Monthly Archives: January 2014

Jan 10 2014
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Business, Corporate Responsibility

That’s one for you and 171 for me

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The wretchedly poor are far more likely than the stupendously wealthy to publicly disclose their incomes. After all, the former needn’t ever worry about being kidnapped for a ransom of mac and cheese.

So, we must turn to the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) to learn that the rich are, indeed, getting richer faster than everybody else in the country.

According to a folio entitled All in a Day’s Work? released last week, the annual compensation packages of Canada’s 100 highest-paid CEOs included, on average, a base salary of $1 million, cash bonuses amounting to $1.73 million, corporate shares and stock options worth $3.93 million, and miscellaneous perks and pensions valued at $1.29 million for a grand total of $7.95 million, giver or take a grand or two.

If anyone is counting, that amounts to 171 times more than the average Canadian wage, which tops up at about $47,000 a year. And, it gets worse (unless, of course, you’re rich, in which case it’s getting better all the time).

“The average wage in Canada increased by 6 per cent between 1998 and 2012 while the average compensation of Canada’s highest-paid CEOs increased by 73 per cent during that same time period (inflation-adjusted),” author Hugh Mackenzie writes. “Reality was harsher for Canada’s minimum-wage workers: If they were lucky enough to have a full-time, 40-hour a week job, minimum-wage workers earned, on average, $20,989 in 2012.”

In fact, another source, the AFL-CIO, says the wage cap in industrialized countries – including Canada – is wider and accelerating faster than even these numbers indicate. In the United States a top CEO, earning an average of $12.2 million annually makes 354 times what a wage-earning stiff pockets in a year. In Canada, the ratio is 205:1. In Germany, it’s 147:1. In England, it’s a downright egalitarian 84:1. “In the past few decades, CEO pay has skyrocketed while the average worker’s pay has stagnated despite increases in productivity,” the union’s website observes.

Of course, the purpose of these timely revelations is not a little political. Neither the CCPA nor the AFL-CIO are especially fond of corporate fat cats. To be sure, the CCPA can’t resist thundering its disapproval: “Five ears after a global recession knocked the wind out of Canada’s labour market, throwing tens of thousands of workers onto the unemployment line and sidelining a generation of young workers, the compensation of Canada’s CEO elite continues to sail along.”

But if such criticisms are expected from the usual assortment of fellow travelers outside the gates and beyond the moat, less predictable is the chorus against excessive compensation rising within the castle keep, itself.

Here’s what McGill University professor of management Henry Mintzberg had to say in a piece he penned for the Wall Street Journal in 2009:

“These days, it seems, there is no shortage of recommendations for fixing the way bonuses are paid to executives at big public companies. Well, I have my own recommendation: Scrap the whole thing. Don’t pay any bonuses. Nothing.”

As Dr. Mintzberg concludes, “Too many large corporations today are starved for leadership – true leadership, meaning engaged leadership embedded in concerned management. And the global economy desperately needs renewed enterprise, embedded in the belief that companies are communities. Getting rid of executive bonuses, and the gambling games that accompany them, is the place to start.”

The larger point is that, ever since much of the world’s financial sector collapsed under the weight of an adept minority’s avarice, fairness and equity (or least some semblance of these scarce resources) have become centerpieces of economic development and job creation among the abused and disaffected majority.

That’s why obscenely high pay packets for CEOs, such as Canadian Pacific’s E. Hunter Harrison who earns a staggering $49.1 million a year, affects public opinion (and perhaps even public policy) more directly today than ever before.

Will it be enough to imbue the system with a little sanity? “Despite the scrutiny and pressure,” Mr. Hugh Mackenzie writes, “the pay of CEOs in Canada and elsewhere has proven to be remarkably resilient.”

All of which suggests a reason other than fear of kidnapping why Canada’s stupendously wealthy are loath to discuss their loot in public: Lest they die of embarrassment.

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Jan 09 2014
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Personal History

Warm at heart on a dark winter’s night

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In my backyard, where the columbine grows bushy and fat in June, now sits a solid cone of snow as tall as an apple sapling. It’s not yet mid-January, and the top of my neighbor’s five-foot-high fence has already begun to submerge under white.

What’s going on here?

Those who dismiss global warming as a scientific hoax are having the time of their lives issuing their standard “gotchas” and “I-told-you-sos”. Meteorologists, of course, remind them that climate change manifests itself in extreme weather over time – not in the occurrence of a single hard winter.

But is this shaping up to be a particularly hard winter for this corner of Canada? It sure feels that way.

