.

Instead, she applauds the IJC’s April 2013 recommendation to install flow-reduction sills in the St. Clair River, saying the structures would both increase lake levels and protect fish habitats over the long term. The IJC proposed raising levels by 10 inches; Muter would prefer 20 inches. She adds there’s an outstanding agreement between the U.S. and Canada for 16 inches.

Sills, which are like speed bumps, would hold water back on Lake Huron. Muter estimates it would cost about $200 million. “It will take three years for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to come up with the analysis,” she says, and another year for governments to agree to and fund the project. “Within 10 years the water levels in Michigan, Huron and Georgian Bay can be restored.”

While some stakeholders may not be able to wait, Muter says that’s the “harsh reality when dealing with bi-national waters.” Plus, dredging can literally only go so far. If you install sills responsibly, she says, “you protect all Great Lakes and deal with 100 years of human alterations in the St. Clair.”

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In fact, the environmental NGO (ENGO) staffer had to explain, it was going to be about increasing the diversity of voices within the environmental movement—an issue such organizations have historically failed to recognize.

That’s a problem, says Dong, because at the moment, the predominant voice is likely to be middle-class and white, despite an increasingly diverse population. As the diversity project manager at the Sustainability Network, a Toronto-based ENGO, Dong sometimes finds herself the only non-white attendee at environmental events.

“Most ENGOs today have little diversity and don’t reflect or authentically engage the communities they serve,” she says. For instance, the executive directors of the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF), Greenpeace Canada, Pembina Institute, Sierra Club of Canada and WWF-Canada are all white males.

It’s a North American problem, too. American environmentalists of colour such as Lisa Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Marcelo Bonta, executive director of the Center for Diversity and the Environment in Oregon, have coined the phrase “tyranny of fleece” to highlight the movement’s homogeneity.

Perhaps top ranks aren’t filled with people of colour because ENGOs don’t think diversity is necessary. A 2009 report by Earth Day Canada found ENGOs mistakenly believe visible minorities are not interested in environmental well-being. In a time when mainstream environmental interest is fading—contrast the discourse of the 2008 and 2011 federal elections—ENGOs must extend their reach into diverse communities more than ever.

Looking in the mirror

“The environmental movement is failing,” says geneticist and broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki. “I don’t call myself an environmentalist anymore. It’s time to broaden our tent and realize if we are working for a sustainable society, any group facing terrorism, genocide or war is not going to give a damn about the environment.”

Freelance journalist Ayana Meade agrees that when survival is at stake, environmental issues aren’t top of mind. Meade, who is based in New York, founded the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Diversity Task Force in response to the low percentage of journalists of colour reporting on environmental issues.

“Poor people of colour aren’t going to be concerned with existential happenings like global warming,” says Meade. “The movement needs to connect with their immediate concerns: economic and social development.”

This is vital, since environmental degradation disproportionally impacts people of colour. A 2005 Associated Press study found black Americans are 79 per cent more likely than whites to live in neighbourhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger. While there hasn’t been an equivalent Canadian study, as of January 2011, almost one in five First Nations communities—117 in total—were under drinking water advisories.

For that reason, says Meade, “it’s important the face of the movement is not just a white face. It should reflect the people most affected by these issues.”

To achieve that reflection, ENGOs need to take off their blinders and realize “hunger and poverty are [their] issues,” Suzuki says. “We’ve got to look at issues of equity and peace [because] they work against truly sustainable societies.”

Reflecting the community

When reaching out to ethnic communities, the DSF tries to remind people social justice and the environment are linked. Suzuki uses his own family history as an example.

“My grandparents came to Canada from Japan in the 1900s for the fish,” Suzuki says. “Many in the East Indian community came for the trees and are still involved in farming in the Okanagan. We explain those resources are all heavily under assault. We’re also trying to tell people the way we live means many of the oil companies are going into more extreme areas to drill, impacting the countries many of our immigrants come from.”

Suzuki’s childhood also shows that diverse communities have much to teach environmentalists. He recalls his parents taking pride in a coat they bought for him that was later handed down to each of his three sisters. “The idea of a throwaway society wasn’t a part of my childhood,” he says. “When you’re poor, you make do with whatever you have.”

Dong’s mother, a Chinese immigrant, had a similar upbringing. “She composts, recycles and grows her own food. She was poor when she was young,” she says. Yet Dong’s mother doesn’t self-identify as an environmentalist. Says Dong: “I think about all the people who wouldn’t call themselves environmentalists, yet should be involved with the discourse because they do all [the right] things.”

Following tradition from the motherland can lead to green actions, too. Suzuki recalls visiting a friend’s Italian parents who grow their own vegetables, can their own sauces and make their own sausages.

“They’re living like they did in Italy,” he says. “I said to my friend, ‘This is what we’ve got to rediscover.’ He was kind of embarrassed they’re still clinging to [tradition.] But this is where a huge amount of the movement has got to go: becoming much more local and self-sufficient. Immigrant groups that come here having a much smaller ecological footprint are going to be instructive in how to live with much less of everything.”

To that end, ENGOs need to realize they can have two-way conversations with diverse communities and forge reciprocal relationships.

“Go out to events,” says Dong. “Learn about the culture and ask what people are interested in before you start talking about your organization. We tend to think we know what’s best—it’s almost paternalistic. Don’t think you’re the expert and [that only] they are going to benefit from the discussion.”

Winnie Hwo, a DSF climate change campaigner and award-winning journalist from the Chinese-Canadian media who is active in Vancouver’s Chinese communities, agrees. “Every time we do outreach, it’s a two-way conversation.”

Hwo has found immigrants are “the doers” because they want to save money. “We’re learning from them,” she says. “We need to widen our thinking as environmental activists and tell [immigrants] they’re doing the right thing.”

Dong cautions the alternative to such engagement can be costly and counterproductive.

“We’ve heard from groups who have invested in translation services, and have stacks of literature in their office because no one wants it,” says Dong. “You need to understand whether or not those translations are meaningful to that community. It’s like looking for a job and adjusting your cover letter accordingly.”

