Monthly Archives: July 2013

Jul 16 2013
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Economy, Society

Facing down service with a scowl

A petrified bloom. . .

The annals of lousy customer service grow longer with each day that passes in this, and every other, country that manufactures careless, disinterested workers in ballooning proportions. Rudeness, it seems, is the preferred posture.

A friend, who shall remain nameless, recounts his recent experience with an airline ticket agent who, when asked a simple question, barked: “Why, exactly, is that my problem? Get back in line!” The friend was so incensed, he wrote a letter to the head of the company. He called it “therapy,” but he’s not holding his breath till redress arrives.

My strategy for dealing with such instances – increasing, as they are – of surliness is more direct. “Don’t give me any of your lip, counter help,” I’m apt to blurt, before taking my business elsewhere. But I grew up on the mean streets of major cities, where we all talked that way.

My real problem is not crumbling decorum as much as it is creeping ignorance among those I pay to do a job I’m not qualified to undertake myself. In these situations, courtesy, though desirable, is less important than competence, which is a perishable commodity in these not especially best of times.

A couple of years ago, Toronto Star business writer Ellen Roseman posted a column on the subject to the CBC’s website. “Dave Carroll, a Halifax musician, wrote a song about the damage to his guitar on a United Airlines flight to Chicago,” she reported. “After posting it on YouTube, he became a symbol of a worldwide protest against poor customer service.”

She continued: “‘United Breaks Guitars’ is now a trilogy of videos. . .While Carroll did get a compensation offer from the airline, he turned it down. His goal is to make big corporations reconsider how they treat ordinary people.”

Indeed, she observed, “Airlines are notorious for bureaucratic handling of customer claims, but they’re not alone. Telecommunications firms – such as Bell, Rogers and Telus – often make you spend time on the phone waiting to speak to a human being. Communication is not their strong suit. . .Banks used to let you speak to branch staff, but now you’re connected to a call centre. One bank, TD Canada Trust, uses call centres in India. And Sears Canada has replaced a call centre in Saskatchewan with one in the Philippines.”

Others merely scratch their heads. “Why (doesn’t a company’s) associates understand that their job is dependent on whether or not I spend my money with the business who writes their check?” wondered an administrative officer and public relations manager at an American home improvement franchise in a post some time ago to eLocal.com. “In the past, I would have blamed this on the teenager behind the counter who was forced to be there by their parents. This isn’t the case anymore. These people are grown men and women, mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, grandparents even.”

In our case, my wife and I have endured a litany of screw-ups by allegedly skilled tradespeople who have worked on our rambling, old home in the west end of Moncton.  There’s the “new” driveway that was graded, helpfully, to conduct water against the foundation, rather than away from it. There are the custom-built kitchen drawers that stick whenever the humidity rises above 60 per cent because they don’t fit the box for which they were designed.

Still, despite all of this, some, small light does shine.

Last week, we took delivery of a brand, new natural gas furnace and air conditioner. The fuel company and the energy distributor worked together like beautifully choreographed ballet dancers – efficiently, knowledgeably and courteously. They answered our questions promptly and convincingly. They didn’t try to oversell us or pull  the wool over our once-jaded eyes.

We emerged from the experience with a renewed appreciation for the dignity of work and for those who remain committed to their own self-respect. All of which proves, if nothing else, that if customer service is an endangered species, it’s not dead yet.

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Jul 16 2013
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Politics, Society

My softening sentiment toward the monarchy

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We are not, in my my family, mindlessly wedded to the notion of constitutional monarchy. The reason may have something to do with a latent strain of Scottish republicanism that I detect, especially on those occasions when we discuss the gathering independence movement among our ancestral tribesmen.

Still, I have noticed that some of the members of my extended households – as fine and as highly tuned as their intellects are – revert to an atavistic state of hero worship whenever they pass a copy of HELLO! Canada on a newsstand. The  comments invariably devolve into versions of vacant fashion statements.

“Doesn’t Kate look marvellous in her condition? Why, she’s eight months pregnant, and you wouldn’t know it.”

“It’s too bad Wills is losing his hair at such a young age. In every other respect he’s the picture of youthful kingship.”

“My, how good the Queen looks. She just keeps going and going.

