 The answer is yes. And the question, does the cold influenced affect the infrastructure in Canada? The answer is yes. Here on view from the north with retired businessman Ken Rogers in Kelowna, British Columbia. Welcome to the show, Ken. Hello, Jay. I think that whether cold weather affects infrastructure or not, the best example in the world today is Ukraine. Yes, I totally agree. You know, we in Hawaii, we don't have a sense of exactly what cold means. And when they say, gee, without, without energy, you know, oil or gas or what have you, without that, that zephyrit, zephyritia power plant, people are going to get really cold. And we don't, we don't really understand that. But you do, because you're Canadian and it gets really cold in Canada. So what is, what is cold in, you know, to you, what is cold in Ukraine mean? Well, Ukraine, geographically, you know, the southern parts of Ukraine, like along the Black Sea are about the same temperature as, oh, let's say, Iowa, or, you know, Oregon, depending on, you know, the weather formation at the time. But the important item is when it gets cold, it can get really cold. Now, lots of Americans would think of Minnesota or North Dakota as, you know, what might be cold? Well, parts of Ukraine are further north and inland from that. And, and so you get, you know, 30, 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. You know, when you walk on the snow, it squeaks. But, you know, when you, if you, you know, have water coming to your house, you know, the pipes have to be, you know, four feet or more deep. Otherwise, the pipe will freeze. You know, you get lots of pipe freezing. You know, if you are not careful and you leave a window open, the pipe might freeze in your house. If these buildings didn't have heat, you know, what would happen? Could you work in a building without heat? Can the Ukrainians live in a building without heat? No. It's just point blank, no, you can't. I mean, no, you can, you know, do a simple item, like if you were in a, you know, a 10 by 10 room and, and you had a couple of candles. The candles would keep the room warm. Wow. You know, you don't need much. It's a matter of can it, can the heat escape out of the room? You know, like window insulation has to be better and, and, you know, you're. So I want to go from that to the question of infrastructure in a place that does get cold and it will be cold in Canada, at least your part of Canada within a week or two. So, you know, what happens to the roads? What happens to the sidewalks? What happens to the electric poles, telephone poles? You know, what happens to the telecommunications in general? What happens when it gets really cold? Well, most of the infrastructure works exactly the same way. You know, if you start off with electricity, you know, the, when you hang the, the wires between two telephone poles, when it's going to be cold at some time of the year, you make sure that you have a little more sag in the wire between the two poles because as it gets cold, it shrinks and, and the wire would get tighter. Well, if you strung the wire very tight in the first place, and it's, you know, 80 degrees Fahrenheit temperature the day you hang the wires and, you know, you think you've done a nice job because they're nice and tight. Well, if it gets cold, the wire will snap. Similarly, you've got with your bringing drinking water, you know, your water has your municipality needs a way to make sure they've got the water that can be stored in a place that will not freeze in depth. So you couldn't have a, you know, you know, a very large pond that's only a couple of feet deep that might freeze for the whole depth and you'd not have your water. Well, it's very rare that something would not be deep enough that that there would be the water underneath the ice to draw upon, but your, your pipes to deliver the water to all households has to be deep enough underground. And when it comes into your house, it's got to be underneath your, your basement or garage and you'd have things like in a city like Edmonton, it's very rare that you don't have a basement that's, you know, at least five feet. The floor is at least five feet below the surface. What about roads, roads, little roads and big roads and turnpikes and freeways? You know, I mean, in my childhood in New York, they would put salt on the roads and the salt would melt the snow and that was good. But then the salt would eat the pavement. And at the end of the cold season, the pavement needed to be repaired or replaced. What do you do customarily in Canada about that? Well, in New York, you don't need to salt very often. If you're in, if you're in, you know, most Canadian cities, you know, the first thing you have is major snow removal. You know, and you have that in, in lots of the larger American cities. So, you know, whether it's Chicago or Buffalo or Minneapolis, you know, there's major snow removal first, but you also do the salting. And you then have extreme difficulty with things like mountain passes. For example, just inland from Seattle are a couple of very Canadian type mountain passes called, you know, snow qualmy pass, a wonderful, wonderful ski area. But in the wintertime, you know, they have, you know, snow removal going, you know, 24 hours a day if it's needed. And you've got to dry very cautiously going over the top and, and they do salt as well. You know, but snow removal is the main factor, you know, and in places like Vancouver, where it's very, very rare that it, that it's cold. But, you know, every year you manage to get a snowfall, you know, three or four inches falls and nobody has special tires on their cars. Like you have what are called snow tires. And, you know, if you're going on any mountain pass in Canada, it's legally required. You can't go in the road unless you have snow tires. No, they don't have