It takes about a decade to build a nuclear reactor. In the time I've observed the climate debate, we could have replaced every single coal power plant in this country, simultaneously eliminating one of the top emitters and fostering a high-tech industry. Oh, and provide cheap energy giving us huge advantages in other parts of our economy. The money from that could go towards preparation for, and mitigation of, future disasters.
Instead, at one end of the spectrum we have stubborn denial, at the other end we have useless virtue signalling and lint-picking. No nuance. No pragmatism. No progress. Just bullshit.
Our leaders are not serious people, because we're not serious people. I fear what it will take to change that.
Possibly, but that would have required some serious questioning of the way our economy has evolved over the last 25 years and whether we might need to take a long, hard look at adopting industrial strategies or doing something about our branch plant economy, but that woud have sent many of our chattering classes into hysterics at the idea of questoning the sacred neoliberal wisdom handed down from on high.
SMRs would be a better solution to energy requirements of smaller isolated communities. They would eliminate the need for long transmission lines that are also subject to failure in severe weather situations like freezing rain which is a frequent weather phenomenon during an average Canadian winter.
Terrific to hear a conservative-side writer going on about "resiliency". Because "resiliency" is what the beloved Free Market actually sucks at. Resiliency never makes economic sense at the time the decision is made.
The heavily-regulated landline industry has resiliency. I've never heard dead air on a phone in my life, always a dial tone, even with all other power out. The cell-phone industry is a great example of a lightly-regulated alternative, where call quality is JUUUUUST good enough to keep you from angrily cancelling your contract with the oligopoly, and no better.
A strong military - never needed even once to defend Canada, and needed only once a generation to defend our "strategic partners" (or participate in their power-move adventures) - is another great example of resiliency. Harper cut their budget 5%.
Frankly, we need to re-purpose our military to be a civil disaster defense organization primarily, that also practices killing when they have spare time, instead of the other way around. There's no need to participate in "large unit manuvers"; just train lots of highly independent snipers, we're good at that anyway.
The "Free Market" is great at resiliency as it encourages markets with lots of participants. If Supplier A can't deliver, Supplier B can step up. Putting all the egg's in a government basket is risky.
Why didn't free-market companies build a whole separate highway system through BC that they could now be charging high rents to use? Man, THAT would have been resilient, a "Supplier B" for a national highway system.
Some things can't profit from the notion of "lots of participants". Unless you'd like to see three different companies put three different electrical systems, three different sewer systems, and three different sets of water pipes (and plants, and reservoirs, and pump stations), so that you can choose between three utility companies for every utility services. Each of which would have to pay for the same length of wires, pipes, or roads, with only a third of the customers.
Hence the term "natural monopoly". I once ran into a Libertarian (on slashdot.org, where else) so into it that he refused to believe that every town had only one waterworks because of simple economics, not because "The government forbade competition; there are no natural monopolies". But everybody else does get the example.
Much of what will be challenged by climate change is either a natural monopoly, or is currently an unnatural oligopoly, like our terrible, expensive cell service. Dikes, and levees and utilities, and rail, roads and bridges, are just not subject to "Supplier B" solutions. Do the competitive cell companies all set up their own cell towers, for greater resilience? No, only if forced to. Mostly, they share cell towers wherever possible, creating greater profit efficiency but less resiliency.
The free market can create resilient products and services, but government has to both mandate it, and as needed, inject money to pay for it, since "resiliency" is the opposite of saleable: pay extra now so that it will not fail even once per decade. Everybody hates insurance salesmen.
The enemy of resilience is a monopoly. Government has to enforce laws against monopolies. A separate highway systems isn't resilient but also having rail access and air access is. Sure, occasionally one, two or more may break down at the same time but resilience does come from OPEN markets more than government mandates. We used to have better rail ,(CN, CP and others)and air access (AC, CP, and others) until we allowed them to combine and collude. Did the government stop that? It was their mandate. Will they stop Rogers and Shaw from combining?
You're conflating this government's submission to oligopolies ("regulatory capture") to the question of whether resiliency can be obtained by the profit motive, rather than mandated from above by a power that doesn't care about profit.
