Public anxiety about allowing offshore drilling has been around for a long time, rising to panic levels during accidents and spills, and for good reason. The continuing environmental disaster off the Gulf coast was the result of poor regulation and should prompt Canadians to question our own regulatory regime for offshore exploration. More specifically, we need to address our inability to manage risks that accompany technological advances and ensure that knowledge about our country’s resource potential is used in the public interest.

Offshore drilling started in the Gulf of Mexico over 60 years ago. In fact, the recent Louisiana spill is remarkably similar to the blowout at Mexico’s offshore IXTOC 1 well in 1979. That accident was caused by failures aboard a Canadian-built oil rig, which, like the recent BP accident, also burned and sank, releasing half a billion litres of oil into the ocean—10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill.

A decade before, that same rig had been used to drill the last hole in Shell Canada’s program off the coast of British Columbia. At that time, the infamous Santa Barbara, California, spill was alerting Canadians to the hazards of offshore drilling, but it hardly mattered, because Shell ended its program as planned, in August 1969.

Oil engineers have had 40 years to learn about preventing offshore blowouts. Rather than question their expertise, a better response would be to ask why government monitors seem unable to anticipate and prevent such events. Disasters caused by new technology occur when a small number of engineers monopolize technical knowledge and fail to protect the public. A prescient 1976 study by the British Council for Science and Society entitled “Superstar Technologies” analyzed this problem.

Frailties of intellect may lead engineers to believe their skills are sufficient for the job; or to work within isolated silos of expertise, ignorant of the skills of others. Frailties of conscience may make them yield to boredom, neglect routine safety measures, or let them be bullied out of more cautious or dissenting opinions. The higher the risk, the greater the need for monitoring, but explicit federal policy cripples its capacity to apply the critical scrutiny necessary to protect our environment.

With the notable exception of Health Canada, federal departments do not recognize provincial licensing for professionals. Self-regulation is the public’s first line of defence. Federal engineers and geoscientists are accountable only to their minister, and not to their peers. Secondly, federal regulators must be attentive to political direction filtering down to their level. If a regulator wanted redundancy in an aspect of blowout prevention and the company engineer replied, “We can’t afford that,” the regulator would be risking his or her chances for promotion by withholding approval. Corporations complain to the political level if their desires are thwarted, and the embattled public servant always hears about it, inevitably acquiescing.

Current drilling of Chevron’s deep well Lona 0-55, off Canada’s East Coast, has made everyone very nervous. The regulators said they balanced this project’s higher risk with more operational requirements and monitoring, but we can’t assess the truth of this statement. Long-standing rules for petroleum rights allow companies to withhold release of their offshore seismic and drilling results for five to 10 years. Arguably, the unexplored Orphan basin off our East Coast needed drilling to define its geology, but Chevron gains the knowledge, not the public. That’s still a problem on our West Coast.

Canada first issued offshore permits for the West Coast in 1961. Shell was the sole bidder, and two years later, the company started a six-year exploration program. After the 1968 discovery of oil on Alaska’s North Slope, everyone saw tankers carrying Alaskan oil to the Lower 48 as a pollution threat. The federal Liberal cabinet then attempted to ban tanker traffic to help its advocacy of a new pipeline for Alaska oil across the continent. By then, the government knew Shell had not found oil.

Preventing oil spills was the government’s rationale when it started the “moratorium” on offshore exploration in 1971. This action exempted Shell from obligations like annual permit fees or releasing geological information. Promises to cancel the permits were not kept, so even today the company pays nothing for its rights, which remain preserved like fossils in bureaucratic amber.

It’s unlikely there is oil off Canada’s West Coast. The moratorium lets Shell sit on what it knows, but it published some hints in 1971. Most of Canada’s oil originated in shallow seas of the Cretaceous era, but rocks of that origin are notably absent on the western continental shelf. Overlying, younger rocks were found to be “tight,” meaning they have poor ability to store any oil or gas squeezed up from older rocks. More ominously, Shell reported drilling into “hard geopressures,” where the rock has higher fluid pressures than the weight of overlying rock would predict. Such conditions make blowouts even more likely.

One might wonder what additional requirements regulators assigned to Chevron’s Lona 0-55, to be equipped to handle “hard geopressures.” If the public has only limited and long-delayed access to facts like these, to understand the geological realities, it cannot properly assess the diligence of the monitors.

Technology seems always one step ahead of our evolving capacity to protect the environment. We should insist that the regulation of offshore development include true independence of the monitoring agency, critical scrutiny by licensed professionals, and complete disclosure, to ensure that the interface between rocks and dollars is managed in the public interest.