This little item in a recent edition of HELLO! literally commandeered one relative’s attention for a good 10 minutes:

“They might be an unlikely pair, but Prince Charles and Cara Delevingne got on famously as they chatted in the grounds of Clarence House. The 20-year-old model clearly found Charles to be a hilarious host, and laughed heartily as she spent time with the amiable royal. Cara was among the guests at a ball thrown by Charles and his wife Camilla in support of the conservation charity The Elephant Family on Tuesday evening.”

Even I have found myself softening, in recent years, to the British Royals. I was once an ardent republican – the sort who inveighed loudly and frequently against their irrelevance, cost and annoying tendency to dominate the summertime headlines. Who cared which garden party which aristocrat at the top of the food chain attended to the delight of genteel supplicants foaming at their mouths to obtain their audiences?

Nowadays, I’m more likely to roll my eyes at the people who insist the monarchist  institution and tradition in Canada present a clear and present threat to their liberty. People, like the ones now involved in legal action against the federal government, which requires them to swear an oath of fealty to the Queen before their landed immigrant status can be transmuted to full citizenship.

As the Globe and Mail reported last week, “A small group of landed immigrants with republican views who have refused Canadian citizenship because the ceremony involves swearing an oath to the Queen will be in a Toronto courtroom. . .facing off with the federal government in an attempt to have this citizenship requirement declared unconstitutional.”

“The court fight is the latest chapter in more than 20 years of failed legal challenges to the citizenship oath spearheaded by Trinidadian-born Toronto activist and lawyer Charles Roach, who died last year at 79, never having become a Canadian citizen. Mr. Roach. . .refused to swear the oath and become a citizen because he believed the Queen was a symbol of imperialism and because of injustices done to his ancestors in the name of the British monarchy.”

Fair enough, I suppose. But, as the Globe pointed out, it’s an uphill battle.

Polls taken last year showed Canadian support for the monarchy was actually rising. A Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey found that 51 per cent people thought that maintaining a connection to the British Crown was a good thing. That was six points better than the results from a poll in 2009.

Some, such as Quebec historian Jocelyn Letourneau, have observed that the Harper government has deliberately raised the profile of the Royals in this country. “The restoration of royal symbols (central to British heritage in Canada as a constitutional monarchy) and the importance given to the War of 1812 (presented as a pivotal moment of resistance to American invasion and the preservation of the country’s distinctiveness) are not the expression of a foolish plan on the part of a disconnected government,” he wrote in a Globe commentary recently. “These initiatives are contributing to the reconstruction of Canadian identity at a time when the country is looking for a new symbolic basis for its current reality.”

Perhaps, but it’s just possible that the Royals represent certain virtues that have all but vanished from the political landscape in Canada. Their popularity may have to do with the simple fact that they, alone, give no offence.

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Jul 11 2013
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Business, Economy

Is a corp’s big difference always better?

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In the category of “tell us something we didn’t know,” fit for summer reading beside the bonfire, a major international market research firm’s report confirms that most people think private industry is better equipped than politicians to save the planet.

To which the only appropriate response is: “Of course it is, as it has all the money; but will it?”

The latest word from Ipsos Global@dvisor – a monthly, online survey of “consumer citizens in 24 countries” – concludes that 63 per cent of its target sample “believe that corporations can make a bigger difference in the world than politicians, who only got a 37 per cent preferential rating.”

The company’s news release continues jauntily:

“Surely both corporations and government get a bad rap for one thing or another any day you turn on the news or look at social media posts. Could the great disparity in confidence have to do with the partisanship that seems to keep some governments from moving forward with any speed?

“Is it that the Warren Buffets and Bill Gates of the world have shown the great potential big business has to cure disease, feed the hungry and invent game-changing technology? Is it that corporations have better PR machine(s) than government(s)? That’s research for another day. Meanwhile, we hope both groups give us ample reason to keep our confidence growing.”

We hope, indeed. But, given recent track records, our faith does not spring eternal on the subject of corporate social responsibility.

Not so very long ago, we may recall, the world’s richest governments effectively united to prevent the international financial system from collapsing under the weight of its own malfeasance. They did so by throwing countless billions of taxpayers’ dollars at big banks in every western nation, save Canada.

In the years since this orchestrated salvation, it’s been business as usual for high finance. And corporate America has never been better positioned to commodify the fruits of its greed.

“Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high,” Henry Blodget, a former analyst on Wall Street who runs the Business Insider website, wrote a year ago. “Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. (And some people are still saying that companies are suffering from ‘too much regulation’ and ‘too many taxes.’ Maybe little companies are, but big ones certainly aren’t).”

