Paul Wells has written for the Toronto Star, the National Post, and the Montreal Gazette. Perhaps most Canadians know him best for the 19 years he spend writing long form journalism with Maclean’s magazine and for his regular appearances on CBC’s The National.
He was trained to admit every error. Then he went into politics. A feature interview with the retiring MP for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount
Introduction
When you resign your seat in the House of Commons, you get to keep your phone for 90 days. The deadlines for cleaning out your offices on Parliament Hill and in your riding are tighter but still civilized. Soon Marc Garneau will leave his constituency office on the third floor of a nondescript office building in Westmount, the affluent anglophone enclave west of downtown Montreal, for the last time. But there’s no rush, so he met me there on Monday.
Trying to get politicians to speak frankly while they’re still in office is not always rewarding, It gets easier quickly once they leave. So I thought a visit with Garneau was worth the drive to Montreal, even though he’s been cagey in his remarks to journalists since he announced his retirement on March 8. I’ll cut to the chase: His interview with me wasn’t the work of a rebel either. Garneau remains a gentleman and a Liberal. He offered only praise for Justin Trudeau. But on several issues — communications philosophy; the handling of the Freedom Convoy occupation of Ottawa; and the proper attitude toward one’s own fallibility — he drew occasional sharp distinctions between his attitude and the Trudeau government’s.
I took the scenic route to get to that stuff. Garneau was the first Canadian to fly in space. He was a national celebrity before Trudeau finished high school. And while that’s a historic distinction, Garneau shares with many more parliamentarians a long career outside politics that preceded, and informed, his career in elected office. Not all of that is the stuff of every conversation, but this one was valedictory in tone. I thought it best to start at the beginning.
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I began by asking him about the year and a half he spent as a combat systems engineer on the HMCS Algonquin. When he arrived on board, it was the newest destroyer in the Canadian Navy.
“It was what I had dreamt of from the beginning of my life,” he said. “My first love was the Navy.” His father’s family was francophone Quebecers, soldiers from way back. His father fought in the infantry in WWII and was posted in Germany for two years as the Cold War settled in. “I crossed the ocean with my parents in 1956 coming back from Germany,” he said. “We came back on a ship that was on its last voyage, the Samaria, and I just fell in love with the ocean. A few years later, we went back to England on the Empress of Britain. Those confirmed for me that I wanted to be in the Navy.”
The Algonquin, a big boat with 280 crew, spent three months doing exercises as part of STANAVFORLANT, NATO’s multinational Standing Naval Force Atlantic, which would pretend the Soviet Union was up to various kinds of risky business and figure out ways to respond. Off Puerto Rico he led tests of the new Sea Sparrow missile system. Around Newfoundland’s outports, the Algonquin took the province’s lieutenant governor on an annual tour.
Young Garneau wasn’t particularly interested in moving up the ranks. “I’m an engineer. I didn’t want to be the ship captain. I wanted to be the engineer that kept the equipment going. That may not sound very exciting. But for me that was exciting, because it’s quite a job to keep all that equipment operational in case you had to go into conflict.”
2. Air
Advancement for its own sake held no appeal. But when he saw a nondescript ad from the National Research Council calling for applicants for Canada’s first astronaut corps, that sounded better than a promotion. “Wow. The idea of possibly going into space just blew me away. At the same time, I thought my chances [of being chosen] were pretty close to zero.”
In May of 1983 there were 4,200 applicants. Six months later, six remained. It became clear pretty soon the program wasn’t just looking for technical expertise but for — well, for heroes. Or at least for people who wouldn’t screw up the illusion.
“They wanted us to write essays about why we thought that we were particularly well suited. Did we realize that we would become public figures? And were we ready for that? And did we think it was important for Canada? Medical [exams] like you’d never had before. Every single thing checked, because you had to be 100% fit. Then they brought us in for the last week and and they subjected us to a whole bunch of things.
