Some of the issues that we are going to discuss in this panel have been teed up, have come up in some of the conversations in some of our previous panels, because here we're going to be taking a look at things that are really important, oftentimes that are behind the scene but vital in terms of the delivery of energy services. So we're going to be looking, we've got people who are going to be addressing finance, dressing the grid, and also storage, all of which are very, very vital to making our whole energy system work. And as I said, various people have sort of teed up some of these issues in prior sessions. We're going to hear more now. Our first speaker will be Fran Teplitz, who is the, if I said that properly, the policy director for Green America and also the board co-chair for the American Sustainable Business Council Action Fund. Can you come up here? You can, from the table, it's fine. Just speak, and please, all of our speakers, please speak very clearly into the mic. Pull it up close so everybody can hear. Great. Thanks so very much. Good afternoon again, everyone. I'd like to thank you for attending this year's Congressional Renewable Energy Expo, focusing on the economic benefits and resiliency of energy efficiency and renewable energy. It's just an incredibly important topic. As noted, my name is Fran Teplitz. I serve as the director for social investing and policy programs at Green America here in Washington, D.C. We are a national membership-based organization over at Farragut North. We have a 30-year history of working to build the green economy, and by green, we always mean both the social and the environmental side of things. We work with consumers, investors, and businesses to find marketplace strategies to solve many of the issues confronting our nation and the world. We have a national membership-based of about 200,000 members and E-activists, as well as a national business membership of companies that we screen on their social and environmental impacts. There are about 3,000 of those small to mid-size mission-based businesses in our business network. And you can find these businesses on our website at www.greenpages.org. We also work in the areas of responsible finance, sustainable food systems, and fair labor practices. And for more than a decade now, we have focused heavily on energy and climate issues, working to advance renewable energy, oppose dirty energy, and promote energy efficiency. One of our major financing initiatives that I'm pleased to share with you today is the promotion of the Clean Energy Victory Bond. The Clean Energy Victory Bond is a proposed U.S. Treasury savings bond that would be backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, and it would support renewable energy and energy efficiency programs that have had a successful proven track record. The original Victory Bond, of course, was issued during the World War II era, and at that time it enabled millions of Americans to help shift our national economy to confront the war effort. In that spirit of patriotism, Victory Bonds generated $185 billion during World War II, which is equivalent to about $2 trillion in today's dollars. We need a similar mass mobilization and mass financing initiative now to help us address today's needs for energy security, clean energy, certainly job creation, and drastically reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The Clean Energy Victory Bond would be available starting at just $25 and can mobilize Americans toward the shared goal of advancing globally competitive U.S. clean technology and ultimately a greener economy. Financing from the Clean Energy Victory Bond would support the extension of important tax credits for sectors such as solar, wind, geothermal energy, residential and commercial energy efficiency programs, electric vehicles, and other sectors. In most cases, the tax credits, such as the investment tax credit or the production tax credit, would be extended for about a decade, allowing these developing industries like wind and solar and the others to become more competitive. From coal to nuclear power to oil, no new energy source has been developed without significant government funding. As the fossil fuel-driven economy becomes increasingly unsustainable and short-sighted, the need for an alternative path forward becomes ever more urgent. Legislation to create the Clean Energy Victory Bond was introduced in the House of Representatives this spring by Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren and Doris Matsui. The legislation would enable the bond to raise $50 billion, and in turn would attract additional private and public investment. We estimate that the Clean Energy Victory Bond could generate one million good clean energy-based jobs across the United States. According to the Political Economy Research Institute based in Amherst, Massachusetts, investment in clean energy generates roughly 3.2 times more jobs overall than similar investment in fossil fuels and 3.6 times more jobs if we're looking at the unskilled workforce. We have seen repeatedly that when the production tax credit, for example, is allowed to expire or is extended, the wind industry and employment levels contract and expand in direct response. We need to ensure there is a steady stream of support which the Clean Energy Victory Bond can provide so that businesses and investors have a clear market signal. In addition to the employment benefits, the bond would also help reduce pollution from the burning of fossil fuels which in turn will lower health care costs and productivity losses associated with pollution-related illnesses. These cost savings to the government and business are significant. Businesses across the United States have endorsed the Clean Energy Victory Bond concept. Small businesses in particular understand the risks to our economy posed by climate change, including supply chain disruption, destruction of infrastructure, rising health care and energy costs, and extreme weather events from which some businesses, especially small to mid-sized companies, will never recover. Financing for clean energy is a must and we need to be creative about it, which is why groups like the American Sustainable Business Counsel Action Fund and others have endorsed this bond. The Clean Energy Victory Bond Act of 2014 now has 34 cosponsors in the House. We need more representatives to cosponsor the bill, which is HR 4426, to demonstrate growing support for democratized financing of clean energy for our clean energy future. Discussions are also underway for the introduction of a companion bill in the Senate. Thousands of Americans have already pledged to buy the Clean Energy Victory Bond once it is available, and you also can pledge to buy the bond at the website dedicated to it at www.cleanenergyvictorybonds.org and you'll also receive ongoing updates on the progress of the Clean Energy Victory Bond campaign. The Clean Energy Victory Bond should attract diverse support since it is not a tax, represents investor choice, creates U.S. jobs, and enhances competitiveness and energy security to help lay the foundation for the clean energy economy, upon which our future depends. So please help yourself to any of these handouts and visit our booth at T9 for more information. Thank you. Thank you Fran. And now we will turn to Catherine Hamilton, who is the policy director with the Energy Storage Association. Thanks, and our booth is right across from Fran, so if you're visiting her, you can visit me at the same time. It's a way you can all make a difference, so that's great. Thanks. The Energy Storage Association represents a lot of companies in the ecosystem of energy storage, utilities, developers, integrators, laboratories, anybody who cares about energy storage is part of this association. And the association does technologies that are in batteries of all chemistries, flywheels, compressed air, thermal storage, which includes ice and heat storage, and pumped hydro. Now, when you think about energy storage and a lot of people, so that just gives you a snapshot of what the technologies are.  How am I going to convey this to a group of regulators? So I Googled what makes everything better. And there could have been a variety of responses. The only response that I got was bacon. So what I want you to do is think of energy storage as the bacon for the grid. It just makes everything better. It really does. So I'm going to tell you why that is. First of all, energy storage technologies allow you to do things with a grid that we've never been able to do before. So the way our system is set up is that electricity is generated and it has to be used immediately upon generation or it just goes to ground unless you have a storage medium. If you have a storage medium, then you can hold it and save it and wait until you're ready to deploy it at the cost you want to deploy it and when you need it the most. So it allows you to operate the grid far more efficiently. It allows you to optimize every resource on the grid, whether it's integrating renewables or whether it's increasing the capacity factor of a natural gas plant. It allows everything to operate better. It does a variety of things that nothing else has been able to do. So it has multiple purposes. It can do frequency regulation. It can help with the ramping. It can do voltage response. It can do, you know, help lower our peak demand. One of the ways that energy storage should be thought of, again thinking of bacon all this time, is that it is a flexible capacity resource. So, for example, a natural gas plant that is nameplate rated at 50 megawatts really only has flexible capacity of about 40 megawatts. An energy storage facility, remember energy storage, say if you keep in your mind something like a battery, it can both absorb energy when it's charging and it can inject energy into the grid when it's releasing. So it actually has double the flexible capacity of a traditional generator. So, for example, an energy storage plant at 50 megawatts actually has 100 megawatts of flexible capacity. That is enormously powerful to think of that resource on the grid and think also that when you're absorbing energy or charging something, it is actually a resource to the grid because often the grid needs someone to absorb it, not just inject. So it really has double value. So what are some of the big opportunities we have coming up? One is that EIA predicts in the next 15 years we're going to need 40 gigawatts of peak generation. That is significant. Where are we going to get it? Especially in the context of the EPA greenhouse gas emission rule. So if you have a cap on your emissions, how are you going to then build emitting plants? Well, we think that storage is going to need to be a huge tool in that toolkit to be able to meet those guidelines and that provides an enormous opportunity for this industry. We also look at the droughts, the severe droughts they're having in California and the need to not use water-intensive technology. These batteries, flywheels, compressor, none of those use water at all. They have no environmental footprint. There's no emissions at all from these resources. So we see this as a great tool to allow everything to work better, cleaner, and to lower our greenhouse gas emission footprint. We also see a huge move right now to a more resilient grid Energy storage can help make that grid more resilient. So in Superstorm Sandy, the folks in New Jersey who had solar rooftop had no idea what the grid went down that they were not going to have electricity. If they had something backing it up like energy storage, they would have had electricity. So right now, New Jersey, for example, is looking at a resilience bank. They're looking at giving grants to critical folks like gas stations, fire stations to be able to back up their solar with energy storage because that will definitely make it more useful. But all of this being said, it's wonderful, and everybody, come look at our booth in the beautiful pictures, you're going to say, well, why don't we have it everywhere then if