That means removing jargon from pamphlets that even native English speakers stumble over. “How do you explain environmental capacity-building?” Dong laughs. “You can do a straight translation but it’s not going to make sense.”

As such, ENGOs are demanding assistance—and Dong is more than happy to provide it via Sustainability Network’s ENGO-geared Environment and Diversity Project. For instance, the network’s Aboriginal training session for ENGO employees in 2009 turned out to be one of its most popular workshops.

“We’re just not informed about the people who really founded this country. There’s this steep learning curve,” she says. “But because there’s an urgency to work on these issues, we want to just fast-track through it. It doesn’t work that way.”

While some feel diversity is an end goal, Dong says it’s a journey that’s never done. “You have to work at it. There’s always something you need to learn. We need to listen to the feedback coming back to us.”

Harpreet Johal, a fellow climate campaigner with DSF, says the feedback she’s seen is a hunger for more environmental information in the Indo-Canadian communities. “They’re really happy when we come knocking on their doors and ask for input on what role we can play,” Johal says. “A lot of people are already doing more than the average person for the environment, just for different reasons.”

She and Hwo are pleasantly surprised at Suzuki’s name recognition in ethnic communities, and enjoy bringing him onto Vancouver’s ethnic radio shows to engage with diverse communities.

“Even though he needs translation, he’s talking directly to the audience. They call in and try to impress him,” Hwo says. “They say things like, ‘Can you tell David I don’t eat meat three days each week, even though he suggests starting with one day a week?’ ”

Hwo and Johal connect with ethnic community leaders who recognize Suzuki’s name and are receptive to the green message. These leaders then spread that message within their neighbourhoods. It’s this type of grassroots effort, experts agree, that will lead to more inclusive and lasting change.

Other shades of green

MELDI
The Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative (MELDI) is a project housed at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. MELDI aims to increase diversity in environmental organizations as well as within the broader environmental movement. It also promotes greater leadership diversity in the environmental field.

MELDI’s faculty and staff conduct research on environmental workforce dynamics and provide resources such as jobs directories, a listing of environmental justice researchers and organizations, and a database of over 200 minority environmental professionals.

Hip Hop Caucus
The Hip Hop Caucus is an American civil and human rights organization that began in 2004. Its vision is to create a more just and sustainable world by engaging more people, particularly youth and people of colour, in the civic and policy making process. With over 650,000 supporters across the U.S., its makeup is quite diverse: 70 per cent are under 40 and 60 per cent are female; a majority are African-American and Latino, with a large white contingent, as well as Asian-American and Native American.

“The environmental movement needs to connect with young people, and the best way to do that is with popular culture,” says Ayana Meade. “Particularly with young people of colour, it’s the hip hop culture.”

Green Change
The Green Change project is an initiative that was started in 2009 to reach out to residents in the Jane-Finch corridor of Toronto on environmental issues. The area has a multicultural population that includes refugees and low-income earners, and it frequently struggles with gang violence. The project trains local youth to talk to residents about reducing waste, conserving energy and other money-saving green ideas.

Sonia Dong says the project is successful because of the grassroots approach. “Other environmental groups were coming out and asking, ‘Why do you have a space heater in your apartment?’ or ‘Why are you opening the window when the heat’s on?’ ” What these other groups didn’t understand, she says, is that residents of community housing [generally] do not have control over the thermostats.

“People are familiar with the youth ambassadors and trust them,” Dong says. As a result, these ambassadors are able to gain more insight into residents’ needs. Resulting initiatives include a green jobs project that will see carpenters providing technical skills training for green renovations.

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RUBIN: The trend from the last four decades has been suburban sprawl. Increasing amounts of car ownership and huge extension of freeways moving into the hinterland has seen people moving from the cities to the suburbs. This is an unsustainable practice. Firstly, the cost of commuting is going to increase. Secondly, we’re going to find that much of the prime agricultural land that has been paved over to accommodate urban sprawl, like in Southern Ontario, will be needed for [agriculture].

In a world of triple-digit oil prices, we’re not going to get chicken wings from China. Sure, the wages are going to be cheaper there. But what we save we’ll more than squander on [the fuel it takes to get] food here. So there’s going to be a move back to local or regional agriculture dictated by higher prices. You’re going to see a movement of people from far-flung suburbs back into the city.

The biggest issue will be public transit. I forecast out of a vehicle stock of roughly 250 million vehicles in the U.S., some 20 per cent would take the exit lane if motorists had to pay the same fuel prices as Western Europeans have for the last 10 years. But if [those] drivers were to get off the road right now and try to get on a bus or a subway, they wouldn’t be able to. No transit system in North America has 20 per cent spare capacity.

CK: What about peak water?

RUBIN: The problem is water and growing populations [aren’t in the same places]. We’re going to find areas like the U.S. Southwest becoming a lot more unsustainable, and cities like Boston might get another at-bat in terms of economic revitalization. The cities along the Great Lakes look significantly advantaged. [Freshwater access] will become even more important as global climate change leads to greater water scarcities in areas that have recently seen huge increases in population and economy.

CK: How will peak oil affect international business?

RUBIN: It’s going to change the very nature of the way business is organized. In recent decades companies have become extremely specialized. We’re going to find that most businesses—except, ironically, the oil business and other resource businesses—are going to become a lot more local and regional. Markets far away on the other side of the world are going to soon become inaccessible because of transport costs. Your familiarity with your local market will probably become one of your most important sources of comparative advantage.

Just-in-time inventories will not be possible in a global supply chain. Even the idea of a global supply chain may become untenable. You’re already seeing companies like Procter and Gamble reorganizing their supply chains as transport costs become a lot more important.

CK: What do you favour as an alternative to oil?