It's conceivable that a purely profit-taking entity could prepare for events of "black swan" rarity, like a 1-in-100-year flood, the investors waiting patiently for three generations for the payoff when the flood comes, and they can charge insane prices for rescue or whatever. But in practice, it's never happened. The only exception are insurance companies, which do insure against very rare events by spreading the risk very widely. But insurance companies almost never mitigate their OWN risk by actually preparing for the disaster, physically - again, it isn't worth it in profit terms, the time-to-payback is too long. They insure 100 communities against flood, and they pay out to the one community that gets the flood, but they definitely don't build 100 anti-flood barriers so they don't have to pay out once.
A "leviathan", whether it's a government, or a heavily-regulated industry like landline-telephone, electrical generation (outside of Texas), or air travel, actually can just invest in safety, charge people for it, and stay in business. Because of the monopoly. But if they had to compete with an alternative service provider that was not regulated to be safe, they'd be outcompeted in no time.
An airline that just skipped the insane levels of checks and re-checks on every nut and bolt, every maintenanance, all operation, would be able to fly you around for a good 30% cheaper, still only lose one flight in a couple of thousand, and, scoop up most of the business from people who shrug at the risk, as they shrug at COVID risk.
If you want that airline to exist, vote for those rules, Libertarian parties will support that. You'll come in behind the PPC in the polls, though. People want that risk mitigated, and they've never seen a profit-making institution mitigate risk. The highest-profit companies - big pharma with their opioids, and big finance with their Black Swan financial disaster - embrace the highest levels of risk in search of profits.
And why not? Government always cleans up their messes when their risk-taking produces disaster.
You say that profit making institutions never mitigate risk -- but they do. They buy politicians. You talk about government regulation -- and cell companies are highly regulated -- but as you say provide minimal service but they have no risk to mitigate. I don't know how a government mandates would have solved the BC problem. (They are already in charge of the highways). Mandate a second highway? Certainly the bridges that were washed out met government standards (even if they were inadequate in foresight).
Government can and should set safety standards. After that companies should be allowed to compete on price/service/convenience etc. but they must compete and not collude or combine. When they are allowed the kind of control over their own industries it is easy to maximize for profit.
I think we are very lucky to be able to watch Jen Gerson rise to be one of the top Canadian journalists before our eyes. Another fantastic article that once again nails it. Well done!!
Perhaps alternative routes from the coast are in order. The current configuration creates a single point of failure for 4 highways (TCH, Highway 7, Coquihalla, Crowsnest), 2 railways (CP and CNR) and 2 pipelines (TransMountain and West Coast) at Hope. The only alternatives I could imagine would be upgrading Highway 99 to full freeway all of the way to Kamloops, or better connectivity into the US Interstate System (upgrade 99 south to full freeway and then US/BC 97 into freeway). Of course Canadian and BC government policy favors real estate NIMBY's and activist groups over building essential infrastructure.
Great point about our underequipped military and weak warning systems. Maybe Stephen Harper's agenda of "tightening the screws" on Ottawa and deliberately kneecapping Ottawa's ability to get things done and cutting funding to everything from coastal rescue systems to the military wasn't such a good idea after all.
Preston Manning talked for years about the need for things like carbon pricing, and how the conservative movement needs to stop ceding the environment as an issue to the left. For his troubles he was largely ignored by Stephen Harper and publicly shit on by Ezra Levant.
Now I can just imagine Manning shaking his head and thinking "told you so!" at both the political and physical developments since then.
Will we ever stop blaming Harper and Harris for all our problems? There have been many years that have passed with many governments installed since they "implemented their inestimable damage to Ontario and the Country".
What is not talked about is adaptation. Media loves to talk about climate change, how we should implement carbon taxes, shut down our oil and gas. This will of course do nothing to affect climate change unless the rest of the world magically start acting. And even then it will take decades to see any impact. In the meantime we need to finally invest in adaptation measures which are totally controlled by Canada. Every nation should also finally invest in serious research into finding cheaper alternative energy sources that could replace oil and gas.
We are a country that chose to create our whole identity around universal cradle to grave social benefits (and not being America) rather than soverignty, nation building and the maintenance of our nation. We chose universal daycare over soverignty and the infrastructure of a modern society.
We also have a cultural aversion to self sufficiency and accountability. Too American for our chattering classes no doubt.
This is not how countries that survive the long term and thrive act. Every disaster poorly handled means one less reason to even bother with the Canadian project. Good thing there isn't a rebellious bone in the Canadian body or there would be hell to pay.
