A Chemist in Langley

As many of my readers know, I have been environmental activist for a long time. As an activist I learned a lot about what you can and cannot legally do at a protest. It is through this lens that I have observed the unfolding protests around the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Listening to commentary on the news and on my social media feeds, I have come to recognize that many politicians, journalists, and activists don’t understand the responsibilities of protesters and the rights of the public affected by protesters. In this blog post I want to clarify the topic by discussing civil disobedience, uncivil obedience and the limits of legitimate protest.

The first thing to understand is that the right to protest is written into our Constitution. Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms describe the freedoms of conscience, expression, assembly and association which together represent all facets of a legal protest. That being said, the Constitution doesn’t give protesters carte blanche. Your right to protest is limited because others around you also have competing rights. While you have an absolute right to conduct a legal protest, there is no “right” to conduct an illegal protest.

To provide a deliberately exaggerated example. Were I to hit a gentleman over the head with a ball-peen hammer and claim it is a protected form of protest, the police and the courts would make short work of my claims and I would go to prison. As a less extreme example, were I in the course of a protest, to elbow someone on the nose causing them to need medical aid, that may be construed by the courts as an assault and I could also be liable to be arrested and charged. Similarly, if I physically prevent someone from entering or leaving a building that action may be considered a form of assault or common nuisance, mischief or causing a disturbance and I may be liable to be arrested and charged on any of these three offenses.

To be absolutely clear here, many of the actions that reporters and protesters were calling a “peaceful protest” at the BC Legislature were absolutely illegal. Just because you don’t hit someone with a ball-peen hammer doesn’t make your protest “peaceful”. The act of physically blocking another individual, who is engaged in lawful activities in a public space, is Common Nuisance and represents a criminal act (under Section 180 of the criminal code) that could send you to jail; set you up for a hefty fine; or give you a criminal record that could limit your opportunities later in your life. Another similar charge is Mischief (Section 430 of the criminal code) which is used when individuals block doors and driveways, particularly on private property.

It has only been the reluctance of our authorities to enforce the law that has convinced protesters that their manifestly illegal actions are legal, “peaceful” protests.

This brings up an important distinction in the protest world. The difference between civil disobedience and uncivil obedience. In his seminal book “Uncivil Obedience: The Tactics and Tales of a Democratic Agitator” noted civil rights activist A. Alan Borovoy explained the difference.

When you protest within the confines of the law you are engaged in uncivil obedience. The Canadian constitution protects uncivil obedience as a form of protest, it does not protect you if you engage in civil disobedience.

Civil disobedience, meanwhile, is the deliberate choice to break the law, on the understanding that it will amplify your protest. It amplifies your protest because you are literally breaking the law. If you choose to engage in civil disobedience you must be willing to accept the consequences of your actions.

So to say it again for those people on my Twitter feed. There is no “right” to commit civil disobedience. I listen with decreasing interest to protesters who argue about their “rights” since most appear to have no clue what a “right” actually means under the law/constitution. Most activists these days appear to believe that they should be allowed to block roads and break the law with impunity. But that is not the case; you can’t legally commit assault or common nuisance or disturb the peace even if you feel your cause is just.

The problem, and the likely reason why so many people are misinformed about civil disobedience, is that the government has trained them to believe that they can use the tactics of civil disobedience without suffering the consequences of their actions. The government has enabled the protesters.

In the case of recent protests in Vancouver, around the Lower Mainland and Victoria the police have chosen to simply stand by to protect the peace, rather than to enforce the right of free passage within our communities. Even when the police do step in it is usually a case of catch-and-release where the police simply hold the offenders then release them without charge. Even more bizarrely, on Vancouver Island the police arrested a man for the act of removing illegal blockades along a public highway. Section 423 (1) of the criminal code makes it a crime to block a highway but the police punished a man trying to open up the highway while protecting those who were blocking it. We truly live in a world beyond the looking glass.  

