Author Archives: brucescribe

Sep 29 2014
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Politics

In Ottawa, the times may, indeed, be ‘a changin’

One election cycle is over and another begins. All eyes in this province now turn to Ottawa to observe what will certainly be a year of such political posturing that it will make the New Brunswick election appear, by comparison, a game of whist played by courteous septuagenarians in a decorous parlour.

On the street where I live, a sign has appeared in a window of a nearby house. “Stop Harper”, it instructs. That’s it. No explication. No fancy design. No cartoonish renderings of Canada’s famously hard-arsed, fearless leader. Just stop him. Now. Forever.

I’m not the first pundit to notice a palpable loathing of our Prime Minister among both the hoi polloi and the elites of this country. A couple of weeks ago, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente penned this:

“Something alarming happened over the summer – several of my friends came down with Harper Derangement Syndrome. ‘He’s gotta go!’ fumed one middle-aged man who had voted for him three times in a row. ‘I just can’t stand him any more,” said another. Both are independent voters who pride themselves on their rational, non-partisan approach to politics.”

What happened? Ms. Wente theorizes: “Is it the Duffy affair? The militant foreign policy? The highly dubious tough-on-crime agenda? No, not really. It’s just. . .him. He’s too controlling, too snarly, too mean. He picked a fight with Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. He sounded callous about murdered native women. It’s not the policies or even the scandals – it’s the tone. They just don’t like the guy.”

I think that’s just about right.

The irony, of course, is that Mr. Harper cruised into power on a platform of substance over style; yet it would be his style that largely upends him next fall.

He’s been a durable, if unimaginative, steward of the economy. His social policies have not been completely disastrous. His track record on the environment has been no worse, and oftentimes better, than those of either of his Liberal predecessors, Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien. His appreciation of Canadian history, while selective and even fetishistic, has, at least, confirmed his true patriot love.

Still, it’s his dour, sour-faced demeanour (even, astonishingly, when he’s smiling) that people notice first.

He seems to loathe journalists almost as much as he does his own backbenchers who, like gadflies, periodically swarm him in Parliament. He appears to brook no dissent, let alone discussion or compromise.

He comes across like the uber control freak, the natural Alpha male in a high school dominated by members of the computer and chess clubs. He kicks sand in the face of both jocks and nerds, equally and democratically. And woe betide anyone belonging to “glee”.

All of which may explain why the Prime Minster’s Office has become so bloated with able bodies over the past six years. A man who promised Canadians that he would consult with his Cabinet as no other chief elected official has in the nation’s history has, instead, left many of those lieutenants to twist in the wind, thanks to decisions his burgeoning ranks of professionally ambitious, personally calculating, mostly young supplicants have made on Big Daddy’s behest.

That the anti-Harper campaign has found purchase in the youth produces more exquisite ironies.

The first is that more young people than ever before — those who are unaligned with the PMO — may actually vote this year (because they despise the political process that installed the current prime minister).

The second us that, by voting, the aspiring progressives in the under-30 set of this nation might actually grab the opportunity and wherewithal to set the political agenda for the first time in a very long time.

And so the sign on my neighbour’s window stands not so much as a indictment of politics as usual, but as a rejection of those who practice it, in high office, with obvious disdain for the people — some of whom elected them; some of whom merely tolerate them.

It stands as a reminder of the transience of election cycles, which come and go with the  autumn winds, and the counter-cultural permanence of disappointment breeding in the bones of every sentient voter everywhere in the world.

It is the sign of our times.

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Sep 22 2014
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Democracy, Law, Politics

When getting answers from Ottawa, the cost is worth the price

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Go ahead, ask a question of one of Canada’s esteemed government members. I dare you.

We unelected peasants are, of course, accustomed to obfuscation masquerading as straight talk from those who we periodically install to purportedly defend our democracy.

But it may surprise you to learn that one Conservative backbencher has actually obtained a price tag for every query his fellow parliamentarians — Tory or not — toss at cabinet members in the simple prosecution of their duties.

It’s $117,188 and change.

That’s not for answers to trivial inquires, such as “Will the minister please explain why the socks he is wearing today do not match?” or “Why does this government insist on telling Canadians that sartorial standards require that all attendees to baseball games wear straw boaters, when clearly brimmed caps are the norm?”

