River Talk

If falling bridges are for real, who’s going to fix them?

2012-01-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

Going under bridges every day in the summer, this is the kind of stuff that captures my interest (apart from avoiding people in rowboats who seem to forget they are facing backwards!)

Berry Vrbanovic, president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, says falling bridges are real. In a December 22 (2011) letter to the National Post, Vrbanovic rejects statements in a Dec. 6 commentary by the Post’s Jack Mintz that the infrastructure deficit is make-believe. “Canadians see bridges falling apart on the evening news,” says Vrbanovic. “They worry when they hear that 1,000 boil-water warnings are issued every year across Canada, and they're tired of crowded buses, traffic gridlock and spending the equivalent of 32 working days a year commuting to and from work… it's clear Canadians want all orders of government to continue working together to put our aging roads, bridges, water systems and public transit on solid ground.”

If misery loves company, then – as Canadians begin to grapple with a serious infrastructure deficit – it should come as a comfort that we are not alone with these challenges.

A 2007 article by Ellen McGirt in FastCompany.com quotes statistics from the American Society of Civil Engineers which indicate it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over a five year period to bring (USA) roads, highways, bridges, railways, tunnels and dams back to “any sort of reasonable condition”. A New York Times article from the same year attacks “ideological influences that have pushed for smaller government and lower taxes – at the expense of our common infrastructure”.

To Canadians, this sounds depressingly similar, even if the numbers themselves are, of course, smaller. But the USA infrastructure debate gets even more weird and similar to – of all things – the health care privatization debate in our own country. Apparently private investors, mostly foreign, are quickly moving in to bail out desperate local governments in the USA which are facing budget shortfalls. In so doing, these investors are taking ownership of many of the taxpayer-financed infrastructures assets all across the USA.

Most fascinating, perhaps, is who is the major player taking on this ownership. McGirt points out that it is increasingly one major player, and not even a North American one at that! Australia’s Macquarie Infrastructure Group (along with its several subsidiaries) is aggressively pursuing more and more privatization deals. As McGirt writes, “As the 800 pound gorilla in infrastructure deals world-wide, (Macquarie) is shoving other investment/private equity players out of the way. Says a source from a competing firm, “they seem to pay any price for what they want… The majority of these deals are considered public/private partnerships, or PPPs, which are long term leases. Local governments get the cash for immediate -and often pressing - needs, the investors take ownership of the asset, and monetize it through tolls which they set.”

As with health care, Canadians will be asking themselves if toll-roads and bridges are the way to build and maintain our future. This debate will be equally divisive, if not as emotional; in the meantime, engineers, contractors and service companies will be watching with interest. Taxpayers will always pay the piper, one way or another. The burning question is… who will be making the decisions and actually writing the cheques to get the work done?

The author, Peter Kingsmill, is a vice president at www.ShearwaterMarineServices.ca

2011 floods underscore our changing reality

2011-07-09T08:49:00.001-07:00

So, this must be the year that the bottom end of Saskatchewan tries to emulate the top end of Australia: half a year dry (we call it winter) and half a year of seemingly endless rain, washed out roads, flooded creeks and rivers, and quiet streams replaced by raging torrents.

At the Top End of the Land Down Under, they get used to it; in fact, the ecosystem there demands The Wet, as it is called, for its very survival. In southern Saskatchewan it’s a different story. We have been caught totally off-guard by what nature has wrought upon us, and are left puzzled – and often angry – as more water than this generation has ever witnessed inundates our fields, homes and businesses. It is not very surprising that we are puzzled, and being puzzled is a good thing because it may trigger our desire to learn about why this is happening to us, understand why we were so ill-prepared to cope, and maybe even adopt new patterns of survival for the future.

We could start with remembering that some 10,000 years ago there were no rivers or lakes or creeks or farmlands. There was just ice, hundreds of feet thick. If you think it’s wet this year, imagine how wet it was when all that ice melted and eventually carved out the prairies, lakes and rivers which we now consider ageless, and the fertile farmland from which our farmers wrest a living today.