Providing midwifery in a public health system presents challenges, but they're worth it. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user limaoscarjuliet.

In March 2009, Nova Scotia became the seventh province to incorporate midwifery into the public health care system. Instead of paying and arranging for the service privately, residents now have it covered and regulated by the provincial government.

Midwifery should be seen as the progressive (yet traditional) and cost-effective method of childbirth in Canada. But the upfront cost of creating a regulatory body for midwives, especially in smaller provinces with few practitioners, is offputting for governments. Still, this community-based model of birth, with its decreased hospital time (due to homebirths, shorter hospital stays for hospital births, and less frequent obstetrical interventions) and on-call services, creates significant long-term savings for the health care system.

Nova Scotia’s example offers important lessons to New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Yukon, and Nunavut, all of which will soon regulate midwifery. (New Brunswick will institute legislation and begin hiring midwives in just a few months.) Nova Scotia’s transition hasn’t come without kinks: there remains a shortage of midwives, a lack of public funds allocated to midwifery and the entire health care system faces geographical challenges—rural communities still have trouble accessing public services.

On the positive side, the change means that midwifery services will now be free in Nova Scotia, as they are from British Columbia to Quebec. “Just the very fact of covering midwifery in a provincial health plan and making that known will attract women of all different backgrounds,” explains Aimee Carbonneau, a Toronto midwife who has only ever worked in a public system. Ontario was the first province to regulate midwifery, in 1994. “If it is not supported and paid for by the government, you end up seeing a clientele that is mostly white, middle-class and up, with post-secondary education,” she says.

Maren Dietze, past president of the Association of Nova Scotia Midwives and a practicing midwife in Nova Scotia’s South Shore District, says regulation also gives midwives a new level of legitimacy: “Before we couldn’t deliver in hospital and we couldn’t order ultrasounds. Now we are accepted as part of the team.”

Midwife groups in Nova Scotia have struggled with successive governments since the early ’80s for public care, yet it remains available in only three of the province’s nine health districts. The other six District Health Authorities did not respond to the province’s call for model midwifery sites. According to Jan Catano, co-founder of the Midwifery Coalition of Nova Scotia, “The province didn’t want to roll out midwifery to the whole province at once because there were not enough midwives.”

Instead, a two-year budget for seven fulltime midwives was created. They work from sites in Halifax, Antigonish, and Bridgewater, leaving most of the province without access. Even if more midwives become available to Nova Scotia, from new graduates and a strong pool of internationally trained talent, the money isn’t yet budgeted to hire them.

Consequently, some midwives were essentially forced out of business in the transition.

To create universal access, Dietze says, “We would need more funding for midwives and we would need to be promoting midwifery to all the health districts,” so that local District Health Authorities demand the service and funding.

In the meantime, any Nova Scotian mother living outside the model districts in the centre of the province will lack access. And the situation is not unique to Nova Scotia. “I think for most of Canada, geography represents a big challenge,” Carbonneau says. “Many northern and especially Aboriginal northern communities are trying to bring birth back, but it’s quite tricky juggling the low numbers with the allocation of resources.” The Association of Ontario Midwives, for example, estimates its members serve only 60 percent of their demand.

Meanwhile, the three midwifery centres in Nova Scotia are swamped. And demand seems to be skyrocketing in some areas, such as Dietze’s South Shore District.

“A year ago we had five or six births here; now we have 40 on our books and we’ll have 70 or 80 people next year,” she says.

But, despite the increased demand regulation brings, midwifery is still not a financial priority in the province; compared to other health issues such as senior care or, more recently, H1N1.

The irony is that midwifery is less expensive than the medical model of childbirth, which treats pregnancy as an illness requiring costly medical interventions like drugs or surgeries. Further, midwives have a rich

Canadian history of catching babies in the most remote locations, especially when doctors weren’t available. In that traditional system, midwives went where doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Now, as more provinces regulate midwifery, those remote areas are being left behind. Midwifery can’t properly be called “public” until access is universal.

To make that happen, more midwives are needed and that requires more Canadian midwifery graduates and greater integration of internationally trained midwives. Provincial governments need to make a special effort to promote midwifery to rural health districts and back up their words with trained midwives ready to live in and serve rural communities and First Nations reserves. And a culture change is needed in the medical institutions hosting midwives. To do their jobs properly, midwives need the freedom, flexibility, and mobility to provide homebirths and travel significant distances when necessary.

All of these changes require upfront investments, but collectively they will save taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on unnecessary birthing interventions and hospital stays that only hurt women and their families.

