Category Archives: Economy

Jul 01 2013
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Demographics, Economy

Survey is no replacement for a proper census

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Greater Moncton’s labour force is alive and well and kicking, which may be one reason why fully a-fifth of New Brunswick’s workers will never achieve “Freedom 55”.

Here are a few other “facts” about Canada, now celebrating its 146 birthday, we may not have appreciated, courtesy of Statistics Canada’s National Household Survey 2011, as faithfully reported in The Vancouver Sun:

“We love driving our cars to work. In 2011, almost 93 per cent of people in the workforce drove to work and most drove by themselves. . .English dominates Canadian workplaces, with 85 per cent of the population using the language at work, compared to just 25 per cent who say they use French. . .Chinese languages are the most-commonly used languages in the workplace after English and French. . .Possessing a post-secondary education increases Canadians’ chances of being employed. But there’s no obvious employment benefit to a graduate degree. . .Canadians ages 25 to 34 are far more likely to have trained to be a cook than an auto mechanic or construction worker, when compared to workers closer to retirement.”

Now we know all we need ever comprehend about our families, friends, neighbours; about ourselves in this great and peaceable land. Or do we?

In 2010, back when the federal government announced it was scrapping the mandatory long-form census in favour of a “voluntary” household survey, editorials in just about every major newspaper in Canada screamed their disapproval. The nation’s two top numbers-crunchers Munir Sheikh and Phil Cross actually resigned their posts at Stats Can in evident, if dignified, protest.

In a news advisory at the time, Mr. Sheikh wrote that while he could not “reveal and comment on (the) advice” he gave the government “because this information is protected under the law,” he wanted to “take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census. . .It can not.”

Only a month ago, Robert Gerst, a partner in charge of operational excellence and research and statistical methods at Calgary-based Converge Consulting Group Inc., declared in an opinion piece for the Waterloo Region Record, “Take the first data releases from the national household survey of Statistics Canada. . . .The quality of the results has come under criticism because the voluntary survey replaced the compulsory long-form census questionnaire. In effect, this replaced a random sample with a non-random sample. Non-random samples have their place, but making conclusions about the population isn’t one of them.

Naturally, then, “no conclusions about the Canadian population can be drawn from the national household survey. Since making these types of conclusions is the whole point of a census, the survey data is worthless. (This is also true for any survey where participation is voluntary, including citizen, customer and employee satisfaction surveys).”

What, then, justifies the heavy media coverage of the survey? (The Globe and Mail devoted its entire Folio section to the data). Aren’t we, in the Fourth Estate, supposed to suspect this sort of information. In fact, isn’t that our job description? On the other hand, when faced with a bunch of lemons, there’s really only one thing to do.

Intuitively, the survey results seem valid. They track neatly with the more rigorous findings of the 2006 census: Canada’s population was getting older; most commuters in major cities did tend to drive themselves to work; possessing an undergraduate degree did improve an individual’s likelihood of landing a good job. That much appears not to have changed.

But the farther out we go from a proper census (broad, random sampling), the less verisimilitude the findings display. A decade from now, we may no longer be able to trust that the survey results are grounded in enough truth to say anything accurate or useful about our families, friends, neighbours; about ourselves.

In an age when information, increasingly, unlocks the door to economic growth, this seems oddly and regrettably retrograde.

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Jun 26 2013
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Economy, Energy, Oil and Gas, Politics, Science

On seismic testing, just the facts please

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Those of us who remain curious about the economic potential of onshore tight oil and gas in New Brunswick might as well face it: There is no perfectly safe way to develop an industry that pulls vast quantities of petroleum from the ground. There never has been, and there never will be.

The only thing that matters is identifying the level of risk we are prepared to assume in return for jobs, royalties and tax revenues. And to do this, we need facts. But where are they?

The news media is in its element when it covers controversy. Altercations and recriminations between shale gas protestors along Highway 126 and SWN Resources, which is undertaking exploration there, make headlines. Dispassionate examinations of the claims both for and against the technologies involved more often do not.

And so, we are left sifting through emotionally charged assertions for clues of validity. We are left, for example, parsing this statement from a local resident, whom the CBC quoted in a story the other day: “There’s lots of money in Alberta, but when people come home they don’t want to see this. The money is good, but the money isn’t everything. . .They still put charges of dynamite in the ground and they still blast them.”

