Author Archives: brucescribe

Jan 23 2014
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Economy, Oil and Gas

The stiff upper lip to success

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New Brunswick’s estimable finance minister, Blaine Higgs, promises as a matter of course that he will announce no new tax hikes at next month’s grand budget reveal. To which we curtsy politely and thank the graveyard of foreboding that dominates Fredericton for small mercies.

Still, at this stage in the daily, grinding, “this-too-shall-pass” culture of what is, indisputably, Canada’s least economically promising province, higher taxes will serve precisely no purpose.

The time for a boost in the HST was four years ago. Today, when a precipitous drop in revenue to government coffers is related entirely to a concomitant decline in business income, the taxman’s various dogs just won’t hunt anymore.

Meanwhile, the list of likely economic saviors grows ever longer, even as it begins to blur the boundaries of credibility.

There is a pipeline into Saint John. It will, we are assured, bring Alberta oil into the Port City for refining and subsequent export to locales both exotic and mundane. In the process, it will employ hundreds of skilled and able-bodied men and women (thousands during the construction phase). At least, that’s the scuttlebutt. Boosters are still looking for the project’s starter pistol, which seems to have gone missing.

There is some fresh promise in the mining sector, no thanks to The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan which, according to a CBC report in early December,  “issued a blow to one of the Alward government’s hopes for job creation in the province.

The company is laying off more than 1,000 people, including 130 in New Brunswick, due to what it describes as slumping demand for its potash and phosphates, which are used to make fertilizer. . .Just last week the provincial government issued a request for expression of interest to explore for and mine potash in New Brunswick.”

Of course, there is always (groan!) shale gas. In fact, there might be 70 trillion cubic feet of the stuff below ground in New Brunswick. If any of it is extractable in a commercially viable sort of way (that is, before oil and gas prices wobble too far into the red zone), then a new fossil fuel industry could create hundreds of jobs and top up the government’s bank account with new taxes and royalties.

On the other hand, there is the little matter of the screaming meemies to which the chronically anxious among us succumb whenever the phrases “government oversight” and “hydraulic fracturing” appear in the same sentence.

It appears that the rest of us are fated to follow their lead as it is embraced by the next premier of the province, Brian Gallant, who has already announced his planned moratorium on further shale gas development once he trundles into power this fall.

And yet, somewhere, in all of this, we’re missing something vital, and it’s getting us down. Behind every commercial and industrial project – large, like a pipeline; or small, like a high-tech joint venture – are people.

That may sound trite, but our tendency is to perceive our economy as intractably composed of forces that are largely beyond our control. This is the language we allow our political leaders to adopt when times are tough and they shrug their shoulders in defeat: “Hey. . .Whaddya gonna do?”

In most cases, the answer to that question is: “Plenty.”

New Brunswick’s future might look rosier than it presently does if mega-deals for oil and gas and other natural resources were firmly on track. Still, this is not the alpha and omega of the province’s potential.

The real, durable future is being written in the idea factories of the private sector, in the common markets of the province’s small cities and feeder towns and villages, on the entrepreneurial front lines where problems are things you solve and obstacles are things you hurdle.

Listen closely, and you will still hear the relentless hum of enterprise, which remains happily oblivious to the macroeconomic demons that torture the province’s elected leaders, appointed officials and, as often as not, professional chatterers like Yours Truly.

If, as one of my colleagues in arms recently claimed, GDP is two-thirds consumer confidence, then attitude is everything.

Perhaps, then, we should try stiffening our lips and, for once, whistle obstinately past that graveyard of foreboding.

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Jan 22 2014
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Economy, Municipal Affairs

Spreading a little of Moncton’s famous mojo

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Hindsight makes geniuses of us all, which is one reason why the most astute economic development gurus are keen students of history.

For Greater Moncton last week, the past met the present and together they stared steadily, if not altogether fearlessly, into the future.

It’s nearly impossible to get 300 people to sit still in one room, let alone command their undivided attention, but there were times during the 2014 Greater Moncton Economic Summit when all eyes were fixed on the gantlet that history has thrown down.

That gantlet is nothing less than 25 years of sturdy growth in the Hub City regardless – and, at times in defiance – of weak economic conditions elsewhere in New Brunswick and Canada.

