Monthly Archives: September 2013

Sep 16 2013
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Culture, Government, Politics

Quebec leaders sing a looney tune

State-enforced "neutrality" is for the birds

State-enforced “neutrality” is for the birds

Ranking high on the lengthening list of Quebec Premier Pauline Marois’s dubious political talents is her unerring ability to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from history – especially other people’s history.

Earlier this year, while on a trip to Scotland, the Partis Quebecois leader gamely offered her help to the independence-minded Alex Salmond, that country’s First Minister. She would, she said, send him a few morsels of information from her province’s 1995 referendum on sovereignty. His reaction, in turn, was to go out of his way to avoid being seen with her in public.

Then, last week, she told Le Devoir that ethnic diversity lies at the heart of social unrest in England, where, apparently, “they’re knocking each other over the head and throwing bombs because of multiculturalism and nobody knowing any more who they are in that society.”

Now, we discover through the Globe and Mail that she believes “France is a model of integration.” Further, she suggests that it is “the most beautiful example . . . (it) has a very impressive number of people (from North Africa) and has found a space to live well with immigrants from other regions.”

Wrong, wrong and wrong, again.

The roots of Scotland’s independence movement are so vastly dissimilar from Quebec’s, the comparison does not bear making. And even if they weren’t, what possible use would the PQ’s trove of documents from its failed attempt to sever Quebec from the rest of Canada be to the leaders of the Scottish National Party?

As for England, sectarian and ethnic violence — which, it’s worth noting, is no more rampant than it is in south-central Los Angeles — has less to do with “multiculturalism” than it does with the nation’s proximity to radicalized networks of European terror cells. This is a fact with which it and its continental neighbours have been dealing for decades.

And what of France, that “model of integration?”

An item from a BBC report this summer should settle the question:

“Crowds of youths have thrown stones at French police and set fire to cars in a second night of disturbances in the Paris suburb of Trappes. The trouble was sparked by the arrest of a man whose wife was told by police on Thursday to remove an Islamic face-covering veil, banned in public. He has been accused of trying to strangle the officer. Up to 300 people attacked a police station in Trappes on Friday night where the man was being held.”

Not for nothing, but methinks Ms. Marios’s staff might want to review the briefing notes they prepare for her before she finds occasion to pontificate in public. For them, and the rest of Quebec, this is getting embarrassing. And it seems to be going around.

In a recent column, my former colleague, the Globe’s Jeffry Simpson worried that Quebec’s leadership appears a tad unhinged, as Ms. Marois and company begin to “secularize” their civil service à la France. “These are the kind of policies that make Quebec look intolerant and slightly crazy in pursuit of some notional idea of the Quebec identity,” he wrote. “After all, the number of non-francophone employees of the province is tiny. From a practical point of view, this (charter of values) and the laws that might flow from it represent a fake solution to a non-problem.”

For Ontario, at least, this phony fix is turning into an opportunity.

“We don’t care what’s on your head,” an advertisement for Lakeridge Health of Oshawa reads. “We care what’s in it . . .Our focus is on safety and quality, and we’re looking for people like you to join our team of health professionals.”

If Ms. Marois cares nothing for most of what’s guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, she should nonetheless scrutinize Section 6, Subsection 2, which reads: “Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right (a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and (b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.”

It’s mighty tough to draw the wrong conclusion from that.

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Sep 13 2013
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Economy, Environment

Such a fine line: economy versus environment

Four strong winds that blow from Alberta

Four strong winds that blow from Alberta

This music industry icon, this erstwhile miner for a heart of gold, steps off the bandwagon just long enough to cluck his tongue and sample the air in beautiful, downtown Fort McMurray.

It looks like a nuclear test site and smells like one, too, says Neil Young: “The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuel (is) all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”

What’s more, he told an American crowd the other day, “Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. . .a wasteland. . .The oil that we’re using here. . .they call ethical oil because it’s not from Saudi Arabia or some country that may be at war with us.”

Actually, there’s no need for atomic-era hyperbole. Good, old Fort Mac (population: 61,000) looks like Fargo, North Dakota, which is, in and of itself, bad enough. But I take Mr. Young’s point: The tar sands are despicable. Boo.

