Seeing / Being Canadian

I have too many contractor's quotes rolling around in my head, so today's post is just a short photo essay featuring Canadian art and Canadian art-adjacent images.

First up, Georgian Bay by me and Tom Thomson (we went to the McMichael Gallery for Bruce's birthday and came across North Star, which features dozens of Thomson's extraordinary, rapid, oil sketches of the great outdoors in the north).  

My Georgian Bay sunset, September 2022

Thomson's Georgian Bay Sunset, circa 1916

Next some shots from Oeno's Sculpture Garden at Huff Estates Winery, a destination in Prince Edward County since 2011. The site's about four acres and has 60+ sculptures by Canadian artists. The garden's full of thousands of perennials, plus groves of maples and poplars, a grapevine arbour, a herb garden, a water-filled quarry and a children’s play area.

Purple verbena and golden rod soldier beetle,
Oeno Sculpture Garden, Prince Edward County, 
13 August 2023

Head made of maple leaves, by Dale Dunning

In charge of the quarry:
a wary northern leopard frog.

Interacting with a sculpture.

Checking out the children's play area.
Photo by K. Macrow.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Caution

Just below the bridge across the west Duchesnay falls, August 9, 2023

The first time I visited Duchesnay Falls just outside of North Bay, Ontario, I was fifteen or sixteen years old, had spent most of my youth in a swimming pool, and had learned no fear of the water. 

On that fine late summer's day fifty years ago, the Pfahl kids, my sisters and I climbed the trail beside the western branch of the falls. We reached a spot high above where our parents stood waiting. Some of the others in the pack of kids held back, but I jumped right into the surging stream. I'd imagined we would be carried along by the water in a thrilling ride that would not involve being dashed to pieces on the rocks or drowned. Our parents appear to have assumed the same because they had not tried to stop us. Or maybe we forgot to tell them.

The trip down the falls entailed more scrambling over boulders than I thought would happen, but was otherwise as exhilarating and every bit as much fun as I'd hoped, especially when I was caught by a giant torrent and carried into the deep pool at the bottom of the falls. It was like body surfing on fresh water.

Fifty years along, I'm still not afraid of the water, but, well, I've learned many lessons about jumping into things, and the wisdom of holding back.

For example, we're imagining we will renovate our kitchen. We put a budget figure ($50,000) on HomeSense just to see what would happen.

What happened was people showed up at our door with a firm idea of what it would cost us to have them take out our old kitchen and put in new cupboards and countertops ($50,000 as luck would have it) and no details whatsoever about any other costs (flooring, fixtures), saying we could take it on faith that "we would have a kitchen" (that's what one guy said) by the time they were done. 

We figured all those undisclosed costs would put us at least ten, maybe twenty or even thirty thousand dollars over our budget. So we held back, thinking there were better options than just plunging in.

Connecting with my inner Millennial (who I have come to trust), I poked around online and found a renovation company that promises to write out a detailed quotation for the whole job, including flooring and fixtures. 

They'll be at our door next week.

I'll let you know, after a careful assessment of flow rate, rocks and incline, if we decide to jump in.

Thanks for reading!

Karen 

The sign said no swimming, so...

Summer Re-Run - Part III

A high-profile issue at the COP was to get countries to agree to no more than 1.5 degrees (celsius) warming. And to get the developed world, which is to say the USA, to pay for it.

An excerpt from my last full blog entry from Paris:

Here's the thing about COPs. When the negotiations get real, no one but the negotiators knows what's going on, and even they have a hard time because there are so many concurrent conversations. Everyone else relies on the ready standbys of rumour, speculation and making things up. For example, the Climate Action Network Press conference today was just silly. Speakers who clearly had no idea what they were talking about regaled the assembled crowd with vague allusions to "vested interests" and "blockers."

The only real information is what comes out after the negotiators send their proposed wording to the COP President. The President pulls it all together into a new draft agreement for everyone to talk about.

The newest draft text came out late in the day yesterday. I looked it over after I got to my room last night.

As a comparative novice in this field, but also someone who has worked with texts-telling-people-what-to-do for thirty years, I think the new document is pretty good.

There are three or four parts of the document that really matter. The rest of it is brokered compromises the purpose of which is just to be in the document. No one will ever refer to these parts, but it was important to someone that they be included.

There's another thing about the climate deal and what it means. I shared these thoughts with my counterpart from the Yukon who needed a quick catch up because she'd been holed up in her hotel room for two days with the flu.

"There's two parts to the COP. There's the work of reaching global consensus through the negotiations, and then there's all the stuff that we learn about around the negotiations.