As a wiser person than I once wrote, “the only constant is change”. Unfortunately, despite being the one species on this planet which is intellectually equipped to grapple with change, like most living creatures we do not handle change well. In fact, as a society we are quick to deny change, perhaps because embracing that reality requires us to invest our energy and our money on things which do not gratify our immediate needs. Our social (and therefore political) reality is that research into the health of our environment and the sustainability of our infrastructure is trumped by research into markets and growth – every time.

With heartfelt compassion for people whose lives have been shattered by this year’s events, perhaps as prairie people we have just received a wake-up call, a chance to examine our future in light of what we already know, and all the things we must learn. When it comes to floods, for example, what we have considered a “one-in-fifty-year event” is beginning to look more like, say, a “one-in-twenty-year event”. That consideration alone moves the planning horizon from our grandchildren’s future to our own very real present!

With that in mind, will we continue to discourage our leaders from developing forward-thinking, research-based policies? Is it logical to blame governments and agencies for our troubles today, when we have steadfastly refused them sufficient funding to do the necessary research to plan and build properly for the future? Can we really still afford to cheap out on our taxes and build roads and culverts which only match our 100-year-old paradigm?

Let’s hope that – while we may yet be somewhat ignorant – we are not totally stupid!

It really should be… a dog’s life !

2011-02-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

The media (across Canada and – unfortunately – in lots of other countries) is a-buzz these days about the killing of some one hundred sled dogs at a tourism operation in Whistler, BC. These animals were apparently deemed as an over-supply of inventory by the operators of a dogsled adventure company whose business reality did not match expectations following the over-hyped 2010 Winter Games.

In our mixed-up world of skewed priorities, there has been far more media attention paid this unfortunate situation than to the wholesale execution of dissidents in countries like Iran, or the daily slaughter of women and children in some struggling third-world countries. This having been said, however, there is certainly something discomfiting about the judgements that led to the killing of these dogs, let alone the apparently questionable methods by which the slaughter was carried out.

It was noteworthy, therefore, when CTV followed up on the Whistler story by interviewing one of Canada’s premier dogsled adventure operators, Brad Muir of Sundogs Excursions at Waskesiu, north of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Brad runs a small, high-quality business which focuses on demonstrating to his guests the close relationships between the dogs, the forests and frozen lakes, and the people who use dog teams and sleds for trade, transport and enjoyment in their traditional habitat. An email from one of Sundogs’ recent guests (in early February 2011), speaks to this better than I can:

Hello Brad and Marcia,
Both L… and I would like to say a huge thank you for your warm hospitality. This was truly a day to remember for the rest of our lives. The passion you show for this sport is channelled through to the enthusiasm of your huskies. Since we returned home, we have not stopped talking about the experience, and have been updating all our friends on this remarkable excursion. We really do intend to do this again sometime, so you might see us some time soon.
Take care
F… and L…

Brad spoke on-camera to the CTV television reporter of the occasional necessity for euthanizing a sick or injured animal. When he is faced with this necessity, he talks of it as a sad time, a time of thanks for a life well-lived, and – perhaps above all – a time to use a professional to undertake the killing in a painless and peaceful manner. It is, indeed, all about respect.

And perhaps respect is at the core of this whole affair. Dogsleds were, in fact, never a feature of life on the west slope of the coast mountains. While there is nothing evil about establishing a dogsledding business there, it smacks of building a ride at a theme park, far removed from any cultural or even geographic context. It should therefore not surprise us that, while cash flow governs the business decisions at a theme park ride, love and respect govern the business ethics of an experience offered in a place where these magnificent animals have been a beloved part of day-to-day life for centuries.

Captain Peter Kingsmill

http://www.canadanatureescapes.ca

When will they ever learn…

2010-07-05T17:05:00.001-07:00

To be sure, accidents sometimes happen. However, often what is reported as an “accident” is not an accident at all, but an event caused by ignorance or stupidity or both. Three close encounters of the deadly kind happened a week ago on our South Saskatchewan River in downtown Saskatoon. Nobody died, but wow, they were close, and two or three people wound up in hospital on an otherwise gorgeous Sunday evening.

The first preventable close-call occurred when the operator of a personal watercraft (PWC) decided to play chicken with a 20-ton passenger boat going downstream in a fast current. The PWC darted in from off the boat’s port side between it and a concrete bridge pier, missing the pier by scant feet and ship’s bow by scant inches. Duh. (Didn’t even look up.)