RUBIN: Unfortunately, there is no substitute for oil as a transit fuel, mainly because natural gas packs only one quarter of the energy density of oil. We don’t have enough time [to develop a substitute] and our rendez-vous with triple-digit oil prices [per barrel] is not in 10 or 15 years, but in 10 or 15 weeks. The solution lies on the demand side. We have to change our economy so that it’s not so dependent on oil or transit costs. Instead of operating as a global economy, which is an energy and oil-intensive way of doing business, we have to go back to local or regional economies. It won’t prevent oil from being in triple-digit range, [but] it’ll certainly mitigate the impact of those oil prices on our economic performance.”

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So it’s no surprise to see Vancity and two fellow co-operatives, Mountain Equipment Co-op and The Co-operators Group, constituting the top three companies in the Corporate Knights Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada for 2010. Desjardins, another co-operative, placed seventh.

Vancity and The Co-operators now have their first female CEOs, Tamara Vrooman and Kathy Bardswick, respectively. Vrooman and Bardswick were in Toronto on October 29 to speak at the Economic Club of Canada on what others can learn from their business models.

Co-operatives are owned, operated, and governed by a group of consumers or employees for mutual benefit, a structure that seems to orient a company toward being a better corporate citizen.

“The full reason a co-operative exists is for the benefit of its members,” says Vrooman, who is also a member of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. “You make different decisions than when you’re worried that your capital is migratory and investors can take it out of your organization.” A stable capital base from member contributions means being able to take on a long-term perspective.

“If banks lived in the communities [they operated in], they wouldn’t have created subprime mortgages,” Vrooman points out. She also emphasizes that the stronger relationship her employees have with customers—since both groups are members of Vancity—helps in turn to make the company stronger.

“[Our innovations] don’t come from the C-suite, they come from our frontline staff being face-to-face with our members,” says Vrooman. The first woman Vancity lent to without a male cosigner was a nurse and well-known to staff, so they made the exception that became the rule. “In that way we’ve been able to lend to markets that other financial institutions have written off as risky,” such as new immigrants, with relatively low numbers of defaults, says Vrooman.

Bardswick says some insurers leave the communities they insure if they cannot find a solution for dealing with extreme weather conditions. Since The Co-operators’ mandate is to provide financial security to Canadians, it stays in communities and instead looks at adaptation strategies. Bardswick is the chair of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction and has overseen the rebuilding of several heavily damaged homes to higher building standards. She sees The Co-operators as having a pivotal role in changing building codes to include these higher standards for everyone’s benefit.

Co-operatives also follow the “one member, one vote” principle, meaning each member has equal voting rights. This creates some interesting outcomes at the ballot box during director elections. “When you have an open and democratic process, [the directors elected] are more diverse,” says Vrooman. Vancity’s board currently has more female than male members, and has had visible minority members in the past.

Vrooman sees age as the next bastion of board diversity. To that end, Vancity is implementing online voting for its annual general meetings. Plus, the barriers to entry are low: a director candidate only needs to be 18 years old and own a $5 membership share.

Both CEOs agree co-operatives need to do a better job of “amplifying” the message of their benefits and advantages. “It’s one of our best kept secrets,” says Bardswick. She points out a credit union, Sherwood Credit Union, was the first institution to install the first full-service ATM in Canada, adding that co-ops tend to innovate because they have to.

“We came about because of unserved needs, and we continue to be driven by needs of our communities,” she says.

And in the case of insurance, co-operatives make up 26 per cent of the worldwide insurance market, a share that has been growing at a clip of one per cent per year the past several years.

“The consumer [wants] to do business with us for reasons that we actually have to deliver on,” says Bardswick, “They want to work with an organization that represents itself as being responsible, with a broader social purpose beyond making profit.”

For co-operatives, the almighty member comes before the almighty dollar—but the dollar seems to follow close behind.

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“I was a family physician in rural practice for over 20 years and twice I had individuals who chose to go blind rather than travel to the big city to access an eye specialist,” says Dr. Roger Strasser, founding dean of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. “So you can hardly say the system is meeting the needs of those patients.”

Those patients were scared of leaving their community, he explains. “If you’ve never been to a big city, it’s really terrifying. People who grow up in rural areas feel comfortable there. They want to access health care [close to home].”

That’s not easy when almost a third of Canadians live in rural areas with access to one tenth of our country’s physicians. The result: rural Canadians have more illnesses and a shorter life expectancy than their urban peers. Specifically, First Nations men and women live seven and five years less, respectively, than other Canadians.

And things are about to get worse. In July 2010, the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine (CJRM) found one in seven rural physicians are planning to move from their communities within the next two years.

Despite the fact that Canada’s urban population is growing and small towns are disappearing, rural and Aboriginal health care should not fall further through the cracks. Beyond the fact that all Canadians deserve the same access to care, rural Canada generates the country’s fuel and food supply, and as arctic sovereignty issues heat up, access to health care in the far north will be critical to keeping a population settled there.

Before nurse practitioner Renate Bennett’s small forestry community of Caledonia, N.S. banded together eight years ago to build a local health care facility, she was working out of a small trailer without heat or running water. We’re not wealthy, she says, “but people were able to find $100 because they were committed enough to having this building.” Bennett knows some communities are not as fortunate. “Sooner or later, if people can’t access primary health care in a rural community, they’re going to end up in a larger centre.”

Frieda Prince, social development worker for the Lower Similkameen Indian Band in the Okanagan Valley of B.C., agrees. “All those people in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal come from somewhere, usually the smaller communities. When you look at your Downtown Eastside, wherever that is in whatever community you’re in, that’s usually made up of people migrating to the larger centres from [rural] communities.”

Instead of promoting a diaspora from rural to urban centres, Dr. Strasser says the best health care solutions come from the rural communities themselves. “There is a tendency to take models from the city and somehow try to miniaturize them. Worst case scenario, it leads to a collapse of the health service.”

The urban formula for determining where to locate care facilities based on population density is one example of this collapse. When applied to rural communities, facilities are often concentrated in one area, which means surrounding districts have to travel far distances. Instead, Dr. Strasser says planners should look at integrated health services, which mix emergency, short-term, and long-term care beds in the same facility. But that means having versatile practitioners.