it's so awesome and everybody loves bacon? And the reason is that we do need policy. So why do you need policy? You need policy to create certainty in the market to bring investors. Investors are not going to invest in something that is considered risky, that is considered an unstable market, you need market signals. So one area that we've been focused laser like on is FERC, which is sometimes my very favorite agency because what they can do is they can tweak the market rules that will allow different, not just technologies but different characteristics and services that are provided to the grid to be compensated for those services. So right now, there is something called frequency regulation that is compensated for speed and accuracy. Energy storage facilities provide speed and accuracy like nothing else can do, so they're getting paid for it. If you don't get paid for it, then your cost is higher. So if you get paid for what you do, your costs will go down. So we're also doing, we've had several other orders go through FERC, we're working with state regulatory agencies as well to try to put policies in place that will create that certainty for investors. What are we doing with Congress? We right now have six bills that we have introduced, totally bipartisan, bicameral. Nobody has ever said to me when I walk into their office that is a really bad idea. They all say we love bacon, it's a great idea. So we have six bills, what are they? There's two of each, so we have investment tax credits. The energy storage industry has never been able to take advantage of any tax credit unless it's completely tied to a renewable energy facility and we like to think of this as more of a grid facility rather than something that is necessarily tied to renewables. So there's an investment tax credit that's been introduced three times now in the House and Senate, totally bipartisan. The lead on the House side is Chris Gibson from New York and he's very bullish on storage, so he's been a huge champion for us. We also are part of the Master of Limited Partnership Parity Act, so where Master of Limited Partnerships right now are only for oil and gas, they're trying to open them up for renewables, efficiency and storage is right in there and we think that will be a huge benefit as well. And then finally the last one that we have, two of as well that one was just introduced, HR4855, which is the R&D tax credit. The R&D tax credit right now is really only able to be taken advantage of by large companies. So we need for some of these pre-revenue startups who are doing really interesting storage technologies, new chemistries to be able to take advantage of that. So we need to make sure to, this is really more of a tax reform proposal where we say, alright, let's let these small companies form partnerships so then they can be able to move their tax liability and to be able to take advantage of the R&D tax credit. So those are the bills that are out there. We've been working them, we've been educating folks mostly on what storage is and what it does because we haven't ever had any kind of policy benefits in the past, it's all been focused on R&D and I will just say we are not a science club anymore. This stuff is being installed on the grid right now, commercial scale projects and if we can just create more market certainty, investors will come and all of you will be able to take advantage. Thanks. Great, thanks Catherine. And I must say with regard to thinking about the whole role of things like MLPs and everything too, EESI has a fact sheet with regard to that on our website so that is another place you can get additional information. And as Catherine was saying, there is a lot of bipartisan support on both sides of the hill with regard to this as we recognize more and more how important storage is to, again, making things work as a system. So we now want to turn to Diana Rivera who is the Director of Market Development and Regulatory Affairs with Clean Line Energy. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. What if I told you that the wind blowing in western Kansas could save you money? For residents here in D.C. and in Maryland and Virginia, or the wind blowing in the Oklahoma Panhandle could save money for Georgians? Well, I'm happy to tell you that it's not only possible but it's also already happening with a combination of innovation and infrastructure. Let me start with innovation. Thanks to state and federal policies supporting wind energy, our American wind industry has grown. More than 550 factories in 43 states across the country make components for wind turbines. And today, 70% of their content is made in the USA. With economies of scale and innovation like taller towers and longer blades, wind turbines are more efficient than ever at capturing energy from the air. In other words, capacity factors have significantly increased and the cost of wind energy has dropped by 43% in the last four years. But wind power prices vary by region and most importantly, wind speed. The windiest part of the country is the Great Plains where wind power is now being sold at record low prices. Tens of thousands of megawatts are under development in this region but they need access to larger markets. The wind industry has matured and it is ripe for expansion. But we need to unlock this resource with the infrastructure to support it and that is the challenge that Clean Line Energy Partners is working to address. It's a pretty simple idea. We have a phenomenal wind resource in the middle of the country but larger markets and stronger grids are hundreds of miles away. We need wires to connect the two. If we can bridge that gap, we can unlock billions of dollars of investment in new wind power, create thousands of jobs, generate millions of dollars in tax revenues and reduce carbon emissions by 10 million tons per year with just one of Clean Line's projects. Build the wires and the wind farms will come. Texas is proving this concept with its Cres lines now completed. Texas is blessed with an amazing wind resource and large markets and its own grid operator all within its borders. It's a little more complicated when you're talking interstate lines but this is the challenge we've been working on since 2009 and we're making good progress. Plains and Eastern Clean Line is a 720 mile line that will deliver 3,500 megawatts of new wind power to Arkansas, Tennessee and other states in the southeast that have historically lacked access to utility scale wind power. Two of Clean Line's projects, Grain Belt Express and Rock Island will deliver wind to the PJM market which includes Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and several other states with strong renewable portfolio standards and an expected shortfall of supply. Grain Belt Express will also deliver wind energy to Missouri along the way. To span distances of 500 to 750 miles we will use direct current transmission lines. With DC lines you lose less energy along the way, you can use fewer wires and fewer structures and have a narrower right of way than you'd need for comparable alternating current lines. These efficiencies will allow us to deliver wind energy at prices competitive with any other new local generation. With AC to DC converter stations acting as toll booths will recover costs for these projects by charging customers directly rather than through broad cost allocation typically needed with AC lines. DC is a well established technology but no overhead DC lines have been built in this country since 1986. So to see the newest modern DC lines we went to China which is thousands of miles ahead of us with 12 DC lines in operation and plans for 30 by 2020. Clean Line has been developing our project since 2009 engaging with thousands of stakeholders along the way and we hope to break ground on a project beginning in 2016. We have some work to do. Grain Belt Express, the project that I've been leading for the past four years was granted public utility status in Kansas and Indiana and received approval to build 370 miles of the line in Kansas. We're currently before the Missouri Public Service Commission and expect to file in Illinois next year after working with landowners to identify a route with the least possible impact. Plains and Eastern Clean Line is a public utility in Oklahoma and seeking the same approval in Tennessee. The Arkansas Commission told us that their laws didn't envision this so we're working with the U.S. Department of Energy and Southwestern Power and existing federal utility in Arkansas and Oklahoma to build the line in those states. DOE is currently underway with the NEPA review process and we expect a draft environmental impact statement later this year.  We take that responsibility very seriously and we work to be responsive to each of their concerns. For example, we are offering annual increasing payments that will continue for the life of the project. I want to leave you with one final thought. Wind Energy is saving money for consumers by decreasing electricity prices and reducing fuel costs. Because wind is free, wind power is not subject to the volatility in fuel prices and in fact, utilities are incorporating renewables into their portfolios to hedge against fuel price risk. Georgia's Public Utility Commission recently approved Southern Company's long-term contract for Oklahoma wind calling it an extraordinary advantage for consumers. But in deregulated markets like here in D.C., Maryland, and New Jersey, consumers are missing out on the price stability offered by renewables because competition disincentivizes long-term contracts. Adopting long-term procurement for renewable energy in deregulated markets like Massachusetts and Connecticut have done recently would open up lower cost financing to construct new projects that could save money for you and me. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and I look forward to taking any questions. Thanks very much and I think hopefully there will be a lot of questions about that because as you said, D.C. lines are something that really haven't been built here and offer a lot of opportunities as we look at how, again, we think about systems overall in this country with regard to renewables and then making them as efficient as possible in D.C. does allow that. So now we're going to turn to Lynn Jorland who is the Chief Executive Officer with Empower Energy. Lynn? Thank you and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be back on Capitol Hill and supporting an old friend and solar, Scott Sklar, who many of us have heard today and heard his bearded jokes and bald jokes and other good things. I wanted to share a little bit on a path to resiliency and really an opportunity in some events and crisis and developments that have been happening over the last years and really ongoing as we speak, which is changing the landscape of energy. But first, wanted to share with you what is Empower Energy. We pride ourselves on delivering the right clean energy mix defined as solar, rooftop, ground, EV charging with a partnership with Chevrolet and GM, as well as parking canopies. We also work in combined heat and power, essentially in brief where energy savings, energy efficiency for inside the building on, say, universities, hospitals, fitness centers with large thermal load can actually get up to 45% increased savings in generation or capturing of waste heat, often with natural gas, sometimes with biogas and other forms of biomass, perhaps. We also work in and are developing two offers as we speak in LED, financed LED lighting, as well trying to really pick our horses and strategic partners in storage. I started in 1994 in solar, a company called Astropower that we built, took public and sold to GE, went to BP Solar and then to Sun Edison and founded that with a good friend, Jigger Shaw, and the whole time had two things on my mind up until 2005. It was the power purchase agreement that was going to stop being pushed aside by the CFO usually who'd say the upfront capital cost is just too much for solar. Help us out here. I was fortunate to be part of