Even the darkest writer's choice to set pen to paper, keyboard to screen, is animated by the presumption that somewhere in the endless swirl of Time, someone out there will hear you and acknowledge your efforts.
Doubtless, shouting from the rooftop has its momentary personal rewards.
However the trend lines of human history are not encouraging. Humans are, despite all the self-promotional advertising, by and large, dumb animals addicted to their incremental habits. Evolutionary incrementalism however is not the time frame for surviving catastrophic systemic crises of one's own making.
Humans are simply not capable of acting in concert to alleviate the consequences of their own behaviours on a planetary scale. Catastrophic collapse is the hard teacher of civilizations. 'Build back better' is not the philosophy of cockroaches.
Which brings me to Big Data. Big Data?
Big Data is part of the human effort to build a form of intelligence humans do not have. In order to overcome its own deficits of perception, analysis, memory and synthesis a particular form of life attempts to create a new form of life without those deficiencies within a non-evolutionary time frame. No surprise if said creature fails to anticipate all the consequences of its efforts.
Approaching the planet like you're just re-arranging the furniture in your room is not just a micro-macro disconnect. God, The Creator, Evolution's Sorcerer in Chief, The Animating Principles of All Things, is not just a built back better human. Bigger, stronger, smarter, faster than the previous edition.
In other words.
The idea that a bunch of humans can micro-manage the planet is just a dumb idea. If my observations are unconvincing, I suggest a conversation with cockroaches.
It's appropriate to talk about climate change in this context. Let's avoid the pointless debate about whether the flooding in B.C. is caused by climate change. That's irrelevant. Even if this single flood were not caused by climate change, we can expect more. You should have stopped here.
Adopt carbon taxes to demonstrate global leadership? When was the last time Canada had enough political wherewithal or international respect to be thought a leader in anything? And how convenient to think of it as someone else’s problem. Instead of throwing our hands up and saying that addressing the climate crisis falls to countries more powerful than Canada, how about tackling it head-on (carbon taxes are a start) simply because keeping our own house in order is the right thing to do? Naïve, I know, and nostalgic for a Canada that, again, is long gone, if it ever really existed in the first place. In any case, it’s not as if our hands are clean on this score – Canada’s per capita CO2 emissions are higher than any country/region the writer lists. We have tremendous reserves of untapped carbon in the ground, which gives us outsized leverage in determining which direction the response to the crisis is going to go. Canada figures more in the causes and solutions to the climate crisis than we have the courage or the moral compass to admit.
-transporting steam is inefficient over distance. SAGD plants needs onsite steam plants. Until SMR become commercial, the alternative of large centralized reactors is not feasible
-using electricity to create heat is also very inefficient, so a nuclear reactor generating stream to prouduce electricity to produce heat will not be cost effective. Maybe SMR could be used in a cogen scenario where the steam both heats bitumen formations and generates electricity
-the current regulatory environment overly includes stakeholders to the point of stalemate. By the time all of the community consultation etc. completes, the SAGD site will be depleted or the world will have moved beyond hydrocarbons
-Alberta lacks large bodies of water to cool a large scale nuclear reactor. Water could be pumped from the Athabasca, but see point #2 above
SAGD operators are already implementing many new technologies to reduce demand for natural gas. Greatest impact will be solvent based extraction. Instread of pumping steam, the upper well bore distributes heated solvent.
Jen you say "But instead of thinking through these problems, we're spending years — literally years — fighting over which level of government has the right to levy a carbon tax, and whether that tax should be $30 per ton or $120. " as if it doesn't matter to Canadians. I wish I were so wealthy that it didn't matter to me as much as it does. (As I pay more for EVERYTHING, Netflix and other subscriptions will be the first to go)
I also think that we want to be very wary of how much power we give to a Federal government vs provincial governments. If that concerns me in Ontario imagine how concerning it is to those outside of the "shield".
Sure it shouldn't take so long, but don't think it doesn't matter. The more I pay in taxes the less I can give to the charities helping my fellow Canadians in distress.
It takes about a decade to build a nuclear reactor. In the time I've observed the climate debate, we could have replaced every single coal power plant in this country, simultaneously eliminating one of the top emitters and fostering a high-tech industry. Oh, and provide cheap energy giving us huge advantages in other parts of our economy. The money from that could go towards preparation for, and mitigation of, future disasters.