“Rural practitioners provide a wider range of services,” says Dr. Strasser. “They carry a higher level of clinical responsibility, in relative professional isolation.”

That isolation presents both challenges and opportunities. With fewer health providers, people get overworked and don’t last very long, says Dr. Michael Jong, Associate Professor with the Northern Family Medicine Education Program (NorFam) at Memorial University. But once there is a “reasonable” number of peers, the broad scope of practice available to doctors means they’ll stay, says the CJRM’s July survey. And there are other exciting benefits.

“[Health providers] live in the community they serve, so they have the opportunity to assist the community as a whole in improving their health,” says Dr. Strasser. “In a small town in rural Australia, the local doctor was so effective in presenting the message of the relationship between red meat, cholesterol, and heart disease the butcher shop started selling fish.”

To achieve such effectiveness, the NorFam program at Memorial trains physicians in rural areas, for rural areas. At the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in Sudbury, first-year students spend four weeks living and learning in Aboriginal communities.

That type of immersion, Dr. Jong says, is the key to successful retention. Dr. Jong came to rural Labrador from Malaysia to practice medicine in the late 1970s and having seen many doctors come and go, he has a deep understanding of the issues with a transient provider population.

“You cannot parachute someone into the community [to help you and] solve your problems. Residents say, ‘You need to be around for at least a couple of years before we trust you.’ Most people hate retelling their medical issues over and over again,” he says.

With programs that expose students to the issues, the fear of working in a rural environment is eliminated. “Most of the doctors here in Labrador were trained here, except the old guys like me.”

And rural and Aboriginal students often prefer staying close to home. The University of Lethbridge has a Support Program for Aboriginal Nursing Students (SPANS) located relatively close to the Blood and Piikani reserves. It prepares and supports First Nations, Métis, and Inuit students throughout the four-year Bachelor of Nursing Program by incorporating mentorship and the wisdom of elders. Before the program there were at most four aboriginal nursing students, and now there are 60, says Dr. Judith Kulig, SPANS’ coordinator.

A varied approach is needed not just for education, but for the doctor-patient relationship.

“We need to allow physicians a multiplicity of ways of dealing with their patients,” says Dr. Diane de Camps Meschino, a staff psychiatrist at Women’s College Hospital. One of her psychiatric patients lives two hours away and has three kids. Despite icy roads in winter, Dr. Meschino can’t treat her by telephone. “A system like that is revolting.”

While Dr. Meschino treats some patients by phone and doesn’t get paid, she criticizes, “How is a system [like] that sustainable?” Increased use of technology would help both patients and other doctors, especially those in remote areas who can’t just go next door to ask their colleague a question.

“While I was on holiday, I had a call from a doctor in a small town in Ontario, and an email from a physician in Newfoundland [looking for specialized expert advice],” she says. “If I can give that kind of information in five minutes to a doctor, it means [neither the doctor nor] the patient has to travel, and the patient gets timely care.”

Some options include telehealth programs, which use video conferencing to connect doctors with each other and with patients. There is also email consultation. In his town of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Dr. Jong says they are piloting remote-controlled robots for surgeries.

But we need to start with the basics. “Canada has among the lowest rate of electronic health records in primary care in the industrialized world,” says Dr. Danielle Martin, Chair of Canadian Doctors for Medicare. “That’s a real barrier to patient safety,” she says, since documentation of prescriptions, allergies, and other medical history is crucial to proper treatment.

Technology alone won’t solve the problem. A different view of what it means to be healthy, however, will improve health care. The Partners in Community Collaboration (PICC) committee in Kelowna, B.C. help remove barriers to health care for the “disenfranchised” by having frontline staff discuss the specific needs of individuals in their community. While developed for the homeless, the program deals with more than just primary health care, bringing together community partners such as mental health, addiction, employment, and legal services.

Adam Wylie, chair of the PICC committee, explains the social determinants of health with an analogy. If someone has one bee sting, they’ll take care of it. If they have ten bee stings, would you have motivation to treat all of them? No, he says. We have to address multiple issues, because addressing one won’t make a difference. “[Otherwise] the issue or the pain’s still there. It still hurts.”

Dr. Kulig agrees. “If they don’t have a chance for a job or an education, you can tell them all you want about eating properly, but there are too many other things for them to deal with.”

To Dr. Meschino’s mind, Québec is a good example. Québec’s health policy extends beyond core public health functions and deals with “healthy public policies:” adequate income security programs, a good education system, a clean environment, adequate social housing, and community services.

In B.C., the First Nations Leadership Council and the federal and provincial governments have jointly created Tripartite First Nations Health Plan to give First Nations greater control over the design and delivery of their own health care. This represents a first in a patient-centred, collaborative approach to health care. Doug Kelly, Chief of the First Nations Health Council, says chiefs in Manitoba and Ontario are interested in a similar direction.

Unfortunately, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band in B.C. hasn’t seen the benefits of this new system, says Eliza Terbasket, health and social team leader of the Band. While she supports the tripartite concept, “There is a lack of communication. Our community hasn’t been informed. When we start setting up organizations provincially, generally the small bands like ours get the tail end.”

Dr. Strasser says there’s a common expectation the Ministry of Health will do everything without the people being directly involved.

Community collaboration and empowerment is instrumental to increasing access to health in rural and Aboriginal communities. Is Canada’s health care system designed to do this? Most practitioners would say no.

This article has been nominated for a RNAO Award for Excellence in Health-Care Reporting.

The article photo is courtesy of the Frontline Health Story Project, the goal of which is to increase awareness of the innovative ways that practitioners are helping to improve the capacity to serve Canadians facing barriers to healthcare. See more at www.frontlinehealth.ca

The post No Canadian left behind? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This amusing yet sobering socialist protest mantra illustrates the misguided view our markets take of the invisible economy—the environmental goods and services like clean air and water that quietly sustain us every day, for “free.”

