Category Archives: Government

Apr 30 2014
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Economy, Government, Politics

Pulling New Brunswick back from the brink

 

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Conspicuous by its almost complete absence from the agonizing ruminations over New Brunswick’s perilous fiscal situation has been any suggestion of a real solution. 

No one in government, it seems, has wanted to poke the 800-pound gorilla that is the electorate for fear of getting squashed en route to the ballot box.

That is, of course, a politician’s prerogative: to hand-ring with the best of them, pledge to swallow the bitter pills and persevere for the sake of all our children, only to turn around and waste millions of dollars on doomed schemes in the name of economic development, if not calculated self-aggrandizement.  

Economists and academics are at somewhat greater liberty to tell it like it is without concern for public reprisals.

Indeed, Donald Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the Universite de Moncton has made the province’s $12-billion debt, $500-million deficit and public-spending crisis key features of his public commentary, almost delighting (if that is the word) in jabbing voters for their refusal (or unwillingness) to reconcile their expectations of government programs with the reality of their province’s circumstances.   

Now, his colleague, Richard Saillant, the Director General of the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy and Public Administration at UdeM, has produced a tight book of 150 pages, or so, provocatively entitled, Over the Cliff? Acting Now to Avoid New Brunswick’s Bankruptcy.

Dr. Savoie is right when he enthuses in the preface that the author, who is also a former federal public servant, “has done New Brunswickers a great service.” In fact, what his dissertation contains is precisely that which has been missing since the discussion began: a solution, or, at least a credible stab at one with enough detail to both warrant and fuel serious debate. 

Be warned, however; Mr. Saillant’s fixes are far from easy, and he pulls no punches in describing them or the conditions that make them necessary.

“For several decades, New Brunswick’s economy has surfed on a rising tide of labour force growth, fueled by the baby boom generation and the steady, largely successful march of women towards equal participation in the workforce,” he writes. “The tide is now receding, dragging down the economy with it. A new Age of Diminished Expectations is upon us.”

Most sobering, perhaps, is his message about public priorities. While he congratulates the Alward government’s success, since 2010, in holding program spending growth to less than one per cent, he insists that the austerity can’t last “while maintaining today’s levels of public services, particularly in the health care sector.”

Indeed, “if the government does not raise taxes further and if it maintains the same public spending patterns as it did on average over the past quarter century,” by 2035-36 New Brunswick can expect to run an annual deficit of $5.5 billion on a long-term debt of $62.3 billion and a whopping debt-to-GDP ratio of 172 per cent. Not that things would likely get that far: “Credit-rating agencies would most likely pull the plug long before this happens.”

As for the solution, Mr. Saillant’s cold-eyed approach involves cutting down “baseline program spending growth every year by at least one-third of the previous year’s deficit from 2014-15 to 2029-30. Starting in 2030-31, this proportion is reduced to one-sixth.”

At the same time, he writes, “The government increases taxes and other revenues above their baseline growth by at least one-third of the previous year’s deficit from 2014-15 to 2029-30.” Again, “starting in 2030-31, this proportion is reduced to one-sixth.”

In the end, this strategy would effectively stabilize the province’s accounts. The annual deficit would fluctuate between $100-500 million. The net debt would peak in 2035-36 at about $17 billion.” 

It’s not, perhaps, the most favorable scenario (we weren’t smart enough, early enough in our collective unravelling to now expect a better result), but it’s the best we can do given our current demographic and economic challenges. And, realistically, even this approach is fraught with all the usual political perils.

But, as Mr. Saillant correctly observes, we voters “need to stop rewarding politicians who make lofty promises without explaining where the money will come from.”

 

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Apr 24 2014
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Economy, Employment, Government

Ottawa’s penny-pinching pound-foolishness

 

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For a government that purports to hold the interests of hard-working, middle-class folks close to heart, Harpertown sure has a funny way of showing it. 

Unless, of course, by showing it, our estimable representatives in Ottawa mean to produce precisely nothing to show for the $4.6 million they recently flushed down the public’s drain.   

That was the tidy sum Statistics Canada spent in 2012 asking 25,000 employers across the country about such timely matters as the workplace skills gap – surveys that now sit on a shelf, unanalyzed and unpublished, because the money’s run out to complete the job. 

Not for nothing, but no less a formidable parliamentarian than Employment Minister Jason Kenney has framed skills shortages and mismatches as one of the most important issues in the nation’s recent history. Indeed, in a speech to the Economic Club of Canada last fall, he was adamant and unequivocal. 

