Today I attended the Blue Mountain Inn & Conference Centre with Maryanne Hill, executive director of the Municipal Waste Integration Network (mwin). Our host from Blue Mountain, Debbi Broekstra, treated us to a nice lunch at The Pottery restaurant and we viewd the meeting rooms and suites. For some time now I've encouraged MWIN to hold its conference in Collingwood since (a) I live there [the most important reason, of course] and (b) amazing developments have gone up in the past few years, especially the Intrawest Village with all its shops and restaurants at the base of what used to be known as Central (to all you skiers and snow boarders).

So now it's official that the MWIN conference will be held there, so remember to mark your calendars and plan to be in Collingwood in June. The plan is for golf at Monterra Golf Course (which is excellent, bny the way) on Tuesday, June 20th, with dinner to follow, and then the main days of the conference being a full day on Wednesday, June 21 and a half day on Thursday, June 22. I will chair the final panel discussion on the last day, as per usual.

Maryanne had a nice idea that we're investigating, which is that after the banquet dinner on the Wednesday delegates would head over to the bars and restaurants in the Intrawest Village (walking distance from the conference building). We're going to try and arrange a "passport" system and prize draw for anyone who turns in a passport the next morning stamped with the half-dozen establishments we hope you'll visit. I have volunteered to help plan that aspect of the conference, which may require that I visit each of the pubs and sample their drinks. I want MWIN members to know that this is a sacrifice I am prepared to make for the greater good of the group.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm having the proverbial manic Monday but wanted to share a couple of quick thoughts.

First, I have a few things to say about the decision of SAQ's chairman Raymond Boucher to step down, but they are based on second- and third-party hearsay, so I'm waiting to talk to our lawyer before prattling on about it here. (Not that it's all THAT controversial, so don't get your hopes up.) But I'd love to share the gossip and await the lawyer's call with bated breath.

Second, I'm preparing my presentation on EPR and program fees, etc. for the upcoming conference next week in Calgary. I look forward to sharing insights gleaned from that conference with you here. I am also in possession of some documents that were sent to me that provide interesting cannon fodder for my presentation, which will involve at least some observations that we're never going to have true EPR in Canada if the way in which information is collected and disseminated is manipulative and selective. I pity the policymakers who have to determine what's the best program when so many reports are designed to mislead in the first place. More on that later!

As an aside, I am interested in traveling to Germany and viewing aspects of its Green Dot system, including its recycling and refilling/reuse operations. I have a couple of leads from people about how to get over there affordably, so hopefully I'll be able to take the tour and report back to readers later this year.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This was just sent over to me and I thought I'd alert readers. I'll provide commentary later, but wanted to post if immediately.

Download file

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I'm getting some administrative things done in between two busy days out of the office. Yesterday, I drove to Toronto to be interviewed and videotaped at our corporate head office by documentary filmmaker Andrew Nisker who's in the final stages of a documentary entitled Garbage Man in which he examines the waste generated by a family in North York, Ontario over a three month period, and its potential environmental impacts. He asked me about such things as curbside recycling, product stewardship and landfill disposal. You can view the trailer at his website here:

http://www.andrewnisker.com/

Tomorrow I head to Mississauga for a workshop on waste disposal technologies and strategies organized by the Municipal Waste Integration Network (mwin) on behalf of the federal government, and then I pop over for the reception and annual dinner/ AGM of the Ontario Waste Management Association (OWMA). I'll tell you about that on Friday.

By the way, Maria Kelleher forwarded to me this morning a hilarious send up of George Bush talking about global warming issues at his cattle ranch. Worth checking out here:

http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=1147&pID=1143716

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I noted in a recent blog entry, I've recently encountered instances at conferences and other professional gatherings of people delivering presentations on the topic of global warming and climate change wherein they use the famous "hockey stick" chart to illustrate the idea that we're living in the warmest period in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 1,000 years, and that temperatures are rising rapidly. The presentations I tend to attend focus on how greater recycling and composting can help us lower our contribution to global warming, but the presentations make use of the same research that's put forward in other "environmental" venues.

Trouble is, this chart (and much of the data behind it) has been discredited. Yes, you read correctly.

The "hockey stick" chart is so named because of its long, stable shaft and fast rising blade. It's often cited in global climate reports -- particularly the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- and illustrates the work of Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, whose findings were fundamental to the assumptions behind the Kyoto Accord.

My most recent encounter with this chart was Maria Kelleher's presentation last week at the Association of Municipal Recycling Coordinators (AMRC) conference. She presented on the benefits of waste diversion and energy efficiency in regard to lowering CO2 and methane emissions, to combat man-made climate change. The PowerPoint slides were borrowed from Ralph Torrie, a consultant on global warming who is popular with the folks at Environment Canada and who speaks regularly at their events. Maria acknowledged that the slides were Ralph Torrie's (whose name was also in large type on the slides themselves), so I'll ascribe the error that I'm about to describe to him. (Maria and I are friends and she knows I hold her in high esteem, so I'm sure she'll forgive me for going on about this.)

Anyway, I got really ticked off when I saw the "hockey stick" chart in the slide presentation. Why? Because the chart, and the research behind it, has been discredited. And in peer-reviewed journals, no less. (More on that below.) The main point isn't that global warming is or is not occurring, so much as that people need to understand there is no "consensus" among scientists on this matter, including climatologists. Opinions range much more than we are often led to believe.

I drew Maria Kelleher's attention to this fact, for her benefit but really more for the benefit of the audience. It really bothers me, as a person who follows the climate change debate fairly closely, to see the hockey stick chart's continued use as a propaganda tool. Does bad science really serve anyone's interests? Including those of even the most alarmist subscribers to the global warming theory? I think not. Don't get me wrong -- although I am a "skeptic" about the theory that man-made global warming is under way, I don't claim to know "for a fact" or "beyond all doubt" that it is not. I've simply encountered many documents written by credible people that indicate there are problems -- some of them very serious -- with the theory, and I find these don't get reported very often. In environmental circles and the mainstream media, the concept that anthropogenic climate change is real and happening in a big way has become an article of faith, and anyone trying to prick that balloon, or any part of it, is accused of heresy, and is shunned. (I'm not kidding! I've been made to feel like a holocaust denier at some environmental gatherings.)

In the discussion afterward (in the conference room and also in the hallway) I took issue with several of the Ralph Torrie slides, including the one that claims that hurricanes have increased in number and/or intensity, doubling in the past ten years from the ten years prior. This is typical selective nonsense: if you look back over the past century, there are natural fluctuations in hurricane activity and things are no worse now than 40 or 50 years ago.

Anyway, I don't want to rehash the whole climate change debate here. What I want to do is simply establish for the record that there are very serious problems with the hockey stick chart, which has been called "rubbish" by one peer-reviewer in the journal Science. (See article below.)

My challenge here is to offer readers something fairly short and accessible to summarize the situation. The trouble with this topic is that one can trot out articles to refute this or that point which are either too short, shallow or glib to be convincing, or way too long and technical for anyone to actually read. ("Inside baseball" as I like to call it.) I went through my files and have cut and pasted an article below that does a pretty good job summarizing the problems with the hockey stick chart, and the controversy triggered by the scientists and statisticians who revealed those problems. The article is by no means the last word on the subject, but it's a good entry point for the lay person.