Slowly, the world is starting to wake up to the reality that if we don’t protect our ecosystem services, we’ll lose them forever and have a huge bill on our hands. As a result, companies are starting to take environmental and social information into account, linking their executive pay to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. Global financial news powerhouse Thomson Reuters has acquired ESG information provider ASSET4—who provided data for this ranking—to integrate its data into mainstream financial analysis. Similarly, Bloomberg’s 250,000-plus data terminals provide access to all the publicly available ESG data of over 3,000 companies, including Carbon Disclosure Project data and renewable energy use.

Retail behemoth Wal-Mart, despite—or perhaps because of—its less-than-stellar labour relations and reputation for “big-boxifying” small communities, is constantly surprising environmentalists with its green announcements, such as its move into organic and local produce, and its purchases of renewable energy. It’s currently working to develop a sustainability index for its products that will include life-cycle analysis.

And, SC Johnson, maker of eponymous products like Saran Wrap and Windex, launched its “What’s Inside” website in March 2009, which has a comprehensive ingredient list. By January 2012, it will list all ingredients on product labels and will reveal fragrance and preservative ingredient information. This required the company to demand comprehensive ingredient lists from its suppliers.

What do these things have to do with the death of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Everything.

“I define CSR as the discretionary things that companies do to try to engage their communities. Philanthropy, volunteering, falls under CSR—what we used to call t-shirts and balloons,” says Sandra Waddock, the Galligan Chair of Strategy at Boston College and author of Total Responsibility Management. “But corporate responsibility or corporate citizenship is much more about the business model. If a company is just looking at CSR then it’s a second-stage company, and that’s simply not going to be enough in the future.”

CSR is built merely on appeasing various aspects of the “real” economy—reputation improvement, better public relations, tax rebates for charitable donations. But the invisible economy guides decisions around true corporate citizenship, and as we’ve seen, the two economies are beginning to merge thanks to the age of information. So building a CSR veneer isn’t going to last.

“If you’ve got a fundamental problem with your business model, in today’s world, someone’s going to find out,” says Waddock. “Very little that companies do is invisible anymore.”

That fact is especially due to the digital age. For example, the environmental, health, and social information of over 70,000 everyday retail products is available at the touch of an iPhone via GoodGuide.com’s product rating app, which includes everything from product safety to human rights controversies to carbon footprint information. ESG data provider KLD Research, owned by Risk- Metrics Group, powers its rating system.

The Internet’s breadth and depth means that consumers can register their reactions to injustices almost immediately. H&M and Wal-Mart felt the wrath of the Twitterverse in January 2010 when a New York Times article revealed that the retailers had been destroying non-saleable clothing that could have been donated during a particularly cold winter. Twitter users voiced their outrage in droves—it was the second-most popular trending topic the day after the article’s release. That day, H&M released a statement denouncing the practice and promising to investigate.

Awareness and outrage over the BP Deep Horizon spill has been largely aided by social networking. @BPGlobalPR, a satirical Twitter account mocking BP’s attempts to mollify the public, has over 121,000 followers. The oil spill and BP have been trending topics ever since the disaster began.

With issues of this magnitude coming to light, simply throwing money at various charities or serving cake at a “community appreciation day” isn’t going to satisfy the increasingly savvy consumer or investor.

Bob Willard, an expert on corporate sustainability strategies, says it would be a “disaster” for companies to simply engage in a cheque-writing exercise to fulfill its societal duties. Chris Jarvis, co-founder and senior consultant of Realized Worth, a company specializing in corporate volunteering, also puts it bluntly.

“Once a company leaves the third stage of corporate citizenship [moving from being innovative to integrative], they no longer do philanthropy. They shouldn’t—it’s regressive,” he says. “It would be like leaving college and using kindergarten tools. Companies leaving stage three don’t use the word philanthropy. They talk about strategic partnerships.”

The charities that vice-president Dr. Cathy Barr deals with at Imagine Canada, a national program focused on promoting public and corporate giving, want to engage with companies on multiple levels so that they can find mutually beneficial goals.

And that way, companies have some skin in the game, according to Jarvis.

“The more self-interested a volunteer or a company is, the more reliable they are, because they’ve tied their well-being to [that of the charity],” he says. “No one wants to be a project. And too often, volunteering and philanthropy objectify the very people we’re trying to help because they become objects to fix or make better. [Instead] we should create some free space so they can understand that they have incredible value.

Jarvis gives the example of IBM, where Willard spent 34 years.

“IBM has forgone all fiscal giving in order to put their talent, networks, and skills at play,” he points out. “They’ve moved past giving computers [with strings attached] to giving computers [without strings] that can be used for making your community better.”

Making things better has become the core mantra of many companies that have come of age in the last decade—partly because of the merging of the invisible and real economies.

“Companies like Google have grown up in this new, highly connected technology era. And they have a new set of values,” points out Waddock. “Google’s [unofficial slogan] is ‘don’t be evil.’ It made the tough decision to pull out of China. It’s created a public good with access to information. You’re going to see many more of these companies that are born with these sets of values in them.”

As a result, CSR as executed by a separate department or committee is no longer relevant for these types of companies. In fact, the term CSR shouldn’t exist at all since it identifies a separate initiative for a business instead of being part of a natural, integrated decision-making process, says Peggie Pelosi, author of Corporate Karma.

Is this just semantics? While there’s nothing wrong with the activities that happen under a CSR mandate, fifth-stage, transformative companies like Seventh Generation and Patagonia—and arguably our top corporate citizen, Mountain Equipment Co-op—won’t do business if they can’t do it right, says Jarvis.

“The expectations of companies being more proactive, not only not doing any harm but actually doing good, have become really hard for companies to duck,” says Willard. “Governments and consumers have started to say that companies’ responsibility is to all stakeholders as opposed to shareholders.”

But how does a company reverse-engineer this stakeholder-oriented, integrated mindset? It’s difficult, since companies are limited by the current economic system— the one that still doesn’t fully take into account the invisible economy.