a team that put together that power purchase agreement with Goldman Sachs and others who has opened up the market radically. The other is, like I said, storage. We haven't chosen which source we're going to use, whether it's advanced lead acid as a transition product or lithium ion, but we know we are. We'd love to talk further about that and get some guidance. The Empower Energy also provides all the financing for these projects. We design, engineer, supply, construct, O&M, and finance solar CHP and energy optimization projects. Some of our clients initially and an investor is General Motors. We started with General Motors about five years ago and have a number of solar energy efficiency and CHP systems on their facilities, mostly in the U.S., one in China, and starting to go global. Cummins, universities wasn't going to have a thermal load, boarding schools would be a typical candidate, hospitals. In the end, our goal is really to try to seize the opportunity of two developments that we've all seen and I thought I'd share some statistics on how they impacted our business model and what I think is a timely opportunity for companies like ours. So the hurricane that changed energy forever in the U.S. by the name of Sandy, a couple interesting statistics is the largest hurricane ever recorded, of course, but it also was the most expensive at over $65 billion. There were more than 8.6 million utility customers that lost power across 24 states. There were eight nuclear power plants that went offline or reduced production and there were 235 energy assets that flooded, including power plants and electrical substations. Again, in that crisis is a chance for a new business model. The most noteworthy, and I think some of us saw pictures of, that it really is just intolerable and speaks to our antiquated grid was the hospital that I cannot recall the name, but in New York that was out of power for 17 days. Again, for this particular application, hospitals, CHP improves really energy savings and again can be up to 45% increase in energy efficiency. And the combined, we've experimented quite a bit over the last four or five years with the advantages of combining solar and CHP because we live and breathe really by the project model and investors that acquire our projects. Lastly, I think defining resiliency, like when I started in more retail rooftop systems with Walmart, this was for solar, Whole Foods, Ikea, Kohl's. In that era it was all about sustainability but many of us knew in about 2005, 2006 it was usually the sort of warm feeling sustainability page on the annual report and I think it's important that we would define resiliency because we're at a similar stage of a buzzword that needs to have economic meaning to people. And I'd say there's four, promoting resilient building and rebuilding, coordinating resilient regional infrastructure approaches, something we're involved with, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, hardening of energy infrastructure, developing microgrids, all areas that we're involved with. We're starting, we don't want to be all things to everybody at the same time or as I've been in one business you go out of business. And we've progressed from solar into CHP and now we're moving into financed LED lighting. The second key development is really coal plant compliance and this is really about what's called Matt's mercury air toxic standards. This is a mix of actions that were really about reducing coal generation and several stats to share with you was that the mats that will take effect in 2016 will eliminate 90% of mercury, acid and gas related and gas released by coal-fired power plants will also limit emissions to the level of the current 12 best controlled plants. And I could go on, I see I have a time clock on me so I'm going to move forward. Bottom line is it's been costly to existing coal facilities and making many too unprofitable to operate. So according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration these developments will take about 16% of coal producers offline in the next five years and in the end it's about what's going to fill that gap and ultimately prevent power outages and energy reliability issues. And Power Energy's integrated renewable energy offer is about on-site distributed generation not about grid tied energy although we've done some projects initially. It's an added layer of reliability between our customers that are in the commercial industrial space and the so-called mush markets and the utility, their utility. Specifically again we're about rooftop and ground mounted PV solar combined heat and power energy optimization, backup power and in time we have some applied engineering work we're doing in micro grids. All of those offers provide a really most important thing is making it simple to the customer ensuring that there are financing options of choice but not too much that we have a team experienced in and ultimately eliminating the significant costs of electric outages and generate economic clean energy. We have a group of people from different solar companies Sun Edison, BP Solar, former Astra Power, TriGen on the energy efficiency, energy management side, Lime Energy, Johnson Controls. I think they're some of the best people in the business and we're just having a lot of fun building what we think is a timely business model and look forward to answering your questions and we too have a booth and look forward to meeting each of you. Thank you. And I must say it is really important to think about how all of this really can be fun by putting this stuff together thinking about different hybrids that in terms of systems, the optimization it can just make you feel really good when you see it all come together and really work and it is very, very exciting and things just keep changing, keep evolving and that is part of all the excitement and everything as well. So let's, we have a few minutes. Let's open it up for any questions you may have. Okay, we'll start right here and there's a microphone coming your way. I was curious if there's been any kind of focus of where the market's going how it's going to get monetized if it's more on frequency regulation or load shifting and what you're seeing that going and then the other question was are you seeing, with people who are developing intermittent generation sources are they able to reduce their costs of interconnection and transmission upgrades by incorporating storage? Those are good questions and they're huge questions. So California has the biggest storage play going on right now. They have a mandate for 1.3 gigawatts of storage and they did that because they also have mandates for renewables and for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Their nuclear power plant songs just shut down. They have a water crisis. They really need something to help them and so the target for 1.3 gigawatts of storage is going to be really important to them and that will help us play out a lot of different scenarios of storage to see really how commercially it's going to function much more holistically. Other states that we're looking at and other kind of market mechanisms, right now the only thing that we're compensated for from the system level is frequency regulation. So in order to think about what other, how else would you do it? Right now we're working really closely in a PJM process right now with the 13 states in the Atlantic that PJM controls to try to ensure that storage has a place in the capacity market. Their capacity market is called the RPM and we're trying to create a tariff for that that would then compensate energy storage for providing capacity resources and if you can do that, that's going to really, really change the game for storage to be able to do that. Otherwise on the state side a lot of this is about just getting it on the menu so when states do, if they're in a state that's doing integrated resource planning make sure that energy storage is considered in part of the planning so that when you're looking at the system energy storage is part of it. So that's really important to make sure that we're all included in that. To make sure that when you think about solar rooftop if you need something to backstop it that you at least consider energy storage. So part of this is educating the regulator community and the states to just get them to understand that it is a resource that should be part of the toolkit and if they start doing that and integrating it into the way they do rate cases and the way they do planning processes then we feel like the compensation will be there and we'll come. Did I answer all your questions? Yeah, I mean interconnection is always a little bit of an issue but we did get an order, we've had three orders on through FERC, that FERC has issued that directly impact energy storage and the last one was interconnection to make sure that there was a you know streamline process for interconnection for energy storage and we feel like that is going to help lower the cost of interconnection. Okay, any other questions? Okay, over here. Well while we're waiting for that question I'll just say that in terms of thinking about storage we put in a battery bank to go with our small solar system so that we, our grid goes down we're still operating so anyway. I'm guessing you're in PEPCOS? Yes, right. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, so I heard you talking about both the clean energy victory bonds and six different bipartisan bills for energy storage. What are the prospects for any of this legislation actually moving beyond just getting co-sponsors and being introduced again and again. Can any of these actually pass? You go first. That is a key question. So we view that the clean energy victory bond campaign in particular we recognize that this would be a multi-year effort. We believe we're meeting with both parties all parties. It has sole democratic support at the moment so obviously that would need to change but the feedback that we get from investors from the American public cuts across party lines, geography you know it's extremely diverse and we believe that our job is to continue to build the momentum needed that will ultimately shift things so that initiatives like this can move forward legislatively but it will indeed be a multi-year effort. As is true with almost everything. Yeah, so we're looking at the investment tax credit which has actually been introduced three sessions in a row and on the Senate side the champion is Senator Wyden who is of course chairman of Senate Finance and he wants to include it in the context of tax reform over the next year and a half that he does so if they do something like that in the Senate I would expect the ITC for energy storage to be discussed and talked about. I also think that MLP Parity Act has a lot of other folks behind it so it's not just the energy storage community and in fact the oil and gas community is pretty closely tied to it as well because they want to make sure they keep their own tax credit. So I see that also happening in that context I don't see it happening before either before they leave next week or in the lame duck. The one thing that could happen in the lame duck is if they do an extenders package that includes the R&D tax credit there's a potential for some tweaks in that for this pre-revenue tax proposal I also am not hitching my wagon to that star but I would say that there is a slight potential for that more so in the context of tax reform though. So stay tuned because these things are going to continue to generate a lot of discussion and of course the chances for things moving is always enhanced if there is lots of discussion and lots of people talking about it, raising it, giving these issues visibility and that's what everybody is always looking for in order to encourage movement. So I want to thank this wonderful panel and so let's give them a hand


Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Scott Speeran. He's the CEO for Medex Health. How are you? I'm very good. Thanks, Tracy. How are you today? Okay, Scott, I got to tell you our investors are following Medex Health. We're all following it.  Can you tell us more about this? It's an incredible project for Medex. I'm fortunate enough to be in the position we are with Brazil. As you know, it's a population of about 260 million people, and they're facing a major skin cancer problem, meaning that it's not being detected until late stages, i.e. stages 3 and 4, and our device will help the people of Brazil detect it on its early onset so that we can put a cure for skin malenoma for Brazilian people. All right, so let's talk about revenue. You've made a number of deals this last year. What are we looking at for revenue for Medex Health? Well, one of the significant projects, as we just talked about, was Brazil for revenue, and we have signed, as was in the release, we have an exclusive distribution partner in Brazil. We have 45 salespeople trained in the use of our sci-scope on dermsecure, and we're looking at significant revenues over the next two or three quarters. We've often had people not talk to us. We say, hey, look at this technology. It's amazing. I mean, for scanning the skin and competitively turning around results. And then people will tell me about an app. Can you tell us why those apps are really not real? I think this is important for investor Intel audience members to be aware of. Can you comment on this? Apps aren't particularly effective when you look at our product, and the significant difference that we offer as an organization is that the sci-scope takes five images and reads two millimeters below the skin. No other product does that, and then uploads to our dermsecure software platform so that these images can then be transmitted to a dermatologist for quick and early diagnosis and detection. And of course, you've just had an announced another initiative in Spain. So we've got Brazil, Spain, everywhere you go to get a good sundae. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? I'd love to talk about Spain because it's a phenomenal project for us. We've done in Spain, we're working with a large group there and a number of national organizations in Spain, and we have done 1,368 patient consults, which involves 2,475 scans, and we've actually identified nine melanomas. So that is significant when you look at early detection through the screening process. You know, this is one of my favorite companies just because the core management team is so passionate and knowledgeable. I mean, you have a significant team that, you know, I would like to recommend investor intel members go out and actually review these websites. Can you tell me what you wish investors would ask you that they never do? Ooh, that's a very good question. I think one of the things that should be asked is to understand more about the device and the medical device industry itself. It's a complicated business. And I've been with medics for a very short time period if you compare it to a product lifecycle. And it takes time to get a product to market. This product, Sciascope on Dermsecure, is on the edge. This is ready to take off for what it can do for the general public in early detection, screening, and solving skin melanoma problems. And so what should we as shareholders and interested investors out there anticipate, say in the next quarter or two, Scott? Again, a difficult question, but I can say with some of the global projects we have in place, as we talked about Brazil, we talked about Spain, we have a project in the Netherlands. And what we're looking at into 2020 in Q1 and into Q2, by the end of Q2, I would like to think we're looking at a cash flow even position with the organization. Well, Scott, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much.


Thank you very, very much. It is indeed a pleasure to be here with you. I always enjoy coming to Halifax. There's always a certain energy and enthusiasm in Halifax. I am a nurse by background. And I am a professor of nursing at the University of British Columbia. And as mentioned, I'm also a scientific director for the Institute of Gender and Health. It's interesting because being a scientific director is really supposed to be a half-time job. And the rest of my time is to be involved in science. They expect scientific directors to do science. Which I think is an interesting model, but so often I don't have a chance to talk about my science. So often I'm primarily asked to come and speak about CHR and the Institute of Gender and Health. So I'm a little rusty at this to tell you the truth, but I'm also really pleased to have this opportunity. And I want to talk to you today about work that we've been doing on frequent marijuana use among teenagers. And I think it's an interesting topic for this seminar series because it really does bring together issues of law, ethics, policy and health in interesting ways. And I'm going to string together a number of observations and hopefully they'll make some sense to you. And I'm also hoping to have some dialogue with you about this area. So to begin with, I want to just kind of outline what I'm hoping to do. I want to talk about the complex and contested nature of marijuana use. And I really am going to focus on, because I'm from the Institute of Gender and Health, I always try to exemplify issues of gender and how gender is an important social factor in shaping health and health opportunities and behavior. But I'm going to talk a little bit about gender, diversity and place-based factors that also shape drug use practices and the enactment of policies. And I want to talk about the possibilities of public health approach to marijuana use. But before I begin, I'd like to begin with a social experiment. So here's a social experiment. Get a little nervous now.  Now, I call it a social experiment because for many of you, see, there's already a bit of a Twitter in the room, for many of you you might have thought, should I put my hand up? For many of you, you might have looked around the room and said, well, she's putting her hand up, maybe I should put my hand up too.  And this actually does exemplify the problem that we're having with marijuana use, is that it is an illicit substance, but it is very frequently used. It has got medical status in this country for medical marijuana use. So it's contested. And because of that, I think often we don't know how to have a meaningful conversation. We certainly aren't really good at really forging forward with a good public health approach. So I want to tell you about a second social experiment. I went to get my nexus card. And a nexus card is a card that allows you to cross the border easily into the United States. This isn't me, it's just so. It's an example. It was on the Internet. I took it all, you know, anyhow. So in the context of having my nexus interview by the American authorities, I was asked the very same question. I was asked the question, have you ever smoked marijuana? And I found myself in this very kind of interesting predicament as well. I thought, well, if I say no, I went to high school, you know, in the 70s. Who didn't smoke marijuana? If I say no, they're going to know I'm lying. But if I say yes, am I actually jeopardizing my opportunity to get a nexus card here? So again, I think it illustrates this kind of contested space we're in. So the, okay, excellent question. So the outcome of this was that actually I did decide to say yes. I thought I'm going to take the high road and be honest and say yes, I have smoked marijuana. They did try to drill down into when and how much and in the most recent past. And I did get my nexus card, which is interesting. So I think again, as we think about cross-border policies as well, the implications get kind of complicated. And again, in our most recent, in the most recent elections in the United States, here in Canada we think we're so progressive, but now we are seeing opportunities for marijuana to be legalized in certain contexts. So things are shifting and changing. And I do come from the province of British Columbia where Pat Carney actually proudly stood up in Senate and said that we do grow the best marijuana in the country and was absolutely outraged that BC did not get the contract for medical marijuana. So it's kind of a fascinating time that we live in. But I'm going to today talk about young people in marijuana use. And I think it's interesting, we can kind of giggle about it because many of us actually have smoked marijuana in our past, have had that experience. Many of our friends have. And it's actually not been at all problematic. But indeed there is some evidence that for some people it is a substance, a problematic substance. And so we've been doing work in British Columbia in three communities looking at marijuana use among teenagers and particularly frequent marijuana use. And so I'm going to draw on the evidence and some exemplars from our work today and talking about how really this, how use is really shaped by gendered norms, by place-based factors, and how policy, how we are in this kind of interesting policy conundrum in terms of how to move forward. So it's interesting because I looked at Canada's low risk drinking guidelines. And so you might actually say, well, do we do this for other things like alcohol use? And this is the Canadian Center for Substance Abuse. They actually have guidelines because they realize teens are going to drink. And so they have this guideline that says alcohol can harm the way the body and brain develop. Teens should speak with their parents about drinking. And if they choose to drink, they should do so under parental guidance. Never more than one to two drinks at a time and never more than one to two times per week. They should plan ahead, follow local alcohol laws, and consider the safer drinking tips listed in this brochure. Now, again, so this is an attempt, I think, from a policy standpoint to actually deal with we know that teens are not to be purchasing alcohol, but they actually can consume alcohol under certain circumstances. But this is actually, I think, an example of a very naive policy approach. I don't know about you, but when I was a teenager, there was no way that I was going to go and consume alcohol under parental supervision. So I think, again, we've got a very naive approach in terms of thinking about who teens are, what they do, and what policy approaches that we should be utilizing. So this isn't going to work for marijuana either. I'll be very clear about that. So marijuana is a contested substance, but I also am going to argue that young people also have a contested status. They also are in between. We on many ways expect them to make rational decisions and be encouraged actually to be responsible. Yet it's many other times we pull back from that and we actually really don't give them the authority over their own lives. And so, again, this creates this kind of interesting tension in terms of how to think about moving forward in this area. So just by way of background in terms of the legal status of marijuana, it was first made illegal in Canada in 1923 with the Opium and Drug Act. And it's interesting, Emily Murphy, so many of us laud the work of Emily Murphy, she actually had a lot to do with this with some of her paper and her writings on what she referred to as the Black Candle because she was very concerned about marijuana and its status and how it potentially could influence Canadian society. And it was because of that that marijuana was listed in part and there were other contextual factors as well in the Opium and Drug Act. In the early 1970s, there were calls for decriminalization of marijuana in Canada and we've seen many cycles about this occurring in terms of the need to decriminalize. And superior and appellate courts have declared that Canada's cannabis laws really have no force or effect. We're all struggling with this question, what should we do with cannabis? And in 2001, Canada became the first country to implement a formal system to regulate marijuana. Now our problem with our medical marijuana system has largely been that the medical