Please read the article below, and if you want to dig deeper, here are a couple of websites you might want to check out. Some are "skeptic" websites, but offer links to other material that is in the "pro global warming theory" camp. Again, my goal here is not to convince you that global warming isn't occurring, but just to make you aware that there is quality information out there that questions the "common wisdom" on this, and suggests that, going forward, no one should trot out that hockey stick chart without at least acknowledging that it has been challenged and the science behind it is under serious review.

Websites you might find useful include:

The Science & Environmental Policy Project http://www.sepp.org/
Note that because this organization has received a very small amount of money from oil companies, global warming theory enthusiasts like to say that it has no credibility and that its founder, Fred Singer, Ph.D. (who was behind the global weather satellite system, ahem!) is just a shill for "Big Oil." Nonsense! I've read a lot of entries at this site, enjoyed them and found them very informative.

University of Guelph http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html
This site leads directly to material gathered by Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, known as "M&M" in climate change circles. Their work, alluded to in the article below, was crucial in exposing problems with the hockey stick data sets. I find their observations about the games played by some of the peer-reviewed journals to try and exclude their findings very funny, and more than a little frightening. If you read enough of their material, including the book Taken By Storm (Key Porter Books) you'll never sit through another Environment Canada cliamte change presentation with a straight face again, no matter where you stand on these issues.

Steve McIntyre's blog: http://www.climateaudit.org/ The message threads and blog posts here are very interesting, and McKitrick has posted some full papers on the "hockey stick" chart and related (or unrelated) topics in paleoclimatology.

Climate Science: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/
A blog site that offers detailed technical information and opinion about the leading-edge issues of climate change.

Now, here's the short article. And please note that I couldn't easily reproduce in my blog a couple of charts that go with this article, so I deleted reference to them from this text. I'm not hiding anything, so if you want the whole article, go here: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=102704F

Is the Hockey Stick Broken?

By Dr. Willie Soon
Co-Authored by David R. Legates *

It’s dubbed the hockey stick. It is a rather simple looking graph -- with a long, stable shaft and a fast rising blade -- that purports to represent averaged Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the last thousand years. More than that, in global climate reports -- particularly the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (TAR) in 2001 -- its used as proof that mankind’s industrial revolution has over the last hundred years started dangerously pushing up global temperatures, thus justifying restrictions on emissions of human produced greenhouse gasses.

But there’s a problem. The hockey stick may well be broken.

A research paper recently published in the journal Science by Professor Hans von Storch and colleagues has found significant problems with the hockey stick. Von Storch, the leader of the research team at the Institute of Coastal Research at Geesthacht, Germany, calls the hockey stick junk or rubbish.

How important is that in the debate about what, if anything, the world should do about climate change? Perhaps quite a bit.

A little background is needed here.

The IPCC hockey stick was originally produced by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes, first in 1998 for the period 1400-1980 and then, with no major progress in the science or database, was quickly expanded to the full 1000-1980 interval in 1999. We will call the studies MBH98, MBH99 hereafter.

Now, since no thermometer readings were available for almost 850 of the 1,000 years, MBH98 and MBH99 first selected what were the then-available temperature proxies. Those proxies were based on tree-growth, coral and ice core records from about 105 sites across the globe. To verify the accuracy of the temperature data derived from those proxies, the methodology of MBH98 and MBH99 tested recent proxy data to see if it fit the available geographical patterns of temperature observed by available thermometer measurements for the last 80-150 years or so. Those proxies that did not fit the pattern were essentially ignored. For those that did, it was assumed that the same geographical pattern of change seen in the very short thermometer record would hold true for the full 1,000 years into the past.

It was with those two critical, but unsubstantiated steps, that MBH99 then came up with the well-known IPCC hockey stick temperature averaged for the Northern Hemisphere.

Since 1999, several climate researchers have challenged those underlying assumptions for deriving the hockey stick, but with little effect on limiting the hockey sticks use as an illustration purportedly helping prove human induced global warming.

The heavy criticism by Von Storch and colleagues in Science may change that. It exposes a clear methodological problem in the MBH99 hockey stick rendition of the 1000-year Northern-hemisphere temperature history. That rendition improperly smoothed out large temperature variations over the 1000-1900 interval that made up the supposedly stable shaft of the hockey stick.

How did Von Storch and colleagues show this?

As the researchers explained it in Science, they used computer climate model outputs to generate the test temperature data series at a number of locations on Earth. By using such computer model climate outputs, rather than actual temperature proxy records, the researchers could take advantage of a completely known set of information about temperature variability in every location on Earth (true, of course, only in a computer model) to perform various sensitivity tests. These tests could then show how different combinations of locations for available test temperature data series throughout the 1000-year climate history could systematically influence or bias the statistical reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere-wide temperature record. Biased results from different statistical methods of combining the computer-produced temperature data for the selected geographical locations could then be compared with the benchmark model results that captured the full range of variability, accurately averaged over the whole Northern Hemisphere.

Von Storch and colleagues added confidence to their adopted methodology by showing that their primary conclusion and results held true using the sophisticated computer climate models from both the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (results labeled ECHO-G or ECHO-G II in Figures 2 and 3) and the U.K. Meteorological Offices Hadley Centre. (Those results are not shown here but were shown in Von Storch and colleagues paper).

As expert reviewers commenting on Von Storch et al.’s paper for the Science magazine noted:

“Accepting Von Storch et al.’s results does not mean that we must also accept that their simulated temperature history is close to reality -- merely that it is a reasonable representation of climate behavior for which any valid reconstruction method should perform adequately.”

In short, the temperature records from the computer model over the last 1,000 years need not be absolutely correct as long as the model outputs can be shown to simulate observed reality in recent years reasonably well. That was the case.

Von Storch et al. show that their ECHO-G computer simulation yields realistic temperature variability similar to the observed Northern Hemisphere temperature (labeled NCEP Reanalysis) in the test period 1948-1990. By contrast, the hockey stick curve, adopted by the IPCC TAR, already underestimates the observed range of temperature change from 1948-1980.

Going back through past centuries, Von Storch and colleagues identified a peculiar problem with the method used to develop the hockey stick. Using the same statistical averaging method on the computer simulated temperature sampled at the 105 sites from where the original hockey stick proxies were taken, and adding a realistic estimate of error and uncertainty of temperature at each geographical locations, Von Storch and colleagues came up with a remarkable finding. The finding agreed reasonably well with the original hockey stick results.

What does such agreement mean? Not confirmation of MBH99s results, but a refutation. As Von Storch and colleagues noted that the hockey stick methodology systematically and significantly underestimated the full range of temperature variability of the last 1,000 years. By ignoring the hockey sticks rules for statistical averaging and instead computing the simple arithmetic average of the temperatures from the same 105 sites, Von Storch and colleagues produced a temperature curve that agreed well with the full range of variability.

Bottom line: the large underestimation of temperature change is mainly an artifact of the hockey stick’s averaging rules.

The authors of the Science paper put it this way:

“…widely-used methods [e.g., IPCC TAR 2001] to reconstruct past global climate variations ... probably underestimate the amplitude of the real variations by a factor of up to two, and possibly more.

Von Storch bluntly summed up his results with the following comment reported in Der Spiegel on October 4:

“We were able to show in a publication in Science that this [hockey stick] graph contains assumptions that are not permissible. Methodologically it is wrong: Rubbish [or Junk, from the German phrase Quatsch].”

Von Storch and colleagues aren’t the only ones who reached that conclusion.

In a recent popular article in MIT’s Technology Review, Professor Richard Muller, through the careful re-assessment and checking by the two independent Canadian researchers, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, highlighted another very serious methodological problem in the IPCC rendition of the 1,000-year hockey stick temperature history -- adopting the hockey stick methodology, the hockey stick shape of the temperature history curve can be automatically generated by using random data series (i.e., in contrast to data series from actual climate proxies or computer model outputs) from each locations.