Meanwhile, he noted, “Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. One reason corporations are so profitable is that they don’t employ as many Americans as they used to. . .Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. This is both cause and effect. One reason companies are so profitable is that they’re paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those ‘wages’ are other companies’ revenue.”

In March, marketwatch.com reported, “The company bottom line is faring a lot better these days than the average American’s weekly paycheck. In 2012, corporate profits as a share of the economy hit the highest level since World War Two, but the overall compensation of workers fell to a 57-year low. . .Last year, the profit of corporations rose to 12.4 per cent of gross domestic product. . .By contrast, compensation slipped to 54.6 per cent of GDP in 2012 from 55 per cent in both 2012 and 2011, according to the Commerce Department.”

Canadian companies were not quite as fortunate. In May, Stats Can reported that the nation’s corporations posted a mere $74 billion in operating profits during the first three months of the years. That was down by a 1.2 per cent, following a 1.4 increase in the final quarter of 2012.

Of course, the corporate world is in no way obliged to part with its loot just because the resources it consumes are, by and large, the common property of all.

But must we continue to delude ourselves that the “bigger difference” it can make in the world is necessarily for the better?

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Jul 11 2013
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Culture, Society

The chickens have left home to roost

Bogland: Where hipsters meet their natural enemies

Bogland: Where hipsters meet their natural enemies

According to Tumblr, the blog-cum-social networking platform, “hipsters” belong to a “subculture of men and women typically in their 20s and 30s” who “value independent thinking, counter-culture” and “progressive politics.”

To others, including Toronto Star staff reporter Alex Ballingall, the (mostly) “city dwellers” are “urbane” and “non-conformist. . .yet people seem reluctant  to identify themselves” as hipsters, per se. (Something about the uncoolness of being seen to be a member of a visible demographic, I suppose).

Still, says one Kayla Rocca – an urban people gazer in downtown TO – you really can’t miss ‘em. “You can spot a hipster from a mile away,” she told Mr. Ballingall for his piece this week. In fact, the reporter noted, she listed the “telltale signs from her bench in Trinity Bellwoods Park: tattoos, cut-off shirts, skinny jeans, vintage apparel, beards, bicycles, thick-rimmed glasses (prescription optional) and an affinity for obscure music and independent movies. . .’They strive to be different, and yet they’re a cohesive group,’ added Rocca’s friend, Angie Ruffilli. ‘And they’re never athletic,’ she laughed.”

That, alone, may explain a strange, but gathering phenomenon, underway in major and minor American and Canadian cities from Santa Fe to Montreal. Hipsters are abandoning their live chickens by the hundreds, maybe even the thousands.

Naturally, at this point, some background will be in order.

The hipster practice of keeping egg-laying hens in their urban backyards (at least among those who own backyards; though that does seem counterintuitively establishmentarian of them) has been gathering steam for some time. They’ve loved the message it sends to the world: See how environmentally sensitive, whole-earthy and animal friendly I am?

Meanwhile, increasingly, jurisdictions across the continent have either relaxed or clarified their rules for maintaining livestock (actually, just fowl) within their city limits. (In fact, Moncton ran a pilot program a couple a years ago; a permanent decision is expected sometime this year).

But a funny thing happened on their way to the chicken coup: The whole business got to be just too damn arduous for the aforementioned, athletically disinclined sub-group. “It’s a lot of work,” writes Globe and Mail reporter Amber Daugherty, who was presumably tipped off to the story by an item on NBC’s website. “Before you know it, you’re sweating tying to clean and feed those animals and you really didn’t consider that if you want to go away someone else has to take care of them.”

Ms. Daugherty notes that in Minneapolis last year, people deposited 500 birds at the doorsteps of various animal shelters. That was up from 50 in 2001. What’s more, she writes, “The trend is being seen in Canada. . .Sayara Thurston of the Humane Society International Canada, who is based in Montreal, said chickens are being dropped off at the SPCA in Montreal every week. . .’A chicken is a pet like any other and they need to be cared for throughout their lives, which people need to take into consideration if they’re thinking of adopting some chickens into their home,’ she said.”

That people are not taking such matters into consideration has got other people, like Mary Britton Clouse, clucking mad, especially at “hipster farmers”. The proprietor of the Minneapolis-based Chicken Run Rescue let it rip in an interview with NBC: “It’s the stupid foodies. . .We’re just sick to death of it. . .People don’t know what they’re doing. And you’ve got this whole culture of people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing teaching every other idiot out there.”