“BP really tried to transform itself to Beyond Petroleum [and failed]. Changing a huge organization is like trying to turn a tanker,” says Waddock. “Even if companies want to make responsible long-term decisions, they’re still under the quarterly microscope. The problem is more than any given company can deal with. It’s a problem of short-termism and the dominance of finance over productive capital.”

If these tankers can’t be turned, they’ll sink. Hope for the future lies in competition- forced transformation.

“The Googles and eBays are creatively destroying [the old paradigms]. Can regular companies keep up? I think you’ll see some social enterprises will succeed and grow bigger and begin to displace the big guys as consumers, investors, and employees turn to them,” says Waddock. “In a sense, it’s a free market process that’s constrained by values that say we want to make the world better, not worse.”

The post Philanthropy is dead? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

What happened that May has been well documented. After heavy rainfall washed bacteria from cattle manure into the town well, known for years to be vulnerable to contamination, residents began to experience bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps, and fever—all symptoms of E. coli.

Although the Walkerton Public Utilities Commission received a fax confirming the presence of E. coli in the water on May 15, 2000, it assured the Medical Health Officer that the water was safe. But on May 23, the Medical Health Officer came forward with his own results and publicly declared Canada’s worst E. coli outbreak.

Almost half the town’s 5,000 people were affected. More than 2,300 people became ill and seven people died, including a two year old girl who was visiting Walkerton on Mother’s Day. The cost of cleanup, including human suffering, was estimated at $155 million. Some residents still suffer side effects from the disease, including diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, high blood pressure, and kidney damage. Some are on medication for the rest of their lives.

The 2002 Walkerton inquiry, led by Justice Dennis O’Connor, found that the tragedy was preventable. He blamed it on the mismanagement of the Public Utilities Commission where staff routinely falsified daily operating reports; some didn’t even realize that E. coli was a health hazard. But he also blamed the tragedy on the Ontario government’s budget cuts and the Ministry of Environment’s ineptitude.

Indeed, nine months before Walkerton’s outbreak, an eerily similar E. coli contamination occurred at a fair in New York state. The associated inquiry report was published just six weeks before Walkerton’s outbreak.

Lessons learned?

“Walkerton could have occurred in a number of locations,” says Bruce Davidson, co-founder of Concerned Walkerton Citizens. “The provision of drinking water in many of our small and remote communities was not being actualized as a professional operation.”

Eleven months after Walkerton, an outbreak of Cryptosporidium occurred in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, causing 6,000 to fall ill.

“North Battleford was an even clearer example than Walkerton of municipal mismanagement,” says Dr. Steve Hrudey, drinking water expert and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta. “Probably the most tangible example is that they had a training budget of $750 and took pride in never spending a cent of it.”

The Walkerton tragedy served as a catalyst for drinking water policy reform. Justice O’Connor provided 121 recommendations, all of which are being implemented. He favoured the multi-barrier approach, which protects water throughout its journey from source to tap. Key components of the approach are a good source of water, effective treatment, a secure distribution system, continuous monitoring of the system, and an appropriate response to adverse results.

Before Walkerton, water plants had been approved using a voluntary certificate system, which often meant little oversight. Now all plants must be licensed, and certification for operators is mandatory. Ontario also appointed a Chief Drinking Water Inspector in 2003, whose latest report finds that 99.85 per cent of submitted water quality tests meet provincial standards. These tests cover systems that serve 80 per cent of Ontario’s population.

O’Connor also recommended better drinking water education and training for owners, operators, and operating authorities of drinking water systems. The Walkerton Clean Water Centre, a Government of Ontario agency, opened its doors in 2005 and has trained more than 2,700 people. The Centre also showcases new water treatment technologies and will be moving into a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold building in June 2010.

“Now we’re known as the education outreach for other communities to learn about the provision of safe drinking water,” says Walkerton Mayor Charlie Bagnato. “It’s just phenomenal how we’ve turned infamy into excellence.”

While Bagnato believes the checks and balances provided by the reformed drinking water regime mean “the chances of another Walkerton are virtually nil,” Davidson isn’t so sure.

“With Walkerton being ten years in the rearview mirror, the tendency is to say we’ve got it covered,” cautions Davidson. He worries about increasing watershed pressures from agriculture, industry, chemical use, and urban sprawl.

His concerns aren’t unfounded. At publication time, there were 975 boil water advisories and 23 do not consume warnings in Canada—including 116 boil water advisories for First Nations reserves.

Third world conditions, first world country.

Drinking water problems disproportionately affect First Nations communities, which are the fiduciary responsibility of the federal government.

“This is a perpetual crisis,” says Tony Clarke, Executive Director of the Polaris Institute. “As long as the Canadian Safe Drinking Water Guidelines are applied across the country, but not to reserves, we’re going to be faced with ongoing problems.”

In autumn 2005, there was an E. coli outbreak on the First Nations reserve Kashechewan, populated by 1,900 Cree near James Bay, Ontario. The community had been under various boil-water advisories for years.

For eleven days, the provincial and federal governments bickered over whose responsibility it was to deal with the outbreak. In the meantime, stories of Kashechewan’s desperate living conditions, overcrowding, sky-high unemployment, and illness began to emerge. Finally, the provincial government evacuated the reserve.

Kashechewan’s outbreak, like Walkerton’s, occurred primarily because of a lack of water operator training. Beaver dams were causing sewage to flow directly into Red Willow Creek, the reserve’s water source. Engineering consultants had told the operators three years before that the dams should be removed.

Dr. Hrudey laments this knowledge gap. “Most of the communities with [water] trouble have high unemployment or underemployment,” he says, suggesting training and supporting operators would help remedy this. “People running facilities in remote locations can’t be expected to be able to know and do everything. But you can train them well enough to recognize when they’re dealing with trouble.”

Indian and Northern Affairs Canada’s (INAC) 2006 Plan of Action for Drinking Water in First Nations Communities is meant to provide training and infrastructure support. The latest progress report shows that while a third of First Nations water treatment operators still lack certification, the number of high-risk drinking water systems in First Nation communities has fallen from 85 to 48 in two years.

