 Welcome to View from the North. And today we're going to talk about transportation, modern transportation in Canada with our old friend, Dr. Ken Rogers. Welcome to the show, Ken. Well, hi, Jay. When you use the word modern transportation, I'm not too sure that Canada would meet a reasonable standard for modern. I mean, if you say modern as something that works, everything in Canada works pretty well, but compared to much of the world, Canada's transportation system, which I think of as the way you move people and the way you move materials or products, is certainly not the best in the world. You know, the United States is better than Canada in some areas and about the same pathetic level as Canada in some others. Now, we do have a certain pathetic quality about transportation in the U.S. In Hawaii, we've been having the war on potholes for 20, 30 years now and we're losing that war. I'm not sure how confident I am about the airline industry. I suppose a lot of people overseas, a lot of countries buy American manufactured airlines, but gee, some of them don't work as well as we want. And I'm not sure about the trucking industry. One of the largest truckers in the country just filed bankruptcy after getting a bailout of $700 million from the Biden administration. I could go on. I mean, I think there are real problems, but I'd like to add another ingredient in the soup of our discussion, okay? So I watch a lot of YouTube and on YouTube these days, it's quite remarkable how many documentaries and interesting movies are posted. It's not like just for the kids. It's not sort of for media. It's real documentaries and they select it for you and then you can see anything in the world. So my wife and I stumbled onto one the other day and she likes to watch things about Japan. This was about Japan. They knew that. And they gave us a movie, a documentary, of a couple who took the ferry from Fukuoka, which is, I guess, near the northern end of Japan, to Busan, which is at the southern end of South Korea, brand new ferry. It was beautiful and it was cheap. And it was a three-hour ride in total luxury. And it was for the people. I mean, it was so comfortable, so accommodating to the passengers and a beautiful, you know, piece of marine equipment. They call it a beetle. Looks like a big beetle. And this thing was like an eye opener, it was a revelationary to think that these days now, Japan is building and using and deploying ferries like this on an international basis. It was impressive. Okay, then later in the same trip, the same couple takes a train and this train goes south through Japan. And it is a speed train, as so many trains in Japan are, like in France, for example. You know, you remember the Téjé-Ve, the train of Grand Vitesse, it's great speed, you know? So of course, Japan has great speed trains, sort of China these days. But this train for the couple for a two-day trip, 6,000 American. And what is that? 3,000 a piece, 1,500 per day per person. Okay, and with this, you get the most incredible five-star luxury on this train. That's why it's so expensive. The meals, the wine, the food, the accommodation in every way shape or form. And I say to myself, there is no train in the United States or possibly anywhere in the world that beats this Japanese train. So, and they have side trips. It's like a cruise ship, you know? You stop at a given city or town and the buses, which are also beautiful, wait for you and then take you around and give you a tour. And then you come back and get back on the train and it goes to the next stop. So I'm saying now that these guys understand transportation. I think Japan always understood transportation of this kind. They were ahead. I think they were the first one with the high-speed train. Maybe France, but maybe Japan. And now the ferry and this very luxurious train. So I'm saying to myself, what are we missing here? Not only do we not have that in the US and I suppose in Canada, but we don't even dream about it. We don't even know about it. And Hawaii, we have this kind of problem with ferries. We have a ferry complex. We threw out the ferry that was servicing us, which was very good. And we have never considered another one to replace it. And we don't have a ferry. And we won't have a ferry because it's radioactive, politically radioactive. So I guess that has to be included in the porridge of our discussion. How does that, does that change your answer in any way? Not really. When you come to ferries, British Columbia has a huge island called Vancouver Island, which is on the Pacific side of Canada. And it has about 750,000 people on it. And it's not unlike near Seattle, there's tons of islands, some of which are American and some of which are Canadian. And the ferries run between these islands in many ways without regard to which country you're in. And those ferries are nice and reasonable, but they're not the latest in the world. And they're not as good as some countries. It's much like, whether you take railroad and say, well, the British built railroads in Pakistan and India more than a hundred years ago. And they haven't maintained them since. And you can see them on television and they look pretty pathetic. The Canadian railroads were built probably before those, but every so often they replace the roadbed or the railbed and they replace the rails and they do this and they do that. And the Canadian railroads are not perfect, but they're nothing like the train that runs from Tokyo to Sapporo or Tokyo to Osaka in Japan or the one that runs from Busan to Seoul in Korea or the ones that run all over in Europe. You can take the next type of thing, pick commuter