A few years back, Canada ranked #1 in a UN survey of the best countries in the world to live in.  That same year, a similar study ranked Saskatchewan as the best province in Canada to live in.  So in honour of Canada Day (and with that sentiment in mind), I present the following list.

Of course, if you're going to make a list like this, the first thing you have to do is figure out what defines "Canadian" - not an easy task and something that writers, politicians, philosophers, artists and the folks on coffee row have argued about since 1867.  But there are some common themes that come up in this discussion every time: hockey, the natural world, our friendliness, our politeness, our export culture, our relationship with the United States, our socialized medicine. 

So why is Saskatchewan the most Canadian of provinces when you consider it in light of these characteristics? 

10. Geography
Canada is a land that celebrates its geographical diversity from coast to coast and, contrary to the "flat boring" stereotype (or as the Corner Gas theme says: "You can tell me that your dog ran away/Then tell me that it took three days"), Saskatchewan is the most diverse province in Canada in terms of geography with eleven distinct geographical regions within its borders.  (And trivia time - did you know that Saskatchewan is home to the northernmost sand dunes in the world?)

9. Export economy/natural resources
The majority of Canada's wealth is based on its history as an exporting nation - from the early fur trade to being the largest supplier of oil to the US in the world today (many people, even in Canada, guess that it's a middle eastern country that is the number one supplier.)  Saskatchewan is a huge part of Canada's export culture as a major exporter of oil, natural gas, potash, pulp & paper, diamonds and more.  Of course there are those that would also point out that the biggest thing we export is our people and unfortunately that's often true as well.  In fact, there's a popular belief among Saskatchewan residents that whenever you find a person in a position of power across Canada, perhaps not at the top of the ladder but the pivot person just below that, you'll often find a person from Saskatchewan filling the role.  (One example - Ralph Goodale as Deputy Prime Minister under Paul Martin.)  Saskatchewan people are apparently disproportionally represented whenever there are volunteer activities as well.

8. Friendly People
In a country that's internationally renowned for its friendly, polite citizens, Saskatchewan's people are arguably at the top of the list.  Why is this?  A settler mentality stretching back to the province's earliest days which meant that you had to get along with your neighbours or suffer the consequences still infuses the province today - in how we deal with each other and how we welcome visitors.   

7. Highway and roadways
Canada is a land of travelers who are often defined by their need to be on the move.  In fact, one classmate at library school did an entire presentation on the "road trip" as the ultimate Canadian experience.  Saskatchewan, although admittedly with highways which leave much to be desired (the worst in Canada according to CAA!) also has the most road miles in Canada due to our grid road system which criss-crosses the province.  Because of the sparseness of our population, we also think nothing of driving 3 or 4 or 6 hours for a one-day visit with relatives or whatever.  (I'll always remember the FIMS classmate who was shocked that Shea and I decided spontaneously to drive to Niagara Falls from London one day - a round trip of six hours.)

6. Weather
Canadians are obssessed with the weather and no where is this more true than "Next Year Country" where, with our agriculture-based economy, the local weather forecaster is the most important person on the nightly news broadcast.  Saskatchewan holds a number of Canadian weather records including most annual hours of sunshine (Estevan), heaviest hailstone (Cedoux) and hottest day (Midale).

5. Relationship with the United States
Some would say that our entire culture is based on our relationship with the United States - how we're similar, how we're different.  In fact, the Canada Day issue of MacLean's this year is titled "How Canada Stole the American Dream". And nothing shows how clearly Saskatchewan leads the way in this differentiation from our southern neighbours than the story about how, in the 1950's, an American publisher produced a social studies textbook with a map showing all of the communist countries on earth in red including Russia, China, Cuba and...Saskatchewan!

