On Immigration and Related Matters. Louis Shalako.

 

The Blind Leading the Blind, Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Louis Shalako

Everything is politics, and all politics is local politics.

Immigration is one of those issues which fall under the aegis of the federal government.

Yet its effects, are seen and felt at the local level—I can only live in one town, one little neighbourhood at a time. What’s happening at the other end of the country doesn’t affect me, mostly because I don’t see it. Canada is a very large country, but it’s a very small town, in the sense that we all know each other. We have wonderful communications in this country, telephone, internet, television. Radio, newspapers and magazines, websites, and all that goes on in our new, electronic, public square. With the Weather Network, I can sit here and watch thunderstorms on radar, rolling on in from wherever.

We have vast resources of information, compared to a few short years ago.

This is one storm no one saw coming, except that they did—they did. We all did. We knew all about the inverted pyramid of demographics back in the early eighties. This is the graph that looks like a pyramid, upside-down, based on statistical analysis of age groups and one would suppose mortality tables of the time. It is the opposite of Malthusian economics, as limited as that is, and as open to question, even at the time it was written.

And people will talk.

***

The housing crisis has come to Sarnia, just has it has come to all Canadian cities and towns.

Past and present federal governments have seen increased levels of immigration as a desirable thing. An aging population and a falling birthrate would seem to make this an inevitable process: when half the population is over 65 years of age, the burden of taxation, including all those state or taxpayer funded pensions falls on fewer and fewer shoulders. People hate taxes of any kind. Older folks hate being rendered homeless and starving to death on the street, a fairly natural inclination. What is interesting, certainly in the case of the Province of Ontario, is that no one seems to have seen this coming. If they did, they sure as hell didn’t think to do anything about it.

In Sarnia, in a recent news story, it was revealed that there are at least 2,000 foreign students at Lambton College. Foreign students pay the going rate, tuition and rent, with no help from federal and provincial student assistance programs.

Foreign students aren’t taking high-end homes and condos. They’re not taking high-end apartments. They are taking the cheapest apartments they can find, what with being here only temporarily.

We can’t blame foreign students for housing inflation in detached homes or high-end condos and apartments. We can’t even really blame immigrants for such inflation, as few immigrants arrive on these shores with big stacks of cash. We all know immigrants can be hard workers, we know their children tend to get good educations, we know that for various reasons related to language and culture, it is often easier for an immigrant to work in low-skilled occupations, right up until the day they quit and start their own business. At which point the rest of us nod thoughtfully and talk about them taking all of our welfare, and all of our jobs…

We sort of know that folks whose French or English language skills are not good will often seek out their fellow countrymen. They will labour in the kitchen rather than at the front counter. One of our local realtors has radio commercials in an Indian language. He’s from India, presumably, there are enough Indians in the local marketplace that this confers some kind of competitive advantage.

Not all foreign students get their education and leave town. Far from it, also, the children of immigrants, Canadian citizens, can go to a college or university as easily as anyone else’s kids.

You see them all over town. Young people, working the gas bar, the beer store, working the vape shop, (as sole proprietor), working the phone sales. Answering the phones at federal and provincial agencies. There are five of those mobile phone shops in our local mall, virtually all of them appear to be ‘foreigners’ or people of colour to be exactly clear.

Some people in the comments section of any major news source just seem to hate immigration, as if it were the cause of all our woes. I won’t lie to you—it probably isn’t the solution to all of our woes either. There may be some valid arguments regarding the level of immigration, but for the most part it is bigotry suffused with ignorance of any economic and social realities. Hatred is blind, and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. It also gets to vote—through the ballots of those who hate.

These are the folks that profess to love Canada—only real problem, of course, is that they seem to hate every little thing and every other person in it.

The housing crisis was caused by a perfect storm of events. Immigration, foreign students, these are only factors, but not the whole story.

Even if there was no immigration at all, zero, nil, nada, ladies and gentlemen, we still haven’t been building what is called the ‘missing middle’ in terms of housing, and we sure as hell haven’t been building the lower and bottom tiers of housing. No responsible developer is going to propose a brand-new, state of the art flophouse, ladies and gentlemen. Not when you can go high-end on the same site, rather than listing one-roomers for $700.00 per month when you can put a few of them together as one unit and get $2500.00 per month for the same square footage. It is, after all, new construction, not some clapped-out old church or factory or a sweatshop in an alley somewhere. Simply put, a one-roomer still needs one toilet, one sink. One fridge, one stove. One bathtub, one patio door. An apartment with five rooms still only gets one toilet—capiche?