Never a truer word was spoken about. . .well, really, anything these days.

We generally don’t know what the hell we’re doing about politics, energy, the environment, climate change, banks, income inequality and, now, animal husbandry. But, in the words of Ms. Britton Clouse, that doesn’t stop us from “teaching every other idiot out there.”

About a month ago, Saint John became the first city in the Maritimes to legalize the keeping of backyard chickens (under strict conditions). As for the keeping of hipsters there, the jury remains sequestered.

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Jul 10 2013
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Economy, Workplace

You get what you pay for

Nickel-and-diming the next generation

Nickel-and-diming the next generation

Before I became a newspaperman, magazine writer, broadcaster and author, I was a copy boy for Canadian Press. It was my first, real summer job, and I hated every sweltering, miserable, fetid moment of it.

From the heartbreaking hours (6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays), to the foul-tempered, Pall Mall-puffing deskers, it was a guaranteed, weekly nightmare that poisoned, for me, all the other days in that school break of 1976.

My duties were simple for a baboon: I made coffee runs; filed the nightly clippings; ordered the weather map from the airport; and, most importantly, ensured that the office’s stash of porn magazines was organized and reliably available.

The only good thing about the whole, rotten gig was that I got paid. It was a pittance, of course. But there was never any doubt about the principle of workplace compensation.

Today, scores of young people across North America, performing far more complex and worthy tasks for corporations earning record profits, can no longer take that principle for granted. They call themselves “unpaid interns.” I call them slaves.

“Hold on,” you might say. “Slaves have no choice. These kids are free to come and go as they like.” The distinction, I would argue, is a poor excuse for treating the next generation of skilled workers as if they were scullery maids in the downstairs kitchen of an English manse, circa 1902.

Not very long ago, this sort of thing was illegal. But around the time of the Yuppie uprising, in the early 1980s, Wall Street and Bay Street fat cats realized that federal governments in the United States and Canada were no longer interested in workplace conditions to the degree they once were. Suddenly, it was open season on the young and largely powerless. From there, the doctrine of greed spread to virtually every sector of the continental economy.

Today, by some estimates, as many as 300,000 unpaid interns in this country are working without a net. South of the border, the number may be as high as half-a-million. We may never know the real tally because neither nation’s numbers-crunching agency keeps tabs on the practice.

Incredibly, corporations justify their usury by claiming that they’re providing a public service. They say they are making it possible for individuals, who would not otherwise have an opportunity to cut their teeth in the work world, to deepen their resumes. But, unless you happen to be a trust-fund baby, the only “deepening” you will be doing is to the well of student debt the private sector seems perfectly content to see you excavate.

Or, as federal Liberal MP Scott Brison wryly told the CBC recently, “Be born into a family rich enough to subsidize you to enable you to take an unpaid internship with a great organization and with great experience.”

Lurking beneath the quip is his more serious concern. According to the CBC piece, “He’s calling on the federal government to measure the scope of the unpaid workforce, identify acceptable unpaid work placements and legislate changes to protect an increasingly ‘vulnerable generation’.”

Naturally, that’s not going to happen within the current mandate in Ottawa. But I grant kudos to Mr. Brison for trying, even though the effort does not go nearly far enough.

The issue here is not only monetary; it’s moral. The more entrenched the unpaid internship becomes in the labour force, the less likely anyone will fight to have it expurgated from the web of social norms. It’s very existence justifies its perpetuation – just as did, at one time, the unequal status of women, child labour and slavery, itself.

Plenty of organizations (such as the one that owns the newspaper for which I write) still pay their interns. They understand that, in doing so, they are reinforcing the imperiled notion of the square deal between employer and employee. More than this, they simply reckon that it is the right thing to do.

There were many moments during the summer of 1976 when I seriously considered not showing up for work. Had I been an unpaid intern, I’m certain I would have played permanent hooky, and I would not have become the angry, opinionated (and, yes, award-winning) journalist you see before you.

Maybe, that would have been a good thing. But I prefer to think that it would have been a loss – if only to my growing sense of self-discipline and respect for the sometimes, unavoidably fetid world of work.