trains. Canada has commuter trains near Toronto and they're about the same league as the Long Island Railroad or the rails run from the suburbs of New York into New York City. But they're just really not like even the British railroad in the UK, all of the railroads are better than the ones in Canada. Now, we have two spectacular railroads if you're talking about owning shares in the stock market. But, and they are world scale in terms of their sheer size, how many million miles of railroad tracks they have. But they don't go very fast and they're far from perfect. Now, they at least have pretty good maintenance. Like you can think of that railroad accident on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border a few months ago. Now, that was not something even though people search hard to say there were negligent maintenance or negligent this or negligent that. And it just wasn't there. I mean, you had a wheel bearing that wore out and overheated and between monitoring stations, it wasn't signaled quickly enough before the train had derailed. Now, you can say, well, gee, you could have, maybe they should have a little better standard. Now, I don't know if that standard of electronic maintenance is as good as the ones in Japan or the Rio or the many new railroads that China's built, but it kind of gives the lay of the land. Like you use the potholes in Hawaii. Well, a good way to describe the Canadian or American problem is, if you think of the potholes, it's a good way to describe why do you have potholes is that in the United States, there are about 285 million small vehicles like automobiles or trucks or little we pick up trucks. Like trucks that are vehicles that have just two axles and four wheels reasonably small. Well, so what you really have is about one and a third of vehicles for every person that's old enough to drive. Now, in Canada, we're not quite as bad as 1.2, but the only reason for that is we have more people over 65 and less under 16 than the US does as opposed to what the people in the middle really are doing. It's about the same. Well, you know, you can say, well, now the roads are a complaint in every city in Canada than the US. Traffic people complain about in every city in Canada than the US. You know, we have some that are much better than others, but you know, and some that are really terrible. However, the underlying key problem is that the individuals, you know, have more money to buy more cars than the public who is responsible to do roads has money for the roads. Now, if you want a good comparison between Canada and the US where the US looks wonderful is Eisenhower in about 1960 or whatever it was, not long after World War II, anyhow, when he was president, they did the interstate highway system in the United States. And ever since then, the United States has paid the US federal government, the one that has all the money or the best taxing power, more taxing power than they have responsibility to spend. They will pay for 90% of any of these interstate highway things. And there's no special new negotiation every time you do, you know, something on one of these interstate highways. Now, they're not perfect. Like you can look at that bridge in Cincinnati that crosses the Ohio River that's made lots of publicity as Biden and the, you know, King Center. Yeah, the opposing party, you know, at least could have a toast because of that bridge finally getting starting to get it fixed, you know, way past when it was due. So, but that interstate highway system includes going through cities. Now, if you pick in Canada, you know, there's, let's say the Friends Canada Highway is about the only what you'd call interstate highway that the federal government had anything to it and or interprovincial. Well, the minute they get to a city, they stop paying. You know, so you'll have this nice highway zoom up to a huge city like Calgary and Alberta or I call a million and a half people, pretty huge city, you know, and suddenly the road sucks. I mean, it just is terrible to get through the city. You know, my wife and I were traveling in France, La Belle, France, and we were 30 miles outside of Paris. All of a sudden the road went down into a tunnel, subterranean road now. And it went on and on and on for 30 miles all underground. And then it came up right in the center of Paris. We didn't have to go through the suburbs or, you know, any of the Enveron. We just came up and there was the Arc de Triomphe right in front of us. That's the way to go. You bypass all of the traffic areas that way. Well, but my point was who pays, you know, and in Canada you'd have, oh, wow, not me. You know, and not my neighbor and not nobody wants to pay. You know, and the only government with enough money to do so, you know, is the feds and they don't have near the scale of financing proportionally to what the French government has. Like European governments have way more taxes than Canada does and Canada has more than the U.S. does. You know, and so, I mean, it's surprising you got any roads at all. Where, no, and our provinces vary. For example, our wealthiest province is Alberta and they have beautiful roads running, you know, from nowhere to somewhere of lesser importance. You know, they got little weed, you know, urban areas with a wonderful paved road. Now, the two big cities in Alberta, you know, have a much better road transportation than other cities in Canada, but still it's not, it's much like your pot hole examples. It's far from appropriate especially because that's the only mode of transportation. You know, the, you know, like the, well, those two cities have light rail transportation and the