No, it’s the cost associated with replying to weightier interrogatives related to such matters as “the percentage of Employment Canada benefits applications that are rejected and how many people have to wait longer than 28 days for a response; which government department is responsible for monitoring the transportation of fissile radioactive material inside our borders; how much money Ottawa has spent developing software since 2011 and what the software actually does; and the amount the government spent on travel expenses while negotiating the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union.”

The quote comes from a Globe and Mail editorial published last Thursday. It refers to actual questions on the Order Paper, which provides mostly opposition MPs with a constitutionally valuable means to ascertain just how much horse pucky a reigning government manages to sling during any given parliamentary session.

Now, Tory MP Mike Wallace wonders whether the cost to Canadian taxpayers is worth the effort to remain accountable to Canadian citizens, if only in this one, time-honoured way.

To be clear, he asked a question, placed on the Order Paper (presumably costing $177,188) that, reportedly, went like this: “Are we sure we’re getting value for the dollar?” In an interview with the Globe, he elaborated: “I think it’s just important that it’s on the record. I think government and Parliament could run more efficiently and effectively in a lot of areas and this is just one little, tiny example of where. . .are we sure we’re getting value for the dollar?”

To ask whether it’s prudent to ask questions of government members, knowing that the question itself will add to the putative $1.2-million, annual bill you’re railing against in the first place, is the apex of right-wing disrespect for, and cynicism about, 145 years of wise, parliamentary procedure.

You might have simply emailed my old colleague Sean Fine, justice reporter at the Globe, with your thoughts. No harm, no foul.

As for you now, though, for shame, Mr. Wallace, for shame!

Still, know that you are not the only one of your ilk who owes an apology to the Canadian electorate.

There is the little matter of your overlord’s constantly fractious relationship with this country’s judiciary, in which he has impugned the reputation of its head, for no apparent reason except spite; slammed its obligations to patiently review the exigencies of government’s legislative branch in the context of constitutional justice; and all but repealed an enlightened policy of his own design because a few big mouths in his circle chose to speak out against him.

Again, the Globe reports: “Last year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that selection panels of MPs from the major political parties would assess candidates being considered for the Supreme Court of Canada, in consultation with leading judges and lawyers, though the actual appointment would remain a Crown prerogative.”

Now, we learn, alongside Mr. Wallace’s concerns about sharing information too freely among the hoi polloi, that this noble exercise in accountability is “being reviewed” for the simple reason that it produced too much accountability, too much truth about Ottawa’s wheelhouses of power and influence, too much public information made too readily to the very people who install these bozos to defend our democracy — we, the peasants.

Dare we ask questions? We’re damed if we don’t.

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Sep 19 2014
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Democracy

In New Brunswick, that was then. This is now

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We are coming down, dear reader, to end of the line, if not our rope, in this, the 38th general election for Canada’s picture-perfect province. Naturally, it behooves us to review what we’ve learned thus far, which may not be much.

Nevertheless, by now we should all fully appreciate the dimension of New Brunswick’s fiscal dilemma, which some observers have characterized as more of a calamity. A $500-million annual deficit and $12-billion long-term debt hang like millstones around our collective neck.

To some extent, we have been conditioned to believe that this is an intractable problem that can’t be ameliorated, let alone managed.

But this is not, strictly speaking, true. Many jurisdictions have faced tougher challenges and recovered nicely (think Saskatchewan). Others have staged convincing turnarounds in relatively short order (think Prince Edward Island).

But to do this for ourselves, we are going to have to work together and on an unprecedented scale. Defying their partisan straight jackets, politicians need to collaborate. Setting aside our ideological differences, unelected citizens must reach out to one another and share their good ideas without hesitation.

Above all, we’re going to need a few big ideas to get us where we want to be: To a place where innovation meets compassionate pragmatism, where natural resources integrate with sustainable development, where healthy communities seed the fallow economic fields of less successful ones.

To say that what this province needs most is jobs is merely to mutter a truism. What sort of jobs are we talking about?

Are these short-term positions, back-stopped by Employment Insurance. We already know what these do for us. Or are the jobs we need more durable and promising than this? And if they are, how do we generate them not just for this generation, but also for future ones?

The steady outmigration of young people from this province to points west is not a problem that we can fairly lay on the shoulders of any political party or government. The exodus has been underway for many years.