The whole civil disobedience approach hearkens back to the days of the Clayoquot protests when the protesters blocked the logging roads. As I have written previously, one feature of the protests in 1993, that has apparently been forgotten by our current generation of activists, was the protesters did not simply get to walk away after being picked up by the police. These protesters were arrested, charged, and had to face the consequences of their actions in a court of law. As described in the Wikipedia article on the subject “of the 932 people arrested, 860 were prosecuted in eight trials with all those prosecuted for criminal intent found guilty”.

As I recounted, many of protesters ended up spending a reasonable amount of time in jail. Can you imagine a modern environmentalist discovering that their actions would get them sent to jail? Remember, this was not a Conservative or Liberal government that had them arrested and charged, the government of the day was NDP. You see the government of the day recognized that their role was to ensure that the law was obeyed.

Another important fact that the protesters appear not to recognize is that just because the police choose not to charge you doesn’t protect you from civil liability for your actions as part of an illegal protest. When you break the law you are liable to the criminal system, but you are also subject to the civil system.

Consider the dozens of truckers who spent last week lined up to get into the Port of Vancouver. If they can demonstrate they were financially damaged by the protest they would be in their rights to go after the protesters individually and as a group. This is what happened in Verchere et al. v. Greenpeace Canada et al., 2003 BCSC 660e where truck loggers sued Greenpeace as an organization and its organizers individually for lost wages due to an illegal protest. While this type of case is highly unusual, a motivated group of defendants could really throw a monkey-wrench into activist groups by going after them financially every time they planned an illegal protest that cost an identifiable individual money.

As an example as described in “Guide to the Law of Protest“:

in A I Enterprises v Bram Enterprises, 2014 SCC 12. The Court held that the tort is available in three-party situations in which the defendant commits an unlawful act against a third party and that act intentionally causes economic harm to the plaintiff.

What this means is that under this ruling the truck drivers financially injured by the protesters blockading the Port of Vancouver could go after those protesters for their direct loses caused by the illegal protest.

To conclude a plea for the press. Stop repeating the trope that these protests are “peaceful”. They were only peaceful because the activists brought large enough numbers to cow the government into silence and to frighten employees into avoiding confrontation. You witnessed a series of illegal acts and instead of acknowledging that you implied that what was happening was part of the new normal. Letting bullies frighten the public cannot become the new normal.

As for my activist readers, stop with the vacuous “protest is legal” argument you have been making about civil disobedience. Legal protest is legal and illegal protest is illegal. Do the former your are fine, do the latter and you have no right or justification to complain when the authorities decide to clamp down or when you are served with a civil suit for lost time and wages.

Author’s note: I have edited this document to add the offense of Mischief, which was less of a concern in my day but appears to be the preferred charge in the current era.

Regular readers of this blog know of my ongoing frustration with the MDs at the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). No group has so consistently disappointed me with the variance between the reports they are capable of producing and their actual output. As I have detailed in previous blog posts, their reports include bad epidemiology, bad takes on projects like the Site C Dam and the Trans Mountain Expansion Project , and bad work on natural gas flaring, fugitive emissions and the climate effects of natural gas.

Given my history with their previous articles, I approached their most recent report: Fractures in the Bridge: Unconventional (Fracked) Natural Gas, Climate Change and Human Health with some trepidation. Unsurprisingly, I discovered it represents another warmed over re-hashing of overblown claims, full of out-of-context citations, thoroughly debunked arguments, and completely irrelevant data from non-comparable jurisdictions. Most of this derives from their failure to recognize the most important factor one must understand when discussing hydraulic fracking:

Geology Matters

In BC, most of our natural gas is very deep and sour. As the BC Oil & Gas Commission puts it:

B.C.’s geology provides a natural advantage over other areas of the world where hydraulic fracturing takes place closer to the surface, as natural gas in B.C. is found deep underground, in some cases over four kilometres, and beneath impermeable layers of rock.

In the Montney, the gas is located 4 kilometers beneath the surface. That is 4000 m through layers and layers of virtually impermeable rock. If you were to start walking down the street at average human walking speed it would take you 48 minutes to travel the depth of this gas. This is why fracking really can’t do anything to affect our drinking water aquifers which are typically very shallow (usually less than 50m – 100m in depth). Sour gas, meanwhile, is poisonous and as a result it is dangerous to vent. As a consequence, venting and flaring of gas is strictly controlled in BC.