Muller remarked that:

“A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one -- if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution.”

In short, the new paper in Science by Von Storch and colleagues confirms what several other climate researchers have long stipulated. The hockey stick curve -- which is a mathematical construct, as opposed to actual temperature information recorded at individual locations -- is problematic because it yields air temperature changes on timescales of a few decades to a century that are simply too muted to fit the phenomena of the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 800-1300) and Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1900), which are well recorded in historical documents and recognized in indirect climate data from growths of tree-rings and corals or isotopic content in ice cores and stalagmites collected around the world.

This is traditional science, with results from one group tested by others. What makes this case important, though, was explained by Von Storch in Der Spiegel:

“The Mann graph [i.e., the hockey stick of IPCC TAR] indicates that it was never warmer during the last ten thousand years than it is today. ... In recent years it [the hockey stick] has been elevated to the status of truth by the UN appointed science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This handicapped all that research which strives to make a realistic distinction between human influences and climate and natural variability.”

* Willie Soon is physicist at the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory. His book (with Steven Yaskell) The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection (http://www.wspc.com/books/physics/5199.html) was published by World Scientific Publishing Company earlier this year. David Legates is Associate Professor in Climatology in the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware. The views presented here by Soon and Legates are solely of their own and do not represent the view of the institutions where they work.

Adapted from TCSDaily.com which is published by Tech Central Station, a division of DCI Group, L.L.C. Small edits have been made only in reference to three illustrative charts or figures which were not copied with this article.
– ed.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm back from the AMRC conference and want to share a few thoughts and observations. There's no particular order to these, so forgive me if this comes across as a bit "stream of consciousness."

I arrived late on the Wednesday and missed some of Janet Robins' presentation on the "utility model" for waste. However I discussed it with her and Maria Kelleher later on, and feel strongly that this model could provide significant benefits to many jurisdictions. Quite a bit of research is being done right now into the legal and economic details (and the pros and cons) of shifting municipal waste management into a utility (very common for water infrastructure, for example). There are something like nine such waste utilities in Ontario at present. Anyway, I have invited Maria Kelleher and Janet Robins to write a feature article on this topic, probably for our June/July edition. Watch for it.

There were sessions on a wide range of topics, including SSO organics, HHW and e-waste. Some of the presentations were a bit general or just short updates. However, I expect next year's conference will really shine on those topics, as there are some major projects starting up this spring and some major policy initiatives that could or should be in motion by next year. For instance, Peel Region is about to do the ribbon cutting ceremony for its new mega-recycling and composting plant, and Hamilton is also about to open its large new plant. (There's an article on each in the upcoming Feb/March edition of the magazine, due out in a couple of weeks). Ontario might have a stewardship plan approved for e-waste, used oil and scrap tires by next spring, (Hey, I'm still an optimist after all!) so hopefully the "insiders" from that process can be enticed to come out and speak about how it all came to be.

I almost missed the last day of the conference (Friday) as I had to drive through a snow storm and view magazine proofs in Toronto the night before. But I'm thankful that I made it back in time to attend the markets update, especially the segment on glass recycling presented by Geoff Love, who also gave a very insightful presentation on the Effectiveness and Efficiency Fund administered under Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO) and related topics such as best practices. It was clear to me that I have to stay in closer contact with Geoff, whose forthright attitude and intellect I hold in high esteeem, and Stewardship Ontario (SO) generally, so as to report for the benefit of readers on the findings of all the SO and WDO research and projects. Ontario may lag some of the other provinces in regards to certain waste programs, but one thing that Ontario now has that is highly coveted is the information from the municipal datacall. This will allow for very close scrutiny of how the plethora of different systems and approaches truly function. We can now start to accurately measure what is being achieved and at what cost. This will no doubt lead to articles; our magazine can share with readers across the country what is being learned about the cost/benefit of certain waste diversion approaches, including those that are appropriate for rural areas as opposed to major urban centres.

I enjoyed attending the hospitality suite of Hamilton-based REMM, and chatting with Atul Nanda, who will start writing the Commodities Corner column in our next edition (April/May). I noticed that the AMRC and other organizations like Stewardship Ontario are making use of Atul and his company to do research on various topics, so it looks like we found the right guy to write our column!

On the second day of the conference I moderated a session on emerging industry trends. A fairly lively discussion ensued near the end of session, including a spirited debate about glass recycling and whether or not LCBO containers should be put on deposit. I admit I was trying to provoke a discussion, so don't hold me to everything I said literally or forever. One panelist produced the recent OI Canada letter about the shortcomings of glass recycling via the blue box, and this elicited a range of comments in the session and afterwards in the hallway. Some municipal recyclers agreed that glass was a tremendous problem in their programs, and expensive to collect and process. Others thought that the blue box is still the way to go, as it collects about 68% of the glass material, and they were skeptical that it was worth the added expense of a deposit-refund system to capture only 10 or 15% more. A deposit system wouldn't capture all the glass anyway (e.g., pickle jars). There were some highly technical side-discussions about the environmental economics and lifecycle aspects of the two approaches, and how deposit-refund would generate a more valuable glass-to-glass container recycling system, and even refilling, while others disagreed, and so on. Too much to report here, but I got some good ideas for future articles and we'll be inviting the experts to comment further in the magazine and on the website.

Mention of the OI Canada letter (search under Headline News on this website for the recent news item on that, and the full text of the letter) precipitated the circulation of a letter from Unical -- a Quebec-based company -- that is critical of OI Canada's position. Unical won a recent bid process and up to $2 million in funding to build a large plant in Ontario to take blue box glass, including low-value mixed color cullet, and recycle it into value-added raw material for such applications as fibre glass and container manufacturing . (Ironically, OI Canada is a customer of Unical -- it's amazing how these policy debates cause various commerical interests to join, break and re-join with one-another.) OI Canada and the Beer Store were sponsors of the environment minister's speech on Thursday night, and all the pamphleteering in the hallway was an interesting backdrop to what is now a heated debate in Ontario about how glass should be collected and recycled.

My antipathy toward the LCBO is well known, and I've recently stated in this blog that I currently favor LCBO containers being put on deposit. However, I am very interested in offering readers a thorough and fair airing of both sides in this debate, and will work hard to make sure that this happens, both on this website and in the pages of our magazine. I've asked Unical to send me an electronic version of its letter for posting here, and I will invite them to write an article about the plant they propose to build in Ontario. They could be a big part of the solution in Ontario and perhaps could redeem the shortcomings of the blue box at present. Frankly, I don't know either way, but our magazine is a "forum for ideas" so we'll get all that good information out in the daylight for all to see and make up their own minds.

Another fiesty dimension of the conference occurred after Maria Kelleher gave the final presentation at the conference. Maria presented on waste recycling and climate change, an area where she's done a lot of work recently for the federal government. I noticed that she made extensive use of some PowerPoint slides from Ralph Torrie, a consultant who is considered an expert and proponent of global warming issues. Now it's no secret that I am a skeptic of the global warming theory (and I consider it my job as a journalist to BE a professional skeptic). But I really took exception to the presence in Maria's presentation of the famous "hockey stick" chart that purports to show that a dramatic increase in global temperatures is occurring, and that a real and measurable "signal" has emerged from the background data "noise."

