So now we get to help move people .....

[jazz]

When the canola trade issue hit there was widespread comments on social media like grow something else, find another customer, get out of the industry because climate change, canola is GMO, farmers are too rich, own too much, don't pay taxes, only work 3 months, they should learn to code, etc etc.

[grassfarmer]

Your generosity knows no bounds. Not only will you donate to our worthy cause, but you willingly agree to stay back and support the rest of Canada once the money tree has been chopped down. Are you aware of the financial implications of what you are agreeing to?

Yeah, and we're setting some more aside as well to help pay the bus fare home for all you misguided souls who'll no doubt be crying like babies the first time the Democrats are in power in the US and the Cons in Canada.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Yeah, and we're setting some more aside as well to help pay the bus fare home for all you misguided souls who'll no doubt be crying like babies the first time the Democrats are in power in the US and the Cons in Canada.

Even more generous than I could've imagined thanks again for the offers. Except the US Democrats are right of Canadian conservatives. Corrections, the electable US democrats, not the left wing nuts like AOC, whose goal seems to be ensuring Trump gets a second term. This is not a partisan issue on either side of the border. And it's not going away when Trudeau do is gone or when Trump is gone.

[sumdumguy]

Yeah, and we're setting some more aside as well to help pay the bus fare home for all you misguided souls who'll no doubt be crying like babies the first time the Democrats are in power in the US and the Cons in Canada.

Holy Crow, sell the greenback if those buffoons get power - Good Bye America. Then there will be a revolution and glory be - we ‘ll be cranking out bazookas out of our workshops to supply the cause. No problem, we won’t have to grow Canola, or anything else.

[katoe]

Any of you complainers got any money left in your agri invest accounts?

[dalek]

Pretty similar story for most of the Ontario flooding.


This is long but worth the read. Written by David Sapin who I do not have the pleasure of knowing.

THE FLOODS IN QUEBEC - - Some brilliant insights (and research) by our brilliant and insightful friend David Sapin

I've been doing a little homework over and above what the media are shoving down our throats.

Ste-Marthe-sur-le Lac (now ironically named Ste-Marthe-DANS-le-Lac) has lost one-third of it's territory to flood waters, and six thousand residents fled for their lives as waters rose dramatically within minutes after a dike burst.

If you look closely, ALL of the flooded houses are new developments, less than twenty years old. And ALL of them are built on a flood plain that has never, ever had any homes or roads or infrastructures built on it since, well, forever.

Why? Because, up until twenty years ago, it was a swamp that was flooded annually ever since the world began.

The old Ste-Marthe, with the church and the general store and the barber shop and the quaint century-old half-timber or red brick cottage-style homes is as dry as toast, and has been for a century and a half.

Why? Because they're all built on higher ground. Only a brain-dead moron would build his house in a swamp.

But twenty years ago, the Municipality in collaboration with developers and real estate agents decided to build not one, not ten, not one hundred but upwards of TWO THOUSAND houses on that swamp.

Cramped together on tiny lots of about 5,000 square feet each, functional cookie-cutter suburban houses devoid of any architectural merit sprouted like mushrooms. A mini-town, basically a suburb of a suburb, suddenly emerged from the swamp. There are no trees, and the streets are aptly named, First Street, Second Street, First Avenue, Second Avenue, etc.

The urban planning map could have been photocopied from a Soviet-era plan for a mining town in Kazakstan, circa 1935.

That said, the town increased it's population (and its' tax base) by 50% almost overnight, and everyone made shitloads of money.

The only problem was, it was still a swamp, and it still flooded annually. So they built a dike around the swamp to keep the water out.

And they built it out of dirt. Clay, to be specific. Part of the reason is that concrete and steel are onerous and un-ecological.

Now here's the thing. If you build a dam out of mud, then you will have to maintain it constantly. And that dike took a serious beating two years ago. And after inspection, it was agreed that the dike needed upgrading.

And because we are dealing with beaurocracies, the municipality analyzed the situation and wrote up a report, and that took a year, and then the report was submitted to the provincial ministry of transport and the ministry of sustainable development and the ministry of health and safety and public security and the ministry of the environment and the ministry of natural resources for approval and then the whole shebang had to be resubmitted at the federal level, and finally approval came in to shore up the dike for September of this year, five months from now, and two and a half years after the dike had been compromised by major floods in the spring of 2017, and five months too late to prevent six hundred million dollars in uninsurable damage to homeowners, ten million dollars in uninsurable damages to vehicles, sixty million dollars in uninsurable damage to city infrastructures, ten million dollars to erect two emergency dikes, two million dollars in emergency rescue costs and maybe a million bucks to fix the original dike.