The challenge, as always, in the here and now, where and when we gather to consider our options, is in properly appreciating what the community has done right – not to replicate an old vision, but to help create a new one for different and, in some ways, tougher times.

Of course, ever since the financial meltdown of 2008 and subsequent recession cities and towns all over Canada – indeed, the world – have made routine naval gazing a part of their municipal roadshows.

But in my 30-plus years covering city halls and urban planning conferences, only in Moncton have I observed deliberate, indefatigably cheerful determination actually transform street scapes, sectors and even industries.

All of which is fortunate for those of us who live, work and play here. The city – nay, the entire province – is going to need such a patented brand of pluck.

“We’ve seen almost five years with no net employment growth in Nova Scotia, for example, and there’s a big difference too now between Newfoundland and Labrador, which is looking to a long and sustained period of large project activity and all the benefits that brings in terms of high income growth, high employment growth. The difference here in the Maritimes couldn’t be more stark.”

Those were Elizabeth Beale’s words in mid November. She’s the president of one of the region’s leading think tanks, the Atlantic Province’s Economic Council (APEC). Specifically, here’s what the organization predicted for the provinces:

“Newfoundland and Labrador is expected to have one of the fastest growth rates in Canada this year, at six per cent, due to increased oil production and capital investment.

“Prince Edward Island will see its economy expand by 1.1 per cent in 2013, due to a strong labour market. The forecast for 2014 calls for growth of 1.3 per cent, due partly to growth in the bioscience sector, a rebound in aerospace and defence, increased food processing and a decent tourism season.

“Nova Scotia sees flat employment and weak consumer spending in 2013, limiting GDP growth to about 0.8 per cent. In 2014, that is forecast to accelerate to about 2.0 per cent, boosted by a jump in natural gas output and increased investment in major projects.”

And what of New Brunswick, host province of the original “Moncton Miracle” – the retail, transportation, IT and entertainment capital of the central Maritimes?

Says APEC: “New Brunswick will have no economic growth in 2013 as a result of a weak labour market, the closure of the Xtrata mine in Bathurst and a lack of major projects. New Brunswick’s real GDP growth is forecast to expand 0.9 per cent in 2014.

However, that is expected to slow to 0.8 per cent in 2014 due to flat oil production and investment.”

This follows five straight years of double-digit unemployment overall (despite one of the highest per-capita public-sector employment rates in the country) the slowest housing starts and lowest house prices east of Toronto. Then, of course, there is the fiscal morass: a $550-million annual budget deficit on a structural long-term debt of $11 billion, closing in on $12 billion.

This is the context in which Moncton now reviews its history by way of envisioning its future.

What does it want to be over the next 25 years, not merely to itself but to a province that, in important respects, has lost its way along with whatever mojo it once possessed?

History may open doors to the future, but attitude – and lots of it – marches us through them.

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Jan 21 2014
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Culture, Economy, Society

Averting the world’s end, on trust

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As the word, “systemic”, appears not once but three times in the two-page Executive Summary of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Risks 2014 report, you get the distinct impression that this members-only club of the planet’s uberinfluencers is already planning for the apocalypse.

In previous risk assessments (released annually) the WEF has been content to merely list the various threats – financial, social, economic – that it thinks imperil the world’s fragile accommodations to national well-being.

This year, however, the Forum is determined to emphasize how these risks have become so well integrated that they pose a systemic danger to civilization, itself.

To be sure, it’s a little like watching a street prophet foretell the arrival of the four horsemen.

“Each risk considered in this report holds the potential for failure on a global scale; however, it is their interconnected nature that makes their negative implications so pronounced as together they can have an augmented effect,” said Jennifer Blanke, the WEF’s chief economist, in the news release that accompanied the report last week. “It is vitally important that stakeholders work together to address and adapt to the presence of global risks in our world today.”

The hit parade of hazards include, in no particular order of pernicious effect: income disparity, fiscal crises, monetary collapse and illiquidity (that means you New Brunswick). There’s also structurally high underemployment and joblessness, especially among the world’s youth.