“We had to give presentations in front of the selection board. Any attempted humour was met with a stone-cold face. I remember coming out of it thinking, ‘I’ve totally bombed this.’ But they’d all been trained not to react to anything.
“Do you remember somebody called Keith Morrison?” I sure do. TV reporter and anchor, CTV to the CBC to NBC. He actually interviewed me once, when that was an odd thing to do, and I remember he was good at it. “Well, Keith was hired for the week. And he put us through our paces, sort of doing the interview thing. So that was another thing they wanted to know, if you’d be able to do that. They had us in social settings, like a cocktail kind of thing. [They wanted to see] whether you were relatively comfortable in the company of total strangers, that kind of thing. So it’s a pretty thorough week. And by the end of that, they said, ‘Look, stand by your telephone between five and seven on the third of December and you’ll get a call.’ We’re 20 at that point. ‘It’ll either be to say, sorry you didn’t make it, or, you made it.’ And I was fortunate to be one of the six chosen. They called about six o’clock. They didn’t beat around the bush. ‘Look, you made it. Congratulations. Keep it private and we’ll trot you out on the following Monday.’ Which they did.”
When you know what happened next in Garneau’s career, all this prodding and profiling and media scrutiny takes on a different meaning. He started to meet prime ministers.
Pierre Trudeau: “Man of powerful intellect. Everyone knows that. There are warmer people than Pierre Trudeau. But very cordial.”
Brian Mulroney: “Mulroney had just been elected. He wanted to meet Ronald Reagan right away… I was summoned, along with two of my crew members, Bob Crippen and Kathryn Sullivan. Which, by the way, is a total no-no. You do not take the next crew that’s going to fly in three weeks out of their bubble of training and getting ready. Except if it’s POTUS. Reagan thought it was good idea, so we were summoned. I spent time in the Oval Office with with Reagan, whom I liked right away, and Mulroney, whom I also liked right away…. I was even at the Shamrock Summit a couple of months later in Quebec City. I wasn’t quite so happy with what PMO told me to do, which is to come up through the floor on a thing that was raising me up with smoke and lighting on me, dressed in my flight suit, and having to say, ‘Take me to your leader,’ which the crowd liked. And I thought, ‘I’m making a fool of myself here.’”
On the first trip, Garneau was a payload specialist, which meant he had responsibility for a suite of Canadian scientific experiments and little else. But he had two audiences he wanted to please. NASA was the first. “I had to make a good impression so that, based on a sample of one, they’d say, ‘Okay, he did pretty well. Let’s keep inviting Canadians to fly.’ And quite a few Canadians have flown.”
Canadians were the second audience. “I wanted Canadians to be proud of me.”
Both audiences gave him the thumbs up. Today there’s a high school in Toronto named after him. In 1992 Garneau and Chris Hadfield reported for training to become mission specialists, with much broader responsibility for mission success. It took another year of training before Garneau was eligible for his second flight, in 1996. His third and final mission was at the end of 2000. There were Russians waiting at the International Space Station when the shuttle Endeavour delivered Garneau and the others. Relations with Russia were as warm as they’ve ever been. “It was more than cordial. Frankly our lives depended on one another.”
It was a longer acquaintance with higher stakes than most of us ever experience. “One of the things I loved the most about NASA was that if you fuck up” — he paused before using the salty word — “you confess. That is the culture there.”
Probably this does not need to be spelled out, but here goes anyway. This culture of honesty was not a simple preference. Shuttle crews rode a lake of liquid fuel and twin towers of solid fuel at speeds their own ancestors could not have imagined. If a bug slipped into the system it could kill them and set spaceflight back decades, as indeed it did, twice. Owning up to error was the primary method of keeping colleagues, and the dream of spaceflight, alive.
“I did hundreds of simulations. I was the first non-American CAPCOM ever. CAPCOM’s the guy who talks to the crew in orbit for Mission Control. And we did hundreds of simulations. I covered 17 missions, just as CAPCOM. And after every simulation, where the crew, perhaps, had not picked up the problem and had not reacted properly to it, we’d do a post mortem.