Among the celebrated elite, it’s a familiar refrain, gaining ever greater traction as U.S. President Barack Obama leisurely considers his next move in the Keystone XL pipeline kerfuffle. Indeed, the list of prominent “deathline” haters grows longer with each day that passes on the protest lines: There’s the Dali Lama and his pal, Al Gore; there’s Bishop Desmond Tutu and Sundance Kid Robert Redford; there’s actors Mark Ruffalo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kyra Sedgwick, and David Strathaim. All are wedded to the simple, if absolute, certainty that Alberta’s oil industry is killing the planet.

They are probably right. Still, no one in a position of authority ever looks at the long game of energy policy – not when the short game is so economically lucrative and politically profitable.

Consider the oft-repeated rejoinder of tar sands apologists to the environmental lobby’s claim that Alberta bitumen is dirtiest source of oil in the world: No, it’s not. Or, as Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver told The New York Times’s Joe Nocera recently, “That statement that the Keystone pipeline would mean ‘game over’ for the environment is absurd.”

Mr. Nocera – a confessed proponent of the project – grabbed the baton from Mr. Oliver and, in his column, sprinted to the finish line:

“Oil mined from the sands is simply not as environmentally disastrous as opponents like to claim. Extraction technology has improved to the point where there is almost no difference, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, between sands oil and old-fashioned oil drilling. The government has insisted that the companies extracting the oil return the land to its original state when the mining is completed. Indeed, for all the hysteria over the environmental consequences of the oil sands, there is oil in California that is actually dirtier than the oil from the sands.”

All of which misses the bigger point – the one that celebrity eco-warriors, themselves, invariably fail to make: If you’re pointing a shotgun to your head, does it really matter what calibre of shell you’re using?

The world is hooked on oil. It’s going to stay that way until it runs out (not likely) or its economies collapse (increasingly likely). If Keystone fails to win presidential assent this time around – thanks, perhaps, to the pickets of the preeminent – it, or something like it, will roll out the next time around, or the time after that. There’s no point in pretending otherwise.

Just as there’s no point in pretending that anyone is giving serious consideration to the long-term economic benefits of the Energy East pipeline proposal for New Brunswick – though we might do ourselves a favour by curbing our crowing tongues for a change and spend a few minutes actually examining the post-construction-phase ramifications of, and the durable commercial opportunities generated by, the project.

After all, out here in New Brunswick, where we don’t lace our boots without a government shoestring, we’re not looking for a heart of gold.

Just the gold.

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Sep 12 2013
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Culture, Politics

Fighting discrimination with more discrimination

The Partis Quebecois's Great Pumpkin: A solution looking for a problem

The Partis Quebecois’s Great Pumpkin: A solution looking for a problem

Finally, we Canadians face an issue about which all federal parties in Ottawa will concur. Even better, their consensus is morally, ethically and, quite likely, legally unassailable. The question is: What took them so long?

With its new “Charter of Values” – about which it has been hinting for weeks – the Quebec government seeks to expunge “overt and conspicuous” religious icons – such as hijabs, kippas and turbans – from its public service. No more veils. No more headdresses. No more ostentatious crucifixes dangling around teachers’ necks.

Big Brother’s foot soldier Bernard Drainville, the minister who is apparently  responsible for conformity in La belle province, explains the new policy bluntly in news reports, to wit: “If the state is neutral, those working for the state should be equally neutral in their image.”

His boss, Premier Pauline Marois couldn’t agree more. In fact, she told Le Devoir last week, “In England, they get into fights and throw bombs at one another because of multiculturalism and people get lost in that type of a society.”

What a profoundly stupid thing to say, but no dumber, perhaps, than Mr. Drainville’s assertion that ensuing “neutrality” among civic workers is a simple matter of imposing a secular dress code, as if the Province were underwriting some outlandish episode of What Not to Wear.

Contrary to the Partis Quebecois’s insustence, absolutely nothing good can come of this unnecessary, provocative nonsense. And Jason Kenney, Canada’s Minister of Employment, Social Development and Multiculturalism, is right to question the constitutionality of the move.

“(We are) very concerned by any proposal that would limit the ability of any Canadians to participate in our society and that would affect the practice of their faith,” he told reporters this week. “We will ask the Department of Justice if these proposals become law to closely review them and if it’s determined that a prospective law violates the constitutional protections for freedom of religion to which all Canadians are entitled, we will defend those rights vigorously.”