4. Inferiority Complex
Sort of related to the last point, a big part of why we're always comparing ourselves to the United States is that Canada has "little brother" syndrome (the more popular analogy is the one about a mouse sleeping next to an elephant.)    Saskatchewan suffers from the same affliction except it's Alberta who is our "big brother" - a close relative who's more glamourous, richer, better looking and drives a bigger car - who we seek to emulate in many ways even as we put them down as too focused on money/fame/power/etc.

3. Hockey
Saskatchewan produces more NHL players per capita than any other province, state or region in the world.  'Nuff said. 

2. Generosity of Its People
Canadians have a long history of selfless dedication to and for others - whether its Terry Fox or Dr. Norman Bethune or Stephen Lewis.  But as a province, nobody can top Saskatchewan which is so generous during Telemiracle, an annual province-wide telethon, that the province has been awarded a place in the Guinness Book of World Records in recognition of the fact.  An average year over the course of the thirty years of the telethon would see $1-3 donated for every man, woman and child in the province.  In 2007, that record was destroyed when more than $5 was donated per capita!

1.  Medicare
Perhaps more than any other value, our socialized medicine system is a point of pride for the people of this nation, especially in light of the dysfunctional system that exists just south of us.  As everyone who watched him win the CBC's "Greatest Canadian" competition, this innovation began in Saskatchewan with a man who was born in Scotland, raised in Manitoba and came to define the province he called home for most of his life - Tommy Douglas. 

When Jessamyn West was here for SLA, this topic came up at the after-event gathering.  I meant to post something about it at that time when the story was still somewhat fresh but never got to it, being as busy as I was with much more important matters like cute baby pictures and Flash-based Friday Fun Links.

A recent invite to the annual Sask Blogs summer picnic reminded me of the fact that the Sask Blogs Aggregator, a site which creates a rolling summary of posts from various Saskatchewan-based and Saskatchewan-themed blogs, is still down.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

In mid-April, a right-wing, Sask-based blog named "Small Dead Animals" posted a link to another conservative site named FreeDominion that had posted a story about Canadian civil rights lawyer, Richard Warman.  As with most blogs, FreeDominion accepts comments.  Warman saw these and made the claim that the comments were defamatory.  He sued but in a unique twist, he didn't just name FreeDominion (which allowed the comments) but also sites that linked to the FreeDominion story such as Small Dead Animals (and therefore, were re-publishing these comments indirectly in his view.) 

Although the case was still in the works and linking to a third-party site that may contain libelous or defamatory material hadn't yet been defined as legal or illegal by a court, the Sask Blogs aggregator shut down their service completely out of concern that a similar charge could be leveled against them - either for linking to Small Dead Animals or to any of the other dozens of blogs that who were part of their feed and which may contain similar borderline comments which could be actionable. 

Here's a summary from the Regina Leader-Post of the whole situation.

I gotta say, I'm with the right winger on this and think that the civil rights lawyer is stretching too way far.  If FreeDominion libeled you or allowed you to be libel, that's one thing.  But suing every single site that links to the story (or links to a site that links to the story - hey, I just realised, because of all the links I've thrown out to the various sites involved in this case, I'm implicated now too!  In fact, because of the interconnected nature of the Internet, every possible site that includes links to other sites is guility as well!  Oh-oh - do you know what that means?  That's it - shut down the Internet - it's over.  Links are no longer allowed!)

Okay, kidding aside, does anyone see the irony in a civil rights lawyer being responsible for an action that's stifled freedom of speech and sharing of information, not only in the original offending site but for numerous harmless bystanders?  To me, this is sort of like the copyright issue where someone is trying to apply old-world views of how things work now to a new world.  In the old days, yeah, if someone else repeated a libelous statement, they were responsible.  But in the Internet age, where a link is a click away, a statement can go out to a million people as easily as to a dozen, the old paradigms simply don't work anymore.  "The genie is out of the bottle" is a phrase I think of all the time in situations like this.  Warman is trying to corral the spread of whatever libelous statements were made but somewhere, someone is going to be able to access them.  That's the new world and we all have to accept that. 