To keep our kids – and bring some back – we need to build a truly creative economy; one that implicitly recognizes that economic sectors should be not silos, but incubators that manage to cross-pollinate the province with ingenious, new approaches to entrepreneurship. And we need to remove the unnecessary, baroque regulatory barriers that continue to imprison our thinking, our imagination, within an old, threadbare box.

The federal government has done us no favours with its various jobs and immigration policies. But we can’t let that stop us from forging ahead, implementing our own plans and priorities that reflect and address our distinctly New Brunswick circumstances.

What, dear reader, do we want to be when we, all of us together, grow up?

I envision a province whose cities greet every commercial, social and cultural opportunity with a view to leveraging its main chances for the benefit of everyone, not just of a  neighbourhood, a constituency, a tiny corner of the municipal steppe.

I envision a province whose government makes targeted, strategic investments in areas for which it is properly responsible – education, health care and social services – and rejects the obvious and costly cattle calls to candidates for corporate welfare.

I envision a province whose political culture finally embraces the contributions that both those in power and those in opposition can make to advance the cause of social improvement, if not human perfectibility, in this place that 750,000 people still call home.

The world beyond our borders is full of dangerous places, full of treachery and depredation. In this world, where 50 million individuals are either literally or virtually stateless, left to their own devices, without the democratic protections and safety nets we have come to expect, we are exceedingly lucky.

Shall we squander this by retreating into our separate cocoons?

Or shall we come into the light together, knowing that we are the champions of our own, formidable passion to do better, and be better, together; knowing that if we can think a thing, we can do a thing.

It’s always tempting to perceive an election as a chance to review what we’ve learned and moan about it.

But, really, elections are about the future, where our minds should wander with hope and wonder, not regret. Never regret.

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Sep 18 2014
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Economy, Energy

Boning up on fracking 101

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The spectacle of an energy company’s CEO teaching the abecedarian facts about a drilling technology that’s been around for at least ten years to candidates for the highest elected office in the province is undeniably amusing.

Still, one or two of our premier wannabes might have cracked a book before showing up for class.

One can only imagine what crossed the mind of Corridor Resources’ Phil Knoll when he decided to pen a lengthy letter to the heads of New Brunswick’s five political parties essentially explaining that, no, gentlemen, it is not possible to extract gas from shale formations in this part of the Maritimes without fracturing the rock.

According to the letter, acquired by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, Mr. Knoll is categorical: “There is no other method to release the natural gas from tight sandstone or shale other than through fracturing the rock. That is the reality.”

And if any political hopeful thinks that fracking (industry slang for hydraulic fracturing, the process by which water and chemicals, or, less commonly, gas, are injected under pressure into sedimentary rock to liberate the fossil fuel trapped there) can be restricted only to the production phase of development, he should think again.

“During the exploration phase, the only way to accurately determine the size of the resource and whether it can be produced economically is through the use of fracture stimulation,” Mr. Knoll explains. “Seismic research and the drilling of stratigraphic core holes can help evaluate the geological formations and their composition at different depths.”

What’s more, he writes, the debate in New Brunswick about hydraulic fracturing – whether, as its opponents claim, it will release vast quantities of methane into the drinking supply, enabling local farmers to literally light their water on fire – is largely misguided if not entirely moot.

In fact, over the past 10 years Corridor has used fracture stimulation to drill 43 wells with, as Mr. Knoll confirms, “no adverse impacts on potable water aquifers. . .Corridor operates some wells that were fractured 10 years ago and still produce natural gas without additional fracturing. Across North America, it is common to have wells producing more than 20 years after initial fracture stimulation.”

All of which suggests that fracking can, at least in this instance, be done safely. But that’s never really been at issue. The underlying quandry in the debate has always been: Will it?

That’s the question an article in Scientific American posed last year, to wit: “A new review article funded by the National Science Foundation and published in Science on May 16 examines what fracking may be doing to the water supply. ‘This is an industry that’s in its infancy, so we don’t really know a lot of things,’ explains environmental engineer Radisav Vidic of the University of Pittsburgh, who led this review. ‘Is it or isn’t it bad for the environment? Is New York State right to ban fracking, and is Pennsylvania stupid for [allowing it]?’ According to the review, the answer is no. ‘There is no irrefutable impact of this industry on surface or groundwater quality in Pennsylvania,’ Vidic says.”