great inspection, but nobody's stupid enough to try it. What about chains? Chains are one step further than snow tires, yeah? Yes, but most people are unable to put chains on their car. I mean, chains work for large trucks. The truckers are good at putting the chains on, you know, the wheel wells are more accessible than on a car. You know, the car is lowered the ground. And where I want to go with this is my, my, my guess would be that when you have cold weather, if you have to spend more money designing, building, maintaining, repairing infrastructure, like roads, like power, power, you know, power lines, like telecommunication lines, like airports, like, you know, infrastructure in general for every city water, because, because the cold has an effect and the change in temperature has an effect. This may not always be the case. One day, maybe soon, we'll have everything really warm with climate change. But for now, it still gets cold. And I guess my question to you is, is, is, am I right to assume that Canada in general spends more money on designing, maintaining, repairing infrastructure all kinds against the change in weather in the winter? Yes. You know, but the economics are very similar to, you know, the whole idea of infrastructure is that if you, you know, spend a dollar on, on infrastructure, you usually get benefit, you know, economically, but alone of about $3 of towards GDP over time. But more than that, I think of infrastructure is really what it, it's not just an economic issue. It's, it's how does it affect a way of life? You know, if you simply start with Hawaii and you say, walk out on to any street in Hawaii and, and it's uplifting, you know, you, you have a view of the ocean, you have the wonderful vegetation. Similarly in a city like Vancouver, it's, it's absolutely a gorgeous setting where if you pick, you know, someplace like Midland, Texas, in the flats and, you know, or, or, you know, the Salt Lake Desert, just west of Salt Lake City, you know, it's, it's, you know, not uplifting at all. So, so you have, you know, the, the environment you start with is there. Well, and if you're going to put in, you start doing some infrastructure, you know, such as, you know, you build a freeway. Well, right away, you've spoiled other things. You know, anybody that lives near that freeway, especially a little uphill from it, has, has horrific noise damage. You know, you get cities like Calgary and, in Alberta in Canada, back when I was young and a senior planner for the city, we built some sound attenuation barriers whenever we were widening any of the freeways and, and those barriers enabled, you know, the ability to build a, you know, million dollar single family home on the other side of the barrier, but really within a few feet of the, of the freeway, which you can't do in other places. Well, I'm, I'm wondering also whether the Canadian model, both at the, at the provincial level and the federal level, attends to infrastructure. Whether you can say that, you know, they're out there working, they're out there improving it. You have a reasonable level of confidence that it won't be falling apart. You know, in Hawaii, you may be uplifting, but the roads are falling apart. We've had a war against bottles going on for a long time. And some people say that's because we don't put enough macadam down when we're, we're fixing the roads. I remember a trip my wife and I took to Italy not too many years ago, where every Italian highway, there were guys working, fixing. And I said, what is, what is all this? Why are they working and fixing on the roads? Well, because that's what they do. They insist on having good roads. So they work on the roads all the time. We don't do that. I don't know if that's happening in Canada. And I kind of doubt that it's happening in, in the mainland US, simply because when Joe Biden, you know, looked at the question of infrastructure, he found that it was not being maintained all over the country. And of course, the best way is the Italian way to just keep on working on it, not just letting it and abandoning it for decades at a time. What happens in Canada? Well, the story is different. And much like the US, a lot of the problems with infrastructure is which level of government is responsible for what? You know, you have the three levels of government, the municipal, provincial, or state government in the US. And then the federal, well, in Canada, the federal government has all the taxing power. The municipality has the majority, the responsibility for infrastructure. You know, so depending on the province, you have a very, very different situation in Canada. You know, Alberta as a province has the highest GDP per capita in Canada, much like Massachusetts has in the US, but for different reasons. But in Alberta, you've got a gorgeous highway running from some town that's nowhere to somewhere of lesser importance. You know, it's, and they're really well maintained. Now they have a combination of, of they contract with some road firm, you know, a private enterprise with on a maintenance agreement and they maintain, you know, a particular stretch of a highway. And they take the risk whether the weather's better or worse. You've got in the mountain passes, you always have, you know, it's a government funded snow removal situation where in the US an awful lot of the infrastructure problems are relate to the obsession by some American governments, especially state governments that everything and anything should be private enterprise where, where really that doesn't work to your best benefit most of the time. You know, the simplest infrastructure example is, is healthcare compare Cuba with the US, you know, in the US, the, because of the idea that private industry should do absolutely everything, you know, the government can't do it as efficiently or