Secession from Canada would be really hard

The provinces of Alberta and Quebec have been bloviating  for some time now (decades, in Quebec's case) about seceding from Canada. It's not clear just how popular a move that would be in either province, but a vocal minority are agitating strongly for it. Alberta is getting close to holding a referendum on the matter, and Quebec will hold yet another referendum if the Parti Québécois assumes power in the next provincial election later this year, as it is expected to do, although exactly when that might happens is now far from clear. 

Most economists think that either province seceding would be an economic disaster, both for the province and for the country. A large majority of Canadians think that, however much of a thorn in the side the provinces currently are, losing either or both would be bad for Canada. But, of course, such logical arguments do not hold much weight with those looking to strike out on their own; this is not a logical argument.

Thing is, though, separation from Canada would be very difficult for either province, even if the populations decided they did want it, as Stéphane Dion (diplomat, academic, former polician, and the ultimate legal and policy wonk) describes in an extensive Globe and Mail article. For context, a couple of other articles in the same paper, one on Alberta and one on Quebec, give a flavour of the kinds of grievances these provinces feel they are suffering.

Unlike most democratic countries, including the United States, the Canadian Constitution DOES allow for a province to secede, but it does not make it easy. For one thing, it does not allow for unilateral secession: it can only happen in a negotiated process, as established by cases in the Supreme Court and by the Clarity Act of 2000. It requires an amendment to the Constitution, which therefore requires the buy-in of all the other provinces. 

Even before that negotiation can happen, the provinces in question must demonstrate "clearly" that a "clear majority" and a "strong majority" (which may mean more than 50%) of its residents want to separate and no longer be part of the country of Canada. There are various stipulations as to what a "clear" referendum question should be, so that there can be no fudging or confusion.

Mr. Dion goes into great detail on what any inter-provincial negotiations would need to look like, detail that would likely make the most ardent separatist blanch and wilt.

The Parti Québécois, in its typical outraged and antagonistic way, has vowed that it will ignore the Clarity Act and just declare its independence anyway if a referendum were to go its way. No other country would accept the legitimacy of such a unilateral secession, and Canada would most definitely not. 

Not only would such a declaration be unlawful, it would be totally impractical. Without the support of the federal government and the global community, there is no way any province could make separation work in practical terms. For example, imagine the process of transferring thousands of federal public servants, of revising a vast array of federal laws and regulations, of the disposition of federal Crown property, assets and liabilities, etc, etc, without the willing (or even grudging) support of the federal government. This administrative nightmare alone should be enough to give any province pause before embarking such a path.

So, lawful secession is possible in Canada. It's just really hard.

A deluge of fireballs

Just while I am on the subject of space, we here on Earth seem to be experiencing an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, number of fiery meteors ("fireballs").

There are meteor strikes happening all the time, some of them even making it though burning up in the atmosphere to land as meteorites. There are also predictable meteor showers like the Perseids that happen every year, caused by the Earth's path through the tail of a specific comet. But this is different.

It is different partly because of the size of the rocks that are hitting and burning up in the upper atmosphere. In terms of visibility, most fireball events draw a few witnesses; in March 2026 there were at least five that drew over 200 eyewitness reports. One on March 8th over Europe had 3,229 reports from the public. There have been more sightings in one month than in the previous 15 Marches combined. Many also punch deep enough into our atmosphere to cause sonic booms, rattling windows and scaring pets. One crashed through the roof of a residential building in Texas and ricocheted around the bedroom. A house in Ohio had a similar experience, as did a house in the German town of Koblenz-Güls.

This is not the prelude to an alien invasion, though. Mapping of the trajectories of these meteors shows that they are emanating from a region called the Anthelion Sporadic Source, a diffuse region of the Solar System where there are lots of asteroids and meteoroids under the influence of Jupiter and other gravitational forces. Meteors from this region are usually quite few and scattered, making this current spate something of an anomaly (and regular viewers of Star Trek know what an "anomaly" usually portends!) The heliocentric origin of the meteors, though, means that we can rule out an incursion from other galaxies. At least for now.

Another Moon mission? Why?

After a few false starts as NATO erred on the side of caution and dealt with various technical challenges, the Artemis II manned mission to the Moon is due to blast off on April 1st (foolish? I don't think astronauts are superstitious).