Added NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, “We’re categorical in rejecting this approach. Human rights don’t have a best-before date, they’re not temporary and they’re not a popularity contest. To be told that a woman working in a day care centre, because she’s wearing a head scarf, will lose her job is to us intolerable in our society.”

Yet, despite the utter correctness of their points, it’s a shame that these two have come late to the contretemps.

In August, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was first and alone among federal politicians to denounce Quebec’s divisive scheme. “We sadly see that even today, as we speak, for example, of this idea of a Charter of Quebec Values, there are still those who believe that we have to choose between our religion and our Quebec identity, that there are people who are forced by the Quebec State to make irresponsible and inconceivable choices,” he told a group of his fellow Grits in Prince Edward Island.

The only official statements coming from the Conservative and NDP camps at that time were watery testimonials to civil rights and commitments to carefully review Quebec’s plans if and when they went public. Still, better late than never.

The values charter is not only a palpable jab at religious freedom; it infantilizes an entire society. It tells Quebecers that those who work for the public service can’t be trusted with the symbols and trappings of their faith and ethnicity while they are on the job; that the only way to prevent discrimination is, bizarrely, to embrace it.

Just as bad, it tells the world that the government of a sizable chunk of Canada is diametrically opposed to the principles of equity and diversity that have, for decades, burnished the country’s international reputation for fairness and inclusiveness.

The Partis Quebecois has taken a non-issue and turned it into a firestorm for no sensible reason other than cynically appealing to certain elements of its exclusionary base. This, alone, transports it beyond the realm of provincial partisanship and lands it squarely in the arena of federal politics.

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Sep 12 2013
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Culture, Humour

The 15-minute solution to (just about) everything

Fame is so fleeting, so cold in its remembrance

Fame is so fleeting, so cold in its remembrance

There’s more time than you think in 15 minutes. Just ask Stephen Harper, who claims to have written a book about hockey in daily quarter-hour increments over the past ten years. I have no reason to doubt him.

In 15 minutes, I can get a lot done. I can walk a mile. I can mow the back lawn. I can weed the front garden. I can start and finish my Pilates routine. I can hard-boil an egg. If life were truly organized the way an advertising agency bills its clients – with a tyrannical focus on getting results in bite-sized chunks of the hour – I might even solve the crisis in the Middle East or work out that whole cold fusion thing.

But, I must admit, the idea of penning a manuscript on Canada’s great game – or, indeed, on anything – in this fashion has never entered my mind. How would that work, exactly?

The prime minister comes home after a hard day of insulting the Official Opposition, grabs a quick bite with the wife and kids, retires to the study, dons his favorite sweater-vest, flips on an old Guy Lomdardo recording, taps the stopwatch sitting to the right of his computer. Go! Fifteen minutes later, it’s time for bed.

Is it really all that implausible? The math suggests the approach is remarkably efficient. Multiply 15 by 365 (for the number of days in the year) and you get 5,475 minutes. Now divide that product by 60 (for the number of minutes in an hour) and you get 91.25. So, that works out to be equivalent to one extremely long work-week a year, or about three months of full-time effort over ten. Not too shabby, at all.

We can’t yet know the quality of the project’s result (it’s only available to the reading public in early November). Still, the economy of its execution is impressive.

On the other hand, why Mr. Harper chose 15 minutes – and not, say, 10 or 20 – as the duration of his daily input remains a mystery. It could have to do with the importance of this unit of time in the popular zeitgeist.

“In the future,” Andy Warhol once said, “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” There’s even a Wikipedia entry titled, “15 minutes of fame”, in which the author, or authors, report, “Benjamin H.D. Buchloh suggests that the core tenet of Warhol’s aesthetic, being ‘the systematic invalidation of the hierarchies of representational functions and techniques’ of art, corresponds directly to the belief that the ‘hierarchy of subjects worthy to be represented will someday be abolished,’ hence anybody, and therefore ‘everybody,’ can be famous once that hierarchy dissipates, ‘in the future’.”

Again, though, why 15 minutes?

A Los Angeles-based media and public relations company that actually calls itself “Fifteen Minutes” explains on its website, “In today’s world, anything is possible in fifteen minutes. Identities are built. Futures are shaped. Legends are born.”

Really? That seems like a mighty tall order for such a fleeting sweep of the minute hand.