whatever. Well, really, in, in the United States, the wealthy person has the best healthcare in the world. The poorest 25% have worse healthcare than Cuba than the poorest 25% in Cuba. And Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Well, I'm just an interesting question because the more you look, including in Hawaii, the more you find that governments are delegating infrastructure maintenance, well, every aspect of infrastructure to contractors under contracts. And, you know, man, for example, I was on the neighborhood board here in my neighborhood. And every time the city showed up to report on what was going on, I said, do you have a list of the roads that you're supposed to be fixing? And the priorities. And every time I asked that question, they had to go somewhere. They never answered the question. And I don't think there was a list anywhere. So I mean, the idea is that there was nobody out there working directly for the municipality responsible to identify the roads that needed fixing and to fix them. And so you sort of wait until the public gets really irritated. And then you have a big contract to fix a lot of infrastructure too late at the same time. One other little story, and I'll stop. But, you know, back in the 90s, the secretary of energy, Phil named Spencer Abram. And one day the Northeast grid went out. I don't know a whole combination of reasons, but the Northeast grid failed. And it failed for a lot of people, for millions of people. And they came to Spencer Abram and they said, what happened to you? How come you let this fail? And his response sticks in my mind even till today after all these years. He said, what are you talking about? The grid was built like in the 50s. No municipality, no state, no federal government, you know, maintained it or repaired it in the way it should have been repaired and maintained. What do you expect? If you don't repair infrastructure, it fails, buddy. Don't look at me. And he was right. And I think that there's a, you know, that's a kind of a virus that's all over the US, you know, you wait till it fails, wait till the bridge collapses, and then you address it. Does that happen in Canada? Yes. And you get the same situation as in the US. For example, if you have hired a major road contractor to look after a section of freeway, you know, and they're contracted to do the maintenance over a period of years. Well, what tends to be the normal case in the United States especially, and it's hit and miss in Canada, is that in America, there's just kind of blindly the politicians assume that the contractor will do a wonderful job. You know, in Canada, we at least start with the idea that they may only be as honest as they have to be. Therefore, if we don't inspect or check up on it, you know, then, you know, we may get cheated. You know, and so, you know, the hit and miss is in some places and for some situations, the Canadian, when a private industry is looking after something like a nursing home or a senior citizen's home, then there isn't a government inspection checking it out. You know, but in some provinces, the same has happened in the US when COVID-19 shows up. You know, all the seniors die because nobody gave a hoot or nobody did the right job. Nobody fixed the road or fixed the healthcare and it's not much better when you reverse it. You know, if the government's supposed to be doing something, you know, there's nobody checking that they're doing a good job. Well, suppose I gave you another world, a world where the government had to guy with the shovel. He was a government employee, okay, and the government had engineers that organized all this and used the technology to determine the useful life of these infrastructure elements and actually went out there at the end of the theoretical useful life and fixed it, maintained it. And they were ready at a moment's notice to go and fix that road or fix that wire or fix that facility, whatever it was. Government facility done by government, agencies, government management, government employees, would that be better? Do we know enough to answer that question generally? Or does that also depend on, you know, the government in question, the province or the state in question? As a general rule, would it be better if government did it itself? Well, two examples I know of, you know, both in Alberta, Calgary and Edmonton, they municipalities have a large engineering department, they employ people, they look after all that infrastructure, and they do a crackerjack job. There is not, you know, there's simply, you know, if the public doesn't like a road and they complain, you know, it does move through the system and get some attention. Now, I'm not that familiar with which level of government's responsible in other places, but certainly, you know, in the central Okanagan area of British Columbia, you know, it is not nearly as good as it is in those areas in Alberta. So that, I would guess it's hit and miss with government, really, you know, my underlying philosophy, kind of to repeat a point, is if government's responsible to do something, you need a mechanism by which the quality of job that they're doing is audited by somebody, you know, and similarly, if private industry is doing it, you better have some government agency auditing that they are doing it properly. Otherwise, I don't think you can be assured that infrastructure is as good as it should be. Well, you know, I was struck with, you know, the idea, and Trump was promising he would spend money on infrastructure, never did, and then when Joe Biden got in office, he was able to get some kind of bipartisan bill through laying, you know, hundreds of billions on infrastructure all of a sudden. And I said to myself, well, you know, what this means to me is not so much that he's organizing the repair and maintenance of infrastructure. And that's, you