A new school in Sheshatshiu, Labrador, has revolutionized teaching and re-energized the whole town. Photo courtesy Innu Nation via Flickr.

Many Canadians associate Sheshatshiu with images of children sniffing gas from paper bags. The troubled central Labrador Innu community received nationwide attention in the ’90s as a place in crisis. Now, years later, with the opening of the new Sheshatshiu Innu School, members are working to shed the reserve’s negative image and turn life around for its children.

“It’s been very, very busy,” says Kanani Penashue, community education director. Classrooms are packed—a happy surprise for Penashue, who expected some rooms in the new school to go empty. Instead, “Students are going to school now,” says Anastasia Qupee, Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation Chief. “We are almost having another space problem.”

The popular new $14-million facility was jointly funded by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and the provincial government. It easily outclasses the old Peenamin Mckenzie School, a run-down, graffiti-covered building with wire-protected windows, boycotted by students and parents in the fall of 2007 because of mould and asbestos problems.

The new eagle-shaped building houses 383 students from kindergarten to Grade 12, dedicating one “wing” to the high school and the other to the elementary school. The multi-million-dollar funding shows: the school is equipped with 110 laptop computers; digital chalkboards adorn every classroom; and the gym floor is identical to the one played on by the Toronto Raptors.

Much credit is owed to students themselves, who lobbied hard for changes, making presentations to both federal and provincial governments after the 2007 boycott. “Students knew that education needed to be brought up to a better standard,” says Qupee.

The Innu have also formed their own school board called the Mamu Tshishkutamashutau Innu Education with the motto: “We care about the education of our children.” The board added more Innu cultural content to the curriculum, reintegrating traditional ways into everyday school life.

School principal Clarence Davis says the new Innu focus has made students—and the whole community—more actively involved in this school. It now holds several free classes in the evenings and a student council was elected for the first time last year. Elders are also playing an increased role in the curriculum in new and creative ways.

In October, an elder took a Grade 9 class for a week-long walk and camp-out on traditional Innu land. During the days the group explored, talked, and hunted small game. During evenings, lessons were given on astrology and biology. “It’s about the philosophy of teaching,” says Davis. “This is an Innu School. I can’t stress that enough.”

Historic treaty boundaries between Canada and Aboriginal peoples. Not representative of any proposed outline for an Aboriginal province; vast areas of Canada have never been formally surrendered or ceded by Aboriginal peoples. Courtesy Ministry of Natural Resources. Click to Enlarge

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 included a clause prohibiting British colonists from purchasing “Lands of the Indians,” so as not to commit more of the “Frauds and Abuses” that characterized colonial takeovers of Aboriginal territory. To my reading, this measure was intended to make clear to the English colonists that Aboriginal Peoples enjoyed equal status. As we know, that’s not quite how it worked out.

In 1987, after the premiers met at Meech Lake and agreed to open the Constitution, I proposed to several prominent people involved in the process that the easiest way to respect that commitment, and to lessen the offence of their putting Quebec before Aboriginals, would be to create an 11th province out of the remaining Aboriginal and territorial lands. Twenty-two years later, First Nations are still fighting to get even a modicum of self-government.

When Canada was patriating the Constitution in 1982, Aboriginal leaders were able to create enough domestic and international pressure on the federal and provincial governments that the first ministers committed to making the next round of constitutional change about Aboriginal issues. They even enshrined in the Constitution a requirement for first ministers to have one, and then two more meetings with Aboriginal leaders.

But the election of the Progressive Conservative party under Brian Mulroney in Ottawa, and the defeat of the separatist Parti Québécois in Quebec at the hands of the Liberals under Robert Bourassa, suddenly moved the now infamous “Quebec round” ahead of Aboriginal people. While the constitutional requirement of first ministers’ meetings with Aboriginal leaders to amend the Constitution was met, it seems with hindsight that these meetings were simply pro forma, as Bourassa and Mulroney already had plans for the Meech Lake Constitutional Accord.

The accord failed, in part, due to a single Aboriginal member of the Manitoba legislature named Elijah Harper who refused to give unanimous consent so it could be adopted by the Manitoba legislature by the Mulroney government’s declared deadline for ratification: June 23, 1990.

A year later, the Mulroney government appointed a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Among its recommendations were a list of powers that Aboriginal nations needed to protect their language, religion, culture, and heritage.