It is more efficient in terms of cost to the builder.

(Where in the hell would you put it? Sure as hell not Bright’s Grove. – ed.)

The people that are against immigration tend to forget that half the doctors in this town are from Africa, India, Asia. They tend to ignore the fact that here in the Province of Ontario, we simply do not graduate enough doctors to serve the needs of our population of 14 million.

That is just one more failure of Ontario social policy, which I have mentioned before.

When the federal government decided on an increased level of immigration, it was a gamble. The gamble will pay off in the long run, in the shorter term, it has brought increased pressure on available housing stock. What they did not gamble on was Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and inflation increased by pent-up demand. They did not gamble on a major European war, which has in fact cost this country billions that might have been better spent elsewhere, and driven up the costs of basic food-stuffs like flour and cooking oil. In Japan, with an aging population and virtually zero immigration, they have rural and small-town housing, vacant and falling into disrepair. In China, with a population of over a billion, they can’t fill the housing they have. There are huge developments, full of half-empty and even half-built high-rise apartments. These are mistakes of demography. When the provincial government decided that free market capitalism would be the solution to all problems, it seems to have overlooked the most vulnerable members of the population in terms of available housing. They had to overlook them. Otherwise, they would have had to have given them a raise…was it wrong to put a moratorium on evictions during the pandemic? Ah, but when they took that off again, there was all that pent-up demand, mostly from the landlords, and yes, some folks did abuse the privilege. Most of us did not—

Just sitting here, watching the storms roll in.

All of those evictions. All of those rent-controlled units, suddenly becoming vacant…that wasn’t very smart now, was it. Don’t forget, half the workforce was sent home for six months to a year or more. How in the hell was the average person supposed to pay the rent?

There are villages in Italy, where they will sell you a house for a dollar. It sure sounds like a real bargain. All you have to do is fix it up and live there, and pray for a bit of luck as it’s Mafia territory—and you look like an easy mark in what is someone else’s country. They like to call it free market capitalism, don’t you know—otherwise, it’s just simple extortion.

Right?

Free market capitalism simply can’t do anything for us—what with being responsible to the shareholders and all. The one thing they ain’t, is responsible to the taxpayers, and I guess that just leaves the poor old government holding the bag.

When the provincial government fails to adequately fund colleges and universities, that was a conscious decision. When the provincial government fails to adequately fund disability pensions, or social assistance payments, to the extent that people can’t pay the rent on the units they already occupy, well, this was more than a conscious decision. It was a moral failure, based on ideology and mistaken notions of how things actually work. At some point, you are asking people living on the street, to save first and last month’s rent, on an apartment they couldn’t afford in the first place and that goes about triple several years later; and by this time, you don’t stand a chance in hell of passing the credit check anyways.

The exact same unit that once cost $700.00 per month now costs $2,100.00. It’s like the blind leading the blind sometimes around here…or maybe they’re just stupid, but I think not, and they would hotly deny it themselves. In that sense, we are in agreement…so, you’re not so stupid after all.

Blind, maybe, but not stupid.

When the provincial government fails to provide rent controls on vacant units, this only makes a bad situation worse. It also fuels inflation in the housing market, what with all that turnover.

The only thing that is going to bring down the cost of housing is to build more housing, as quickly as possible and that is going to require skilled labour—and our construction industry is facing a demographic crunch that cannot be denied.

Where exactly do you plan to get all those people? The Province of Ontario is already receiving the benefit of 50 % of all immigration. They have literally fought over immigrants, ladies and gentlemen, although Quebec insists on French language skills in all new arrivals. They still wanted their fair share.

They are here to be exploited, in other words, at least for the first few years, or until they become real Canadians, or something.

It is also true that immigrants do not move to the wide-open prairies and bust some sod these days. They don’t take a freehold title in northern Ontario and begin, with axe and plow, clearing 140 acres of timber to wrest a subsistence from the land in what turns out to be a very short growing season. The land is all taken. They move to the cities, where the opportunities abound and they can be absorbed in a more cosmopolitan environment.

