Author Archives: brucescribe

Feb 19 2016
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Politics

Who’s on first?

The gorilla in the room

The gorilla in the room

Whenever the stars align to produce a conjunction of leadership at both the federal and provincial levels, those in opposition invariably fuel suspicions that latter is merely a handmaiden to the former.

It is a time-honored political strategy, designed to undermine public confidence in the proper separation of powers in this country.

So it was some months ago when highly placed Tories in Fredericton solemnly informed me that the Liberal government of Brian Gallant is more than happy to do the bidding of the Grit forces of Justin Trudeau. So it was just last week when federal Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose urged the premier of New Brunswick to get tough with Ottawa over the Energy East pipeline proposal, the implication being that he his loath to challenge his so-called patrons in the centre of the nation’s political universe.

Ms. Ambrose’s comments immediately drew fire from New Brunswick MP and federal government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc.

“Rona Ambrose is party of a Conservative record of complete failure in respect to pipelines,” he declared. “Every time somebody who served in (former Prime Minister) Stephen Harper’s cabinet talks about the importance of getting natural resources to tidewater, it reminds us of how they failed for nine years.”

What’s more, he pointedly noted, “The idea that she would reproach the premier (Mr. Gallant) for not advancing his own viewpoint on this issue is rich. He (went) tow-to-toe with the mayor of Montreal on French television to state his case for the pipeline, speaking forcefully for the interests of this province.”

Now, some may say that Mr. LeBlanc, by speaking out in this way, is doing no favours for Mr. Gallant; that his defence of the premier’s comportment on this issue actually reinforces the argument that Ottawa exerts too much influence over affairs in Fredericton.

Still, it’s hard to credit this viewpoint with any degree of verisimilitude, even as, for some, it’s easy to interpret what amounts to a productive, mutually supportive relationship between two levels of government with playing footsy.

The irony, of course, is that the former Progressive Conservative government of David Alward in New Brunswick would have given its eyeteeth to build a happy alliance with Stephen Harper’s hardline Cabinet. That it could not was no comment on its skill or effort; the former prime minister wasn’t much of a fan of any provincial government.

Beyond this, it should be clear that Mr. Gallant is quite eminently his own man with his own agenda.

Some weeks ago, before handing down his second budget, the premier told me, “To me, our focus in the province has to be about growing the economy and creating jobs. And we also want to ensure that New Brunswick is a great place to live, work and play. Obviously you need many efforts and investments to make that a reality, but I think it’s pretty clear that education is the one area that gives you those things. I am a huge proponent of the role that education can play in developing our economy, and, of course, what it does for every individual in giving them opportunities in our province. So I am very happy, despite the fact that we face many challenges both fiscally and economically, that as a government we were able to prioritize education to the extent that we did, increasing the budget by $33 million, which represents an increase of over 3.1 per cent.”

We may not agree with any or even all of this, but there should be no doubt about who’s in charge in this province.

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Feb 19 2016
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Climate, Environment, Government, Society

A fossilized vision of the future

 

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As the planet continues to warm, the battles lines in the debate over the causes continue to retrench and harden.

Where once climate science informed popular understanding about carbon dioxide emissions from human industry, and the effect these have had on average global temperatures over the past century, now this research is being hijacked by two diametrically opposed ideological camps bent on formulating fundamentally irreconcilable solutions to the present crisis.

On the one hand, the rising tide of environmental radicalism argues that the only way to save the world from ecological catastrophe is to abandon every mine and every drill. “Leave the carbon in the ground, where it belongs,” the mantra goes. “We must become clean and renewable; and we must do it now.”

It’s a nice, even necessary, idea. But it fails to recognize the essential truth about global society’s dependence on the stuff: It’s cheap and addictive. Virtually nothing we do or consume is unaffected by oil, gas and coal. Going cold turkey overnight is simply no option.