Less ambitious, perhaps, is Christine from the U.S. Midwest who runs something called 15minutebeauty.com. “I’m a Pediatric Critical Care doctor,” she writes. “My husband is a professor at a huge university. . .I’m a mommy and a bit of a beauty addict. If left to my own devices, I could easily spend four hours getting ready each morning! Unfortunately, I am most definitely NOT a morning person, so I’m often running late. I need to squeeze a product heavy routine into. . .15 minutes!”

For its part, ABC Literacy Canada thinks a quarter-of-an-hour is just the right amount of time to wean junior off the gaming console. “Learning can happen at any time,” it declares on its website. Practicing literacy together for just 15 minutes a day has tremendous benefits for both children and parents.”

You can, among other things, “Create your own comic strip about your family. . .

Invent two new endings to your favourite book. . .Tell knock-knock jokes together while doing the dishes” and “find 15 things that begin with the letter ‘S’.”

Here’s one: “S” is for “Stephen Harper”, who wrote a book about hockey in daily quarter-hour increments over the past ten years, and who’s now enjoying his 15 minutes of fame for having done so.

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Sep 09 2013
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Economy, Employment

A pot-kettle-black moment for a good read

Where the hypocrites float

Where the hypocrites float

It’s not that I disagree with Thomas Frank, the resident writer of Harper’s polemical column “Easy Chair” and one of America’s finest living essayists. It’s not that I take issue with his latest effort in this month’s issue of the magazine and what he says about the financial collapse of 2008 or the “waste product” that “had been deliberately moved through the bowels of a hundred shady mortgage outfits.”

In fact, I have no problem at all with his visceral renderings of the villains and thugs who further soiled the already reeking back alleys of Wall Street with the scat from their gorging on other people’s money bought with the proceeds from their particular form of legal larceny. I have no problem with this: “Bribery and deceit and crazy incentives had been the laxatives that pushed this product down the pipe; money and bonhomie and reassuring economic theory had been the sedatives that put the regulators to sleep.”

I was one of those people “who were left to cry over cratered investments.” I have friends and relatives in the United States who were left “to pay for the bailouts and endure the downturn.” No one needed to be Greek, in those days, to appreciate that this wretched thing of ours “may well be the central economic episode” of our lives.

Surely, it has scarred us, marked us, made us less generous, less trusting – especially of authority, which is ironic when you consider that it was an almost complete lack of oversight that facilitated the global disaster. Or, as Mr. Frank, puts it: “The industry would supervise itself, we were told – and we believed it. Instead, our economic order turned out to be wobbly, even rotten. The great banks looked insolvent. The great capitalists looked like criminals.”

As for the salvation of these cheats and their confederates, it was purchased at the expense of trillions of dollars in taxes – dollars that would never again be fully available to the purposes and projects for which they were intended. In the process, we learned that “there was a whole class of businesses that could not be allowed to fail, no matter what kinds of suicide missions they undertook. . .That this class’s chosen public persona was one of churlish, sniggering contempt for the non-crooks who were now required to rescue them only compounded the shock.”

And the shocks keep coming: The evisceration of what was once known as the middle class; the yawning and widening chasm between those who have and those who have not; the gnawing suspicion that meaningful economic progress is a thing of the past; the scattering of all but the richest members of the global entrepreneurs’ club; the mounting debt; the disappearing jobs; the pervasive, collective sense of impotence.

Writes Mr. Frank: “A society that believes good government to be an impossibility is unlikely to do what is necessary to keep industry honest. Instead, its regulators will come to see the regulated, rather than the public, as their main clients. . .The rest of us will resign ourselves to scandal after scandal, as a new generation of looters rises up to claim positions at the trough when the old looters retire.”

As this esteemed writer – with decidedly progressive leanings and an artful skill at the angry lament – notes, we have become hardened by our travails, cynical in the long shadow our rage once cast. We no longer demand to know how these things could happen to us. We expect them with the regularity of the changing seasons. It’s not our fault, exactly, though “we have chosen to live with that.” What else should we expect of ourselves? “Just grab your cash,” he writes, “and hang on.”

No, I don’t disagree with any of this. I take no issue with the premise or conclusions of this lengthy screed.

Still, I do wonder, as I cast my eyes down past the bottom of Mr. Frank’s worthy essay on the crimes of the rich, the essential unfairness now bred in the bone of a once-far-more-generous society, and read the following ad posted by his own employer, Harper’s, which is “accepting applications” from university grads for two art and editorial department internships:

“All interns are encouraged to generate ideas, read widely, and approach problems creatively. . .Both positions are unpaid.”

