North Pole

Thursday November 26, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday November 26, 2020

‘We took our eye off the ball’: How Canada lost its vaccine production capacity

In the race to develop and produce a COVID-19 vaccine, Canada is on the sidelines despite its once notable status as a global source for life-saving injections.

December 8, 2017

Canada lost that standing long ago, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained this week, which means even if the country had developed its own novel coronavirus vaccine, there would be no means to produce it on the scale required.

“We used to have [production capacity] decades ago but we no longer have it,” Trudeau said Tuesday in Ottawa.

How did it get to this point? Canadian administrations simply took their “eye off the ball,” said Earl Brown, an infectious disease expert and a former member of the H1N1 vaccine task group in Canada. After that pandemic, a review found that vaccine production capacity was “right at the top” of the list of problems, he said. It wasn’t always that way.

“We had great vaccine producers in Canada — world leaders essentially — 50 years ago,” he told CTV’s Your Morning on Wednesday. There was Connaught Laboratories in Toronto, which was known for producing insulin to treat diabetes and inoculants for diphtheria and polio, and Institut Armand Frappier in Montreal that produced vaccines, including one for tuberculosis, he noted.

December 17, 2014

“The problem was they had a poor business model,” said Brown. “These were vaccine companies spun off from universities, so there was indirect funding and they had a model of not making so much profit.”

So they were eventually sold, Montreal’s Frappier lab to British multinational GlaxoSmithKline and Connaught, through a series of mergers, to French multinational Sanofi Pasteur  after Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government’s program of privatization . The labs now have a “tighter production line and not so much capacity,” said Brown.

For those Canadian companies to mount production campaigns on their own will take time — and a lot of it, they have said. VIDO-InterVac said it has plans to build a facility in one year, but that it would take another still to get it in operating shape. “That’s not the time frame you like,” said Brown.

December 10, 2015

In the meantime, Canadians will have to rely on speedier countries with approved COVID-19 vaccines to provide doses, but Canadians won’t be prioritized ahead of their own people. “Countries like the United States, Germany and the U.K. do have domestic pharmaceutical facilities, which is why they’re obviously going to prioritize helping their citizens first,” Trudeau said on Tuesday in Ottawa.

The reliance on other countries and private companies is upsetting critics of Trudeau, who said Tuesday that his administration has begun funding domestic vaccine production capacity because “we never want to be caught short again.” 

Pandemic Times

“This is gross incompetence that’s going to cost Canadians their lives and their jobs,” said Conservative health critic Michelle Rempel Garner on Tuesday from Parliament Hill.

But criticism toward one government’s inaction may often easily be directed at another with hindsight, countered Brown on Your Morning. (CTV News) 

 

Tuesday December 19, 2017

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday December 19, 2017

Trump considers rolling back rules protecting coal miners from black lung disease

President Donald Trump’s mining regulators are reconsidering rules meant to protect underground miners from breathing coal and rock dust — the cause of black lung — and diesel exhaust, which can cause cancer. An advocate for coal miners said Friday that this sends a “very bad signal.”

The Mine Safety and Health Administration has asked for public comments on whether standards “could be improved or made more effective or less burdensome by accommodating advances in technology, innovative techniques, or less costly methods.”

Some “requirements that could be streamlined or replaced in frequency” involve coal and rock dust. Others address diesel exhaust, which can have health impacts ranging from headaches and nausea to respiratory disease and cancer.

“Because of the carcinogenic health risk to miners from exposure to diesel exhaust, MSHA is requesting information on approaches that would improve control of diesel particulate matter and diesel exhaust,” the agency said.

The Trump administration has said many federal regulations, including pollution restrictions, have depressed the coal industry and other sectors of the economy.

“President Trump made clear the progress his Administration is making in bringing common sense to regulations that hold back job creation and prosperity,” Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta said Thursday in releasing his agency’s regulatory and deregulatory agenda. “The Department of Labor will continue to protect American workers’ interests while limiting the burdens of over-regulation.”

The notices on coal dust and underground diesel exhaust had few details. Both were described as “pre-rule stage.” (Source: Associated Press) 

 

Wednesday December 17, 2014

Wednesday December 17, 2014Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday December 17, 2014

Denmark challenges Russia and Canada over North Pole

Denmark has presented a claim to the UN, arguing that the area surrounding the North Pole is connected to the continental shelf of Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory.

Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard said it was a “historic and important milestone” for Denmark.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013Canada and Russia have already asserted their own sovereignty over the energy-rich Arctic territory.

Arctic nations have agreed that a UN panel will settle the dispute.

The focus of the dispute is the Lomonosov Ridge, a 1,800km-long (1,120 miles) underwater mountain range that splits the Arctic in two.

Back in 2008, a US Geological Survey report estimated that as much as 22% of the world’s undiscovered and recoverable resources lay north of the Arctic Circle, but the North Pole itself is unlikely to have much oil or gas beneath its deep waters.

The 21-member panel investigating the competing claims to the pole will have to decide whether the scientific evidence put forward is valid. If the claims overlap, the relevant states will then have to negotiate, the spokesman said.

Mr Lidegaard said data collected since 2002 backed Denmark’s claim to an approximate area of 895,000 sq km (346,000 sq miles)- roughly 20 times the size of Denmark – beyond Greenland’s nautical borders.

Denmark, along with Russia, Norway, Canada and the US said in 2008 that the territorial dispute should be settled under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

After ratifying the convention, a country has 10 years to submit a claim to extend its continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its borders. Canada expressed formal interest last year, and Denmark’s deadline is about to run out.

Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen of Denmark’s Syddansk University said the government in Copenhagen had staked its claim, partly to show the world that Denmark could not be pushed about, but also to prove a political point to the people of Greenland. (Source: BBC News)

 

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Wednesday, December 11, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday, December 11, 2013

‘This is not a race’: Baird defends delay in making claim for North Pole

Canada has filed a claim that dramatically expands the country’s boundaries in the Atlantic Ocean, but it will be a few more years before Canadian scientists determine whether that claim can extend all the way to the North Pole.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird — along with Minister for the Arctic Council Leona Aglukkaq — announced Canada’s submission with the UN’s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which covers 1.2 million square kilometres of the Atlantic Ocean floor.

During a news conference in Ottawa on Monday, Baird said Canada also filed preliminary information on what it believes to be the outer limits of its claim to the Arctic seafloor.

While the area is not yet fully mapped, Baird says Canada will try to extend its territorial claims to the North Pole.

Tuesday February 3, 2015“We are determined to ensure that all Canadians benefit from the tremendous resources that are to be found in Canada’s Far North,” he said.

The Arctic is believed to contain as much as one-quarter of the world’s undiscovered energy resources.

Aglukkaq said expanding Canada’s continental shelf is central to Canada’s future economic prosperity.

“We are defining Canada’s last frontier,” she said.

Canada, Denmark and Russia all say they believe the mineral- and oil-rich Lomonosov Ridge, which runs beneath the ocean and close to the geographic North Pole, is a natural extension of their continental shelves. The ridge is where scientists must focus their work, Baird said.

The UN submissions will not lead to a binding decision, but instead set up negotiations between countries staking a claim to the region. Talks could drag on for years.

“This is not a race,” Baird said. “This will be something that will benefit the people of Canada for centuries to come and we wanted to take the time to get it right.”

Baird did not explain at his news conference why, after 10 years of research, the mapping work remains incomplete. (Source: CTV News)

Thursday July 26, 2007

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, Editorial Cartoonist, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday July 26, 2007

Russia deploys mission to claim North Pole

A Russian expedition sailed yesterday for the North Pole, where it plans to send a submarine crew to plant a flag on the seabed and symbolically claim the Arctic for the Kremlin.

The mission is part of a race to assert rights over the Arctic, an icy wasteland that is rich in energy reserves and, as climate change melts the ice, could open up to form a lucrative shortcut for ships sailing between Asia and North America.

“The Arctic is Russian,” expedition leader and parliamentary deputy Artur Chilingarov told Russian TV. “We are going to be the first to put a flag there, a Russian flag, at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, at the very point of the North Pole.”

One of their biggest worries is resurfacing at the same hole in the ice they dived into — missing it could mean becoming trapped as the mini-submarine is not powerful enough to break through the ice.

International law states the five countries with territory inside the Arctic Circle — Canada, Russia, the United States, Norway and Denmark, via its control of Greenland — are limited to a 320-kilometre economic zone around their coastline. (Source: Ottawa Citizen)