On the other hand, the burgeoning call for more drilling, more mining posits that fossil fuels are the glue that binds civilizations together. Without them, the argument goes, humanity will simply devolve into brutal clans forever warring over scarce resources; after all, internationalism is predicated on more or less equal access to the same suite of energy resources.

This, too, can be persuasive. Still, the reasoning also conveniently ignores the inconvenient truth of our shared predicament: Science indisputably proves that our time plundering the earth for cheap sources of energy is running out; sooner or later our industrial habits will make much of the planet uninhabitable.

In either scenario, the outcome is disastrously similar: millions will die and millions more will become economic refugees, merely waiting to die.

To avoid the coming zombie apocalypse, there is, of course, a third option: We could start using our minds (which are, I am reliably informed, in great abundance) and stop flapping our gums from the ramparts of our two fortresses of solitude.

If we can’t quit fossil fuels altogether, and we can’t live with them as we do today, then why don’t we stop thinking about them as commodities to burn and begin to appreciate them as strategic assets to deploy in the effort to build a largely clean, broadly renewable future?

In other words, use them as the feedstock for new manufacturing technologies that more effectively capture and distribute in-situ wind, solar and tidal sources of energy. Use them to power research into cleaner forms of short- and long-range transportation systems. Use them to, in effect, eliminate them as anything but the necessary evils they are for advanced research and development.

To some extent, this process is already underway in countries that maintain offshore drilling operations and yet pull as much as a third of their non-locomotive energy from clean, renewable sources.

Lamentably, it’s not underway in any convincing fashion in Atlantic Canada. New Brunswick may possess one of the world’s greatest wind resources, but its infrastructure woefully lags its renewable energy potential. Thanks to its high concentration of universities and advanced institutes, this province could become a living laboratory for this type of urgent research, the results of which might actually spark a durable, sustainable economic development boom with global consequences.

Naturally, this would require the sort of foresight, vision and collaborative determination we rarely witness in this province.

But without this resource available to policy makers, politicians, industry representatives, and environmentalists, our fossilized vision of the future is secure.

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Feb 19 2016
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Business, Economy, Government

Between ‘The Rock’ and a hard place

Newfoundland's debt is as immoveable as a neolithic obelisk

Newfoundland’s debt is as immoveable as a neolithic obelisk

For an object lesson on the capricious nature of economic dependence on fossil fuels, we need not cast our weary eyes westward to Alberta. We need only scan the eastern horizon to where Newfoundland and Labrador hover into pale view.

Not long ago, we may recall, this province was Canada’s miracle child – for decades, a perpetually slow learner that, seemingly overnight, became the highest achiever in the land.

Oil and gas reserves were plentiful (they still are) and commodity prices went through the roof. The province of fish and cut bait was reborn as the proverbial one of milk and honey. Public coffers were full to brimming with billions of bucks. Incomes in St. John’s soared, as did house prices. Road works and other infrastructure projects dotted the craggy landscape.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the Big Rock Candy Mountain: The bottom fell out. A reckoning was nigh. In fact, it’s right about now.

According to a recent report by the Fraser Institute, a private think tank based in the West, writing about the newly benighted East, “Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial finances are in a dire state. The government’s latest projections have the province facing a nearly $2 billion operating deficit, equivalent to almost a third of its total annual revenue. After adjusting for the size of its economy and population, Newfoundland and Labrador will have by the far the largest deficit among the provinces in 2015/16.”

Indeed, says the Institute, “It gets worse. The government currently projects deficits averaging approximately $2 billion from now until 2020/21. Meanwhile, provincial net debt (a measure that adjusts for financial assets) is set to almost triple in nominal terms from the recent low of $7.8 billion in 2011/12 to $22.9 billion in 2020/21.”

What’s the cause? It’s simple: Overspending based on rosy projections about a singularly fickle industry.