What say you now, Mr. Frank, on the subject of grabbing cash and hanging on?

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Sep 09 2013
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Politics

On crime and political punishment

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For the second time in six months, New Brunswickers appear ready to anoint Liberal Leader Brian Gallant with the premiership of the province. Or is “punish” the more appropriate choice of words?

Two consecutive quarters of public opinion polling reveals that the young lawyer, lately of Dieppe, is mopping the floor of the Legislative Assembly with his Tory opposite number David Alward. The most recent Corporate Research Associates survey has the former holding steady with 30 per cent approval ratings, compared with the latter’s rather negligible 19 per cent (which is just a shade above NDP Leader Dominic Cardy’s 15 per cent – a statistically meaningless distinction).

To put this into perspective, 19 per cent is Richard Nixon territory. (In fact, the old reprobate, long gone, managed 22 per cent just before he high-tailed it out of office in 1974). Michael Ignatieff – another notable, though less villainous, loser – pulled a 21 per cent on the eve of his political destruction in 2011.

It’s not entirely clear which factor, above others, accounts for Mr. Alward’s woebegone stature among voters. Is it the wretched state of the province’s finances? Is it the constant bickering with the New Brunswick Medical Society? Is it cutbacks to the public service. Is it his determination to give shale gas exploration a chance to gain a foothold in the region’s watersheds? Or is it, more likely, a pernicious combination of all of the above?

Far more explicable is Mr. Gallant’s popularity. He’s young, articulate, highly educated, passionate, personable, and telegenic. Most important of all, he hasn’t done anything yet. The moment he does, if given the chance a year from now, the tide will turn against him, as it has against the current premier. This is as certain as the ebb and flow of the Bay of Fundy.

The fact that Mr. Alward has made only mild tweaks, minor course corrections, to the province’s development during his time in Fredericton (he hasn’t threatened to sell of the power utility; he hasn’t touched the HST), and yet still earns a degree of opprobrium once reserved for public tax cheats, is telling.

It tells us that voters, en masse, no longer trust the office holder as much as they mistrust the office, itself. In this, they join the wave of contempt now sweeping across North America for all forms of mainstream politics – indeed, for governments deemed no longer to be for the people, by the people, of the people (an American construct, to be sure, but reasonably applicable to Canuckistan).

In such circumstances, people turn inward when they should gazing outward. And any politician who entreats them to observe the better angels of their democratic nature gets slapped down hard.

Still, if this now goes with the territory of elected representation in this province, in this country, there’s little to be gained by embarking on that journey with half measures. Ironically, the sole justification for a Gallant premiership would be found in the degree to which it continues the work of the Alward one – only faster, more deliberately and, frankly, more outrageously.

A province whose population could fit into a suburb of Toronto with room to spare should not post structural annual deficits of $500 million. It should not carry $11 billion in longterm debt. Doing so compromises every social program, every infrastructure project necessary to support economic progress.

How, finally, would Mr. Gallant’s Grits solve this hoariest of New Brunswick’s problems? Would they trim government spending, incrementally, as Mr. Alward’s team have? Would they bring a meat cleaver to the operating table? Or is there an approach that has, thus far, eluded us, but for which equal quantities of courage and ingenuity are urgently required?

As for tactics, would a new Liberal government embrace the politically expedient concept of public consultation as fulsomely as has the existing Progressive Conservative one? Would it be able to make a distinction between productive brainstorming and wasteful gum-flapping and act in the collective, rather than vested or special, interests of the province?

However a future Gallant government comports itself, it will not be popular. But if you’re destined to be punished for something, you might as well do the crime.

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Sep 06 2013
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Environment, Humour

Musings on the remains of daylight

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Where I walk, almost daily, to feed my illusion of youthful vigour, the mall at the corner of Champlain and Paul Streets in Dieppe posts signs that cheerfully remind patrons about its program of “daylight harvesting”.

One finds a fuller explanation on its website, which boasts “Champlain Place is leading the way in energy efficiency. 2008 renovations. . .included skylights with photo sensors able to ‘read’ sunlight entering . . .and adjust the interior lighting system, shutting lights off when sunlight reaches the pre-determined level. It’s lights out for the environment!”