It takes time, decades, before they filter down to the smaller cities and towns. It will happen. It happened here, after all. At some point the immigrants arrive in Tuktoyaktuk, and one wonders what the Innu will think of that one, ladies and gentlemen…more bloody foreigners, eh.

Malthus was a mathematician studying social effects. His thinking was limited in that his model was of an agrarian society, where nothing ever changed except the level of population. He did not take into account changing technologies, and he seems to have completely missed the industrial revolution, with its explosion of productivity, which was happening all around him.

Malthus recognized goods, but failed to recognize services. Immigration, classic or internal, (province to province, for example), played no role in his calculations.

Canada is the second largest country in the world, geographically, with a relatively tiny population. How in the hell are you going to develop all that potential, without people to build the things, to consume the services, to invent new technologies, to find greater efficiencies and to become a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

That, my dears, is a series of very good questions flying in some kind of a fur-ball of aerial combat.

 

END

 

Louis, under oath before a Congressional Committee...

Government to Cap Student Visas.

Same Story from CBC. A two-year cap, due to ‘housing crunch’.

Government to Decrease Temporary Resident Population.

What Is Canada’s Immigration Policy?

Why Canada Wants to Bring 1.5 Million Immigrants by 2025. (BBC)

Ontario Receives Benefit of 50 % of International Immigration.

Malthusian Principles.

The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy.

Canada, the Second Largest Country in the World. (Britannica)

The Innu.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromAmazon.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading.

Opinion. Double Highway 40 Already. Louis Shalako.

The north-south axis is what's missing from this social and economic equation.

Louis Shalako

Highway 40 should have been doubled thirty or forty years ago.

It is a kind of ring road, one which with the growth of the city, would eventually bisex it.

(Bisect. – ed.)

It’s a very schizoid little highway, never quite able to make up its mind as to whether it is a four-lane, divided highway, a two-lane, provincial highway, a county road, a quiet residential street, or maybe just a death-trap and a hazard to human health. If it had indeed been doubled, many years ago, the petrochemical industry in Sarnia would have probably still suffered roughly the same decline. The difference, is that we might have had a better shot at some other kinds of industrial development, which does not depend on pipelines and tanker ships full of asphalt…which is, ironically enough, what roads are made of.

It’s not like we don’t have plenty.

The City of Windsor has a huge battery plant under construction, with a huge foreign investment, as well as billions of public money from the federal and provincial governments.

St. Thomas, just south of London, has something similar. There are auto plants in Ingersoll and Listowel. What these places have in common is the Highway 401, which leads to Detroit to the west, and presumably, all the way to Quebec to the east. It is the busiest highway in Canada. Through Toronto, is the busiest highway in the world if you can believe such statements. Sarnia is connected to London by the Highway 402, with the twin spans of the Bluewater Bridges taking traffic over the St. Clair River to Port Huron Michigan, and then it’s roughly an hour to Detroit on the American side. The bridge was opened in 1938 and was a busy corridor for war trade and production during WW II.

The Highway 40 was built to coincide with the construction of the 402. The 402 was built on acquired land, in a process which took years. Essentially, it followed a concession line, where a property on one concession butted up against the back of a property on the next concession. It was driven through the woodlots, which minimized costs and the loss of farmland. Highway 40 followed the path of Modeland Road at the north end, and then kind of hooked into the existing Churchill Road at the south end. It used existing rights-of-way. You can see the evidence of this just west of the Beehive intersection along Plank Road. The extension of Highway 40 goes south to Wallaceburg. That’s the set of stoplights right at the Ineos/Styrolutions plant, recently in the news for benzene levels. Only short stretches of the road are four lanes, divided by a ditch. The rest, for the most part, is two opposing lanes, with a speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour. That means head-on closing speeds in excess of 160-kph in the event of collision. That’s because everyone speeds a little bit, and some folks by a lot—

Then there are those stoplights, advanced green signals, and uncontrolled intersections such as MacGregor Sideroad and Scott Road. There are some concerns…

At the north end of Modeland Road, the speed limit is 50 kph, but this is well away from the high-traffic, commercial and industrial areas of the city. Chemical Valley traffic can be fast and aggressive, which I am always reminded of when I go to the smoke shack on the rez before dawn on a winter’s morn. Honestly, I should plan things a little better, I mean, it’s dark, with snow or drizzle or fog, and it’s like these people aren’t some little old man out for a Sunday drive and a carton of smokes. Quite frankly, some of you guys should get up a little earlier, leave a little sooner, and slow the fuck down—for crying out loud.

