A wasteful proposal.(ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING)

The hottest issue in Northern Ontario today is biomass. It is also an IQ test for Dalton McGuinty, Michael .Gravelle, and Donna Cansfield.

Are they going to undermine Northern growth once and for all, or are they going to use the last scraps of the Northern forest to blaze a new path?

The Ontario government has been administering Northern resources since Confederation. They did such a good job of extracting the wealth that politicians tell me that Northern Ontario now costs the province more than it brings in. If Queen's Park really believes this, I'd like to repeat my offer to buy the entire money-losing region for a dollar.

In the early days the goal really was to suck as much wealth out of the region as possible. Today there is almost nothing left in the North but the scraps, literally. The province is about to hand out the rights to take the wood waste, the shavings, the bark and needles left over after 142 years of exploitation.

I have a modest proposal, hand the wood waste over to the people of Northern Ontario. Give every community a permanent biomass entitlement of 10-tons per-person, per year. We would have a huge boost to local economies that cost the province almost nothing.

This is radical talk. It goes against every principle of provincial resource management for the last 142 years. Of course the last 142 years have failed to create a sustainable Northern economy. Michael Gravelle and Donna Cansfield need to think about Albert Einstein's observation: an insane person is someone who does the same thing over and over again and expects different results.

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Why not try a strategy that we know will work? Encourage communities across the North to convert to renewable energy. Let's have a Northern infrastructure program to install wood-waste heating systems in every public building in the North. Energy costs for communities will come down. When gas and oil prices take off, as they will, Northern communities will be insulated. They won't have to raise taxes to cover the increase. The North will be economically sustainable.

We should invest in district heating, too. Instead of having separate furnaces in every house, we could have wood-fired community owned co-gen plants that provide low cost hot water to surrounding homes. We would be creating a new industry and saving home-owner's money.

We should have a biodiesel program to supply renewable fuel for all publicly owned vehicles. It could expand to include all the mining and forest industry vehicles. Northerners could be encouraged to buy diesel vehicles.

These are all demand side projects - they would help create a market for wood waste and pellets in the North. They don't depend on selling off Northern resources in the vague hope of getting a good price. They would create more opportunities for technological innovations and business development than any other scheme the government can come up with.

Will it work? By now, every Northerner knows that it works in Europe and the economics make more sense than any export strategy. We send something like a billion dollars a year out of the region for heat and transportation fuels. How could it possibly be more profitable to send large volumes of waste wood out of the region so other people can make energy for themselves?

It is just nutty to think that shipping Northern bio-fibre to Europe is better than using it in Northern Ontario. You have to be crazy to think that shipping Northern fuels to Southern coal plants is good economics. Fuel prices are higher in the North, so we actually save more by using biofuels here. In fact, we are saving at RETAIL prices and exporters have to earn at WHOLESALE prices. Exporters get to take their share after they pay for transportation. It is a lot cheaper to ship to the local hospital or school heating plant.

Lets create a Northern Ontario Renewable Energy Corridor from Kenora to Mattawa. Let's use the last scraps of our Northern resources to get all Northerners off fossil fuels by 2019. And let's build a stronger Northern economy as we do it.

Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian University.

drobinson@laurentian.ca

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