That last phrase may be understood in one of two utterly different ways, but as the summer begins to recede and the sun seems ever lazier, I prefer the more optimistic interpretation. After all, every last morsel of daylight is, as Martha Stewart might agree, a good thing.

Unless you happen to live or work near Tower Bridge in a certain European capital of ancient repute.

“Developers have promised urgent action to cover up the Walkie Talkie skyscraper being built in the City of London after an ultra-bright light reflected from the building melted a Jaguar car on a street below,” reports a joint piece from the Independent and Associated Press.

“The 160m tall, £200 million ($397 million) building has been renamed the Walkie Scorchie after its distinctive concave surfaces reflected a dazzling beam of light which blinded passersby and extensively damaged vehicles below. . .Company director Martin Lindsay left his Jaguar XJ for an hour opposite the building, and returned to find warped side panels and the smell of burning plastic. ‘They’re going to have to think of something. I’m gutted,’ he said.”

In fact, “they’re” working on it. In a statement, the developers – Canary Wharf and Land Securities – explained that “the phenomenon is caused by the current elevation of the sun in the sky. It currently lasts for approximately two hours per day, with initial modeling suggesting that it will be present for approximately two to three weeks. . .We are consulting with local businesses and the City to address the issue in the short-term, while also evaluating longer-term solutions.”

One of these might be to stop building skyscrapers with so much glass. England’s weather service reports that London – traditionally, a dark and dank metropolis – has experience a record number of glitteringly sunny days this summer. The cause, it says, is most likely climate change, which suggests that residents can, in the future, expect regular occurrences of charred cafe awnings, melted dashboards and burnt doormats up and down Fenchurch Street.

But London is not the only place where Earth’s G-class, yellow dwarf star is causing headaches.

“Alarmed by what they say has become an existential threat to their business, utility companies are moving to roll back government incentives aimed at promoting solar energy and other renewable sources of power,” The New York Times reported last month. “At stake, the companies say, is nothing less than the future of the American electricity industry. ‘We did not get in front of this disruption,’ Clark Gellings, a fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the industry, said during a panel discussion at the annual utility convention last month. ‘It may be too late.’”

The worry is that if roof-top solar panels continue to drop in price and rise in popularity – as they have in California and Arizona – the cost of regulated, distributed energy from more traditional, less environmentally friendly sources will shoot up, perhaps to unmarketable, unsustainable levels, forcing everyone back into the stone  age. As the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in July, the solar segment of the electric power sector in that country is expected to grow by 79 per cent in  2013, and 49 per cent next year.

Should I worry? Does Cadillac Fairview, which manages Champlain Mall, realize that its daylight harvests are contributing to the decline and fall of western civilization? Or am I simply suffering from a mild dose of sun silliness?

It seems to be going around.

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Sep 05 2013
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Economy, Education

Learning life’s lessons early and often

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Apart from global warming, few issues in Canada provide readier cannon fodder for partisan warfare than early childhood education. That’s because, when it comes to her kids, every mum is willing to fight to the death on the battlefields of ideology.

When should the state intervene with structured pedagogy? When a tyke is five years old, or four or three? When she’s a toddler? What’s wrong with private daycare? For that matter, what’s wrong keeping your youngster tethered to your apron strings for as long as possible?

Politicians on the right side of the continuum love to make hay with this. They frame the debate, literally, as a motherhood issue. And the strategy works to marvelous effect within a certain important segment of the voting public.

The reform-minded Tory team – before it became the federal government – launched a terrific salvo into the camp of the reigning Liberals in 2005 when, as the CBC reported at the time, “Stephen Harper unveiled a Conservative plan on Monday that would give parents of young children $100 a month for child care. The. . .leader made the announcement at a noisy day-care centre in Ottawa. ‘This is just like a caucus meeting,’ he said on a campaign stop for the Jan. 23 federal election.”

The item continued: “Addressing the challenges parents face in raising kids while trying to earn a living, Harper said, ‘The Conservative plan for families will help parents find that balance.’ The Conservatives’ two-part plan includes money to help create child-care spaces as well as the $100-a-month ‘choice in child-care allowance.’ With the new allowance, families would receive $1,200 a year for each child under the age of six. . . .In fact, the only people who should be making these choices are parents, not politicians, not the government.’”

In fact, all the evidence suggested, contrarily, that early childhood education –  universally accessible, structured, and integrated into the public school system – is a boon to kids, their parents and, in fact, society at large.