But, essentially, we have two issues. The first is Chemical Valley traffic, and the fact that the highway represents the fastest north-south axis, and then there is traffic between Sarnia, Wallaceburg, Chatham, and then on to Windsor—where all the big auto plants are, and then there is Detroit on the Michigan side. At the time of writing, the two halves of the new Gordie Howe Bridge are about to meet above the Detroit River—they’ve actually snagged the two ends together with some temporary girders while getting set up to drop the last sort of pre-fabbed bridge section into the middle…a few boxes of some really big bolts, and that puppy will be all set for the paving, one would think.

Simply doubling the Highway 40 where it is now two lanes doesn’t really solve the essential problem. The highway south of Wallaceburg is two lanes—and the route goes right through the centre of a small town, with small bridges over the Sydenham River.

It would be best to bypass Wallaceburg, and the same is true at Chatham, with the route sort of going through town and hooking up with the 401 south of the city. A technical point, I would bypass Wally-World on the east, and Chatham on the west. This is due to low, swampy ground west of Wally-World and simply shortens the distance by going to the west of Chatham.

Otherwise, there is too much two-lane, two-way road, and too much cutting through a city or a town to make it an efficient route from Sarnia to Windsor, bearing in mind the sort of trucking traffic necessary to put any kind of battery plant or EV vehicle plant in Sarnia—we’ve long missed the boat on that one. If one does consider the possibility, it makes more sense to build parts and accessories in Sarnia, and then ship them over the Bluewater Bridges, use the double-stack rail tunnel, or the 1-95 Interstate Highway to get them to Detroit. Detroit—not Windsor.

There is your conundrum. The distance from Sarnia to Detroit is simply shorter than the distance from Sarnia to Windsor. From Sarnia to Windsor, on the Canadian side, is an easy ninety minutes—by car. A big transport truck is just a lot harder to drive, and arguably, slower as a consequence. A four-lane, divided Highway 40, bypassing smaller centres, is a desirable thing in its own right, and it does open up certain possibilities, because it would eliminate one or even two border crossings, for trucking traffic between Sarnia and Detroit, or even Sarnia to Windsor using the I-94 through Michigan…two border crossings means two administrative roadblocks, as all paperwork has to be cleared, some random number of vehicles will be pulled for inspection. It means two security roadblocks, and often huge backups of traffic, at the bridge. This is especially true on holiday weekends. There have been too many accidents along that stretch of the 402, westbound, leading up to the border already. The fact that an all-Canadian route might be a little longer in terms of physical distance, balanced against the hurdles of a double bridge crossing, is a kind of economic and social equation, in which we measure the costs versus the benefits. I see it as economically strategic. The east-west axis is served well enough, it is the north-south axis that has been missing for many years.

An obvious first step would be to double the Highway 40 from Lambton College to South Indian Road. The obvious second step would be to double the highway all the way to Wallaceburg. This could be done in two to three short sections, as the budget and the season allows. Traffic would be slowed by construction, but only for the summer months, and quite frankly, it’s slow enough already. Four lanes all the way would alleviate that and bring important economic benefits all along the line, including Wallaceburg, Chatham and points in between.

There are some other projects which might tie in, just as the original Highway 402 and the Highway 40 tied in with each other, at the time.

It has always baffled me as to how we expect to attract new industry to Chemical Valley, when South Vidal Street is in such poor shape in relative terms. There’s all kinds of industrial space along there, and yet Vidal Street is the first thing prospective buyers see when they go to look at a potential industrial site.

Also, as long as we’re looking at building roads, why not extend Wellington Street all the way to Blackwell Sideroad, which would also require upgrades. This can be seen as an alternative or emergency route when the next big accident closes the Highway 402 and traffic is backed up way out to the airport or even further. This would only be used by heavy trucks in an emergency, but the road surface would be engineered with this type of occasional duty in mind.