marijuana that is produced under that program is terrible. Nobody likes it, nobody likes to use it, it's not good quality marijuana so it's been problematic as well. And it's interesting because despite all of these contested factors there are approximately 40,000 people per year who are charged with marijuana possession. So this is, wow, it's interesting. Again, the situation we find ourselves in. So it's interesting because polls suggest that 66% of Canadians are in favor of the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana. So the majority of people out there actually do think that we've got to kind of get a grip here and start to think about this issue. And in 2007, sorry, this is not as up to date as I'd like it to be, 61% of youth indicated that they have used marijuana at least once. This is a Canadian population-based survey. And 8.2% of youth report using marijuana on a daily basis. Now, so we kind of again have this conundrum. We have marijuana being an illicit substance, we see most Canadians are going, eh, you know, really, but it has a contested status. And we have many teenagers also indicating they've used it and are using it frequently. And so young people in BC, I've done a lot of work in tobacco as well. And in doing a survey and working with kids and teens on tobacco use in British Columbia, they said to us, why are you studying tobacco? None of us can get that anymore. It's hard to get tobacco. Ask us about marijuana. There's something to talk about. So we actually shifted gears after that because we realized while there was something going on here, indeed marijuana was much more easier to acquire than tobacco because we've done such a good job in terms of public health around tobacco. It's not available in stores, it's behind closed doors, we've priced it out of control, we've had a public health approach. So it is, again, I think, demonstrative of kind of this conundrum we find ourselves in. So we decided we would go forth and study and work with young people in communities to really try to understand what was going on. And I've been doing this for about eight or nine years now, talking to teens and trying to think about what we can do about marijuana. And I guess the bottom line is it's complex. And I want to kind of give you a bit of a sense of some of the data out of this work. So I've said it's got an in-between status in terms of its legal status, but it also gets taken up in very interesting ways and is actually approved and actually considered more, I guess, more appropriate in particular conditions. And it's also silenced in particular conditions as well. And I think that's interesting from a policy standpoint. So we've been doing a project called TRACE, Teen's Report on Adolescent Cannabis Experience. I love naming my projects, it's something I do tend to do. Because then when you're talking to people, you just call it the TRACE project. And so what we were really interested in is working in communities and trying to understand the culture and context of frequent marijuana use. So this was an ethnic graphic study to develop a richer understanding of how young people, their schools and communities in which they are in place coincide to generate a set of local social processes that affect cannabis use. And so we were in three communities in British Columbia. Two smaller communities and Vancouver was the other community. And we spent time interviewing teenagers and talking to them and talking to law enforcement, talking to teachers and adults in these communities. And since that time, there's been a few other chapters, but we've been now moving into more of a knowledge translation, trying to think about public health messaging and what we might do about some of this. So it's no surprise and they call it high school. So it's interesting. It is the place where most teenagers spend the majority of their daytime hours. And I do think it is a space that we don't really think about. I don't know, how many of you have walked through high school recently? Yeah, it's fascinating. Whoa, it's really interesting to walk through high schools and see what's really going on there. And it's interesting because even as adults, we don't actually have a sense of what goes on in high schools and what that dynamic is really about. It is a space and place where, unless you're a teacher, I haven't ruled to be there. And that does make sense. It's kind of, I don't know, it's illusory to us about what's really happening there. So we spent time in high schools talking to teenagers. And what we found is that marijuana use is a concern for teachers and administrators. They are concerned about it, but they don't know what to do. So one teacher told us that kids are smoking before school, kids are smoking before lunch. The timing seems real really crappy. They start early, they go the whole day high, and really don't get a lot accomplished. Now, it was interesting because at a number of the schools, the way they would deal with marijuana use is they would actually suspend the kids. So if you were caught smoking marijuana, you would be suspended from high school. But this also led to a very interesting kind of problem because the teachers knew that if I was going to suspend this kid, I was really setting them adrift. And this was going to be very problematic for them. So rather than suspend the kids, they would ignore the problem. They would actually prefer to not deal with it, not have to talk about it, not even have to mention it. Because if they did, it would then become an actionable matter within the school system. So many of the students that we talked to also admitted to using marijuana frequently and coming to class stoned. And what we often saw, we actually saw visible use of marijuana outside the schools. You'd walk into the school and you'd see kids, and you can imagine this hanging outside on the edges of the tree-lined areas smoking marijuana. And so you could tell this was happening. It was apparent. And the school authorities were doing a variety of things to try and deal with this problem. They were putting up walls and barricades and doing all sorts of things. But again, all that was doing was driving the problem further afield so kids who were smoking frequently would actually tend school less frequently. Now, it's interesting, you might say, well, what's the big deal with marijuana use? But here's an 18-year-old who was telling us that I started smoking a couple of months after my 12th birthday. Since that, it sort of snowballed. It was once or twice a week, then four times a week, you know, until it got to the point where we were skipping out of school so we could go smoking dope in the morning and then at lunch. So this is not for all teens. This is a subset of kids who really are smoking frequently. Four, five times a day. And so it is interfering with their lives. It is interfering with their engagement in school activities. And indeed, it's interfering with their engagement in the social world with their families and friends as well. So again, I think there was a conundrum here that we need to be thinking about why is this happening for these kids? And here's an example from a girl, a 16-year-old. Well, I smoke it every morning so I can actually get out of bed. And it gives me that boost of energy to just get up, to get ready for school. I drive to school with a couple of friends and we'll smoke a couple of joints and then I'll be stoned for lunch and halfway through I'll be burnt out. And then once the class starts, I'll be normal again. I won't get high or anything. And then after school I'll smoke again. Some, or a lot, laughs. And depending on the day and then at night I'll have a bowl to myself and go to sleep.  And we could ask ourselves what's going on here. And this is part of the backstory. What we have found is that kids do smoke marijuana for a variety of reasons. But probably most troubling to us is that a number of them are smoking frequently like this because they do have unaddressed emotional issues that are not being dealt with by the health system or the school system. And they also have very effectively taken up the discourse of medical marijuana use to actually manage. And they actually are managing their health and emotional problems through marijuana. And so it's, again, because, and who can blame them? Who can blame them? But I think it points to the need for us to really start to think about the role of marijuana in our society. So here's teachers' responses and this is about what they did. And I've kind of spoken to this point already. In one case I just told them, I picked it up right away and I just said I don't think today is a good day for you to be here.  So this is a very interesting mixed message to this young person. It's like, don't look like you're stone and you can be here. But it's not really engaging in a discussion and really no ability on the part of teachers to actually have a conversation about what's happening for you. Why are you smoking? What's going on? And again, in part, because it's an illicit substance, how do you have that conversation? Another teacher said, I said I can't have you in my class stones. It's just totally unacceptable. I'm sorry, but I can't have you here so don't come. Again, instead of dealing with what might be behind the scenes, we end up in this kind of reactive mode. And I'm not saying this is happening in every school system and there are some fabulous systems out there that actually are trying to shift the way we think about these issues. But I do think it is problematic. The other thing that we found is that in our work with teenagers that many of them actually, because it is so acceptable in their families, they have parents who are smoking, they actually told us there's a normalization that's occurring there. We talk to young girls who talk about being paid in marijuana instead of cash for babysitting. It is part of the currency of the day. So we've got to recognize that this is taking place in communities and think about on the one hand how to have a conversation. So the silence is quite profound and I think the silence happens on two levels. One is around the need to use marijuana. So what's underlying frequent marijuana use in particular for teenagers? And the secondly is around the amount of use. I hope you're shocked at these kind of quotes of young people using so frequently. It is problematic and we do need to think about it. So we're not talking about a kid who has a joint on a weekend. We're talking about kids who are really taking up and utilizing marijuana because it is serving a particular role in their lives. The problem though is that teens often perceive that there's an avoidance of this issue on the part of the teachers. And I think silence is actually saying it's okay in so many ways. And I think that again we've got to figure out how to begin to have the conversation. So one student expanded, but really in the school there's no teachers that talk about it or unless they're saying the dogs are coming. They had sniffer dogs coming to the school or something like that is not really discussed. Teachers don't discuss it up here. I don't know why. So they would bring sniffer dogs into the school to kind of sniff out the lockers but they wouldn't actually kind of deal again with the issues at hand. So I'm going to shift gears here because the other part we have to put at least one little gendered nub in here. The other thing that's really interesting is that marijuana use is a highly gendered practice as well. So we do see boys smoking marijuana more than girls do and that's for a variety of reasons. There actually might be sex-based factors at play. We don't actually understand it very well in terms of whether males and females actually respond to the components of marijuana differently. But we do know that there are a number of factors that actually cause, you know, stoner boy kind of culture to take place and also kind of provides messages to girls that it's not appropriate for them to smoke marijuana because they become too giggly and inappropriate. So there's certain kinds of social norms at play that actually kind of reinforce boys and marijuana use. So, and I think Anderson, this is just a quote from the work of Anderson, which she really drove the point home. Employing a critical approach to researching gender and drug use asks us to study substance use more carefully and to recognize the impact of social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity on individual and group drug use. So we were really interested in gendered norms and how they were playing out for boys and girls around marijuana use in our study and have written a paper about this as well. So, you know, if you ask teenagers to talk about gender, they say, well, I don't know. It's really actually hard. It's one of, again, one of those things that is so much a part of our lives, but it's hard to recognize how it is a gendered practice.  