This hockey stick chart (called that because of the sharp upward shape at the right of the chart) was published years ago in a peer-reviewed journal years ago and adopted by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change as justification for its dire predictions of what was happening to the earth, and the negotiations that led to the famous Kyoto Accord. I like Maria a lot and was going to mention to her privately in the hallway after her session that this chart has been COMPLETELY DISCREDITED and that scientists have disowned the scientifically invalid process via which the original team collected and manipulated the data. But I couldn't help myself telling Maria in the public forum that this chart is discredited and that she must remove it from her presentation. I couldn't stand the thought of the session delegates hearing all this and not being alerted to the serious problem that the climate change proponents now have with this discredited diagram, which they continue to trot out at conferences as though it's still true. Anyway, Maria is a tough lady and my being mean to her in the session didn't stop us from having a nice chat at lunch afterward, at the end of which I invited her to write an article about recycling and greenhouse gases, etc. So maybe I'm not so awful after all.

I told the audience that I would dig up some articles about the hockey stick chart debacle and put them up on this website, so that we will ALL KNOW about this, and not act surprised when it pops its ugly head up again in future, as it no doubt will. I will also try to locate and put up the article that appeared in the VERY SAME peer-reviewed journal as the original hockey stick article, revealing the problems with it. (I forget whether it was Nature or Science, but I will find it, I promise.) I also promise not to be mean to my friends in future at conferences (although I warn my fingers may be crossed.)

Lastly, I want to comment on what was the most lame aspect of the AMRC conference, and something that really ticks me off. YET AGAIN, no one from Ontario's Ministry of Environment attended this conference! Everyone at the conference was very observant of this fact and some were highly annoyed. It's just further proof that this ministry is not engaged (as the consultants and recycling coordinators politely put it). Also, while I respect the fact that she braved a snow storm to get there, the Environment Minister Lauren Broten deliverd a very UNINFORMATIVE speech. Sorry to be so blunt but everyone at my table agreed that there was nothing worth writing down, just platitudes worthy of maybe a Grade 12 student delivering their "speech project" at the end of term. What was irritating is that the minister's staff had agreed to have the minister answer some questions that were in fact emailed to her in advance of the vent. No, I wouldn't expect her to reveal "state secrets" about controversial topics like e-waste stewardship, used oil or LCBO glass, but she could have at least offered some comments. This minister needs to get it in her head that when professional people (real experts in environmental topics) pay a lot of money to stay overnight at a resort so they can listen to the minister, they expect more than a canned speech of the ilk Brenda Elliott used to deliver, over and over again. This is not a highschool audience that needs warm and fuzzy messages about "all their good work" recycling. They want content. They want insight. They want a minister who will entertain questions and stick her neck out, at least a bit. I give the minister "two thumbs down" for her performance.

Well, that's enough of a novel. Watch this space for updates on the glass recycling issue and the climate change hockey stick diagram matter. I'll try to get ontop of each in a day or two. And if anything I've written above aggravates you, please don't call me or email me privately. Instead, enter a comment of your own by clicking on the green word "comment" below, and join the debate here, in this space. Thanks!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'll be spending most of the rest of this week attending the annual conference and AGM of the Association of Municipal Recycling Coordinators (AMRC) in Hockley Valley, Ontario. When I can get my laptop online I'll post a report here, and will certainly share some impressions after the event concludes on Friday.

I look forward to today's workshop on Management Issues and Finances, which features a presentation by our regulations writer Rosalind Cooper as part of "Treating Waste Management as a Utility."

Most conference sessions are scheduled for Thursday, when I moderate one session, and the day concludes with a speech from the environment minister at the gala dinner. Let's hope she has more interesting and worthwhile things to say than her predecessor, whose staff-written speeches were superficial and repetitive. I'll let you know if she announces anything worth reporting.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I just finished signing off on the final set of magazine proofs for our upcoming February/March edition, which will be out in a few weeks. I'm cooling my heels today and preparing for the AMRC conference later this week in Hockley Valley.

I'm going to resist musing too much on this blog space about issues that aren't related to waste management and recycling, but, since it is a publishing topic, I'm going to indulge myself for a moment and add my two cents worth about the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons that are alleged to make fun of Islamic beliefs and which have triggered protests among Mulsims around the world.

I won't bother to repeat the analysis you've likely encountered elsewhere, saying that the publication was irresponsible during this era of the global war on terror or, alternatively, that the protests have been orchestrated by mullahs and other leaders who live in countries without freedom of speech, and that much of the action has been rent-a-mob scenarios staged for TV cameras. The mainstream press has already covered that, and done not a bad job.

I have an observation to make, and then a point that I haven't seen written elsewhere, although it no doubt has been made by someone.

First, I have looked at the cartoons and didn't find them particularly offensive. I know! I know! I'm not Muslim, so of course they're not going to offend me. But allow for the fact that I can somewhat try to imagine what might be offensive, discount as heavily as you like that I'm not Muslim, and it's still arguable that the cartoons are mildly funny, mostly silly, and even the cartoon that purports to show Mohammed with a ticking time bomb in his turban makes a valid editorial-cartoon-style point, irreverant though it may be. I say this not to convince you, if you're Muslim, but just to share with you that I've looked at the cartoons and thought about them before shooting off my mouth. (Unlike some people on either side of this debate.)

Second (and lastly) the point I'd like to add is this: I can understand why a Muslim may be held to account for writing or drawing something that some may consider irreligious, sacrosanct or outright heretical. While I wouldn't condone the person being stoned to death or having his hands cut off, I could appreciate him or her, say, being told not to come back to the local Mosque, or being made to pay some kind of fine, or publicly reprimanded. that sort of thing. But what I do NOT understand is why Muslim people think that a NON-Muslim person should feel beholden to follow the same code of practice as Muslims! I mean, if I'm a Danish cartoonist and I want to make an ironic point about Islamic extremism, and draw (as this guy did) someone in heaven telling the suicide bombers to knock it off because there are no more virgins left in paradise, I should be free to do so. Even if such a cartoon is considered tasteless (which it no doubt is), people in free democracies, who are NOT Muslim, should feel free to draw and write such things and newspapers should feel free to publish them.

If they do, I agree that the artist/writer and the publication should be prepared for, say, some angry letters to the newspaper. It should expect a call from local Muslim groups demanding a meeting with the editorial board, and perhaps be expected to publish a critical letter from that community. But when Muslim mobs around the world behave in a totally unhinged way and call for the death of the cartoonist and threaten terrorizing actions against the Danes and the West in general, they not only elevate awareness of the cartoons to a wider audience, but their actions illustrate exactly the extremism that the cartoons were lampooning in the first place.

I suspect most Muslim people around the world still maintain their sense of humor and aren't that offended by the cartoons. Some might even chuckle at them in private. It's too bad that a segment of the Muslim population is being led into rioting by manipulative political and religious leaders who clearly have an agenda of their own, that has nothing to do with true outrage over these cartoons, and everything to do with a chance to demonize the west. There is a difference between hate literature and these cartoons, and the difference is a sense of irony. But if you don't have a sense of irony, you're not going to "get it," right? So what I'd to close by saying is this: If you're Muslim, and if you have a sense of irony, speak up and tell the over-the-top angry Muslims they don't need to overreact this way.

And if you're Muslim, and you don't agree with what I've just written, I suggest that you add a polite (but terse, if you like) comment to the end of this blog entry. Or write me a letter. I would like that, as would you.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today's National Post features a wonderful article by one of my favorite writers, Lawrence Solomon, on the topic of supposed wilderness protection in B.C. (As a convenience, I have pasted the whole article below.)