one in Calgary carries more passengers than almost any LRT system in North America. But, you know, it's certainly not really, really speedy. No, it's better than, let's say I was on a train from the newer airport to downtown Manhattan, you know, and it wobbled, the whole carriage wobbled back and forth sideways as if, you know, the road bed was not at all level and, you know, it creaked and grunted and ground all the way there and the carriage looked like it was something that, you know, the Europeans sold secondhand 50 years ago. Let me offer some thoughts about that. I remember in the 80s, possibly the early 90s, a fellow named Spencer Abram was the, he was the energy secretary in the US and there was a big blackout in the Northeast part of the country, large blackout. And they came to him and they said, Spencer, you know, what's wrong with you? How come you couldn't avoid this? How come the, you know, the energy infrastructure was so deficient and decrepit that, you know, we had this blackout, why didn't you do something? And he said, and I will never forget this. He said, you know, you really have it wrong. You can't build the interstate road system and never update it. You can't do that. It gets old. You have to keep on updating all these systems, use the best technology. And they do that in Europe to a large extent. And they do that in Japan or the parts of Asia, Korea, for example, because, you know, they start from zero. So whatever they do is new, okay? And China, the same thing. The other thought I was going to, you know, suggest to you is that transportation, you know, we have mismanaged transportation and it sounds like, you know, the US and Canada are in roughly the same place. We've mismanaged it because we haven't understood the lesson of Spencer Abram. But more than that, it is a canary in the coal mine. It is a metric of what we think of our community society, what we think of getting along and getting together. I mean, one of the great lessons that I learned from Bogota, Columbia, I told you before, is that these people, investors, it's private, have decided that building roads into the hinterland is a way to connect the country, bring government to people, people to government and make a collective country better for everyone. Okay, so transportation is so critical for the country in general, whatever society it is. And we don't understand that, we don't do that. Finally, last point, and I'll let you respond to me, is technology. You know, every time there's an accident with an autonomous vehicle, the media goes wild and says we shouldn't allow this. We have to have a congressional hearing. We have to stop everything until we figure it out. No more autonomous vehicles, not only cars but trucks. But the future, I suggest Ken, is autonomous everything. You know, it's more efficient for fuel. It's more efficient for getting the right route. It's more efficient for the way the roads are used and the way they've deteriorated. So autonomous vehicles are coming, and that includes airplanes. And, you know, there are a lot of airplanes, interestingly enough, made in China, you can buy a kit. You can buy an airplane kit from Costco, big kit, huge kit, and in your backyard, you can take the kit apart and make a little airplane out of it. Now, there's no software to keep you from colliding or anything, but that's coming. What I'm saying is that we have to keep up with technology on transportation. Well, there's no rules in the sky. I'll think about drones. Yes, well, drones are obvious. I mean, you've had gyrocopters for a long time. But one area of transportation where the U.S. is really good, it's pipelines. You know, now I tend to think that the maintenance on some of those pipelines may really be suffering. However, you know, their, you know, pipeline system in the U.S. is really efficient. Of all the areas of transportation, that's probably the one where relative to the U.S., Canada looks worse, you know, the worst comparatively. But we have a variety of domestic reasons why that's so. I mean, the U.S. basically thinks of energy security with its economic side is really key where Europe and Canada took the same position of, oh, well, hurrah, hurrah for the environment to heck with anything else, kick energy, you know, any way you can. And, you know, Europe's stuck in here because of it. Canada's economically not doing as well as they should because of it. But nevertheless, you know, the difference is there where, you know, some countries want to throw rocks at the U.S. saying, well, you just are pumping out the oil and gas like crazy, well, the world needs it. Well, it's very interesting that you talk about that because if we are really to address climate change, we have to deploy electric vehicles not only in one place but all places of the world. And, you know, the U.S. creates a lot of greenhouse gases, I guess, so does Canada, but not as much. And, you know, what's happening is that the oil and gas interests are really standing in the way, as they have been for decades, of electric vehicles. The only way to deal with this huge amount of greenhouse gas is to make everybody use electric vehicle. And I feel that the efforts in this country are really limp. You know, if you were king of the universe and you wanted to deal with climate change, which is presenting itself every day now and in tougher and tougher ways, you know, you would start out with a car and you'd make every car electric vehicle and you'd make electric vehicle right now, not next year, not five or 10 years away. I don't really think that automobiles are the worst. I mean, I tend to think of international shipping. You