“As the head of Canada’s economic union, the federal government plays a critical role in creating the conditions for strong private sector job creation to position our country for success in an increasingly competitive global economy,” he declared. 

“What I’m going to do is to share with you my take on what many agree is the biggest challenge facing our economy. I’m going to talk about how we can tackle skill shortages and skill mismatches, turning them into good jobs for Canadians and greater prosperity for the long term because I think my number one priority is to address this paradox of too many Canadians without jobs in an economy that has too many jobs without skilled workers.”

Of course, to do this, one needs an arsenal of good, accurate information. Or, does one?

Thanks to some intrepid reporting by the Globe and Mail this week, we now know that the StatsCan data, which was collected at the behest of Employment and Social Development Canada, “has sat idle for two years due to lack of funding to make it public. . .StatsCan collected the surveys over the first three months of 2012, but the funding ended there, before the data could be analyzed.”

In the wake of a $30 million budget cut to the numbers-crunching Agency’s budget over the past 24 months, it’s hard to avoid a creepy sensation of deja vu.  

In 2010, 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 statisticians, Munir Sheikh and Phil Cross, actually resigned their posts 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 last summer, 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, “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).”

Apparently, we’ve devolved from worthless survey data to non-existent survey data – or, at least, unexamined and, therefore, worse than worthless if only because we’ve still had to pay the bill for its compilation.

When will this government get it through its institutional head that to speak with any degree of authority about anything, one must first have facts and figures – evidence – at one’s disposal? 

That’s what truly concerns hard-working, middle-class Canadians about their elected officials and the policies they pursue in the interests they purport to hold dear.

 

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Apr 22 2014
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Government, Society

Putting the true profit motive back into government

 

At some point during their long campaign to regain the relevance they once enjoyed in western society, progressive liberals of the social-democratic mien finally wised-up to the fact that filthy lucre, not moral suasion, makes the world go round.

Specifically, unless they can link improvements in living standards, literacy and child care to actual wealth creation, they might as well go home and write folk songs for all the influence they’ll wield.

The money principle has been the genius of the counter-counter-culture that began with the reign of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, continued under the “everything goes” administration of Bill Clinton, persisted during the corporatist eras of the daddy-son Bush tag-team of George and Georgie W. It now languishes in Barack Obama’s uncertain hands. 

The fundamental idea was, and is, that Government is, at best, a necessary evil. Most of the time it’s just evil by nature – wasteful, tyrannical, ineffective. 

The “market” was, and is, mankind’s true salvation. Individuals, properly motivated through low taxation, will solve their own problems.

In this conception of reality, welfare is for weaklings, schools are for learnin’ the three Rs and, higher education is for snooty elites unless it leads to a job at a billion-dollar tech firm in Silicon Valley.

Or, as the late Margaret Thatcher once opined, “We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state.”

Lately, though, that notion has been turning on its head.

Andre Picard, the Globe and Mail’s award-winning public health reporter, recently quoted from a study underwritten by the Mental Health Commission of Canada. The findings were startling.

“For every $1 spent providing housing and support for a homeless person with sever mental illness, $2.17 in savings are reaped because they spend less time in hospital, in prison and in shelters,” Mr. Picard reported earlier this month.

“People who are severely mentally ill and chronically homeless use a lot of services – an average of $225,000 a year, according to research. Providing housing and support is costly too – an average of $19,582 per person. But the avoided costs are much greater, $42,536 on average, because those who are housed are put in hospital less often, make fewer ER visits and do not use shelters as often. . .For people with less severe mental illness and lesser needs, 96 cents is saves for every additional $1 spent on housing.”

The results suggest that, contrary to the opinions of nanny-state decriers, Government’s obligations to provide safe, reliable housing to the erstwhile homeless is not only moral – it’s also financial, as the investment yields an enviable return for all taxpayers.

Apparently, that’s something even a Harperite can get behind. 

“We can do more – not just manage homelessness, but eliminate it altogether,” Candice Bergen, federal minister of social development, said at the study’s unveiling in Ottawa on April 8. “I’m realistic. I know there will always be people who will be homeless and who will need help. But most people can recover, they can get back on their feet.”

Lately, the same line of reasoning has been leaking from commentaries by the unlikeliest sources: economists. 

When TD Bank Group’s Craig Alexander is not talking about the dollars-and-cents benefits of structured, universally accessible early childhood education, he’s pointing out the enormous costs to society of structural, endemic illiteracy.