It would also tend to take the east-west load off of London Line/Exmouth Street, when people just need to bypass the bottleneck and get to the other side of the city. The only other east-west roads that cut through the entire town would be Lakeshore Road, Michigan Avenue, and Confederation St, with Confederation the only one rated for heavy vehicles.

Anyhow, it’s something to think about. As for the provincial government, they’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

The time to act is now.

 

END

 

A Brief History of Highway 40.

Council Seeks Widening of Highway 40.

MP Says $25 million Sewer Upgrade all That’s Needed.

Windsor Battery Plant 30 % Complete. (CTV)

Honda Commits to Four Ontario Plants in EV ValueChain.

Ineos/Styrolutions to Close.

Highway 402. (Wikipedia)

Highway 40. (Wikipedia)

The New Highway. An excerpt from My Criminal Memoir, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play.

The book on Google Play.

St. Thomas to See Population Surge.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

 

 

In Depth. The Challenges of Reforestation. Louis Shalako.

Where the deer and the antelope play...

Louis Shalako

There are many challenges to reforestation, not the least of which is where to plant all of those trees.

In Canada, the federal government has pledged to plant two billion trees by 2031 in order to combat global climate change. Potential chokepoints include seed and sapling production, as well as the prospect of funding changes. These operations require multi-year investments of time, space and money. Last year’s record forest fire season sort of underlines the case in point.

The federal government, along with their partners, the provinces and territories; will be responsible for planting a substantial portion of the two billion trees. Many of them will be planted on vast stretches of public land.

“But many 2BT projects are planting on private land — and in places like Southern Ontario, there’s not enough of that land to go around,” according to experts.

***

Here is the Wiki article on the history of climate change science.

A tough read. I got about halfway through it. I was actually looking for Edward Gibbon references, in which the Romans and other groups at the time recognized that the clearing of European forests for agriculture had raised the temperature to the extent that grapes and olives were now grown much further north than in their own immediate historical past. It was anecdotal evidence. It’s only reliable because of a certain agreement among the sources, and the fact that we don’t have any others. (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Gibbon was more than a 'philosophical historian', being something of the gentleman virtuoso. Considering the times, he might very well have read or been aware of other scientific progress of the era.

Deforestation is merely one aspect of global climate change. Other aspects are the sheer growth in population, which results in surface changes including vast expanses of concrete and asphalt paving and resulting heat islands caused by major centres of population. The sheer, vast number of vehicles on the roads, increasing by hundreds of millions per year, mostly still burning fossil fuels, are still the major factor. The difficulty here, is that it is difficult to imagine doing away with transportation entirely, and how would our current large populations be sustained—the short answer is that it is impossible, not with our current food and distribution networks.

This Washington Times opinion piece sort of pussy-foots around, and may well be a piece of climate change disinformation. Even so, he has found the reference. He mentions an increase in population (and therefore consumption of forest into farmland), and the increased burning of firewood. Firewood is not a fossil fuel, yet the burning of wood does produce carbon. We have to be careful of certain claims.

“…In one of the early chapters of the first volume, Mr. Gibbon analyzes the development of the northern European Germanic tribes that would become violent and would ultimately contribute to the destruction of Rome. He delves into the history of those tribes and speculates as to why they became such a threat to Rome and were ultimately able to prevail over the then-preponderant power in the world.

In describing the role of those tribes and of the growing threat they posed to the Roman Empire, Mr. Gibbon makes reference to “some ingenious writers.” He ascribes to those writers the belief that in the early years of the Roman Empire, northern Europe “was much colder formerly than it is at present” and that the cold weather of earlier times made the northern tribes physically stronger and better able to fight against Romans who were unaccustomed to the cold while they sought to defend the northern borders of their vast empire. As the Romans challenged the Germans, they faced an enemy particularly accustomed to cold weather and undaunted by it while they, the Romans, who came from a much warmer area, had great difficulty in fighting in a climate colder than their own.

Mr. Gibbon then goes on to add some details about the evolution of the climate, noting that “the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm the theory.” In other words, Mr. Gibbon is documenting what he perceives to be a steady warming of northern Europe that, it must be agreed, long antedated industrialization and today’s vast reliance on fossil fuels.