There’s oil price shocks, critical infrastructure failures and currency devaluation.  Then there’s climate change: greater incidence of extreme weather events; greater incidence of natural catastrophes. There’s also greater incidence of man-made environmental catastrophes, such as oil spills nuclear meltdowns.

If that’s not enough to send you back beneath the covers, consider the failure of global governance models, political collapses, increasing corruption, a major escalation in organized crime and illicit trade, large-scale terrorist attacks, the deployment of weapons of mass destruction.

Wait, we’re nowhere near done.

There are food crises during which access to appropriate quantities and quality of nutrition becomes inadequate or unreliable.” There are pandemic outbreaks thanks to

“inadequate disease surveillance systems, failed international coordination and the lack of vaccine production capacity.” And there’s the “increasing burden of illness and long-term costs of treatment” which threaten “recent societal gains in life expectancy and quality while overburdening strained economies.”

Apart from growing income disparity, by which the WEF seems most troubled, the problem of the kids today hovers like a dark cloud. “Many young people face an uphill battle,” offers David Cole, the Group Chief Risk Officer of the Forum-affiliated Swiss Reinsurance Company. “As a result of the financial crisis and globalization, the younger generation in the mature markets struggle with ever fewer job opportunities and the need to support an aging population. While in the emerging markets there are more jobs to be had, the workforce does not yet possess the broad based skill-sets necessary to satisfy demand.”

Naturally, there’s a bunch more perils – including a nifty event the WEF rather provocatively dubs “cybergeddon”, in which “systemic failures of critical information infrastructure (CII) and networks negatively impact industrial production, public services and communications” – but why blunt the point with too much repetition?

We might as well face it folks. We are well and truly. . .um, you might say, fastened by means of a screw.

Or, maybe not. All good end-of-the-world myths contain escape clauses. And they all share the same qualities: an almost childlike faith in certain principles, the absence of which caused our headlong rush to perdition in the first place. The WEF’s creation/destruction story is no exception.

It wants us to put on our “longterm thinking” caps, get busy getting together for “collaborative multi-stakeholder action” that includes effective “global governance.”

Most crucially, though, its wants us to “trust”.

Trust, it says, “is necessary if stakeholders are to work together to tackle global risks, but trust is being undermined in some systemically important areas. For example, much of the younger generation lacks trust in traditional political institutions and leaders, while recent revelations about cyber espionage have undermined trust in the Internet in general and the governance of cyberspace in particular.”

Of course, restoring trust to a bitter, cynical world on the brink of collapse would be a neat trick, indeed.

One might even call it systemic.

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Jan 20 2014
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Economy, Workplace

For once, a great notion

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Astoundingly, the federal and provincial governments in Atlantic Canada are getting out of their own way and forging a rational, relevant and thoroughly reasonable accord designed to improve both job prospects and economic development in the region for years to come.

And no, bitter winter weather aside, hell is not freezing over.

Witness last week’s announcement of an $8-million joint program (cost-shared between the feds, who are ponying up $4.3 million and the four Atlantic provinces, who will contribute $3.5 million) to promote trades training and apprenticeships and remove educational and labour market barriers that prevent employers and workers from finding  true, wedded, occupational bliss together.

“What’s happening now (is), in essence, we have four provinces doing their own thing virtually doing the same thing,” Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil told The Halifax Chronicle-Herald.

That’s got to go, said federal Employment Minister Jason Kenney at a news conference in Fredericton last week: “We need to break down the unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy that exists to people getting their apprenticeships done and to getting their journeyman ticketed status so they can actually be full journeymen on the job sites and moving around to where the work is.”

In practice, the program will harmonize training, certifications and standards across the region in 10 trades, starting with cook, instrumentation and control technician, bricklayer and construction electrician. The rest will follow in due course, and not a moment too soon.

For decades, certain parts of Canada have been enduring a steady erosion in the number of skilled tradespeople on the job. Where once being a cabinet maker or plumber was considered a thoroughly viable career choice, we somehow got it into our heads that, as Mr. Kenny so aptly states, “everyone just had to go to university. . . We stopped encouraging people to pursue vocational and technical trades in our  high schools.”