Still, the dike is made from dirt, and even if you pile a shitload more dirt on top of it, it's still just a shitpile of dirt. one tiny runoff, the size of my finger, can breach that puppy within minutes. And that is precisely what happened.

Six thousand human lives and a billion dollars in equity were gambled away on a pile of dirt.

It won't be long before absolutely everyone will be shrieking about climate change. This disaster is not a result of climate change. It is a direct result of extremely bad, short-minded mismanagement at every level of government. That piece of land has been flooded every single year since God's creation. What the hell were you thinking by simply surrounding it with a pile of dirt, and then declaring it safe for human habitation forevermore?

Whatever specimen of human shit that dreamed up this wonderful social development program should immeditely blow their ****ing brains out, just after they relegate the huge commissions that they earned to a legitimate charity, like, say, Ducks Unlimited.

One more point. When you dike a swamp, the water, which for millions of years has flowed sideways, keeping the water level low, now can only move one way. Up. Ste-Marthe was just a tiny part of the Lake of Two Mountains, but that area is among the most beautiful in the country and possibly in the world. Who wouldn't want to buy a piece of that?

So similar development projects have been going on at a huge scale on Ile Bizard, in Roxboro and Pointe-Claire in the West Island of Montreal, and particularly in Vaudreuil-Dorion, just west of the island. Millions of hectares of wetland have been converted to bedroom communities all around the Lake of Two Mountains, and the water, when it comes, can no longer spread out. All it can do is rise. And rise it will. Every year a bit more. Not because of climate change, but due to poor management.

On the up side, the demand for waterfront property has declined considerably. People who thought that they were sitting on a goldmine are now paying cash out of pocket because they can't even give their homes away; they have to pay someone to take it off their hands, because the demolition and cleanup on waterfront property can cost a hundred thousand dollars or more. You've lost everything, and you have to pay 350 thousand dollars for the balance of your mortgage and the clean-up costs. The quebec government will give you 200 thousand dollars to buy back your land and return it to the swamp that it was supposed to be and always was.

Also that brand-new Hyundai Elantra that is costing you four bills a month is a total write-off, but it's not covered by your insurance, and without a car you don't have a job.

And insurance companies are right to refuse payment. You want to build there? Yup! You want to live there? Yup! And when the water rises and destroys your home and everything in it you want me to pay for that? Yup! Well, no. Thank you. Goodbye.

Not enough? Boo hoo. You wanted waterfront property. You were prepared to pay a premium for it. You wanted to buy water. You got served.

Seasonal floods have been a reality in Quebec since the last ice age. (Imagine THAT one!).

Four factors influence spring floods. Or maybe five.

Precipitation. It rains in spring. That's why they call it spring.
Snow melt. Snow melts in spring. That's why they call it spring.
Ground frost. In the winter, the earth freezes three feet deep. It's like concrete, and it can't absorb moisture, so any water on the ground will stay on the ground.
Gravity. It's a fact of life, and the universe depends on it to function properly. A dike is a human device designed to defy gravity. Gravity always wins. Always. That's why rocks always fall down, and never up. That's why it's called gravity. (from the latin ''Gravitas'', which literally means, ''serious shit''.
Ice dams. The ice on the surface of rivers breaks up into huge floating chunks that flow downstream. When they hit a narrow part of the river they pile up like bricks in a wall and dam the stream, which promptly overflows its' banks and floods the local village. When the church basement is inundated, the ping-pong tables and egg-salad sandwiches have to be emergency evacuated to the rectory.
We might just as well have built those houses at the bottom of the lake and covered them with plastic bubbles, but used the cheapest possible plastics available, knowing in advance that the bubbles would eventually fail and that everyone would drown, but their mortgages would be covered by their life insurance policies, and everyone except the dead people would make a shitload of money.

If they had simply spent a million dollars two years ago to refurbish the dike, we would have saved a billion dollars today. Better yet, if they had simply used common sense and decided that building a city on a swamp next to a lake the size of a small European country that floods every single year without exception, and surrounding it with a dike made of dirt yay high was a stupid idea, which it is, and always was, and always will be, then we wouldn't have these problems.

So who's gonna pony up that billion dollars in lost assets? Certainly not the people who amply lined their pockets in designing, promoting, building, financing and selling that bullshit snake-oil scheme in the first place. The folks upstream got their bags of money; the folks downstream, well, they just have to swallow their pride along with a big mouthful of swamp water.