Still, the article continues, “That’s not to say there haven’t been problems. That’s because there are many ways for things to go wrong with a natural gas well during the fracking process. A new well – or the 100,000 or so existing but forgotten wells – can allow natural gas from. . .deposits to migrate up and out of the rock and into water or basements. Leaking methane, in addition to being a potential safety hazard, is also a potent greenhouse gas that exacerbates climate change, although that environmental impact was not examined in this study.”

However New Brunswickers choose to chart their collective energy future, the wisest course will always begin with the self determination to obtain the best of all possible facts.

After all, to avert a risk, you must first understand it.

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Sep 17 2014
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Politics

“Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled. . .”

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As a direct descendent of Robert the Bruce (as are all of us who bear his last name, don’t you know), I wonder how I would vote – were I real Gael and not some poseur separated from the mother country by seven generations of Canadian rock farmers – in this week’s referendum for Scottish independence from Westminster.

Would I be sensible and prudent (like a true Scot) and vote with my head, realizing that that a break from the United Kingdom would, in all probability, result in my reconstituted nation’s immediate economic duress and, quite possibly, social dislocation?

Or would I be passionate and adventurous (also, like a true Scot) and vote with my heart, believing that the challenge of charting the undiscovered country that is sovereignty is just the tonic that five million souls need to engineer a new political and socio-economic order?

Certainly, Spain’s Basque and Catalonian separatists are watching events unfold in Edinburgh with keen and partisan interest. Their sympathies are clear: Be bold, Scotland, and go your own way after more than 300 years under the yolk of British rule; and, while you’re at it, show us how to do it without spilling the blood of innocents.

We, in Canada — where more people claim Scottish ancestry than there are actual Scots  living north of the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall — are somewhat less impressed by the prospect of waking up on Friday only to find a new applicant to the G-20 assembly of nations.

Oh, Albans, are thee mad? So beseeches the Globe and Mail.

“Dear Scotland. . .You made us,” last Saturday’s lead editorial states both unctuously and presumptuously (a strange, oddly affecting, combination that this newspaper has been perfecting for decades). “As a gesture of thanks, we’d like to offer some advice on how to avoid unmaking yourself. This bit of history you are living right now? We’ve already been through that. We may be a young nation but we have far more experience than you on this issue. We nearly tore our country apart. Twice.”

Talk about hubris.

Clearly, the writer forgot that Scotland is, already a “devolved” government within the United Kingdom, with its own First Minister, its own system of education and health care, and a long history of steadily, if incrementally, separating itself from London’s parliamentary influence with, one might add, Britain’s compliance and, oftentimes, complicity.

To compare the predicament that this country (and it is, in fact, just that) faces with Canada’s constitutional wrangles with the province of Quebec in 1980 and 1995, is to juggle apples and oranges and wind up with bananas.

More bananas, courtesy of the Globe: “Dear cousins from across the seas, here is our advice and our plea: Stay in the United Kingdom. Let time pass and passions subside. Make changes happen but within the U.K. And meet us back here in, say, 2040. You can take the U.K. apart then, if you still want to. We think you will not. And we know this: If you take it apart, you can never, ever put it back together again.”

Sort of like Humpty Dumpty, which, as it happens is a figure from a children’s verse, the authorship of which has been attributed to a Scot. . .Just saying, is all.

Ultimately, the Globe – which thinks with the many heads it employs to staff its editorial board – is probably right. Nothing sensible can come from Scotland’s secession from the union of British states, which also includes Ireland and Wales.

And there’s certainly nothing efficacious about becoming what George Will, a Washington Post columnist, recently warned “the 16th among what would then be the 29 nations of the European Union” in terms of GDP.

Still. . .

Somebody, somewhere must have told Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. Macdonald (a Scot) that he was insane to attempt to forge an independent nation from a collection of British colonies. That particular somebody must have thought him downright certifiable when he proposed linking the nation’s two coasts with an intercontinental railroad.

As legend goes, my putative forebear, Robert the Bruce, split the skull of an English general while on horseback at the battle of Bannockburn, during the original war of Scottish independence in the 13th Century.

I am, like most descendants of Alban adventurers, made of less sterner stuff.

But, if I were a true Gael, I’d vote with my heart come Thursday.

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Sep 12 2014
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History, Politics

The Franklin find: genuine history turned political theatre

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Since 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has authorized Parks Canada to spend millions of dollars on six polar searches for the wrecks of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus – the two British, Hecla class bomb vessels that ferried the expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin to its watery grave 169 years ago.