In recent years, the pendulum has begun to swing back. According to careersintrades.ca “the wage gap between workers with bachelor degrees and trade certificates is declining.  Between 2000 and 2011, the average weekly wages of full-time workers aged 25 to 34 with trades certificates grew by 14 per cent, while bachelor degree holders saw their wage growth slow to 1per cent. And, apprentices begin to make money right away, earning a wage from their first day at work.”

And yet, according to Rick Spence, business columnist, writing in the Financial Post last year, “Studies cited by Skills Canada, a federally supported organization dedicated to trades and apprenticeships, indicate 40 per cent of new jobs in he coming decade will be in skilled trades or technology (think computer animation, network support, etc.). “

Meanwhile, in guidance offices and family dining rooms, the song remains the same: just 26 per cent of young people aged 13 to 24 plan to consider a career in the skilled trades, with 59 per cent of youths saying their parents have not encouraged them to consider the trades as a career option.”

Given the coming demographic changes – the last cohort of baby boomers retiring (we’ll see about that, of course), dropping birth rates, and a steady-state universe for immigrants – a country with an increasingly light supply of people who can actually make things, like toilets, work invites a whole new set of productivity problems not yet imagined in chambers where bankers and economists chatter about national competitiveness.

Indeed, as Mr. Kenney observed, “We have a lot of tradesmen, the guys and ladies who literally built the the country, who are about to start retiring. We have a much smaller group of people to fill their shoes.”

It is refreshing, like a blast of Arctic air, to hear politicians of any stripe, from any level, talk pragmatically about issues into which they are willing to invest some expertise and over which they are prepared to exert some control – and all for the common good.

It is heartening to watch them put their heads together, work out their problems logically and calmly and, when the day’s work is done, unveil the big reveal.

Why, it’s almost as if some of them went to trade school.

Well. . .almost.

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Jan 18 2014
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Idiocracy

It’s time to stop thinking magically about the future

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Those of us who are well-established in our irascibility – a function of our sullen conviction that most people are thoroughgoing nincompoops – approach the dawn of a new year experiencing an odd mixture of dread and resignation.

Didn’t we just come off the tail-end of one of the stupidest 12-month periods in recent Canadian history? Why must we do this all over again? Do we really expect to get it right this time when getting it wrong is what we do best?

Of course, part of getting it wrong – maybe the most important part – is making darn sure that otherwise eminently solvable problems become utterly intractable and, so, eternally, nauseatingly durable.

Consider, in this context, shale gas.

There might be 70 trillion cubic feet of the stuff trapped in sedimentary rock beneath the surface of New Brunswick. Presently, a handful of companies pursue exploration leases to determine whether any of the resource is commercially exploitable. If any of it is, then a new industry dedicated to its extraction and export could create hundreds of jobs and replenish provincial government coffers with royalty revenues.

Meanwhile, cognizant of the potential environmental hazards associated with drilling operations, the Government of New Brunswick has released not one, but three sets of guidelines to govern industry practices. Premier David Alward calls these rules “the toughest and most comprehensive in North America.” He’s not wrong.

All things being equal, then, one should expect a broad level of public support for the investigative phase of this resource’s development. After all, no one’s building a strip mine or digging a quarry, many of which exist in New Brunswick, posing far more of an existential threat to potable water and uncontaminated soil than do shale gas wells.

But lest John Q. Public becomes confused, he must always ignore the facts. Now, the only images tight plays of petroleum conjure in the minds of the majority are those of angry, rural locals (and their urban, politically correct confederates) who are convinced that democratically elected governments cannot be trusted to regulate industry responsibly.

Somehow, placards, barricades and protest lines do a far better job than does the law of holding accountable those dirty, rapacious drilling operations.

Equally absurd, and no less irksome, is the notion, gaining widespread currency in the mainstream of the population, that New Brunswick should abandon all efforts to develop any of its natural resources – non-renewable and otherwise.

The argument against harvesting and processing fossil fuels is already familiar and, though not actually practical, not without some merit. But many of those who decry pipelines for Alberta bitumen into Saint John’s refinery also condemn wind turbines, which pollute nothing, contribute no green house gases to global warming, as they add 500 megawatts of electricity to the province’s power grid each year.

