The imaginary circle from the first paragraph of r=40 would be about 5,000 square miles in area, or 13,000 square km, and in either instance is about 2 per cent of Saskatchewan. There are many such circles across Canada. Some produce no grain but a lot of minerals. Some produce no minerals but a lot of fish. Some produce a lot of vegetables. Some have small but vital manufacturers that keep big operators going.
These circles are in the background; the rural people, the truck drivers (I said it), the equipment operators, the welders. Most Canadians live in urban centres and only think of these places in the context of distant relatives or if someone in one of them snaps in a big way and the story makes the Big News.
These places do what they do as conditions allow. Condition ls are getting much more challenging. It is hard to get many basic things such as small and boring parts that equipment won’t run without. Costs are going through the roof but income is not keeping up. The squeeze on people and businesses is palpable.
More fundamentally, the lifeblood of all this, affordable energy, is disappearing.
It’s a very good column, be sure to share it around.
h/t another ian
$5 a gallon diesel (in the US) is going to destroy a lot of small businesses.
Has anyone noticed that governments are always the problem?
Only every day.
The worst human and environmental catastrophes are all the results of government policy. That much is undeniable.
Any politician selling “Net Zero Carbon” is completely incompetent. It is pie in the sky bullshit.
Oil and gas are not going anywhere and making it artificially more expensive is criminal behavior.
I paid PG&E $750 for a months worth of energy in one of the warmest States in America. My house is insulated with 2” of foam and R-38 on top of that. My water heater is instantaneous and tankless. My ducts are brand new and insulated greater than code requires. I have all top of the line Marvin windows. And our thermostat is set at 62 deg.F
Our governments are DELIBERATELY creating energy poverty. Deliberately. The people we’ve passively allowed to infect our institutions like termites are destroying all that was built before they were born. They won’t stop till they’ve erased it all.
“I paid PG&E $750 for a months worth of energy…”
Jesus Christ, Kenji…
Yikes! Mind you, earlier this year, I paid over $700 for 2 months of gas usage at my house in B. C. That was when we had the extreme cold and the house, being so old, lost heat.
BA, sell the house as is where is. It must be worth a million Canuck bucks. At least you would save thousands in travel expenses.
VOWG:
I’m in the process of negotiating a sale. A few years ago, I sold some of the stuff I inherited to somebody who makes his living by buying older houses, fixing them up, and then selling them.
He called me just before my last trip and he and his wife looked the place over when I was last in town. Before I returned to Edmonton, he made an offer for the place as is, and I showed him everything I knew of that was wrong with it. We’re getting a few final details sorted out before papers are signed.
I still have a lot of stuff I don’t know what to do with, such as furniture, but they would be willing to keep it on the property until I either sell or store it.
It’s going to be hard on my canine step-brother, though. His “holidays” with me at the house will be coming to an end, so we’re going to have to find a place where we can still play “go und get it” when I’m back in town.
I’ve already started looking for another place in Edmonton and it could take a few weeks before I find something suitable.
And my neighbors all paid MORE than that …
Welcome to the Fantasyland of CA. This place ain’t what it’s cracked up to be …
How many times do I have to tell you to move?
Well, at least your $750 is being used to buy more windmills. LOL
RD:
The host of a certain Internet radio show that I listen to regularly is in the process of moving from the San Francisco area to near Las Vegas. The reason he gave is that he couldn’t stand the taxation policies in that state any more.
I’m working on it … too bad I wasn’t ready to bail out a few months ago … now I may have to wait out an economic downturn … grrrrrrrrr … effing leftist LOSERS running this country into the ground.
Kenji that requires war, Holy sh-t.
I’m afraid we are headed for Civil War II
stats can is no different than cbcpravda now with its fake inflation numbers
Great article and so true .Cost to do what I do has almost doubled and can only pass on so much of the new expenses.A rural manufacturing outfit here in Sask says he gives it 6 months and his doors will close.This is an honest question Are the Liberals trying to break the country and if so why?
Tom
They need to break it … completely Break it so as to “Build Back Better” for their Great Re-Set. This is in yer face WEF policy…100%.
And every Politician mayor on up in this country is on board.
All of them…just like they were in Lockstep over the Covid Scam…
On the bright side, all those people who have been clamouring that automation is gonna make everybody unemployed have shut up.