Instead, at one end of the spectrum we have stubborn denial, at the other end we have useless virtue signalling and lint-picking. No nuance. No pragmatism. No progress. Just bullshit.
Our leaders are not serious people, because we're not serious people. I fear what it will take to change that.
Possibly, but that would have required some serious questioning of the way our economy has evolved over the last 25 years and whether we might need to take a long, hard look at adopting industrial strategies or doing something about our branch plant economy, but that woud have sent many of our chattering classes into hysterics at the idea of questoning the sacred neoliberal wisdom handed down from on high.
SMRs would be a better solution to energy requirements of smaller isolated communities. They would eliminate the need for long transmission lines that are also subject to failure in severe weather situations like freezing rain which is a frequent weather phenomenon during an average Canadian winter.
Jen, you nailed it!
Exactly right from beginning to end. Thank you.
Terrific to hear a conservative-side writer going on about "resiliency". Because "resiliency" is what the beloved Free Market actually sucks at. Resiliency never makes economic sense at the time the decision is made.
The heavily-regulated landline industry has resiliency. I've never heard dead air on a phone in my life, always a dial tone, even with all other power out. The cell-phone industry is a great example of a lightly-regulated alternative, where call quality is JUUUUUST good enough to keep you from angrily cancelling your contract with the oligopoly, and no better.
A strong military - never needed even once to defend Canada, and needed only once a generation to defend our "strategic partners" (or participate in their power-move adventures) - is another great example of resiliency. Harper cut their budget 5%.
Frankly, we need to re-purpose our military to be a civil disaster defense organization primarily, that also practices killing when they have spare time, instead of the other way around. There's no need to participate in "large unit manuvers"; just train lots of highly independent snipers, we're good at that anyway.
The "Free Market" is great at resiliency as it encourages markets with lots of participants. If Supplier A can't deliver, Supplier B can step up. Putting all the egg's in a government basket is risky.
Why didn't free-market companies build a whole separate highway system through BC that they could now be charging high rents to use? Man, THAT would have been resilient, a "Supplier B" for a national highway system.
Some things can't profit from the notion of "lots of participants". Unless you'd like to see three different companies put three different electrical systems, three different sewer systems, and three different sets of water pipes (and plants, and reservoirs, and pump stations), so that you can choose between three utility companies for every utility services. Each of which would have to pay for the same length of wires, pipes, or roads, with only a third of the customers.
Hence the term "natural monopoly". I once ran into a Libertarian (on slashdot.org, where else) so into it that he refused to believe that every town had only one waterworks because of simple economics, not because "The government forbade competition; there are no natural monopolies". But everybody else does get the example.
Much of what will be challenged by climate change is either a natural monopoly, or is currently an unnatural oligopoly, like our terrible, expensive cell service. Dikes, and levees and utilities, and rail, roads and bridges, are just not subject to "Supplier B" solutions. Do the competitive cell companies all set up their own cell towers, for greater resilience? No, only if forced to. Mostly, they share cell towers wherever possible, creating greater profit efficiency but less resiliency.
The free market can create resilient products and services, but government has to both mandate it, and as needed, inject money to pay for it, since "resiliency" is the opposite of saleable: pay extra now so that it will not fail even once per decade. Everybody hates insurance salesmen.
The enemy of resilience is a monopoly. Government has to enforce laws against monopolies. A separate highway systems isn't resilient but also having rail access and air access is. Sure, occasionally one, two or more may break down at the same time but resilience does come from OPEN markets more than government mandates. We used to have better rail ,(CN, CP and others)and air access (AC, CP, and others) until we allowed them to combine and collude. Did the government stop that? It was their mandate. Will they stop Rogers and Shaw from combining?
You're conflating this government's submission to oligopolies ("regulatory capture") to the question of whether resiliency can be obtained by the profit motive, rather than mandated from above by a power that doesn't care about profit.
It's conceivable that a purely profit-taking entity could prepare for events of "black swan" rarity, like a 1-in-100-year flood, the investors waiting patiently for three generations for the payoff when the flood comes, and they can charge insane prices for rescue or whatever. But in practice, it's never happened. The only exception are insurance companies, which do insure against very rare events by spreading the risk very widely. But insurance companies almost never mitigate their OWN risk by actually preparing for the disaster, physically - again, it isn't worth it in profit terms, the time-to-payback is too long. They insure 100 communities against flood, and they pay out to the one community that gets the flood, but they definitely don't build 100 anti-flood barriers so they don't have to pay out once.