With evidence that is almost diaphanous, opponents of “big wind” claim that proximity to the rotating blades produces everything from migraines to vertigo to brain tumors. Besides, they whine, they’re ugly.

Such was the condition of New Brunswick’s polity in the year that was. Such, we may reasonably fear, will be its condition in the year ahead, solely because, in this province, a lack of intellectual firepower is matched only by a catastrophic failure of the collective imagination.

Increasingly, far too many of us cannot conceive of a day when we will witness the economic engines and commercial levers freeze for good. It’s never happened before. We’ve always managed to pull through, demanding and pretty much getting everything we’ve asked our politicians to deliver.

The corollary effect, of course, is that we get politicians who will only pander to our misguided, uninformed expectations.

But the day of reckoning is nearly upon us. A province of 750,000 people, sporting a structural deficit of $500 million on a long-term debt of $11 billion – a province that is shedding people and jobs faster than any other in Canada – cannot afford to engage in magical thinking about its future.

Should this realization eventually dawn on New Brunswick, version 2014, I’ll gladly apologize to all those of my fellow citizens who once apprenticed in this sullen, self-satisfied land as nincompoops.

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Jan 17 2014
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Society

Cheery news from World Economic Forum

Just when you though it was safe to go back in the water. . .Think again. . . The end is nigh!

Jan 17 2014
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Business, Economy, Workplace

The dos and don’ts of reducing disparity

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In an astonishing turn of events, worthy of major international coverage, your humble scribbler finds himself in actual, authentic agreement with the right-wing, free-market- loving think tank, the Fraser Institute.  Sort of.

How this happened is less important than why, which I can summarize thusly: Even a blind pitcher will hit the broad side of a barn once in a blue moon if he’s standing next to a silo. . .or. . .something like that.

The point is when the Institute’s recent report, The Economic Effect of Living Wage Laws, concludes that such legislation in the United States – which is designed to raise poor people’s salaries and, so, reverse growing income disparity – are backfiring, it is largely, albeit lamentably, correct.

“The best available evidence from the U.S. serves as a cautionary tale for us in Canada about adopting living wage laws,” said Charles Lammam, the study’s author and Fraser’s resident scholar in economic policy. “When governments try to legislate wages, there’s typically a trade-off – while some workers may benefit from a higher wage, their gain comes at the expense of others who lose as a result of fewer employment opportunities,”

The press release continues on to explain: “Although activists claim living wage laws can increase wages with minimal costs, the reality is quite different. According to the best available research, a 100 per cent increase in the living wage (for example, going from an hourly minimum wage of $10 to $20) reduces employment among low-wage workers by between 12 and 17 per cent.”

The reason has to do with labour market shock. When living wages are “mandated” to rise regardless of other factors and circumstances, businesses cut back jobs – especially the lower-end ones – and training programs precisely because they are not likewise “mandated” to employ anyone. The relationship between the supply of jobs and the regulations governing pay rates asymmetrically disadvantages workers.

This has the corollary effect of undermining overall productivity and innovation in the private sector despite the fact that Mr. Lammam found evidence suggesting that “employers also respond to living wage laws by hiring more qualified workers and passing over those with fewer skills thereby reducing the opportunity for less-skilled workers to participate in the labour market.”

All of which only means that which we already know: Governments are lousy micromanagers of wages and prices. But can they play any productive role in narrowing the income gap between the rich and the rest? Fraser doesn’t say, but I suspect their answer would be: “a minimal one, thank you very much.”

This is where I (with a sense of great relief) would part company with the Institute.

The socio-economic costs of wage disparities, which are growing rapidly in the western world, are several and serious. As more money flows to fewer people, lobbies and special interests skew public spending priorities.

Suddenly, the infrastructure on which a fair and democratic nation relies – everything from public transportation, roads and bridges to schools and hospitals – becomes less important than tax cuts for the wealthy.

The malign effect on the culture is equally worrying. Prolonged, structural economic inequality creates class systems and all the attendant evils of social immobility: little access to high quality education and jobs; and few, if any, opportunities for meaningful career advancement. In effect, permanent, grinding working poverty becomes the norm for millions until, of course, comes the revolution.