At any rate, the Sask Blogs aggregator was a great, volunteer service that I miss a lot.  I tend to read blogs that are in my narrow areas of interest or written by people I know so Sask Blogs was a simple way for me to get an overview of what people were writing about across the province - from all viewpoints, all writing styles, all geographic locations, all manner of topics from personal to political and everything in between. 

Hopefully this case will be resolved and Sask Blogs will be back soon.

No, not the catchy Feist song...

Instead, "Saskaboom" was the name given to a feature that CBC's "The National" aired last night on Saskatchewan and our booming economy.  The piece included a feature on Weyburn and the impact of the oil sector on the local economy.  So if you want a taste of the city where I've spent most of the past year and a more positive spin on the Peak Oil idea that I wrote about the other day, watch the video clip.  

It was interesting to hear the Mayor of Weyburn talking about losing city employees to the oil patch.  We're seeing something similar in our library region.  I would say that traditionally, the bulk of our branch librarians were stay-at-home moms and housewives who were married to farmers or other people earning an average (or below-average in the case of most farmers ) income. 

Now, with the booming natural resource-based economy, it's harder for us to find women wanting to supplement their family incomes because their husbands are making around six figures in "the patch".  Or, if the wives do want to work, they can find higher paying employment with longer hours fairly easily since many gas stations and restaurants are offering $10-15/hr with all the hours you want just to get workers.  (And lest anyone think I'm being sexist by talking only about female employees, I will mention that of the approximately 100 employees that SRL has out in its rural branch network, fully every single one of them - ie. 100% if you like easy math - are of the female persuasion.  Sadly, the only males in the entire organization are the four professional librarians, our van driver and our shipping/receiving clerk.) 

In related news (to the "boom", not to the issue of "who has boobs" ), Shea and I drove out to Stoughton, a town half an hour east of Weyburn for the local library's presentation on "Surface and Mineral Rights" as this is something that is of personal interest to both of us. 

(I'll preface this by saying "as I understand it", since I always tend to get these things slightly wrong.  But, basically, surface rights are where an oil company pays the landowner an annual fee for the right to be on your land as they explore for oil or for continued access after a well has been drilled.  Mineral rights are when you earn a percentage from any producing wells that are found on your land.  Mineral rights are, by far, the more lucrative although someone with a few producing wells on their land could make a decent annual wage, just from the surface rights.) 

Now, a quick quiz - what's the most successful library program you've ever attended?  How about 150 people in a community hall where said community has 653 people according to the last census?  Of course, they'd advertised quite widely and a lot of attendees, including Shea and I, were from out of town.  But still, that'd be like getting 45 000 people out to a library program in Regina!  (Hmm, maybe the RPL should become the RidersPL?)

There's definitely a lesson in there about running programs that meet your community needs no matter the size of your community.  Plus, the opportunity to promote the library and its services is huge, especially for a non-standard program like this.   (Although it was embarrasing to hear one Government employee who was presenting ask, "Do you have Internet in the library here?  I know we do in Regina but I'm not sure about here."  Ouch!)

Anyhow, I'm off to sing myself to sleep...

Old dirt road,
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
knee deep snow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
o-o-o-o-old

Peak Oil is a theory that is increasingly relevant as the price of oil and gasoline continue to skyrocket.  It was first proposed in the 1950's by an American geoscientist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell in Texas and correctly predicted that the supplies of oil were limited in the United States and extraction would peak at some point in the late 1960's then fall afterwards. 

This theory was later applied to world supplies of oil with the prediction for when peak oil would occur worldwide ranging anywhere from 2010 to "never" depending on which study you read.  (The "never" people are the ones who claim that oil is produced continually by internal earth processes and are sort of like the folks who still deny climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)

MetaFilter recently had a thread about an International Agency study of 400 oil fields that found that, barring a substantial decrease in demand, the world would face an oil supply shortfall of 12.5 million barrels a day by 2015 or 15% of current production.