Says Fraser’s researchers: “A popular narrative holds that falling revenues are to blame, particularly as the energy sector and consequent government revenues have been hit by depressed commodity prices. And there is no doubt revenues have taken a big hit in recent years, declining by 31 per cent since 2011/2012 and placing considerable pressure on government finances.      “Nevertheless, the view that declining revenues alone are responsible for the province’s fiscal problems ignores the important role that provincial spending growth has played in creating the crisis.

“Government spending in Newfoundland and Labrador took off after 2004/05, coinciding with the commodity boom when energy prices and development began to rise. Subsequently, the provincial government continued to aggressively increase spending as revenues quickly poured into the provincial coffers. In fact, program spending is now almost 80 per cent higher in nominal terms than in 2004/05. From 2005/06 to 2011/12, the government increased program spending by a whopping 8.4 per cent each year on average – much faster than the rate needed to keep pace with increasing overall.”

All of which may only prove that governments, when faced with a windfall of found money, are loath to replenish their “rainy day” funds in favour of spending like sailors on shore leave.

In any case, by comparison, New Brunswick’s rather ill fiscal condition looks almost robust. After all, with a population about the size of Newfoundland and Labrador’s, our $400-million deficit and $13-billion debt seems almost manageable.

Still, it only seems this way. Unless we begin to diversify and innovate, own resource-based, commodity-dependent economy will surely find itself in the circumstances those of our brethren to the northeast now face:

Between a rock and a hard place.

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Feb 16 2016
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Economy, Humour, Municipal Affairs, Politics

We don’t mean to be rude, but. . .

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We’re the best, the brightest, the fastest. We’re so exquisitely fine, the sun glints off even the ugliest girders in our fast-corroding downtown core, just as it does off the brand, spanking new strip malls along the ribbon roads and circumferential highways that encircle us.

Welcome, Canada, to the eighth-fastest growing ‘metropolis’ in the country, the purebred greyhound of the Atlantic region.

Say hello to Greater Moncton. . .again.

Sure, we’ve been here before – before your adoring eyes. You know we have. You’ve read about us in the headlines. We’re the little city that could. We’re the home of social and economic pugilists who famously (if sometimes nauseatingly) “punch above their weight class”. Does the phrase “resurgo” ring a bell? It should.

We’re one of the world’s “smart cities” (if only because we weren’t entirely too late to the global party of installing free public Wi-Fi in our downtown). We’re the nexus of economic dynamism in southeastern New Brunswick (whatever that means), of transportation, light manufacturing, university innovation, and information technology. We’re great, and we know it. We just don’t brag about it; that, after all, would be rude.

And we don’t want to be rude. Heaven forbid that we let our hubris run away with our modesty and bury it in a muddy flat of the Petitcodiac River, which, in case we failed to mention, now hosts one of the greatest displays of tidal-bore activity on the freaking planet. Did I say planet? I meant universe.

Of course, we don’t have to brag about our achievements here in the Hub City. We have Statistics Canada to do that for us. Except for Moncton, said the agency in a recent report, “Preliminary estimates indicate that the seven CMAs (Census Metropolitan Areas) with the highest population growth rates were all located in Western Canada. In 2014-15, the population growth rate was two per cent or higher in four CMAs: Kelowna (+3.1 per cent), Calgary (+2.4 per cent), Edmonton (+2.4 per cent) and Saskatoon (+ two per cent). They were followed by the CMAs of Regina (+1.9 per cent), Abbotsford–Mission (+1.4 per cent) and Winnipeg (+1.4 per cent).

“In contrast, the CMAs that posted population decreases were all located in Eastern or Central Canada. The population decreased in the CMAs of Greater Sudbury (-0.3 per cent), Saguenay (-0.2 per cent), Peterborough (-0.2 per cent) and Thunder Bay (-0.2 per cent).

Population growth also varied in areas outside of the CMAs. In 2014-15, the non-CMA part of Alberta grew at a rate of 0.7 per cent, the highest among the non-CMA areas for the provinces. Population decreases were recorded in the non-CMA parts of three provinces: Newfoundland and Labrador (-1.1 per cent), Nova Scotia (-0.7 per cent) and New Brunswick (-0.4 per cent).

