It's not nice to trivialise the hardship conditions hundreds of millions of people endure in the impoverished third world. But this past week, it has seemed like the gods conspired to give southern Ontario a taste of that experience.
The gasoline shortage and rationing, followed by the closure of hundreds of refuelling stations, was the first apparent indicator for consumers.
Then there were the disruptions resulting from a legal/not-legal rail strike (not to mention the all too regular disruptions to commuter rail service).
Then came the electricity outages, some of which may last for a close to a week, caused by a - surprise - winter storm.
The gasoline shortage is perhaps the best indicator of how services have deteriorated in Canada (and the USA, if media reports are to be believed). The direct cause, a minor fire at Imperial Oil's Nanticoke refinery, should have been a disruption but not the near disaster it has become. Because all the oil companies have so consolidated their refining capacity, taking one refinery off-line for two weeks with no back-up has resulted in shortages affecting not just consumers but the trucking industry and consequently the whole economy. It's not just the 25% increase in retail gasoline prices. And it's far from being resolved as hundreds of gasoline stations remain closed and prices continue to climb for what has become a scarce commodity.
Moreover, even in the so-called free-marketplace, Imperial's competitors lacked the capacity to pour product to the pumps and take business from Imperial. Not only have they lost the opportunity to gain market share but also to claim that the retail gasoline market is competitive and undeserving of regulation.
All the oil companies have claimed the situation was compounded by the legal/not legal CN rail strike, which made it difficult to ship replacement product to Ontario. This was an interesting "strike". Locals across Canada walked off the job but the union leadership never endorsed the job-action. Therefore no strike-pay and no strategy for resolving the dispute. CN sent in managers to keep at least some of the trains running and waited for the strike to collapse or the government to intervene. When the gasoline shortage came to be blamed, in-part, on the strike, the government vowed action on the same day as the strike began to collapse and the workers voluntarily returned to work. CN had a settlement in less than 48 hours. Does this sound like a solid industrial-relations strategy?
Yesterday's power outages were the result of an act of nature and, to their credit, the crews had the damage repaired in a reasonable time in my area, at least. But the local utility, PowerStream, failed abysmally in its communications. A few months ago, every household received notice of a new "hotline" to report power outages and get updates on the status of repairs. Included were little stickers to put on a telephone with the number to call. We lost power here around 4:15AM. No surprise there, given the weather forecast the evening before and the warnings given. When I got up about 6:30AM and called the hotline to check the status of repairs, there was a recorded message with a long list of areas without power - maybe a dozen communities - and and estimated time of restoration ranging from 7:00Am to 9:00AM. Ours was the last community expected to be back on-line.
I called several times through the morning as the predicted time of restoration came and went. When we left the house at 12:30PM the recorded message had never been updated and was still promising power to most areas by 7-8:00AM. What kinds of incompetents allowed this to continue? The people responsible for communications weren't out repairing lines, I am sure. Meanwhile, people who needed to have an idea of when power and heat might be restored (what if they had to relocate elderly or ill members of the household?) were denied any information because no one was bothering to do his/her job and take a minute to update a recording. We got power back by 2:30OM
Meanwhile, in the City of Toronto, more chaos was reigning. While the deputy fire chief was warning residents to "stay in your houses" to avoid the risk of electrocution from fallen power lines, the Mayor was stating there was no emergency and people should go about their daily business. The fire department was telling people not to leave their homes but the school board was announcing on radio and TV that the schools were open and students should attend. Oh well, that's just "business as usual" for the city of Toronto. No one knows what anyone else is doing but everyone wants to be in charge. Third-world bureaucracies indeed.
