In Depth. What Do We Do With Sarnia Airport. Louis Shalako.

Eighteen passengers, on a good day.

Louis Shalako

What would happen if we gave up Sarnia Airport?

Would we ever be able to replace it? 

How much passenger traffic would it take to sustain Sarnia Airport at a break-even or even profitable level? How much does it even cost, and is there any benefit, in sustaining the thing in limbo for any great length of time. Is there any potential for that sustainable level of air traffic in the local market, barring any great increase in the local population, which doesn’t seem very likely in the short term.

The population of Sarnia and Sarnia-Lambton has been stable, if not stagnant, for many years. We do have a sizable population of foreign students, who may or may not stick around for the longer term. Foreign students are, for the most part, not buying five or six hundred thousand dollar new-build homes, and they don’t take affordable, geared-to-income housing because they aren’t eligible. What they do take, are apartments, in the lower range of the scale in terms of pricing. They take them for the short term, which means when they vacate landlords can take a look at the local going rate and jack the rents accordingly.

How much land is involved in the operation of Sarnia Airport. What happens if the airport loses any certifications that it might have. What are the chances of any major or smaller air-carrier bringing passenger or charter flight services to the Sarnia area? How long can we hang on, waiting for such an outcome.

If we closed Sarnia Airport to any flight operations at all, what would we do with it? Is there any real chance of replacing Sarnia Airport, in some other location, at some future date. That doesn’t seem very likely. Where else would you put it, and if there really are economic benefits, how would we like seeing those benefits going to a neighbouring municipality.

Use it or lose it, in other words.

What value does private flying, what value does a small flight school, what economic or social benefit, or any other public good does that bring to the municipality. If they lost the privilege, where would all the private pilots and flight students go?

What upgrades would be required to bring Sarnia Airport up to snuff, in order to attract any air carrier to the Sarnia area. Where is the demand. Back in the 1960s, ‘Great Lakes Aviation’ operated air services, flying DC-3s of WW II vintage on short, regional routes. These were twin-engine tail-draggers of about 28 passengers. This was superseded by ‘Air Ontario’, flying Convair 440 aircraft; piston-engine, twin-engine aircraft with nose-wheel landing gear. Those were good for 52 passengers, they were noisy, nearing the end of their service life, and no doubt expensive to maintain.

For some years, small, twin-engine turbine aircraft provided the service, for the life of me I cannot recall the name of the company…

In a personal note, my buddy Bill Stone and I rode our little banana bikes out to the airport, from the Bright St. and Germain Park area, when we were twelve or thirteen years old. (It was summer and we fished for catfish and suckers out there in Wawanosh Drain as well.) We went into the ‘new’ terminal and got an airline schedule from the nice lady behind the counter…the security guard sort of grinned and shook his head when he saw us coming. I guess you could say we liked aircraft. We rode out there to see them landing and taking off. It’s probably a good thing our parents didn’t know too much about all this—

The cockpit of the Convair 440.

***

Late on many a hot summer night, with the windows open, laying in bed, one could hear the bigger planes landing at Sarnia Airport. They would put the propellers into reverse pitch, pushing full throttle, in order to brake on the relatively short runway—rather than plunge off the NW end of the runway and fall into Wawanosh Drain. We used to go out there and cluster at the end of the runway when Canada’s Snowbirds came and went, although it has been a while…considering the age of the Tudor training aircraft, perhaps that is understandable. Our age, too.

Some of this was before the opening of the Highway 402 in about 1980. Traffic between Sarnia and London meant travelling on the two-lane, very narrow Highway 22, which did have one centre passing lane—one result of which was head-on collisions when folks misjudged the distance and the speed. This community doesn’t support the costs of passenger rail traffic, it all has to be subsidized at a loss, and one wonders about the intercity bus service as well. It’s all very well to read about it or see it on the evening news. What is it like to actually ride upon it…??? Ten or eleven people on a train going one hundred kilometres, isn’t very profitable, or ticket prices quickly become prohibitive.

***

How much would all that cost, and would the economic, spin-off benefits offset those costs.

This holds true for any form of transportation service.

What would happen if an actual cruise ship, actually docked in Sarnia Harbour…and what would that actually do for downtown…???

What would it do for Bright’s Grove. This is where most of our politicians live, after all.

The real question we need to ask ourselves here, is what would this do for Bright's Grove.

What alternative uses might the existing airport footprint support, bearing in mind Badger Daylighting and other services onsite, and bearing in mind present and future zoning requirements. How does this all fit into the official plan?

Surrounding the airport are areas zoned for agriculture, commercial and light industrial. There are farms and residences along Telfer Road, Michigan Avenue and Blackwell Road. There are businesses along London Line, including the municipal business park.

How would they be affected by major changes to the site, and how would that be perceived. They’ve lived with it this long, what would they think if the land was sold off for some major industrial operation? It is the largest single parcel of land in the city--it is available, in some sense.

Some kind of mega battery or EV plant might fit there—only problem there is, we still lose the airport and the NIMBYs would be well and truly out for blood…

Backtracking just a little bit, there is plenty of room already, for middle-class and high-end housing development.  Called Zone 2, it’s in the official plan. An increase in development land near Bright’s Grove has been rejected the last I have heard. Any form of affordable, geared-to-income housing will be a hard sell in any neighbourhood, this in spite of all the efforts of ineffectual do-gooders, (sandals-wearing, shorts-wearing, floral shirts-wearing, weak and ineffectual, slightly-incompetent socialist bureaucrat-gender-tag-wearing people), going down on the riverbank and burning candles in order to raise awareness of the need to reduce stigma, which they have just reinforced with the success in getting front-page coverage with what is an otherwise bogus endeavour…to put that sort of development in an area that is ‘desirable’, merely rubs salt in the wounds of the long-suffering bourgeoisie. Who, as we all know, have been having it pretty rough lately.