On the same afternoon, a couple of folks decided to drift down the in-flood river on inner-tubes. All well and good, maybe, but they seemed to forget that they needed to get to shore before they went over a 12-foot dam - until it was almost too late! One did get to shore, and thence to hospital, and the rescue service was sent out to find the other person.

And, while the rescue boat was out looking for the missing tuber, yet another PWC operator arrived alongside to report a PWC collision half a mile upriver. At last report, the damage from that little exercise was two people sent to hospital and two badly wrecked motorized water toys.

The “duh” factor in this last little piece of excitement doesn’t just belong to the PWC jockeys. The really dumb thing is that this last event – injuries, property damage and all – went apparently unreported, with no police investigation and no charges laid. How can this happen? You can bet that if two guys had crashed their motorcycles in a parking lot, things would be different. Why is dangerous behaviour on a public waterway somehow less important?

Happily, nobody died on the river in Saskatoon that Sunday afternoon. We were much luckier than the folks on Shuswap Lake in British Columbia a few days later. Thirteen people were cruising along in their houseboat when a high-powered runabout came over the bow and through the cabin, killing one person and severely injuring several others. As reported in the media, the usual litany of excuses was being blamed: alcohol, inexperience, darkness, crowded waterway, and so on.

But what it’s really all about is lack of education and enforcement (impaired driving, operating illegally, failure to follow the rules of the road) along with a highly ineffective and annoying operator licensing system. Good grief – it’s more complicated to fill out a magazine subscription than it is to pass the Private Vessel Operator’s Certificate online, and it costs about as much.

I have had a lifetime love-affair with boats and small ships of all sorts, and fully understand why people want to be out on the water. And I welcome pretty well everyone and everything that floats onto the water. But unless governments of all levels agree to shed their inter-jurisdictional disagreements, and commit some serious funding to enforcement, people are going to start dying in ever-greater numbers. And it’s not just the people at the bottom of the gene pool who drown – a lot of innocent people wind up dead too!

Peter Kingsmill

Plan B...

2010-06-27T12:08:00.001-07:00

Wow. Welcome to summer! Saskatchewan (well, the southern part of it anyway) has just experienced the wettest spring on record, and now our South Saskatchewan River is running high and fast through the City of Saskatoon, thanks to heavy rainfall events in southern Alberta.

Without getting into the debate about what causes climates to change, there can be no doubt at all that our climate is, indeed, changing. Folks whose only concern is whether or not to carry an umbrella may not see the larger picture, but those of us (whether farmers, construction workers or captains) whose livelihood is daily impacted by rain or wind, drought or flood, tend to have a different perspective.

Of course, those of us who are captains on these boats love all the extra water in the river. As Captain Tamara Sowellu (Meewasin Queen), commented during a Global Television interview this week, we can take our passengers further upriver than we have been able for five years. We started the season with Plan A - some of the lowest river flows we have seen in 15 years in business on this river. When the water gets that thin, our travels between the sandbars are pretty limited, so this is a welcome change!

So for us, Plan B (lots of water) is pretty cool. Unfortunately, many of our friends and neighbours are ‘way past Plan B, maybe working on Plan X. Thousands of acres of farmland, along with several towns and villages more normally associated with cactus than floods, are underwater.

There is a buzzword (or perhaps a “buzz phrase”) going around a lot these days: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. While there is more than a little truth to that, it is far too simplistic to be adopted as a recipe for survival. Poet Robert Burns was more realistic: “The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

Perhaps the best we can do is to always have a Plan B, pray that it works, and be very thankful if it does! So far, life on the river in 2010 is wonderful!

Peter Kingsmill

Kudos to all hands onboard SV Concordia!!

2010-02-22T08:55:00.001-08:00

Our hearts go out to the owners, captain, crew and passengers of the sailing vessel Concordia which went down last week in mid-ocean off the coast of Brazil. The survival of all hands, with few injuries and a successful rescue is a tribute to careful planning, excellent training and the presence of good equipment.

