Conservative thinkers urge stronger environmental focus
Nation must be ready to take action
OTTAWA — Two of Canada’s leading conservative power players served notice Friday that Canada must do more to both strengthen and trumpet the country’s environmental credentials if it expects to fight off international climate criticism and achieve its energy and economic goals.
Former federal environment minister Jim Prentice and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall were two of the star attractions Friday at the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa, and both delivered frank assessments of Canada’s strengths and weaknesses on the energy and environmental files.
Wall said introducing overdue federal greenhouse gas regulations for the oil and gas sector would send a helpful signal that Canada is taking action on the environment, but he doesn’t believe they’re necessary to get the Obama administration to approve the Keystone XL oilsands pipeline.
Prentice, CIBC vice-chairman and a former senior minister in the Harper government, said leading on the environment is an economic and political imperative for the federal government and Conservative party.
The federal government and Canada as a whole have at times been stuck on the wrong side of the environmental debate, Prentice said, and the country “can never again” be caught in a circumstance where it’s following on the environment instead of leading.
Global concern over climate change is increasing and Canada must be ready for it by taking aggressive environmental action, he said.
“Those who are paying attention can see that the next wave (of climate-change concern) is building again and the wave will come, and trust me, when it crests on Canada’s shore, it will be at its highest point,” Prentice told hundreds of grassroots conservatives, activists and political organizers gathered in Ottawa for the two-day conference. “And so Canada needs to be ready for it, and we as conservatives need to be ready for it.”
More ove r, Canada’s position in the debate “is amongst the most precarious” because of an economy that relies heavily on resource development, he said.
Prentice said Canada must adopt world-class greenhouse gas regulations for the oil and gas sector, but it can’t be done unilaterally because it would damage Canadian competitiveness. Rather, it must be done in concert with the United States because the environment is a North American issue.
At home, the country must also build economic partnerships with aboriginals that are based on sound environmental principles, he added.
“If you are in the energy business today, then you are in the environment business today,” Prentice added.
Earlier in the day, Wall said the Harper government’s unwillingness to introduce greenhouse gas regulations for the energy sector through eight years in office is “admittedly a long period,” but the Saskatchewan premier wants Ottawa to make sure it gets it right.
The populist premier said Canada must give the Obama administration more “environmental elbow room” to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and trumpet what Canada is al- ready doing on the environment, including harmonizing greenhouse gas targets with the United States.
Canada has focused its Keystone sales pitch to the U.S. on the number of jobs the pipeline would create, Wall said, but “what we now need to do is pivot to the environment.”
Wall acknowledged that having Ottawa introduce long-awaited greenhouse gas regulations for the oil and gas sector would certainly help Canada’s sales job on Keystone XL and send a strong message to other customers interested in Canada’s oil and gas.
“It would be a signal that would help (on Keystone XL). I don’t think it’s necessary because we have all of these other things to point to on the environmental side,” Wall told reporters, noting Canada’s efforts on carbon capture and storage, tackling coal-fired emissions and harmonizing greenhouse gas targets with the U.S.
Wall also called on the federal Conservative government to step in and force rail companies to haul more grain to alleviate what he says is a mounting agriculture crisis in Canada.
Billions of dollars worth of Canadian grain is stranded on the Prairies because of a lack of rail capacity to move it to market.
There are currently around 50 empty ships at the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert, B.C. waiting to ship Canadian grain abroad, he said, but a shortage of rail cars and a transportation bottleneck from the two main railways — CN Rail and CP Rail — are preventing the grain and other agricultural products from getting to the West Coast. A gathering of the Tory party
in exile: Coyne,
He was known as the Sherlock Holmes of medicine. Dr. Joseph Goldberger forged a career as an investigator of disease outbreaks, but he is best known for solving the puzzle of pellagra, ominously referred to as the disease of the four “D”s, for dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death.
This “Scourge of the South” erupted into an epidemic in 1906, striking about 3 million people until it began to decline in 1940. By that time it had dispatched about 100,000 mostly poor Southerners. The swath of death would have continued had it not been for Goldberger’s epidemiological skills.
Born in 1874 in Hungary, Goldberger shared both the country and year of birth with another tenacious investigator, Harry Houdini. While Houdini probed the possibility of life after death, Goldberger focused on keeping the living in this world as long as possible. He was brought to the U.S. at age 7 by his parents, who were in search of the American dream. The tenements of New York City turned out to be more of a nightmare; nevertheless, his grocer father managed to send his son to college. After two years of engineering, young Joseph switched paths and in 1895 graduated as a physician, at the top of his class.
