Frédéric Cyr, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Iceberg Alley, the stretch of coast ranging from Labrador to Newfoundland, is the southernmost region of the northern hemisphere where one can regularly see icebergs. But hurry up! As the planet continues to warm, Iceberg Alley may soon lose its name.

Iceberg sightseeing is a common — and much-anticipated — activity in Newfoundland. Every spring, locals and visitors brave the region’s damp and chilly weather — it’s one of the foggiest places on the planet — to scrutinize the horizon for large white objects or embark on boat tours, hoping that luck will be on their side.

But with iceberg counts ranging from zero to more than 2,000 per year, booking a trip in advance to see these 10,000-year-old blocks of ice can be a gamble.

10,000-year-old ice

Every year, hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice, equivalent to more than 100 million Olympic pools of water, once melted, is shed from Greenland’s glaciers into the ocean. This phenomenon is called calving.

The bulk of the ice calving from Greenland’s glaciers form icebergs. While about 10-50 per cent of these icebergs melt directly in Greenland’s fjords, the majority are carried away by ocean currents.

The Greenland ice sheet is the result of thousands of years of snow accumulation that has reached a thickness of more than one kilometre. The pressure that comes from the enormous weight transforms the snow into ice. The same pressure pushes the glaciers — rivers of ice funnelled by numerous fjords — towards the ocean where they calve and form icebergs.

A subset of these icebergs, mostly originating from the west coast of Greenland, will reach Newfoundland. While these icebergs can live for as long as a decade, those reaching Newfoundland are generally one to two years old.

Sinking of the Titanic

The most famous of these icebergs is probably the one that sank the Titanic just south of the tip of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in 1912. That year was not an abnormal one for icebergs, with 1,038 icebergs reported. Following this tragedy, in 1913, the International Ice Patrol, operated by the U.S. Coast Guard on behalf of several maritime nations, was created to monitor iceberg dangers for ships in the North Atlantic.

The International Ice Patrol’s annual count of the number of icebergs that slip south of 48 degrees north provides the longest and most reliable time series of icebergs in Newfoundland. In an average year, nearly 800 icebergs are expected to cross the boundary, which lies just north of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

These annual counts are extremely variable and affected by the climate of the North Atlantic. The 1980s and ‘90s were an especially cold period in the region, and more than 1,500 icebergs were observed during some of those years, with a record high of 2,202 in 1984. More recently, 1,515 icebergs were spotted in 2019, a year characterized with colder than normal spring temperatures and immediately following another cold period in the mid-2010s.

But these numbers decrease drastically during years characterized by milder winters and an early spring. This occurred in 2010 and 2021, where only one iceberg was observed; in 2011, which saw two icebergs; and in 2013, where 13 icebergs were recorded. Only two years, 1966 and 2006, in the 122-year time series have reported no icebergs journeying south of 48 degrees north.

An uncertain future

With the planet warming up as a result of anthropogenic climate change, the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass. While this may suggest that more icebergs will calve into the ocean, it is far from guaranteed that this will lead to more sightseeing opportunities in Newfoundland. And the numbers may lie, as improvements in iceberg-detecting technology may be responsible for an apparent upward trend in counts.

The environmental parameters that control the number of icebergs in Newfoundland in a given year remain unclear. However, it appears that a warmer climate definitely leads to fewer or simply no icebergs at all in Newfoundland.

For example, when looking at the region’s three warmest years on record — 1966, 2010 and 2021 — only zero, one and one icebergs were reported. These outliers may well become the new norm as climate projections suggest with a high level of confidence that the frequency and severity of extreme events, such as an anomalously warm year, will increase in the future.

While the Newfoundland iceberg sightseeing tourism industry may well have benefited from a succession of exceptional iceberg seasons linked to a recent rebound in cold ocean conditions in the mid-2010s, its future is less certain.

Will the Iceberg Alley lose its name? It would be unfortunate, but it is possible. For the moment there is still time to enjoy these 10,000-year-old remnants of the past. So hurry up before it’s too late!

Frédéric Cyr, Adjunct professor, Physical Oceanography, Memorial University of Newfoundland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Petr Varmuza, University of Toronto; Linda A. White, University of Toronto, and Michal Perlman, University of Toronto

Many parents, economists and and child-care advocates celebrated the signing of Ontario’s early learning and child-care agreement with the federal government at the end of March.

The agreement means a substantial infusion of federal government funding to allow an immediate 25 per cent reduction of child-care fees, followed by a further reduction to 50 per cent at the end of 2022. A final reduction to an average of $10 per day is set to happen by 2026.