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Jul 09 2013
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Economy, Politics

Re-inventing the N.B. economy

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No statistic serves ruling political priorities more faithfully than the monthly jobs number. When it’s up, governments rush to congratulate themselves for their acuity. When it’s down, they go out of their way to remind voters that deepening unemployment can’t possibly reflect a wayward policy agenda.

So it was, mere days ago, when Statistics Canada confirmed that in June New Brunswick posted the worst jobless rate in years – the worst, in fact, in Canada. According to a CBC report, “At 11.2 per cent, New Brunswick had the highest unemployment rate in the country for the first time while Newfoundland and Labrador saw its unemployment rate dip to just below 11 per cent to 10.9, a significant decrease of 1.9 percentage points from a year ago, the biggest year-on-year decline in the country. . .Manitoba and British Columbia saw the biggest employment increases in June, gaining 7,300 and 8,900 jobs, respectively.”

Meanwhile, “Ontario’s unemployment rate inched up slightly in June, rising 0.2 percentage points to 7.5 per cent. Employment was up 1.6 per cent in the province compared with a year ago. An increase in part-time work in the province was offset by a decline in full-time work, which was also true for the country as a whole.”

The news left New Brunswick Liberal Leader Brian Gallant salivating. Quoted in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, he said, “We’ve lost 7,000 jobs since the government came to power and as we’re waiting for them to come up with a plan we see that New Brunswickers have to leave our province. We’re the only province in the country that saw its population decrease last year.”

To which Energy and Mines Minister Craig Leonard appeared to retort, in a statement, “We are building new jobs and new industries through our recently announced $20 million investment over five years to support research and innovation in New Brunswick as part of our $80-million innovation strategy.”

He then blathered on, in predictable fashion, about the job-killing predilections of his Grit rivals, whose support of a moratorium on shale gas development, he insinuated, threatens to upend longterm economic development in the province.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the wisdom of hitching New Brunswick’s fortunes to the deeply controversial prospect of onshore petroleum production, this government wastes its time defending its record in the face of the June unemployment metric. It might argue just as convincingly that the jobless rate in that month was good news, for it could have been much worse.

For some time, New Brunswick’s economy has been undergoing profound, even structural, changes, most of which have had little to do with the partisan identities of those who have ruled the roost in Fredericton. Governments of both Progressive Conservative and Liberal persuasions have been broadly feckless in their management of economic opportunities.

There have been the “prosperity plans” and the “growth agendas,” the “blueprints for change” and the “roadmaps for sustainability.” There have been the “big gets” and the “major announcements.” Sprinkled throughout the years have been new slogans, old slogans and, occasionally, no slogans to reflect New Brunswick’s salient dilemma:  A fundamental lack of direction.

People, here, are aging. Young people are leaving. Aging people are leaving. The problem is not, essentially, that they can’t find rewarding work; it is, increasingly, that such work is temporary, fleeting, rootless.

Economic development is not about plans, priorities and programs. It’s not even about tax breaks. It’s about building capacity from the ground up. It’s about nurturing a culture of innovation, enterprise, self-reliance and self-determination. It’s about incubating entrepreneurship.

“What makes Silicon Valley so successful?” asks the website Internationalboost.com. “It’s the story of a number of pioneers who were able to produce an environment that stimulated the emergence of entrepreneurial talent and, most importantly, attracted more of this same talent into the area. . .Silicon Valley is not only the place where companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Apple can literally be founded in a garage – it is the foundation for these companies to continue to re-invent and innovate, becoming world-dominant players in ever-evolving markets and technologies.”

If New Brunswick’s political establishment finally grasp what ought to be self-evident about the province’s prospects, then the monthly job numbers will look after themselves.

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Jul 09 2013
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Politics

The rise of Trudeaumania, redux

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Charging twenty-thousand bucks to a charity that looks after old folks for speaking at one of its fundraising events would be, for anyone, tantamount to committing political suicide. Anyone, except the ridiculously telegenic Justin Trudeau.

The federal Liberal Leader, it seems, can do no wrong, which is not how Conservative and NDP oddsmakers hoped the world would be working by now, mere months after the Grit convention.

As the Saint John Telegraph-Journal reported last week, Mr. Trudeau’s offer to return his appearance fee to the Saint John-based Grace Foundation has met with stony silence. According to the story, “Kate Monfette (spokeswoman for the Leader) said the Grace Foundation is the only organization so far to indicate it wants a refund,” and yet, she said, “We have made initial contact with all organizations and so far we have not received a request for a refund.”