Yeah, I've never seen a chick, one of them, be a stoner. For some reason, I have a lot of trouble seeing a girl smoking pot. I mean, it seems to be more like a guy thing to me. I mean, I know it's not, well, maybe it's more of a guy thing, but I know the girls do it and stuff, but I just have trouble seeing that, I guess. And again, it's interesting here, we do tend to see in our conversations with teenagers about examples of boys smoking socially and in groups more and girls actually like the girl who woke up and had a puff before she got out of bed smoking alone and hiding it more. So here's another quote from a girl because we see it working both ways. I think guys do it more to get high and girls do it more to fit in. So here's another theory about gendered practices. I think I don't know that for sure, but that's my perception because you see a lot of the preppy girls up at the school smoking pot and they just shouldn't smoke pot. They don't even inhale it. It just doesn't look right. It just doesn't look right. It's not that right type of person. So now we see an example of the right type of person smoking marijuana. And so you can see how it becomes embedded in culture and context, how certain kind of girls and certain kind of boys smoke marijuana and get reinforced for doing so and actually get reinforced by their peers for doing so. So if we're going to actually understand policy, practice, education, we do need to understand these dynamics as well. So it's interesting because I'm also very interested in kind of how broader social discourse is. So this is a slide that's exemplifying a broader social discourse and it says, you can't read it very well, go to work, send your kids to school, follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch TV, save for your old age, obey the law, repeat after me, I am free. I kind of like it anyway because I do think there is a broader discourse out there that we also know is shaping marijuana use and we were also interested in trying to understand, you know, to kind of step back and going, well what are the messages and how are we reinforcing, might be reinforcing marijuana use or how does it get taken up? So in the final phase of my presentation today I want to talk to you about a media analysis that we did because we were also interested in understanding the media's role in terms of thinking about marijuana use. So we did a discourse analysis of Canadian newspaper reports and so we took the main newspaper reports and we did a word search. This is a problem, just a brief theoretical or methodological note here. If you want to do a word search for marijuana you've got to use all these other terms like pot and weed, but you get all the gardening articles, right? It's a problem. So this actually took a lot longer than you think. So we had to weed through thousands of articles to come up with our sample and actually indeed came up with a sample of a couple thousand articles over a ten year period and we were interested in looking at, so we did a quantitative and a qualitative analysis and this is from some of the qualitative analysis and this is about what we call privileged normalization, that it's okay for certain people to smoke marijuana and I think that's again part of the dynamic in society at the present time. So we were interested in describing dominant messages and trends related to marijuana in a population of Canadian national newspaper stories over a ten year period and so I just want to kind of give you a sense so it's no surprise and kids are taking this up in terms of the way the messages they're getting because I think there are broader societal messages that are also influencing this. So what we learned from looking at these papers is that marijuana use is sanctioned for particular groups and I'll tell you a bit more about that and that the negative consequences of use are associated with violence and crime. So often the crime story might include the fact that they were stoned at the time or that they were selling marijuana or selling other drugs but there's no health story out there at all about marijuana. No one really wants to talk about health and that was kind of interesting to us as well. And I think the other thing that was interesting is that particular Canadian values and perspectives suggest that a progressive view that marijuana use is acceptable in the right circumstances. So again on the one hand I think we have this notion that it is appropriate in this particular context. So here's a few of these kind of discourses that we think are particularly interesting. One is about elite privilege. So reporting marijuana use by celebrities and athletes. You'd be amazed how many stories there are in newspapers that suggest and these are the football players the Cheech and Chongers the other movie stars who can freely admit that they smoke marijuana and it's normalized for social elites and typically men not women. And so these are musicians, athletes and other celebrities. In contrast there's also a gender privilege we talked about gender that gender buys some stories about women's marijuana use.  And they're not presented as women but instead are represented as being particularly problematic in some way. The other thing is this defining of the underclass or the othering of marijuana users in news reporting. And usually issues of race and ethnicity start to come into play. So these are the other people who smoke marijuana. It's not, you know, it's not the kind of the majority. So all of a sudden we see in stories references to racialized groups to other minority groups coming into play in terms of their status or their so-called outlaw or sub-cultural group membership. Again interesting to pay attention to. And then finally the discourse on Canadian identity really was linking marijuana use to Canadian values.  And in particularly we would contrast this to American context. It's interesting this was done before the American election most recent American election. I think many of the results of the most recent American election have caught us off guard with thinking anew about what the status is, what our quote-progressive status is in Canada. So I guess I'm pointing this out to really get you to think about how broader it's not just about individual places and spaces, but also how these broader discourses are influencing how we take up and understand marijuana use. So I think that these themes are important to consider because they play a role in shaping how the public and policymakers think about marijuana. You know, the media plays a very important role in kind of informing us about what we should think, how we should act, what is important. And the tone of debates about marijuana as a criminal, legal and public health issue, where does it get placed? And I guess we're concerned that it hasn't been put into a public health context to any great degree. It's primarily been discussed as a legal matter. The consequences have been talked about in terms of grow operations, etc. But actually, if you really look at the science, there's a lot of things we actually don't know about the health effects of marijuana. So I do think that we do need to fill the public health vacuum. I think we need to figure out what we're going to do about this and how we're going to talk about it. And one of the things that we're interested in doing is trying to figure out what we can do in relation to this. So, you know, if you ask a kid to talk to you about marijuana, their biggest source of evidence is Google. And right now, that's where they're going to learn about it. And when we talk to them, they can tell us all the great websites and what they're learning. But the quality of that evidence is problematic. The other thing that's again, it puts us in a very awkward space is that the evidence is confusing. In some context there are some benefits. In other contexts, there are some harms. And in other contexts, you know, just like alcohol use, using alcohol infrequently isn't going to hurt any of us. So it's confusing. And I think the fear in terms of engaging with young people in particular is that if we start to talk about it and we actually indicate that there's not good evidence out there, that somehow they're going to start all smoking marijuana. So what do we do? What do we do about this? So I do think we are interested in reducing potential harms related to cannabis use. And I think it really is going to really call on us to actually trust young people to make good decisions and provide them with the evidence. Actually help them, you know, think through the evidence. So if our intention is that young people are going to minimize the harms related to cannabis use, we need to understand how they engage in weighing this evidence. So we've been doing work for the last two years bringing teenagers in and having them read the scientific literature to see, to really kind of understand, you know, how do they take up the scientific evidence related to this? Can they understand it? Can they use it to inform decisions? And how do they think about this? Because I think that's actually a bit of the nub of this as well is that we want to give young people prepackaged messages like just say no. And in that context we feel like somehow you know, because they can't understand the complexity of it all. So we're interested in a really a harm reduction strategy that's aimed at supporting young people so that they can become equipped to weigh reliable evidence, to think about what the evidence is to weigh it and make appropriate decisions. So we're not, right now, we know kind of a no-win game to actually really find there is no middle ground here in a way in terms of saying it's good or it's bad under what conditions. I think that what we need to do is equip young people to understand the role of marijuana in our society to think about what the evidence is and to make decisions. And indeed when we do that with young people they can indeed come up with some very clear recommendations. So in talking to them here's one young person who said I thought doing the research would kind of help us find the yes and no's, but it actually didn't. It made us more confused. But we did learn more of the why. It could be a yes or it could be a no. So I think those that are really valuable towards finding the conclusions, trying to weigh the evidence, trying to understand what's happening. And here's another young man. I pick out the parts that I find interesting. He's reading, you know, he's reading papers in BMJ and Nature and it's a challenge for me to read these papers. I pick out the parts that I find interesting and I read those. And then I also look at the graphs first because they're well organized and interesting. And I find the relevant sections of text that actually elaborate on those graphs and I conform my own thought process because I'm reading through it in my own way. So again I think this idea that they can't pay attention to this, they can't, you know, weigh the pros and cons, think about the evidence is again problematic. So we've been working with young people and they've actually come up with a list of what they think are appropriate public health