Governments, then, owe it to themselves and to the people – all the people – they represent to be mindful of even the slightest imbalances in the scales of social justice. The role they play is not properly reactive (living wage legislation, as one example), but proactive. Robust, progressive, encompassing social policy designed to create the conditions for broad and general prosperity is what they can and do best.

They should start with a redistributive frame of mind by tithing the personal wealth of rich more aggressively. The notion that economic opportunity trickles down from the top is utterly bankrupt. Rich people spend less of their incomes, per capita, in their local economies than do middle-class wage earners.

Governments should also provide corporate generators of wealth with more incentives for plant reinvestment, job training and apprenticeship programs – for, in effect, a national, private-sector “manpower” program that focusses, once again, on people as much as it now does on profits.

Such are, of course, humble proposals that have, in the current political climate,  about as much chance of being adopted as I have.

On this matter, too, I am certain the Fraser Institute would concur.

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Jan 17 2014
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Uncategorized

Quote of the day

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“Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character” – Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898

Jan 16 2014
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Business, Economy, Municipal Affairs

Retooling New Brunswick’s economic engine

Resurgo, indeed!

Resurgo, indeed!

This past summer, the Petitcodiac River roared back to life, its tidal bore once more ascendent. Californian surf-boarders came to marvel at its muddy might and frolic in its frothy curl. You Tube went berserk and, for a short, sweet time, Moncton made headlines around the world.

Perhaps, then, it is fitting that the city’s largest downtown hotel, the site of the first economic summit for the municipal region in 20 years, should overlook a waterway whose resurgence holds more than metaphorical meaning. After all, it was not fate that brought back the bore after an absence of 40 years; it was us, mere mortals, who opened the causeway flood gates and kept them open.

As 300 of the community’s movers and shakers from all avenues of life prepare to assemble tonight at the Greater Moncton Economic Summit 2014, one wonders: What new gates shall they open?

Not even the event’s organizers can be sure. “We don’t know what they are going to come up with,” Ben Champoux, CEO of Enterprise Greater Moncton, told the Moncton Times & Transcript. “The tangible result is we are going to have a list of great ideas that are realistic, that are tangible, that people agree with.”

Still, why gather and why now? By every possible yardstick, the Greater Moncton  area has exceeded its own and others’ expectations over the years.

Dieppe, Moncton and Riverview currently comprise the fifth-fastest growing Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) in Canada. In fact, the region has typically attracted at least three times as many people every year than any other area in New Brunswick.

Since 1990, this CMA has added more than 25,000 jobs to its workforce. The annual unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the Atlantic region and substantially below the national average.

In Moncton, alone, home sales in 2011 reached the fourth-highest level in the city’s history. Yet, with an average house price of $158,561, the municipality remained one of the most affordable housing markets in the country.

Meanwhile, the total value of building permits issued in 2011 reached $184 million, the second highest level on record. What’s more, retail sales reached $2.1 billion in 2011, 17 per cent higher than the Canadian Cities’ average.

Then, of course, consider Greater Moncton’s formidable technology sector: major Canadian customer contact and back office operations with a robust “near-shore” IT outsourcing industry. It continues to leverage its success with a plan that calls for new partnerships with regional universities to deepen the region’s knowledge economy, diversify the IT economy, and actively promote tech-based entrepreneurship.

Given the broader context of a fiscally imperiled province and a moribund national economy, Greater Moncton is not only punching above its weight class; its punching above just about everyone else’s .

So, again, why bother brainstorming?

The answer is in the question. And it has something to do with an ounce of prevention.

Summits, conventions, conferences are only marginally useful when their conveners are mired in full-blown crises. Adrenaline and cortisol may be handy hormones to have in a fight. But they are not particularly conducive to rational, creative or innovative thinking.

Greater Moncton’s relatively healthy and prosperous economy permits the sort of blue-sky musings that arc out over the horizon to destinations that remain hidden in bad times. And, of course, the whole point of an idea factory, such as Summit 2014, is to figure out how to avoid the bad times altogether.

What new gates shall open, indeed?

What fresh ideas will be brought to bear on a downtown core that has, frankly, seen better days?