“And that culture of honesty and openness, which you absolutely need in the space business — you can’t have people making excuses or trying to hide things — that’s what I love the most. And I wish it existed in all facets of life, including the one I ended up in.”
3. Earth
Garneau first ran for Parliament in 2006, just west of Montreal Island, and lost, in the first of three elections when losing was most of what Liberals did. He was interested in Outremont in a 2007 by-election. So was Justin Trudeau. Stéphane Dion was the leader, though, and he thought a political scientist was just the ticket. Dion’s designated nominee, Jocelyn Coulon, did not fare well.
In 2008 Garneau inherited the Liberal nomination, essentially a Wonka golden ticket, in Westmount, as solid a Liberal fortress as any in Canada. Only a catastrophe could lose Westmount for the Liberal. In 2011 it almost happened — Garneau beat the New Democrat by only 642 votes in the party’s worst national defeat in since Confederation. Soon Peter C. Newman had a book out proclaiming the Liberals were history.
“There’s something intimate about being only 33 [MPs in the Liberal caucus], Garneau recalled. “We got to know each other in a kind of a relationship that you don’t get when you’re 150 or 160. So I really enjoyed the collegiality of having that small, small group. Although of course I was hoping it wouldn’t last too long.”
In 2013, Garneau, who hadn’t been interested in commanding a ship, decided to try his chances with a political party. He ran for the Liberal leadership. He had competition.
“I personally believe that I had good policy that I put in the shop window. What I didn’t have — what I still don’t have — is charisma. I’m not interested in charisma, by the way. I’ve lived my life very well without charisma. And I’m not saying the electorate chooses on a superficial basis. But there was something about Justin Trudeau that was incredibly appealing to people.”
Garneau bowed to the inevitable and dropped out of the race. Eighteen months later he was co-chair of the Liberal Party’s “International Affairs Council of Advisors,” with a threefold mission: Figure out the party’s foreign policy; teach foreign policy to a leader with extremely limited experience in the field; and be seen showing interest in foreign policy. The group met regularly. “Trudeau only came occasionally to meet everybody and to sort of stir stir things up and have a really good discussion,” Garneau said.
4. Fire
As co-chair (with Andrew Leslie) of Trudeau’s Council of Advisors, Garneau figured he had a good chance to become foreign minister. He got Transport.
“You know, I’ve lived 17 years of my life abroad. And I love foreign policy. I wasn’t expecting Transport. And it turned out to be a job I loved. Although at first I thought, ‘Why’d he put me in transport?’
“When I got the call that, you know, ‘The Prime Minister wants to meet you,’ I thought — This is after the vetting process, ‘Are there any skeletons in your closet?’ — I thought, ‘What’s he going to put me in?’ I thought, Defence because of my background. I was in the regular forces. Or I thought, then, maybe Industry, because I was the president of the Canadian Space Agency and I worked for the Minister of Industry, Science and Technology at the time. And maybe even Foreign Affairs, because he’d had me in this job for the past two years. I wasn’t expecting Transport.” Garneau chuckled at the incongruity of it. “But now, after a little while, I saw the logic of it. I was in the Navy, ships, so I know the marine environment. I know the air environment. And so there is a certain logic to it. And it’s a job that I came to love.” He held the post for five and a half years. Only David Collenette and Lionel Chevrier lasted longer.
The new governing caucus had five times as many MPs as the Liberal caucus it replaced. “It was a heady experience,” Garneau said. “And there was a certain amount of chaos, which is understandable because it takes a couple of years to learn the basics of your job.”
It must have been a management challenge for the Prime Minister’s Office, I ventured. To have a finance minister, health minister, justice minister, defence minister who’d never been Members of Parliament before, let alone cabinet ministers. How did the PMO handle that? “It was a little bit like when you see kindergarten children all tied up with ropes, going down the street.”