A "leviathan", whether it's a government, or a heavily-regulated industry like landline-telephone, electrical generation (outside of Texas), or air travel, actually can just invest in safety, charge people for it, and stay in business. Because of the monopoly. But if they had to compete with an alternative service provider that was not regulated to be safe, they'd be outcompeted in no time.
An airline that just skipped the insane levels of checks and re-checks on every nut and bolt, every maintenanance, all operation, would be able to fly you around for a good 30% cheaper, still only lose one flight in a couple of thousand, and, scoop up most of the business from people who shrug at the risk, as they shrug at COVID risk.
If you want that airline to exist, vote for those rules, Libertarian parties will support that. You'll come in behind the PPC in the polls, though. People want that risk mitigated, and they've never seen a profit-making institution mitigate risk. The highest-profit companies - big pharma with their opioids, and big finance with their Black Swan financial disaster - embrace the highest levels of risk in search of profits.
And why not? Government always cleans up their messes when their risk-taking produces disaster.
You say that profit making institutions never mitigate risk -- but they do. They buy politicians. You talk about government regulation -- and cell companies are highly regulated -- but as you say provide minimal service but they have no risk to mitigate. I don't know how a government mandates would have solved the BC problem. (They are already in charge of the highways). Mandate a second highway? Certainly the bridges that were washed out met government standards (even if they were inadequate in foresight).
Government can and should set safety standards. After that companies should be allowed to compete on price/service/convenience etc. but they must compete and not collude or combine. When they are allowed the kind of control over their own industries it is easy to maximize for profit.
I think we are very lucky to be able to watch Jen Gerson rise to be one of the top Canadian journalists before our eyes. Another fantastic article that once again nails it. Well done!!
Perhaps alternative routes from the coast are in order. The current configuration creates a single point of failure for 4 highways (TCH, Highway 7, Coquihalla, Crowsnest), 2 railways (CP and CNR) and 2 pipelines (TransMountain and West Coast) at Hope. The only alternatives I could imagine would be upgrading Highway 99 to full freeway all of the way to Kamloops, or better connectivity into the US Interstate System (upgrade 99 south to full freeway and then US/BC 97 into freeway). Of course Canadian and BC government policy favors real estate NIMBY's and activist groups over building essential infrastructure.
Those will hit mass market right after the electric ones
Great point about our underequipped military and weak warning systems. Maybe Stephen Harper's agenda of "tightening the screws" on Ottawa and deliberately kneecapping Ottawa's ability to get things done and cutting funding to everything from coastal rescue systems to the military wasn't such a good idea after all.
Preston Manning talked for years about the need for things like carbon pricing, and how the conservative movement needs to stop ceding the environment as an issue to the left. For his troubles he was largely ignored by Stephen Harper and publicly shit on by Ezra Levant.
Now I can just imagine Manning shaking his head and thinking "told you so!" at both the political and physical developments since then.
Will we ever stop blaming Harper and Harris for all our problems? There have been many years that have passed with many governments installed since they "implemented their inestimable damage to Ontario and the Country".
What is not talked about is adaptation. Media loves to talk about climate change, how we should implement carbon taxes, shut down our oil and gas. This will of course do nothing to affect climate change unless the rest of the world magically start acting. And even then it will take decades to see any impact. In the meantime we need to finally invest in adaptation measures which are totally controlled by Canada. Every nation should also finally invest in serious research into finding cheaper alternative energy sources that could replace oil and gas.
We are a country that chose to create our whole identity around universal cradle to grave social benefits (and not being America) rather than soverignty, nation building and the maintenance of our nation. We chose universal daycare over soverignty and the infrastructure of a modern society.
We also have a cultural aversion to self sufficiency and accountability. Too American for our chattering classes no doubt.
This is not how countries that survive the long term and thrive act. Every disaster poorly handled means one less reason to even bother with the Canadian project. Good thing there isn't a rebellious bone in the Canadian body or there would be hell to pay.
Jen, I believe you are hopelessly optimistic.
Even the darkest writer's choice to set pen to paper, keyboard to screen, is animated by the presumption that somewhere in the endless swirl of Time, someone out there will hear you and acknowledge your efforts.