It doesn't plan on landing on the Moon - the last time that happened was 1972. Artemis II will just fly around it and back home. But this is still a big step in the reboot of American lunar ambitions, and is seen as an important testing run for future missions. Ultimately, the plan is to establish a permanent human base in the Moon, theoretically by as early as 2030.

The Artemis program is the successor to the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s. (In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, so the name was pertinently chosen.) Artemis I was an unmanned flight 3½ years ago to test out the Space Launch System (SLS). Artemis II will be the first manned mission to go past the International Space Station (in near Earth orbit) since 1972, and the first to include a Black astronaut (Lt. Cmdr. Victor Glover), the first to include a woman astronaut (Christina Koch), and the first to include a Canadian astronaut (Col. Jeremy Hansen).

How did a Canadian wangle his way on there? Negotiations over several years (pre-Trump, back in the days when the USA and Canada actually got along) yielded an agreement whereby a Canadian astronaut got to tag along in return for about $2 billion in Canadian investment in the lunar program, and the provision of an AI-enabled robotic arm designed to operate on a lunar orbital space station called the Lunar Gateway. (Robotic arms are something of a Canadian specialty - the original Canadarm paved the way for Canadian astonauts Marc Garneau and Roberta Bondar to fly into orbit; Canadarm2 was Chris Hadfield and David Saint-Jacques' ticket to the ISS; and Canadarm3 was part of the Artemis deal for Jeremy Hansen.) 

As it turns out, the Gateway project has since been abandoned in favour of a push for a lunar land base (at least partly to get ahead of Chinese lunar ambitions), so the future of Canadarm3 is unclear, but Hansen still gets to fly. The deal also includes a second lunar mission for a Canadian, and a Canada-based control centre for the robotics (maybe?) The European and Japanese space agencies are also partners in the Artemis program, and they are also expecting to have astronauts included on future missions.

Incidentally, the current American push for the Moon is not Donald Trump's doing, whatever he might try to convince us of later. It was George W. Bush that first announced a new initative for NASA after the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster sent US space ambitions into an existential tailspin. Barack Obama repurposed Bush's lunar project into an asteroid mission, but that too foundered, and space exploration gradually became the province of private space companies like SpaceX for a while. It was only when space missions by Japan, India, Europe and particularly China started to eclipse American efforts that NASA announced its new lunar direction. A new space race had begun.

When Col. Hansen orbits the Moon in the Orion crew module, he will get to see, first-hand, parts of the Moon's far side that have never been seen by human eyes (although the flight's trajectory will actually keep it at quite a distance away). As Chris Hadfield puts it: "the first non-American to fly beyond Earth orbit will be from Canada, not from Russia, not from China, not from India". Depending on the precise trajectory taken, he will probably be further from the Earth than any human ever before at one point.

Do we need to go to the Moon? No. Is it exciting? Sure!

Why is diesel so much more expensive than gas?

I keep asking myself questions I don't know the answers to - it's shocking how much I don't know! Well, here's another one. Why is diesel more expensive than regular gasoline? I'm sure it used to be cheaper than gas, but now it's substantially more expensive.

Well, it seems there are at least three main reasons: 

• Diesel is the main fuel used for shipping, trucking, farming and construction. Global demand for diesel has been particularly high in the last couple of decades, driving up prices. Diesel prices are particularly sensitive to shipping and maritime disruptions.
• The transition to less-polluting lower-sulfur diese, again over the last 20 years or so, and particularly in the USA, has required more intensive and more costly refining processes.
• Taxes on diesel are typically more than the taxes on gasoline.

There is also a seasonal effect, as home heating oil - which is quite similar to diesel and often produced together - sees peak demand in the winter, which has the effect of pushing up the price of diesel.

Either way, the price of diesel has indeed gone up substantially more than the price of gasoline since the Iran war - about 50% compared to 30-33%. And that, of course, will make everything else more expensive, given our calamitous over-reliance on diesel for transportation.

Should we be concerned about a helium shortage?

We are told that the US/Israel-Iran war, and Iran's closing of the Strait of Hormuz in particular, is causing a worrying global shortage of helium. So, there might not be enough lighter-than-air gas to fill party balloons? We won't be able to make our voices sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks? What's the big deal?

While those might the most common every day uses for helium the man in the street might think of, they are far from the most important. Helium gas is indispensible to the manufacture of computer chips. And computers are what make the world go round these days. 