He was referring to the practice of seismic testing, which, according to the website naturalgas.org, “artificially (creates) waves, the reflection of which are then picked up by sensitive pieces of equipment called ‘geophones’ that are embedded in the ground.” Essentially, the procedure takes a picture of what lies beneath.

The question, of course, is whether this citizen’s concerns about the potentially catastrophic effects of the process on the water table and broader environment  – which, not incidentally, mirror those of many others in the province – are justified.

Or is Marc Belliveau of the provincial Department of Energy and Mines closer to the truth? Yesterday, he told this newspaper, “There is, unfortunately, a lot of misconceptions of what seismic testing is and what it is not. . .It’s used in making highways, it’s used in finding water sources for municipalities. . .There was seismic testing carried out along more than 500 kilometres in New Brunswick two years ago. . .There were no issues.”

Still, that was then. What about now? Back in the stone age, when I briefly majored in Geology at university, seismic testing was breakthrough technology in the oil and gas industry. And, like all breakthrough technologies – which are, by their natures, intrusive – this one did cause “issues”.

Even today, the procedure can be problematic. Earlier this month, oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico agreed to forgo using the technology over concerns that it may harm marine life. According to a news report from KNOE.com, “Michael Jasny of the Natural Resources Development Council says the (moratorium) will give the government and industry time for required environmental studies and research.”

That said, the best evidence suggests that seismic testing in New Brunswick is about as safe as can be expected given the province’s regulatory framework and SWN’s statement of exploration practice, which appears on its website.

“The vibroseis technique is only used on roadways and provides quality signals with minimal disturbance,” the company declares. “Seismic vibrator trucks are equipped with an underlying vibrating plate to generate specific sound signals. . .The strength of the signal from one seismic vibrator truck is very small; several trucks need to be activated simultaneously to create a signal strong enough to be recorded. These vehicles create noise levels similar to that made by a logging truck.”

When no roads are available, SWN says it deploys the “shot hole technique”. In these instances, the company clears “a maximum three metre-wide path for a drill vehicle in the woods. No vegetation larger than 15 centimeters in diameter is cut. The track-mounted drill vehicle drills a hole 15 metres deep. A small seismic source is placed at the bottom of the hole and is sealed with clay and drill cuttings per provincial regulations. When safely secured, the source is activated with specialized equipment. Afterwards, the area is restored to its original state.”

Whether or not this statement can allay public concern depends entirely on the degree to which one is willing to allow fact to triumph over fear.

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Jun 23 2013
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Economy, Energy, Environment, Politics

Denial and deflection on shale gas

Too much official hot air as shale gas in New Brunswick bloats expectations

Too much official hot air as shale gas in New Brunswick bloats expectations

Into each political life, a little denial must fall. But the New Brunswick government’s contention that the tide of opinion in the province is turning in favor of shale gas development seems particularly delusional.

Survey after survey have clearly established that more people than not believe tight petroleum drilling – which employs the controversial method of hydraulic fracturing – poses a threat to the environment and, by extension, to communities in rural areas. A recent Corporate Research Associates (CRA) poll merely confirms what we have known for months.

“New Brunswick residents are concerned about the safety of shale gas exploration and are split on whether the process is important to the economic future of the province,” the Halifax-based opinion-taker announced this week. “One-half (48 per cent) of residents believe shale gas to be critically important or important but not critical to New Brunswick’s economic future, while a similar number (44 per cent) believe it to be not very important or not at all important to the economy of the province.”

Meanwhile, “when asked (about) the safety of shale gas exploration, on a scale of ‘1’ to ‘10’ where ‘1’ is not safe at all and ’10’ is extremely safe, the average rating was 3.9 indicating many residents perceive shale gas exploration to be unsafe. Those in the Northern Region (3.3) and Moncton area (3.5) are more likely to consider the exploration of shale gas unsafe compared with those in the Southern region (4.6).”

All of which moved CRA’s chairman Don Mills to observe, “it is clear that there will be significant and continuing challenges to government and industry in the development of shale gas resources in the province of New Brunswick.”

In an interview with the Telegraph-Journal this week, he went further: “The results say to me that the provincial government and the industry are both in a tough corner right now. . .There are so many people who believe that fracking is unsafe, I think the opponents of shale gas have won the day on that argument, at least at this point.”