Much of the US gas is very shallow (like Powder River Basin in Montana) or co-located with liquid fuel deposits (the technical term being “associated gas”) which means it can be vented or flared while trying to get the crude oil. This can result in natural gas being released to affect the public health in the region of the wells.

This is not the case with BC natural gas.

You cannot compare shallow, conventional, associated gas to deep, non-associated gas because they are not comparable and if you do then, by definition, you are either ignorant or attempting to misinform.

Now let’s look at the CAPE report. It has page after page of citations from Pennsylvania and Texas where the Pennsylvania references deal with incredibly shallow gas deposits and the Texas articles deal with associated gas. Moreover almost all their references are in built up areas while BC natural gas is not from near-urban settings. The only Canadian reference they tend to use is the British Columbia Scientific Review of Hydraulic Fracturing (which they call “the Review Panel, 2019”). This brings me to my next complaint. Their inability to effectively reference their work.

When I opened the report I went first to the section titled “Concerns Related to Hydraulic Fracturing” and almost immediately saw obviously wrong statements and/or information taken out of context. Just to be sure I went to the cited references only to discover just how shoddy the scholarship was.

As scientists we are taught about proper citation. If you cite a document, that document should be the source of the information cited. CAPE often fails in this task. Instead the CAPE report often relies on secondary sourcing (i.e. citing a report as if that report was the source of the information but instead the cited document simply reports that information from another source). They also have an issue where they appear unaware of the context of the information they are citing, which results in them citing things out of context or misstating what the references actually say. As an example, the second paragraph in the section starts with the line:

The most commonly used chemical [in fracking] is hydrochloric acid (Sibrizzi and LaPuma, 2016, p14).

Except when you look at Sabrizzi and LaPuma you discover it is a paper about: “Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Associated With the Use of Water, Sand, and Chemicals in Shale Gas Production of the Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale” and is not a reference that deals with the general composition of fracking fluids. For that information any reasonable observer would go to the EPA’s “Analysis of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Data from the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry” which indicates that hydrochloric acid isn’t even in the top three of chemicals used in fracking fluids.

Fracking fluids are mostly made up of two components: they are 99% water and sand. Depending on the depth of the work the fluid will contain a handful of additives (including hydrochloric acid) added to improve performance and flow. For fracking fluids used in the deep subsurface these will include hydrocarbon distillates because that helps in the process deep down there.

Looking more deeply at that section, the first paragraph took the classic “fracking fluid is toxic” gambit that I addressed in my post On the misleading use of toxicology in discussions about fracking chemicals? Let’s get something straight right away. Fracking fluids are generally not good for human consumption. The reason for this is simple: fracking fluids are industrial mixtures intended to be used under controlled conditions. No one wakes up in the morning and asks themselves: “what shall I have for breakfast this morning: a nice chia smoothie or a glass of fracking fluid?” But that is because fracking fluid is literally being injected into geologic formations full of hydrocarbons. You wouldn’t go out and drink gasoline, so why would you expect that the fluids that are pushed into these formations be drinkable?

It is when discussing water that the CAPE report really goes off the rails. Water is a touchy subject but one where a lot of bad information is out there. As suggested by CAPE the EPA acknowledges that in some shallow US aquifers groundwater has been affected by fracking and even in BC the Review Panel noted that some surface spills have indeed affected small areas of groundwater. But this is not how CAPE represents the issue. They include a highlighted scare quote (p 18) that says:

There have been instances in which contamination of surface and ground water could clearly be linked to hydraulic fracturing activity.

They present lots of information from the United States and imply that it is relevant to the Canadian experience. The truth is that not a single example could be located by the BC Review Panel report of a water user in BC who lost the use of a drinking water supply to fracking. Not one. Thanks to the depth of the fracking in BC the likelihood of affecting a drinking water aquifer is extremely low and the spills that have occurred have all been surface spills that are extremely localized and relatively easy to clean up or are deep in the bush where no one would ever be affected by the spill.