Mr. Gibbon’s description seems enlightening. It suggests that global warming is not a recent phenomenon, but may have taken place periodically, and certainly centuries ago, even millennia ago. Although Mr. Gibbon’s work is hardly a scientific treatise, minimally, Mr. Gibbon’s observations suggest questions that could challenge contemporary conventional wisdom and currently accepted scientific “facts.”

Until just a few centuries ago, world population, including European population, was a mere fraction of what it is today. The inhabitants of the world, including those of Europe, largely depended upon wood as their principal source of fuel. Beyond that material, they had very few alternatives, and fossil fuels were mostly beyond their ability to extract. And yet, if Mr. Gibbon’s sources are to be believed (and they are assuredly not cited by Mr. Gibbon for the purpose of rebutting any contemporary theories), then a very consequential global warming occurred well before any fossil fuels could have impacted the globe…”

The south end of Stag Island.

The logical fallacy here is to state that wood is not a fossil fuel, and then somehow equate that in some ‘logical’ scientific conclusion. Science depends on more than tricky rhetoric.

On a personal level, I have spoken more than once about what I would do if I won the lottery. Let us assume a few million dollars. Nowadays, with the price of farmland up a good one-third over a few short years, you’re looking at an easy thirty thousand per acre for the land, then there would be cost of buildings, equipment, and any improvements to the land in terms of tile drainage, brush-clearing or whatever. My plan would be to buy a farm or any number of farms, each unit would be a minimum of 150-200 acres. I would put up good fences after an accurate survey. I would put up gated access points, with small gravel parking lots and a padlock. We need to get in and out, and we need to keep other people out. I would sell off farming implements and machines, insofar as I simply wouldn’t need most of it. I would take down unused or unusable structures, clean up rusting old hulks and other garbage laying around. I would systematically plant a few acres of seedlings, according to a site plan, each and every season. I would do it in strips, first the outer edges of the fields, and then working inwards. I would intersperse smaller numbers of larger saplings: live Christmas trees, if you will. Buy them in tubs, get them as large as possible. Individual sites would have a mix of conifers and hardwoods, with provision for small meadow areas for native plants and grasses, including the all-important milkweeds, which support the Monarch butterflies and their hatchlings. In the meantime, we could still lease out fields or parts of fields for crops in order to continue some level of cash flow...

Any small ditch or water-course would be lined with windbreaks and hedgerows. Natural streams would be rehabilitated, and ponds would be dug, with the resulting spoil landscaped into pleasing natural-looking rises.

Acquisition of neighbouring properties would be preferable to scattered but extensive holdings…the goal would be to produce the largest possible contiguous areas of reforestation, which would allow network effects (essentially, mutually-reinforcing feedback loops), to contribute in a kind of natural law. This includes, trees, plants, insects, wildlife, fish and other riverine creatures.

This wreck lies off Stag Island.

Okay, what would the neighbours think of some asshole coming into their neighbourhood and taking good farmland out of production. First of all, good fences make for good neighbours. Good public relations are important, especially when you’re doing anything new and different. In the middle of winter, people might be used to taking their snow machines across the neighbour’s fields. No real harm is being done, and the neighbour has the same privilege on your own land. It’s reciprocal. Okay, so why not leave a gated opening, at the back of my own property. Leave a trail, marked, through the bush-lot, so that the neighbours can at least cross your land. The rules would be simple: no fires, no littering, no hunting, and please stay on the trail. (If you want to carry a hunting firearm through my land, that might be acceptable. You could let me know, right?) Otherwise the gates will be closed and locked. A simple sign at each end would suffice. Also, when they see the deer population begin to increase, and many farmers do hunt, they might see things a little differently. By taking my land out of production, the value of your own land goes up, along with the value of the production of crops or livestock. A forest isn’t hard to look at, compared to the controversial wind farms dotting the county. Let’s be honest: some folks just plain hate them. Yet I can envisage a use for the small, old-fashioned farm-type windmills, which were ubiquitous for many, many years…

Assuming a well-maintained and sizable Victorian farmhouse, a living antique, I might actually keep it as an educational centre. Elementary school students could come for a tour, whether in spring or fall. We could explain what we are doing and why, show them the ponds and the critturs, and maybe even generate a little positive publicity for the project. As for myself, a small house, a small field office would suffice. Hell, I wouldn’t even give up my apartment in town…we’ll have work crews coming and going, and they will need certain facilities.