Methinks, the organization has thought better of its original decision to tap Mr. Trudeau for the largesse. The firestorm of controversy that erupted in the wake of its highly public request barely singed the young politico.

Indeed, recent public opinion surveys tell a convincing tale

“A new poll shows the federal Liberals continue to pound the Conservatives, with Canadians saying for the first time leader Justin Trudeau would make a better prime minister then Stephen Harper,” The Montreal Gazette reported late last month. “According to a new Léger Marketing poll, 27 per cent of Canadians now think Trudeau would be a better prime minister than Harper, who has a score of 23 per cent.

New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair is seen as the best prime minister by 14 per cent. It’s the first time Léger has reached such a polling conclusion since Trudeau took over the party April 14, said Léger vice-president Christian Bourque. ‘It’s the Trudeau phenomenon,’ said Bourque. ‘In our polling it’s the first time that he’s edging ahead of Stephen Harper.’

In fact, the newspaper added, “The national poll, conducted for The Gazette and Le Devoir, showed the Liberals under Trudeau would have rocketed into a majority government had an election been held this week. With distribution of the undecided vote, the Liberals now stand at 37 per cent in the polls – up seven percentage points from March – followed by the Conservatives at 29 per cent – down two from March – and the NDP at 21 per cent – down three points from March.”

Meanwhile, it seems, Atlantic Canadians are warming even more steadily to the prospect of federal Liberal government. According to a CBC News story last week, “The federal Liberals opened up a wide lead in party support in May, earning the support of 49 per cent of Atlantic Canadians, compared to 24 per cent for both the Conservatives and the NDP.

“Don Mills, the chief executive officer of Corporate Research Associates, said the Liberals received the jolt in popularity after Trudeau won his party’s leadership.

‘He has had, obviously, a pretty significant impact in the resurgence of the Liberal party. It was only in 2011, just before the election, where the Liberals fell to the lowest support ever in 25 years of tracking in Atlantic Canada,’ Mills said in an interview. ‘Now we see the NDP are falling back to more traditional levels of support and the Liberals are seeing the highest amount of support in eight years.’”

What accounts for Mr. Trudeau’s rock-star status, particularly on the East Coast, has less to do with his policy statements – which are, frankly, as thin a gruel – and more to do with who he is not; namely Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair. That and the fact that he appears genuinely happy to be wherever he is found, captured on video, compensates for his youth, relative inexperience and the odd misstep.

For all the legitimate criticism he could draw for charging charitable organizations for the pleasure of his company, none of it will stick. The Grace Foundation’s silence might only signify its dawning realization of the reality of their own awkward circumstances.

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Jul 04 2013
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Humour, Society

The mysteries of life on Earth abound

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Nietzsche was wrong. God is not dead. But he is. . .well, uninteresting.

Or that’s what the latest issue of The Atlantic reports in a wee item entitled, “We’ve figured Out the Universe – and It’s Boring.” The magazine’s Rebecca J. Rosen, a senior associate editor, quotes several scientists suffering from mild depression, a not-yet-diagnosed malady I’ll call “post-Higgs boson syndrome.”

Having borne witness, last year, to the discovery of the particle that was supposed to explain everything (and, in fact, does, just as predicted) British mathematician Stephen Wolfram complained, “At some level I’m actually a little disappointed.”

Why? The formidable Stephen Hawking, the Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, put it this way: “The great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn’t expect.” Added Columbia University physicist Peter Woit, “I always felt the best possible thing. . .would be to not see the Higgs.”

All of which only proves what every nerd and geek knows in his or her ComiCon-drenched soul: Poets can’t hold a candle to scientists for unalloyed sentimentality.

But if the cosmos is entirely explicable, what are we to make of its constituents – specifically, this third rock from a yellow dwarf star in the suburbs of the average-sized galaxy we call The Milky Way? The mysteries that attend life of Earth show no sign of remission. If anything, they advance in perfect marching step.

Today, Egyptians rejoice at the removal, by their unelected military, of their duly elected president Mohammed Morsi. As the Globe and Mail’s Patrick Martin notes, “Historic Tahrir Square exploded in joy shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday when, for the second time in two years, Egypt’s military leaders announced they have forced the country’s president from office, relieving him of his command and replacing him with an executive of their choosing. . .It was an odd thing to celebrate. Just 29 months ago, many of these same people had occupied Tahrir Square and cheered the prospects of democracy finally coming to Egypt. This warm night in July, they were welcoming back a military-led transition in place of a democratically elected president.”