The season roared in well before Christmas with successive storms, each dumping at least 20 centimeters of snow on southeastern New Brunswick. By January 1, there was at least 120 cms of the stuff on the ground. Then came the freezing rain, followed by the tooth-snapping cold.

All of which made mincemeat of the official forecasts issued by Environment Canada, which had predicted a far less eventful holiday season. Curiously enough, the Old Farmer’s Almanac came closer to the mark with its declaration that “temperatures, precipitation, and snowfall will all be above normal this winter” and the “the coldest periods will occur in early and late December.”

Despite the snow, cold, rain and power outages in the eastern part of the country, however, those who actually follow the weather for a living insist that, so far, there’s nothing particularly unusual – longitudinally speaking – about this start to winter in the Great White North. It’s just that in recent years, especially mild conditions have pampered us into forgetting our own history, and not for the fist time.

Consider a few excerpts from David Phillips’ Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar.

On January 7, 1911, “A dispatch from central New Brunswick said ‘Raining again today, our fields are as bare as mid-summer, cattle are not grazing.’ Owing to the absence of snow, lumbermen complained that yarded lumber could not be hauled out. In Fredericton, the opening hockey game featuring arch rival Marysville had to be rescheduled because the balmy weather made it impossible for the teams to get into shape.”

In the other extreme, on January 13, 1975, “a major storm in Atlantic Canada, with winds gusting to 130 km/h, snapped ice-laden power lines, leaving hundreds without warmth in -30 celsius weather. In New Brunswick, a utility lineman was killed when winds upended the bucket on his cherry picker and he fell 10 meters.”

Then, there was the infamous gale of January 31, 1992, which covered the Moncton area in snow that was literally yards deep (so deep, in fact, that my sister, who was living in the city at the time, entered and exited her second-floor apartment through a window under which a drift had conveniently formed).

In fact, though, as I grow older I mind harsh (or even normal) winters far less than I once did. As a younger man, visions of warm beaches in tropical locales and golf courses in desert resorts of the American southwest, kept my cabin fever at bay.

Now, I’m inclined to perceive our winter for what it is: a months-long opportunity to reacquaint myself with the inexorable cycle of life, which, to my four-year-old grandson simply means building a snow fort.

And so, with his dad, that’s what we did on the night before New Years Eve, after dark, with flashlights and sturdy garden spades in hand. The youngster and his grandmother crafted a cardboard sign, which read “Sno Mou” (that would have been “Snow Mountain”, but they ran out of room), and affixed it to the fort’s roof.

As every architect who works in snow knows, the fate of every fort is assured by the builder’s obsessive need to tweak and carve and dig until the thing possesses the structural integrity of a wad of tissue paper.

Still, my grandson seemed eminently pleased with himself, post collapse. And as he headed into the house, he grinned at the solid cone of snow as tall as an apple sapling that was, only minutes before, “Sno Mou”.

Maybe, I thought, we’d build another some time this winter before the columbine grows bushy and fat in June.

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Jan 09 2014
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Energy, Politics

Same old, tired chestnuts of office

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Tradition, if not prudence, demands that the premier of New Brunswick addresses the province’s electors at least once a year through the shrewd graces of the local, mainstream media.

So it was last week and this when David Alward presented himself to various editorial boards, his talking points in hand, his brow appropriately furrowed in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion.

New Brunswick, he said in so many words, was on the horns of a dilemma. Or, rather, perhaps it was at a crossroads, a critical juncture, a turning point. In any event, it needed a reality check, an infusion of entrepreneurial vigor, a shot in the arm.

These, naturally, are what one must endure when the sturdier veins of vision become varicose: cliches, all of them empty.

“We are still as focussed as we have ever been in terms of getting back to that fiscal strength where we need to be as a province,” Mr. Alward told the Telegraph-Journal. “We have taken and continue to take the difficult decisions, whether that be from an expenditure perspective – we see for the first time in many, many years a government actually come in under budget – the work on foundational reforms, whether that be on work on pensions or local government.”

It is, of course, authentically absurd to speak of coming in “under budget” in a province that’s running an annual budget deficit of $538 million for the current fiscal year and a long-term debt of $11 billion. Shall we now praise the provincial Tories for managing to keep most of their spending promises while the apparatus of the economy crumbles at their feet?

Yet, Mr. Alward also spoke of cornerstones: “Jobs and the economy continue to be the overriding issue that faces us collectively as a province, but as individuals and families as well. Continuing the work that we have done with the development of natural resources will be a very important part of that.”

Specifically, he said, “We are committed to seeing natural resource development as a key cornerstone. . .Next steps when it comes to shale gas development, next steps on things like the TransCanada pipeline, on a number of mining opportunities in the province, will all be very important.”