It would be an interesting social experiment. The operation might even qualify for carbon credits, which can be sold to maintain some kind of cash-flow, admittedly the land would already be paid for. Once the forest is built, the cost to maintain it is fairly low. Here’s another thing. Bickford Woods is the single largest contiguous patch of forest in this part of the county. To purchase adjoining farms would be a great advantage, for the project as well as the wildlife. Too many species are at risk simply due to habitat loss. In my lifetime, I have seen one porcupine in Lambton County, and that was thirty or forty years ago. They’re not officially extinct in Lambton, but the fact that you never see porcupine roadkill is a kind of evidence. This is why bears and other large predators are simply gone. There are too many roads, too many vehicles, too many guns and too many hunters, and not enough large forested tracts for them to ever take hold again as a population. My fantasy project really won’t do much to change that.

Which reminds me, I really ought to check that lotto ticket, and maybe even buy another one.

The Lotto 6-49 is up to a sick $60 million or so. I could happily live on a couple of million for the rest of my life. A simple stipend from the Louis Shalako Foundation, would be sufficient for my needs—at least one of those farms would have a viable house to live in, and I would have interesting work to occupy my final days.

It’s a nice dream, as I am sure the reader will admit.

An education centre and certain amenities.

In addition to Bickford Woods, large tracts of forest still exist in Lambton, for example Pinery Provincial Park, perhaps Walpole Island, and the Amjiwnaung Reserve within the city limits. Imperial Oil has quite the chunk of forest, north of Hwy 40 and East of South Indian Road. Interestingly, the south end of Stag Island is unpopulated. This would be a wonderful opportunity to reforest much of the island, reachable by boat or helicopter only…for a project like this, it would require participation and protection by federal and provincial governments. Otherwise, it’s just going to end up ringed with palatial houses, boat houses, docks…it’s only a matter of time, considering just how little undeveloped waterfront property exists.

In a somewhat related matter, there is the issue of lake and riverbed degradation, which affects fish stocks and all related species that prey on them, or are otherwise dependent on them or the same sort of environment. A stretch of Lake Huron shoreline extending southwest of Kettle Point, shows evidence of extensive dredging, where homeowners have dredged channels through what is fairly shallow water, so they can get their private craft out into the lake proper. Some of it is historical, dating back to before regulation, some of it is authorized, in the sense that someone actually got a permit—which might be a lot harder to justify these days, and which would require an environmental assessment, and then some of it is unauthorized. The folks, having all that lake at their doorstep, don’t see much of a problem cutting down along the face of the bluff, on an angle, and somehow dragging a boat and trailer down to the beach: the only problem then is the shallow water. Hence, the dredging. You can see such a ramp at the McKewen Conservation Area along Lambton 7 in Plympton-Wyoming.

So they’re digging up, in season, prime spawning habitat, in order to get their own fishing and sporting craft out onto the water. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the sheer lack of launch-points, private or otherwise, is at least partly the cause of folks putting in their own rather disruptive little channels. The choice, of course, is to trailer the boat quite some distance, and launch it and pay a fee, or dock the damned thing right on their own beach. This is why some of the small creek mouths do have small lagoons—which also have to be dredged periodically, and over the years, very small campground and marina operators have come and gone, including on the west side of the Kettle Point Reserve.

My own plan is of course mere fantasy, although any farmer, any landowner can plant trees, windbreaks, and hedgerows, which tends to prevent soil erosion and to improve the soil and its productivity. The government’s plan actually makes a lot of sense, assuming they can pull it off.

At the risk of going on way too long, the valleys of Bear and Black Creek, the North and South Sydenham rivers would be prime candidates for buffer strips, maybe as little as a hundred feet wide in places, where tree-planting would pay dividends in terms of clearing up sediments, shading and cooling the water, and providing wildlife corridors across the county.

 

END

Canada to Plant Two Billion Trees.

The opinion piece in the Washington Times.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Bickford Woods Management Plan.

Images: white-tailed deer.  Screenshots are from Google Maps.

Why I Love Edward Gibbon.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

He loves Gibbon too.

See his works on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading.