All posts by Rupert Nuttle

B.C. needs to know where the party’s at

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By Rupert Nuttle

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Interior of a party bus. (image: http://newclassiclimo.com/rates.html)

The B.C. government is screening drivers and keeping a close eye on “party buses” amid growing concern over the industry’s handling of public safety and underage drinking.

Companies operating stretch SUVs and limo buses – which are popular among students celebrating graduation, and as a classy way to get from Vancouver to Whistler – were subjected to increased regulation from the Ministry of Transportation last spring. Companies operating under the old regulations were made to re-apply for updated licences.

According to documents obtained under the B.C. freedom-of-information law, the new rules were also accompanied by an emphasis on knowing where the vehicles operate and a renewed scrutiny of the companies themselves.

“The (ministry) has access to information on all vehicles operating limousine style services, and knows exactly where the vehicles are operating,” the documents read. They go on to explain that this information “will assist with auditing and other enforcement measures.”

The party bus industry is regulated by the passenger transportation department of the Ministry of Transportation. Kristin Vanderkuip, the department’s director, says she uses a specific penalty framework to determine what enforcement measures to take when operators break the rules.

If a party bus operator is caught outside their predetermined boundaries, for instance, they’re fined $500. Other infractions include leasing a vehicle’s plates for a fee (a $1,000 fine), and smoking while driving ($100).

According to its website, the department also conducts “random” audits of party bus companies on an annual basis. If an operator isn’t up to snuff, they are given the chance to make the necessary changes.  In more extreme cases, though, the ministry will notify the Passenger Transportation Board, an independent tribunal that also monitors the industry.

Last year, the single-vehicle company called New Classic Limousine & Coach Services was forced out of business when it was discovered that then-president, owner and sole operator, Hardyal Singh Dhanoa, had been convicted of three criminal offences while operating his party bus service. These included dangerous driving, possession of a weapon, and assault with a weapon, according to a document on the Passenger Transportation Board’s website.

Vanderkuip’s department brought this information to the attention of the board last June, and the board found that Dhanoa had failed to acknowledge his criminal record when applying for special licensing under the new regulations. They then issued a directive to cancel the licence, effectively forcing New Classic to shut down. (The company still has a website and an active phone number, but refused to comment.)

Ranji Virk, the manager of Time Limo, a Vancouver company, says that single-vehicle operators like New Classic are among those most affected by the province’s new regulations. Virk’s company has a total fleet of 20 vehicles, including vans, SUVs, stretch limousines and 3 party buses. He says the new rules have had very little impact on his business.

But he also says he’s not sure how effective the changes have actually been, and believes the department isn’t diligent enough. “They’re not really tracking, I can tell you right now,” he says. As for audits from the department, Time Limo hasn’t seen one in “many years.”

The efficacy of the new regulations has come into question lately, after a 23-year-old woman died when she fell out of a moving party bus in downtown Vancouver, just over two months ago.

According to Virk, that incident points to an issue that the department isn’t addressing: where the party buses come from. Many of the vehicles operating in Canada are modified shuttle buses manufactured in the U.S. The vehicles don’t always comply with Canadian safety standards, says Virk, but they manage to get across the border anyways.

“Those vehicles are not allowed in Canada, but those vehicles are in Canada,” he says. “They don’t track that.”

 

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Gulf War syndrome unanswered after 25 years

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By Rupert Nuttle

He was 26 years old in December 1990, a recent graduate of the Royal Military College, when he was shipped from Cold Lake, Alberta to Doha, Qatar. Now in his fifties, retired Captain Sean Bruyea has struggled for two and a half decades with Gulf War syndrome.

He’s not alone. The illness has affected hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans worldwide, but still goes unrecognized by the Canadian government.

“They’re still highly dismissive of it,” says Bruyea, who speaks regularly before Parliamentary Committees on Veterans Affairs, and has published more than 30 articles promoting the welfare of disabled soldiers and veterans.

“It’s really just a tragic, sad litany of bureaucratic and government failures over the years,” he says, adding that the government’s response has been “completely ineffectual and insensitive.”

About 4,500 Canadians were deployed to the Middle East between 1990 and 1991 in the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq. Some started coming forward in the mid-1990s, complaining of chronic fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and lapses in memory and concentration, among other physical and psychological symptoms.

The causes are thought to be exposure to environmental toxins – such as oil-well gas fires, pesticides and depleted uranium – as well as a host of military-issued vaccines and medications that were administered to soldiers at the time of deployment.

A recent report from the American Institute of Medicine confirms that as many as one in three veterans deployed to the Persian Gulf theatre are still plagued by the multi-symptom illness today. In Canada, the medical research has been less conclusive. A government report from 2005 suggests that the illness “cannot be linked to an identifiable cause,” and goes on to mention that the same symptoms are also found among civilians and non-deployed military personnel.

When asked to comment for this article, Veterans Affairs wrote in an email: “Gulf War Veterans are covered for any disability that arose during their service in this theatre.” According to Bruyea, it isn’t enough – those who suffer from Gulf War syndrome have had to seek treatment at their own expense, and still do. (The Department of National Defense did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Part of the problem around the government’s response has to do with the complexity of the illness, suggests Dr. Gordon Broderick, a medical researcher at Nova Southeastern University who has published numerous papers on the syndrome.

He says the thinking has changed over the years. While initially the culprit was thought to be the depleted uranium used in munitions, Broderick says the focus has shifted to the effects of government-issued medications on soldiers’ immune systems. The combination of powerful vaccines and combat stress could have made troops more vulnerable to allergens and disease, he explains.

As Bruyea tells it, “We were basically guinea pigs.” He remembers being lined up and administered with a whole slew of vaccines within the space of a day, before being loaded into Hercules aircraft and flown to the middle of the desert. Upon arrival, troops were ordered to take pyridostigmine bromide, a powerful anti-nerve gas agent, every eight hours.

And on top of the toxins and the cocktail of medications, he says the stress was “gut-wrenching.” “We were fully expecting biological and chemical weapons,” says Bruyea, “And we fully expected that people would die.” After twelve weeks, he was diagnosed with Combat Stress Reaction (an acute form of PTSD), and sent home.

There may have been no Canadian casualties in the Gulf War, but the health effects of that conflict will stick with Bruyea and many others for a lifetime.

 

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Canadian Oil Sands deep in the red at time of takeover

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By Rupert Nuttle


Canadian Oil Sands Stock by RFN on TradingView.com

Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., which was bought out by a major player in Canada’s energy sector this month, had been losing money and scrambling to offset debts for close to a year, according to analysis of their most recent financial statement.

To begin with, the company lost $488 million in the first nine months of 2015, versus a net income of $435 million in the same period the previous year. In other words, they lost more money in 2015 than they made in 2014. That’s a decline of close to a billion dollars.

To see an annotated version of the financial report click below.



What caused this change of fortune?

Some of the reasons are well-known. The global oil market has not been kind to Canadian crude producers lately. Canadian oil is relatively expensive to extract compared to Middle Eastern producers such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, where low production costs recently drove the per-barrel price of oil down to an unprecedented $30 USD.

On this point alone, Canadian Oil Sands was operating at a loss. Last year, it cost them $40 CAD to produce one barrel of crude, which, even at today’s slightly higher prices, would go to market for about $35. On a bad day, they could lose $10 on every barrel produced.

To try to mitigate these losses, the company slowed production and stopped expansion – a strategy that’s becoming more and more common among Canada’s oil producers, according to Canadian energy market analyst Jean-Thomas Bernard.

But for Canadian Oil Sands, it wasn’t enough. Slowed production means limited cash flow; limited cash flow means less money on the books. Financial reports reveal that their cash flow had dropped to a quarter of 2014 levels in 2015, meaning that if they were to survive they would have to wait for global prices to recover.

This hurry-up-and-wait message was exactly what Canadian Oil Sands CEO Ryan Kubik delivered to investors in early January, faced with a “hostile” takeover bid from Suncor Energy. In a video posted on the company’s website, Kubik promised “a new era of low-cost operations” that would help them weather the market’s deterioration until prices rose again.

In the end, though, independence wasn’t worth the wait.

When Suncor’s $4.3 billion offer for the company expired on Jan. 8, close to half of Canadian Oil Sands investors had already tendered their shares – not the two-thirds needed to secure the deal, but a telling sign that the merger was imminent.

So Suncor extended their offer once again, and on Jan. 18 the companies reached a “friendly” agreement. Suncor raised its bid to $6.6 billion, absorbing close to $2.4 billion in Canadian Oil Sands debt. Key investors finally tendered their shares.

“In the end, the willingness to fight the bid clearly was not strong enough, or was attenuated through a better offer by Suncor,” said André Plourde, an expert in oil sands economics at Carleton University.

With more assets distributed more broadly, Suncor was in a good position to take a larger slice of the oil-sands pie. The agreement with Canadian Oil Sands boosts Suncor’s share in the Fort McMurray project (also known as Syncrude) from 12 per cent to 49 per cent.

At a time when breaking even is a thing of the past, “there is definitely no expansion,” says Bernard. Hence Suncor’s move to purchase an ailing industry partner, instead of building new projects of their own. Bernard believes Suncor’s expanded Syncrude share will benefit all players in the oil patch by centralizing its operations and increasing information-sharing between companies.

Plourde agrees. But, he says, “time will tell whether this will be possible since these are hugely complicated operations.”

Both experts also mentioned that Suncor’s takeover makes Syncrude more responsive to provincial regulations. Since Suncor controls assets in other parts of Alberta, the new arrangement simplifies the industry’s relationship with regulators.

“As the owner of two sets of operations, [Suncor] will be in much better position to negotiate fiscal arrangements with the province,” says Plourde.

With Canadian Oil Sands no longer in the picture, the experts say that Alberta’s oil patch will now be characterized by a tug-of-war between Suncor’s increased share in Syncrude operations and the executive power of Imperial Oil – an Exxon Mobil subsidiary with a 25 per cent share of the project.