On Tuesday, having heard that one of those ships (no word yet on which one)  had been found resting under barely 11 meters of the Victoria Straight, off the coast of King William Island, far from the fabled Northwest Passage it and its sister ship had been commissioned to sail, Mr. Harper might have body-checked his own mother had she been blocking his access to a microphone.

“For more than a century this has been a great Canadian story, a mystery; it’s been the subject of scientists and historians, writers and singers,” he fairly giggled before a hastily arranged press conference in Ottawa. “So, I think we have a really important day in mapping together the history of our country.”

Indeed, as he reminded his fellow Canadians last month at the height of one of Parks Canada’s annual hunts for all things Franklin-rated, this “ultimately isn’t just about the story of discovery and mystery and all these things. It’s also really is laying the basis for what’s, in the longer term, Canadian sovereignty.”

In fact, on the face of it, Mr. Harper’s enthusiasm is both endearing and justified; amateur and professional historians owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. The find does, indeed, solve many mysteries, even as it will almost certainly raise tantalizing questions to vex and titillate scholars for years to come.

But does it really have anything to do with Canadian sovereignty, as Mr, Harper claims? According to at least one authority, that’s stretching the truth almost to breaking.

“The discovery of two historical wrecks from the 1840s that sailed under the authority of Britain before Canada was even a state doesn’t really extend our claims of control over the waters of the Northwest Passage,” Rob Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, told the National Post. “This myth just had another chapter added,” he further commented for the Globe and Mail.

What it does do, however, is send another message to the international community – notably Russia and the U.S. – that Canada’s claims to Arctic region are historically valid, if that was ever in doubt.

It also ensures, as Mr. Huebert points out, that “the Arctic is going to be one of his (Mr. Harper’s) major legacies when people look back on his leadership period.”

In the broader sense, the Prime Minister’s interest in, and willingness to support, ventures like the search for Franklin repudiates some of the harsher criticism of him as a by-the-books politician with little or no interest in research and science. It all depends on what research and which science we’re talking about.

The Globe and Mail’s lead editorial yesterday congratulated the Harper regime for demonstrating both leadership and collaboration – qualities that, at least, helped searchers find the wreck – even as it castigated certain government members for cracking down on researchers who go off message.

Remember, the piece instructed readers, “The government that allowed journalists open access to the scientists looking for the Franklin ships is the same one that has routinely gagged government scientists since taking power. It is now impossible in Canada for a reporter to speak with a federal scientist without going through media relations officers, a lengthy and often fruitless process. The policy has been condemned  by the British scientific journal Nature and the American Association for the Advancement of Science”

How, one wonders, has that worked out for them?

Nope, unless some crafty spin doctor with a soft spot for unfettered free speech, environmental stewardship, and basic research for the sake of basic research can figure out a way to dramatize all science to good Conservative Party effect, this prime minister’s interest in science, while genuine, will remain politically discriminating.

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Sep 10 2014
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Politics

Shooting the messenger at election time

Leaves of grass for NB's labour market

Few in these jaundiced times espouse an unshakeable faith in much of anything. But those handful who do believe in the primacy, if not permanence, of polling numbers might be disappointed in events presently unfolding in Scotland.

There, the Scottish National Party, under the spirited leadership of Alex Salmond is rallying it supporters of independence before next week’s historic referendum, the outcome of which could redraw the map of Great Britain both figuratively and literally.

According to Griff Witte, writing this week in the Washington Post, “The once-unthinkable prospect that Britain could be ripped apart this month with a vote for Scottish independence became bracingly real Monday after the campaign to keep the three-century-old union together was accused of panicking amid polls showing the referendum in a dead heat.”

Indeed, “Just 10 days before the vote, the new surveys depicted a dramatically tightening race after months in which the ‘no’ side appeared to hold a comfortable lead. Although both sides have questioned the accuracy of the Internet-based polls, the pro-independence camp immediately claimed the momentum.”

In fact, until last month, Scottish naysayers (those who wish to remain in the United Kingdom) accounted for between 60 and 70 per cent of intended voters. The ‘yes’ forces, in contrast, had trouble breaking above 40 per cent. Now, it seems, those in favour of Scottish independence are nudging the 52 per cent mark.