I've followed GreenPeace's campaign for years to get a large area of old-growth forest in B.C. protected from exploitation. I recall being mildly offended at the organization coming up with the cheesy name "Great Bear Forest" which is in fact their creation, which was quickly followed by posters and a boycott campaign directed at Europeans (e.g., Germany) who don't know enough about realities on the ground in Canada to see how they were being manipulated.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a conservationist (as opposed to "environmentalist") and I very much favor settting aside certain tracts of land and water as world heritage sites. Actually, I'm of the school that things we can't, in fact, be trusted to "manage" wilderness, which is why I favor setting aside large pristine areas for the preservation of habitat and wild creatures, and the enjoyment of future generations of backpackers and canoeists or kayakers.

Which is why, as Solomon so deftly points out, the Great Bear deal is such a sham. It's not at all what the environmental groups advertised, beforem during or after the deal. And it's entirely the kind of "manage the wilderness" arrangement that I distrust and that is sought out by rent-seeking corporations.

Sometimes my friends react with amazement when I tell them I have no time for GreenPeace and some of the other mainstream environmental groups. They assume this means I'm somehow against the environment. Nonsense. Read Solomon's article and you'll see a perfect illustration why I distrust these groups, and overtly dislike them, in fact. They allow their members and supporters to feel smug and superior to everyone else, while in fact they are the biggest sellouts around. It's true, and I've encountered literally dozens of sad stories like this over the years. This Great Bear sell-out is not an exception -- it's actually the rule nowadays with environmental deal making.

It's a bit simplistic, but my rule-of-thumb in assessing these things is to follow the money and ask, Is there a subsidy? If there is a subsidy (direct or indirect) that's usually a red flag that someone is fooling us again. In a perverse way I have to admire the Machiavellian lumber companies for their cynical tactics. I hate the outcome, but I have a sort of awed respect for how good they are at playing this game, actually getting the government to underwrite the costs of logging old growth forests, and getting the world's best-known environmental groups to applaud them for it in public. Who'd a thought it possible?

Anyway, here's the story.

Great Bear hug
Environmentalists are cheering, but they are the losers in an agreement reached over B.C.'s last rain forest area

By Lawrence Solomon

Financial Post

Friday, February 10, 2006

The British Columbia government, B.C. resource industries and environmentalists on both sides of the border struck an agreement earlier this week to take down or otherwise exploit almost three-quarters of the Great Bear Rainforest, one of the world's largest and last remaining intact temperate rainforest. More remarkably still, the environmentalists are cheering.

"A huge victory" exclaimed Greenpeace. "An incredible conflict-to-consensus story," declared Sierra Club. "This innovative rainforest agreement provides a real world example of how people and wilderness can prosper together."

In truth, we have a real-world example of how industry can squeeze government for subsidies to extract resources from wilderness areas that would otherwise remain untouched, with environmentalists the catalyst that precipitates the environmental despoliation.

Under the agreement, the BC government and the environmentalists have co-operated to put together an attractive financial package for industry, and all parties will now lobby the federal government for further subsidies. More provincial subsidies will follow, the amount to be negotiated, as is any determination of how much wilderness will actually be protected.

The agreement -- really an interim step in a process 10 years in the making, with several more years ahead -- couldn't come too soon for industry. To stop foot-dragging on this deal, needed by wood-product consumers to keep feedstocks full and the cost of wood low, NorskeCanada, B.C.'s largest consumer of forest products and the world's largest producer of telephone directories, intervened directly in a letter to Premier Gordon Campbell last year: "I am writing to add the voice of our company to those you have already heard from to urge you to move forward ... prior to the upcoming Provincial Election," urged president and CEO Russell Horner.

The industry efforts paid off with this week's historic deal. With the help of all concerned, the remote Great Bear Rainforest, until now uneconomic and all-but-inaccessible for most kinds of economic development, has been put into play: "When we work together, we can produce meaningful benefits for everyone concerned," an enthused Reynold Hert, Western Forest Products CEO, told the press.

Premier Campbell was also enthused. The central and northern coast of his province has mostly been unused wilderness, save for the coastal wolves, goshawks, spirit bears and other animals that sport there. Now, he will put this part of the province to work. As his Ministry of Agriculture and Lands reported the deal, in a Backgrounder under the theme "Jobs and the Economy, Environmental Management," a key element in the province's new vision for its coast is the "Promotion of stability, certainty and long-term resource use." As the cherry on top, the Premier also knows the way is clear to making the now-protected spirit bear the mascot of the Vancouver Olympics, without fear of embarrassment.

The only losers in the deal are the environmentalists -- Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and ForestEthics --who have unwittingly been outmanoeuvred at the negotiating table. The David Suzuki Foundation, originally co-operative, to its credit turned critic when the consequences of the negotiations became evident.
Helping industry and government promote the subsidization of remote resource extraction, and helping to snooker the environmentalists, is a new enviro-industrial concept called "Environment-Based Management." EBM, intended to base decisions on the social and economic needs of resource-dependent communities as well as on environmental factors, is now employed in aid of resource extraction worldwide. Japan uses EBM to justify its whaling industry. EBM B.C.-style will not only promote uneconomic logging in the Great Bear Rainforest, it will even allow mineral exploration and mining in the region's new biodiversity areas.

These mineral lands constitute more than half of the so-called "protected areas" the agreement establishes. As further example of the little environmentalists can show for their years of coziness with the forestry industry, the industry has needed to make only trivial concessions on lands containing merchantable timber. In effect, industry will now get subsidies for giving up next to nothing, and will also receive the blessings of Greenpeace et al as it carries on with its removal of old-growth species.

The success by industry and government in getting the environmentalists to sign on is all the more remarkable in light of what seemed to be impossible-to-ignore benchmarks. The Great Bear Rainforest is the name of the Canadian portion of the West Coast temperate rain forest. In the more northerly U.S. portion, a region in the Alaskan Panhandle that is topographically and ecologically similar, the United States Forest Service in 1999 protected -- rather than opened up -- approximately 80% of the rain forest from development.

Canadian industry also needed to convince environmentalists to overlook one other detail: the findings of the independent scientific panel they themselves had helped establish. Known as the Coast Information Team, this multi-year, multi-million-dollar government-funded study concluded that as much as 70% of the Great Bear Rainforest needed to be protected to conserve the habitat of its large mammals. Yet the environmentalists accepted a proportion of protected land so low they can have no assurance that important habitats will be protected.
In a way, the environmental outcome is hardly surprising, In other attempts by environmentalist to negotiate agreements with government and industry, environmentalists have invariably come up short. In this case, the environmentalists have not only been worn out by the endless negotiations, they also faced enormous pressure from backers -- mostly U.S. foundations -- that put up an astonishing $60-million to seal a deal and wanted to see results.

A Suzuki Foundation report last year on the emerging agreement, which has not materially changed in the interim, lists the results:

"The proposed land-use agreement for the area would leave:
- 80% of critical Kermode [spirit bear] habitat unprotected [from logging and other forms of development]
- 65% of the most-intact and highest conservation value ecosystems unprotected
- 86% of the timber harvesting land base unprotected
- 77% of cedar old-growth forests unprotected
- 65% of the most productive salmon rivers unprotected."

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of you might start to think of this space as the LCBO/SAQ bashing corner, and my apologies if recent posts have been a bit monothematic in that regard, but I just can't avoid the unfolding story of what's happening in Ontario and Quebec right now with respect to exposure of what's up at the two province's alcohol monopolies.