Helium is the coldest liquid on earth, and it's used as a protective inert atmosphere as tiny semiconductor circuits are etched onto silicon wafers, as well as to flush out the toxic residue after chemical washes. Helium is also used to cool the super-powerful magnets in MRI machines, to prevent air bubbles forming in the production of fibre optic cables, to detect leaks in high pressure vacuum systems in heat exchangers and air conditioners, as a shield gas in arc welding, to prevent nitrogen narcosis in deep-sea diving oxygen supplies, for cleaning out rocket fuel tanks, and any number of other industrial applications.

Industrial helium is a by-product of natural gas processing, but not many countries are geared up to produce it in usable quantities. Qatar produces about a third of the global supply, only the US produces more. Other than those two big guns, the only other producing countries of any note are Russia and Algeria (don't ask!) And it is the Qatar production that is at risk here, using as it does the Strait of Hormuz to get to market.

Why is the helium market dominated by so few countries? Not clear. I read that it is expensive to extract and expensive to store (sure, but that would apply to all countries). It also appears that not all gas fields have a high enough helium levels to make extraction economical, and different gas fields have different concentrations even within a country. Recently, some quite concentrated helium sources have been found in areas WITHOUT gas reservoirs, such as in Tanzania, which is leading to a hunt for other such hydrocarbon-free helium reservoirs.

Besides, you say, isn't helium all around us in the air? Well, technically yes, but the concentraction of helium in the earth's atmosphere is of the order of 5 parts per million (0.0005%), so it's definitely not practical to extract it from the air. Universe-wide, it is much more common - in fact, it's the second most abundant element after hydrogen, comprising around 23% of the mass of the universe - but it is almost all found within stars. Not easy to mine.

Back here on earth, the price of helium has soared since the war began. The helium shortage will increasingly force semiconductor production cuts and will have supplements effects from electronics (computers, phones) to automotive production (particularly electric vehicles). It might sound like a relatively unimportant victim of Trump's war in Iran and the least of our worries, but helium actually packs a big punch in global industry. Helium is indeed a big deal.

Why are Canadian housing prices down?

Housing - real estate - has always been considered the best investment you can make here in Canada. Not so much any more. Compared to the top of the market, back in the heady days of 2022, the average value of a home is down about 21%. A pretty substantial hit. The stock market, on the other hand, is still going great guns, despite all the global turmoil that would suggest otherwise.

So, what happened to house prices? Let me count the ways.

Mortgage rates have come down some after the precipitous increase following the pandemic, but they are still well above the 20 year average.

The country's population is actually falling for the first time since Confederation, after a huge increase in immigration in recent years, and housing responds very quickly to falling demand.

Housing remains unaffordable for many. The gross debt service ratio for housing remains stubbornly high.

New housing starts may have flatlined or even fallen recently, but there is still an oversupply of housing if anything (despite what the politicians are saying), at least in some markets, which is depressing prices.

General buyer sentiment is likewise depressed, as a sluggish economy and a poor job market (largely as a result of AI developments and US trade policy) weigh on people's minds. The uncertain CUSMA trade deal renegotiation later this year, and the current oil price shock, also has people waiting out commitments to large expenditures.

Can we ever know whether Chinese imports are made using forced labour?

The issue of forced-labour products from China's Xinjiang province is a thorny one indeed.

It's pretty clear that China does use the forced labour of ethnic Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang. What's not so clear is to what extent our Chinese imports include such products. Goods manufactured using forced labour are explicitly prohibited in the North American market, and are specifically prohibited by the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA, or CUSMA), which comes up for renegotiation later this year.

The Canadian government assures us that it is vigilant in excluding such products from Canada's imports, but it's really not that simple, especially given the lack of transparency around the whole issue. China obviously does not detail for us which elements of an exported product contains what percentage of Xinjiang labour. And not everything that comes from Xinjiang is made by forced Uighur workers anyway. It's a bit of a minefield.

It has all come to a head recently with the Canadian government's decision to allow some Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) into Canada, and the scrutiny over the vehicles' supply chains. Michael Ma's inflammatory (but actually pertinent) questions about whether Xinjiang forced labour content might just be based on "hearsay", and whether the expert in question had seen it for herself, have taken up most of the media attention on the industry committee's deliberations. Expert witness Margaret McCuaig-Johnston's impetuous put-down of such a challenge to her authority and credibility on the subject seemed to be definitive, but the issue is far from straightforward. (In the end, Mr. Ma apologized, and claimed he was actually referring to Shenzhen, not Xinjiang. Hmm.)