Civilization is based exclusively on cheap energy. When it is gone civilization is gone. Time to invest in buggy whips.
The cheap energy is still there, its just that the leadership has declared it off limits, and the sheeple have gone along with that insane decree.
HiHo, correct. A courageous people would have tarred and feathered the current crop of politicos and jailed those who agreed with the insanity.
Expect buggy whips to be banned, because they are so horsist.
“This divide between people that buy Carhartt because it lasts forever and those who buy it for the cool factor is dangerous and revolting and a harbinger of very bad things to come. The divide is nothing new, of course; rural and urban people have long had different concerns. ”
Bingo. The urban mindset sprawl has killed us. The ticks are winning. It’s the helpless vs. the capable; the wipe my arse crowd vs. the leave me aloners; the useless vs. the useful.
Carhartt? Forever?
• My neighbor 3 doors away is in the O and G business — he’s been working in the States lately.
• In this area a few stores closed, 2 clothing, one variety. Nearby, one Goodwill Store opened, and another, a Value Village Store.
These are signs of the times in not R40 but R10 locally, in the city of Calgary.
Years ago, PM JC got drilling going by offering a chance to drill here and creating Income Trusts to get the job done. We never heard the end of the whining on that one. Will JT do the same? I doubt it. Guys like my neighbor will probably move to the States. Will we have another brain drain?
What’s next? Will there be bread lines? Who knows but I heard that the FOOD BANKS are busy. Saw their large truck parked at The Superstore Grocery Store. Also saw a panhandler or 2 and people sleeping at the C-train shelters. Saw some looking for bottles and empty pop cans in the trash to resell and make some money before the City takes it away in their trash.
I think we’re headed for a retail sector populated only by dollar stores, liquor stores, pawnshops, and Goodwill.
Speaking of prosperity, I saw a street-corner panhandler yesterday with a sign that bore these words: “I need a girlfriend. I have a job.”
I just spent three days in Toronto, a formerly clean and lovely city. It’s now a dirty, ugly, third world shithole where you can’t even find a restaurant that will make you an omelet or bacon and eggs. Way to go Juthtin and company. They’ll support you, however.
Beautifully written. I shared it with several friends … mostly in urban centers.
Meanwhile Loblaws announced a profit of $437M in the three month period ending in March. Nice to see Trudeau’s pals the Westons are coping with inflation just like the rest of us and thank God they received gov’t money for those fridges. Meanwhile those upstream who make sure the food is produced and delivered are getting a righteous kick to the gonads…and if you’re a woman, well, you know what I mean.
Not to worry though, Master Galen says they’re “Keeping an eye on the structural pressures” as they unfold…yeah, I’m sure you are. He also says inflation has driven people to seek relief at discount grocery stores like “No Frills” which the Westons own as well.
See how this works?
Now if you’ll excuse me…I’ve spinach seeds that need planting. It’s early I know.
burton, those people own the supply line from start to finish. Just read about some of their direct and indirect holdings. Many years ago I was doing business with that corp and looked into it. They are web like.
Milk powder for my veal calves, $85 to 120 per bag, March 21 to present. Corn through the roof, good if you are selling. Meanwhile the cost of beef at the consumer end is so high I wonder if the buyer can afford to eat it. And I’m just a small fry, with the mortgage paid.
I see it as well. A slow downward spiral that starts out at the edges and works it’s way into the center. At first you make do, gets parts etc as you can to keep the new machinery working. Then you start giving up and get out the older machinery and replace as you can fitting it in as best you can. But at some point it will collapse.
A case in point is new semi trucks. Almost a quarter of a million new but when they breakdown(which happens more than you think) parts availability is almost nil and when it available has to be shipped and takes 2 to 3 days. I was at a Pete dealership in billings Montana, they had a brand new semi in the shop. Maiden voyage for it. Broke down the week before and waiting on parts. Andrus flew the driver home rather than pay hotel etc costs.
When the small bits and pieces disappear it is like sand in gears. Slows everything up, hardly noticeable at first but then gets worse and worse.
You wake up 10 years from now when it finally collapses as it did in Venezuela. And how ask how did we get here.