We already have thousands of approvals, very few of which represent ‘shovels in the ground’. Many of them have simply been forgotten.

Perhaps the Ineos/Styrolutions site will come available soon, and of course this is much more suitable when you consider the encampment at Rainbow Park, and the fact that the intersection of Tashmoo and Churchill Road/Highway 40 is so much closer to the addictions and mental health services people require—or does that sound snarky. We could always bus them in—the social workers, I mean.

We could always nail up a sign and call it a ‘leper colony’, or ‘Free Gaza’, or ‘Ford City’, or something like that.

It’s crazy enough, it might just work. Why, that big old airport can house any number of homeless people, in tiny little fibreglass veal-calf sheds, or maybe we could just put in a few hundred McMansions for the Sarnia City Councilor Bill Dennis’s of this world.

 

END

They just liked aircraft.

Badger Daylighting.

So, here’s this story where Council was looking to sell Sarnia Airport.

Here’s a Master Plan for Sarnia Airport. Be prepared for your bum to fall asleep.

This link is from 2018. Some Canadian journalist really ought to follow up.

Okay,leaving Sarnia for Toronto at 8:40 a.m. $48.00VIA rail. One would hope there is some kind of return ticket—

Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms. Because you never know when you’re going to fish in Wawanosh Drain.

DC-3A Great Lakes Aviation.

Scottsdale Aviation.

The Sarnia Airport claims hundreds of thousands of trips in 2019. This seems like nonsense, what is a ‘catchment area’ and how can the local population produce 472,000 trips.

The last air carrier at Sarnia Airport operated aircraft very similar to the Jetstream.

Images. Top photo. Alan Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories abounding upon Amazon.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Go Deep: What Would Happen if Imperial Oil Left Sarnia? Louis Shalako.

The Sarnia site, the St. Clair River in the background. Photo from CanadianFuels website.

Louis Shalako

“To engage in idle speculation is the mark of a free man.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero.

What would happen if Imperial Oil shut down their Sarnia plant and moved production elsewhere?

This article relies on sheer speculation.

However, there is some evidence, not so much of their intentions, as for an ongoing process.

The company recently took down the big smokestack, visible for some miles when entering the city along Confederation Street.

The old tool crib, machine shop and warehouse building is gone. Old oil tanks, the ones that appeared to have been constructed of large ceramic blocks, are gone. The bottling plant, built in the 1980s, which was meant to bottle the new-at-the-time synthetic oils, is gone. As an employee of a company in the industrial door business, we supplied hollow metal doors and frames for that plant. I knew a guy who drove a big rig. All he did was move trailers around the property—empty trailers go up to the loading dock, full trailers are pulled out and lined up in rows for the ‘real’ truckers who would take them on from there.

The Esso ‘low density polyethylene’ plant, across Vidal Street from the refinery proper, also built in the 1980s, appears to be largely gone—it’s kind of hard to say for sure, from looking at Google Maps, but the street grid, all behind wire and on private property, has some empty blocks. Google Maps isn't always very up-to-date. Those blocks show signs of something being taken away, perhaps storage tanks, perhaps redundant production units. We supplied many, many overhead doors for a train loading dock and factory area. We supplied doors, frames and hardware for the plant. Going on forty year-old memories is not very reliable. It might be better to say that I just don’t know about that one and cannot find any confirmation online.

Imperial Oil has taken out a number of storage tanks, which used to be to the west of south Indian Road. Historically, the company operated a small fleet of tankers, plying the Great Lakes. Nowadays, fuels are mostly transported by rail, by road, or by pipeline.

Now, the provincial government has halted production at the Ineos/Styrolution plant due to high benzene emissions, and just the other day, the federal government issued an order for all Chemical Valley plants to reduce benzene emissions.

The tanks in the centre of the photo are gone...

The Imperial Oil refinery is historical. It is the oldest oil refinery in Canada, maybe even the world, but the focus of those activities has shifted to a large extent to western Canada.

There’s a lot more competition these days. There are also two or three other refineries locally, Shell and Suncor, and the one on Plank Road which used to be Dome Petroleum. Now it is 'Plains-Midstream', whatever the hell that means.

With a large footprint, and a fair bit of open space, a refinery can be rebuilt, it can be upgraded, a newer plant could simply be built on the same property—there is a power generation plant onsite. Those no longer rely on coal, all such plants locally, have been converted to gas. That being said, there is nothing to stop the company from shutting down much of the plant, maybe even most of the plant, and keeping a few such assets in play. The local operation could sell power into the grid, or to other Chemical Valley operations. One, specialized unit could produce one, specialized feedstock for local customers. There was a news story where the Shell refinery was up for sale. I forget the price, something like $250 million. There were no takers—no one wanted it.

Most recently, Imperial Oil announced a rationalization plan, with the result that the Research Centre is shutting down locally, with operations to be transferred to the southern U.S. Their all-weather simulator, built back in the 1980s, where vehicles and lubricants were tested in arctic and high-temperature conditions, (using the new synthetic oil) would now appear to be redundant…it was a source of pride at the time, as was their new synthetic oil product line.

There are signs, the problem is how to interpret them.