know, that's a good thing by itself. But he's really saying that we are behind. We are behind by hundreds of billions of dollars. And we were not paying attention. And when this money that he got Congress to appropriate for infrastructure, when this money is spent, what then? How long do we have to wait for this to happen again? The scenario repeats itself, like a news cycle. You wait until everything collapses and crumbles. You wait till the bridge falls in the river and oh, yeah, well, now we have to spend some money on infrastructure. You know, I find this completely inadequate as a long term solution. And I'm hoping that because of the cold, because Canada is Canada, that you don't have the problem that we have. And I mean, including Hawaii, where, you know, you have to have a political crisis before you actually fix anything. I'm not sure that I would agree with that fully. I think my experience, you know, traveling extensively in both countries, you know, that Canada generally is better with its infrastructure than the US. But we also have some blatant disgraces. You know, we have these native communities scattered all over the place in Canada, like Canada has about 6% of its population is is native. And a good percentage of them live on in native reservations, let's call them, and and they're in remote locations. And the federal government has been responsible for their infrastructure forever and ever. And it is absolutely disgraceful. We probably have, you know, half the native communities in Canada don't have clean drinking water. And we got 20% of the world's fresh water. Hard to understand. But let me know it reminds me, if you will, of some shows we've had with, you know, with lawyers, and I guess we call it those who seek equity justice in Bogota, Colombia. I know you spent time down there, that area and what when I was struck with was one lawyer who was responsible in his firm for raising capital and building infrastructure into the hinterland of Colombia. And PS, you know, Colombia, like many South American Latin American countries has these cities of gleaming steel and glass. But then, you know, 10 miles outside the city, you have jungle, and you have these these these towns and villages in the hinterland that are completely undeveloped. And his this mission in life, and his vision for his own, for his own, you know, way of helping, was to build infrastructure to these towns and villages. Why? Because if you build infrastructure, then you get knowledge, you get the internet, you get the ability of government emissaries to do their jobs in these places. You reduce the operations of the the FARC, you know, the guerrillas out there in the hinterland, and you essentially bring the country together and avoid the fragmentation and violence that you might otherwise have if you could not reach these these these rural areas. And he felt that that was a way to, you know, make a better life for everyone, if you could connect the country. But connecting the country was a matter of infrastructure. Now, it's not exactly the same in the US, because there's not too many places like that. But there are some, there are some rural areas that are not being reached, whether it be the digital divide, whether it be, you know, any number of economic things, governmental things that are not reaching these areas and and they are are they're suffering, whether they realize it or not, they're disconnected. Infrastructure connects. What are your thoughts about that, Ken? Well, just when you mentioned internet, you know, as I understand, there's between 5 and 10% of American citizens live in locations that they don't have broadband. Now, that's that's an absolute disgrace. The but the idea to me of infrastructure is is that it is something that is designed, it's a an asset that increases the standard of living of the people where that infrastructure involved. Now, whether you call it well being or standard of living, I don't make a great distinction. It's not solely an economic thing. You know, if you're if you're going to have an airport and you've got lots more planes, you know, the good news is your your airport does certain things, but somebody lives in the flight path, you know, and so their well being or standard of living is reduced because they've got to deal with the noise. Similarly, you put in a, you know, in Los Angeles, you know, you've got freeways that make it so you can certainly get around easily. But on the other hand, most of the street freeways are on concrete stilts. And they're, you know, there's housing and other people living beneath the freeways, you know, and and they're really unsightly. They're not they're not that noisy because the sound goes up and, you know, the people are living below, but certainly compared to walking down Kalakaua Avenue in Hawaii, you know, it's a really ugly scene. You know, there's it spoils the the standard of living or the well being of the people and destroys the neighborhoods below and around. Yes. You know, but, you know, inconsistent, you know, infrastructure exists all around the world. You know, it's, you know, when you have an older city, or let's let's take even a new sparkly city like Vancouver, you know, if you want to, because the city's population has grown greatly over the last few years, you know, they're trying to improve the subway system. Well, how do you create a subway after you've already got, you know, a pretty big city sitting above ground? You know, if you're going to close down a street, it's going to cost you billions of dollars for just a few miles of subway. So that, you know, there's not an easy solution all the way around. It's simply to recognize that infrastructure is important economically. If you use a simple example, one of the, you know, best infrastructure things the world ever saw was when Eisenhower created