This was no disaster, and nor was the happy outcome a miracle; it was an incident at sea that was properly handled. As the residents of Haiti, and more recently of the Portuguese island of Madeira, can attest, you don’t have to be a foolhardy adventurer to fall prey to the vagaries of nature. In the case of the Concordia, 48 well-briefed and intelligent students, along with a captain and 15 crew members, were not foolhardy adventurers – they were people intent on pursuing educational excellence and life-skills training. Sad as the loss of the ship is, nobody should be wringing their hands over this unfortunate confrontation with a weather abnormality.

Let us hope that McCarthy (Nigel McCarthy, president and CEO of West Island College International) and his innovative Class Afloat program can pick up the pieces, obtain the necessary financing, and put back to sea with another group of students in a new vessel as soon as one is built.

Peter Kingsmill

SASKATOON - GATEWAY TO SO MUCH MORE!

2010-01-28T07:17:00.000-08:00

There’s much more to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan than just a couple of curious names! Saskatoon may have emerged over the last five years as perhaps the fastest growing city in Canada, but she has survived this exponential growth to maintain her well-deserved reputation as a friendly, intriguing destination with a vibrant cultural and entertainment scene, set against a lovingly preserved landscape of parks, river valley, and unique historical buildings.

We have operated Saskatoon Riverboats since 1996, serving many thousand customers every summer season for sightseeing cruises, dinners, and entertainment evenings. We are told that these cruises along the South Saskatchewan River downtown are one of the very best ways of experiencing Saskatoon, and so we have expanded and enhanced our cruise offerings over the last decade to meet the expectations of visitors and city residents alike.

This year, we are expanding our ability to serve a broader segment of visitors interested in this part of Saskatchewan. Valerie and I have long recognized that the area outside the city – and beyond into Canada’s north country – beckons visitors from all over the world who want to enjoy this spectacular region’s lakes, forests and rolling hills.

So, Shearwater Tours has begun to work closely with a consortium of high-quality tourism and travel providers in the parkland and boreal forest to make sure visitors can easily partake of these special Saskatchewan experiences. Opportunities include exquisitely designed lakeside resort accommodations, canoe excursions on the famous Churchill River, horse and cattle ranch adventures and accommodation in the rolling parklands, and a remote – but spectacularly comfortable – ecolodge deep in the Churchill River watershed, accessible only by floatplane or canoe.

And this is not just a summertime proposition! Saskatchewan does winter better than anyone, and these resorts and ranches are ready to serve, with the added experiences of sleigh rides, snowmobiling, wolf-calling and dogsledding.

These special packages will be available under the brand “Canada Nature Escapes”, and include consortium members Land of the Loon Resort, Sundogs Dogsled Excursions, Sturgeon River Ranch, Eastview Wilderness Guest Ranch, Ness Core Ventures, and Churchill River Canoe Outfitters (Horizons Unlimited). A Canada Nature Escapes feature website, and a full range of excursion packages, will be ready for the market by early spring, but more information can be obtained about these well-established individual properties through the Shearwater Tours website at www.shearwatertours.com. (Click on “Packages” and follow the links.)

The sky is the limit, we hear, and in Saskatatchewan, known as Land of Living Skies, the possibilities are, well, limitless!

Peter

'Twas the Night Before Christmas - revisited

2009-12-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

Hello dear readers - it is that time of year when (in our part of the world anyway) we focus on the Christmas season, the holidays, and the new year. I have a cousin in France who, though now retired, spent most of his career working around the world as a senior bureaucrat with both the International Red Cross and the United Nations. As his contribution to Christmas 2009, he "did a number" on the ubiquitous poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas". With his permission, I share it here because, in my mind, it says so much:

I had a dream…

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all ‘round the Earth
the cannons were silent, the smog had dispersed.
The writers and activists were leaving their jails
and liberated women had cast off their veils.
The curates, the imams, the monks and the priests
were embracing the godless as they joined in their feasts
while windmills rivalled with minarets and steeples
to bring a message of light to the peoples.
All the world’s politicians had unanimously agreed
to promote the Declaration of Human Rights as their creed,
to ban racism, intolerance, torture and war
and live peacefully together forever more…
So I snuggled while sugarplums danced in my head
…and then I woke up and it was all still ahead.
George Gordon-Lennox

The best to everyone this year!

