Right in the centre - It doesn't make sense

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Published on Thursday, July 18, 2024

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner & Press

I have been accumulating a number of things in my mind that don’t make sense. I am sure you could add many more to the list

A recent report notes that B.C. produces more wood pellets than any other Canadian province, and production is “dominated” by a U.K.-based company Drax, which owns the world’s single-largest wood-burning facility. Drax also owns, or partially owns, eight of B.C’s 12 pellet mills and is responsible for 80 per cent of the province’s exports. Anther report noted that Drax gets paid a huge subsidy from the British government to burn these pellets to make steam to make electricity. Why? Because the government has decided that wood pellets are better than coal. Really? Britain produces coal so how can wood chips make more sense than coal when the trees have to be cut, the wood has to be chipped, then pelleted. The pellets have to be trucked to a railhead, shipped by rail to a seaport, shipped by sea to England, unloaded and then put into a huge furnace to make steam so an electrical generator can make electricity. Now please tell me why that makes sense? 

It’s like a lot of other things that don’t make sense from a logical or governance view but it does make sense financially to businesses because of the government subsidies.

CBC doesn’t make any financial sense either except that the feds pay them $1.3 billion per year in subsidies. Left to their own resources, CBC would die in a year. Left to its own resources, Drax and the pellet industry would die in a year too.

Going back a little in time, why did the federal government shut down the Indian Head tree nursery? 

Why did government shut down the prison farms? For decades prisoners found reason and purpose in the barns and fields at the prison farms. Not anymore. I guess everyone can be rehabbed in a jail cell. Yeah, that makes sense, four walls, no windows, little fresh air, no real work or purpose in life. That should do the trick. When the prison farms were shut down, over 700 inmates were employed on the farms.

From a 2018 Free Press story came this quote, “A prisoner advocacy organization is hoping the reopening of two federal prison farms in Ontario has sewn the seeds for the re-blooming of the at Stony Mountain Institution.

The John Howard Society of Manitoba wants the Rockwood Institution farm, closed by former public safety minister Vic Toews in 2010, to reopen now that the federal government’s budget includes plans for opening two such operations at Kingston, Ont.

John Hutton, the society’s executive director, said the production of the prison farms helped reduce the amount of money spent on food in the facilities, while also helping inmates acquire the work ethic they would need once they were out on in society again”

And back to more recent times, the federal government is investing billions of dollars on EV car battery plants. Never mind that EV cars are more expensive, less reliable. heavier and therefore harder on the roads and basically, at least in rural areas, a pain in the ass to use and recharge. I find that very maddening.

And while money at both levels of senior government is going into EV cars and battery plants and such, we are told there isn’t enough money to put a CT Scan into the hospital at Neepawa or a MRI machine into the new hospital at Portage la Prairie.

The collection of brain cells that run Manitoba health have obviously not accounted for the reduction in ambulance transfers that would be made. You know, those white little buses that move patients around the country in times of emergency. Oh, no, we have to plug their schedules with inter-hospital transfers. That’s so much better than having a CT Scan or a MRI closer to the patients. My wife laid in Neepawa hospital for three days waiting for an ambulance for a transfer to get a procedure that can only be done in Winnipeg. That made sense, right?

We have a problem in Canada, there are dozens of things that don’t make sense as bureaucrats bend over backwards to screw up our lives, our pocket books and in some cases our very safety.

Here’s a secret for bureaucrats and politicians. If you would just bloody think for a few minutes in your life, you would do the right thing and you would be lauded for your common sense.