Rivers melt Arctic ice, warming air and ocean.

 SCIENCEDaily

An Arctic river in Alaska. Photo by mypubliclands 

A new study shows that increased heat from Arctic rivers is melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and warming the atmosphere. Details here.

For at least a decade, three founders of HyLife Foods have contributed thousands of dollars to the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba.

by Larry Powell

Giving money to political parties, while older than Manitoba itself, has now erupted into something of a political storm in the province. And, to give context to the role of party donations, it's necessary to explain it in chronological order, going back a few months.

Colleen Munro, owner and president of Hugh Munro Construction Ltd.,
Winnipeg. (HMC) A company photo.

This summer, Opposition parties slammed the provincial government when a financial contributor to the PCs, Colleen Munro (above), got the green light to develop a controversial limestone quarry in the southeastern RM of Rosser. The Government-appointed Municipal Board, made up of at least two other PC party donors, approved the project, over-ruling opposition to the quarry, both from local residents and the duly-elected local council. (There is no appeal from Board rulings.)

As the Manitoba Liberal Leader, Dougald Lamont put it at the time, "If you want something done, all you have to do it to give lots of money to the PCs."

Now, PinP has uncovered a strikingly similar scenario - with a twist - in another part of the province. Except this time, the role that political donations may be playing has so far, flown beneath the radar. 

Over the ongoing objections of several local residents, Canada's biggest pork processor, HyLifeFoods has just won approval to build a multi-million dollar hog factory near the Village of Elgin in the southwestern RM of Grassland. After initially rejecting the proposal, the local council there reversed itself and announced, last week, it was approving it. 

The Reeve publicly claimed, the turnaround came only after winning concessions from the company. But, had the RM not reversed itself, it almost certainly would have faced a lengthy and expensive appeal before the Municipal Board. Given the precedent the Board set in Rosser, it surely seems approval would have been the final outcome, anyway.

My search of ElectionsManitoba records (see screen shots, below) reveals the following: three of four HyLife founders, Claude and Denis Vielfaure and an associate, Donald Janzen (above) of the southeastern Manitoba community of  La Broquerie, have, since 2010, contributed almost 24 thousand dollars ($23,569.75) to the PCs. 

2019

 2018

 2017

 2016

 2015

2014

2013

2012

  2011

                                              $862.00

2010

(There is no record of the fourth founder, Paul Vielfaure, having made any contributions. And it doesn't show any of them donating to any party other than the provincial PCs. My search did not go further back than 2010.) 

A Thai-based company took over controlling interest in HyLife last year. The three have now stepped down, at least from full-time duties at the company. But they remain a large part of the image it presents to the public.

For about a week, I've sent several messages to the three, inviting them to comment on my story. They have not answered at the time of this posting.

"He who pays the piper calls the tune?"

Over the years, HyLife and its forerunners (including HyTek and Springhill) - along with other players in the livestock industry - have received significant taxpayer support from governments at other levels and political stripes, in the form of grants and loans. 

In Hogs We Trust - Part 11 - the Price We Pay For A$$embly-Line Pork. 

But, it's Manitoba's current Government, led by Brian Pallister's Conservatives, which has, arguably proven to be the friendliest to the hog industry. 

Soon after coming to office in 2016, it set aside environmental regulations under the previous NDP which had been seen as roadblocks in the way of industry expansion. 

Local RM councils used to be able to reject new factory barns or expansions of existing ones. Now, it's much harder, if not impossible, to do. 

And, there's more. 

One informed source tells PinP, "A plethora of bills have been introduced into the Manitoba legislature. There are more changes to the Planning Act proposed which are designed to further erode local government authority over planning decisions."

So, despite a pandemic, hog industry expansion in this province seems set to continue apace.

Meanwhile, voices of dissent in both cases cited here, have not gone away. Here's what Steven Tufts, who farms close to the site of the future barns in Grasslands, thinks of HyLife's decision to re-submit its application after initial rejection by the local council.

"I am again writing a letter to who it may concern about the Hylife Gibsons Nursery. I am a small farmer south of Elgin with land across the road from the proposed barn. This is all fine. What really turns me off greatly is how this sneaky, devious bunch would reapply for this barn after the neighbours and RM of Grassland said no to them the first time. It is very obvious how sneaky these people are to reapply in Harvest time when other real farmers are too busy to deal with it. That is just an ignorant thing to do. I do not want people in my area who are like this. We have enough crime in our area."