A new study – reportedly the largest of its kind in Canada – seems to bear this out. The report, released earlier this week, by Queen’s and McMaster Universities found that children who attend full-day kindergarten are “better prepared to enter Grade 1 and to be more successful in school” than those who don’t.

That’s according to a blurb on the Ontario government’s website, which also states: “Comparisons of children with two years of FDK instruction and children with no FDK instruction showed that FDK reduced risks in social competence development from 10.5 per cent to 5.2 per cent; reduced risks in language and cognitive development from 16.4 per cent to 4.3 per cent; reduced risks in communication skills and general knowledge development from 10.5 per cent to 5.6 per cent.”

How much better prepared would they be if they had access to a national early childhood education (pre-kindergarten) system shouldn’t be a matter of conjecture. A seminal report on the subject, The Early Years Study 3, published in 2011, is both categorical and convincing: “Researchers have found that parents whose children attend programs that are integrated into their school are much less anxious than their neighbours whose kids are in the regular jumbled system. Direct gains have also been documented for children. Evaluations of Sure Start in the UK, Communities for Children in Australia and Toronto First Duty found children in neighbourhoods with integrated children’s services showed better social development, more positive social behaviour and greater independence/self-regulation compared with children living in similar areas without an integrated program.”

Naturally, there is a cost. But there’s also a reward. And as The Early Years Study 3 points out, the return far outweighs the investment: “Economist Robert Fairholm. . . (shows) how investing in educational child care (is) a handsdown winner. Investing $1 million in child care would create at least 40 jobs, 43 per cent more jobs than the next highest industry and four times the number of jobs generated by $1 million in construction spending. Every dollar invested in child care increases the economy’s output (GDP) by $2.30.”

These considerations, alongside the evidence of improving outcomes for kids, makes you wonder not whether our society can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford our society without it.

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Sep 04 2013
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Education

Good teachers are society’s golden geese

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In school, everything came easily to me. Everything, I  should say, except math, a subject at which I was utterly hopeless. In this, I was in good family company. One of my forbears failed algebra so many times, he abandoned any thought of attending an Ontario university.

My Waterloo arrived in Grade Eight when, having scored a two out of a possible 100 on a quiz, my teacher – a woman who seemed to my 12-year-old eyes to be as old as Methuselah, but who was probably only as wizened as I am now – openly wondered whether some administrator had committed a grievous error by placing me in her class.

“What are you?” she squinted at me. “Stupid?”

She genuinely wanted to know. She had never before detected such an obvious and spectacular deficiency in any of her pupils. My mere presence vexed her almost viscerally, like a foul odor.

In those days – the early 1970s – Canadian public schools were not well equipped to manage problems like mine. The phrase, “learning disability”, had not yet entered the academic lexicon. And since no authority seemed inclined either to mitigate my circumstances or, in the alternative, prevent me from matriculating, I carried my handicap – mysterious, undiagnosed – into high school.

Some weeks into my first term, my freshman year trigonometry teacher turned to me and queried, “You’re not really getting any of this, are you?” With a palpable sense of relief, I admitted, “No, I’m not into math.” He grinned: “Sure you are. You just don’t know it yet. See me after class.”

With that, he embarked on what was, for the day, an unprecedented course of personal tutelage. And when he was done with me, not only did I get it; I loved it. He had identified the glitch in my software and repaired it. Thanks to him, I spent the next three years actually enjoying myself.

All of which, it seems to me, underscores the enormous importance of the one academic resource many members of the public – and, to their eternal shame, some politicians – routinely vituperate: the teacher.

For every hellion who calls a kid a dummy (not something any pedagogue is likely to get away with these days), there are at least two who know better and do better.  In fact, the role that good teachers play in the lives of their charges is almost immeasurable.

Writing for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) a couple of years ago educator Brian Keeley declared, “It’s hard to overstate the importance of teachers. Strip away the other things that determine how well students do – such as social background and individual capacity – and you’re pretty much left with teaching as the major factor that can be shaped by education policy.”

And, around the world, the happiest results correlate with the earliest starts.