What, then, justifies Energy Minister Craig Leonard’s sunny disposition? He also told the TJ this week, “(People) need to understand that we have the strictest rules in North America in place. But the support is growing and from what we are hearing on the ground, most people we are discussing this with say that even if they have concerns with the process, they want us to see what kind of resource we do have through the exploration phase.”

That’s hardly a ringing public endorsement. People are always willing to consider the necessary evils of their circumstances as long as those evils remain hypothetical. The moment the drills go into the ground and the gas starts flowing in earnest, it’s a whole new ball game. For the provincial Tories, the game may already be over.

CRA’s early June survey found that support for the government, among decided voters in New Brunswick, had slipped to just 29 per cent, down from 32 per cent in March. The Liberals commanded a 41 per cent approval rating, up from 35 per cent in the earlier three-month period. These shifts in electoral preferences neatly coincide with Grit calls for a moratorium on further shale gas development.

Now, in a tactical tour de force (though farce may be a more accurate word), the provincial government is hoping to secure acquiescence to onshore exploration by conflating the effort with a potential eastern pipeline into Saint John – a project for which there is broad, if not unanimous, support. This sort of deflection, though common enough among politicians, almost never works. Worse, in most cases, it backfires.

The plain, hard truth is that leadership in public office inevitably entails disappointing and angering many of those who put you there.

If shale gas is, in the opinion of this government, worth pursuing, then get on with it – safely, responsibly and openly, of course. But leave out the sugarcoating and magic tricks. No one’s buying any of it.

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Jun 23 2013
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Economy, Government

Are happy days here again?

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Here, in the shadow of the western world’s setting sun, we are languishing in a near-permanent state of decay – both victims and authors of our decidedly unenlightened self-interest.

This, at least, has been the received and incontrovertible wisdom, and there’s no longer any point in trying to save ourselves.

First, came the financial crisis of 2008, which effectively wrecked private savings, public accounts, the manufacturing sector, and the housing market. Then came the government bailouts (“stimulus” spending, if you prefer), which saddled states, provinces and cities across North America with spiraling deficits and structural debts.

Finally, came the language of the resignedly defeated: No growth is the new normal; quit your jobs and plant your gardens, for the end of our global, capitalist hegemon draws nigh.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the economic abattoir. Suddenly, with no portents or premonitions, everything got just a little bit better. How? Why? Economists, bankers, politicians are still scratching their heads.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of IHS Global Insight, told The New York Times recently. “There is more optimism about the U.S. and in particular about the second half of this year and 2014. Three months ago, we wouldn’t have come to that same conclusion.”

Three months ago, no one, it seems, was ruminating on the efficacious effects of certain economic outliers, such as advancing technology, growing energy independence and the resurgence of what can only be described as a sort of gritty self-determination.

Referring to the future, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen told The Times, “It’s better than it looked. Technological progress comes in batches and it’s just a little more rapid than it looked two years ago,” adding somewhat circumspectly: “The great stagnation will end for a lot of people but not everyone. I think there will be great breakthroughs but the distribution of those gains will go to owners of capital and intellectual property.”

Still, some economists predict the U.S. economy will outperform its average of two per cent per year growth rate by as much 1.5 percentage points over the next eight quarters, which would effectively close the doomsday chronicle of recent times.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in Canada. May was an astonishing month for employment in this country. The economy generated 95,000 new positions, most of which were full-time, private sector jobs. That was the single, largest monthly surge in more than a decade.

Again, in interviews with the Financial Post, the experts were gob-smacked. “Canada’s job gain. . .is simply stunning on the headline and most of the details,” said Derek Holt of Scotiabank Economics. It is equivalent to the U.S. adding over 1 million jobs in a single month.” Indeed, noted Douglas Porter of BMO Capital Markets, “Even outside of construction, which is definitely the eye-popping stat here. . . (May’s data) was still a mammoth number for employment.”

Naturally, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty prefers to take the long view. To the Post, he declared, “What’s more important is the positive long-trend when it comes to employment in Canada. . .We can’t be complainant. We are still facing a very volatile global economy. We recently saw European unemployment hit a record high. Canada is not immune to these challenges from beyond our border and we will be impacted.”

He is correct, of course. Canada is joined at the hip with the international community, and our national prosperity depends on the degree to which we diversify our goods and services and, crucially, our trading relationships.

