I saw a heartwarming tweet on Sunday. It was notable for two reasons. The first was that something heartwarming was a nice change of pace. But the second was that it spoke to a story that is currently very much in the news and also very relevant to my interests. The municipal water-service department in San Diego, California, is shipping the city of Calgary a spare section of pipe. It is apparently exactly what Calgary needs to help recover from the recent catastrophic water-main failure that has deprived the city of 60 per cent of its potable water supply, resulting in the declaration, this weekend, of a state of emergency.
I’ve got some thoughts on all this…
Let’s stay with the heartwarming theme for just a minute. Canadians have long had a complicated relationship with, and complicated feelings toward, their neighbour to the south. And certainly, these days, I absolutely worry about American political and societal trends and stability. Problems in either of those departments automatically spell trouble for us. I think about this a lot andwrite about it sometimes, too.
But let me put something on the record: at its best, America is the greatest country the world has ever seen, and its current troubles notwithstanding, Canada could not have asked for a better neighbour. The fact that San Diego is shipping a Canadian city urgently needed spare parts — and also took the time to literally spray-paint a heart onto it first — is completely in keeping with the best of America. To any American who may happen to read this: thank you. We have been and remain so lucky to have you next door.
It felt good to say that. But now let’s actually take a closer look at why this worries me and why it fits in with a lot of what I write about.
Why is the closest necessary spare part in California?
Regular readers of mine will know that two themes I write about a lot are our lack of strategic, defensive thinking and, of late, a growing list of indicators that suggests to me that Canada is failing in many basic tasks — more to the point, that the government has lost basic core competencies and can no longer perform tasks we once would have routinely expected of it. Such as, for example, keeping infrastructure in a state of good repair. This is a story that touches on both of those.
Readers may know I am fond of saying that I worry “our expectations are a problem.” Most Canadians alive today, and basically all of them in positions of authority, grew up in a time when Canada did not have to worry about the basic necessities of life. Normally when I write about this, I’m referring to defence and national-security matters. But not always. A general lack of preparedness for emergency response is a big part of my expectations-are-a-problem thesis. We have not prepared and do not prepare for bad scenarios, because we have very little lived experience with them. We don’t really expect them to happen, on a gut level, even though we know intellectually that they can occur. So we treat them as intellectual projects and design purely intellectual, paperwork plans to respond to them.
I will grant that this is not a uniquely Canadian failing. Few of us in the Western world, with some possible exceptions in former Communist-bloc countries, have much lived experience with infrastructure that is consistently unreliable. And one of the things that means, as our friends in Calgary are discovering, is that many if not most of our governments have only very little surge capacity for responding to catastrophic system failures.
This was amply demonstrated during the pandemic. As COVID-19 hit, we very quickly realized that we had almost no ability to surge extra health-care staff into an emergency role without totally disrupting routine health-care delivery, which is what we ended up doing. We had almost no spare physical infrastructure in the system, no spare equipment (such as ventilators — which is why there was such a rush to acquire them at enormous cost), and not even the personal protective equipment that we thought we had stockpiled after our experience with SARS. We had it! Then we let it rot.
We have long since squeezed any slack out of the system in the name of financial efficiency. I like financial efficiency! But any system that routinely operates at or near 100 per cent of capacity has no ability to respond to emergencies.
It’s not just health care. You will find this replicated at scale across most North American governments — which is why Calgary is calling in any private-sector worker who can help their municipal engineers and shipping up spare parts from California.
Let me tell you guys a little story. A few years ago, at the major intersection nearest my house, one of the traffic lights was knocked down into the intersection by a crash. Thankfully, no one was hurt by it, but the pole was a complete write-off. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly it was replaced. The entire thing was up and running again by the end of the day. I talked to some of the engineers who had done it. I don’t recall whether they were city employees or contractors, but I remember their telling me that light standards are something the city has to replace so often that it keeps them around as an actual inventory of ready-to-go spare parts. One of the guys quipped to me that they were one of the few things the city actually kept on hand. Most parts are ordered as needed.
We’ve all heard the concept of the “just in time” economy. That describes how manufacturers don’t really keep an inventory of consumables (whatever those may be for a specific business) around, instead relying on deliveries every day or every few days at most to sustain their operations. If anything delays or disrupts those deliveries — anything at all — operations grind to a halt almost immediately. Again, this is in the name of efficiency.
And, again, I like efficiency. I’m not here to argue against efficiency. But I think we should all take a minute and reflect on the fact that Calgary, one of our largest and richest cities, does not have enough engineers or critical spare parts in its inventory to deal with this problem quickly by itself. It needs to call on the private sector and ship up parts from the United States.
I’m glad it is doing both of these things. I am hopeful that Calgary, a gorgeous city that is home to many people I love, will be back on its feet again as quickly as possible.
But we really ought to be thinking about whether or not this is really how we want to be running a society. Everybody loves efficiency, but we also need redundancy. Keeping critical spare parts and a bit of excess skilled-labour capacity on the payroll may look like an inefficiency, most of the time. But when you do need it, it looks like something else: a life-saver. Sometimes literally.
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