It is true, that the plant is close to eastern markets. This is relevant when it comes to gasoline, diesel and jet-type fuels, which are more akin to good old kerosene. It is also true that the fate of Line 5, which crosses the Straits of Mackinac, the State of Michigan, and the St. Clair River, remains up in the air pending court rulings and no doubt subsequent appeals. What would happen to Chemical Valley as a whole if Line 5 was shut down. Bearing in mind the new Nova plant in St. Clair Township will rely on feedstocks from some source, what would happen if any one of their major suppliers were to shut down. That plant represents a $2.5 billion investment or thereabouts.

***

Louis. Going deep on pure speculation. Yet the conclusion is obvious...

Historically, plants and factories have come and gone. Prestolite in Point Edward manufactured electric coils and windings for electric motors and devices related to the auto industry. Holmes Foundry was a subsidiary of American Motors, taken over when AMC became part of Chrysler. When the plant was shut down, the site was mostly dismantled, with the eastern end looking like a post-apocalyptic wasteland with partially-demolished buildings and overgrown with trees and scrub. A friend’s first job was at a place called Mueller Brass, where he was a ‘nipple-polisher’, according to him. The company made brass fittings for the auto and hardware industry.

Fibreglas Canada is gone. The small, old-fashioned plant produced several types of pink and white wool insulation, as well as acoustic ceiling tiles and pipe insulation. Production was simply moved south of the border. The old Polysar, a Crown Corporation formed in early World War Two to produce synthetic rubber, was broken up, with various elements taken over by NOVA, Bayer and BASF to my own recollection. Many of those units have been decommissioned although some industrial operations continue on the site. The Ineos/Styrolutions plant is, in fact, the old Polysar Butyl II and Styrene II plants under new management—and yes, I helped build those plants too.

Dow Chemical decommissioned their Sarnia facility after seventy years in Chemical Valley, although the company has returned to the area with an operation in Corunna.

The Ontario Hydro coal-fired generating plant has been demolished. Welland Chemical, in response to a strike, packed up and left in the middle of the night or so it seemed. The old Ethyl Corporation used to produce lead additives for fuel—a changing regulatory environment pretty much killed leaded fuels, and some other company may have taken over certain assets which may have been useful or adaptable to their own needs. Holmes Insulation was taken over by a Finnish company, and then somebody else, and it’s one of those sites which seems barely active on a casual drive-by.

Coca-Cola had a tiny little bottling plant near the intersection of Indian Road and Confederation Street. The building is still there, behind the Tim Horton’s. The small size gives an easy answer as to why it is gone: it was simply more efficient to produce the product in a larger plant, somewhere else, and truck the product into town (or to a distribution centre), from there.

In light of global climate change, it is simply inevitable that certain refining operations must fall by the wayside, somewhere, someday.

The oldest refinery in Canada might very well be gone in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years. It will almost certainly be gone in thirty.

END

Imperial Oil Research Moving to U.S. (Sarnia News Today)

Imperial to Begin Demolition of Stack. (Sarnia Journal)

Oil Blending and Packing Operation to Close. (Sarnia Observer)

Shell Refinery Sale Plan Scrapped. (Reuters)

Tower Falls at Imperial Oil Sarnia. (Global News)

No Charges for Imperial Oil Despite Massive Fire. (Global News)

Feds Extend Benzene Restrictions for Two Years. (National Observer)

About the author. 

Once upon a time, Louis Shalako worked for Bice Specialties, Wilding Industrial Doors, and Cecco, (briefly), in the industrial doors trade. He worked for C.H. Heist, mostly in industrial vacuum work as well as high-pressure water-blasting. He spent ten weeks on the end of a shovel, hand-digging around pipes and cables, working for Dow Chemical in their Utility/Construction labour force. He worked for Lyndon Security, working a gate at the Shell Marketing Terminal and one or two other places. As an unarmed, uniformed security guard, Louis picked up the weekly mail pouch from Holmes Foundry and took it over the river to the Port Huron Michigan Post Office, which saved the company a day or two on mail delivery. The fun part was, they provided a Jeep Cherokee owned by the company for the trip. (Bridge fare was still fifty cents back then.) As a cab driver, he delivered overtime meals to company gates and drove workers all over the county, after overtime, having missed their car-pool. He worked for Fibreglas Canada for about a year and worked the Cabot Carbon strike as a security guard in 1986. He has been in and out of every plant in the valley as well as many other industrial operations in southern Ontario cities and towns.

 

Louis has books and stories in ebook and audiobook format available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Algorithms, and How to Get One Million Hits On Your Blog. Louis Shalako.

Looks like I picked the wrong day to stuff them keywords...

Louis Shalako

A recent story (BBC I think), noted that Google had diddled the algorithms and killed a lot of traffic to established websites. My latest story has a grand total of 25 reads or hits.

Over fourteen years, the site has garnered 961 k hits. My first blog post wasn't very good.

It took a week to get a handful of hits, some of which might have been indexing bots or even my own reads, which can be managed through the site. But this is why I think people quit blogging. They have a dozen or so stories up, and they don't keep it up because it looks like it isn't working. Looking at the big spikes in the graph: someone adjusted their algorithms and I got 60,000 hits from France in a few months. (Page bottom). The next big spike, came out of nowhere, and traffic was unusually high at a time when I really wasn't doing much with the blog, although I routinely repost old stories. I routinely repost online serial content, including Heaven Is Too Far Away.

I'm the only guy I know who does online serial fiction. I was probably the first, and possibly the last, to serialize a manuscript before the book was even finished...