Events unfolding at Ontario's LCBO and Quebec's SAQ are eerily similar. Both these monopolistic entities have come under fire recently for such things as (in SAQ's case) padding profits by NOT passing on to consumers savings from, among other things, a devalued Euro. I mean, if these agencies are actually gouging consumers, doesn't that fly in the face of their very raison d'etre?

Do yourself a favor and read fellow blogger Usman Valiante's entry yesterday on this topic. Just so you know, he arranged to have the La Presse article on SAQ translated. In other words, this is the only place you'll get that amazing article in English. This is a big part of the problem, you see. Ontario and Quebec together constitute the largest market in Canada and share very similar approaches to such things as wine and spirit bottle recycling. But the two solitudes persist and don't pursue a potentially powerful collaboration in how they reform their liquor agencies. This is a missed opportunity and a huge shame.

Yet, right now, at this moment in history, something may be possible. Both agencies are, right now! in the midst of accounting scandals. Both have a dismal record in true bottle-to-bottle recycling. In Ontario, which has a better recovery rate than Quebec, glass recycling is mostly "downcycling" into low-value aggregate. The recent O-I Canada paper (posted on this site under Posted Documents) reveals that glass from The Beer Store is propping up and masking what is actually a poor performance for LCBO glass recovery.

The time is ripe for the governments in both Ontario and Quebec to talk to one another, and develop a parallel strategy to place SAQ and LCBO glass on deposit-refund. It's time to resist the sham data and the well-paid lobbyists and (a) privatize these money-losing (you read correctly) moribund entities and open them up to true competition and (b) place their containers on deposit.

Ah, but there's only one catch, and that is that our governments HAVE NO GUTS! I forgot that, you see. Unless public opinion polls show that the public's view is off the charts negative on a topic, the government will sit on its hand. And most people have been bamboozled by the LCBO bribing its customers with their own money, setting up fancy stores so they will "like" the LCBO and not want it changed. (The renovations have not increased sales, by they way, and have helped the corporation lose tons of money.)

All of that ties in with Usman's other blog entry yesterday, his review of the book On Bullshit that I also recently read. I can't think of a better example of "bullshit" (in the proper sense of the word) being used to protect corporate fiefdoms and delude policymakers than Quebec's SAQ and Ontario's LCBO. Making the connection between the environment, recycling, deposit-refund avoidance, and accounting problems is the key to unlocking the puzzle. There's enough ammo there for either government to substantiate why they are going in there and cleaning house.

If only they would!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's National Post expands upon a segment of Monday evening's six o'clock news program on Global TV about a fired LCBO accountant who has launched a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against the Ontario wine and beer crown corporation, alleging millions of dollars of funds have been misappropriated. I have reprinted the National Post article in full below.

The article speaks for itself. There's not enough detail for me to analyze the situation in a meaningful way, other than for me to say that rumours have swirled around the LCBO for years among journalists of possible mismanagement and outright corruption at the organization. Yet no one has ever had enough solid material to go to press, especially in the wake of a libel chill that has most news organizations only printing or going to air with material that is "bullet proof" -- meaning it must be of the same quality as a sworn affidavit to withstand a possible legal challenge. Obviously, there are a lot of great stories that don't get to press because of this situation.

Media critics may be glad about that, but in fact the famous fifth estate has its hands tied in Canada at the moment, and this is only abetting the interests of crooked politicians and powerful businesspeople. If Watergate were to occur today, I doubt the lawyers for the Washington Post would go to press with the investigative journalists' copy. they wouldn't be allowed to reveal things as they encountered them; the whole story would have had to be told at once, and Deep throat would have had to sign a sworn affidavit. Unlikely.

Anyway, this most recent scandal to hit the LCBO may or may not signal the beginning of the unravelling of the status quo at the moribund organization. I hope so, but we'll have to wait for details from the court case to see.

(Note: On Wednesday I will be in Toronto meeting with a trade association about redesign of its website, and reviewing final proofs of our magazine. I won't enter another Blog entry until Thursday.)

Fired LCBO accountant alleges money missing
Files $800,000 lawsuit

Leslie Roberts and Kelly Patrick
Global News Hour and National Post

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

An accountant fired by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario alleges the arms-length government corporation may have misplaced as much as $55-million, Global News Hour reported yesterday.

John Alexopoulos, the LCBO's manager of retail accounting from April, 1998, until November of last year, says he lost his job for repeatedly pointing out "discrepancies" in the provincial alcohol retailer's books, according to a lawsuit filed last month.

"I observed that there were some discrepancies between warehouse shipments and retail store receipts," he said in an interview broadcast last night.

"I was off balance on a daily basis. I felt as if somebody was trying to put me off balance on a daily basis."

Citing the legal action, officials with the LCBO refused an interview request. But in a written statement, the liquor retailer said it is "confident in the integrity of its inventories."

The Ontario government owns the LCBO and oversees its near-monopoly on liquor sales. Its profits are poured into provincial coffers.

In an $800,000 wrongful-dismissal suit filed on Jan. 19 in Ontario Superior Court, Mr. Alexopoulos says that even after he put his concerns about the missing money in writing, his supervisor refused to investigate the problem.

The allegations contained in the lawsuit have not been proven in court.

"On or about March 11, 2005, the plaintiff submitted a project report to his supervisor analyzing the defendant's system of inventory regarding its product warehouse and retail outlets, after having expressed his concern from time to time," the lawsuit reads.

"The plaintiff reported that the defendant was experiencing annual inventory shortages between warehouse shipments and retail outlet receipts in the range of between $16-million and $55-million."

Mr. Alexopoulos reached the figure after examining the numbers at 21 of the province's liquor outlets, then extrapolating for the LCBO's more than 600 stores, Global News Hour reported.

The lawsuit says that after Mr. Alexopoulos submitted the report, "harassment and criticism from his supervisor intensified and created a poisoned workplace environment."

The suit also says Mr. Alexopoulos was diagnosed in September, 2004, with "reactive depression and generalized panic disorder," a condition the suit says was caused by job-related stress and prompted him to take two medical leaves from the LCBO.

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives are calling for a full investigation.

© National Post 2006

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As noted in our news section today, an industry lobby is asking New Brunswick’s environment minister to alter Bill 15’s new product stewardship legislation that, as drafted, would prohibit separate stewardship fees from being shown to consumers and, in effect, make it difficult for brand owners to pass on recycling and waste diversion costs to a third-party stewardship board. The letter is reproduced in full below.

In Canada, the western provinces have moved forward with product stewardship schemes that use advance disposal fees (ADFs). This is sometimes casually called the “Western model” and is notable in Alberta where it's used for such things as scrap tires, used oil and electronics waste. In ADF schemes, companies set up a stewardship organization that funds recycling and diversion from landfill of waste materials. While this may be effective in keeping certain materials out of landfill, this “arms length” relationship between manufacturers and their waste streams comes in for heavy criticism from environmentalists, who want programs to be designed in such a way that more responsibility is placed on manufacturers to change the way they manufacture, package and distribute their goods in the first place. For materials like used oil, the Western model has been shown to actually undermine environmentally superior re-refining and to encourage burning.

New Brunswick’s Bill 15 may be the first step in what could become the “Eastern model” -- i.e., programs that function without ADFs. A good example of what these could look like is the new e-waste program in the State of Maine. (We recently posted a news item on that program under Headline News.)