messages for marijuana use and this is what they've told us. And these are kids who have used marijuana and those who have not. It's better to stay abstinent than to suffer the potential consequences. Okay, but do you think there are consequences? That kind of makes sense to me. It's best not to resort to marijuana when life isn't going well. There's always help available. That's a good message. That's interesting because that kind of speaks to some of the other context in young people's lives. Initiating marijuana use before adulthood is a lot more dangerous than beginning it at a later age. Again prudent because there is scientific evidence to suggest that there is a role of marijuana in brain development. They're reading that and they're kind of thinking delay, harm reduction. Marijuana affects everyone differently both physically and mentally. Okay, it's good to know that. If you choose to use it, make sure it only impacts your life, not the lives of others. Again, they're understanding the context of marijuana use. Know your source. There may be a lot more in the dose than just marijuana. The higher the dosage, the more severe the impairment and finally know the risk. Make informed decisions use responsibly. Now I'm not saying this is the perfect set of public health messages, but I think what I'm pointing to is that I think we can fill the void. I think we can begin to have a conversation and it's not just about either saying marijuana is okay or not okay, but really thinking about how it is used, how it's taken up much like alcohol, much like tobacco understanding it and having a conversation and I think it is it's in between status as an illicit substance that really has blocked that from happening. So I think we need to move away from just say no. That ain't working. I'll tell you that right now. It is not a good message because they know they've got parents who smoke marijuana. This isn't working. So we need to meaningfully engage with young people. We need to acknowledge the state of the evidence and we actually need more research on marijuana. It's shocking what little evidence actually is there. Silence is a response and there are a number of unmet needs of young people in Canada right now and I think in part the frequent marijuana use in particular is symptomatic of an unmet need and I think drug use policy can privilege particular people and particular forms of use and I think it's interesting for us to think about that as well. So I'm going to stop there and I'd really love to hear from you and engage in a discussion with all of you. Thank you. I'm going to manage the questions for you. Great. I think there's one in the back there. I'm just wondering whether or not there is any studies done that need teenagers to marijuana use and actually their grades and the reason why I ask is because it seems as though I've only been in high school in those six years and I remember being in high school and students being removed from their classes because of the marijuana use and I feel like being removed from the class was more of a problem for the marijuana use itself because they aren't engaging with everybody else doing the score, failing their exams and is it actually the marijuana use that we're breaking down the grades or is it actually the removed from the class so I'm just curious about any research on that. There is evidence that particularly frequent marijuana use is correlated with poor academic performance as is other type of drug use. There's pretty good evidence on that. It's interesting because a lot of the young people we talked to thought that they actually were able to pay attention more and that their cognitive skills were improving but that's probably not the case. For some, I'm pointing to the psychiatrist in the room, I think for some it actually might relieve some anxiety for them so they're able to function in maybe a more relaxed way so they feel better about their thought processes but you're right but that then gets compounded by the fact that they are being removed from school and their other issues might not be being paid attention to so absolutely it's interesting, I should say there are some fabulous programs now around not removing kids from school so I don't want to suggest that it is still happening in a number of school districts but there are a number of schools now that are really beginning to engage in a much more fulsome dialogue with kids around their use, why they use, what's going on in their lives so thanks. I was wondering if any of your research looked at knowledge of legal status so what did they think the legal status of the drug was and because I think the just say no message is actually not the message that they think is out there they don't think that it's prohibited and so I wondered how the mixed legal status affected their behavior A lot of them actually did not know it was illicit, they actually did not understand that because it was used so frequently by the adults around them and because again I think there is confusion on our messaging in the medical marijuana program so it's kind of again so they were confused about that and a lot of them did have incorrect information so again I think to help them understand that context is important as well so I'm glad you raised that thank you. Is there a conflict between the way people feel about marijuana use and the reality of it do you think legalization is a necessary step in order to open up this dialogue and create a space for health promotion you know I knew someone was going to ask me that question I'm really torn about it you know in British Columbia there are a lot of people who are making a very compelling case related to the criminal element and the public health harms that are coming because of the criminal element that is associated with marijuana trade and that is very compelling but I'm also very cognizant of you know I remember colleagues saying to me you know if we were going to actually create legislation around tobacco for example we would have never created legislation to make it so available we would have thought twice about that so I want to make sure that we're prudent in terms of thinking twice and I am a little bit concerned about the status of the evidence but it's same like same as alcohol use as well so I think there's going to have to be regulation I think that we're going to have to be prudent and think about you know about licensing availability those kinds of things and that's the approach that's being used in the United States and actually I think for young people it would clarify the status I think about the initial comment that I made that indeed tobacco was more difficult for them to access than marijuana I think it would clarify some things and that it would actually give messages to adults as well and actually maybe create a space in place for us to actually research some of the evidence related to potential harms as well because there are harms I mean there is evidence for example especially among not everybody just like alcoholism we don't see everyone who drinks a glass of wine doesn't become an alcoholic but there is a dependency syndrome in marijuana I think it's important to note that you know it's not so great for your lungs it's important to note that there are kind of other harm reduction mechanisms we could be thinking about so that's a long answer to your question so I think there's a lot of things that we need to think about and putting in place to move forward you know if the legalization of it would really solve any sort of problem with health orientation because it would seem like medical marijuana so it wouldn't have the potency that the illicit drug has presently would get off the street which in many instances there's more than just marijuana in the drug so whether the youth would still search for that other or accept the fact that they could now use this if they were at the right age and where there is growing evidence of the link of psychosis with the use of marijuana and depending on your vulnerability it's not everyone that develops that just alone that the uniqueness that help the effect of the drug on the individual I think is holding back the opening up the because it would be a source of income just like tobacco was just like alcohol was that can control those things yeah it's interesting just around your first point you know when prohibition of alcohol was finally lifted in the United States people didn't have gin mills in the basement anymore because it became and actually quality products improved and labeling so I do think actually we probably could have more control of products and the free market would dictate availability I'm not as concerned about that I do think there are ways around that point and it's interesting because I actually I don't know the answer to this question I'm troubled by it as well we also know for example that alcohol, that people who have a very there are particular predisposing factors that will lead certain individuals to have a more likelihood of becoming alcoholics family history being won so but we can give people that information and then they can make free informed decisions about what they should do about that I just think it's an interesting issue but there are consequences as you said for the public purse in terms of health consequences etc so again I think that I think there's a lot of in my view there's a lot of thinking that we need to do and if we move down that road in Canada I think there's going to be a lot of education that we're going to need to do in terms of figuring out our public health messaging figuring out how we engage and being very honest about the evidence gaps as well in the area of increased resources for mental health might be on the road to go if you're going to do something like this because they're linked and you have a question I have just a question about your presentation that is encapsulated in a report or something that you bring up here yeah so I do have, sorry I didn't bring my reference list with me but I do have a number of papers and a few reports for schools and I'd be happy to share those with you so I'll give you my e-mail send me an e-mail how long you carry out these studies and you speak to students who are frequent users do you have any who say that their use is that result and negatively and you would like to start the path that they continue yeah there are some who know they're in trouble and so for example we had we talked to some young people as an example who had been medicated and put on sleeping pills or put on anti-anxiety medications and we're not liking the feeling of those drugs and so then went off those drugs and we're using marijuana to try and manage their symptoms as an example and but they also knew that it was having some consequences it was costing a lot of money it was also it was interrupting it does influence your social behavior and they knew that was happening for them as well and it is it does create some amotivation it's very hard to kind of get motivated to do particular things and they were cognizant of that but they didn't know what else to do and I think we see that in other drug use situations as well people who smoke tobacco frequently know they are in trouble they know that they're going to have a bit of difficulty so there was some awareness I don't think there was just blind ignorance to this issue but I also think it points to the fact that other solutions weren't in place for them and I think this broader issue of mental health and young people is at play and I'm not saying everybody who uses marijuana has mental health problems but that is a core issue that we need to pay attention to I'm just thinking about modeling this on other harm reduction programs where you have a question of criminal law or a success this and so in those cases it's how do people act around that you're not going to change the status of the law but the fact that the act is illegal has an impact not only on people who are engaging in it but what those can do who are around them those structures are