Lately I’ve been reading and watching history pieces about the Second World War. What stands out for me as a common thread was how entire societies were able to mobilize and perform tremendous feats in just a few short years.
Shipyards cranked out Liberty ships, destroyers and corvettes by the hundreds. One shipyard built 50 escort aircraft carriers in less than three years, in a Vancouver, Wash., shipyard that didn’t even exist before the war. In Western Canada, almost every airport of any consequence was built as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Places like North Battleford, Yorkton and Estevan all instantly saw air bases with 1,000 men and five large hangers pop up in the middle of nowhere and begin training aircrews by the thousands.
Step forward to today: a friend posted on Facebook she is looking for an “approved” kitchen for her 13-year-old daughter to bake goods to sell at the farmers’ market. She wrote, “Apparently we need to bake her cookies and baked goods in an approved facility, so I am looking for somewhere affordable.”
That is how bogged down we have become, from a society of doers, to a society of “it can’t be done.” And if it must be done, there must be a web of red tape before it happens. You can’t just “do” anything anymore.
Potluck dinners started going by the wayside a decade or so ago, when regulatory authorities started telling people they couldn’t bring food to functions. Funny, I should be dead many times over due to all the potluck suppers I attended as a kid – basically every church and school function. I don’t know how my late grandmothers survived their own cooking, or how they avoided killing people by the dozens with their perogies.
Food preparation is a basic human skill that every family must master or die. It’s that simple. But our bureaucratic red tape seems to have forgotten that fact.
Writ large, we can’t build pipelines anymore without spending half a decade, or more, studying them. Why? Almost every pipeline these days is built along an existing corridor, meaning that land has already been studied, usually multiple times, over generations. The processes and safe-work procedures for pipelines are well established, as are environmental protection procedures. How many times must we re-invent the wheel to do something we have been doing for generations?
We still have not scratched dirt on any liquefied natural gas plants on the West Coast, yet the Americans have already begun exporting into the markets we were targeting. Why? Too much talking, not enough doing. The opportunity may soon be lost.
Our military’s procurement is a shambles, and our ships and planes are on their last legs as a result.
Can you imagine how difficult it would be to build, from scratch, a transcontinental railway now? A town hall meeting in every town, every seven miles, along the right-of-way, to obtain social license?
It all comes down to three words — paralysis by analysis. The get ’er done spirit is gone.
There’s a reason why the oilpatch has become the last get ’er done industry. As the old-timers grey out, the new challenge will be maintaining production within the choking regulatory framework with a young workforce that can’t accomplish much without handholding.
Major pipeline project crews used to average 5,000 metres per day of pipe built. Now, if you get 3,000 metres, managers are doing backflips. And they can’t build pipelines in the summer anymore, lest, God forbid, a bird build a nest on the right-of-way. Farmers will plow over that nest with their airseeder without thinking twice, and the bird population somehow survives.
No individual is responsible for anything in rule by committee. Society will dictate what is done because those who have no knowledge feel they must give an opinion, no matter how baseless in reality that opinion may be.
Uneducated opinion has festered into the cancer known as social license. It has permeated into every aspect of our life. To obtain such license, the clueless must be satisfied (usually by some sort of high-cost consultant or bureaucrat) with some sort of analysis that no one will ever read.
In this case, the 13-year-old girl must obtain social license vis-à-vis use of an approved kitchen to bake cookies.
Everyone has to eat. We all have kitchens. We all cook. If she puts the ingredients on the label, I’m pretty sure her cookies won’t kill anyone.
Otherwise, the big box stores better stop selling ovens, because we all might die due to our unapproved kitchens.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