The industry letter uses careful wording to suggest that prohibition of visible fees prohibits "a transparent cost recovery process, which in turn will impair consumer awareness of the recovery/recycling costs for designated products and packaging, thereby reducing consumer compliance."

This statement is meant to appeal to people who don't understand how ADF schemes function, and to characterize visible fees as superior (in the sense that no fees, or hidden fees, are somehow nefarious and dishonest). I doubt that the policymakers in New Brunswick will be confused by these statements. The signatories to the letter probably feel they just "have to" defend and promote the stance they've taken elsewhere over fees, while fully understanding the full ramifications of every aspect of this "game."

My guess is that within a year or so there will be two (maybe even three!) regimes for funding of product stewardship in Canada: a Western ADF-based model, and Eastern/Atlantic Region fee-less model, with Ontario and Quebec in the middle (sucking their thumbs, probably). We should all follow this with interest.

Here's the letter (also posted as a pdf file under Posted Documents on this website home page)

February 1, 2006

The Honourable Trevor Holder
Minister of Environment and Local Government
Government of New Brunswick
Marysville Place
P.O. Box 6000
Fredericton, NB E3B 5H1

RE: An Act to Amend the Clean Environment Act (Bill 15)

Dear Minister:

On behalf of Corporations Supporting Recycling (CSR), Retail Council of Canada (RCC), and Food and Consumer Products of Canada (FCPC), representing Canadian-based manufacturers, retailers and distributors of a wide range of food, beverage and consumer products, we are writing in response to Bill 15, An Act to Amend the Clean Environment Act.

Collectively our members are committed to environmentally sustainable business practices and our goal is to ensure sustainable product/packaging stewardship programs are developed in provincial jurisdictions across the country. While we fully support New Brunswick’s intention to develop a multi-material recycling program, we are concerned that paragraph r.26 of Bill 15 prohibits a transparent cost recovery process, which in turn will impair consumer awareness of the recovery/recycling costs for designated products and packaging, thereby reducing consumer compliance.

In jurisdictions such as Alberta and British Columbia where recycling and recovery fees are transparent and directly traceable to actual packaging and product recycling costs, the benefits both to consumer awareness and the program’s ultimate success can be significant. Transparent and traceable fees:

• Educate consumers on what it costs to recover and recycle a particular product or package

• Communicate to consumers which products and packaging are costly to recycle and which are less costly, allowing them to make educated and environmentally- friendly choices

• Provide consumers with a convenient and accessible way of “doing their part” for the environment

• Contribute to the sustainability of a stewardship program by helping to recover the costs

In light of these considerations, we request that Bill 15 be amended to exclude paragraph r.26. Approving the legislation as drafted could deny industry operating in New Brunswick the opportunity to establish sustainable stewardship programs to meet recovery targets established by government.

We would appreciate the opportunity to meet with you as soon as possible to discuss our concerns and will follow up with your staff to establish a meeting date. We look forward to your reply.

Damian Bassett, President & CEO, CSR, (416) 594-3456

Diane J. Brisebois, President & CEO, Retail Council of Canada, (416) 922-6678

Gemma Zecchini, Senior Vice President, Public Policy, FCPC, (416) 510-8024, ext. 2239

c. William Eaton, Chair, New Brunswick Multi-Material Stewardship Board

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is an important media day for anyone who, like me, hates the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO).

There are two reasons.

First, the National Post ran a column today on its op-ed page by journalist and consumer affairs writer David Menzies that is the best succinct analysis I've ever read of what's wrong with the money-losing (you read that correctly!) crown agency. Menzies' conclusions fit with some of my own research, and fill the dismal overall story beyond the more narrow packaging waste issue that we look at in our magazine and website. In my editorial in the forthcoming February/March edition I offer readers some insights into cynical strategies the LCBO is using to avoid recycling fees and a deposit-refund system for used beverage containers.

The second reason is that I'm told there will be a rather sensational segment tonight on Global Television's Six O'Clock News program. Global TV advertised what it claimed will be revelations of a major piece of LCBO financial mismanagement throughout the SuperBowl on Sunday, apparently at every commercial break! (I have to confess I wasn't watching the game.) I'm told there was even a two-minute long teaser at the half! Apparently they have a fired LCBO accountant who has blown the whistle and claims millions of dollars have been squandered. So tune in tonight and watch, and then check back here for commentary tomorrow.

Now, here's Menzies' wonderful piece. Way to go, Dave!

The truth about Ontario's booze baron

David Menzies
National Post

Monday, February 06, 2006

After 15 years as chairman and CEO of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Andy Brandt is stepping down. Not surprisingly, a recent press release emanating out of the LCBO's bloated PR department heaps copious quantities of praise upon the former accordion teacher. Example: "Proof that Andy and the organization has succeeded is clear: record annual sales, record dividends, high customer satisfaction ratings and knowledgeable employees committed to service excellence, all of which is conducted in a socially responsible manner."

The release goes on to hail Mr. Brandt's supposed customer service initiatives, including the decision to allow LCBO customers to obtain Air Miles.

Alas, much like the LCBO's gleaming, multimillion dollar liquor stores, Mr. Brandt's record behind the helm of Booze Inc. appears impressive at first blush. Dig a little deeper, though, and a vastly different picture emerges.

For starters, let's analyze those "record annual sales and dividends." Take away the tax component of the LCBO's annual sales (which the LCBO classifies as "revenue") and the corporation actually loses money. For example: In fiscal 2002-'03, the LCBO claimed "net income" of $939-million on sales of $3.1-billion. But after paying the $975-million tax, the LCBO actually lost $35-million, forcing it to dip into retained earnings.

How is it possible for a state-sanctioned booze monopoly to lose money? Actually, it's not that hard when capital and operating costs soar through the roof thanks to the LCBO spending money like a drunken sailor on its opulent retail stores (the unspoken strategy is to torpedo privatization by creating a network of stranded assets).

As for the LCBO championing its "high customer satisfaction ratings and knowledgeable employees," this, too, is a crock. The LCBO's employees are unionized (making far more per hour than just about any other retail staffer.) They also enjoy the fact that there is precious little competition. That's why a rank-and-file LCBO clerk doesn't care if you're unable to find a certain brand of Scotch or bottle of vodka. After all, what's a dissed consumer to do? Drive to Buffalo?

Perhaps the most outrageous claim is that the LCBO operates in "a socially responsible manner." Social responsibility is the chestnut the LCBO trots out to justify its very existence. It works like this: Alcohol is a potentially addictive and even dangerous substance; therefore, the province can't possibly entrust the sale of booze to private-sector entrepreneurs (we'll overlook the fact that an even more potentially addictive and dangerous substance, tobacco, can be obtained at the local variety store.)

Still, in recent years, the LCBO has immersed itself in a Catch-22 of its own making. "Social responsibility" boils down to preaching moderation via the occasional "don't drink and drive" TV or billboard advertisement. Yet, the lion's share of the board's marketing budget goes toward promoting consumption (the liquor board even runs contests giving away vacations and home theatre systems.) By simultaneously discouraging and promoting consumption, the LCBO is essentially sucking and blowing at the same time.

As well, Mr. Brandt made many enemies in the domestic wine patch during his tenure. According to the Wine Council of Ontario, domestic vintages take a back seat to imports at LCBO stores. While Ontario varietals can account for up to 30% of total LCBO wine sales in any given year, many LCBO stores give Ontario wines as little as 14% of shelf space. The unspoken strategy is that the LCBO actually perceives Ontario wineries as a competitive threat given the existence of their on-site wine stores.