policies that are impeding the schools and the teachers from being able to act so for example I was wondering is there an obligation on teachers to have to report unlawful activity and so what is the legal status of the drug what is its impact on the capacities of not the students to act but those around them to act because I think those are your laws that are really going to affect a program like this they can't do anything because they're so worried about their own culpability in light of being seen to endorse it or allow it or so forth which makes them just silent on it in order to avoid or the opposite that they're forced to take action and then what would that mean to so I wondered if you encountered any of those policies or even legal requirements on teachers or schools and I think it's context based in part it's about how it gets taken up in school districts how these regulations get interpreted so I'm not sure about legal status but I think policy status is more what we paid attention to so it's interesting in our school districts we have zero tolerance for example and obviously that is informed by the drug's legal status but I think then it kind of trickles down into school district policy and then it gets interpreted and taken up again in very particular ways so that's why we're interested in going to different communities because there is different dialogue happening in different communities and I totally agree with you I think it is for me at least a lot more about the adults surrounding the circumstances and this kind of conundrum in this one high school that we were in it was kind of a legalistic interpretation of this policy that really put teachers they felt that they were in this conundrum where if they said something the student would be expelled and if they didn't say something they knew their silence was speaking volumes so it's interesting and I do think there are workarounds with this and I think the workaround is to not to actually arm students themselves to provide evidence and arm students themselves so not get into this kind of policing but to talk about these broader issues I think that's the way to have this conversation and I think teachers just haven't been provided with that material so there's an openness to it but nobody's expecting it I think there's a lot more and let's be clear the Canadian anti-drug strategy I didn't talk about that but that is also shaping materials policies it's playing a very important role it was renamed the anti-drug strategy it used to be called the harm reduction strategy and is that implemented into schools or not? it has trickle down effects, absolutely the gender difference you saw in New Zealand and link it to something I was reading recently about research and education in boys and why boys are failing they're disproportionately failing and wonder whether you've made the link with issues around differences in risk between boys and girls but the other piece is differences with respect to future planning because that seemed to be the theory behind this person who's speaking about failing in education it's about a difference about planning for the future and that sort of connected to me in terms of their decision making around marijuana use do you make that link? Do you think it helps understand? I think that there are a number of things at play it's so interesting to really start to dig into this one thing we know that developmentally that boys lag behind girls in terms of their social skills and abilities and so marijuana if you've ever smoked it it kind of makes you giggly and interact it provides an opportunity to interact in a social way it provides an opening for that and because of a developmental lag there might be reasons why boys would get to that substance it also creates a context for risk taking we know that snowboarding skiing, biking, culture it also gets taken up in that regard so I think these things are all linked in terms of masculine performance sense of social skills all those types of things so I think that that's why I think we need to understand it as gendered practice and that's why we need to think about again in terms of the way we engage to make sure we're sensitive to those issues as well I do think that we do have a number of issues we need to think about as well around what's happening to boys in our school systems at the present time and I think this begins to point to some of that as well so thanks for that I was wondering whether there's been any evidence with respect to how the uptake or use of marijuana has affected the uptake or use of other substances like alcohol or tobacco I know you spoke about the gender difference the guy is referring to marijuana the girl is referring to alcohol but what I've seen as a family physician is we went through a generation of kids that had got the message about no smoking but now that they've been turned on to marijuana it's bringing them to smoking as well so not only are they picking up on the marijuana but it's leading them to tobacco abuse which of course is another health concern have you seen that in sort of your researcher excellent question we actually have them work on that and so first of all I think that it is mythology that marijuana is a gateway drug there is no evidence that if you smoke marijuana you're going to start using heroin a lot of heroin users happen to have smoked marijuana in their lives I think that's the issue so I just want to put that out there but we actually have used the language of reverse gateway to tobacco because actually there is some evidence that if you start smoking marijuana you actually might start to smoke tobacco and in some communities you know splits, blunts, you know all of this is part of popular culture so putting marijuana in a cigar, rolling paper mixing it with tobacco mixing it in a bong with tobacco that is all part of practice in different contexts you go to one community, kids are doing that all the time and in another they're not there is also a concern I guess and that's part of the harm reduction messaging as well that we need to be getting kids to think about their exposure to tobacco when they're smoking it with marijuana so I totally and I actually think, yeah, so I think that that's part of this public health story as well absolutely last burning question so thank you very much Dr. Johnson for coming to speak to us on the research it's an important societal issue and you said at the beginning that you would be through public health concerns legal concerns ethical concerns and you've been able to do that as well as public policy so you said that you're going to continue this research so good luck with the rest of your research thank you and we hope that in a couple years you'll be back to Halifax to present it to us thank you so much, thanks for your attention


In this presentation, we will calculate the federal income tax withholding or FIT withholdings. We are here in the payroll register. We're currently calculated up through total earnings, that being the addition of regular pay and overtime pay, giving us total earnings. Now we're going to go through and calculate the FIT wages. The FIT wages will differ from total earnings, total earnings, including everything, whereas FIT is going to be reduced by some things that would be not includeable in gross pay for our 1040 reporting at the end of the year. Those would be the above the line deductions on our 1040, which would include a cafeteria plan if it was a section 125 plan and the retirement plan. So that's how these two numbers could differ. I hope that this is really our full compensation.


BFNN headline news update.  So what you had out of the indices folks is this, NASDAQ got all the loss back from Friday. Dow Industrial is not even close, 236 points, you down to 1,000, you get 236 back, S&Ps only got half the back, bottom line. I suspect the average is going to try to charge up to higher price because we have window dressing going on, but I expect what you're also going to see here is this, as we go to higher price, you're going to see a contraction of volume. Gold, gold contract traded down $2.70 at 17.85, we had silver off 27 cents, $22.83, light sweet crude up a buck 39, but that's after being down $10 on Friday at $69.55. The note and bond market, that continues to want higher price, lower yield. Today you're back down, you're back down with lighter volume after exploding higher Friday with volume and we only had 3.5 hours in the day versus 6.5 hours every other trading day. You had the 10-year today, I'll trade down one tick at 13104, the 30-year off 20 at 162.08 and then King dollar. King dollar was up 178 ticks, trading at 96.266 and the bottom line you had the euro at 112, yen at 113, the British pound at 133 to one US dollar. When we take a look at the spy, what you're going to see there in the spy is that the bottom line you come down hard, you come down fast, you come down with volume and we go higher with lighter volume and 3.5 hours on Friday, on Friday you come down with 112 million, you go higher today with 73 million, bottom line we'll see what they can make up to the highs, the lows of the highs are 467, we made it to 466.56 today and the X100 is a different animal, bottom line and the X100 what you have with the 3Qs, 3Qs came down to a price point on Friday so check this out, this is pretty amazing actually, that came down to 389, the bottom line is that we're 399 okay, so the bottom line we're over that level, the lows of the high is 399.19, so you're already into the bar, once you're into the bar that's saying more than likely the bottom line is that that baby is going to get up to the higher end which is that 408.71, so this is going to be really intriguing watching this whole baby play up, have a great night folks, have a safe night, come back and visit Tommy tomorrow I'm on kicks us off 9am, have a great one, have a safe one.


Talking is easy, right? We all do it every day, whether it's in person, by email or by text. But what happens when something goes wrong? What happens when what we're using to communicate just isn't reliable, reliable, la la la la la la. We use protocols. Protocols is a fancy word for a simple concept, communicating formally. The stock market's doing so poorly, what shall I do? Not like that. Pilots use protocols. The communication has to be reliable and efficient. They have to be able to communicate with other planes and various airports in order to stay safe. For example, how do they report their positions? What happens if they don't understand what was said? What happens if they don't hear back? We can get into some pretty cool good situations. So what runway should we use? I think you said land on the cake. Okay, we're landing on the cake. What now? To avoid this, we use protocols. Protocols are a way to formalise communication, such that we don't get ourselves into trouble. That's why pilots are always a pedic snuff, always a pedic snuff. And use special code words to avoid being misheard. Christchurch Town, Charlie Charlie Elford Bridge, Eastern Firebreak, 1500. We have information, Juliet 10344POV, request landing on the runway. Pilots, emergency services, law enforcement, surgeons, builders and even you use protocols every day. They are essential to effective and efficient communication. Scavel. A lot of people think that internet is bulletproof, but it's not. Messages are lost, corrupted and delivered out of order all the time. Think about when you send a message on Facebook. If we didn't have protocols, it would look something like this. Luckily, the message arrives on the other side of the world just fine. The protocol is in place to ensure each word or letter is delivered properly. And if need be, they are recent. In this chapter, you'll learn about protocols such as TCP and UDP, which we use to build awesome applications on the web. Even people in the film industry use protocols. For example, to finish filming, people say cut. Is it cut? All sorts of people use protocols. But in this chapter, guys? See you tomorrow, Sam. Are you still filming?