Once you have the content, (and my blog is close to 1,200 posts), you can recycle it in various ways. You can also update the links, fix a typo, add photos, etc. I hope to have one million hits sooner rather than later—I had hoped by summer, but things have definitely slowed down, for whatever reason.

When I get a million hits, I'm going to call up the newspaper—

I have scraped my own blog for a new ebook or short story. An example would be One Million Words of Crap, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play. 

Lately, I am replacing Smashwords links with sites that are still up and running as ebook aggregators, yes; I have paperbacks and audiobooks as well. I found out about Smashwords on Facebook. As I said, when I repost a story, I can update as well. I can take out dead links and add in a new one.

Smashwords and Draft2Digital have merged and the books will surface over there in a month or two.

Scary shit for beginners.

When you go to edit an old story on Blogger, the interface might show the code. People take one look at that and it’s “…fuck. I can’t do that—”

Well, just so you know, for the first six months, I didn’t even know what a tag was. The site can be a bit glitchy at times, but just keep hacking away and you will get it. When formatting, it's hack, hack, hack, then preview. Save, then hack some more...confidence is everything, and patience is everything else.

On the upper left, click on ‘compose mode’ and its back to the old familiar interface. Just a quick pro tip, I compose in a Word doc and that way I can control the font size. There are just a lot more tools in the doc format. I prefer 13-pt Times New Roman. I copy and paste from the doc file.

It was at Genrecon, held at the Sarnia Library in 2009 where I met Douglas Smith. I cornered him for a minute and introduced myself and all of that. He is the one who suggested a couple of things. One was to join Facebook. The other was to try a free blog from Blogger. And we all know how that went.

When I signed up for Facebook, one of the first things I said was: “Whoever invented this is a genius.”

And I was right, too.

The blog is fairly flexible. You can change themes, change colours and fonts. Click around on all the buttons in order to figure out what to do. The widgets are handy, as you can see from the right-hand column. I had to fight for quite some time to get Google to take ads off of the blog. They were telling me that I had some kind of problem with the blog, and they weren’t paying me for blog hits. I said, if you’re not paying for blog hits, please take the ads off of my blog. I will never see a penny of it anyways. In fourteen years of blogging, they owe me $25.88 and the threshold for payment is $100.00. If you’re in this for the money, you might want to prepare for a little disappointment…and a few spammers in the comment section.

'Compose mode' is a lot more civilized.

Their help pages are impenetrable. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they wanted me to do, and I did provide feedback, more than once, to exactly no response whatsoever.

You can stuff keywords into your posts, but a handful of tags will do nicely.

You might read Active Versus Passive Blogging.

The best thing you can do is to produce regular, interesting, helpful and informative content. Entertain the people. Sing for your supper. As for myself, I do enjoy the work, and that is always something.

Right. And if I die, and if Google gets to keep my $25.88, then I guess that’s what the service was worth. In other words, not much, but the actual blog is what you make of it. My most popular story is Ghost Planet, with over twelve thousand reads...over ten or twelve years. I won't stick in a link for that one. If you would like to take a look at it...you will have to Google it.

(Tricky, Louis. - ed.)

(Yes, but it might also work.)

And, in the meantime, it is a useful promotional tool.

#Louis

END

Click on the image to enlarge.

From the BBC: Google's New Algorithm.

The website of Douglas Smith.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

See his works on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

Go Deep: The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy. Louis Shalako.

In a kind of social horror, Louis goes deep on social policy, or so it is called...

Louis Shalako

The systematic failure of social policy in the Province of Ontario is no accident. 

That's because things are caused to happen.

It’s more than systemic, a pretty good word all on its own. It’s a little more deliberate than that. Systemic refers to those funny little provisions, built into the system, which sometimes makes some things difficult, and other things impossible. The so-called Catch-22, a wonderful story by Joseph Heller.

Systematic, means it is a bit of a lesson in applied cruelty, and this by a democratically-elected government, of whatever ideological stripe. It isn’t exactly enlightened, but it does stem from a kind of self-interest of the taxpayer kind. To claim it is a big conspiracy is to mistake its organization, for it has none. It is smugness, writ large; and its inevitable results, where the rich complain about the cost of housing, and bitch and whine about the costs of homelessness, all in one and the same breath. This situation did not come about overnight.

Our system of food banks and homeless shelters goes back at least forty years, by some accounts, although such things have always existed, in one form or another, probably since the dawn of time itself. There was a big recession, and remember when interest rates went just plain ludicrous—this would be the early to mid-eighties. When the old man went to re-mortgage the family home, the rate was over eighteen percent—and my father, a divorced parent, was scared shitless, too.

That was all so long ago.

More recently, it was Conservative Premier Mike Harris of Ontario and his ‘common sense revolution’, that struck the first and the worst blow, insofar as the present crisis of homelessness and affordability is concerned. We will talk about the impacts of ‘mental health and addictions’ some other time, although I am sure I will get to it someday.

It was in 1995, when the Province of Ontario, with the conservatives elected by a strong majority, gutted social assistance payments by twenty percent. Where the rate for a single adult had been $663.00 per month, it was reduced to $520.00 per month. Using an online ‘inflation calculator’, inflation has taken what would have cost $100.00 in 1995, up to $183.26 in mid-May of 2024. If we multiply that by 5.2, the figure would be $916.30 per month, and yet the current rate is only $733.00 per month. Welfare payments have not kept up with the rate of inflation, and in fact our current, Progressive Conservative government here in Ontario, did not give any raises to folks on disability, for the first five years of their mandate. They have not given one single raise to folks who are unfortunate enough to find themselves on ‘welfare’, social assistance.