know, these large boats, you know, they're using bunker fuel and I mean, they're to talk about, you know, the most non-environmental of all of the oil and gas products. You know, where, you know, I would think of a lot of things that I would do, you know, for climate change before I would be kicking the oil and gas industry, like in Canada, the oil and gas companies are at the forefront of installing, you know, wind farms and solar farms and, you know, they're on a world comparative basis. The oil and gas industry is probably the cleanest. You know, it's certainly better than the US and the US is better than anywhere else in the world that I'm aware of in terms of oil and gas standards. You know, we have political considerations and considerations of investors and corporate interests and all that. But to save the planet, we have to do it all at the same time, right now. That's my view. I mean, you know, you may not agree fully after all you were originally from Alberta, which is, you know, an oil and gas place. I understand, Ken. Deep, deep in my heart, I have this, you know, unconscious favor of the oil and gas industry. So you're trying to tell me? Well, similar to the bunker fuel, you know, problem of international shipping, you have the creation of power. Well, you say electric vehicles, we've got to have all electric vehicles. Well, where the hell are you going to get the electricity? You see, you can't, like China, what are they doing? They're pumping out, you know, one new major coal power plant every month or more often than that. Like, great big plants, you know, now they could do nuclear, they could do all kinds of things. They're just sucking air for the need to have more electricity. Well, you know, North America are, you know, newest power, let's call it the economic problem in Canada or the U.S., is we both need to generate and offer a lot more electricity than we are to deal with the stuff that's coming down the pipe, of which electric cars are a significant one. You know, but, you know, your transportation of goods, you know, you get on it and, you know, go on any U.S. interstate highway and or on, you know, the Canadian highways that travel between any major city. And, you know, what percentage are 18 wheelers? You know, a big percentage and, you know, those are diesel, not just gasoline. You know, today they're diesel. Well, when are they going to be electrified? Nobody's pushing that to the same pace that they're pushing electric cars. You know, you've got to take the whole bundle. Like when I was saying the U.S. had a smarter policy than Europe in terms of energy in general, because you were saying energy security should come first. You know, and I think that, you know, the way you blindly, I don't know, I'll just pick on you to say blindly said, you know, electric vehicles are the be-all and end-all. You know, like Trump can exaggerate or stretch what somebody said, I suppose I can too. I don't think that that's the total picture. Well, I think all these things are connected. Energy and transportation takes a lot of energy to run transportation wherever you get it from. In fact, it takes a lot of energy to run an economy, a country that has plentiful and relatively cheap energy has got a much better chance of having a good economy. And a country that has good transportation has a much better chance of having a better economy. And the problem is, are we doing the right thing in public policy and in making, you know, demands on our individuals and our businesses to get on board with developing cheap energy and clean energy and in the same way, developing transportation for everyone. And the answer in my view is generally no, although I agree with you, that Europe is more conscious of this issue. And I don't know really where Asia fits. I know where China fits, but Japan tries hard and I think Korea tries hard. Bottom line is, I think Canada and the US are out of parity and you can disagree with me. Near the bottom of the pack and on some issues, that's correct, but on the concept of a nice balance of the energy security and its interplay with or it is the basis of all economics or most economics. That the US as a better policy than Europe or Canada or China, you know, now Japan and South Korea, you know, have a problem that they just don't happen to have very many sources of energy, you know, and they had Fukushima and you know, looking at, they also have the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, so you'd say, you know, what should they do? So they're crying for LNG or liquid natural gas and the US has stepped up to the plate in terms of energy security worldwide, you know, but why did the US do it? It may be because, you know, your cynical way to say, oh, well, the greedy oil and gas industry pushed and so they could pump out more gas from the US and ship it off to South Korea and Japan. You know, well, Canada's so stupid in our natural gas that we've been sending it to the US, who's sending it to ports, converting it to LNG and sending it to Korea, Japan, China, anybody else will take it, you know, and getting more than half of the value out of doing that. We haven't really even touched the subject here today, honestly, because if you go through your own life and the transportation you take or don't take and the changes that are visible around us, we need to really address this because as you said, energy and transportation are central to the development of global economy. At a time, Ken, and I'm so sorry, but I know we'll find something else to discuss next time. Don't you think so? Thanks very much. Ken Rogers, Dr. Ken Rogers in Kelowna, Canada, Allah.