Further dissenting voices can be viewed here.

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The Government of Manitoba robs its rural citizens of their local autonomy to serve its political friends and big business. (Opinion)

Manitoba’s organic sector seeing slow but steady increase: report

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An organic market garden in Manitoba.
A PinP photo.

Manitoba was the only Prairie province to see an increase in organic crop acres in 2019. Story here.

Pallister's petrifying parks privatization plan.(Video)

The Manitoba Wilderness Committee

A vicious circle. Global heating leads to melting ice leads to more heating.....

                                            Nature Communications

A polar bear navigates a dwindling ice pack. Photo by Andreas Weith

The melting of ice in polar and mountain regions around the world could lead to an additional 0.43 °C increase in global warming in the long term, according to a study published online in Nature Communications.

The loss of ice cover is known to influence air temperatures, for example through albedo changes (the amount of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface). Although the mechanisms that are responsible for increased warming are well understood, it isn't clear how large the contributions of different ice sheets and feedback mechanisms to global temperature changes are.

Nico Wunderling and colleagues use a simplified Earth system model in combination with different CO2 concentration levels to provide such an estimate. They find an additional median warming of 0.43°C in response to the loss of all ice sheets at CO2 concentrations similar to today's (400 parts per million). The contributions from different ice masses range from 0.05°C for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to 0.19°C due to the loss of Arctic summer sea ice. 

However, these experiments do not consider changes in CO2 concentrations over time or feedback mechanisms that could have an impact on shorter time-scales. Furthermore, the authors note that this warming does not emerge over years or decades, but rather on a time-scale of centuries to millennia (although they highlight that the Arctic might become ice-free during the summer within the 21st century). Therefore, these results should be interpreted as idealized estimates of contributions of different ice sources and feedback mechanisms.

Residues of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides (known as "Plant Protection Products," or PPPs), being found in pollen and nectar, are "a significant stressor" for bees and other pollinators.

Environmental Research

   

The Government of Manitoba robs its rural citizens of their local autonomy to serve its political friends and big business. (Opinion)

        by Larry Powell 

The Premier of Manitoba, Brian Pallister. A Gov't. photo.

The lengths to which the Pallister government is going to enable the unfettered exploitation of Manitoba's resources and massive expansion of its hog industry, should now be clear for all to see. For the past few years, it’s been rolling out, at significant taxpayer expense, the truly draconian measures it’s now taking, to make this happen. 

While the writing has been on the wall, only now are the worst fears being realized. They expose this government’ naked contempt for the democratic rights of rural Manitobans who have the audacity to point out that these goals are misguided - that the emperor has no clothes.

Late last year, the Municipality of Rosser, near Winnipeg, rejected a bid for a gravel mine (euphemistically called a limestone aggregate quarry). The politically well-connected owner of the construction company proposing the mine (who made a substantial contribution to the Conservative Party of Manitoba last year), appealed. Then, along comes a newly-minted creation of the Pallister Conservatives, a "blue-ribbon panel," as it were, called the Municipal Board, and overturns the council’s decision. Anointed with quasi-judicial power and peopled with several of the "party faithful," it can, in the words of one savvy observer, "relieve local councils of their administrative burdens." And, it did. It overturned council's rejection and, surprise, surprise, ruled for the proponent!

So the mine, er, quarry, will now go ahead. There is no appeal. 

So I guess the good people of the little, nearby community of Lillyfield, will just have to grin and bear it.

A gravel mine near the southwestern Manitoba community of Shoal Lake. 

A PinP photo.

Believe me, I know a thing or two about gravel-mines. A big one near my home, in the picturesque Birdtail Valley (above), supplied raw product for a major roadbuilding project to the south of here last year. 

Twenty-two wheelers take a break in Shoal Lake. A PinP photo.

Convoys of big dump-trucks rumbled past my front window in a seniors' complex for months (above), from morning ’til night, carrying their loads - hundreds of round trips a day to the site. 