Doubtless, shouting from the rooftop has its momentary personal rewards.
However the trend lines of human history are not encouraging. Humans are, despite all the self-promotional advertising, by and large, dumb animals addicted to their incremental habits. Evolutionary incrementalism however is not the time frame for surviving catastrophic systemic crises of one's own making.
Humans are simply not capable of acting in concert to alleviate the consequences of their own behaviours on a planetary scale. Catastrophic collapse is the hard teacher of civilizations. 'Build back better' is not the philosophy of cockroaches.
Which brings me to Big Data. Big Data?
Big Data is part of the human effort to build a form of intelligence humans do not have. In order to overcome its own deficits of perception, analysis, memory and synthesis a particular form of life attempts to create a new form of life without those deficiencies within a non-evolutionary time frame. No surprise if said creature fails to anticipate all the consequences of its efforts.
Approaching the planet like you're just re-arranging the furniture in your room is not just a micro-macro disconnect. God, The Creator, Evolution's Sorcerer in Chief, The Animating Principles of All Things, is not just a built back better human. Bigger, stronger, smarter, faster than the previous edition.
In other words.
The idea that a bunch of humans can micro-manage the planet is just a dumb idea. If my observations are unconvincing, I suggest a conversation with cockroaches.
It's appropriate to talk about climate change in this context. Let's avoid the pointless debate about whether the flooding in B.C. is caused by climate change. That's irrelevant. Even if this single flood were not caused by climate change, we can expect more. You should have stopped here.
Adopt carbon taxes to demonstrate global leadership? When was the last time Canada had enough political wherewithal or international respect to be thought a leader in anything? And how convenient to think of it as someone else’s problem. Instead of throwing our hands up and saying that addressing the climate crisis falls to countries more powerful than Canada, how about tackling it head-on (carbon taxes are a start) simply because keeping our own house in order is the right thing to do? Naïve, I know, and nostalgic for a Canada that, again, is long gone, if it ever really existed in the first place. In any case, it’s not as if our hands are clean on this score – Canada’s per capita CO2 emissions are higher than any country/region the writer lists. We have tremendous reserves of untapped carbon in the ground, which gives us outsized leverage in determining which direction the response to the crisis is going to go. Canada figures more in the causes and solutions to the climate crisis than we have the courage or the moral compass to admit.
Good article Jen ... except for this incongruous sentence -
"However, the residents of British Columbia sure didn't get the same kind of notice of imminent danger that their American counterparts surely did."
???
Residents in Washington state got early warning where residents in BC did not. We will have a column on this coming Monday.
Thanks. I look forward to your Monday column.
At best, the world has ~125 years of accurate weather data. These allegedly "unprecedented" events may not be so unusual.
Nailed it! Well said Jen Gerson.
Several challenges to nuclear powered SAGD:
-transporting steam is inefficient over distance. SAGD plants needs onsite steam plants. Until SMR become commercial, the alternative of large centralized reactors is not feasible
-using electricity to create heat is also very inefficient, so a nuclear reactor generating stream to prouduce electricity to produce heat will not be cost effective. Maybe SMR could be used in a cogen scenario where the steam both heats bitumen formations and generates electricity
-the current regulatory environment overly includes stakeholders to the point of stalemate. By the time all of the community consultation etc. completes, the SAGD site will be depleted or the world will have moved beyond hydrocarbons
-Alberta lacks large bodies of water to cool a large scale nuclear reactor. Water could be pumped from the Athabasca, but see point #2 above
SAGD operators are already implementing many new technologies to reduce demand for natural gas. Greatest impact will be solvent based extraction. Instread of pumping steam, the upper well bore distributes heated solvent.
Pat -- good points all.
Jen you say "But instead of thinking through these problems, we're spending years — literally years — fighting over which level of government has the right to levy a carbon tax, and whether that tax should be $30 per ton or $120. " as if it doesn't matter to Canadians. I wish I were so wealthy that it didn't matter to me as much as it does. (As I pay more for EVERYTHING, Netflix and other subscriptions will be the first to go)
I also think that we want to be very wary of how much power we give to a Federal government vs provincial governments. If that concerns me in Ontario imagine how concerning it is to those outside of the "shield".
Sure it shouldn't take so long, but don't think it doesn't matter. The more I pay in taxes the less I can give to the charities helping my fellow Canadians in distress.