Did the control ever chafe? “I had some times where I felt one way and and I felt that the centre did not necessarily agree with it. Yeah. That comes from the dynamic. If you’ve got your mandate letter, and you interpret that mandate letter the way you feel it must be implemented — you know, the vast majority of the time, no problem. But there was the odd occasion. You’ll forgive me if I don’t go into details on it. But I was very conscious of the fact [that] you have a chief of staff, your chief of staff is a key person for you. But that chief of staff reports to you, but also must report to the chief of staff of the Prime Minister. I made an indirect reference to it in my parting speech, that I sometimes made their life difficult because I might have wanted to go one way whilst the center didn’t necessarily want to go that way.”
We had been talking for more than an hour. I asked Garneau about the Freedom Convoy of January and February 2022, which has been on my mind. Specifically, I asked Garneau about his Liberal caucus colleague Joël Lightbound, who held an astonishing news conference in the second week of the Ottawa siege to say the Liberals’ COVID policy “stigmatizes and divides people.”
“I definitely took very much note of it,” he said of Lightbound’s surgical sortie. “Some of what he said is true. There were people on the Hill that were not extremists. They were just there because they felt that their rights were being not respected.” He faced his share of verbal abuse as he made his way to and from the Hill, but even still —
He paused. “I’ll be very candid. I don’t think we handled it as well as we could have.”
In what sense? “I think there was a sense that, ‘We’re not going to talk to you people. You’re just a bunch of troublemakers.’ I had always been brought up to not avoid dealing with difficult issues. This was an incredibly difficult issue.” Another pause. “So that’s just my personal comment.”
The other thing I wanted to ask him about was the tremendous controversy he and two other back-bench Liberals have stirred up over the interaction between Quebec’s newly beefed-up language law and Bill C-13, which proposes amendments to the federal Official Languages Act. This has put Garneau and his colleagues squarely on the side of Montreal’s anglophone population against a majority of Quebec’s elected politicians. And it’s brought Garneau in for some unaccustomed criticism. Barely two weeks before he resigned, he was complaining about the rough ride from Quebec commentators on Twitter.
Marc Garneau @MarcGarneau
Quand Michel David du Devoir, une personne que je respecte, me traite de colonisé ou d’angryphone, je trouve ça irrespectueux et triste. Peut-on être respectueux l’un envers l’autre même si on ne pense pas de la même façon?
12:40 PM ∙ Feb 18, 2023
271Likes39Retweets
Garneau’s comments on this were long, and would constitute inside baseball for most readers outside Quebec, but he didn’t like seeing Quebec’s language laws incorporated by reference into a federal bill. “I have very rarely disagreed with my party, but I disagreed with them on that.” It got worse for Garneau when he read 88 amendments introduced by the Bloc Québécois, five of which said that in case of a conflict between federal and provincial legislation, Quebec’s should predominate. Those amendments were eventually rejected, but by then Garneau was already on the record with his concerns. “I’m always ready to face criticism, but it got personal. And I think that’s sad.”
The controversy has been a much bigger deal inside Quebec than outside, but Garneau insisted it’s not why he’s leaving politics.
The reason I’m leaving is because I made that promise to my wife, and to my family. I actually told him after the 2019 election that that was my last election. I had been reappointed to Transport. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is a lovely way to finish.’
“Then in January of 2021, to my great surprise, the Prime Minister [shuffled Garneau.] I think it was motivated by the fact that Navdeep Bains pulled out. The Prime Minister, I personally think that he said, ‘Okay, I want François-Philippe to take over from that. And there’s a bit of musical chairs and I ended up in foreign affairs.
“But seven months later, an election was announced. And I felt, in all good conscience, that after seven months in that portfolio — to now say, ‘Sorry, I’m leaving,’ when I had been the fourth appointed in under six years, it just wouldn’t have been right.
“Now, if the prime minister had told me, ‘Mark, after this election, you won’t be in the cabinet,’ I wouldn’t have run. But he didn’t tell me that.