But 48 communities is still too many, begging the question of whether a nonreserve water system would be allowed to languish. While INAC allocates $250 to $300 million per year for First Nations water infrastructure, Lee Ahenakew, Proprietor at Canadian First Nations consulting firm 4Sight, estimates the cost of fully connecting all First Nations communities to a clean water supply is $5 billion.

In a 2008 Polaris Institute report, Boiling Point, six high-risk First Nations communities were profiled. The report highlighted deplorable conditions such as astronomical rates of gastrointestinal illness, overflowing outhouses, one community under a 13-year boil-water advisory, and high suicide rates. While some of these communities have seen improvement since then, “there are lots of communities near the point of explosion,” says Clarke. “We need a regulatory regime that is aimed at safeguarding drinking water for First Nations communities.”

Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen says that First Nations issues were among his concerns when drafting the soon-to-be-released Water Opportunities Act. “It would not be right for Ontario to export our tremendous [water treatment] technology without first making sure that our people, including First Nations, have the best protection when it comes to the quality of their water.”

But Chief M. Bryan LaForme of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation has yet to experience this protection. “Walkerton had an effect in mainstream Ontario, but not in First Nations,” he says. Twenty- five per cent of his southern Ontario community does not have access to clean drinking water. “We’re still underfunded. We’re still under capacity. All my staff have to multitask.”

The danger of indifference.

Clearly, there’s still work to be done. Even though most urban areas have safe tap water, the Canadian Water Attitudes Study finds that 21 per cent of Canadians are not confident in their drinking water. And there are no legally enforceable national drinking water standards.

But Dr. Hrudey believes change won’t happen until Canadians demand it—and are willing to pay the full cost of safe delivery. “We’ve gotten used to the idea that drinking water outbreaks are rare, so why should we care?” he says. “We understand that if you don’t pay for cable, we can’t watch TV. But Canadians don’t [equate] their cable bill with their water bill.”

Davidson shares his experiences with getting people to understand the costs of water safety.

“I don’t think people think about being a senior citizen under a boil water order. The only way he can get water to his upstairs bathroom is to lift a jug up the stairs one step at a time,” he says. “Or the people like my wife, who are on medication for the rest of their lives, or the young boy who is waiting for a kidney. These are the things we need to animate for people.”

And it’s crucial that drinking water operators and policy makers remain vigilant.

“Stagnant water isn’t nearly the problem that stagnant thinking is,” says Davidson. “The minute we say we don’t need to focus on this anymore—that’s the minute we’re in trouble.”

The post Thirsty for answers appeared first on Corporate Knights.

With high-temperature geothermal energy, it’s possible. “The rig and personnel who drill for oil and gas can be the same rig and personnel who drill for geothermal,” says Alison Thompson, founder and chair of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA), which now counts 30 companies, including Enbridge and Nexen, as members.

High-temperature geothermal is different from the low-temperature geothermal energy that fuels geo-exchange or geothermal heat pump systems for commercial and residential heating and cooling. Located a few kilometers underground and often visible at the surface as hot springs, this “conventional geothermal” can be used to generate electricity on a large scale. Closed-loop geothermal systems produce virtually no emissions or waste, as all water is re-injected back into the ground to eventually be reheated by the earth.

“This is a huge renewable on the scale of hydro dams,” says Thompson. A 2009 report from the Pembina Institute estimates that 21 billion gigawatt hours of energy are released every year underneath the surface of Alberta, at depths of less than five km.

“Even with the conservative assumption that only 0.5 per cent of this potential is recoverable, it represents more than 1,100 times the current total installed generating capacity in Alberta,” says the report. CanGEA estimates that at least 5,000 megawatts (MW) of high temperature hydrothermal potential are available in B.C., Alberta, and the Yukon, and could power 3.7 million homes.

A January 2009 Credit Suisse report finds that geothermal energy is the least-expensive form of alternative energy at 3.6 cents per kilowatt-hour; cheaper than coal, which costs 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (assuming a 1.9 cent/kWh savings from U.S. tax incentives). And it makes sense to produce: forty-year old Nevada-based geothermal company Ormat Technologies is steadily profitable. “Long before Kyoto, geothermal was already making money without incentives,” says Thompson.

Geothermal is “not new, it’s new to Canadians,” Thompson adds. First used to produce electricity in 1904 in Larderello, Italy, geothermal fluids such as the Roman Baths have been used as therapy for hundreds of years. Currently, there are 10,000 MW in operation in 24 countries such as Iceland, Germany, the US, and Mexico—and yes, still in Larderello, Italy. The US is the world’s largest geothermal producer with 3,000 MW installed, powering the equivalent of almost three million homes.

Because it is continuous and reliable, geothermal “behaves in a way that utilities are used to,” says Tim Weis, Director of Renewable Energy and Efficiency Policy at the Pembina Institute. This means that geothermal can fill in the gaps of variable renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

“We are the trunk line of the renewables industry,” says Thompson.

So why doesn’t Canada have any geothermal on the grid? For starters, since drilling for geothermal is a capital-intensive undertaking, industry needs to know where to look—but data on geothermal potential is woefully outdated. Since Canada’s formal geothermal energy program, under the auspices of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), lasted from 1975 to 1985, much of the data available on geothermal heat flow is a quarter-century old. With two decades of technological improvements, these maps may have failed to catalogue what is now a viable geothermal site.

“Technology’s marched on,” says Thompson. “Power plant technology can now operate with water as hot as your cup of coffee.” In addition, most countries have improved the detail of their data, mapping not only heat flow, but also underground water (which is used to transfer heat), permeability porosity (which allows hot water to move through the rock), and land surface features such as national parks.

Without formal direction or funding from the federal government “we’re decades and hundreds of millions of dollars behind,” she says. “The Americans are spending $350 million on their geothermal program. We’re still spending effectively nothing.”

“It’s really a catch-22,” responds GSC research scientist Steve Grasby. “Until there is active need for the information, it doesn’t necessarily make sense for the government to invest in providing it. But if you don’t have it, you don’t get [outside] investment.”