Never mind that diesel fumes are a major air pollutant which cause lung cancer; Or that the United Nations has long warned the construction industry to curb its greenhouse gas emissions "yesterday" if we are to make any dent in the climate crisis. 

Would the cancellation of that single project have turned this global calamity around? Of course not. 

But will a broader, worse-case climate scenario be in the cards if every community on Earth barges ahead as this government obviously wants us to? Absolutely!

The absence of "eco-wisdom" these events reveal on the part of our lawmakers, is breathtaking.

And Bill 19, the same legislation which tramples local autonomy (or, in the fertile mind of government, reduces red tape), has resulted in another outrage in another part of the province. 

The HyLife killing plant in Neepawa, the largest pork processor in Canada. 
A corporate monolith based in Thailand with tentacles reaching into many
corners of the world's food business, now owns controlling interest.
A PinP photo.

The local, duly-elected Council in the RM of Grassland, near Brandon, has also voted decisively to reject another proposed project - this time a massive complex of hog barns proposed by HyLife Foods (above) near the Village of Elgin. 

And surely, only the naive now believe the Municipal Board will rule any way other than it did in Rosser.

The Grassland Council simply doesn’t believe the tax revenue from the project will cover the cost of servicing it. And residents fear the increased traffic will bring dust and noise, disrupting their quiet, rural lifestyles. 

They also worry about their water supply. That’s because the new complex will suck more than 100 thousand litres of water each and every day from the local aquifer. Twenty-four thousand pigs will be crowded into several large buildings. 

That’s about thirty times the human population of my own little town of Shoal Lake. And each pig produces several times the waste of one person. Yet even here we struggle to keep nutrients from our sewage lagoon - which often exceed recommended levels - from entering the lake. 

These likely help feed the growth of toxic algae which have been clogging up the lake water for years, tangling outboard motors and surely contributing to major fish-kills like the one we had here last year (above). 

It's been common knowledge for some time that, wherever humans or pigs are gathered together, deteriorating water quality soon follows. So, if our small town can feel such an impact, imagine the potential for harm there!

And, as a new report from the World Wildlife Fund reveals: "The overall (pollution) threat in the Assiniboine-Red watershed and each of its four sub-watersheds (where the new barns will be built) is (already) “very high.” It blames much of this on "agricultural runoff!"

Dissenting voices are systematically ignored.

In the spring of 2018 - the citizens' group, Hogwatch Manitoba - 

emblazened this headline across its website.

"BILL 19 THREATENS LOCAL CONTROL FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES."

Here is Hogwatch's prophetic, cautionary tale, word for word, as it appeared, two-&-a-half years ago.

"Bill 19 will silence the public. It will allow municipal leaders to get rid of conditional use hearings and Provincial Technical Reviews for factory hog barns. If local politicians take this route, the Province will have the only and final say on where hog factories can be built. The Government of Manitoba is and has been both a promoter and regulator of the hog industry.  Bill 19 is the latest move to promote and de-regulate hog industry expansion. Why is Provincial control a problem? If conditional use disappears, local councils and rural people will not have any say in how factory hog operations perform. Municipalities will have no means of monitoring, enforcing conditions, and protecting local people and the environment from hog operations." 

John Fefchak of Virden is another example of a voice that needs to be listened to, but is not. John is a veteran of the Canadian military and long-time critic of his province's factory-farming style of pork production. He sees the government’s almost messianic drive to be both a regulator of, and cheerleader for the industry, as an attack on the democratic freedoms he did his part to win in the deadly conflicts of the past. Yet, his frequent comments to the news media, including the farm press, are often censored. 

And my local Shoal Lake newspaper, the Crossroads, is refusing to print this story which I put in the form of a letter-to-the-editor. The publisher, Ryan Nesbitt, claims it is "not local enough." He has also refused other letters I have submitted, about climate change, for the same reason.

It's encouraging that the Opposition is now taking up this issue. But I do hope it won't roll out as just another bit of political theatre. We need a profound public discourse on the very ways we develop our resources, produce our food, and exercise and protect our precious democratic rights, too. Is it all working? Or does it need to change? We all need to think about these things when the next election comes around.

RELATED:

For at least a decade, three founders of HyLife Foods have contributed thousands of dollars to the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba.

Manitoba's environmental laws under siege.