Ah, but if we take a figure of $183.00 and multiply that by 6.63, the figure now becomes $1,215.01 per month. It’s still not a lot of money, what with the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment all across the province being much higher than that, but it would, under some circumstances, have given people a fighting chance, of at least keeping a roof over their heads. It is also true that if more people had simply been able to keep the roof they already had, over their heads, the average price of rent in this province would actually be lower—that is because, while the province does have rent controls, on buildings of a certain age, there is no rent control when a unit becomes vacant. The landlord now has the right to charge what could be called ‘market rate’, which is a fine term, useful enough, but only if we accept that things might have been different—if only the Province of Ontario had any kind of effective, or even just rational, social policy.

You're welcome to check the math.

If they had raised the rates, more people would have kept their homes—and if you, had moved within the last five or six years, into any apartment in this province, your rent would have been lower—

Ah, but you prefer to cut off your noses to spite your faces, because the ideology trumps truth, and logic, and utility, every fucking time with some of you people.

Some years later, in an interview, Mike Harris was asked about the common-sense revolution. He considered it his ‘legacy’, that within a fairly short time, unemployment went down, and had stayed down. Yet he made no mention, that it was the economy, (stupid), and not regressive social policy that had made that happen. I ought to know.

I have lived through every recession of the last fifty or sixty-plus years, although as an infant, I could hardly have been aware of such things. As an adult, it is much more up close and personal. When I was on welfare, however briefly, I was paying $450.00 per month in rent. Knock that welfare check down to $520.00 per month, and I had seventy dollars per month, for food, clothing, personal needs including soap, toothpaste, dish-soap, and quite frankly, hobbies, entertainment, were out the door. So was any hope of ‘bettering myself’ with training or education, anything that was not provided by the system. Training a guy with a broken back to become a mason’s helper, slugging 100-lb. concrete blocks, mixing mortar and wheeling that around in a wheelbarrow is simply not appropriate, and is simply not going to work—yet sending him to college or university, in order to train him, (or her), in something more appropriate, something that might actually be a viable career, was never in the cards.

What is interesting is that disability and welfare are always divided up into ‘shelter’ and ‘personal needs’ portions. The minute you lose your housing, you no longer ‘need’ that shelter portion, although the Province, so I have been told, does provide a meagre $100.00 per month ‘homelessness benefit’. Yes, you heard me right. Now you’re supposed to live on the street, feed yourself, stay off the dope and somehow, over the course of several years, without getting robbed and beaten for your money, to somehow save first and last month’s rent for an apartment you can’t afford in the first place, also bearing in mind after all of this you are sort of unlikely to do well in any sort of credit check—right???

The so-called homeless benefit mostly goes to the rich, in the form of reduced taxes.

Affordable, geared-to-income housing would appear to be a desirable thing, a ‘social good’ in every sense. Yet the County of Lambton appears to be totally incompetent to build any such thing in any appreciable numbers. When confronted by a looming crisis, the council voted unanimously to fund a five-year study. This was a cop-out by any other name, and of course the ultimate results of that study were a study in pure shamelessness.

The rich are your friends...

They’ve been spewing out this pap smear for years, and yet they haven’t succeeded in doing one damned thing about it.

Neither city council, or county council, have ever said one word about the levels of social assistance, federal and provincial disability pensions, levels of Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan, or any other federal or provincial benefits for low-income Canadians. It’s almost like they’re afraid someone might do something about it—

If you look at the image, you will see that MillDon, recently split off from Steeves & Rozema, is charging three percent if a tenant shows up at head office to pay their rent by debit or credit card. Considering that a one bedroom unit is going for an easy $1,500.00 per month, this equates with $45.00, per month, for the privilege, of paying your rent. That is $540.00 per year, for someone just to pay the rent.

With a lack of affordable housing for working Canadians, we end up with a captive audience of renters. There is nowhere else to go. What are they going to do, especially as there is still a fair percentage of unbanked individuals, and they have to live somewhere. It’s a lot like the family doctor—so many of us simply don’t have one. Why would someone not have a bank account? There are a hundred reasons: garnished wages, child support or alimony in arrears, overdrafts, accounts frozen or sealed, unpaid fines, overdraft maxed out, service charges built up and no funds to pay—the usual sins of poverty, ladies and gentlemen, this is how folks end up taking their cheques to a payday lender, and end up hooked on that peculiar and rather predatory service.

$45.00/month, just for the privilege of paying the rent.

***

The landlord lies awake at night, wondering if they even have the nerve to try that with automatic bank payments; which don’t cost them a single damned cent. The simplest of software will tell you who has paid, and who hasn’t.

In one local development, affordable, geared-to-income development of over fifty units, a very small number of people wanted garden plots, and their wish was granted. Funny thing is, the landlord, in this case the County of Lambton, squawked about water usage, and therefore, imposed a hundred-dollar per month water surcharge, regardless of whether a household was using the vegetable plots or not. One wonders how many tomatoes one would have to grow to make it worth it to the individual user, or whether they had such plots the next year, or what the County actually did with the estimated $5,400.00 per month they gouged out of our most vulnerable citizens, (half of them dying of cancer), with that little stunt…

What I thought was interesting, was when tenants, all of whom are low income, many on disability or other benefits, had to pay for their own hot water tanks, installation and monthly fees. This is of course, over and above the one-third of income that the so-called rent is supposedly set at. One wonders what happens when a ‘client’ is evicted—where do we go from here, right.