Except, naturellement, good, old Moncton, which posted a population growth rate of 1.3 per cent over the past year and a bit.

We are obviously overjoyed to be counted in this company of speedy CMAs. We also mourn the loss of vigour amongst our closest civic neighbours (Saint John at -0.4 per cent? Oh, for shame!).

But I wonder what any of this actually means in the larger scheme?

New Brunswick’s population can’t compete with Mississauga’s. Noting that Moncton is a “fast-growing” community is akin to observing that a snapping turtle runs more quickly than a tortoise.

If this province hopes to reverse its economic and demographic fortunes, its major communities must work together to determine how we all become the best, the brightest and the fastest.

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Feb 15 2016
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Culture, Economy

Breaking up the culture club

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In a budget that does little to up New Brunswick’s game in the big, wide world of economic competitiveness, the Gallant government’s decision to ‘trim’ $400,000 from ArtsNB seems malignly small-minded.

Freddy Beach’s recent talking points on the matter suggest that the move is designed to render the organization more accountable to the artists it supports by ensuring that more public money flows into the pockets of creators, and less into those of administrators.

This is the typical, chimerical argument that governments trot out whenever they decide to defend a frankly indefensible position. They get away with it for two reasons: First, the sums in question are almost too small to generate much widespread opposition; and second, who gives a fig about the arts when there are roads to build and natural resources to plunder?

But if the underlying argument is that arts and culture in New Brunswick – indeed, across Canada –comprise a shuddering economic sector, then the facts, which are easily accessible, say otherwise.

An Industry Canada monograph, updated in 2009, makes compelling points: “The cultural sector contributes $40 billion to Canada’s GDP and directly employs close to 600,000 Canadians. Cultural industries are a significant contributor to Canada’s economic growth. Examples of cultural goods include: books, newspapers, videos, compact discs, sculptures, paintings. Examples of cultural services are film production and post-production services, broadcasts, live artistic performances.

“In 2002 . . .Mining and Oil and Gas Extraction contributed only $35.4 billion. The Agriculture and Forestry industry contributed $21 billion to Canada’s GDP, approximately half that of the cultural sector. Put differently, cultural activities in 2002 amounted to a 3.8 per cent value-added contribution to Canada’s GDP.”

What’s more, between 1996 and 2001, employment in the cultural sector grew annually at 3.4 per cent, which outpaced the overall national rate. And this measurement only included “direct jobs created”, not the indirect ones generated over this period.

Statistics Canada’s 2010 report on the industry may be even more persuasive. It said, “Culture industries accounted for 3.2 per cent of the total output in Canada, reaching $99.3 billion (in that year). GDP of culture industries was $53.2 billion, contributing 3.4 per cent to Canada’s total GDP. Of which culture products accounted for $40.7 billion and other products (i.e., non-culture products), $12.5 billion.

“In 2010, the total number of jobs in Canada was 17.3 million. Culture industries accounted for 703,900 (of these), a four per cent share. This includes jobs associated with the production of culture and non-culture products.

The largest contributors to the GDP of culture industries (presented by domain) were: Audio-visual and interactive media ($13.8 billion) followed by Visual and Applied Arts  ($13.4 billion), Written and published works ($10.1 billion), and Governance, funding and professional support ($8 billion).”

Still, in the face of these facts, governments continue pandering to stereotypical perceptions of arts administrators as lazy and artists as feckless – the latter needing either abandonment (if the reigning political class is Conservative) or infantilizing (if the government of the day is avowedly Liberal).

In New Brunswick, though, the arts and culture sector play an enormously important role in shoring up the bulwarks against this province’s final socio-economic dissolution.

Apart from the GDP, job and export numbers they represent, musicians, writers, sculptors, and painters (among many others) promote the broader virtues of literacy, numeracy and critical thinking – in fact, all features of solid primary, secondary and post-secondary systems of education.

They remind us that we, all of us, are invested in both past and future.

That’s a benignly large-minded act of creation to embrace.

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Feb 12 2016
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Economy, Government, Municipal Affairs

Dear Dad: Send money soon

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Canada’s municipalities want the federal government to avoid the middlemen and send them their allowances directly and without delay.

Given that the middlemen in this instance are the nation’s provincial governments, can you blame the burgermeisters for their impudence?

The country’s tripartite system of democratic rule has been, since Confederation, both a blessing and a curse. Lately, it’s been more of the latter than the former.

Cities – big ones, in particular – have become the indisputable magnets for international and domestic migration. Simply put, these are where most people in Canada now live, work, build businesses, and care for their families; in the process, they exert enormous pressures on physical, technological, social and economic infrastructure. These burdens are now beyond the capacities of many urban areas to shoulder.

At a recent meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, several mayors made their case.

Said Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi: “Ideally, the funds should flow directly from the federal government to the municipalities. If we have to involve the provinces in another layer of authority, it’s going to slow everything down.”

Added Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson: “Prime Minister Trudeau is breaking down the silos between cities, provinces, federal government and First Nations. Canada’s cities compete against cities around the world that have more jurisdiction, more tax revenue to work with. And frankly for us to compete economically, our cities need to have more resources and (a) stronger partnership with the federal government.”

Or, as Montreal’s Denis Coderre declared, “Cities are no longer just creatures of the provinces.”

Uh-huh. . .Tell that to the provinces. Here, in New Brunswick, this is exactly what the province’s three major cities are: creatures of provincial jurisdiction.

We love talking about our civic innovation, vibrant cultural amenities, dynamic entrepreneurship and “punching above our weight”. But, let’s face it, we’re still fly-weights in the arena of government funding and, with populations denuding across this province of ours, we’re not likely to land a palpable blow against the status quo anytime soon.

Still, perhaps we can learn from our more muscle-bound brethren across Canada (you know, in case we do have an even chance of someday emerging from our 98-pound-weakling cocoons).

According to a recent survey conducted by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, “The 2016 (infrastructure poll) included a section on asset management for the first time. These questions shed light on the state of Canadian municipal asset management practices. Survey results point to varied asset management practices according to community size. For instance, 62 per cent of large municipalities, 56 per cent of medium-sized municipalities and 35 per cent of small municipalities reported having a formal asset management plan in place. All communities, particularly smaller municipalities, would benefit from increased asset management capacity.”

Read: More direct control over federal government assets specifically targeted at municipalities; fewer provincial middlemen.

In fact, the prime minister does seem cautiously optimistic about embracing a new paradigm for cities – though, by doing so, he would surely bite off a chunk of constitutional reform that would, by comparison, render a Senate makeover appear like child’s play.

“We are restarting a relationship that had been significantly neglected over the past 10 years,” Mr. Trudeau said at the mayors’ meeting. “Ensuring that we get the money flowing in a responsible and rapid way is a priority for all of us.”

If ‘Dad’ and his cabinet do manage to pull this off, of course, think of all the money that would liberate for the provinces to. . .oh, I don’t know. . .lure multinationals.

After all, middlemen never waste money.

Not ever.

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Feb 12 2016
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Corporate Responsibility, Culture, Government

Mother Nature trumps ‘Mother Canada’

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Rarely do governments come to their senses in time to make an efficacious difference in the lives of the people they represent. But when they do, it’s occasion for commemoration.

So it was last week when agents of the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau announced that a planned war memorial for Cape Breton Highlands National Park – the brainchild of a private consortium that had received fulsome, moral support from the former Conservative government under Stephen Harper – would not proceed.

The so-called ‘Mother Canada’ monument would have been a 24-metre-tall testament to the dogged determination of a Toronto businessman who, having seen the graves of the nation’s war dead in Europe, thought it would be a swell idea to erect a statue in honour of them along one of the prettiest and ecologically significant coastlines in the country.

Writing in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald last year, columnist Ralph Surette fairly foamed at the mouth about the proposal and the evident support it received from the federal government at the time.

“For those who still don’t fully understand the game, the ‘Mother Canada’ controversy should provide some enlightenment,” he wrote. “The discovery that Parks Canada has furnished $100,000 to the project – after swearing that the statue in Cape Breton Highlands Park was a purely private project – blows the lid off the scheme. The political engineering comes from the Prime Minister’s Office.

“This is Stephen Harper building yet another monument to himself. It’s not just the money. The fact that the rules governing national parks have been casually trashed to accommodate the project has the PMO’s fingerprints all over it. No use hollering at Parks Canada bureaucrats. Like everyone else in government, they’ve been reduced to yo-yos of the PMO, detached from their guiding principles.”

Not anymore, it seems. Parks Canada officials, now presumably untethered from their partisan leashes, have correctly adjudged that Canada requires another war memorial of this monstrous sort like it needs a hole in its head. After all, what possible benefit to memory and national pride does a stone giant facing Europe – which can be seen properly only by denizens of international fishing trawlers – actually provide?

For their part, government reps are explaining their decision in more diplomatic and circumspect terms. According to a report in the Globe and Mail this week, “Daniel Watson, the chief executive officer of Parks Canada, said that the agency reviewed the war memorial proposed for the Cape Breton park and concluded there were too many problems preventing its completion by July 1, 2017, the date of its planned unveiling, including the availability of funds to the private foundation backing the project.”

Specifically, Mr. Watson stipulated, “As a result, the project will not be moving forward on Parks Canada land.”

It may, however, move forward in another guise on private land. More’s the pity. Still, that’s not a matter for public policy to settle.

In truth, the most irksome feature about this project was never its grandness or aesthetic effrontery; it was the very notion that land held in trust by the Government of Canada on behalf of the people of Canada – all people of Canada – could be so easily and cavalierly betrothed to private interests who may, or may not, have an ideological bone to pick with our common heritage.

Good Lord! What would be next?

Carving the faces of Canada’s first prime ministers, Mount Rushmore-like, into New Brunswick’s world-famous flowerpot rocks? Erecting the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Corporate Donor’ to boot?

Governments don’t do many things right. But when they do, it’s time to commemorate.

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Feb 12 2016
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Business, Economy, Wealth

Circling the jobs drain

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It’s not hard to understand why politicians vying for elected office routinely proclaim the number of people they intend to put back to work, if only the great unwashed would be so kind as to hand over the keys to the garden.

After all, job creation is the lowest-hanging fruit on the vine of campaign promises.

Who, among us, doesn’t understand the importance of a fully employed, adult citizenry? More to the prosaic point, who doesn’t want steady, reliable work for himself? And who isn’t, at least once, willing to swallow whatever sweet and succulent promise a politician offers, especially if it has to do with one’s livelihood.

Still, the problem with low-hanging fruit is that, all too often, it’s past its ‘best before’ date.

New Brunswickers witnessed this during former Progressive Conservative Premier David Alward’s term in office, in which he promised to create jobs across the broad spectrum of the provincial economy, only to preside over losses approaching 4,500.

Now, perhaps, we prepare ourselves for a repeat performance by the Liberal government of Brian Gallant (different party, same story), which, according to its own Department of Finance, appears fated to watch the provincial labour market shed hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more by 2018.

The reasons are pretty straightforward, and can apply to any government in this age of perennially straitened circumstances, regardless of ideological stripe and partisan palaver.

According to the Economic Outlook 2016-2017, which accompanied the most recent New Brunswick budget, “Weaker growth at the national and global levels, challenges in the export and manufacturing sectors, slower-than-expected growth in investment and continued weakness in the labour market contributed to subdued growth in 2015. . .Real economic growth of 1.3 per cent in 2015 (is estimated), down from 1.8 per cent projected at budget last year. This estimate is consistent with the latest consensus among private sector forecasters.”

On the other hand, “Economic activity is expected to be tempered by demographic realities, private sector investment, fiscal measures and the recently announced suspension of operations at the Picadilly mine. Private sector forecasts may not reflect the latter development, which will put downward pressure on their projections.”

In fact, “Growth conditions will be further limited by PotashCorp’s announcement that it was indefinitely suspending operations at the Picadilly mine. The economic impact will be partially mitigated in the short-term by transitional measures being offered by the company. However, the effect of the suspension will continue to be felt well into 2017.”

Add to this boiling cauldron of trouble New Brunswick’s rapidly aging population and low birth rate and you have the perfect recipe for moribund economic conditions and, at best, stagnant job prospects. Or, as the finance department’s report observes, “Looking ahead to 2017, external demand and further government capital spending will drive economic activity. However, an aging workforce, overall population decline and weak private sector investment will curb growth.”

Naturally, all this translates into job losses, not growth.

Indeed, evidence of deep-rooted rot in the province’s economic garden has been extant for several years. And, except for specifically dunderheaded moves by certain elected officials, none of it is actually any individual’s or even government’s fault.

It’s a product of decades of short-sighted policy, calcified programming, and uncompetitive and complacent private-sector players. And, don’t underestimate the effects of rolling, increasingly deep recessions on resource-based, export-oriented jurisdictions, such as New Brunswick’s.

Despite their proclamations, politicians don’t create employment in the private economy.

But when they fail to deliver the fruits of their campaign promises – jobs – perhaps it’s only right that they should lose their own.

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Feb 09 2016
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Democracy, Politics

Membership has its privileges?

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Trust New Brunswick to tilt at the beast of federal complacency and partisanship. After all, didn’t this province help invent the Senate of Canada? Shouldn’t we, of all this great land’s citizens, now properly tame it, if not actually slay it?

Two senators from this fair province – and from two different parties, no less – prefer door No. 1. But how much luck are they having travelling the high road to reform?

Pierrette Ringuette, who was appointed as a Liberal senator but who has announced that she will quit the Grit caucus and sit as an independent, declared last week that “Canadians have been clear in their desire for a non-partisan Senate. The Senate, as an institution and senators themselves, should be working to remove partisanship from the chamber and with that goal in mind, I believe in taking the proactive approach and sitting as an independent.”

In this, she joins fellow New Brunswicker John Wallace, a former Conservative senator who is now an independent. At the time of his resignation last November, he stipulated in a letter, “Differences that I consider to be irreconcilable exist between myself and Conservative Senate Leader Claude Carignan and other Conservative Senate Caucus members regarding the required Constitutional roles, responsibilities and independence of Conservative Senators. These differences are fundamental to the roles and responsibilities that I have sworn to uphold as a member of the Senate of Canada.”

In an interview with the CBC’s Jacques Poitras, Mr. Wallace said, “I believe in order for the Senate to function as it was intended by the Fathers of Confederation. . .political partisanship, as much as it can be, has to be removed from the Senate,” he told CBC’s Jacques Poitras in New Brunswick. “Others can think otherwise, but I don’t want to find myself constrained by feeling that every time I go against the will of my political leaders, it’s an act of disloyalty.”

Still, as fine and noble as these sentiments ring, when it comes to the Senate of Canada, independence does not necessarily confer any privileges – except, perhaps, those of conscience. In the meantime, just try and get a committee appointment. Go ahead, Mr. Wallace, I dare you.