This is why those of us who know a little something about statistics, approach all numbers meant to startle, scare or otherwise provoke only warily.

Still, election polls are notorious, not so much for their inaccuracy but for their unreliability from one day to the next.

For this reason, they’re also the source of some of the most heated debates, sometimes eclipsing all other, more relevant, issues, as candidates desperately fear being trampled by the herd mentality on voting day.

Indeed, when the circumstances are ripe, even some pollsters will wade into the fray. Witness, for example, Corporate Research Associates chairman and CEO Don Mills last week instructing his lawyers to fire off a stern missive to New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward regarding some unfortunate wording the latter deployed during one of his many stump stops around the province.

“CRA has been great over the years at playing games,” Alward had told an audience of supporters, following the release of its latest polling data showing the Liberals ahead of the PCs in popular support (49 versus 29 per cent). 

“You only have to go back to the last election when in the weekend leading up to the voting, they were saying it was too close to call or even that we were behind. In reality it was a 42 to 13 landslide.”

In a statement, Mr. Mills retorted: “Through hard work and diligence, CRA has built its reputation as a non-partisan public opinion polling company since its founding in 1978. Comments attributed to Mr. Alward impugn that reputation and imply bias in our work.”

If they do, it wouldn’t be the first time a frustrated politician has shot from the hip at political pollsters.

“Gov. Chris Christie wasted little time in taking aim at pollsters during his latest town hall event just as a recent poll found the governor’s job approval rating is plummeting amid the ongoing George Washington Bridge controversy,” reported PolitickerNJ last winer.

“The governor started the event discussing the weather, telling residents on another snowy day in the state that there are people in two professions who continue to get paid despite getting it wrong time after time. Meteorologists? Of course, he said. But according to New Jersey’s governor, there’s another group of workers in the same pool: Pollsters. ‘They don’t ever have to have it right,’ Christie said to laughs from the crowd.”

At best, political polling is an accurate snapshot of people’s opinions and attitudes at the time of asking. They can, and do, suggest longer-term trends. But the reliability of those trends is in direct proportion to the number of people who will never change their mind – who will, with an unshakeable faith in their own world view, vote as they say they will regardless of sound facts and arguments that militate for alternatives.

Fortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. Just ask the Scots.

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Sep 09 2014
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Politics

How to seize the big Mo at election time

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With the federal Grit establishment firmly entrenched in this picture-perfect, if not so fiscally beatific, province, you’d be forgiven for imagining that the New Brunswick election amounts to nothing less than a dry run for Justin Trudeau’s 2015 assault on the capital of Canada.

In fact, the nation’s self-styled arbiter of all that is newsworthy says as much.

“Justin Trudeau and his Liberal team are using New Brunswick’s Sept. 22 election to test-drive their organization and potential policies for the federal campaign expected in the fall of 2015,” wrote Jane Taber last week in the Globe and Mail. “‘There are so few election campaigns in this country, you don’t get a chance to try things out,’ said a senior Trudeau strategist.”

Ms. Taber’s effort is a good piece of reporting: heavily sourced, thoughtful and mercifully free of the sort of rash and kited conclusions that all to often accompany press coverage of election campaigns in this, and every other, country that still enjoys a reasonably free press.

But is it, strictly speaking, news?

Federal-provincial linkages, especially during elections, frame a sturdy strand of Canada’s political DNA. Traditionally, that’s how various parties have crystallized the issues common to all voters, regardless of their provinces of origin and residence. It’s how they’ve synchronized their policies and platforms and, crucially, gotten the voters out to the polls on the day that counts.

Until only a few years ago, the Liberals had been past masters of this practice. Now, in New Brunswick, they’re at it again and with gusto.

Here comes former Prime Minister Paul Martin, providing sage advice to New Brunswick Liberal candidate Brian Gallant (for now, the statistical front runner) and promising to provide more from his treasure trove of best fiscal practices for cutting public costs, building economic capacity and managing expectations among taxpayers who, the best money suggests, will take at least some kind of hit should the Grit leader march triumphantly into power later this month.

Indeed, who can’t smile at the widely distributed photo depicting Messrs. Gallant and Trudeau disembarking from the former’s campaign bus somewhere near Fredericton last week? Meet the absurdly attractive and telegenic Liberal dream team, the new Hardy Boys of Canadian politics with broad grins and thumbs-up signals at the ready.