And yet, the recent numbers suggest that rugged, defiant entrepreneurialism – inventiveness, creativity, opportunism – is not as easily squashed as the prophets of calamity (in whose company, I must admit, I have found myself) would have us think.

That’s worth remembering here, on the East Coast, as we gnash our teeth and wring our hands over the high cost of government, the seemingly endless string of failed economic development schemes and the hollowing out of our productive population.

The heart of true enterprise still beats. We can feel it if we try.

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Jun 11 2013
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Business, Economy, Environment, Politics

New Brunswick’s biggest natural resource is fury

Seeing the forest for the trees in hydraulic fracturing

Seeing the forest for the trees in hydraulic fracturing

Those who believe that New Brunswickers are apathetic about their futures need only survey the province for visible signs of outrage, which are everywhere. Apparently, we are mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

The question is: What is the “it” we refuse to “take”?

Once upon a time, it was the sale of NB Power to Hydro-Quebec. The contretemps over that issue brought down a government already reeling from the outcry over its proposals to establish a network of polytechnics in the province and reform French language instruction for Anglophones.

These days, it’s cuts to the public service, education and health care that have ignited the pyres of dissent from Sackville to Edmundston.

No issue, however, is as incendiary as hydraulic fracturing, with its dark promise to pollute and sunder communities wherever the shale gas industry sinks its wells.

Last week, the RCMP arrested three people – about 120 kilometers north of Moncton – who were protesting SWN Resources seismic testing (advance work in the exploration of tight petroleum plays). The cops said the trio refused to make way for trucks. Other observers at the scene said the authorities overreacted.

For his part, Brad Walters a professor of environmental studies professor at Mount A, called it a sign of the times, to which we should grow accustomed. He told  CTV it reflects “a combination of things coming together here. . .There is this network of over 30 groups across the province who are talking to each other and are very strongly opposed to shale gas development.”

Call it the immoveable object that meets an unstoppable force, but opposition to shale gas in this province has become a permanent feature of the landscape. No careful ministrations by the provincial government, promising to enforce the “toughest” regulations in North America – no vows by industry representatives to adhere to only the highest standards of environmental stewardship – are likely to placate the critics.

This worries people like Susan Holt, president and CEO of the New Brunswick Business Council, which commissioned a report, released recently, on the economic potential of shale gas in the province. “Some of the opposition is a little bit disconcerting to industry because it appears to be general industry opposition rather than specific,” she told the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris. “When New Brunswickers resist general industrial activity, that is more nerve-racking for our folks because it begs the question, how do we develop our economy?”

How, indeed?

Legitimate concerns about water and soil degradation and principled stands against fossil fuels warming the planetary orb only partially explain the current antagonism. At the heart of the hostility to shale gas is a position against which there is no defence: People simply detest the idea of it. Onshore petroleum development somehow cuts against the weave of the province’s social fabric.

The identical mental dynamic was at work when potash was first developed. It was in even planer view when wind turbines began dotting the countryside. Lest we forget uranium?

Logic is a blunt instrument of persuasion when passions are running high, as they tend to do when statements from the provincial Department of Energy and Mine declare that “Nine companies hold a Crown license to search and/or lease within New Brunswick. These include a total of 71 rights agreements, covering over 1.4 million hectares, for the exploration and production of oil and natural gas.”

In fact, the Province has spent a good deal of time touting New Brunswick as the undisputed nexus of the emerging tight oil and gas industry in Atlantic Canada. Estimates, it likes to say, peg the volume of natural gas trapped between layers of sedimentary rock hundreds, or even thousands, of meters beneath the soil’s surface at close to 77 trillion cubic feet.

What it – and industry, itself – hasn’t spent much effort doing is reminding New Brunswickers that no one yet knows whether the resource is even commercially viable. Nor have they attempted to explain (until very recently) the safeguards that must attend its extraction and development.

Now, it may be too late to expect a sea change of attitude.

It’s a shame we can’t harness the energy from all the outrage we generate.

If we could, we’d never again worry about the future of our province.

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Jun 07 2013
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Economy, Politics

Stop depending on the kindness of strangers

Pennies from Ottawa? It just cancelled the currency, Atlantic Canada

Pennies from Ottawa? It just cancelled the currency, Atlantic Canada

Once, when he was not yet a serious contender for federal office, Prime Minister Stephen Harper opined that Atlantic Canada’s “culture of defeat will be hard to overcome” as long as the region “physically” trails behind the rest of the country.

