Author Archives: brucescribe

Oct 10 2014
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Government, Humour, Politics

An open letter to Brian Gallant, the new leader of Eastern Canada’s la-la land (AKA New Brunswick)

Surf, baby, surf!

Surf, baby, surf!

Dear Mr. Premier,

Allow me to congratulate you on your recent victory at the polls, you poor bastard.

Why anyone would subject himself to the slings and arrows of the New Brunswick electorate, only your political forebears and God Almighty knows.

But here you are, taking names and numbers, dropping the small-business tax rate by 50 basis points on your first day in office, promising a $900-million-dollar infrastructure build over six years (two years longer than your current mandate), and vowing to steer this ship of state around the shoals and sandbars that have sunk previous governments, both Grit and Tory, for nearly a generation.

Good for you.

Here’s the excellent news: You are young, educated, smart, and perfectly bilingual.

Here’s the less excellent news: You are young, educated, smart, and perfectly bilingual. Naturally, people will expect you to hand them the world on personalized pewter platters.

A few things going in your favour include a radically curtailed cabinet, the semblance of a ‘right-sized’ public bureaucracy, and cuts in everything except front-line services in health care and social programs. There’s also your avowed commitment to educational attainment in New Brunswick, an ambition that, heretofore, has continued to disappoint educators in this province. All of which should leave the impression in the minds of all but the most vested interests and partisan individuals that you are serious about the commonweal.     

The many things going against you include a $400-million deficit and $12-billion debt that, for all the world, looks like a permanent feature of the fiscal landscape; a moribund economy (apart from some recent, positive signs from the mining and forestry sectors) that’s still far too reliant on seasonal and part-time positions in rural areas; a mismatch between highly skilled jobs and training in urban areas; and a steady flow of talent (what economists like to call ‘human capital’) to points west, notably Alberta.

Then, of course, there are the lobbyists.

There is, for example, the Coalition for Seniors and Nursing Home Residents Rights, whose executive director Cecile Cassista told the CBC this week, “Right now, we have about 57 agencies and basically getting money from the government, which really doesn’t actually meet the needs of the workers that are doing the work.”

There’s the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, whose director of provincial affairs Denis Robichaud also told the CBC, “We see positive measures, I think, in the Liberal program on (taxation). . .But the new Liberal government also plans to return business property tax rates to the levels in place in 2012 so that worries some of our members also.”

And this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface.

Still, you correctly assess the dimension of your challenge when you say, as you did recently in an interview with the Telegraph-Journal, “The whole point of why I embarked on this adventure was to try to make a difference. Now, I really do feel I have the capability and the responsibility to make a difference. . .We have some rocky roads ahead of us as a province to get over these challenges. But we will take it very seriously, and we will make the right decisions so we can get over that hump and make sure we have better says as a province.”

Mr. Premier, I will leave you with two thoughts.

The first is: be bold right away. Make all your dramatic, radical moves within your first year. Your job is no longer to win friends and influence people. That one terminated on election day. Your job is to slay the beast and save the girl (metaphorically speaking about New Brunswick as a damsel in distress may not, however, serve your interests as you are the province’s minister responsible for women’s equality).

That brings me to my second point: keep your sense of humour. You’re going to need it. Remember what Groucho Marx once said (“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies”), or Ambrose Bierce (“a vote. . .is the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country”)

Good luck, you poor bastard.

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Oct 09 2014
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Climate, Government, Politics

Opposing lessons in crisis management

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If single-minded attention to a gathering emergency is the measure of leadership in government, then Stephen Harper’s Torytown manages to both pass and fail in spectacularly simultaneous fashion.

This week, a deeply ambivalent House of Commons issued its imprimatur for Canadian combat operations to commence in the treacherous reaches of northern Iraq, where the Islamic State (IS) currently wreaks havoc. The mission is modest (it includes nine airplanes and about 600 military personnel), but the purpose is definitive.

“We are undertaking a range of actions, and we are very fortunate to have men and women who are prepared to put their lives on the line to undertake those actions on our behalf,” the Prime Minister said on Tuesday. “What the world understands very clearly is that in the absence of any response, (the Islamic State) was growing like a cancer over the summer, over an entire region. This constitutes a threat and not just to the region, to the global community entirely and also to Canada.”

It’s the brand of tough talk and focussed reaction for which Mr. Harper has become justly famous. Posit a gun-toting enemy with sharp teeth and dastardly intentions, and you can count on Captain Canada to swoop into the fray, his six-shooters a-blazing.