Canada is done as a country. The western provinces and northern British Columbia and perhaps western Manitoba will leave. Possibly northern Ontario as well. We will export the commodities that the world will need so some support will come from that. Quebec will do its own thing and Ontario will become northern Mexico. A cheap warehouse and low cost manufacturing base for the USA. The Atlantic provinces will become welfare bums or wake up and realize they need to produce to live.
Whether they stay or go is irrelevant to western Canada. If we can get energy and resources out thru northern bc and Alaska we could do well. If not we continue as an economic colony of the USA.
ROV.
Agree 100%…on ALL points
That Diesel is (& IN Calgary at likely its lowest price in the country), sitting at ~ $1.75/litre + is very very telling: EVERYTHING that is shipped, rides on DIESEL…..everything.
That we need to leave has been to me apparent since day I got laid off: Dec 24th ’81 thanx to PM Dickspanks daddy & his Nat Oil Program.
A good essay and thanks for posting it. The article stresses the cultural/political disparity between rural and urban people. And we saw this disparity between the trucker protess and the Laurentian elites. One should add that the elites control everything.
The author notes, “Parts that used to be in stock are now “on order””. With the erection of centralized distribution centers, it been that way for decades. There’s a reason why parts businesses (NAPA, for instance) get daily shipments. When the lion’s share of the parts inventory is only a day away, why invest millions of $$$ in inventory? And, yes, when it puts everything on hold for a day, it is a PITA.
Add to that the adoption of the “just in time” inventory policy. Uh, no. Things don’t always work out that way as there’s no allowance for “just in case” situations.
I temped for JRC in Lethbridge back in ’90-’91 as a delivery driver. They were making cell phones in the old AEL Microtel building. They were adopting the JIT concept. Having had a fair amount of experience in parts, purchasing, shipping, receiving & truck driving at that point, it just screamed failure to me. I’d seen the system break down far too many times over the years, especially in backwater Lethbridge and the surrounding back-backwater communities. I tried to explain to my supervisor that you should never employ a policy with a single point of failure. It fell on deaf ears. They ended up closing the doors but I don’t know if it was because of the JIT, their ongoing QC issues or some combination thereof.
I’m not surprised that Microtel went belly up. It used to be the manufacturing side of the old B. C. Tel and, even in the early 1980s, it was on shaky ground. Northern Telecom was, perhaps, its biggest competitor at the time and it tended to muscle its competition out of the way.
I used to work for a certain company in Saskatoon back then and the office I was in was located across the street from AEL Microtel’s facility by the airport. A few rumours about what happened there leaked out over time. I don’t recall that it was a happy ship.
If I remember correctly, that outfit, as well as the one I worked for, lost a few people when NT opened its fibre optic cable plant on the other side of town.
My fondest memory of AEL Microtel was the summer of ’82 when they went on strike. Most of the female protestors dressed up in bikinis & parked themselves on lawn chairs along 5 Ave N, probably the busiest thoroughfare in the industrial park. Was driving freight truck then, too. Could always find a reason to drive by & honk my horn in support of their…bikinis.
The great divide in western countries is no longer liberal and conservative, it’s urban and rural (also to some extent male and female, but that’s another topic). The urbanites are in charge and will be until it all falls apart because their idiotic policies have destroyed the people who generate material wealth (and food). At the rate things are going this won’t take long.
JB, I think the urban/rural divide is still largely a liberal/conservative divide.
I think the great divide is sane versus insane.
Like this right here. These are the insane ones.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/gavin-newsom-mocked-disgusting-transphobe-men-cant-get-pregnant-abortion
I’ve seen what’s coming, I lived through the depression and economy tanking in the early 80s. My family had a farm and Dad fished offshore for a living, both industries collapsed and we lost every thing, including furniture and our TV. Oh those old repo days. We moved to a scummy area of Halifax to begin again in a apartment, let me tell you a country pumpkin living in the city was quite the eye opener. Those who work in the snivel service/goberment/city hall are so out of touch with normal people, and that won’t change until they lose their ability to buy gas, oil, food and lose their pensions– until then they just don’t care if they destroy rural areas with their goberment endorsed incompetence. I live in a retirement community of thousands of over 55, many of the females have had to take part time jobs at fast food places just to make ends meet. It sickens me to watch all I’ve worked for destroyed because the NDP have become nothing more than the corrupt liberals towel boys.