That stinging characterization, in 2002, of the birthplace of Confederation played well out west among his base of prairie farmers and Calgary oil men. So well, in fact, that he took another crack at ringing the defeatist bell a few days later for The Ottawa Citizen, which quoted him in more generally ruminative terms: “I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it.”

Back here, among the lobster pots and pogey checks, his remarks lit a fire of indignation. We fumed and fussed. We wrote letters to the editor and posted angry comments to websites. We demanded that our premiers speed to our defence, as if we were so many jilted brides.

We missed the point, of course. But that’s only because Mr. Harper deployed the the wrong word. It wasn’t “defeat” that gripped us; it was “dependence”. And that culture of dependence – on Ottawa, on the richer provinces of Canada – shrouds us today, like a swaddling blanket.

In his illuminating series of commentaries about New Brunswick and its  challenges (now running in this and the province’s other major newspapers), public policy expert Donald Savoie observes, “There is a growing reluctance on the part of the have-provinces to continue to finance transfer payments to have-less provinces at current levels.”

That’s a polite way of describing the situation. Another was Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s vituperative critique last year. The current system of equalization, he declared in an opinion piece, generates “distortions, often of a significant scale, that impair the national economy and discourage people from moving to places of economic opportunity.” The system, he insisted, discourages “labour mobility in a way that hurts the national economy and ultimately individual Canadians.”

There was a certain amount of bald-faced nonsense in this claim. Federal transfers haven’t stopped thousands of Maritimers and Newfoundlanders from leaving their ancestral homes for more lucrative economic opportunities out west. But the larger point has to do with the way we, on the East Coast, routinely meet such criticisms: defensively, even peevishly.

Defending equalization against attacks by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Premier David Alward told the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris on Wednesday, “It is part of our Constitution and part of who we are as Canadians. It allows provinces that do not have the fiscal capacity to provide comparable levels of service at comparable levels of taxation. It’s not a fat cat program.”

In other words, we “depend” on it. And in depending on it, we have, at some basic level, come to think of it as a program to which we are entitled – a part of the province’s 40 per cent, annual revenue take from “Fat City”, the capital.

Perhaps, this is only natural. Everyone perceives reality through the filter of his or her experiences. And if those experiences involve relying on a massive infusion of money from jurisdictional underwriters in other parts of the country to pay for schools and hospitals, then we perceive our reality – though fundamentally tethered to the generosity of stranger, it may be – as fixed in time. The status quo of equalization is, or should be, immutable. Shouldn’t it?

Equalization may be a right. But if we are serious about forging a more economically sustainable future, we should stop looking upon it as a permanent virtue and begin regarding it for what it is: a temporary evil, one from which we should work hard to wean ourselves. At the very least, the language our elected representatives choose to use in their public pronouncements should reflect this long-term purpose.

The horizon for this decidedly bowed, yet not defeated, part of the country instantly clears the moment we embrace the notion that the only ones on whom we should depend are ourselves.

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Jun 03 2013
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Business, Economy

Pointing a way forward for Atlantic Canada

Somewhere over the rainbow, a brighter future for Atlantic Canada

Somewhere over the rainbow, a brighter future for Atlantic Canada

It’s timely, cogent and thoughtful, which is exactly why it’ll never work. Human nature abhors big ideas and grand schemes, preferring, instead, to domicile stubbornly in its hobbit holes.

That’s one way to regard the final report of the 4Front Atlantic Conference, a meeting of regional business leaders that just wrapped up in Halifax.

Another is to recognize that the document contains just enough practical magic and common-sense solutions to the problems that burden Atlantic Canada’s economy to suggest that durable, sustainable prosperity in this corner of the steppe need not remain a pipe dream.

That, too, is human nature. After all, the future is about nothing if not the choices we make today.

“What can I do to make Atlantic Canada a more promising place for our children – so that they can realize their potential and their dreams, and be successful in this changing world, living and working here in Atlantic Canada?”

That’s the action plan’s “rallying cry”.

So is: this: “How do we change to prosper in a world where China and Brazil are among the global economic leaders, old trade relations are no longer enough, and all markets are global?”

And this: “How should I work with my neighbour, whether down the street or across the region, to seize these opportunities today for future generations of Atlantic Canadians?”