Today, U.S. President Obama (who doesn’t know what to think about the latest developments in Egypt) is hell-bent on completing his man hunt for Edward Snowdon, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked specifics about American and British surveillance programs that target, essentially, everyone.

According to the Guardian this week, “The plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, from Russia has been rerouted to Austria, following suspicions that (Mr. Snowdon) was on board, leading to a major diplomatic incident. The Bolivian foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said French and Portuguese authorities refused to allow the plane to fly through their airspace. He added that rumours Snowden was on board were unfounded. ‘We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,’ Choquehuanca told Associated Press.”

Today, a new study from the World Meteorological Organization finds that the ten-year span between 2001 and 2010 was the warmest decade in 160 years. Says the WMO news release: “The world experienced unprecedented high-impact climate extremes during the 2001-2010 decade, which was the warmest since the start of modern measurements in 1850 and continued an extended period of pronounced global warming. More national temperature records were reported broken than in any previous decade. . .Global-average concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to 389 parts per million in 2010 (an increase of 39 per cent since the start of the industrial era in 1750), methane to 1808.0 parts per billion (15 per cent) and nitrous oxide to 323.2 parts per billion (20 per cent).”

Still, other research paints a somewhat different picture. In May, Scientific American reported: “The Earth is now warming faster than at any time in the last 11,000 years, but scientists do not understand clearly why the atmosphere has warmed less than they expected over the last decade or so – and more slowly than in the 1990s.”

God may be boring. We, on the other hand, continue to ignore His example.

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Jul 04 2013
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Economy, Society

We’re forever blowing (and bursting) bubbles

What goes up, must come down

What goes up, must come down

The increasingly trustworthy Wikipedia defines a bubble as “a globule of one substance in another, usually gas in a liquid.” Thanks to something called the “Marangoni effect – the mass transfer along an interface between two fluids due to surface tension gradient – bubbles may remain intact when they reach the surface of the immersive substance.”

Ultimately, however, the laws of the universe will not be denied. All bubbles burst. It’s just a matter of when.

One need not hold an advanced degree in fluid dynamics to recognize that we infuse society with bubbles every day. We create them from the fabric of our fads, which soon become crazes and, finally, business as usual. That’s why when they pop – as, inevitably, they must – we are left owning little to fill our empty pockets.

In this fine, early summertime, bubbles dance about our ears.

An interesting commentary from Keith Helmuth, a member of the Woodstock Sustainable Energy Group (published by the Telegraph-Journal the other day), describes the coming “carbon bubble,” which now worries economists and environmentalists, alike.

“If the nations of the world act to constrain carbon emissions, as they are pledged to do,” he writes, “the asset base of the hydrocarbon industry will suddenly contract by an enormous amount, leaving oil and gas companies with ‘stranded assets.’ Unfortunately, the industry debt load of $1.5 trillion will remain on the books.”

Why is that “unfortunate?” As Gwynne Dyer explains in one of his recent columns, “If you liked the sub-prime mortgage fiasco in 2008, you’ll positively love this one. . .It’s a grim choice: either financial meltdown if we act decisively to halt climate change, or physical meltdown if we don’t.”

Pop!

Meanwhile, the venerable Economist outlines the dimension of a more familiar bubble. “Housing markets are notoriously prone to boom and bust,” it declares in a report published two months ago. “To judge whether prices are at sustainable levels we use two yardsticks. One is the ratio of prices to disposable income per person, a measure of affordability. The other is the price-to-rent ratio.

“On this basis, Canada’s market is especially vulnerable. A large bubble now looks set to burst. Home sales in March were 15 per cent down on a year earlier. Buyers are in short supply. A recent poll showed that only 15 per cent of Canadians are likely to buy a home in the next two years, down from 27 per cent last year – the steepest decline in the 20-year history of the survey. After a big boom, the housing bust will be a wrenching affair.”

That’s indisputably good news if you’re in the market to buy, not sell. But to buy, you’ll need a good, steady job. And to get one of those, you’ll need a graduate degree in something other than applied basket weaving. Or, do you? An item by Jordan Weissmann, entitled “The Grad-School Bubble is Set to Burst,” in the July issue of The Atlantic begs to differ.

