The news these days is so discombobulating and disheartening that it has seeped into my dreams, definitely not pleasant dreams. I feel a sense of relief when I wake up. Unfortunately I can’t wake up from real life. Hearing the US president, a man who wields such a terrifying amount of apparently uncontrollable power, spout his rhetoric on the media day after day is unnerving. It suddenly seems our good relationship with our southern neighbour may be in jeopardy. Relationships between the US and many other countries are getting somewhat shaky as well. Hopefully good sense will prevail.
Perhaps this should be a wake up call for Canada - too many eggs in one basket, too many trade barriers between provinces. I know very little about interprovincial trade barriers so I decided to do a little research. If you don’t mind a bit of internet browsing here’s a link I found helpful - https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/how-interprovincial-trade-barriers-in-canada-affect-everyday-canadians/. It turns out there are so many rules, regulations, permits, educational standards, road safety regulations, food safety regulations, etc. that differ from one province to the next that doing business outside of your own province but within Canada can be slow, costly and/or prohibitive. As a consequence in many cases it’s easier for companies to do business with the US! This makes little sense, seems like we’re cutting our own throats.
There’s a local issue we should pay attention to. Our county seems to be entertaining the idea of having a small nuclear reactor within its borders. The Canadian government tends to promote nuclear power as green energy but I think this is fuzzy logic. Uranium mining is certainly not green, reactors are super expensive to build, they are not likely to employ very many local people, spent fuel storage can be an environmental disaster in the making, and accidents do happen. I think caution is called for. It’s not wise to blindly accept ideas presented by those who profit from their implementation. Today I listened to a podcast about a nuclear reactor, invented in the 1960’s (!?), that uses spent fuel, recycles it over and over until its dangerous radioactive after life is reduced to about 100 rather than 100,000years. These reactors are being used in Japan but not in North America. If we’re building new shouldn’t we at least be building better? Podcast is by Cleo Abram, https://youtu.be/IzQ3gFRj0Bc?si=_nzlkiy0j0SGFbc9.