Halting it, he recently told a business crowd in Saint John, “raises your income, which ends up creating a better standard of living. You invest in people. You improve their skills. You give them the ability to be much more productive. It’s good for business.”

It’s also good for the state – which, for all practical purposes, means all of us.

 

 

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Apr 11 2014
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Economy, Government, Politics

No need to gild the finance minister’s good record

 

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They came not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. Boy, did they ever. 

Former federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s passing on Thursday – at 64, reportedly from a heart attack – dominated the front page of the Globe and Mail’s Friday edition. In fact, “dominated” might not be the right word; utterly blanketed would be a more accurate description. 

Apart from an ad announcing Toyota’s “red tag” days, nothing else appeared Page-One-worthy for “Canada’s National Newspaper”. 

Our “guiding force” was gone; the man who “shaped the Conservative Party, the nation and the world’s response to the Great Recession” was no more, tragically cut down in the late-middle-age of his life. It took eight reporters and editorialists to say so.

Political Affairs Correspondent John Ibbitson’s walk down memory lane was almost affecting: “In politics, you do what you gotta do. . .At the end he (Flaherty) was pretty happy with his record. . .But then, he was a pretty happy guy. Back when we were  both at Queen’s Park, he’d drop by the press lounge every now and then late on a Friday afternoon to mooch a beer and find out what the boys and girls were saying. He always greeted you with that impish grin, trolling for gossip, though he seldom offered up any of his own.”

At the back of the paper’s front section, the lead editorial continued the eulogy: “Goodbye to the little giant. . .Mr. Flaherty was a giant in the Harper cabinet, and not just because he ran the department whose control of the purse strings makes it, to some extent, the ministry of everything. He was one of the few Harper ministers who acted with considerable independent authority.”

Indeed, it’s difficult, even impossible, to recall another Canadian public official of Flaherty’s metier accorded such a fulsome tribute as this. Pierre Trudeau, Tommy Douglas, Jack Layton, perhaps; still, they were all leaders of national parties and political movements. They weren’t finance ministers.

But, of course, therein lies the answer. 

One of the great foundational assumptions of the post-recession era – especially by the Ontario-centric national press gallery – is that Mr. Flaherty’s foresight and steady hand prevented the country’s Toronto-based financial institutions from circling the drain along with all the others in the wild, wild west during the financial collapse of ’08. For many media mavens, that “fact”, alone, makes the former finance minister’s track record a far more compelling story to tell than even the prime minister’s.   

Another key supposition of the modern age is that Mr. Flaherty’s fiscal stimulus program (Economic Action Plan) – all tallied, about $150 billion – was singularly responsible for preventing the economy from crashing and burning, given the private lending community’s terror of bad debt during the recession. Again, this “fact” has served the frequent press portrayals of the “little giant’s” rock-star status both at home and abroad.

There’s truth in both claims: Mr. Flaherty was a competent steward of the economy in tough times; had he been an inflexible ideologue with a fetish for balancing the nation’s accounts in a zero-growth environment, the road to recovery would have been much rockier than it was. 

But the real secret behind Canada’s relatively robust financial performance during the era of diminishing expectations – at least compared with those of the United Sates, and much of continental Europe – was, and is, its responsible and well-regulated banking system and monetary traditions. 

Mr. Flaherty deserves plaudits for not messing with these (the way former U.S. President Bill Clinton disastrously did with his nation’s laws when he repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that had, for 66 years, successfully separated commercial from investment banking). But he doesn’t deserve credit for engineering a recovery with a system he merely inherited. 

Neither does he warrant much praise for using the Economic Action Plan creatively and to truly productive effect by making strategic investments in crucial infrastructure, higher education and training, advanced technology commercialization, and work-based poverty reduction programs. To have done so would have invited internecine warfare in his own party. 

Mr. Flaherty should be remembered in public circles as a bright, decent, effective, and tough cabinet minister. He was also that rarest of birds in the Harper government: he could both tell and take a joke. 

But he was not Caesar, and he never sought that company. 

Perhaps, that’s one reason he left Parliament a month ago: Too many little emperors running about, taking credit where credit is, most certainly, not due.

 

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Mar 31 2014
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Government, Politics

Who vouches for real democratic reform?

 

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You have to hand it to him. When faced with utter, public repudiation the likes of which might send more seasoned political warriors running for cover, young Pierre Poilevre merely restocks his rhetorical ordnance and grins for the newsreel.