Rose, the NDP were never anything but quasi communists. They destroy everything they ever touch. The terminally stupid vote NDP Liberal, or any of others that wish to control peoples lives. Those who can’t see it never will.
Oddly enough, those that do vote for those parties never seem to suffer the consequences of doing so.
While I was at UBC, the congregation I was associated with was comprised largely of leftists and outright communists. They truly believed that the NDP was the only political party that Christ would vote for and by casting their ballots for it, they were doing God’s work.
After all, those of us who they regarded as hillbillies, rednecks, and ignorant bumpkins were the source of all of society’s ills and had to be made to pay for it. Being stomped on by the Dippers was God’s justice for our profligate ways and that our “wealth”, such as it was, had to be confiscated and “re-distributed” (i. e., theft by any other name, but justifiable theft). Once the sin of conservatism and being right-wing was finally erased forever from existence, true justice, a true society would emerge and we shall have peace at last.
Of course, nobody there believed me when I let them know they were full of it. I moved back to Alberta the following year. By then, I had concluded that Lotusland was the biggest insane asylum in the country.
Things are accepted once proven.
Yes Terry, this is the primary cultural divide between rural and urban/suburban people. The folks who live closest to the land … understand that TRUTH talks, bullshit walks. The people living in the UN-real urban world have no such discretionary powers.
That is true Kenji as one who has observed and experienced it.
I know it’s off topic…but did anyone experience credit or debit card problems today as in “the system is down”??
Just curious.
Nope. Fooled ’em again.
Isn’t the increase in immigration supposed to take care of this problem ? All those productive workers willing to go anywhere for a job and live in a new built house with schools and hospitals springing out of the ground as promised by our political elite ?
I bet your heard that from the same guy who said the budget would balance itself.
A neighbor ordered a new air seeder a year ago. It was supposed to be here 2 months ago and has yet to arrive and seeding is about to start. Luckily he kept the old one but the dealer had a buyer for it who is now out of luck. It’s like the economy is locking up.
It’s not like a typical Depression where people don’t acquire new goods because they cannot afford them. Instead, goods are literally unavailable at any price. With businesses unable to acquire capital goods, it amounts to the same thing.
I did not even know what an air seeder is. Is there a way to make one from a truck or semi-trailer? I can see how a clever mechanic could improvise a planter. An air seeder would require big clever. If enough other farmers are in his boat, you might be able to capitalize a manufacturer.
Capitalize with what? You’d be in the same boat as any other manufacturer. As interest rates rise, expansion becomes more costly and less viable.
“On this planet, there are only two alternatives for survival, you can conquer nature or you can conquer people who conquer nature” – Ayn Rand (paraphrased). Advanced (bankrupt) welfare states have produced a culture where the human conquering “humanities” graduates have dominated, marched through all the institutions and have mastered the fraud of democracy to employ the power of the state to ensure rule by sociopaths. Terry’s article should be front page news everywhere.
This is a powerful reminder that, like in American flyover country, a lot of what makes privileged whites able to enjoy their overpriced sugared coffees, and artisan breads, are people whose lives do not matter. We are the wrong race, one that is automatically dismissed no matter how poor we are, or whatever obstacles we faced growing up because privileged whites cannot imagine how someone who looks like the person they see in the morning mirror could be anything but an oppressor.
Communism doesn’t work.
This is all a plan.
L – I heard a rumour that Ottawa has banned all tractor-trailers from the city and environs.
Pass it on.
Civil service soyboys need their peace and quiet, you know.
Give it to them good & hard then.
Fat Fords Ontario.
Thats the way the rumour should be spread.
For it is no rumour,under their perpetual suspension of Rights and Freedoms,no sane trucker can afford the risk of working in Ontario.
Government Minions ,based on speculation ,rumour or their perverse vindictiveness can seize your property,cancel your contracts,with insurance and destroy your business..
At the whim of inferior minions..
So how do you insure against such risk?
What “Special rates” do you charge to compensate yourself and your employees against said risk?
So while Fat Ford don’t know it and his minions are too stupid to ever figure it out,Ontario has already banned all who use mobile equipment..
And to top it off,look at the people they issue licenses too.
Oh they can drive,just not an automobile.