And the pseudo-filial connections don’t stop there. As Ms. Taber reports, “(Paul) Martin’s former top aide, David Herle, is polling for the provincial Liberals as he did for the provincial Liberals in Nova Scotia and Ontario, both of which won majority governments.”

Meanwhile, “Frank McKenna, the well-connected former Liberal premier of New Brunswick, is raising money for Mr. Gallant” (which, if nothing else, surely proves the truth in the adage that politics does, indeed, make strange bedfellows, as Mr. McKenna has been one of the more forceful proponents of shale gas development in the province – a proposition that Mr. Gallant has publicly repudiated as risky, at best).

Again, though, none of this is news. What is is the extraordinary lack of federal engagement on the Tory side of the fence.

When Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was in office, he made a point of embarking on extended whistle tours through any provinces that were readying themselves for local elections, going as far as to the press the flesh in constituencies if he reckoned that this would burnish the electoral fortunes of his fellow, regional travellers.

In this campaign, however, PC Leader David Alward looks, for all the world, like a political orphan rolling up to grocery stores in his big, blue bus that bears wistfully written slogans on its aluminum flanks – slogans that read, “Say Yes” to. . .well, your guess is as good as mine.

What accounts for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s light engagement – conspicuous by its spottiness – in his provincial confederate’s electoral ambitions, one suspects, has less to do with Mr. Alward and his policies and more to do with the democratic culture that informs Ottawa’s ruling class nowadays.

After all, to it, the political fortunes of one or two provinces are far less important than the grand sweep of right-wing reforms that guarantee the approbation of the powerful and entitled.

Of course, as this audience still forms the minority of the Canadian electorate, Mr. Trudeau may have already won his election even as Mr. Gallant seeks his own mandate beyond being a handmaiden to federal power.

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Sep 05 2014
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Politics

Scrubbing the ‘politics’ from politics

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It’s stunning how political even the effort to appear apolitical becomes during an election campaign.

Take all three principal leaders vying for that vaunted (thankless?) job of premier of New Brunswick this month.

In one corner of the province, Progressive Conservative honcho David Alward unveils a plan that promises to excise politics from educational policy making and programming. In fact, he said this week, “this is an approach that transcends politics and includes sound curriculum development policies, engagement from parents, educators, district education councils and researchers.”

Indeed, he insists, “politicians shouldn’t be making day-to-day or year-to-year decisions that affect the classroom.”

Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Liberal Leader Brian Gallant issues his statement on education, wondering, in effect, if a Tory echo machine is dogging his public appearances.

“We have to have a plan that will be long term, one that’s going to be based on evidence, going to have commitment and engagement of all people involve,” he says.

Not only that, he declares, “we need to take the politics out of this and sit down with educators, parents, students and stakeholders to build an action plan to improve our education system. . .We think having a 10-year plan, where we invite other political parties to play a role in guiding the plan is the right step for our province moving forward. It’s going to be important to put politics aside.”

Then there’s NDP commander Dominic Cardy who also believes, not surprisingly, that vile politics has poisoned the wellspring of educational achievement and opportunity in New Brunswick.

“We need to back away from having the politicians decide the curriculums, and instead talk about the outcomes we want to see,” he opines reasonably.

Here we have that most precious of spectacles, rarely seen in public: complete and utter unanimity among three distinct campaign rivals representing three philosophically divergent political parties on an issue that cuts to the very core of their collective raison d’etre.

And the question quickly becomes existential: When is anything a politician says or does not, by definition, political?

Of course, the “let’s-get-the-politics-out-of-this (insert appropriate issue here)” gambit was bound to emerge. It was just a matter of when.

In recent years, public opinion surveys in jurisdictions from Nunavut to Nantucket to North Yorkshire have confirmed that the politician who successfully convinces the public that he genuinely despises the very craft he plies to win their votes. . .well, in most cases, wins their votes.

Consider the following item in The Guardian newspaper not long ago:

“Nearly half of Britons say they are angry with politics and politicians, according to a Guardian/ICM poll analysing the disconnect between British people and their democracy. The research, which explores the reasons behind the precipitous drop in voter turnout – particularly among under-30s – finds that it is anger with the political class and broken promises made by high-profile figures that most rile voters, rather than boredom with Westminster. Asked for the single word best describing ‘how or what you instinctively feel’ about politics and politicians in general, 47 per cent of respondents answered ‘angry’, against 25 per cent who said they were chiefly ‘bored’.”