After three conferences and hundreds of hours examining the issues, the folks at 4Front offer a few suggestions, the most important of which is to start thinking for yourself and stop believing in governments as the fountainheads of originality. They are not. They merely reflect the broader aspirations – or lack, thereof – of those who installed them. And that’s us.

Henceforth, our concern should be aggressively collegial. The history, geography and demographics of this region precludes any degree of economic success as long as we remain siloed by our narrow, parochial interests.

We need a common approach to our common purposes.

On education and training, 4Front says: “We must create a ‘K‐to‐work’ approach, where the focus is on preparing students for the workforce of tomorrow and providing a link between formal schooling and future employers.The public education system should investigate the usage of open online courses and what this technology could mean for core K‐12 courses. We recommend an increased focus on experiential learning and co‐op placements, so that students have the chance to apply their knowledge while trying out different careers and building skills.”

On new skills: “We need dramatically higher levels of economic immigration – this can be done through a business‐government‐university‐community partnership where we are clear about the skills needed, geographic targets, and an engaged community to welcome and integrate these new Canadians.”

On innovation and productivity: “We need to significantly increase the collaboration and alignment between university and industry R&D. University research capacity should be more accessible to private companies and the private sector must engage better with universities and invest more in innovation. We need to establish an accelerator to support and mentor Atlantic Canadian emerging start‐ups, similar to Communitech in Waterloo.”

On globalization: “We must focus on strategic business sectors and global geographies where we can be globally competitive and develop a detailed regional strategic plan for each that is managed and measured. We need to help make Atlantic Canadian SMEs export ready, through ‘reverse trade missions’ where we bring international businesses to visit us and other initiatives.”

On capital: “To combat serious underfunding of Atlantic firms, we should create a regional equity‐investment tax credit. We need to create an organization that can forge stronger linkages to external networks (Silicon Valley, angel investors, Canadian VC funds, universities). We should unify our provincial securities commissions,thus eliminating the four‐tier fee structure for companies and brokers and make financing easier for our firms.”

As for governments, their watchwords should be collaboration, efficiency and relevance.

None of this is particularly new which means, if nothing else, all of it is perfectly achievable, as long as the better angels of our human nature choose to act.

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May 28 2013
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Corporate Responsibility, Economy, Society

Je me souviens. . .the late, great jobs swindle

St. Paul's wasn't built in a day; the jobs were crap!

St. Paul’s wasn’t built in a day; the jobs were crap!

Few jobs are uniformly good. But some are unrelentingly awful, and you remember them as you would a bully’s fist.

I remember the wretched May of 1981 when, at the untempered age of 20, I sold encyclopedias door-to-door in poor trailer parks that ringed the outskirts of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. I remember the unemployed residents, drunk and foul in their singlets. I remember the doorless freezers, rusting in gravel drives. I remember the feral dogs chained (if I were lucky) to iron bars driven into cracked and broken lawns.

I remember the infamous summer of 1982 when the only jobs recession-ravaged Halifax offered a young, university-bound father of an infant daughter were dish washer at a greasy spoon on the failing thoroughfare of Spring Garden Road and box boy at a woman’s garment store in a crumbling strip mall in the city’s dying west end.

I remember the middle-aged matrons who managed these establishments reeking of unrequited desire and cheap perfume. I remember the weekly pay packets, rattling with just enough loose change to pay for the bus rides home and 36 hours (again, if I were lucky) worth of groceries.

All of which flooded back to me the other week when, while researching a piece on youth employment in Canada and the United States, I happened upon an item penned in 2002 for my favorite parodic organ of news and opinion, The Onion.

“In a keynote address at the National Economic Summit, (former) President Bush issued a bold challenge to the nation’s business leaders Monday, calling on them to create 500,000 shitty jobs by next year,” the squib began. ‘So long as unemployment continues to rise, this recession will continue, as well,’ said Bush, speaking before nearly 400 of the nation’s top CEOs. ‘That is why I am turning to you to create thousands of new shit jobs. Whether it is a night-shift toilet-cleaning position at an airport or a fry-cook post. . .it’s up to you to help provide every hard-working American with a demeaning, go-nowhere job.’”

To be any good at all, satire demands verisimilitude, and this is good satire. More’s the pity; for in the intervening years, conditions have, if anything, worsened, especially for young people.