On the contrary, even people who agree with the idea of peak oil and don't think it'll bubble from the ground forever, point out that improvements in technology and/or the rising price of oil will lead to more finds or re-approaching fields that were previously unfeasible or thought to be tapped. 

But with massively increasing demand from China, India and other developing nations, the odds are that either technology or the promise of massive profits inherent in $200 (or $300 or more) barrels of oil still won't be enough to meet demand.  (Oil is at $135/barrel today which is an increase of about 35% since the start of 2008, nearly double what it was at this time last year and seven times the $20/barrel price that oil hovered for most of the 1980's and 1990's.)

So instead of gas that's $1.39/litre (~$4/gallon in the US) today, you could be looking at $4-5/litre gasoline ($15/gallon) in the very near future.

The other related issue is, of course, climate change.  Even if the earth did have unlimited supplies of oil, there has to be consideration of what the burning of so many fossil fuels are doing to our environment. 

(A digression - "fossil fuels" is a bit of a misnomer and many people think that oil fields are like the dinosaur version of elephant graveyards.  The reality is that oil fields were likely produced, not by dinosaurs but ancient micro-organisms and foliage.  A great way to understand this that I read somewhere: the weight of all the ants on earth is more than the weight of all elephants.)

Ethanol isn't the solution because, although it is renewable since it is fuel made from crops such as sugar cane and maize, it still involves burning which harms the environment plus it drives up the cost of those basic food crops.  (Mexico recently capped the prices for tortillas.)

The role of speculators, both in driving up the prices of food crops (see the last linked article) and of oil itself, can't be ignored either.  In fact, there are some that think the huge increase in oil prices in the last year doesn't have anything to do with peak oil and is completely based on self-fulfilling speculator prophecies (if you bet millions that the price of oil will go up, that will push the price up which leads other speculators to do the same and it becomes a vicious cycle which only end with a massive crash which will make 1929 look like a 16-year old learning to drive versus the coming crash which would be more like Evil Kinevil jumping over a canyon and not quite making it.)

Why am I writing this now?  I've always been interested in the idea of Peak Oil for all the different areas it brings into contact - economics, environmentalism, politics, geology, etc. - but now that the Saskatchewan economy is booming due to our oil and other natural resources, and having spent the last year living in the epicentre of the Saskatchewan oil & gas industry (Weyburn-Estevan), it's hitting especially close to homebi-.  (out of curiosity, I even went to the bi-annual Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Show in Weyburn last year - a place I never thought I'd find myself!)

Recent studies have declared that there is a "Saudi Arabia of oil" under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota and Montana in the Bakken and Torquay formations (the blogger who posted the image below has downsized his initial estimate but it's still apparently the largest find in Canada since 1957). 


I drove out to Shea's farm with her family a few months ago and we didn't recognize the area.  The landscape now looks like the moon - instead of the never-ending greens, yellows and browns of the farm fields, there is just endless, flattened, black earth covered in rows of  pumpjacks. 



I've got a lot more that I could say but I hear a baby crying so I might come back to this topic later.  I do hope this has given you an introduction if you didn't know about peak oil and maybe some more info if you do!

I drove nearly four hours round-trip today to do a five minute presentation at a tea in honour of a branch assistant who's been with our region for fifteen years...

...which makes me think that rural librarianship has some unique requirements you won't find in any other type of library...

...which makes me think that rural librarianship also has some unique rewards including the joy of homebaked cookies and dainties, a fly on the wall perspective for two hours conversation covering all manner of small town comings and goings plus the inevitable "Saskatchewan One Degree of Separation" moment of finding out that one person attending the tea has a daughter who signed a document for you in her role as a Justice of the Peace in your hometown and the former librarian who is also attending has a son who is married to a friend of yours from University...

...which makes me think that the afternoon tea is the small town female equivalent of the more male dominated "coffee row" which I've also sat in on in a couple different communities while traveling as part of this job...