This particular development is sort of high-end for subsidized housing, and yet the county has been unable to build anything like it since. We have, over the last ten years or so, ‘approved’ something like 2,400 housing units, many described as ‘affordable’, in Sarnia-Lambton. Some would even say 3,500, but some of those have been acknowledged to be dead in the water—which is at least honest, and one would hope that some other property developer will take that over and maybe do something—anything, with it.

Let’s not hold our breath waiting.

And I have often wondered. When the Doug Ford government imagines affordable housing, just exactly what do they see in the privacy of their own heads.

I’ll bet it’s nice.

Government: building more castles faster.

***

In the fourteenth century, the Black Plague killed anywhere from one-third to one-half of the population. The cost of labour went up. The profits of the lords of the manors fell, due to vacant lands. They had trouble getting people to work for them. The result, in legal terms, was that efforts were made to bind the serf ever closer to the land—and the master.

Naturally, it didn’t really work, and when someone who had gone to work in London, and yet found themselves disabled, they had to return to their home parish just to get poor relief, which did exist in those days. Back then, the Church provided virtually all social services outside of the military and the courts. To see the state still relying on that in modern times pretty much says it all...

The sumptuary laws literally told people what they could and could not wear. In 1 Corinthians 7:20, it says; Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.

The ruling classes, of course, took it literally—or presented it literally, for they themselves, did not feel bound by it. Basically, do not quit your job and go looking for more money somewhere else. This was the original rentier class, and they meant business—even as they plundered France and held their captives for ransom, even as they built new castles with the money they had ‘earned’ by valor in battle. In their own eyes, the very paragons of virtue. But then, that’s what they always say.

***

With the aging of the population, and a falling birthrate, it is a similar situation. The cost of labour will go up, the number of hands will go down—and the upper crust of society will do all they can to continue to exploit the labouring classes. Not the least of which, is to just plain lie to us, and still expect us to like them for it. But this is why the federal government took a gamble on an increased level of immigration. This gamble will probably pay off in the long run, in the short term, it has indeed exacerbated the housing crisis. Or, as I like to call it, the income crisis. And I am not talking about the rich when I say that.

What would happen if we all just stood here and stared at the camera...

One aspect of all this is surveillance: at some point, the landlord put cameras outdoors, and then, they put cameras indoors, and then, some time later, put in more cameras, looking up and down the hallways. They call it security. It may actually provide some, assuming it’s not the landlord and renoviction we’re worried about. This is an effort to exercise their rights—in the future, tenants may be asked to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. If you prefer not to sign such an agreement, they might prefer not to offer you a lease. It’s their right. Not so much yours. It’s that simple. Odds are, you will sign it.

Oh, and when you do leave, and if you do open your mouth and speak about some negative experience, you have violated the NDA and you can be sued for ‘damages’ in a court of law.

It’s one more attempt to control.

 

 

END

 

Go deep: a theory of local journalism.

Okay. So, local radio reports on important local news stories. Whether it’s on the air or on the website, the stories are short and shallow. This is a feature of the medium, where the attention span is assumed to be about three minutes or less—accounting for the sort of music they play as well. In the local daily, stories range from very short, up to the average, roughly five or six hundred words, and a long story is maybe a thousand. In our local monthly, the same holds true, in that ‘genuine’ news coverage, biased as it might be, is no more than five or six hundred words, and the columnists, being mostly unpaid, about the same. It is true that the major news sources, the CBC for example, have the budget and the time to do investigative reporting, analysis, the regular panel of experts commenting on one major issue of the day. It struck me that in a media environment where the tendency is to go shallow, and devote the least portion of time and resources to news coverage, (the local market in other words) a person of some journalistic bent, someone with a few gut instincts, might go deep.

A bit of background. The Sarnia Journal won a Community Journalism Award for doing just that, going deep, in their series on homelessness and addictions in this community.

Yeah, but doesn’t that just prove what I am saying?

Go deep. It’s not like I have anything to lose, or anything better to do, while I await renoviction papers and a verdict of ‘mental-health addictions’, on the front page of those very same publications, when I finally am rammed through the cracks with a fine-toothed hatchet and end up living in a tent in Rainbow park, or maybe, if I’m lucky, in a van down by the river. Since I don’t work for them, I don’t have to play by their rules. I am a private citizen, not responsible to any other person or entity besides the law and the constitution, and I will say what I want, I will write what I want, and let the chips fall where they may. I do not have any advertisers. I do not rely on donations, corporate or otherwise. We're not selling Girl Scout Cookies here, ladies and gentlemen...

Maybe that’s why they want to get me out of my house, ladies and gentlemen—or am I just being paranoid.

(His instincts are killing him. – ed.)

The funny thing is, I have been very stable these past thirty fucking years on disability, and one can only wonder just what in the hell is the matter with you people.

Would you like to know the truth? You’ve probably guessed it already.

They—or maybe even we—in a collective sense, just don’t want to spend the money, unless it’s somebody else’s money—the very socialism they profess to despise, ladies and gentlemen.

#Louis

 

The Bank of Canada’s online inflation calculator.

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through an Endless Amount of Bullshit.

Catch-22. Joseph Heller.

Catch-22 available from Russian Website. Use at own risk.

Food banks arose to fight hunger:

The Interest Rate Crunch of the ‘80s.

If you can make any sense of this, please let us know.

Lambton’s housing pap smear.

Failure of the County.

Recommended reading.

The Hundred Years War, by Desmond Seward. 

English Society in the Later Middle Ages. Maurice Keen.