“I ran hoping to go back into that job. Because Lord knows there were things that I wanted to do. With respect to Afghanistan, China, the Indo-Pacific strategy, I’d been working all that stuff. But the bottom line was that he said, ‘You’re not in cabinet anymore.’
“And so, at this point, I felt it would be really not acceptable for me to say, ‘Okay, thank you for electing me three weeks ago, I’m leaving.’ So I felt I needed to put in some time. To my great personal satisfaction, I was given two things that I really enjoyed. One was to be chair of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee, which I think has an important role with respect to reconciliation. And the other one was kind of unexpected… medical assistance in dying, where I was co-chair with a senator on this special mixed committee.”
That committee presented its final report in February. Garneau resigned three weeks later. He was already in the history books before he ever ran for office. Would he run now, in the atmosphere of today’s politics, if he were just starting out? Is there still room in politics for an engineer who just wants to make things work better? These are eternal questions, and I had already asked Garneau enough questions for one day.
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Ostriches at a farm in British Columbia, Canada have been making headlines around the world for almost a year. That is because they were the focus of a huge battle that raged regarding what to do about the fact that swabs from two dead birds tested positive by PCR for avian influenza. I have deep, relevant expertise in this area based on my training in immunology and virology at the interface of human and animal health. I have conducted research with influenza viruses and I have published peer-reviewed scientific papers about influenza, both in humans and birds.
Egregiously, all the ostriches (well over 300) were just executed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear a stay of execution order. They had gunmen shoot the ostriches one by one as they were clustered inside a make-shift compound. These elegant, intelligent, very large birds had to witness their flockmates get executed while awaiting their turn. The outcome of this case raises concerns that Canadians should take seriously, or ignore at their peril.
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The data suggest the ostriches experienced an outbreak of avian influenza, which was most likely introduced to the farm by wild birds, in which the virus is endemic. In the ostriches, the virus functionally behaved like a low pathogenic strain, based on the percentage of deaths. Ostriches that had been on the farm for more than several years did not get sick, suggesting that they had naturally acquired immunity, likely from a previous exposure to the virus. Newer members of the flock got sick and some died. Most of the sick ostriches recovered and returned to full health. This suggests that all of the remaining healthy flock had naturally acquired immunity. So, to execute healthy birds with gold-standard immunity in no way increases the safety of people or animals in the region. In fact, it does the opposite.
A flock with naturally acquired immunity creates a geographical location where the virus will either be stopped dead in its tracks, or will have great difficulty getting transmitted. Instead, the farmers will be allowed, if they so wish, to repopulate the farm with immunologically naive birds that will be highly susceptible to influenza viruses that can get re-introduced by the birds that forever migrate through the property. Absolutely nothing has been done or can be done about the carrier population of wild birds that spread the virus between continents. So, by failing to acknowledge the reality of naturally acquired immunity, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has done the opposite of enhancing public safety. Their policy of ignoring this basic science has raised public risk through the removal of a flock that achieved the ultimate public health goal of herd immunity and allowing them to be replaced with highly susceptible birds.
Indeed, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has documented multiple farms across the country in which their stamping out policy for avian influenza facilitated the repeated return of the disease when naive birds were introduced. Over just a few-year span, several farms were documented to have up to four repeat outbreaks. Let’s explicitly spell out what that looks like…
A flock of birds tests positive for avian influenza courtesy of wild birds visiting the farm.
All the birds get executed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Naive birds are introduced to the farm.
The new flock tests positive for avian influenza courtesy of wild birds visiting the farm.
All the birds get executed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Naive birds are introduced to the farm.
The new flock tests positive for avian influenza courtesy of wild birds visiting the farm.
All the birds get executed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Naive birds are introduced to the farm.
The new flock tests positive for avian influenza courtesy of wild birds visiting the farm.
All the birds get executed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Naive birds are introduced to the farm…
This is the very definition of insanity.
And now you know one of the reasons why food prices are skyrocketing.
The ostriches that were just killed represented an opportunity for Canada to become a leader in managing avian influenza in a way that would genuinely reduce risk.
Establishing herd immunity is always the ultimate goal for slowing or stopping the spread of any infectious disease. To force the maintenance of immunologically naive populations in place of those with herd immunity counters the very foundation of public health. Remember how much COVID-19 shots were pushed in the name of trying to achieve herd immunity?
The ostriches would have produced massive quantities of avian influenza-specific antibodies in their eggs that would have been invaluable as therapeutics both for people and animals.
Perhaps most importantly, there were ostriches that were immunologically naive when the avian influenza outbreak occurred, they would have been exposed to the virus, yet they never got sick. These individuals could have been confirmed through serological testing looking for antibodies against the virus which would mean they had been infected, alongside medical records to confirm that they didn’t get sick. These birds should have been treated like pure gold. They would have made ideal breeding stock that could be used to populate other farms, including in other countries, with ostriches that are inherently resistant to avian influenza!
So, the actions of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency contradicted the science. Canadians and Canadian animals are at greater risk because of this scientifically unjustified execution; not safer.
So why was the execution carried out? Apparently it is because Canada has married itself to yet another global entity based in Europe. It is called the World Organization for Animal Health, which is the equivalent for animals of the human-focused World Health Organization. Canada has submitted to the authority of yet another globalist entity instead of letting Canada determine what’s best for Canada. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has now relegated many of its scientists to being recipe-followers, with the recipes being the policies dictated by the World Organization for Animal Health. Indeed, the vast majority of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s efforts in court were dedicated to educating the judge about the policies while largely ignoring the science.
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The Canadian Food Inspection Agency went light on the science by bringing in one neophyte scientist to tackle that component. That scientist misinterpreted much of the science, misled the court, and even resorted to the desperate, immature tactic of non-evidence-based defamation of much more senior scientists with deeper expertise. As an example, the public record from the initial judge’s decision highlighted a concern that areas of the farm, like the pond on the property, might be contaminated long-term with the virus, and that alone was a potential reason for executing the ostriches. But what wasn’t disclosed to the court was the fact that the studies to support this actually found that the virus could not survive in pond water unless two things were done to it. The water had to be filtered to remove microbes, and it had to be protected from radiation in natural sunlight. This is because bacteria, with are present in massive quantities in ponds, consume viral particles that are essentially balls of proteins; the viruses are like yummy granola clusters for the bacteria. Further, long-term exposure to radiation in natural sunlight is a great way to kill viruses via lethal damage to their genetic material. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency would prefer the birds to be inside, far removed from their natural habitat. But that would only potentiate their concern about environmental contamination by removing sunlight from the equation while removing the ostriches from the sunlight that allows natural production of vitamin D that is needed for an optimal virus-repelling immune system.
In the court case, the initial public judgement noted that the courts are not a place to debate the science! This should concern everyone. Scientific debate has been actively suppressed in public forums for the past five years, courtesy of the COVID-19 narrative. Legacy media, by and large, has no interest in promoting any real scientific debate anymore. And now the courts are starting to opt out of allowing this. So if scientific facts are not properly put to the test in our courts, how are fact-based decisions to be facilitated? In this case, the science was largely thrown out in favour of debating policies. With that said, I have reviewed the policies in this area and my expert opinion is that even if one discards the science, there were clauses that could have been leaned on to allow the ostriches to live. And, even if the policies on their own did not allow it, my expert judgement is that policies that fail to follow the science need to be discarded and replaced with ones that do. I have no interest in discussing policies that fail to properly acknowledge scientific facts.
By the way, vaccines against avian influenza are likely not going to be a viable solution. Influenza viruses are naturally prone to mutations and, as such, vaccines are always out of date. Applying non-lethal immunological pressure to a virus like influenza virus is a recipe for accelerating mutations. Peer-reviewed published data from experiences in places like China have confirmed this. So, be wary if vaccines start getting pushed as the solution. Unless they are ideal vaccines, which, by Canada’s definition, prevent disease and transmission after a single dose, they could potentially put people and animals at increased risk.
A huge question in this case is why was the Canadian Food Inspection Agency so averse to testing the ostriches, especially after they had been so obviously healthy for so long? This was all done based on two sets of PCR tests from almost one year ago. Any new testing by the farmers themselves carried the threat of massive fines and even jail time! One can only assume that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency did not want to risk the massive embarrassment of proving that they were executing avian influenza virus-free ostriches. I am not a gambler, but if someone were to place a wager on tests demonstrating an absence of the virus due to robust naturally acquired immunity, I would recommend that they make it a massive pot. Personally, as an expert immunologist, I would have had no fear whatsoever of getting into close proximity of those ostriches.
So, shame on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and shame on the mercenaries they hired to have a heyday executing valuable ostriches that represented the proper way to manage an avian flu outbreak.
The ostriches were not even being used for food purposes, but they were treated the same as intensively raised, genetically non-diverse chickens raised indoors under high-stress/immunosuppressive conditions and for which avian influenza often behaves as a highly pathogenic virus. This means this decision has implications for our entire food industry. Those who support what the CFIA did to the ostriches and those who hold no opinion about it had better never complain about escalating food prices, nor a future in which we move towards greater reliance on ‘protein sources lacking pandemic potential’, which essentially means ‘eating bugs and loving it’. Mark my words, this is the direction the current leadership of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is taking us. They have fallen into lockstep with Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada. Naturally acquired immunity be damned, polices be praised.
Look at the vilification of cattle that has been happening over the past few years. We used to praise farmers for ‘feeding cities’. Now many are trying to paint them as the bad folk putting our health at risk while pushing us into a climate crisis. As for me, I support our farmers, as does the overall weight of the scientific evidence.
When it comes to the ostriches, I can’t help but ponder the fact that the relevant veterinarians within the Canadian Food Inspection Agency likely would have applied to their doctor of veterinary medicine programs declaring how much they love animals and how they want to help them. But their mantra, spoken in yesterday’s actions, seems to have been ‘do no harm, unless they are perfectly healthy ostriches, then execute them’!
Instead of blindly following policies, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, if it really cares about reducing health risks associated with avian influenza, should start following the science. This would include:
Promotion of optimal functioning immune systems of farmed animals through things like exposure to sunlight and achieving immunosufficiency for all other essential micronutrients.
Help make less intensive family farming more profitable because intensive practices stress animals, which naturally causes immunosuppression.
Whenever feasible (as it was with the ostriches), use biocontainment practices to manage outbreaks through to the point of achieving herd immunity.
Embrace breeding practices that promote inherent disease resistance, which can be facilitated through point #3 (i.e., by identifying survivors of outbreaks that were infected but rapidly cleared it without developing the disease).
I pray for the well-being of the farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed when their ostriches, that were like pets to them, were executed yesterday by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They fought hard to try to correct the mismanagement of Canada’s outbreak responses.
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An innovative approach to facilitating natural gas production in B.C. while respecting treaty rights could become a case study for future cooperation and partnerships between First Nations, government and industry.
In an attempt to open an area that producers have essentially been shut out of in northeastern B.C., the B.C. government directly awarded oil and gas tenure to the Halfway River First Nation, giving them greater control over how oil and gas extraction in the area might happen.
That tenure is now getting “farmed out” to companies like ARC Resources.
“The granting of the tenure by the B.C. government to the nation is new,” said Greg Kist, executive manager for Tsaa Dunne Za Energy, the Halfway River First Nation’s energy business.
Greg Kist, former president of Pacific NorthWest LNG and current managing executive for Tsaa Dunne Ta Energy, THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh.
Depending on the outcome of the experiment, it’s the kind of thing that might one day be showcased at a future Indigenous Partnership Success Showcase event.
For more than two decades, a large area in Halfway River First Nation traditional territory in northeastern B.C. has been off limits to industrial activities like logging and oil and gas exploration and extraction, due to treaty rights.
In 1999, the BC Supreme Court quashed a timber harvesting permit approved by the province for Canfor, based on Halfway River First Nation’s Treaty 8 rights.
An extraction moratorium of sorts was placed over core HRFN territory, which happens to be in the “fairway” of the Montney natural gas formation.
“All of the lands were deferred from any further development,” Kist said. “And that meant everything from logging it, to oil and gas activities.”
This “deferral” of industrial activities in the area has been one of the question marks hanging over the oil and gas-rich Montney formation in northeastern B.C.
The 2021 BC Supreme Court Yahey decision had also left Treaty 8 territory dotted with question marks.
In Yahey, the court ruled cumulative impacts of activities like oil and gas development constituted a breach of the treaty rights of the Blueberry River First Nation, one of eight B.C. signatories to Treaty 8.
These various treaty rights rulings in northeastern B.C. create a serious challenge: How can B.C. continue to benefit from an abundance of natural gas to feed a burgeoning LNG industry without infringing the rights of Treaty 8 First Nations?
In the case of Halfway River, the B.C. government, the First Nation and industry are taking an innovative approach, using oil and gas tenure.
Last year, the B.C. government and HRFN signed a treaty settlement agreement that grants the nation more control over land use and development. As part of the agreement, the B.C. government directly awarded HRFN oil and gas tenure over 34,000 hectares of land. It was the first time the province has directly awarded oil and gas tenure to a First Nation.
In turn, the HRFN is now farming out its tenure rights to companies like ARC Resources, whose existing land holdings in the Attachie play are directly adjacent to the HRFN tenure.
“The resource quality is comparable to ARC’s existing Attachie asset, further extending the development runway at one of ARC’s most profitable assets,” ARC said in its second quarter financials at the end of July.
The tenure awarded to HRFN through its energy business, Tsaa Dunne Ta Energy, encompasses prime Montney real estate that had been essentially sterilized from development for decades.
“That 34,000 hectares is right in the middle of the Montney fairway,” Kist said.
Under an “earning and development” agreement with Tsaa Dunne Za Energy, ARC Resources will gain access to 36 parcels of land contiguous with its existing land parcel in the Attachie play. This expands its Attachie holdings by 10%.
Green area denotes Halfway River First Nation tenure; blue represents ARC Resources tenure.
“Think of it as Tsaa Dunne farming that land out to ARC, and we have an agreement that benefits us financially,” Kist said.
“The tenure award and landscape planning pilot will help to ensure that oil and gas development in these areas is sustainable and managed in accordance with the values of the Halfway River First Nation,” Chief Darlene Hunter said last year with the signing of the treaty settlement agreement.
Kist notes that the agreement with ARC represents only 25% of the land tenure granted to HRFN. So 75% of the land tenure could be open to further agreements with other natural gas producers.
“There will likely be more deals over time as we look at the different opportunities that are out there,” Kist said.
Kist is the former president of Rockies LNG and, before that, president of Pacific Northwest LNG. He and Jim Stannard, a former Petronas executive, are now managers for Tsaa Dunne Za Energy.
The tenure award does not represent a transfer of subsurface rights. All subsurface rights to things like minerals, coal, and oil and gas belong to the Crown.
“And at the end of the day, the B.C. government still gets its royalties,” Kist said. “But now the nation is very much in control of that activity.”
The recent agreement with ARC to develop 36 parcels adjacent to its Attachie lands is just the first one to be signed so far. There may be more such agreements in the future, Kist said.
Kist said the First Nation tenure model could end up being used elsewhere.
“I think the B.C. government’s going to look at these sorts of opportunities in areas where maybe there is a lack of development moving things forward,” he said.
“I think this could potentially be the model for development, with First Nations leading the way.”