Red tape at the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum resources has added to the frustration from industry. Despite sitting on the geothermal-rich Pacific Ring of Fire, the last B.C. land tenure auction occurred back in November 2004. Meanwhile, 14 different companies made approximately 175 tenure requests from late 2007 into 2008.

As a result, says Thompson, many Canadian-listed geothermal companies like Magma Energy, where she is Vice President of Corporate Relations, are spending “every single dollar in other countries, except for on the lights in our head office.” Consequently, Canadians with drilling expertise are missing out on hundreds of green jobs.

The B.C. Ministry is now targeting three dates for tenure disposition in 2010, says spokesperson Jake Jacobs. Four parcels of land are out for referral with industry, First Nations, and local governments. As all parties move forward, Thompson urges Canadians to learn from the experience of New Zealand’s Maori indigenous people, who are owners and operators of key geothermal generation properties.

Nicholas Heap, Climate and Energy Policy Analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation, says that such caution is required to maintain a social license to operate.

“Geothermal can be low-impact and sustainable, but it’s not necessarily going to be that,” he says. “If the public perceives this just to be more dirty, high-impact power, we’re not going to get the kind of support that we need to effect a large-scale transition to a renewable and sustainable energy system.”

Part of this perception may come from the fact that while almost all of the steam produced from geothermal plants is water vapour, other particulates including hydrogen sulfide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide may be present in extremely low amounts. But these can be controlled and utilized in beneficial ways. The Blue Lagoon geothermal spa in Iceland is fed by the output of the nearby geothermal plant Svartsengi, and its warm waters are reputed to be therapeutic. The plant also uses a heat exchanger to heat the municipal water system.

A 2009 report by Northwestern University researchers found that geothermal has the least land use per generated power. “If that land was previously agricultural, most of the use could continue unabated,” says Dan Schochet, Executive Vice President of Ram Power, which operates the Meager Creek Hot Springs exploration project in B.C. (currently on hold).

David Gowland, Policy Director for Can- GEA, stresses the need for a long-term view, citing the short-term approach that has caused some Californian sites to run down the resource too quickly. “Countries like Iceland and New Zealand recognize they will be relying on the resource for the longterm so they draw out heat at a sustainable rate,” he says. “They are attuned to successfully managing the resource.”

Despite these benefits, until Canada has a commercial-scale geothermal operation, public awareness and demand will likely remain low.

Tim Weis compares the geothermal industry to a fledgling wind industry. “It really tipped the balance for wind energy when we got a couple of commercial projects in the ground,” he says. “Then that set the stage for substantial, long-term policies.”

Despite lagging behind our peers, Nicholas Heap of the David Suzuki Foundation thinks there’s still time for Canada to create “a planning and development system that makes low-impact renewables a core goal”.

“A lot can be done in a short time if there is the will to do it.”

The post Boiling hot appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But the “Suz’s” rendez-vous on Bay Street makes perfect sense. After all, the TSX is now home to more cleantech companies than any other exchange in the world. Many of these companies, like geothermal player Magma Energy, have the know-how to dramatically transform our society to live in greater harmony with the planet. The question is, will they do it from a Canadian base? The answer, Suzuki suggests, depends in large part on whether Canadians can believe in ourselves and think big—for a change.

Can Canada be a global leader in cleantech?

I hate the fact that our governments have done nothing in this area and yet they say we are world leaders. We are not world leaders! Canada could have been up at the head of the pack but we failed over and over again.

In 1978, the Science Council of Canada, headed by Ursula Franklin, said that if Canada made the investments now, we could become the leaders in wind power, solar, and geothermal. And what did we do? Nothing. Germany and Denmark, they all did the right things and now that is where the jobs are. Germany has created 400,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector. Denmark gets 20 per cent of its energy from windmills. Canada did nothing.

In Canada, we have never really had the confidence in what we are doing to say let’s put our money here and become global leaders. We blow it again and again because we don’t believe in ourselves. We have to fund a lot of the technologies that already exist. We have to get on with reducing emissions, which means we have to subsidize wind, solar, geothermal – all the renewables. We need to put a price on carbon.

On the limitations of technology

We use technology as a solution before the technology has even been proven. For instance, our government is putting a huge emphasis on carbon capture and sequestration. It is a totally unproven technology and to invest in it exclusively is crazy. Thirty years ago, the most promising renewable energy option was fusion. We poured billions of dollars into fusion energy and it is still not viable. Now they are saying, “We’ll develop the tarsands because we have carbon capture and sequestration.” It is a crazy way of planning.

His advice to U.S. and Chinese Presidents Obama and Hu on climate change policy:

As soon as the Kyoto Protocol came out, the Alberta oil industry said, “Why should we do this when countries like China and India aren’t?” As the instigators and major contributors to the problem, it is up to us to show leadership. If we continue to say we have to have more growth, why on earth should the Chinese pay any attention to us? Why should they do what we refuse to do ourselves? It is up to the industrialized countries to show leadership and we haven’t done that.

His favourite cleantech gagdet:

I bought the first Prius sold in Canada and I love it. I think the technology is fantastic.
Laptops absolutely revolutionized my life but they are part of the problem now. These products turn over at such a rate and end up in garbage dumps in phenomenal quantities. Virtually everything we buy now is built for fashion, not durability. It costs you more to fix them than it does to buy a new one. I think obsolescence is deliberately built into these things and it is a huge part of the problem.

On hope

I have grandchildren so at the end of the day I have nothing but hope. I interviewed Jim Lovelock who invented the idea of Gaia and he has basically given up. He says 90 per cent of humanity will be dead by the end of the century. But I refuse to accept that prognosis, because you need hope. We have no idea how forgiving nature can be. The situation is desperate and we need to act now.

Right now, the biggest impediment to action is the government we have in Ottawa. What they are doing now in the face of all the evidence is absolutely criminal. It is an inter- generational crime. And I hope Canadians voice their concern.

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