A recent OECD report states that in Sweden “The system of pre-school education is outstanding: (a) in its fidelity to societal values and in its attendant commitment to and respect for children; (b) in its systemic approach while respecting programmatic integrity and diversity; and (c) in its respect for teachers, parents, and the public. In each of these categories, the word ‘respect’ appears. There was trust in children and in their abilities, trust in the adults who work with them, trust in decentralised governmental processes, and trust in the state’s commitment to respect the rights of children and to do right by them.”

In Finland, the OECD concludes, “The early childhood education workforce has several strengths, such as a high qualification level of staff with teaching responsibilities, advanced professional development opportunities and favourable working environments. Staff with teaching responsibilities are well educated and trained with high initial qualification requirements. Professional development is mandatory for all staff; and training costs are shared between individual staff members, the government and employers. Working conditions in terms of staff-child ratio are among the best of OECD countries.”

In international surveys, Canada ranks reasonably well in the quality of its teachers and in the support it provides to them. But if the benefit of a good education is a tolerant, literate, productive, innovative and just citizenry, then the return on investing in teachers is priceless.

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Sep 03 2013
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Business, Economy, Politics

Taking our economic bull by the horns

 

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It is a fitting chapter in a saga that is becoming as familiar to New Brunswickers as olympian economic woes are to Greeks.

Promising technology upstart makes headlines with its innovation and ingenuity; sells itself to an international company for a pretty penny; vows, nevertheless, to remain a vigorous, job-generating player on the provincial landscape; has the rug pulled out from under its head-office-manacled feet; lays off a hefty chunk of its workforce; waits for something else to happen.

It’s the waiting for something else that is the recurring theme in New Brunswick’s beleaguered commercial sector. And Radian6 of Fredericton is just the most recent, unhappy example.

Last week, the tech firm’s parent company, Salesforce.com of San Francisco, announced it was trimming about 200 jobs worldwide, roughly 67 of them in this province. The move came after the global social media monitoring operation purchased ExactTarget, an email marketing outfit, for $2.5 billion. The move, it said, was necessary, though it didn’t bother to explain why or how.

In a statement, Salesforce declared, “Combining ExactTarget with our existing Marketing Cloud provides synergy, and we will be reducing our total headcount . . .to reflect this opportunity. . .We care deeply about our employees and we’re providing resources to position them for success in the next step of their careers – whether that’s a new position within Salesforce.com or a new opportunity elsewhere.”

That’s mighty decent of them, only it’s not entirely clear where the surplus “headcount” will actually land in a province where the track record of job losses is now more entrenched than in any other part of Canada.

The many layers of poignancy in all of this are hard to miss.

Salesforce.com’s 2011 purchase of Radian6 – whose homegrown technology enhanced the American firm’s competitive position in the marketplace – for $326 million was heralded by all, but a few who wondered about the efficacy of offshore ownership, as a coup, positive proof that New Brunswick companies can succeed internationally.

Only last year, the provincial government offered Salesforce.com a payroll rebate totaling $3.8 million to help Radian6 create 300 jobs in Saint John and Fredericton by 2018. According to news reports, it has already dispensed about $500,000 of the fund, though Premier David Alward is at pains to explain why this is nothing to fret about.

Talking to reporters last week, he said, “There are significant accountability mechanisms or processes in place between the department and the company and I have full confidence that those will be followed and that the company will live up to their responsibilities under the agreement.”

Translation: Even though Salesforce is cutting its staff in New Brunswick today, it is still obliged to boost the total number of jobs by 300 over the next five years.

Still, that’s a remarkably optimistic posture for any government to assume regarding any foreign-owned entity operating within its backyard. Global economic trade  winds (or headwinds, as the case may be) routinely shred “agreements” to play nice with the locals. Ribbon cuttings, alas, are far less frequent than the cutting of losses.

In fact, none of this was even remotely preventable. We should expect such blips in jobs – up or down – as log as business flows more-or-less freely across national borders. Where New Brunswick’s private and public sectors must train their attention is on the urgent need to inject greater diversity, better capacity, more durable self-sufficiency, into the provincial economy.

We must start generating new opportunities that will load our cities and smaller communities with options. For every Radian6 that rises to prominence, there should be sixty others percolating with promise. Our provincial innovation agenda should have less to do with payroll support for existing (and exiting) enterprises and more to do with animating early-stage growth among commercially viable startups – export assistance, plant development, skills development, technology adoption.

For all the talk of pipelines and shale gas – opportunities (or challenges) over which we have little control – we must stop waiting for things to happen to us.

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