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Peterborough issues few tickets for idling vehicles

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Few people are getting tickets for idling their vehicles, but a parking enforcement official says Peterborough’s six-year-old anti-idling bylaw is helping reduce emissions from parked cars nonetheless.

Documents released under municipal Freedom of Information legislation reveal there were just 11 tickets issued in 2012 and seven in 2013 under the anti-idling bylaw. The measure, introduced in 2008 to reduce air pollution and climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, bans idling a vehicle for more than two minutes. It was criticized at the time as unenforceable.

“Even though the numbers might be low, the conversation has started and the education process obviously has started,” said Dennis VanAmerongen, parking operations supervisor for the city.

According to Natural Resources Canada, if Canadian drivers all cut back on unnecessary idling by three minutes per day, the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions would be equivalent to taking 320,000 cars off the road.

VanAmerongen said parking enforcement officers mostly only issue tickets if an empty vehicle is left running while its driver pops into a store. If the driver or a passenger is in an idling vehicle, “most times” the officer will approach and explain the bylaw. “Nine times out of 10 people will comply and shut their vehicle off,” VanAmerongen said.

“And that’s really what we’re after, just to kind of educate the public and let them know that they really shouldn’t be doing it.”

There are several exemptions under Peterborough’s bylaw, including for police, fire and ambulance vehicles and transit vehicles while they embark and disembark passengers.

VanAmerongen said parking enforcement officers are less likely to ticket idlers on the kinds of extremely cold days Peterborough has seen plenty of this winter.

“We understand that people are just trying to keep their vehicles warm, especially if they have small children in the car,” he said. “So we’ll have that conversation with them, give them the information and if it’s only going to be a short while, then most of the time it’s fine.”

But one Peterborough resident, Megan Millette, got a $15 ticket for idling her car on a day in early January when the windchill dipped below minus 30 Celsius.

By the time she received it in the mail she couldn’t remember what she was doing on Jan. 2, the day the infraction was issued. And she’s not sure how she could have got it.

“I never idle, I always turn my car off, I never remember being on Water St. and idling,” Millette said. “I don’t ever remember leaving my car on and leaving. I would definitely turn it off and lock it before I left.”

She said she supports the bylaw even though she’s not pleased about her ticket.

“For the environment it’s good,” she said. But “the way they go about ticketing maybe needs to be different so people are aware right away” that they got a ticket.

The childcare worker said she is considering challenging the ticket, which will now cost her $31 because she didn’t pay it by the due date. “It’s something I’m thinking about, definitely.”

The city hasn’t collected statistics to determine if idling has decreased. But Otonabee ward councillor Lesley Parnell doesn’t think the bylaw is effective.

“Bylaw enforcement quite often is not the way to go,” she said, adding that the city should focus more on educating people about the environmental impacts of idling.

She said she agrees reducing emissions is important, but “enforcement is always an issue because you have to balance the resources you have with how you enforce your bylaws.”

“I do think the bylaw is a little bit flawed in our situation,” she added. “It’s not realistic in the Canadian winter and in the Canadian summer.”

Enforcement of anti-idling bylaws is a challenge in other cities as well. Only one ticket was issued under Toronto’s anti-idling bylaw last year. A ticket in that city will set you back $130 and can be issued after one minute of idling.

tickets1What is the information?

This is a summary of tickets issued by type by Peterborough bylaw officers between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2013.

From which department and level of government were these pages obtained?

It was released under Ontario’s municipal Freedom of Information legislation from the City of Peterborough’s parking department.

Why was this information helpful?

This information was helpful because it revealed the exact number of tickets issued under the city’s relatively new anti-idling bylaw (it was introduced in 2008). It showed there were few tickets issued in 2013, raising the question of how effective the bylaw is in reducing idling.

tickets2

What is the information?

This is a summary of tickets issued by type by Peterborough bylaw officers between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012.

From which department and level of government were these pages obtained?

It was released under Ontario’s municipal Freedom of Information legislation from the City of Peterborough’s parking department.

Why was this information helpful?

This information was helpful because it revealed the exact number of tickets issued under the city’s relatively new anti-idling bylaw (it was introduced in 2008). It showed there were few tickets issued in 2012, raising the question of how effective the bylaw is in reducing idling.

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Energy plan survey shows weak support for green power

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Wind energy projects have faced stiff opposition in some parts of Ontario but the province continued its commitment to investing in renewable energy sources like wind and solar in its new energy plan for the province. Photo credit: Ken Whytock, Flickr.