The savvy politician knows that this is the general state of affairs everywhere in the democratized world. It’s one of his trade’s occupational hazards.

One solution is to never make promises, even ones that might actually seem plausibly keepable. Then again, that’s how Mitt Romney managed to give Barack Obama a second term of office as leader of the free world. The public needs at least a little red meat to chomp.

The other option, which Messrs. Alward, Gallant and Cardy seem to understand with implicit savviness, is to talk broadly and winningly about issues that are too big and important – too vital to our physical, emotional and spiritual well being – to sully with rank promise-making.

The alternative, don’t you know, would be playing politics. And responsible politicians don’t do that; play politics, that is.

At least, they don’t when they’re trying to win a political election.

Or something like that. It’s complicated.

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Sep 05 2014
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Education, Politics

Hey teacher, don’t keep those kids at home

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If Ontario’s government hopes to maintain public support for its new full-day kindergarten (FDK) program, it had better abandon its inexplicably dismissive attitude about the regime’s evident growing pains.

News reports this week suggest that the province’s ministry of education has been flooded, in recent months, with complaints by both parents and educators about bloated class sizes and the noise, disruption and confusion this caused in several schools last academic year.

In at least once instance, as many as 40 tykes were crowded into a room. Documents obtained by the Globe and Mail through a freedom-of-information request indicate that “about 640 kindergarten classrooms, or eight per cent of those that introduced the (full-day) program had more than 30 children. . .according to a confidential briefing note to the minister in January.”

Moreover, the Globe reported, “Martha Hradowy, who represents early childhood education workers at Windsor’s Greater Essex County District School Board, said the situation has become so dire that some schools have created learning areas for full-day kindergarten students, which hold about 100 children. Classrooms are divided into four separate corners.”

This is exactly the kind of bad press no government should want as it implements the final phase of an FDK soft launch to all schools in the province. And yet, so far, the ministry’s response has been decidedly tepid.

Noting that daycares in the province are required, by law, to maintain a one-to-eight caregiver-child ratio and that pre-school primary programs must limit class sizes to no more than 23 kids, government officials blithely allowed that, at present, there is no comparable cap for FDK, only a requirement that school boards preserve an average class size of 26 throughout the system. 

Certain Ontarian editorialists of my acquaintance are, no doubt, itching to get busy scribbling their provocative nonsense in response to this new, so-called crisis in public education. “Ontario’s kids crammed into classrooms like sardines in a can”, “Ontario’s schools turning into factory farms”, “Ontario’s kindergartners pay the price for nanny-state meddling,” the headlines will scream.

The overcrowding, these pundits will write, proves that Ontario is nowhere near ready to assume the responsibilities of providing efficient full-day kindergarten; indeed, that such a monumental task is probably beyond the administrative and fiscal capabilities of any province in this country.

They will then use the point to segue into an entirely separate, if equally specious, argument: that there is no credible proof that FDK or, indeed, any form of early childhood education provides lasting social, psychological or educational benefits to kids; and that those youngsters who do evince advanced interpersonal and academic skills as a result of their exposure to such programs lose these advantages over their more classically schooled peers by the end of Grade One.

The arguments that it can’t be done and that it’s not necessary, anyway, have dogged the discussion about publicly sponsored and subsidized child care and early education for decades.

But it’s only been within the last 50 years when rigorous research and empirical evidence have shown that state investments in these programs have generated multipliers (in the reduction of public costs related to poverty, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, crime, illiteracy, innumeracy, and mental illness) worth billions of dollars a year in countries that have had the perspicacity to spend the money accordingly.

And the suggestion that all kids eventually even each other out, regardless of their early childhood education backgrounds (or lack, thereof), is hardly a resonant reason for abandoning such programs.

Who would want his enriched, curious, empathetic kid suddenly leavened in grade school by the lower common denominators in his midst?

Isn’t the better idea to raise everyone’s standards by providing a commonly accessible, superior system of play-based, pre-school education that’s integrated seamlessly into the higher grades where meritorious principles (team-playing, integrity, love of learning) may continue to flourish?

The growing pains the Ontario government’s FDK program now suffer are serious, but they are perhaps predictable and, more importantly, eminently fixable.

Now is no time for officialdom to take them lightly.

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