Indeed, whether the evil-doers in our midst (or just over the horizon) are stalkers, cyber-bullies, pedophiles, or murderous jihadis, this prime minister has never let down his rhetorical guard whilst demonstrating his country’s determination to wipe out vicious hellions wherever he may find them.

Unfortunately, without an obvious, two-legged enemy at which he can shake his big stick, Mr. Harper – and, in fact, every one of his political lieutenants – appear, all too often, hopelessly distracted or, worse, mindfully disengaged from even greater threats than those IS now poses to the world’s well being.

“At the 2009 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the Government of Canada committed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020,” writes Julie Gelfand, Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development in her Fall 2014 report, her first since accepting the job last March.

Realistically, though, “Environment Canada’s latest projections show that Canada will not likely meet its commitment.” That’s because “the federal government has chosen to reduce GHG emissions by establishing regulations on a sector-by-sector basis.” In this fashion, “it has introduced several such regulations to date, notably in the transportation and the electricity generation sectors.” At the same time, “in 2006, the government first announced its intent to regulate GHG emissions from the oil and gas industry but has not yet done so even though emissions are growing fastest in this sector.”

The bottom line is straightforward and chilling:

“If Canada does not honour its climate-change commitments, it cannot expect other countries to honour theirs. If countries fail to reduce their emissions, the large environmental and economic liabilities we will leave our children and our grandchildren – such as more frequent extreme weather, reduced air quality, rising oceans, and the spread of insect-borne diseases – will likely outweigh any potentially positive effects, such as a longer growing season.”

None of which should come as any great surprise to those who have kept a watchful eye trained on this federal government’s policies concerning the environment. Agents provocateurs of the blue zone on Parliament Hill routinely pillory critics of big oil and gas, drubbing them for their allegedly anti-business, anti-prosperity, anti-technology agitations. Meanwhile, the bigger picture goes deliberately unappreciated, with nauseatingly predictable results.

“While the Government of Canada has recognized the need to urgently combat climate change, its planning has been ineffective and the action it has taken has been slow and not well coordinated,” Ms. Gelfand concludes.

“The sector-by-sector regulatory approach led by Environment Canada has made some gains, but the measures currently in place are expected to close the gap in greenhouse gas emissions by only 7 per cent by 2020, and the actual effects of these measures have not yet been assessed.”

And likely never will. Unless we somehow manage to transform global warming into a sword-brandishing terrorist on which Mr. Harper can draw a bead, this is one crisis that will continue to loom.

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Oct 08 2014
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Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics

Fracking’s other, hidden challenge

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New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant did himself an enormous political favour during his recent election campaign by sticking to his guns, insisting that he would follow through with a temporary ban on hydraulic fracturing in the province until experts convinced him that the drilling practice is broadly benign.

After all, the one thing a lightly informed voter can get behind is a candidate for elected office who successfully appeals to the public’s expectation of clean water, air and soil.

But whether or not you believe fellows like Gywn Morgan, a former Canadian energy executive, who recently argued in a Globe an Mail commentary that the “technology. . .has one of the most impressive industrial safety records ever compiled,” that “in the United States, where some 1.2 million wells have been hydraulically fractured over the past 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management and the Environmental Protection Agency have found no supportable evidence of fracture-induced water contamination,” and that, “here in Canada, more than 200,000 wells have been fractured in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan with a similarly sterling record,” another problem emerges – one that’s not so cut and dry.

The chief argument for permitting the development of tight, onshore oil and gas plays in New Brunswick is economic. In fact, proponents routinely insist, it’s a no-braine:  the province needs jobs and the government needs new sources of money (i.e., taxes and/or royalties from production companies) to balance its books and pay down its accumulated debt. If fracking, girded by effective regulations, is safe, then what are we waiting for? Drill, baby, drill!

But what if the economics of shale gas extraction – at least to the host jurisdictions – are not always as attractive or predictable as they appear?

Jeremy Scott of Forbes magazine recently examined various U.S. state budgets, noting that, for the third consecutive year, overall tax revenues have risen. Referencing some enlightening numbers-crunching by Todd Haggerty, a policy specialist in the fiscal affairs department of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), Mr. Scott reported “state tax revenues went up 6.1 per cent in fiscal 2013 to a total of $846 billion, says the NCSL. Personal income tax revenues were up 10.3 per cent, while corporate collections surged 7.9 per cent.”

In fact, those states that opened their doors to frackers some years ago, have been leading the boom in tax dollars. Says the Forbes piece: “In 2004 North Dakota’s severance tax (a levy imposed on producers in the United States for mining or otherwise extracting non-renewable resources) raised $175 million a year. In 2013, it raised $2.46 billion. West Virginia’s boom hasn’t been as dramatic as North Dakota’s, but its severance tax revenue increased from $204 million in 2004 to $608 million in 2013.”

On the other hand, “in Kentucky, severance taxes raised $172 million in 2003, rose to $346 million in 2012, but then dropped back to $269 million in 2013.”

And herein lies the problem. The oil and gas industry is notoriously fickle and subject to its own pricing, supply and demand cycles. The industry can reliably guarantee a certain amount of economic activity accruing from its ministrations, especially at the outset of full, commercial production, but those assurances become less dependable as time goes on.    

“Kentucky illustrates the problem with relying on severance taxes and the fracking boom for revenue stability,” Mr. Scott writes. “As traditional energy states like Texas have shown, taxes on the extraction of natural gas can fluctuate wildly. Texas raised $974 million from severance taxes in 2004, $4.1 billion in 2008, $1.9 billion in 2010, and then $4.6 billion. That’s healthy growth, but it’s hardly consistent. Colorado is an even better example. Its severance tax revenue rose from $37 million in 2003 to $285 million in 2009, before falling back to $71 million in 2010.”

Of course, to fracking’s true believers in New Brunswick (and there are still a few), such revenue instability is better than no revenue at all.

But it could become a nightmare for any premier who, once convinced of fracking’s safety, relies too heavily on its proceeds to balance the public accounts.

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Oct 07 2014
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Humour, Politics

Muskrat love and Mountie wardrobe malfunctions

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It’s always heartening to see Canada’s elected officials prosecute the course of our democracy with assiduous attention to detail. And what could be more minutely meaningful to the future of our rights and freedoms than the sartorial decisions of our national police force?

New York’s Fashion Week has come and gone, so we’re on our own with this one. Well, not entirely. Fortunately, there is Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, whom we can always trust to weigh in on the weightier matters of national security.

Commenting in the House of Commons last week about the RCMP’s policy change regarding the hats they issue to constables – that, henceforth, the traditional muskrat-fur toppers will be replaced with woolen toques to all but the most northerly, frostily bound units – the minister said, in effect, ‘no way.’

I wish I could get behind her.

After all, don’t fur trappers account for 95 per cent of the working population not already productively engaged making Leonardo DiCaprio’s life a living hell at Alberta’s tar sands?

And, considering that the trade in animal skins accounts for several gagillion dollars worth of national gross domestic product today (or was that in 1680?) doesn’t she make a point, and, perhaps, isn’t that all we can expect from our political leaders in these the last days of common sense and pragmatic wonder in 2014?

Still, I truly ponder the effects her declaration that the “RCMP decision, which is causing much glee among anti-fur activists, is being overturned” will produce among the voting public. Recent signs are not particularly auspicious for the reigning Tories.

As a recent EKOS Research public opinion poll makes clear, Harpertown has lost much of its mojo among average Canadians. “On a range of issues – law enforcement, legalization of marijuana, foreign policy, and the appropriate role and size of government – a majority of Canadians are offside with the government, the survey suggests,” Mark Kennedy writes in the Ottawa Citizen.

“The electorate is becoming rapidly polarized with a wave of Canadians declaring their political ideology to be ‘small-l liberal,’ regardless of which political party they support . . . Moreover, the poll finds deep discontent among Canadians in key areas: Middle-class anxiety about the economy, a gloomy prediction about the quality of life for the next generation, a dissatisfaction with the ‘direction’ of the government, and a growing distrust of the political system.”

According to EKOS president Frank Graves, “When you have a shrinking, pessimistic middle class, that could become a crisis if left untended.”

Spoken like a true pollster; from the mouth of a babe who loves his numbers. Courtesy of the Citizen, which tabulated the EKOS findings, to wit:

Twenty-four per cent of people surveyed in 2008 considered themselves left of centre. Today, the answer is: 47 per cent.

Sixty per cent in 2008 said police should be able to shove around the innocent if that meant snagging a better chance to protect the body politic. Today, the answer is 29 per cent.

Meanwhile, says the Citizen article, 40 per cent of people polled say “international development and aid should be the utmost in Canada’s foreign policy” . . . 64 per cent surmise that the “incentive systems” in the economy are “broken and hard work is no longer paying off” . . . 57 per cent believe that “the next generation in 25 years will be ‘worse off’ in terms of quality of life” . . . and 56 per cent “support compulsory voting in Canada,” presumably as the best possible method to stave off another long period of political malaise and hat malfunctions at the RCMP.

As to those garments that cops should wear on their heads, this government remains defiantly unapologetic. Apparently, no branch of federal authority has the right to choose how it micro-manages its employees – not federal scientists, not publicly supported museums and parks, and certainly not the Mounties.

The latter had better get with the program, it seems, and slap those muskrat hats on their beans and without complaint. If they’re lucky, their authoritarian masters in government will follow suit.

Or, perhaps, they’ll use them to cover their arses in the long, hard, cold political winter ahead.

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Oct 03 2014
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Climate, Environment

Lions, tigers and bears, oh my, and say goodbye!

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Nothing induces data fatigue more profoundly than the bitstream of doomsaying numbers the industrial-climate-change-complex throws our way every minute of every day.

Is the earth warming by .05 per cent a year, or is the gradient closer to a catastrophic two per cent? Has our planet’s oceans acidified by fractional parts per million over the past century, or have they already become largely uninhabitable for great swathes of marine life? Will the Gulf Stream, which keeps our maritime weather moderate, suddenly grind to a halt and, as a paradoxical consequence of global warming, usher a new ice age into northern climes?

So many questions; so many glazed-over eyes.

But one statistic this week – shone like a headlight into the eyes of the last deer on Earth – stopped me dead in my tracks.

According to the latest World Wild Fund for Nature’s Living Planet index, this third rock from the sun has lost more than half of its native animals since 1970.

That doesn’t mean cats, dogs and other domesticated creatures, including those we husband for food. It’s the fauna that, decreasingly, live in our rivers, seas, forests, mountains, and on our plains, plateaus and islands.

The report’s ‘key findings’ read like a shopping list for the grim reaper.

“Populations of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles have declined by 52 per cent between 1970 and 2010. Humanity’s demand on the planet is more than 50 per cent larger than what nature can renew. We are currently using the equivalent of 1.5 planets to support our activities – if everyone on Earth lived as the average Canadian does, we’d need 3.7 planets to support our demand.”

What’s more, “research cited in the report found that climate change is already responsible for the possible extinction of species. Canada has the 11th largest per capita Ecological Footprint of the 130 countries included, behind: Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Belgium, Trinidad and Tobago, Singapore, the United States of America, Bahrain, and Sweden.”

The WWF stipulates that, to generate its dire conclusions, it deployed a new methodology – which it says “aims to be more representative of global biodiversity” – for this year’s iteration of its biennial study. But if that’s true, then the data is even more troubling for its enhanced credibility.

Says a CNN story out of London this week: “The decline in animals living in rivers, lakes and wetlands is the worst – 76 per cent of freshwater wildlife disappeared in just 40 years. Marine species and animals living on land suffered a 39 per cent decline in their populations. Animals living in the tropics are the worst hit by what WWF calls ‘the biggest recorded threats to our planet’s wildlife’ as 63 per cent of wildlife living in the tropics has vanished. Central and South America show the most dramatic regional decline, with a fall of 83 per cent.”

All of which tends to support the miserable proposition of a growing number of environmental biologists and zoologists that the planet is in the throws of a major extinction event, the sixth in its four-billion-year history.

The difference, this time around, is that it has been engineered almost entirely by human, industrial activity.

And still, the agents of organized rapacity in our own species will argue that all we need do is adapt to changing global conditions. We’ll lose a few birds, whales and rhinos. But isn’t that worth preserving our various standards of living and qualities of life? Or shall we all just recede into time and chuck our smart phones into the already plastic-clogged oceans?

It’s always an “either-or” conundrum with these folks.

What it isn’t (yet should be) is an economic opportunity to embrace.

Utter madness is magically thinking that our fossil-fuel technologies are durable beyond their abilities to bridge our efforts to reinvent our energy and manufacturing processes as demonstrably, provably sustainable – both commercially and environmentally.

The window through which we have to do this is just barely open. The WWF research strongly suggests that it’s closing faster than any of us had expected.

The data may be fatiguing, but it is, with each minute of each day that passes, becoming frighteningly clear.

Either we remake the world that created us, or we destroy it, and, with it, ourselves.

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Oct 03 2014
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Demographics, Society

What’s so trendy about getting old?

It is the dawning of the age of senescence, and the evidence of society’s fallen arches is everywhere – on the covers of major magazines, at the top of Google’s list of most popular searches, with fashionably silver-haired talking heads, leading the nightly news.

Of course, we’ve seen this coming for some time. It’s been decades since the wiser demographers among us issued their first warnings about the geriatric crunch we now face. That most populous of generations, the post-war baby boom, would one day cease to be young, and the rallying cry for millions of arthritic ex-hippies would become, “You can’t trust anyone under the age of 50”.

Still, the Atlantic magazine’s October issue’s main story makes it official: As we’re all living longer, it’s now cool to be gramps.

  “Since 1840, life expectancy at birth has risen about three months with each passing year. . .If about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of this century, American life expectancy at birth will be 88 years,” writer Gregg Easterbrook notes in his piece, “What Happens when we all live to 100?”

What happens, indeed?

As Easterbrook points out, “Longer life has obvious appeal, but it entails societal risks. Politics may come to be dominated by the old, who might vote themselves ever more generous benefits for which the young must pay. Social Security and private pensions could be burdened well beyond what current actuarial tables suggest. If longer life expectancy simply leads to more years in which pensioners are disabled and demand expensive services, health-care costs may balloon as never before, while other social needs go unmet.”

On the other hand, he writes, “If medical interventions to slow aging result in added years of reasonable fitness, life might extend in a sanguine manner, with most men and women living longer in good vigor, and also working longer, keeping pension and health-care subsidies under control. Indeed, the most-exciting work being done in longevity science concerns making the later years vibrant, as opposed to simply adding time at the end.”

It’s a sort of glass-half-empty-full proposition, which is a safe call if you happen to reside in a relatively affluent, vibrant jurisdiction that offers plenty of professional and cultural opportunities to younger, well-educated workers.

But what if you don’t?

“The proportion of people aged 65 and older was highest in the Atlantic provinces and lowest in the territories,” Statistics Canada reported last month. “Among the provinces, the highest proportions of seniors were in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (18.3 per cent in both cases), while Alberta (11.4 per cent) recorded the lowest. The nation’s youngest population lived in Nunavut, where seniors made up 3.7 per cet of the population.”

Meanwhile, “Population aging was most rapid in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the proportion of people aged 65 and older rose by 9.5 percentage points (from 8.2 per cent to 17.7 per cent) between 1984 and 2014. Population aging was also rapid in New Brunswick and Quebec (+7.8 percentage points for each province) over the last 30 years.”

As laughably hip as the mainstream media likes to make growing old appear, economists pose serious questions about social and economic costs an aging, steadily less productive workforce impose on the generations coming up behind it.

“Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established,” writes Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a 57-year-old oncologist, bioethicist and vice-provost of the University of Pennsylvania, in an Atlantic piece, which accompanies Easterbrook’s.

“Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower. It is not just mental slowing. We literally lose our creativity. About a decade ago, I began working with a prominent health economist who was about to turn 80. Our collaboration was incredibly productive. We published numerous papers that influenced the evolving debates around health-care reform. My colleague is brilliant and continues to be a major contributor, and he celebrated his 90th birthday this year. But he is an outlier – a very rare individual.”

As for the rest of us, not so much.

That neatly explains the meaning of Emanuel’s article, the title of which I’m even tempted to endorse: “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

Oct 01 2014
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Business, Politics, Trade

Europeans flying high on Canada’s dime

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Taxes, we are firmly told by our big brothers in federal office, are not for repairing the nation’s frayed social safety net.

They are not for offsetting the demographic demands on the health care system of an increasingly aging population.

And they are certainly not for anything so wobbly and unnecessary as a fully-subsidized, universal program of early childhood education spanning this great realm from coast to coast to shining coast.

I can tell you what they are for, though.

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave visiting European delegates a free flight home to Brussels last week, after adding a Toronto reception to their schedule,” the CBC dutifully reported on Sunday, after having obtained a government email to the RCMP’s Protective Policing branch.

According to the public broadcaster’s Terry Milewski, “That reception made it impossible for the visitors to make a planned commercial flight from Ottawa, and thereby get to a Saturday meeting in Brussels. The cost of the (Canadian Forces) Airbus flight is estimated at more than $300,000”

Specifically, the piece states: “The modified Airbus A310 costs $22,537 an hour to operate, according to official figures in 2012. The price has likely risen since then, but, at that rate, and assuming 15 hours’ flight time from Toronto to Brussels and back, the trip would have cost $338,055.”

And that doesn’t begin to account for the costs of additional security, motorcades, or the reception, itself, which was arranged to mark the occasion of Canada and the European Union signing their new Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Of course, opinions varied on the significance of the cotillion, itself.

Trade Minister Ed Fast assured the House of Commons that it was “a critical element” of the European visit. “On this side, we understand how important trade and investment are to driving economic growth and long-term prosperity in this country,” he said whilst denouncing his NDP tormentors as “anti-trade”.

Yet, the Europeans, themselves, seemed to suggest that the reception was not a formal extension of the summit which produced the final agreement earlier in the day. It was. . .oh. . .how do you say? . .a party.

And as people would be up late, presumably having a marvelous time trading war stories from their days at the negotiating table (Hey Frank, you remember that time I rewrote Section 4, Sub-section 8, Paragraph A in less than three minutes? I tell you, the Europeans never knew what hit ‘em), putting a publicly paid-for jet at the disposal of our new best-friends-forever to facilitate their last-minute return home, is just the gentlemanly thing to do.

At least Greg Thomas wasn’t buying the hooey. According to the CBC article, the director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation found himself in the deliciously ironic position of being a guest of the event at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto: “(He) said his organization would send a cheque to the government for the cost of his attendance, and added that the Airbus freebie was a waste of taxpayers’ money. ‘Victory lap or not, there’s no excuse (for) blowing 300 grand on short notice for what amounts to a political show,’ (he added). ‘Many Canadians can stomach the expense of hosting the royal family when they come to Canada. (But) having royal treatment afforded to European bureaucrats is not something that’s going to go down, I think, in any part of the country. They could have done this in Ottawa. They could have saved $300,000 and it would have had the same effect.’”

Amen to that, brother. And if this were any other sort of negotiation, planners in the Prime Minister’s Office might well have decided that discretion is, indeed, the better part of valour.

But this was CETA, the glittering jewell in Stephen Harper’s crown as prime minister – or so he believes. 

“The historic. . .Agreement is by far Canada’s most ambitious trade initiative, broader in scope and deeper in ambition than the. . .North American Free Trade Agreement,” reads the Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development website. “It will open new markets to our exporters throughout the EU and generate significant benefits for all Canadians. The Government of Canada has made opening new markets through agreements like CETA a priority – just one way it is creating jobs and opportunities for Canadians in every region of the country.”

Let us hope so. It seems we have some taxes to pay.

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Sep 30 2014
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Government, Politics

The fault is not in our “stars”; it’s in ourselves

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The mind of a Canadian premier is a terrible thing to waste.

Its life can be as short as four years, but never longer than 12. And during that midge-like span, it must muster all the mental and physical resources – intellectual flexibility, empathy, focus, judgement, courage, energy – necessary to the task of not utterly failing the electorate that enshrined it.

The voters (it goes without saying) expect nothing of their government leaders, if “nothing” means everything.

As balloteers grudgingly mark their election-day cards, they flee back into their workaday lives, sure of the disappointments that are about to mount, insensate to the absurdity of their standards for political representation.

We, the people, demand that our roads be paved, our potholes be filled, our educational facilities be matchless, our health care system be the best in the world. But when a government flies the rare kite, suggesting tentatively that to pay for these things, it might actually have to raise a highway toll, or increase a sales tax, or (gasp!) actually tighten its belt, out come the placards and the picket lines.

It’s worse in the United States, where they, the people, have managed to transform the poor slobs who run for public office into mewling supplicants of populous fashion. That’s the leadership they’ve come to expect; the leadership they ultimately deserve: unfocused, apologetic, tremulous, and, ultimately, ineffective.

Still, there there was a time in this fair land when democratic imperatives intersected neatly with political ambitions. It didn’t last long, but for as long as it did, women got the vote and all Canadians got a minimum standard of universal health care.

Since then, however, women have served in our parliaments and assemblies with decreasing frequency and increasingly shorter duration. Meanwhile, our health care system has devolved into a multi-jurisdictional hodgepodge that serves some people superbly well, but most of us poorly and without even the semblance of discernment.

All of which may only lend credence to the notion that true democracies are extraordinarily fragile, as likely to wither from neglect as crumble from abuse. And those who we authorize to guard them, for however long a period, should be given every opportunity to muster their resources, especially at the beginning of their mandates.

New Brunswick’s incoming Liberal Premier Brian Gallant faces a terrifically challenging four years. And that’s to say nothing of the several hundred wish lists voters and their organizational proxies will dispense with nauseating regularity.

The most monumental of his tasks, however, will not be grappling with one particular issue or another. It will be applying the considerable faculties of his nimble and educated mind to urgent questions of the common good, even as broad swaths of New Brunswickers stubbornly refuse to recognize those matters that constitute their shared cause.

Surely, chief among these must be resuscitating an economy that’s been beached for some time.

Does Mr. Gallant soften his position on hydraulic fracturing in the nascent shale gas industry and clear the way for commercial exploitation of the resource, a move that could one day generate tens-of-millions-of-dollars in taxes and royalties for this fiscally bereft province?

Or does he stick to his guns and slap a moratorium on the controversial practice, as he has vowed to do, until such time as he believes it sufficiently safe and manageable? And then what?

If he is, as he has intimated, the “education premier”, will he make literacy, numeracy and higher learning tools for economic development now and in the future? Does the road to prosperity wind its way through vistas of human capital, as yet unexplored, or the all too familiar terrain of natural resources and the raw labour they require, often only seasonally?

Campaign rhetoric aside, what, in fact, is Mr. Gallant’s endgame for New Brunswick, and will he be permitted to pursue it in relative calm, free of the cacophony the vested, the specially interested, the lightly knowledgeable, and the constitutionally loud-mouthed among us are so good at raising?

Or, perhaps, knowing that there is no time to waste in New Brunswick, he will let none of it stand in his way.

That, in itself, would be an achievement worthy of note.

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Sep 29 2014
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Democracy, Government, Politics

Is PR an idea whose time has come?

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Calls for a systemically more representative government always seem to follow a deeply unsatisfying election. Last Monday’s vote in New Brunswick produced no deviation from this familiar – and, for some, increasingly tiresome – norm.

After all, here was the spectacle of five jockeying, jostling, jiggling parties, only two of which had any chance of securing a meaningful number of the legislature’s 49 seats. (David Coon’s Fredericton South win for the Green Party was the exception that proved the rule).

Here was another pitched battle in the seemingly endless war between the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives over whether or not to allow hydraulic fracturing in a province that has, in fact, permitted the drilling practice for years, and with no evidence of environmental harm accruing.

And here was a fractured plebiscite, replete with technical glitches and calls for recounts, in which, despite all efforts to the contrary, much of the electorate politely declined their invitations to the cotillion.

Unofficially, 373,337 New Brunswickers did their democratic duty. Nearly 200,000, who were eligible to cast a ballot, sat this one out. . .again.

That was the lowest voter turnout on record (65 per cent) – lower than the 2006 and 2010 elections (68 and 70 per cent, respectively)

According to a CBC report last week, “Jamie Gillies, an assistant professor of communications and public policy at St. Thomas University, said low voter turnout is in part a generational problem, which won’t be easy to fix. ‘This is a feeling among a lot of people who believe that voting as a civic duty does not matter. It does not matter who we elect on election day.’”

Need we even wonder, then, why people like Kelly Carmichael are calling for an entirely different – and fairer – way to participate in our democracy. She’s a spokesperson for Fair Vote Canada, a national group that advocates for proportional representation.

The organization’s definition is succinct: “Proportional representation is any voting system designed to produce a representative body (like a parliament, legislature, or council) where voters elect representatives in proportion to (their) votes.”

As it was, in our existing first-past-the-post system, the Liberals earned 43 per cent of the popular vote, but more than half the seats in the Assembly. The Tories’ garnered slightly better than a third of the vote, but won more than 40 per cent of the house. The Green Party took one seat with seven per cent of the vote. The NDP (13 per cent) and the People’s Alliance (2.1 per cent) were out of luck, left only to shuffle along old Freddy Beach’s cobblestones.

If Ms. Carmichael and her like had their way, all parties would have emerged with some degree electoral representation: Liberals with 21 seats; Progressive Conservatives with 17; the NDP with six; the Greens with three; and the People’s Alliance with one.

Lamentably, in Canada, proportional representation has been a notoriously hard sell, not among voters, but among those who have the most to lose under such a system: the political establishment, members of which often spout the most egregious generalizations and spin the most outrageous myths about the process.

They say it’s uncommon and unstable. They say it would, in New Brunswick, generate confusion, instability and deadlock. It might even embolden the secret extremists among us who, given a chance, would seek and secure representation for themselves in the Assembly.

The reality is, however, that proportional representation is the most common electoral system in the world, favored most major democracies – though not Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

As for instability, Fair Vote points out on its website, “Since Italy reformed its voting system in the 1990s, Canada is actually now the most unstable of the major democracies, with twenty-one elections since World War II to Italy’s eighteen.”

Finally, the facts simply don’t support the claim that our present system – which can, and frequently does, reward lightly supported candidates for office with absolute power – is somehow inherently better equipped than proportional representation to prevent the barking lunatics in our midst from joining our various assemblies and parliaments.

Of course, no system of self-government is perfect. In fact, oftentimes, it’s a democracy’s flaws that suggest the very strategies for improvement.

This was, indeed, the case last Monday in New Brunswick, where one system of representation pointed, in its failure, to the promise of a better one.

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Sep 29 2014
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Humour, Personal History

Pearls of wisdom from the Buddha of showmen

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A casual acquaintance of mine (I’ll call him Cal Tripken), who makes a good living on the motivational speaking circuit in Toronto, sits across the table from me, picking calamari out of his teeth with a dessert fork.

“Sorry, dude,” he says. “I still don’t see what your problem is.”

Lunch is over and the cheque has arrived. I have a column to write, but I reckon I still have enough time to reiterate my predicament once more.

I have been asked to give a keynote address at business convention, I explain. I can say anything I want as long as it’s not scatological, pornographic or racist. My problem is that, in recent years, I have developed a morbid fear of public speaking.

Oh sure, I can write a screed for my city’s daily newspaper or for CBC radio that would, and often does, make a politician’s blood churn cold with rage, or an anti-shale gas activist’s dander jump like fleas from his overheated scalp. It doesn’t bother me at all; I sleep great.

But when faced with the prospect of speaking before a live audience of more than 20 people, my throat constricts, my palms sweat, and I cast a frantic glance over at the baby barn at the back of my garden and seriously wonder whether, with a few last-minute renovations, it might serve me well as a hermitage, where I might hole up for the rest of my life.

The curious thing about all of this is that when I was much younger, I was a professional stage actor who had no trouble – indeed, I relished – holding the attention of a theatre packed with between 500 and 1,000 patrons at a time.

So, I ask Cal, what gives. . .dude?

“Well,” he says, putting down the fork, “Let’s parse this. . .You are chiefly a political commentator. . .Correct?”

Correct.

“So, that means that you presumably know something about the subjects that interest you. . .Right?”

Right.

“Bro, there you have it. That’s the problem in a nutshell.”

He still has a little strand of squid stuck between his lateral incisor and canine teeth, which I decide to ignore.

“What are you talking about?” I say as I check my watch and hand my credit card to the sever, as her several, earlier attempts with Tripken’s plastic produced inconclusive results.

“It’s as clear as the frog in your throat. . .You’re too authentic. Your audience doesn’t want to hear what you really think. They want to hear what they think, in your voice. That lets them off them off the hook from actually having to think for themselves.”

Dear Buddha, do go on.

“Deep down, you know this; you’re just not admitting it to yourself. You can write a speech in the privacy of your own boudoir and rehearse it until the cows come home. But if it actually comes from you, what is really you, it’s always going to sound hollow to you when you’re giving it in front of a live audience. . .Frankly, my friend, you’ve forgotten your theatre training. Nowadays, it’s all about the show, baby.”

So, I venture, maybe I should put a pillow under my jacket and prance around the stage like an ersatz Richard III sounding fury and melancholia during speech. Or, perhaps, I should channel Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and scream “Stella!” at the top of my lungs before I segue into a dissertation about how a higher HST rate in New Brunswick will pay for. . .well, streetcars.

“Whatever, dude,” Cal says as he grabs a toothpick. “How do you think Ronald Reagan became the most beloved President of the United States in 50 years. It wasn’t because he was a policy genius. It was because he was an actor. . .And what about our very own Stephen Harper? Do you actually think that hard-talking Steverino means half the things he says. The guy plays soft rock on the piano. . .And in a sweater-vest, no less.

Tripken gets up to leave. “Now, I really gotta go and brush my teeth.”

I smile and, as I retrieve my credit card, say: “Oddly enough, so do I.”

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