Now go to the “Worker Health and Safety Section”. Apparently CAPE feels we should be worried because employees are exposed to BTEX and diesel exhaust. This is the CAPE people trying to make exposure to gasoline and diesel engines sound scary. Lots of people are exposed to gasoline components, like when we pump gas or walk along a street. I love how they make exposure to sand (crystal silica) sound terrifying. Better avoid sunny beaches. They also make a point that employees are exposed to power tools, because in CAPE’s experience only employees at fracking facilities are exposed to power tools.

The thing to understand is that we have occupational health and safety laws designed to protect employees from workplace risks and don’t need to ban fracking to ensure these laws are followed.

The folks at CAPE even manage to link fracking to auto accidents (see page 22 “Vehicle collisions”). Apparently when you get more jobs and industrial activity in an area you increase the number of auto accidents accordingly. Better avoid fracking, that will save all those unemployed people from potential accidents going to and from work.

I could write another 10,000 words debunking the CAPE report but you get the point. The article is another mis-mash of overblown claims, out-of-context citations, thoroughly debunked arguments and completely irrelevant data from jurisdictions with massively different geologies. It is clear that the authors had an agenda and they intended to write a report to advance that agenda. It is time for the good MDs at CAPE to either figure out how to write a reasonable scientific report or go back to their day jobs as physicians. Because if they tried to publish this report in any reputable source it would get a bench rejection and would be returned to its authors for a complete re-write.

As my readers know, I am trained as an academic chemist and spent a decade teaching in lab environments. Since I left the academic community, my work has included a lot of time doing occupational health and safety. This practical background has taught me a lot about how to protect myself from dangerous chemicals and this training translates directly to how to protect yourself from nasty viruses like the Coronavirus.

Viruses aren’t magic, like dangerous chemicals, they are only a risk if there is an exposure pathway and there are some simple rules to help interfere with that pathway and protect yourself from infection.

Watching the media it has become apparent to me that the public is missing some of the most important lessons we have been given about how to prevent the spread of dangerous viruses and it all goes back to those lessons your mothers taught you as kids (and we teach in the lab):

• Wash your hands (and wear gloves)
• Keep your hands to yourself (don’t touch that)
• Keep your hands away from your face,
• Don’t wear outside clothes inside (and keep your hands out of your pockets) and
• Use your sneeze pockets (or wear a mask).

In the rest of this blog post I will explain why following these rules will increase your likelihood of staying flu-free and will better prepare you in case the Coronavirus makes it to our shores.

Wash your hands (and wear gloves)

The first rule we learn in the chemistry lab is that to protect yourself you have to wear your personal protective equipment (PPE). In a lab your PPE includes your lab coat, safety glasses and nitrile gloves. The reason we do this is because when you work in the lab you are going to come in contact with compounds that can harm you and your PPE is your first line of protection.

From a human health perspective wearing gloves and washing your hands is the absolute best thing you can do to protect yourself from infection. Think about your last visit to a hospital and ask yourself, what were the nurses, orderlies and doctors wearing? Most weren’t wearing masks but all were wearing gloves and scrubs. I will deal with scrubs later but let’s first talk about gloves.

Gloves are the easiest way to protect ourselves from infection. Virtually every public surface is covered in germs and gloves protect your hands from those germs. If you don’t want to wear gloves in public then as the Centers for Disease Control points out you need to

perform hand hygiene (e.g., handwashing with non-antimicrobial soap and water, and alcohol-based hand rub if soap and water are not available) after having contact with respiratory secretions and contaminated objects/materials.

If you are wearing gloves then remember

remove gloves after contact, followed by hand hygiene. Do not wear the same pair of gloves for care of more than one patient. Do not wash gloves for the purpose of reuse.