Also:

Check out How to Rob a Bank, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery, by Louis Shalako on iTunes.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Electric Vehicles. What You Are Selling, and What I Am Buying, Are Two Different Things. Louis Shalako.

We all know what we want...then again, there is what we actually need, and then there is what we can afford.

Louis Shalako

 

What would I actually need in an electric vehicle.

What I Don’t Need.

Why don’t we begin with what I don’t need.

I don’t need zero to sixty times of one-point-four seconds or less. I don’t need to get to one hundred in one-point-nine seconds. I don’t need eight hundred and fifty horsepower. I don’t need a thousand foot-pounds of torque. I don’t need a top speed exceeding two hundred miles per hour. I don’t need to corner at four and a half gees…I don’t really need five different modes. Economy, and economy, would be just fine.

More than anything, I don’t need to pay seventy thousand fucking dollars for it.

I don’t need gullwing doors, a whale-tail, and a high-speed aero package. It does not need rear-wheel steering. It does not have to be four-wheel drive or even rear-wheel drive, like a sports car. It does not have to make teenage girls cream in their jeans.

I do not need to plunge at high speed through pristine mountain rivers, I do not need to ford three feet of mud or hold my sideways track on a 45–degree slope. I’m not crawling up boulder-strewn ravines. I don’t need hands-free, autonomous driving, at 150-kph on the Highway 401 through rush-hour Toronto traffic. I don’t need any kind of miniature bubble-car, and I don’t need some behemoth that requires three steps up to the cab. I do not need to lift anything onto a truck bed that is getting on near four and a half feet off the ground these days, and I do not need an engine bay that requires a step ladder and a safety harness to check the fluids. I don’t need a million bells and whistles and this thing is fucking talking to me about my extended warranty and don’t I think I might want to get some counseling for issues related to anger and some kind of Oedipus complex…I do not need the internet in my vehicle, or a father-confessor, or some kind of artificial intelligence, which, having achieved the bare bones of self-awareness, which must inevitably become sexual, after a while, ladies and gentlemen. I do not need to binge on Seinfeld on my morning commute.

A little peace and quiet is all I need.

I don’t need to tow ten thousand pounds at eighty-five miles per hour all the way to Florida. I don’t need to push a button and it parks itself, I do not need to send the thing autonomously to the store for a litre of milk and a loaf of bread. I really don’t need seating for seven, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of the time—more likely, never.

It does not have to be plastic, or stainless steel, or carbon fibre.

It doesn’t even have to be aluminum.

An ash frame and hand-beaten steel panels, à la Morgan is going a bit too far.

This is not a three-wheeler, front-wheel drive, motorcycle-engine tourer of the 1920s.

I don’t need freaky styling. 

I don’t need a car only a Cylon’s mother, a little old robot lady from Pasadena, could love. 

I don’t need to impress a bunch of hicks when I go to church on Sunday. 

I don’t need power everything, or a Blaupunkt stereo with 750-watts of 21-speaker theatre sound.

I don’t need fine Connolly leather or burled walnut trim. 

I don’t need screens in the back end or even six hundred miles of range.

If you want my money, for fuck’s sakes, give me something I can actually use—

Cross-country trips to see my agent, get a million-dollar advance. 

Lunch with the client at the Four Seasons. 

Track days at Laguna Seca really don’t enter into the equation.

What I need, is a little more prosaic. What I need is the Volkswagen Kombi of the 21^st Century.

Track day in the Behemoth.

What I don’t want.

I don’t want to have to purchase a high-end phone for a thousand dollars, or worse. I don’t want to have to upgrade to the most expensive phone plan ever—right now, I’m paying $28.25 per month, for phone and text. I don’t want to pay a couple of hundred a month to the service provider, (for seven to nine devices, no less), just for the one extra privilege of plugging in my vehicle.

I live in a three-floor walk-up apartment in the central city. I don’t want the landlord to put in one or two charging stations, and then jack the rent by six hundred a month…I don’t particularly want to charge up in five minutes, and it sure would be nice if I could use coins and bills in the machine—I don’t particularly want you to track my every movement, even though I am sure the data would be extremely valuable to the manufacturer and other service providers.

For crying out loud, give me something I can use.

***

What I Want and What I Need.

Whether I want it or need it, for my present purposes, a low-cost, versatile and efficient minivan is the best option. My Chrysler has stow-and–go seats. I would prefer to simply remove them, better yet, sell me a two-seater with a flat deck for cargo space. Give me a tailgate that clears my head and two sliding doors on the sides. They don’t even have to be powered. We could save a few dollars by leaving some of the powered options off the vehicle. Give me a minivan, for about twenty-thousand dollars, with a range of 150 to 200 miles.

The odds of the landlord putting in charging stations anytime soon are rather slim, but then, at this point in time, there isn’t much demand from low-income, working class folks, senior citizens, foreign students, and guys on disability…they’ve been reading all the horror stories and disinformation coming out of the anti-faxxers and climate change denialists.

Give me two heated seats. One would think that a heater, with good defrosting capability is a must-have. In Canada, air conditioning is a must for most of the country, although how much people use it in northern parts of the country is unknown to me—probably less often than southern Ontario. However, when you do need it, you really need it, as anyone who has been stuck in a major traffic jam on a hot summer’s day will agree. That’s especially true with a diesel bus stuck right beside you and you’re sucking in all those fumes. If nothing else, with a/c, you can recirculate the air and keep the windows closed.