General practice turned out to be somewhat unfulfilling and Goldberger, craving travel and adventure, took an exam for a commission in the U.S. Public Health Service. He ranked first among applicants and his career as an epidemic fighter was underway. It was tough going and Goldberger contracted almost every disease he investigated: dengue fever in Texas; typhus in Mexico; and yellow fever in New Orleans. But in New Orleans he caught something else as well: the eye of debutante Mary Farrar. That was a real problem with Joseph’s Orthodox Jewish parents, who objected to their marriage as strongly as Farrar’s family did.
In 1914, the surgeon general asked Goldberger to undertake an investigation of pellagra, a problem to which he would devote the rest of his life. At the time, pellagra was thought to be an infectious disease and patients were often quarantined and their families ostracized. Since the disease was common among cotton pickers, some speculated that cottonseed oil was the cause. Nonsensical cures ranging from arsenic and castor oil to strychnine and spring-water baths were proposed.
It wasn’t long before Goldberger published his first paper, Etiology of Pellagra: The Significance of Certain Epidemiological Observations with Respect Thereto, in which he noted that in mental hospitals and orphanages where pellagra among inmates was rampant, staff members did not contract the disease.
Goldberger had worked with infectious diseases enough to know that germs did not distinguish inmates from employees and he suggested that “the explanation of the peculiar exemption under discus- sion will be found in the opinion of the writer in a difference in the diet of the two groups.” And so it would turn out to be.
But proposing a hypothesis and proving it are different matters. Goldberger set out to show that pellagra could be cured by altering the diet, and that it could be induced with a restricted diet. His first experiment took him to an orphanage, where half the orphans had pellagra. In one ward, he instituted a diet that included milk, meat, eggs and fresh vegetables, while in another ward the orphans were kept on the usual diet of the South, basically grits, corn bread, collard greens, fatback and molasses. Pellagra was wiped out in the treated group, but its incidence was unchanged in the control ward.
Goldberger’s proposal to prove that pellagra could be induced was more controversial since trying to make people sick does not exactly mesh with the ethics of medicine. However, at the time prisoners were sometimes offered freedom if they “volunteered” for a medical trial. Eleven murderers, embezzlers and forgers were enlisted with aid of the governor of Mississippi, and they agreed to eat only the corn-based diet Goldberger had approved. The results were clear. After just six months, five of the men had contracted pellagra. Goldberger was accused of torture and critics complained that the whole experiment had been set up to pardon two convicts who were friends with the governor.
Goldberger retorted by organizing “filth parties” in which skin, nasal secretions, urine and feces from pellagra patients were mixed into dough and swallowed by volunteers. There was some nausea and diarrhea, but no pellagra. It simply was not an infectious disease.
The challenge now was to find the exact nature of the “pellagra preventive factor.” Goldberger went on to show that brewer’s yeast prevented the disease as effectively as milk, meat and vegetables, but he never managed to identify what the responsible component was. In 1937, Conrad Elvehjem extracted niacin from liver and soon after Tom Spies demonstrated that the compound cured pellagra. Niacin fell into the category of vitamins since these are substances that must be included in the diet to prevent specific diseases. Vitamin B3, as niacin came to be known, can actually be made by the liver from tryptophan, a common amino acid in proteins. But conversion is slow and it takes about 60 mg of tryptophan to make 1 mg of niacin. So unless we have a diet that is extremely high in protein, we need to get our niacin from food. Goldberger’s enthusiasm for recommending changes to the diet of the poor, and the addition of niacin to bread starting in 1938, led to a dramatic decline in pellagra.
Curiously, the disease had not been noted in Mexico, in spite of much of the population living on corn as a staple. That’s because niacin is actually found in corn but is bound to other molecules in a way that makes it unavailable to the body. In Mexico, corn is traditionally soaked in a lime solution before cooking, a process that releases the bound niacin.
Today, at least in the developed world, pellagra is no longer an issue but niacin still makes it into the news. It turns out that in doses far greater than that needed to prevent pellagra, it has a beneficial effect on blood-cholesterol profile, although it is associated with a flushing of the face that many find intolerable.
Goldberger’s dogged work in tracking down the cause of pellagra is a masterpiece of investigative craftsmanship, certainly worthy of Sherlock Holmes.