Since his resignation from the Tory caucus, the good fellow and other independents in the chamber are having a dickens of a time getting a seat on any of the signature quorums that essentially comprise the Senate’s raison d’etre. “The total exclusion of myself and other independent senators from any committee, it’s completely outrageous,” he told the Telegraph-Journal’s Adam Huras not long ago. “It goes right to the heart of the credibility, the reputation and the integrity of the institution. There couldn’t be a clearer example of that problem of irreconcilable difference than what this represents. There is a message that is being sent to me.”

For her part, though her political associations may differ from Mr. Wallace’s, Ms. Ringuette is sympathetic to her colleague’s cause, which is, naturally, also her own. “It’s a sad state of affairs,” she was quoted as saying last week. “You would think that individually and collectively with the events of the last three years that independent spirited senators would rise to the challenge.”

Actually, given those very events of the last three years, I would expect nothing less than the officious, foot-dragging, obstreperous behaviour from the partisan-aligned majority of senators we witness today.

Mr. Wallace’s and Ms. Ringuette’s principled stand, notwithstanding, notions of meaningful reform do not pass frequently through the Upper Chamber’s gilded doors.

Perhaps it’s time to slay the beast, after all.

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Feb 07 2016
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Government, Politics

The dummies of small things

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Let’s face it, no government drops a budget without engaging in a substantial amount of tortuous explanation and twisted logic.

The problem, of course, is that elected officials are notoriously poor spin doctors; voters, more often than not, easily penetrate their veils of assurances and, worse, never forget the degree to which political prevarication undermines everyone’s faith in public institutions.

Still, two measures in the New Brunswick government’s most recent budget, announced last week, are precious, to the point of being almost adorable, for their utter lack of perspicacity.

It’s almost as if communications personnel at Freddy Beach downloaded a page from some apocryphal version of “Public Relations for Dummies” and attached it to their media emails.

In the first instance, provincial brain trusts thought they could explain a palpable drop in the personal income-tax rate (to about 20 from 21 per cent) for the highest earners in New Brunswick (those netting $150,000 or more a year) by emphasizing that the feds are planning to raise levies on these putative one-percenters anyway: a kind of glass-half-full-empty sort of argument.

In the second, the Gallant government justified its $400,000-a-year cut to the New Brunswick Arts Board – a move that would effectively render the arms-length organization extinct – by absorbing its staff into the civil service, which would then prosecute the defunct group’s mandate. This is despite the fact that the Province intends to eliminate as many as 1,300 public employees before its reigning Libs head to the polls again.

Uh, huh. . .What, pray tell, is credible about any of this?

If we were, for example, to accept the Gallant government’s contention that fat cats in this province will still wind up paying their fair share in taxes, we must also perceive that a substantial amount of these levies will now travel to Ottawa’s coffers, leaving New Brunswick with an unfunded shortfall (based on original expectations) of close to $10 million a year.

That’s ten million bucks that won’t be available to offset the cost of the HST hike here, which affects pretty much all but the poorest. It’s certainly not going to defray the price of higher education or health care.

It is, purely and simply, a political giveaway to a higher level of government pursuing its own agenda, but which wears the same-colored jersey on the political football pitch.

Again, if we were to accept, in principle, the evisceration of the province’s arts board, what assurances do we have that the new ‘civil service’ to cultural workers will be fair and politically unmotivated. How do we know that it will even survive the next round of budget cuts?

As Akoulina Collins, the Arts Board’s executive director, lamented to the CBC last week, “We were informed that the (government) wished to respect the arm’s length nature of (the organization), yet in the same breath (they) informed us that they would be making contact with our employees to move them over to become employees of the government. . .It’s problematic.”

You bet it is. Political interference is always a danger in arts funding.

To be sure, these two, juvenile adventures in budget butt covering are minor; given New Brunswick’s enormous fiscal challenges, they amount to nothing but chump change.

Still, they are troubling for a government (in fact, all governments in recent years) that fails to appreciate the effect even its littlest decisions have on its ability to govern.

It is, after all, the small thing voters remember.

Remembering that might save the next government from torturing its explanations to justify its logic.

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