...which makes me think of how, when we were traveling to a series of meeting in branches near my hometown and after hearing me talk about my experiences growing up in the area, my boss commented "I don't know why you want to work in Regina.  You belong in a rural library."...

...which also makes me think about how many people have said (some variation of) "we'll miss you - you understand rural libraries" as my contract begins coming to a close...

...which makes me think that sentiment is properly better captured as "you understand the rural mindset" (trust me - I've barely begun to get a handle on rural libraries!)...

...which makes me think of the fact that we have a special line in our acquisitions budget to buy copies of one book for every branch in our region (rather than the more usual practice of buying one copy that rotates through the region one branch at a time) and how this year, I bought a book called "Our Towns" which features historical information and background about hundreds of towns across Saskatchewan...

...which makes me think about how this book was being discussed on talk radio today and I got the tidbit that "coffee row" is a phrase that originated in Saskatchewan  and another tidbit that, at its peak in the late 1800's, my hometown of Indian Head had the most elevators of any community in Saskatchewan (12), a fact I never knew...

...which makes me think that this book was a pretty good pick for a "branch perm" as we call them whereas the books I picked last year on "The History of Patents", "The History of Inventions", "A Child's Guide to the Night Sky" and "A Health Guide for Those Over 50" weren't maybe as good of picks (long story!)...

...which (also) makes me think how those picks led to one of many screw-ups I've had over the past year when I asked that the books be catalogued as "reference" materials when in fact, the proper designation was "branch permanents" which means people could actually, you know, take them out...

...which makes me think that as excited as I am about whatever may come next, I will truly and honestly miss working in a rural library system, with all of its quirks and challenges and small magical moments such as the care taken to design a perfectly arranged tray of goodies...

Today was our semi-annual branch librarian's workshop where we hold a day-long series of presentations related to librarianship and our library system specifically. 

It went off fairly well with the usual mix of the good (the Dilly Bars from DQ for the afternoon "stretch break" were a hit, even if the weather had turned bitterly cold in the last couple days), the bad (one presenter didn't show up) and the ugly (most of my jokes at the podium. )

An unexpected highlight was meeting David Sparvier who is Canada's first Aboriginal professional librarian.  We had invited a number of librarians from various First Nations in our region and Mr. Sparvier came even though he is now retired.  (He told me his age and I said I would've guessed twenty years younger!) 

I got to sit with him at lunch and spent an enjoyable but all too brief bit of time hearing about his experiences at U of T in the 60's doing his MLS, his early work with Provincial Library setting up the regional library system and various other related topics.  I didn't even know that he had that small claim to fame as Canada's first Aboriginal professional librarian until a colleague pointed it out.

One of our branch librarians also works for Regina Public Library. She wrote this article comparing and contrasting the two types of libraries for the Sask Library Association newsletter a couple years ago. I'm reprinting it with her permission.   more »

Each year, our library system gives out four awards to our branches - one for Service, one for Programming, one for Branch Development and one for Branch of the Year which incorporates elements of all three plus more.  Right now, I'm working through nearly 200 quarterly reports (48 branches x 4 reports per year) to come up with a shortlist for this year's nominees. 

As part of the process, I did a tabulation of which branches have won awards since 1992.  I knew my hometown of Indian Head had done okay, being one of only two branches in the whole system, to have won Branch of the Year twice.  What I hadn't realised was how well Indian Head had done across all categories.  Since 1992, we've they've won 6 awards. 

The next branches that come close are our two city branches, Estevan and Weyburn, which have won four awards each (and it's apparently a perennial argument around here whether city branches serving thousands of people should even compete with small towns serving hundreds or villages that literally serve dozens.)  If you take away the two city branches, the next closest communities have won three awards over the same span. 