For example, yes, Xinjiang does produce aluminum, but it does not have the capacity to process the metal into the more sophisticated alloys used in the automotive industry. Its blocks of unprocessed metals are amalgamated elsewhere with other aluminum and other materials, so that it is really not possible to estimate how much of the end product came from where, and how much of that was produced using forced labour. And as for Uyghur labour forcibly transferred to factories in other parts of China (which is definitely a thing), there is no way at all to keep track or quantify that.

Even Tesla, which maintains much better records than other Chinese car manufacturers, is unable to definitively say how much of the aluminum used in its cars might have its origins in Xinjiang. Given that Xinjiang produces about 10% of the world's aluminum, other car brands, including GM, Toyota and Volkswagon, almost certainly also incorporate Xinjiang aluminum in their vehicles. Like I said, minefield.

The other thing that occurs to me is that we seem to be fixating on a few Chinese EVs, partly due to pressure from the US. Canada - and the US and everywhere else - imports no end of other products from China. Most of the contents of the average Dollarama store probably come from China, many of them made from, or containing, aluminum. Do we know the forced labour content of that cheap frying pan or spice rack? Does the US? It's easier when the product entirely made in Xinjiang (e.g. clothing and textiles, tomatoes, silicon for solar panels, etc), but the aluminum issue in particular is fraught with difficulties.

The challenges of doing science in Trump's America

Here's a good account of how scientific research has had to pivot in Trump's America.

The article deals specifically with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), but I'm sure it applies to any number of government departments and agencies. Scientists and researchers are having to self-censor and find creative ways around the Trump-mandated ban on using MAGA trigger words and phrases like "global warming", "climate change", "solar energy", "alternative energy", "decarbonization", "energy transition", "renewables", "environmental justice", "greenhouse gas emissions", "carbon sequestration", "sustainability", even "safe drinking water". Otherwise, they run the risk of having their research censored or their grant applications denied.

So, instead of using phrases like "climate change", resourceful researchers - those that have not already given up completely or moved away, that is - are trying to use less controversial, softer phrases like "elevated temperatures", "soil health" and "extreme weather", so as not to trigger discovery by the automated tools of the Trump woke police.

I know it reads like a bad science fiction story, but this is really happening in modern-day America. In Trump's America there are about 100-plus words and phrases that are essentially banned in academic and scientific research circles, about a third of them related to climate change (which is, remember, a "hoax"). Some of them are real head-scratchers, like "diesel", "affordable housing", "runoff", "microplastics", "rural water". There are also whole other categories of banned words to do with DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), gender, abortion, immigration, etc. 

Of course, if your whole paper or grant application is about solar energy or affordable housing, it is essentially impossible to avoid these phrases. So, the beleaguered American scientific community is finding alternative sources of funding and alternative publication destinations. And some of them are just leaving for less restrictive and repressive regimes. This is having a huge impact, not only on the American research community, but on that of other countries too, where local talent is now having to compete against well-qualified American ex-patriates and academic exiles (as my son-in-law, who is currently looking for post-doc opportunities abroad, is finding, to his chagrin).

US government department websites have been dilligently "scrubbed" of offensive words like "climate change" and "renewable energy" since early in Trump's second administration. Whole reports have been conveniently removed if they were considered too woke or prejudicial. It makes me wonder: did Trump personally come up with the list of proscribed words and phrases? And who are the people who carry out these bizarre instructions? Talk about the banality of evil.

Imagine working in such a system! Imagine that the field of inquiry you have spent your whole career in (or your future prospective career) is in one of these proscribed areas! Imagine having to avoid using the word "green" or "black" anywhere in your dissertation! I'm sure that many are just hoping to wait it out, on the assumption that "this too shall pass". Others, though, may be second-guessing their whole careers.

I have a suspicion that most Americans are not even aware that this is going on under their noses. Many will not care, of course, those who routinely complain about "radical wokeness" and other such nonsense. But many others will. And if I just found out about it (or at least about the extent of it), I'm sure there are many potentially concerned citizens who have no idea just how close to Margaret Atwood's Gilead or George Orwell's Thought Police modern America has become.