As the The Huffington Post reported earlier this year, “In 2000, the United States had the lowest non-employment rate for 25- to 34-year-olds among countries with large, wealthy economies. By 2011, America had one of the highest youth non-employment rates compared to its peers, according to a New York Times op-ed by David Leonhardt, the paper’s Washington bureau chief. . .As unemployment soared during the Great Recession, young people – with and without college degrees – were forced to compete with more experienced candidates suddenly out of a job for very few openings. The result: Nearly half of the nation’s unemployed are under the age of 34, according to a report last month from public policy organization Demos.”

Moreover, Huff Post declared, “It doesn’t seem like things will get better for America’s young people any time soon. Demos found that the U.S. economy will have to create more than 4 million jobs before young adults will be employed at levels similar to those before the recession. In addition, 16.1 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 were out of work in April, according to Generation Opportunity, a nonpartisan youth advocacy group.”

And this doesn’t begin to touch the gathering “truly-bad-job” phenomenon, which Canadian writer and filmmaker Jim Munroe dissects to marvelous effect in his 2011  mockumentary, “Ghosts With Shit Jobs”. In it, he chronicles the daily, working lives of a band of young professionals as they struggle to survive a dystopian future following the economic collapse of the western world and the concurrent ascent of China.

His cast of characters, variously, assemble android babies for affluent Asians, operate as human “spammers” pushing corporate products and brands in the otherwise polite company of restaurants and call centers, and function as virtual-reality repairmen ridding cyberspace of plethora copyright infringements and expired slogans.

It’s damn funny stuff. It is, that is, until you realize the filmmaker is not kidding, and it’s no joke.

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May 02 2013
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Economy, Education, Politics

Time to quit the Mickey Mouse Club

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Banding together in common purpose was once the stuff of boys’ adventure stories and early morning kids’ television programming. In the zeitgeist of popular culture, you could either be a mouseketeer or a muskateer; but never both.

It’s a little like that today in the real, hardscrabble world of Atlantic regional politics, where two distinct “groups of four” are forming to promote two competing conceptions of what it means to be a citizen of Canada’s most easterly realm.

In one corner, lately nestled along the white beaches of a certain Nova Scotia south shore resort, is the Council of Atlantic Premiers whose members seem to think that the most productive use of their time and energy is to issue stern denunciations of federal government labour market policies, and little else.

In another is the brand, spanking new “U4 League”, a group of mostly Maritime superheroes masquerading as university presidents whose initiates actually believe that the only way to improve life in this relentlessly unpromising pasture of the Great White North is to cooperate and. . .gasp! . . .get things done.

The League comprises Mount Allison University’s Robert Campbell, Acadia’s Ray Ivany, St. Francis Xavier’s Sean Riley and Bishop University’s Michael Goldbloom. Yesterday’s Globe and Mail story explains the unlikely collaboration as a marriage of virtue and necessity: “With public funding under strain and concerns about the quality of undergraduate education getting louder across Canada, the partnership is meant to get the most out of each school’s strengths.

Specifically, “The schools’ leaders aim to make it easier for students to tap the expertise of each university from their home campus, encourage faculty to work together across campuses, share ideas and find back-office savings – all without growing enrolments or eroding the intimate campus experience that is their hallmark.”

Does this suggest that these small institutions of higher learning are plotting a formal merger? Hardly. The point their head masters seem to be making is that forging closer ties – judiciously selected – will, in fact, strengthen their institutions’ individuality and independence. The approach could even cut costs without undermining the quality of the education they provide.

After all, as Mr. Goldbloom told the Globe, “At a time of limited public resources for public education, you had better be really good at what you do.” Meanwhile, added Mr. Campbell, “We’ll remain autonomous. It’s the competition that keeps us all sharp.”

Naturally, there is some tongue-in-cheekery in all of this, but there is a broadly good example to draw, as well: It has something to do with lemons and the making and serving of a tasty, refreshing drink, when one finds oneself in hot water.

Now, flash to Atlantic Canada’s sullen band of premiers, whose sole contribution to the process of transforming the region’s economy is their threadbare, bankrupt argument that bad dad Ottawa is determined to keep our seasonal workers under his hob-nailed jack boot until we run out of fish to catch or trees to cut or tourists to bed and breakfast.