Respondents to an online survey see nuclear power as the best option for the future of Ontario’s electricity system. “Green” energy sources like solar and wind power—a major plank of the Ontario government’s new Long Term Energy Plan—were rated as the worst options.

The survey, conducted over summer 2013, offers a glimpse into the public consultations the ministry of energy used to come up with the plan, released last December.  Almost 8000 completed the online survey.

“You have to take this with a very large, not a grain of salt, maybe a large shaker of salt,” said David Butters, president of the Association of Power Producers of Ontario, a non-profit organization that represents over 100 companies in the electricity sector. “It’s an online survey, so we don’t know whether these people are representative of the population.”

But the point was not to gauge public opinion, ministry of energy spokesperson Andrea Arbuthnot said in an email. Survey respondents were self-selected and no attempt was made to attain a representative sample of the population.

“The survey was open to all Ontarians so that anyone with an interest in Ontario’s energy future, regardless of where they were from, could share their views,” Arbuthnot said. Ministry staff also met with industry representatives, local distribution companies and members of the public as part of its consultations.

“Throughout this process, we heard that Ontario needs to take a balanced approach,” Arbuthnot said.

That “balanced approach” includes plans to up the amount of wind, solar and “bioenergy” to a total of 10,700 megawatts by 2021. Renewable energy sources, including hydro, are expected to meet half of the province’s electricity needs by 2025.

“Renewable energy projects help clean up our air and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels – helping us to attain the goal of closing all coal-fired generating stations in Ontario by the end of 2014,” Arbuthnot said.

Christian Holz, executive director of the environmental group Climate Action Network Canada, said the low support for renewable energy may have to do with the strong resistance to wind turbines in some areas of the provinces.

“Ontario has suffered from quite a strong campaign against renewable energy, which made quite liberal use of lies and exaggeration and misinformation, so I’m sure that had an impact on a lot of people,” Holz said.

Holz would like to see more money put into conservation and renewable energy and less into nuclear.

Nuclear power’s share in the province’s energy mix will decrease from 56 per cent to 39 per cent by 2032. But the government is still committed to nuclear energy, Arbuthnot said.  “It will continue as the backbone of our electricity system.”

Conservation is another major focus of the government’s energy plan that also had low support among survey respondents. However, there was strong support for reducing emissions from electricity generation.

Butters said public opinion, gathered in surveys like this, should not be the sole driver of energy policy. Most people don’t understand the complexities of Ontario’s energy system and so expert opinion needs to play a strong role in planning.

“A lot of people still think that most of the power still comes from Niagara Falls,” he said.

It’s “partly the job of governments to reflect the needs and wants of the population but to do that in a responsible way,” Butters said. “You could not build a power system for today that is based on ‘let’s do what popular opinion suggests we do.’”

Temagami’s old growth forest still standing 25 years after major anti-logging protests

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A stalemate drags on in the conflict over logging in Temagami’s old growth forest in Northern Ontario that saw more than 300 aboriginal and environmental activists arrested 25 years ago.

“The result was the forest is still standing,” said Gary Potts, who led a blockade of a logging road in the Temagami region—100 kilometres north of North Bay—as chief of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai aboriginal band in late 1989.

“Indigenous people from all over Ontario and non-Indigenous people, settler people, were supporting us,” said Potts, one of the many arrested in several blockades that took place between June and Dec. 1989—along with Bob Rae a year before he was elected premier. “They were supporting our objective that the road was not to be built and that the forest was not to be cut.”

Construction of the Red Squirrel road was never completed after the Ontario government agreed to a partial halt to logging in the disputed area in 1990. Logging has been nearly stalled since, but the future of the ancient pine forest is still “in limbo,” said Second Chief Joseph Katt of the 500-plus member Temagami First Nation, located on Bear Island in Lake Temagami.

The Teme-Augama Anishnabai’s control over their traditional lands remains elusive following a 1991 Supreme Court ruling that rejected their bid for aboriginal title to 10,360 square kilometres in the region.

The court also ruled that the Crown had breached some of its treaty obligations. Those breaches are the subject of negotiations between the First Nation and the Ontario government that have also reached an impasse.

A settlement was nearly reached in 1993. The Teme-Augama Anishnabai council, which represents both status and non-status Indian community members, approved the settlement. But the Temagami First Nation band council, which represents only status Indians, rejected it.

Since then, the Temagami First Nation changed its membership code to extend membership to non-status Indians. But Katt said the federal government requires that a majority of band members vote in favour of the updated membership code before negotiations can start again. That majority vote has so far proven hard to get.