all the U.S. interstate highway system, where those freeways go through every city so that, you know, if you're going, you know, down the West Coast and you're going to go through Seattle, you can go through the whole city on a freeway. Now, if you try to go through any city, you know, and perhaps the worst might be New York, you know, without being on the freeway, and, you know, on your freeway, you're doing 75 miles an hour. And if you're going a lot of miles, some of which is in the country as opposed to only in the city, you'd be lucky to do 50 miles an hour average if you didn't have that freeway. Well, that's one and a half times as fast so that the driver, you know, if he gets paid for delivering the goods from point A to point B, you know, if he has to go on a back road instead of a freeway, he should only get two thirds as much money. You know, like nice, trying to give it the equation of how does it affect economics? You know, it's pretty blatantly obvious. Yeah. But you can actually make a, you can make a model, you can make a chart. There are lots of those models out there, you know, like the U.S. or the American Society of Civil Engineers does a report every year on the U.S. infrastructure. Now, they have their normal bias of, you know, their civil engineers, they like to build things like roads, bridges, buildings, et cetera, you know, whether it's, you know, water, fresh water or waterways or any infrastructure. And so, they have all kinds of models for rating different infrastructure. You know, they give the example, the most recent report, you know, says that, you know, railroads delivering freight get sort of a B mark, you know, your A, B, C, D gives your grade, eh? So, they get a fairly good grade for delivering freight, you know, but the passenger traffic gets sort of a D minus, you know, and I could agree with that. I recently rode an Amtrak train from Newark Airport to Penn Station in downtown New York. Well, the train just shook back and forth sideways and it was the most ancient, you know, train coach that I've seen in many, many years. It reminded me of a trip I took across Canada on a train when I was 23 years old going from Montreal to the western Canada. And, you know, at least the train back in those days I thought was not too bad, but this Amtrak looked like the leftover coach from 50, 60 years ago. You know, and it was really, you know, it made it, you know, but, you know, you knew the tracks needed repair, the, you know, coach itself was terrible. You know, Penn Station was nothing to write home about either, and so, you know, I would agree with the, you know, American Society of Civil Engineers saying, you know, the American passenger railroad infrastructure is a disgrace relative to the, you know, GDP of the United States. I mean, you've got places like Japan with a gorgeous high-speed rail, you know, Taiwan has it, China has it. I mean, some really poor countries got way better, you know, passenger rail service than the U.S. Yeah, going back to the point of, you know, having government attend to this, having government structure itself, so that it pays attention. I think there's a natural inclination in this country and maybe to some degree in every democracy. If you put the infrastructure in there in the 50s, it must still be working. As long as it's not falling in the river, you don't have to do anything about it. This is a mistake. You have to pay attention to it all over the country. I'm thinking of Flint, Michigan and the water. Nobody paid attention. And now the population of Flint, you know, was pretty ticked off about the water. And this is, you know, exhibited in so many places in so many ways, not just, you know, the train into Manhattan. So I think we need to rethink infrastructure in this country. And maybe to a lesser degree, we need to rethink infrastructure in Canada and various other democracies. It's interesting too that the newer countries, the ones that built those high-speed rail facilities only, you know, 10 years ago, they're way better off than we are. Although I would say that those countries probably pay more attention to maintaining the high-speed rail than we spend maintaining the low-speed rail. In any event, infrastructure is a big category of things that includes so many things. The idea is it includes things that people expect the government to either do or manage. And I don't think we can be cavalier about it. Your final thoughts? Well, I think the U.S. Biden's infrastructure bill is really a wonderful step in the right direction. In studying the detail, I saw one piece that I thought was missing. You know, there's effort to deal with water infrastructure like the Flint, Michigan problem. You know, as if drinking water is a human right kind of thing, whereas there was nothing to do with a large irrigation projects. You know, as I think that, you know, the Central Valley in California is one of the major assets the United States has and something that, you know, Hawaiians would understand if you have to bring all your food in from somewhere else, you've got a major problem. You know, you need to be more self-sufficient on certain things and food is a major one of those. And to let the Central Valley die because of lack of water, which is really what's going to happen if there isn't infrastructure to get additional water there, you know, whether you're going to run a pipeline from the mouth of the Columbia River down to California or not. I think it's a lot better investment than fixing Fort Myers, Florida that's going to flood again. To say. So much more to discuss, Ken. We'll be back in two weeks, hence, and we'll make other comparisons and lessons between Canada and the U.S. I look forward to these conversations. I learned so much. Thank you so much, Dr. Ken Rogers. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.