“The economic benefits of a graduate degree are dwindling,” the magazine contends. “While unemployment is still low among graduate- and professional-degree holders, underemployment seems to be rising in some fields. Nine months after graduation, for instance, barely more than half of 2012 law-school grads had found full-time, long-term jobs that required their typically six-figure J.D. And even graduates who do find decent jobs face stagnating wages and skyrocketing student loan debt.”

All of which leads him to conclude that “the grad-school bubble is one that may actually pop.”

As Jeff Jeff Kosnett is a senior editor at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance writes in his blog, “The original bubble, the blowup of the South Sea Company, lured Englishmen in 1720 to bet their spare pounds in a failed scheme to get rich trading with South America. South Sea shares soared some 800 per cent in months and collapsed even more quickly. The affair led to hostilities between Britain and Spain as well as an economic meltdown.”

Of course, the world has come a long way since then. Today’s bubbles are far more sophisticated, if no less fragile.

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Jul 03 2013
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Energy, Oil and Gas

Injecting reason into the fracking debate

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For academic geologists, who study the world’s reserves of oil and gas, which have slumbered beneath the surface for millions of years, time is a meaningless concept. For public officials, embroiled in the politics of petroleum development, it’s the only thing that matters. Or it should be.

One of the broad and exquisite ironies (and there are many) about the gathering controversy over shale gas in New Brunswick is that the provincial government has only just figured this out.

For months, if not years, elected representatives of the Tory persuasion have ceded nearly all of the high ground in the battle to win the hearts and minds of the great, voting unwashed to the Internet-mining, documentary-viewing, anti-fracking, fossil-fuel-loathing constituency.

At times, Premier David Alward’s cabineteers have seemed downright flummoxed by the vehemence of opposition to shale gas development in the province. After all, they said as they scratched their scalps, as we don’t yet know whether there is an actual industry to despise, shouldn’t we identify its true, commercial potential before we lose our collective minds to inchoate outrage?

But, of course, such musings are not how you win a revolution. Environmental and community activists know well the first rule of effective civil action: Don’t wait for your enemy to set the agenda.

This is especially important in circumstances where your enemy has more money than God. If and when shale gas companies actually do fire up their production platforms, no amount of peaceful – if vitriolic – protest will ever shut them down. Only economics can achieve this. Hence, the marvelously orchestrated fury.

Lately, though, the Province has stepped up its game in defence of what it might term the prudent development of shale gas in New Brunswick. In two, surprisingly articulate, commentaries carried by the Times & Transcript’s sister organ, the Telegraph-Journal, Energy and Mines Minister Craig Leonard sets out his case. First, he says in so many words, “We can’t afford to do nothing,” before he declares, “We will ensure we can enjoy the economic benefits. . .while proceeding in a safe, responsible and sustainable manner.”

Of these, the strongest argument is the latter and, again, one wonders why it’s taken this long to make it this cogently.

At the heart of the opposition to shale gas is the conviction that hydraulic fracturing is inherently injurious to the environment and, by extension, to communities proximate to drilling operations. To support the claim, critics produce a virtual trove of information, gleaned from the Web, that clearly demonstrate just how fully industry players have desecrated whole regions of the United States with faint regard for their responsibilities, above those that secure shareholder values.

Some of the “proof” is spurious; some of it is persuasive. (Valid or not, it’s hard to counter a homeowner’s assertion that he abandoned the family farm because his once healthy child began coughing blood only after the nearby rig started drilling).

And yet the massive hole in this argument, through which no one in public office (until now) has seen fit to drive a rhetorical truck, is that New Brunswick’s opportunity lies before it. The province has a chance to do things better and more safely. It is not tethered to shoddy regulations and “industry-friendly” arrangements. It starts with a clean slate. Or, as Mr. Leonard, writes: “We designed the new rules for industry to ensure issues with the industry faced by other jurisdiction will not occur here.

“Whether it is requiring that all fluids used in the gas extraction process are kept in a closed loop system to ensure no contact with the land, the constant monitoring of air and water or improved construction of the wellbore, our rules will protect the land, water and air.”

The other piece is that no two shale plays are exactly alike. The experiences of one region are not reliably transferrable to another simply because we invoke the word “fracking” – like some, dark incantation – to describe industrial activity in both.

Mr. Leonard’s arguments will not convince everyone, of course. But they are, at least, useful contributions to what should be an informed, public debate. And, for once,  they are timely.

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