What will impel municipal officials and entrepreneurs to transform the concept of a multi-use events centre into actual bricks and mortar, sooner rather than later.

As Mr. Champoux astutely notes, “The dance floor is more crowded than ever before in economic development and business development. Let’s brainstorm and and define who we are now, what we want and how we are going to get there and who is going to lead that.”

Let us, indeed. Let us begin again.

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Jan 15 2014
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Energy, Environment, Oil and Gas

How Neil Young gets it right (and wrong) on oil

Oil is everywhere and everything?

Oil is everywhere and everything?

Fossil fuels make hypocrites of every environmental activist in the world.

The bright ones know that as consumers in the unavoidable petro-economy, they are just as culpable as anyone for climate change; but they push their planet-saving agenda anyway. After all, why remain silent on strategies for using oil and gas to transition to a cleaner, more sustainable future?

The dimmer ones, who never seem to suffer from a loss of words, prattle on about “us versus them” in apparent ignorance of the enormously complex socio-economic web this and other nations have spun with the products of refined dinosaur bones. Forget transforming the world; let’s just shut it down.

Thanks to celebrity big mouths and the media’s even bigger appetite for controversy, the question of the moment is: Into which camp does Canada’s legendary folk-rocker Neil Young fit? Is he a shining light or a broken bulb? A not entirely unrelated question is: Does it matter?

The Prime Minister Office seems to think it does. Why, otherwise, would it have dispatched its spokesman Jason MacDonald to defend Alberta’s curiously vulnerable tar sands against Mr. Young’s vituperative attack on them last Sunday night during the launch of a countrywide tour. At that time, the Grammy Award winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer said, using his outside voice:

“To me, it’s a basic matter of integrity on the part of Canada. Canada is trading integrity for money. That’s what’s happening under the current leadership in Canada, which is a very poor imitation of the George Bush administration in the United States. It’s lagging behind on the world stage and it’s an embarrassment to Canadians.”

To which, Mr. MacDonald responded: “Canada’s natural resources sector is and has always been a fundamental part of our country’s economy. . .The resource sector creates economic opportunities, and employs tens of thousands of Canadians in high wage jobs, contributing to a standard of living that is envied around the world, and helping to fund the programs and services Canadians rely on. . .Even the lifestyle of a rock star relies, to some degree, on the resources developed by thousands of hard-working Canadians every day.”

For Mr. Young, overall, so far so good. Whether or not you agree with his characterization of political leaders who are almost giddy at the prospect of selling their country – and First Nations communities in Alberta – down the river for a bag of bucks, you must, at least, acknowledge that he takes a principled stand.

More than this, perhaps, he is keenly aware of his stature, an effective weapon in the public relations battle to win friends and influence people (though methinks the man has already won enough hearts and minds for one life).

But, then, a funny thing happens on Mr. Young’s way to mainstream credibility regarding oil and gas. In his response to Mr. MacDonald’s jab about rock stars‘ reliance on natural resources, “Shaky” gets a little. . .well, shaky.

“Of course, rock stars don’t need oil. I drove my electric car from California to the tar sands and on to Washington DC without using any oil at all and I’m a rock star,” he says. “My car’s generator runs on biomass, one of several future fuels Canada should be developing for the Post Fossil Fuel Age. This age of renewable fuels could save our grandchildren from the ravages of Climate related disasters spawned by the Fossil Fuel Age; but we have to get started.”

He’s right. We do have to get started. But if, as he insists, rock stars don’t need oil, is he suggesting his life is a petroleum-free zone? For, if it is, that would be a neat trick, indeed.

According to one calculation from Ranken Energy Corp., “Americans consume petroleum products at a rate of three-and-a-half gallons of oil and more than 250 cubic feet of natural gas per day each.”

In fact, oil is in just about everything, from floor wax to bicycle tires to golf bags and purses. “Anything that’s not iron or steel or metal of some sort has some petrochemical component,” West Virginia University chemistry professor Dady Dadyburjor told The Associated Press not long ago.

This, one presumes, includes the chassis of Mr. Young’s electric car.

Of course rock stars need oil. We all do. And owning up to our collective addiction is the first step on the royal road to recovery from hypocrisy.

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