The underlying concepts are similar to the powers that the Fathers of Confederation from Lower Canada had identified as necessary for the preservation of the francophone language, religion, culture, and heritage. Letting provincial governments have the powers necessary to protect language, culture, and religion, was the key to Confederation and then the innovation of federalism was chosen for the new Dominion of Canada. Even though Canada was based on this idea of division of powers to allow for regional cultural autonomy, the federal and provincial governments have rejected similar devolution of powers to Aboriginal communities or provincehood for the Northern territories. The federal and provincial governments claim the population is too few and too dispersed to manage all these powers. And, of course, small provinces and Quebec do not want to start adding multiple provinces, beginning with three in the North, as their own relative influence would diminish.

But what about one province for all Aboriginal Peoples?

Aboriginal lands, including the three Northern territories, are legally held in reserve on behalf of Aboriginal Peoples. The federal government acts as trustee over the land, and this creates a rather distasteful paternalistic dimension to Aboriginal–Non-Aboriginal relations. What if our government simply takes all this land held in reserve and returns it to Aboriginals? Make all that land the 11th province of Canada.

The structure of government for this new province is unimportant and frankly not the business of the people who don’t live on this land. The constitutional change would be simpler than one would imagine. It would not require the unanimous consent of the provinces. According to the Constitution Act, 1982, the agreement of only seven provinces, representing the majority of the population, is needed for the federal parliament to create a new province. But it also states that this is “notwithstanding any other law or practice,” and for the federal parliament to take all remaining Aboriginal land and designate it the “final” province, given constitutionally entrenched treaty rights and federal jurisdiction over “Indians, and land reserved for Indians,” it may even be possible to do part of the change without provincial consent.

This change does not even have to significantly alter the existing structures of Aboriginal communities—unless, of course, they decide to alter them on their own once they have obtained provincehood. In many of the current provinces there are three levels of government managing provincial powers, namely the provincial government, regional governments and municipal governments. So, for example, the Government of Nunavut could continue as a regional government within the new Aboriginal province and the Sambaa K’e Dene Band could continue to operate similar to a municipal government, with authority delegated from the Aboriginal province. As the Aboriginal province would have all of the powers that Aboriginals have identified as central to the preservation of their languages, religions, and cultures, it can delegate powers as needed locally or act provincially as expedient.

With the exception of the creation of a provincial government, this is pretty close to the position the federal government has been taking vis-à-vis territorial governments and local band councils. The big change will be that in the future, instead of Aboriginals demanding from the federal government the right to handle their own affairs, they would be dealing with their own provincial government—a government they elect and that is accountable to them.

For those concerned about corruption within band councils, their own provincial government would regulate these matters and being concerned about how monies transferred to the local governments are handled, it would undoubtedly do so more effectively than the federal government, and without the racism or paternalistic interference. Equalization payments to the province would replace the now direct transfer to Aboriginals and their band councils, thus eliminating the demoralizing stigma of dependency. What is more, some of the Aboriginal land held in reserve is resource-rich, providing an independent source of revenue.

Critics of nationalism most strongly reject the idea of a province based on ethnicity. But based on its territory and its land base, the new 11th Province would not be exclusively Aboriginal. Many non-Aboriginals live on these lands and within the broader Aboriginal grouping there are First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, subdivided by hundreds of individual Aboriginal nations. This would be a civic nation like Quebec, and a province like any other, though the provincial leadership will likely be Aboriginal.

This largely Aboriginal province will be bigger in territory, richer in resources, and competitive in population size to the average Canadian province. It can negotiate with the more influential provinces, where many of its off-reserve citizens live or work, namely Alberta, B.C., Quebec, and Ontario. And, like the other civic nation of Quebec, its premier, by virtue of representing a cultural group that is in the minority across Canada, would have a powerful voice at the table of first ministers.

With provincehood would come an increase in Aboriginal members in the Senate and House of Commons. Aboriginal Peoples would finally be truly engaged in Canada’s political process—and this is essential for full citizenship and equality.

* December 2008 StatsCan figures. These have likely risen since then.

While at first glance it might look like the federal government is playing favourites, with benefits starting earlier and lasting longer in Newfoundland and Labrador, these regional inequalities actually make a lot of sense.

Explains Julie Hahn from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada: “When a region’s unemployment rate increases, the entrance requirement is relaxed and the benefit duration is extended to allow more time for a successful job match.”

This is why Newfoundland and Labrador, with unemployment rates nearly five times Edmonton’s, sees their residents eligible for EI at the minimum number of 420 hours, while Edmontonians need to work the maximum 700 hours.

So while the schemes aren’t equal, they are designed to be fair. If only last year’s EI surplus, which topped more than $50 billion, was handled with such care. That money, which could have been used to support laid-off manufacturing workers, was instead funnelled into the government’s general revenues, where it helped pay off the national debt — and cover corporate tax cuts.