Does this seem yawningly familiar? Once upon a time in the Progressive Conservative liturgy, shale gas was but one “opportunity” the province might tap to lift the spirits of its flagging economy. Others included: commercially viable university research and development, health care innovation, software engineering, back office services, and data storage.

Now, the message coming from government circles is all about shale gas all the time, which would be just fine if there were anything new and constructive to contribute to the conversation. There isn’t.

The industry still doesn’t know if or when it will proceed to extract what remains, at best, an estimable asset. A vocal minority of New Brunswickers remain adamantly opposed to shale gas drilling. The rest of the population doesn’t seem to know or care enough about the issue to venture an opinion one way or the other.

And yet, this potential economic player somehow becomes a “cornerstone piece” in the puzzle that is New Brunswick 2014.

So does a pipeline from Alberta’s oil depots into Saint John. Forget the fact that political goodwill, while useful, does not a pipeline build without pubic support and regulatory approval.

These projects are not, in fact, projects until they begin to generate revenue for their commercial masters.

How, then, can government seriously view them as pillars of the provincial economy? A priori reasoning works marvelously well in philosophy – not so much in public planning.

Still, get ready one and all for another round of useless deficit targeting. Tradition  demands the February is the month for reckoning the condition of our collective pocketbook. And so, as usual, all the vain assumptions will be assembled. All the projections, masquerading as actual calculations, will be trotted out.

Mr. Alward, meanwhile, may wonder whether prudence, in the absence of anything novel or encouraging to say, now demands his silence.

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Jan 09 2014
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Personal History, Travel

Home alone for the holidays

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They rolled over the central Maritimes, one after another, each a vast, white steamroller, each inevitable, inexorable, remorseless; and at some point on the day after my holiday haircut and before the last bag was packed, I knew the adventure was over before it had begun.

“We’re not going to make this happen, are we?” I quizzed my wife, already certain of her answer. She remained silent, but the look on her face said everything that needed to be said.

We had started planning the trip to New York City – a short, Christmastime sojourn in the Big Apple – last winter. It had made terrific sense. Our adult daughters would be gone with their families, enjoying the seasonal cheer this year with their husbands’ relations. We, in turn, would escape to Manhattan’s jazz clubs and Central Park and the Museum of Modern Art.

By early November we were ready: tickets bought, various admissions arranged, hotel reservations confirmed. Nothing would stop us. Nothing could go wrong. After all, we’d orchestrated a similar jaunt to London, England, only two Christmases ago, and it went off without a hitch.

Of course, December 2011 was not, as things transpired, December 2013.

The Canadian winter dominates the nation’s literary canon as Professor Moriarty did the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: capricious, diabolical, confounding. And so it was in the days before our scheduled great escape. Storm upon storm upon storm descended, bringing with them all the attending power outages and, more relevantly for us, flight delays and cancellations.

We had planned for every contingency except, naturally, the one for which there is none. Now, the battle turned indoors.

How exactly does one enjoy a merry Christmas when no halls had been decked, no mistletoe had been strung, no presents had been wrapped? Hell, no tree had been raised. Is any scene more pathetic than that of two 50-somethings huddled around the fireplace channel, crackling away on the tube? The packet of American bucks rested, inert, in the living room bureau drawer, feeling very sorry for itself, indeed.

Fortunately, my wife possesses a streak of resourcefulness wide enough to inspire a planeload of stranded passengers. With cheerful fortitude, she determined that if we could no longer go to New York then New York would come to us, and began to organize our leisure time accordingly.

Back issues of the New Yorker magazine were rescued from the recycle and placed prominently on the coffee table. Annie Hall, Manhattan, Broadway Danny Rose, and Bullets Over Broadway were stacked neatly beside the CD player, waiting only for the bagels and lox to be served.

In no time, quotes from the iconic New Yorker – Woody Allen, himself – danced through our heads. . .

This: “I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.”

And this: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

And this: “The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.”

And this: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

When we’d had our fill of that sort of wit, we turned to another, in form of The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 miles in the City by William B. Helmreich. The book, a gift from our daughter, fairly brims with a native’s good-natured observations about his home town:

“The conclusions drawn. . .are based. . .on the more than six thousand miles I walked through the streets and parks of New York City over a four-year period,” he writes. “I hung out on street corners, attended community meetings, sat in parks, went to concerts, danced in nightclubs, and spoke with hundreds of people from every walk of life. In truth, I’ve actually been walking this city since I was a young child, having been raised here.”

Meanwhile, storms continued on their punishing course and the planes stayed grounded, as did we – but in a good way, as we gorged on the promise of spring.

“What about New York in May,” I quipped. “Winter should be over by then.”

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