As researchers with combined expertise in public policy and its effectiveness, and applied psychology and human development and preschool-aged children, we believe universal access to early learning and child care should mean an equitable treatment of every child, where every child receives the support they need. But this isn’t the case with Ontario’s agreement.

Something that deserves scrutiny and redress is how Ontario’s new early learning and child-care deal creates inequities for children in the most economically disadvantaged families.

Issues with the agreement

Only a few days after Ontario’s agreement was signed, significant cracks began to emerge. Child-care researchers and advocates raised concerns about the agreement’s provisions that allow proportional expansion of the for-profit sector and the lack of commitment to living wages and benefits for child-care workers.

The proposed expansion of 86,000 spaces beyond the 2019 licensed capacity falls overwhelmingly short of the forecasted demand that will be generated by lower child-care fees.

Expert analysis suggests that as many as 200,000 additional licensed child-care spaces may be required as a result of demand spurred by halving parents’ child-care fees. By 2026, when the full fee reduction must be implemented, yet another 100,000 spaces may be required.

Every unique early learning and child-care agreement Canada has signed across the country leaves it up to provinces or territories to determine how the average $10 fee will achieved.

Subsidy rules

In Ontario, the agreement provides for the $10 provincial average to be created by the combination of a flat $12 fee combined with lower fees paid by families receiving child care subsidies. Those subsidies are subject to availability and aren’t guaranteed to every family who meets established social need criteria. Criteria include being employed, attending school or having a certified child or parent with a special need.

These conditions are reminiscent of Victorian-era attitudes that obscure the policy and systemic roots of poverty and which restrict state aid for the “deserving” poor — those who are considered gainfully employed, “productive” or working to improve their economic situations.

In Ontario, the amount of the financial subsidy is the difference between full fees and a family’s own contribution as determined by an income test defined by provincial regulation. The payment is calculated by excluding net taxable family income under $20,000, charging a 10 per cent of income between $20,000 and $40,000 and rising to 30 per cent for income above $40,000.

If a parent’s child-care provider agrees to participate in Ontario’s new early learning and child care agreement, 25 per cent fees parents have paid after April 1, 2022, would be retroactively refunded. The new rate would apply going forward. Providers have up to Sept. 1 to sign up.

For fully employed families, whether they pay full fees or receive a subsidy, the child-care cost may be further reduced by claiming the Child Care Expense Deduction and the Ontario Childcare and Affordable Relief from Expense tax credit.

Access isn’t universal

Ontario’s agreement thus creates a universal, flat-fee child care for medium and high-income families. Subject to limited funding availability, Ontario retains subsidized child-care for a portion of the subsidy eligible parents for low-income people under stringent conditions.

Higher-income families have no eligibility requirements or a maximum income cap to take advantage of the reduced child-care fees.

But for those low-income families who meet the subsidy eligibility criteria, access will become unfortunately harder: Ontario’s April 2022 provincial funding guidelines reduce transfers to municipalities for subsidy funding by 25 per cent. They also specifically prohibit the use of the new early learning and care agreement funding from increasing the number of subsidies, despite long waiting lists in many areas of Ontario.

Many low-income families won’t be eligible

Decades of research demonstrates that the most disadvantaged children can benefit most from access to high-quality licensed child care.

The very tool that can improve the life chances and reduce the inter-generational transfer of poverty is, by the Ontario government’s exclusionary policy, systemically less available to many of the most disadvantaged children.

There is substantial international and Canadian evidence that well-off families living in well-off communities have better access to better-quality child-care programs. Without attention to equitable access, universalization of child-care access leads to over-representation of children from relatively more affluent families. This can be seen in Québec’s experience with implementing what was launched as $5-a-day child care more than 20 years ago, as well as in the experience of several European Union member states.

Universal access should mean an equitable treatment of every child, where every child receives the support they need.

Next steps

In Ontario, the obvious next steps are the removal of the subsidy system’s restrictive eligibility criteria.

Ontario needs to introduce a guarantee access to full early learning and care experiences for children from low-income families. Right now, the $12 flat fee should be replaced by an income-tested fee reflecting family incomes. The income test mechanism should be flexible enough to meet the conditions of the new agreement.

Reducing the inequity gap should be at the top of agenda for implementation of the new early learning and care agreement. If this is not addressed, this policy direction will have consequences affecting the life chances of disadvantaged populations possibly for generations to come.

Petr Varmuza, Assistant researcher, Perlman Lab, Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education, University of Toronto; Linda A. White, RBC Chair and Professor, Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, and Michal Perlman, Professor of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.