We haven't decided what to do about Indian Head this year - I've got a pretty big conflict of interest being from there so think I might get a colleague to look over their reports to see if they should be on the shortlist for any of the awards this time around.  (But frankly, they can afford to wait for a year.  Give everybody else a chance to catch up! )

As I said, the awards only go back to 1992 and by that time, I was off at University.  I haven't lived in Indian Head since (though my parents still do.)  Even without the awards to "prove" it, I think Indian Head has always had a strong library with great boards and staff - even as I personally tend to think of Indian Head as more of a sports town in general.  (On the prairies, my theory is that every small town basically falls into one of two categories - you're either a sports town or an arts & culture town.) 

I talked about it in my Statement of Intent to get into FIMS.  Although I laid it on pretty thick (as I tend to do), I honestly think you can draw a pretty straight line from my formative experiences in that small town library to where I am today (er, supervising that small town library while trying not to let my biases show! ) 

Amy Jo Ehman and her husband recently spent a whole year eating nothing but Saskatchewan-produced foods.  Her year-long experiment is over but she's continued to buy (mostly) from local suppliers.  She recently posted a list of where she gets her food from these days. 

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I've been on the road for the past two months doing computer and Internet training at our various branches around SE Saskatchewan (for anyone who doesn't know about our territory, if you draw a straight line from Regina east to the Manitoba border and south to the US border, that's pretty much us. Here's a map but I just realised that it doesn't render in Firefox very well so you might have to look at it in Internet Explorer - sorry about that!)

Anyhow, I thought I'd sum up the last couple months in numbers...
Branches Visited - 45 (out of 48)

Number of kilometres put on the company car - 10 000+

Cancellations Due To Illness (mine) - 1

Cancellations Due To Illness/Family Emergency (the branch librarian) - 2 (and it was the same person both times which makes me wonder if she was just really nervous about the training as happens with some people)

Cancellations Due To Cold and/or Blizzards - 1.5 days (the half day is because I went out for my daytime sessions but had the evening one canceled by the local librarian)

Number of blizzards I drove through when travel wasn't recommended - 1

Number of -30 degree or colder days - too many to count

Number of 0 degree days where, the mix of melting/half-frozen snow and massive wind gusts made it feel like you were driving on a combo curling rink/jet engine turbine simulator scarier than any blizzard - 1

Number of members of the general public who attended my sessions overall - 150-200? (sounds impressive until you realise that averages out to 3-4 people per library)

Number of communities that had not one person show up for either of my two public sessions - a drop-in Q&A and a one-hour "guided tour" of the Internet - 3

Not having done the math, what I think my average rating would be for all training sessions (2 with general public, 1 with branch librarians) based on the feedback forms (out of 5) - 4.0

What it would be if you discounted the people who obviously filled out the form wrong - 4.5  (some examples - a few people gave all 1's - our lowest mark - but wrote nothing but favourable comments, some put lower marks in the "Length of Session" field meaning they enjoyed it and wish the session could've been longer but which comes across as a negative when you include it in the average rating.  Who said survey design in 504 was useless?)

Two reasons I probably got higher marks than I deserved.  1) I often mentioned I was from Indian Head and had grown up in SRL which immediately sets a "you're one of us" vibe and 2) people filled out the feedback form before actually going home to see if my advice actually would help with their problem!

Number of our branches still on dial-up - 5

Question I should've expected but which caught me off-guard with how much it was asked - "how do I get satellite Internet on my farm?  What does it cost?  What are the advantages/disadvantages?"

In my opinion, the single biggest problem for people who at least have the skills to get online but are otherwise total beginners?  They don't recognize ads on pages or know how to tell when they've surfed away from a site.  The amount of people I'd show a site to and have them miles away as soon as I looked away because they just started clicking on the page randomly boggled my mind.

Number of people I helped figure out how to use a mouse - 4

Number of people I (may have ) instructed in the use of BitTorrent - 6

Number of members of the general public who brought me fresh-baked cookies when they came to the second session after attending the first one - 1

Number of 80+ year old ladies I helped sign up for Facebook accounts - 2