I want good visibility, in all directions and on all sides…

I want good lights, wipers, signals, I want good size wheels and tires without going too sick or indulging pure vanity. This thing is not a show car, it is a rather utilitarian machine. That being said, additional seating, as an option, should be appropriately priced, if I should care to order that second or third row of seating from the dealer or any aftermarket supplier.

A certain level of customizability should be built-in. What I need, is to deliver plastic totes full of frozen pizza dough. A carpet-installer, a locksmith, a taxi company would obviously have different needs, and the vehicle should be easy to configure, whether on the production line, or by a secondary builder. In the latter case, I am thinking of the manufacturers who purchase a chassis and cab combination, and then they put an aluminum box or a flatbed, or some other specialized application on the back end. Think the old fashioned ‘cube’ van and you get the idea. Look underneath, it’s a Ford, a GM, whatever.

My exact same vehicle is good for camping, holidays, or just putting about town with the minimum of excess dead weight—and two rows of rear seating weighs a good four hundred pounds in the Chrysler.

I’m not saying the thing needs to be ugly, (the Chrysler isn’t ugly, for example) it does not have to have big slab sides and flat planes for the hood, front end, windshield. Far from it, the real design challenge is to make it look as good as possible, without going all Flash Gordon on the drawing board.

This is not a space truck, not yet anyways—perhaps that will come.

(For that, we have to invent anti-gravity. – ed.)

Here's something Louis could actually build, ladies and gentlemen...

If you were to produce a rational kit design, it would be intriguing, at the very least, for those with a home shop or other facilities.  I would love to build my own car. Which even I can admit is just crazy—

Not a serious option for serious manufacturers, I get that part.

It should have a mount for a trailer hitch and a reasonable towing capacity. I want a good roof rack. It should be able to carry one or two passengers and a minimum of 1,200 lbs. of load. The spare wheel should be accessible, either from inside, or in a frunk—none of this shit where the spare wheel is under the centre of the vehicle, hung on a cable, and the fucking thing is so rusty by the time you need to pull it out, that you can’t get the damned thing off anyways, and so you need to call the auto club…you’re only going to get so many free tows.

I would prefer manual switches and buttons, in all the right places. I do like a radio, that’s all very well. I don’t particularly need GPS or satellite navigation.

Give me a centre console, a capacious glove box, and a couple of drink holders. I don’t necessarily need electric seat adjustment. Capiche? Just keep it nice, simple and efficient for my needs.

That being said, it would be best if I can just plug it into a 110-V receptacle, the same one many readers use to plug in their hedge trimmer or Christmas lights. I don’t necessarily need to charge that battery in five minutes. Here’s the thing. I could drive it to work, plug it in, and then, living in an apartment isn’t a problem. I’m at work for a minimum of three or four hours at a stretch, and that’s plenty of time to recharge from a commute of about 25-30 kilometres. As far as I’m concerned, that thirty-dollar extension cord from the hardware store shouldn’t even get warm.

I agree, that a battery with greater range is somewhat desirable, because no matter how long or short the trips, you don’t need to charge up quite so often.

As for battery replacement, that really ought to be as easy as undoing a handful of bolts, easily accessible from below, with the vehicle on a lift. Lower the vehicle, unplug a few connectors, and pull the thing out the back end, or the passenger side, or whatever. For that, you could have simple bogie wheels, on retractable arms. Simply wheel the new one in, jack that into position, plug it in. Throw the nuts back on them bolts, retract the bogies, and you’re ready to go. Here’s the thing: a lower capacity battery is simply cheaper to replace, and you also have a vehicle with a potential life-span of fifteen to twenty years. It doesn’t weigh a ton, and it really does not need to be integrated into the load-bearing structure of the vehicle. If the battery was in the frunk, then it’s four to six bolts, a few plug-ins, and you can lift that out with a chain-lift in a job that couldn’t take more than half an hour.

As an option, a simple Briggs & Stratton, one-cylinder engine and a gallon of gas, hidden in an outer compartment, perhaps the right rear fender, would be available for emergency charging. If they can put an electric starter on a model airplane, they can do it in a vehicle fender…put a decent muffler on there and the cutest little catalytic converter and you really got something.

It ain’t exactly sexy, but all of this is doable.

The real question is why in the hell haven’t you done it yet—this is why the Chinese are going to cream this market, all too soon, ladies and gentlemen. They will produce some reasonable battery-electric vehicles at half the price of internal combustion vehicles and that’s when the market really takes off.

In the meantime, you’re still thinking of supercars; and the pickup truck as a status symbol.

Here’s the deal, okay. Maximum price, $20,000.00 brand-new, with a few options and upgrades if folks want to pad that up some. A sensible warranty on the battery, motor and drivetrain.

Make it fucking easy for me, okay.

And the world will beat a path to your door.

 

END

 

The County of Lambton operates fourteen charging stations.

This seems to be confirmed by EVhype.

In Sarnia-Lambton, charging stations have been installed, to great fanfare in local media, only to be taken away some time later, not so much to any great fanfare from local media.

The Volkswagen Buzz is coming to Canada in late 2024.

Here is a question. Is the U.S. 100 % tarriff on Chinese EVs meant to protect the U.S. EV industry...or maybe it's the U.S. internal combustion industry they're protecting, bearing in mind what I said above. What about consequences, intended or otherwise? Will this tend to drive Chinese investment into battery plants, vehicle assembly plants, in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, which might very well fall under the North American Free Trade Act? In which case, they would no longer be subject to such high tarriffs. (Video from the CBC)

Louis Shalako has books, stories and audiobooks available from Google Play.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.