Peter

2009-12-09T08:23:00.000-08:00

Kermit was right. It’s not easy being green.

Seems like no matter how hard we try, some days we can’t win for losing. Three major industrial fires over a ten-day period, and "poof", our sparsely-populated little province has just blown off more greenhouse gases than the sum of emissions from every farm tractor in Saskatchewan for 3.5 years, and laden the atmosphere with enough carcinogens to outweigh the health benefits of smoke-free workplaces for at least a decade.

Or perhaps not. Or maybe it’s even worse than that; I don’t pretend to have a handle on the numbers, but I do know bad things happen despite all the regulations. It is a bit discouraging, though, when you consider that – regulations or not - some folks are making every effort to ensure the total impacts of their personal and business activities contribute as little damage to our world as possible.

But it’s an uphill battle. Just the simple (and involuntary) act of breathing adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, let alone all the other pollutants generated by simply going through a human lifecycle. When we were all hunter-gatherers, sustainable food harvesting consisted of being where the food was already growing, and sustainable tourism was the process of getting to that place - on foot, of course. Things are a little more complicated now; we all seem to want to live in cities and have the food delivered to us on demand, and we are apparently enthusiastic about embracing the concept of a forever-growing worldwide population (presumably because we need more markets and bigger tax revenues to support this new-found lifestyle of ours.)

There is yet another disconnect in our cultural logic: travel has become the latest in a string of new "human rights". Remember that bit about our hunter-gatherer ancestors having to travel for food? Nowadays we not only expect our food and water delivered, but we think we are entitled to travel anywhere we want, anytime we want, just for the hell of it. And we seem unwilling to include walking in our travel plans; how many people do you know who crank up that new hybrid car engine and drive over to the walking-jogging-cycling paths so they can feel good about exercising? I know some, and I see lot’s of ‘em!

So how is a person in the tourism business supposed to respond? To carry on with hope and faith may be an appealing option, although without action, hope and faith are no better solutions than doing nothing while harbouring an abiding cynicism. Maybe, just maybe, our clients (despite themselves) may prod us to move in the right direction. There are signs of a new consumer maturity moving forward along with that sense of "travel entitlement"; it appears this new entitlement may include an expectation that the tourism and travel industries will actually deliver a more responsible product, rather than simply fill brochures with "greenwash". Industry leaders – and ultimately industry survivors - will do so because it is the new business imperative.

That is the thinking behind the Canadian Sustainable Tourism Advisory Council, (CSTAC), an initiative of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. CSTAC is calling on input from a number of professionals in the tourism industry to develop sustainable tourism business criteria and – ultimately – a certification process which will principally function as an instructive tool for tourism practitioners to help their businesses meet global expectations.

PGK

Casting off for the first time!

2009-11-22T22:13:00.000-08:00

Hi folks:
As my wife and business partner Valerie, my children (AND grandchildren), staff, and municipal colleagues will readily attest, this particular blog author is seldom short of words. However, this evening – as I approach my first attempt at writing a blog – I find myself peculiarly short of things to say!

Operating a passenger boat service in a northern prairie city like Saskatoon is most certainly a seasonal affair, and at this time of writing, our little motorships Saskatoon Princess and Meewasin Queen are safely up on blocks in our boatyard outside the city in a small town named Hafford, which I happen to think is just the best place in the world to live. We currently have unseasonably warm weather (like gosh, it only went down to –6 degrees Celsius last night, and there is no snow on the ground just yet!) And today was sunny and a balmy 7 degrees above zero (that’s 20 degrees for our American friends); furthermore, our province’s source of common passion – the Saskatchewan Roughriders – won the western football final this afternoon and the team is headed to the Grey Cup next week in Calgary. Ah, so many reasons to rejoice!

I hope this blog will be informative and fun for its readers, and for me as its author and moderator. I look forward to receiving readers’ comments about what is on these pages, as well as pictures that are relevant to the marine industry, our company, our City of Saskatoon, and tourism in general. That is, after all, the business we are in.

May the nighttime find you everywhere at home!
PGK