"I listen to people like Mark Carney and Mike Bloomberg say companies are going to have to share information with their shareholders about their climate risks; I hear stories about entrepreneurs bringing solar energy systems to a billion people in Africa; there are billions of dollars of private money being invested in new technology that will fuel the economy without throwing a whole bunch of carbon into the atmosphere.

"The climate deal is important because it sets some high-level aspirational goals at the global level. But it is hardly the only thing."

With 80 people perished (at time of writing) in the Hawaii fires, and tens of thousands killed in last year's heat waves (the count's still going for this year), hot-tub temperature ocean waters, and more hectares of forest burned in Canada this year than the past ten years combined, in retrospect my expectation that Carney, Bloomberg and their ilk could help turn things around seems, well, pathetic.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

Gadgets will save us: a wind
power tree on the COP grounds

Summer Re-Run - Part II

This isn't from the COP, and is a joke about domestic government policy, not international negotiations, but still conveys what climate change talks are like

I'm assuming that a few readers have figured out that the posts from the 2015 Conference of the Parties are easily accessible without my having to reproduce them here. 

That's true.

So I should add some value in these re-run posts, such as shedding light on how it happened that I was even there at all, and what on earth it was that I was supposed to do.

I was there as part of the Canadian delegation. As a member of the framework convention on climate change, Canada attends the annual conference of the parties. Canada always invites the provinces to send representatives along.

Provinces can send as many people as they like, but only one per province can be assigned the role of "super delegate," a title that inspires lots of dumb jokes, some of which you are thinking of right now.

As Ontario's super delegate, I had quasi-privileged access to the negotiations but of course could not in any way negotiate at all. 

In the COP early days, I could sit in on the plenary negotiation sessions, which, as illustrated in my last post, were maddeningly unproductive and obtuse. I could also attend the morning briefings of the Canadian negotiating team, like the one I was late for on the first day.

As time wore on and negotiations heated up, access became more constrained. I couldn't sit in on the discussions any more. Even Canada's morning briefings stopped. 

It was my job to send dispatches back to Ontario about what was going on, a job that got progressively more difficult. I resorted to various means of information gathering, not all of which make me proud. On the last day of the conference, I was reduced to cribbing notes from an industry newsletter, the only credible-seeming source I could find.

My blog posts, on the other hand, were more about my personal take on the COP, what it felt like to be in the midst of all that. 

From Day Five

... I found a seat in an "overflow" room to listen to a conversation among all the members of the Convention. They had agreed to spend some time talking about the seven things they hate the most about each other.

It was an interesting conversation, but not a heartening or inspiring one.

...The most illuminating moment for me was the long "intervention" by the negotiator from Malaysia, representing a group of countries calling itself the "Like Minded Developing Countries." He went on at great length about the injustice of the countries who have caused climate change now looking to the developing countries, struggling to bring their populations out of poverty, to solve the problem for them. ... He was, to quote a line from a film perhaps fading from the collective memory, "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore." When he was done, there was applause in the overflow room. A lot of applause.

From Day Ten

I have a couple of favourite negotiators, not so much for what they say but how they say it. One is Claudia Salerno from Venezuela. She's strong and articulate in her "interventions" and she doesn't mince words. Not everyone finds her positions useful, but she's really good at her job...

I also admire the negotiator from Malaysia [see above], whom everyone calls "Professor".

Other distinguished negotiators: 

For smooth delivery and resoundingly reasonable-seeming interventions, no one does a better job than the EU. 

The party with the best mumble: Belarus. 

Best-looking negotiating team: the Congo.

The night before last, a part of the Canadian team headed by Minister Catherine McKenna made a report to the President of COP on the progress of negotiations around "cooperative approaches" - meaning market mechanisms to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions. The team was all women - the Minister, the Head Negotiator, the Chief Negotiator and the team specialist on market mechanisms - and under the bright lights of the plenary hall, with their tired faces and similar hair cuts projected on the big screens, they looked like a girl band about to perform a cover of Katy Perry's "Roar."

***

Next week, the last dispatches from the COP, and what the world looked like eight wasted years ago.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Posing with Aurora, the steam punk Greenpeace polar bear puppet, from L to R:
Dianne Saxe, then the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario
now the Toronto city councillor for University/Rosedale and
Glenn Murray, then the Ontario Minister of Environment and Climate Change,
 now, after not becoming leader of the federal Green Party and not becoming the 
Mayor of Winnipeg, still looking for something to do.