Remember, during flu season you should assume that every public surface represents contaminated objects/materials. Which brings us to rule Number #2

Keep your hands to yourself (don’t touch that)

As a parent I am constantly reminding my kids to keep their hands to themselves. This builds on our first rule. My kids are constantly running their hands along every horizontal surface. Doing so covers their hands with germs.

During cold and flu season think about what you are touching and keep contact with foreign materials to a minimum. When walking up stairs hover your hand over the hand rails don’t drag your hand over it. If you are going somewhere where you will need a pen bring your own and if you know that you will need to use things like shopping carts then bring wipes (or use the supplied wipes) to clean the surfaces you need to touch.

Now the reality is that we will have to touch things in public which brings us to Rule #3.

Keep your hands away from your face

As we all know, humans evolved on a planet full of germs, and our bodies are well equipped to protect us from germs. Our skin is our first layer of protection. Our nasal passages are designed to trap materials and keep them away from our interior. Our mouth is connected to our digestive system which helps protect us. There is one access point that is not well defended, that is your eyes. It is well-established that viruses can get into your body via your eyes.

One of the worst accidents I encountered in the Chemistry lab involved a completely innocuous series of events. My lab colleague was working with an organic solvent; he had on his lab glasses and was wearing nitrile gloves. Then he had an itchy eye. He reached behind his safety glasses to rub his eye, and etched his cornea with the organic solvent.

The simple truth is, when in public assume that your hands are covered in germs and anytime you scratch your eyes you are injecting whatever is on your hands directly into your system. So in public keep you hands away from your face.

If you are wearing gloves (or have been outside) then you have to assume that your hands are dirty/covered in germs. If you pick up a pen while wearing gloves, then whatever was on the outside of the gloves is now on your pen. If you then put that pen in your mouth whatever was on your glove is now in your mouth. Put the pen in your pocket and your pocket is now a problem.

This brings us to Rule #4

Don’t wear that inside (and keep your hands out of your pockets)

Earlier in this piece I talked about doctors, nurses and orderlies wearing scrubs at the hospital and chemists wearing lab coats in the lab? An easy way to protect yourself from chemicals and germs is to have outside clothes and inside clothes.

Lab coats (or medical scrubs) are intended to protect the wearer from exposures but that means they pose a risk to anyone who comes in contact with them. Lab coats are designed to protect the user from spills by keeping the spill on the outside layer of the fabric. That means the outside fabric of the lab coat is potentially dangerous since any spilled material will remain on the outside of the coat. If you are wearing a contaminated coat and it touches someone, the compounds on that coat will then be transferred to that person.

As such you never wear your lab coat outside of the lab. Clothing used in the lab should stay in the lab. If you are wearing a coat outside, don’t wear it inside. During cold and flu season change your clothes when you get home and put those used clothes in the wash.

Another thing to remember is during flu season try to avoid using your pockets. Remember the comment about pens in the pockets? This goes even more when it comes to flu and viruses. Anything on your hands ends up in your pockets and if you use Kleenexes then your pockets are germ central. Wash your pants/top regularly and avoid putting your hands in your pockets if you can.

Use your sneeze pocket or wear masks

As I noted earlier in this piece, when you go to the emergency room you don’t see the doctors and nurses wearing masks. While some research indicates that the correct use of masks may, in limited circumstances, protect the wearer from illness most studies show them to have little effect. The big thing masks do is protect the rest of the world from you.

If you are sick sneeze into your sneeze pocket and if you are sick, or fear you may become sick, then wear a mask. For those wondering the sneeze pocket is the crook of your arm. When you feel the sneeze coming reach your arm across your face and the crook of the arm will fit naturally over your nose/mouth. Since that portion of your arm doesn’t generally come into contact with other objects it is a safe place to control your sneeze.

As for the masks, recent research from the Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that the fancy N95 masks are no more effective than surgical masks at protecting medical practitioners from exposure to influenza.

The thing to remember is that you shouldn’t assume that the mask will protect you from infection. Masks do indeed prevent you from inhaling aerosols and droplets, but they simply don’t hold a candle to the important three rules:

• Wash your hands
• Keep your hands to yourself, and
• Keep your hands away from your face.