Even if that were true (it is not), there’s nothing they can do about federal reforms to employment insurance or joint labour market agreements. And in their disingenuous hearts, they know this. But it’s a whole lot easier to take pot shots at the unfeeling “center”, than it is to roll up their sleeves and get down to the tough, necessary business of building, with the private sector, a competitive, durable, sustainable East Coast – one where home-grown innovation replaces tax-funded dependency in the lingua franca of the region.

The premiers’ implicit argument that changes to EI will make Atlantic Canada even less competitive than it is already relies, for its premise, on the absurd calculation that seasonal unemployment fuels economic growth.

But what, in fact, do they know about it? Which entrepreneurs have they consulted? How many full-time professionals and wage-earners have they tapped for advice lately?

The choice for Atlantic Canadians twas ever thus:

We can remain as mousketeers, or become, instead, musketeers.

Pick one; not both.

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May 02 2013
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Economy, Energy

Canada’s future isn’t what it used to be

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When, exactly, the Conference Board of Canada decided it would serve the interests of policy makers better by dusting off its crystal ball and throwing caution to the wind is not immediately clear. But wonks and pundits of all stripes owe this sturdy think tank a debt of gratitude for producing its first report under its Strategic Foresight Initiative.

This slim study, which weighs in at only 12 pages, posits four possible “energy futures” for The Great White North, and each one makes for fascinating reading. But first, the obligatory disclaimer: “Unlike traditional economic forecasting that focuses on development of a probable or most-likely future, strategic foresight aims instead to develop a series of plausible futures. Its goal is not to predict the future – or even suggest which direction might be most desirable.”

Rather, the authors state, “The goal. . .is to offer insights to decision-makers in governments, businesses, and other organizations on how best to prepare for all possibilities, what they might do to shift toward a future they prefer, and how to recognize and adapt to events and trends that may point toward a specific future.”

That dutifully said, the Board can’t disguise the delightful fact that it had a ball conjuring four distinct scenarios for the shape of things to come “out to 2050” or that the document reads, in places, like Hugo Award-winning science fiction.

Consider scenario number one, also known as “Hockey Stick”.

It’s a world in which “the Greenland ice cap has shrunk, as has Antarctica. Rising sea levels and an increased frequency of extreme weather events are forcing coastal cities to build massive dykes, with low-lying countries suffering extensive damage from storm surges. The Gulf Stream has shifted south, leaving much of Europe to shiver even as former breadbaskets like the American Midwest have baked into desert. Extreme weather has become frequent – damaging crops, disrupting transportation, and eroding infrastructure.”

As for Canada, where “personal vehicles have become a luxury”, we’ve been hit hard. Fortunately, we anticipated “a world of energy scarcity and environmental trauma,” and so “recognized the need to shift” our economic centre of gravity beyond both resources and manufacturing, toward a competitive post-industrial base.”

The section entitled “Superpower” describes a somewhat happier condition for the nation. This is a world in which, “The opening of Arctic waters has enabled exploitation of other energy pools as well as easier access to mineral deposits, and Canada’s North has become a booming frontier. Canadian producers have been able to reap the higher world prices for oil and gas. But even as export pipelines were planned, reviewed, and built, Eastern provinces have moved quickly to build up their own energy sources.”

Life is, indeed, grand for Canadians. But, as the paper warns, it may be too grand: “For more than a generation, they have been getting rich by selling the world what it wants. But most of what they have been selling is finite. Eventually the party must end. The question now is whether Canadians are setting aside enough of their current income – and investing it well enough – to fund their future well-being in a post-resource world.”

Perhaps, a better, more sustainable, future for the country is the one outlined in “Green Machine”. This states that “Governments have quickly recognized the importance of supporting clean energy development through a combination of technology investments and regulation. Major breakthroughs have been made in energy storage technologies for variable energy sources and massive efficiency improvements for renewable energy generation and transmission.”

As a result, “there is a sense of balance across the country, and general optimism about the ability of technology to handle the continuing evolution of the global environment.”

Then, of course, there is the status quo of “Made in Canada” in which economic stagnation in formerly growing and emerging economies has secured Canada’s role as the world’s premier location for immigrants. Moreover, “With gas cheap and the economy strong, there has been little constraint on urban sprawl and lots of money for more roads in provinces with significant energy resources.”

Will any of these scenarios play out in the years to come? Crystal balls are notoriously cloudy. Still, the fun is in the peering.

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