Aside from being shameful, this strategy of favouring foreign vintages is economically perverse. According to a 2002 KPMG report, the sale of a bottle of Ontario wine adds about $4 of non-tax income to the provincial economy; the sale of a bottle of foreign wine adds less than 50 cents to the economy.

Last but not least, there is the behaviour of Mr. Brandt himself. In 2004, this newspaper revealed that Mr. Brandt was receiving a secret $2,100-a-month living allowance from the board to maintain a Toronto condominium (dating back to 1991). As well, it was revealed that Mr. Brandt was being provided with a luxury car. But Mr. Brandt chose not to reveal these perks as mandated under the Public Sector Disclosure Act. Nor did he claim these plums as taxable benefits as required by the Income Tax Act.

Interestingly, Mr. Brandt was not reprimanded for his double-dipping. All of which was quite odd given that news of Mr. Brandt's allowance came on the heels of Glen Wright's abrupt resignation as chairman of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. (The WSIB was paying Mr. Wright $2,800 a month to maintain a Toronto apartment. He resigned after Premier Dalton McGuinty claimed his use of public funds was "inappropriate.")

If the LCBO were a publicly traded company, Mr. Brandt wouldn't be retiring with accolades; rather, he'd have been frog-marched out a long time ago.

We can hope the LCBO's new chair and CEO will be someone who will run the monopoly in a more responsible and transparent fashion. Better yet, there has never been a better time for Ontario to follow Alberta's lead and privatize this obsolete booze bureaucracy once and for all.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There are various yardsticks for measuring the success or failure of a government, or specifically a minister and his or her staff.

I've been watching Ontario Environment Minister Laurel Broten for some time now, and have suspended judgement. There hasn't been to much to get excited about so far, and no major disasters. It's clear that the Liberal McGuinty government wants to play up its agenda, such as post-Walkerton drinking water safety, and avoid being drawn into other priorities, especially those that concern solid waste.

I'm not going to sit on the sidelines any longer. For me, there's one issue that will go a long way toward showing whether we have an effective government and environment minister in Ontario or not. It's my personal litmus test.

The issue is whether or not the government is prepared to take on the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), both in the sense of privatizing this moribund crown corporation, and in the specific matter of putting LCBO glass containers into a return-to-retail and/or return-to-depot deposit-refund system.

I have read a great deal about this issue, and attended many conferences and workshops in which the current blue box recycling of glass has been discussed. I know the environment minister has access to all this information, too. Now we have today's news item, from Owens-Illinois -- which operates two large glass manufacturing and glass-to-glass recycling plants in Ontario (one of them in Minister Broten's own riding!). O-I Canada has submitted its critique (a five-page letter) of glass recycling in Ontario to the Stewardship Ontario Blue Box Funding Review Committee.

We've posted the letter as a downloadable pdf file on our website under Posted Documents. For your convenience, I also reproduce today's news item below in full. If there was ever a searing indictment of the status quo of blue box recycling, at least as it applies to glass, this is it!

I'm going to watch Minister Broten's reaction carefully. My expectation is that sometime in the next six months to a year, she and her government will (a) pass legislation that requires the LCBO to place its glass containers on deposit and (b) halt the LCBO's tactics in trying to shift suppliers into Tetra Paks (or at least fund the full cost of diverting these from landfill). If Minister Broten accepts the status quo for LCBO glass, or if she allows the lobbyists to guide her into some policy in which the poor performance of the current system is further masked, the data fudged, I will conclude that Broten is a lousy environment minister, and I will sharpen my pen here and in our print magazine to point out in painful detail exactly why.

So there, I've thrown down the gauntlet! Watch this space for ongoing commentary on this issue. And DO read the O-I document. It's one of the most powerful critiques I've read of this issue in a long time.

O-I letter castigates Ontario recycling system

Through its Canadian subsidiary O-I Canada Corporation, glass manufacturer Owens-Illinois (O-I) has written its comments to the Stewardship Ontario Blue Box Funding Review Committee. The document is posted on our website under Posted Documents (at www.solidwastemag.com). O-I operates two large glass recycling plants in Ontario.

The document constitutes something of a scathing indictment of the current Ontario curbside recycling system, at least as it applies to glass containers. The document also sheds light on problems that stem from single-stream recycling -- a current trend.

The five-page letter pulls no punches and states: "...glass recycling in Ontario is failing and failing badly."

"Single-stream" blue box collection of recyclables means that more glass is being sent to landfill today than just a year ago, the letter says. Ironically, as Ontario ships millions of tonnes of garbage to Michigan each year for disposal, O-I Canada is importing cullet derived from Michigan's deposit-refund based recovery system to manufacture glass packaging in Ontario.

Rather than address the problem of low glass recycling rates, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO), O-I says, the single largest source of waste glass in the province, is coercing its suppliers to switch to Tetra Pak cartons that are recovered at a rates of only 12.7 per cent (or one-fifth the rate at which glass is recovered by the blue box today).

"While low-weight packaging with a low recovery rate certainly offers the LCBO lower
applicable stewardship fees, it comes at a tremendous cost to Ontario's environment and economy," the letter states.

Based in Toledo, Ohio, O-I is the largest manufacturer of glass containers in the world, with leading positions in Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America. For more information about the company, visit www.o-i.com

EDITOR'S NOTE: The forthcoming February/March edition of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine will contain detailed editorial comment on the LCBO glass and Tetra Pak issue. Additionally, readers will want to watch the online diaries (blogs) on this website for additional analysis of the glass recycling issue in the days to come.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you read nothing else today, read Usman Valiante's blog entry (under Contributor's Blog on this website) analyzing the Quebec environment minister's reaction to (and standing up to) Coca Cola's unilateral move to withdraw the voluntary deposit-refund on its non-carbonated drink containers. Two recent news items posted under Headline News here tell the basic story.

This is precisely the sort of timely anaylsis that I hoped Usman would provide for readers; analysis that is not available elsewhere and that nicely complements our printed magazine, which only comes out every other month.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers would be interested to learn that I spent much of yesterday in a meeting with the IT people at our company -- and other editors of our company's environmental products -- to develop a common terminology for how we editors encode articles and news items (to make them fully searchable across different products and websites offered by our company). I'll spare you the technical details, but what this means to you, as industry people and readers -- is that in the near future, when you visit our website, or when you subscribe to our "topic alerts," even more information will be available to you. Furthermore, you'll have the option of subscribing to a new EcoLog website that will be announced soon, that will provide "one-stop shopping" for all your environmental information needs, including legislation updates and news on all kinds of environmental topics. I'll update you about this interesting project as it unfolds.

I also met with our publisher and our IT department about some soon-to-be announced modifications to our website, that will include new offerings, some of which will be free and others that will be paid services (via an online "shopping cart"). My goal is that over time everyone working in the solid waste and recycling business in Canada will visit our website regularly (even daily!) because of the robust content available here, and only here, and subscribe to our unique web-based services.

On another note, I received an email today from Rod Muir, founder of "Waste Diversion Canada." Rod asked me to post a web link to a website where a conference presentation he gave on waste and climate change is posted. You can click there and view or dowload the presentation in different formats. Please find the link below.

Dear Guy

Please find below the link to my webcast on "Waste Diversion and the Mitigation of Climate Change" from the recent COP Climate Conference in Montreal. To view it you may need to download free software from www.real.com

Look on right side of opening page as well as right side of second page which opens

Rod Muir

http://unfccc.int/meetings/cop_11/climate_talk_series/items/3554.php

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)