“I wish the federal government and the provincial government would do the honourable thing and come back to the table and say, ‘let’s resolve this issue’,” Katt said. “I have a generation following up behind me, of children and grandchildren that need a secure future and cannot get a secure future until we have a secure land base we can identify as our own.”

Meanwhile, in the hands of the Ontario government the ancient red and white pines are mostly available to be harvested now, if logging companies want them.

But according to Ministry of Natural Resources forester Don Farintosh, low demand for Ontario lumber has kept many loggers out of the area. Logging companies have opted to harvest from forests that are closer to lumber mills and have better access roads, he said. A lumber mill in the town of Temagami was bought and closed by the province in 1990 following the decision to temporarily scale back logging in the area.

“There hasn’t been as much cutting as originally projected back there, just because of the higher costs and the low demand,” Farintosh said.

But the risk of another protest might be part of what’s keeping the loggers at bay.

“They’d prefer to stay away from a contentious area, but they’re sort of reluctant to back away too much because then they’ll lose options in the future if they walk away from any area that’s under contention,” Farintosh said.

Judy Skidmore represented a pro-development group in favour of logging in the Temagami forest during the blockades in the late 1980s.

“Temagami was just the tip of the iceberg,” Skidmore said. “We still have an Ontario government that’s completely ignorant of the economy of the whole province.”

“Things are worse now than they were 25 years ago.”

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Hopes are sky high for Montreal-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals, but so are debts

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Revenue and stock value–along with debt–continue to climb for a Montreal-based company determined to become one of the five biggest drug companies in the world.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals’ revenues totalled $3.7 billion U.S. for the first nine months of 2013, 45 per cent more than the same period in 2012. Meanwhile its stock price has more than doubled in the last year.

But its long term debt has been mounting steadily too, rising 62 per cent in the first nine months of 2013 to over $17 billion.

It all traces back to what Aegis Capital analyst Raghuram Selvaraju calls “a buying spree of monumental proportions.”

That spree included the purchase of eye health company Bausch and Lomb for $8.7 billion and medical device systems maker Solta Medical for $250 million in the last year.

If interest rates stay low, Valeant can comfortably keep borrowing money to fund the acquisition streak it hopes will launch it into the ranks of the world’s five most valuable pharmaceutical companies by 2016, Selvaraju said.

Some are concerned a change in interest rates could spell disaster for the company, though. Such a rise would make it harder for Valeant to raise the funds it needs to keep up its expansion, Selvaraju said.

“In recent months the company has faced some criticism for the high debt that it insists on carrying in order to fund all of these acquisitions,” Selvaraju said in a phone interview.

But with revenues high and interest rates low, at least for now, that criticism hasn’t been reflected in the company’s stock prices.

Only a hike in interest rates will make Valeant feel the weight of its debts, Selveraju said. “If long term interest rates start to spike, the party’s over.”

Valeant (Text)
Valeant will also have to keep its effective tax rate low to maintain its acquisition streak. Selvaraju said that rate was 2.8 per cent in the third quarter of 2013, well below Canada’s 15 per cent corporate tax rate.

“That’s another reason why shareholders love this company,” Selvaraju said.

The company keeps taxes low by spreading its operations across various jurisdictions worldwide, including several with extremely low corporate taxes, Selvaraju said.

“This is a company that moves ahead of the tax authorities very aggressively,” Selvaraju said. He said you’d need a PhD in tax law to understand the company’s tax-management system. He’s confident that system will succeed in keeping Valeant’s tax rate low “for at least the next five years.”

That’s good news for investors, since a low tax rate is a big part of what is making Valeant’s revenues climb. It’s the other crucial factor, along with low interest rates, in the company’s success.  Valeant’s low tax rate means it can lay out huge sums to acquire a company and then reap more revenue from it than the company was making before being sold.

“Every time Valeant acquires a company, the cash flows associated with the products of that company wind up being taxed at Valeant’s lower effective tax rate, as opposed to the effective tax rate that was being applied to them before. That effectively makes the cash flows associated with companies that Valeant acquires two-to-three times more profitable immediately after the acquistion is closed,” Selvaraju said.

With some major acquisitions under its belt and an expansion strategy investors appear confident in, Valeant seems poised for its biggest-ever takeover. There’s widespread speculation that the company is eyeing a merger of equals in the near future. Selvaraju said Aegis Capital’s top choice is for Valeant to merge with Isreal’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.