For more than a month, Canada’s minister for state for democratic reform (age 34, in case anyone is counting) has been thumping tables, insisting that the nation’s electoral system is grievously flawed and, so, requires an immediate and wholesale fix. He has even taken to penning editorials for major newspapers to ram his points home to “elites” about whose opinions he does not ordinarily care.

“Many of the government’s critics have reacted with predictable hyperbole to the Fair Elections Act. (Bill C-23, now in committee),” he wrote in a piece for The Globe and Mail last week. “Yet the bill is common sense. . .The bill requires voters to choose from 39 pieces of acceptable identification to prove identity and residence. Photo ID will not be required, but simply having someone vouch for a voter’s identity – without so much as a utility bill to back it up – will no longer suffice.”

To reinforce his arguments, Mr. Poilevre has relied heavily on the work of Harry Neufeld, the author of Elections Canada’s compliance report on the 2011 ballot. Quoting liberally from the report, the junior minister wrote: “‘Errors that involve a failure to properly administer these procedures are serious. The courts refer to such as irregularities which can result in votes being declared invalid,’ it reads on Page 5.” 

Moving on, chip appropriately balanced on shoulder, Mr. Poilevre, taunts, “If you don’t like that, try this, on Page 14. . .‘Too frequently, the errors are so serious that the courts would judge them to be irregularities that violate the legal provisions that establish an elector’s entitlement to vote.’ Further, Mr. Neufeld noted that the sorts of vouching errors that occurred in the riding of Etobicoke Centre ‘could contribute to a court overturning an election’.” 

The problem is that Mr. Neufeld, himself, isn’t buying anything Mr. Poilevre is selling and really wishes the young fellow would stop quoting him “selectively”. Even more damning, he told reporters following a parliamentary committee meeting last week that Bill C-23 should be either amended or killed outright, because “it appears like they’re (government) trying to tilt the playing field in one direction. . .theirs. It makes me wonder whether this process is really being administered in a completely neutral way.”

And what say you, Mr. Poilevre to this rather unequivocal rejection of your noble scheme by the very man on whose findings you base your entire case for reform? 

“Mr. Neufeld is entitled to author recommendations, he is not entitled to author he law,” the minister rejoined last week. “That (the law) is left to parliamentarians. And at no time did I ever claim to agree with his recommendations. I don’t agree with them, and that’s why they are not in the bill.”

Apparently, two public officials, like two physicians, can agree on a diagnosis; just not the course of treatment. This, of course, assumes that the two are equally qualified. In this case, however, they are not. Worse, one is carrying a gross weight of partisan baggage.

Mr. Neufeld is right to worry about the tens-of-thousands of people (possibly, as many as 500,000) the Fair Elections Act’s interdictions on vouching and voter registration cards will alienate from the democratic system. He’s also right to speculate about the minister’s motives for leaping to conclusions the evidence does not support.

According to a Globe story last week: “‘A large number of irregularities did occur, but there is no evidence whatsoever that any voters fraudulently misrepresented themselves in the vouching process,’ Mr. Neufeld said. The errors included mixing up the vouchee and voucher or failing to fill in the date, he said, adding of Mr. Poilievre: ‘I think he has been selectively reading and quoting from my report.’”

Of course he has. That’s what a loyal government member does. And the thicker his skin, the better the troops perform in the trenches where truth and ideology fight the eternal battle for supremacy. 

 

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Mar 27 2014
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Government, Politics

Canadians chime in on ‘unfair’ Elections Act

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Those habitues of the Ivory Tower who have, from time to time, harboured serious misgivings about the average Canadian’s commitment to democracy in this country need worry no longer.

Thanks to his Fair Elections Act – which purports to reduce the risk of voter fraud by eliminating “vouching” (in which a voter vouches for another if the latter lacks sufficient ID) and rewriting much of the rulebook to render Elections Canada more accountable, but also less independent – Pierre Poilievre, the federal government’s Minister of State for Democratic Reform, has done more in one year to light a fire under his fellow citizens’ butts than an invading army could in 10.

Having passed its second reading, Bill C-23 (officially saddled with the cumbersome descriptor, “An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and other Acts and to make consequential amendments to certain Acts”) represents Mr. Poilievre’s earnest effort to fix what he and his political masters perceive is a seriously flawed system.

The problem is, the more time one spends examining the substance of the proposed legislation, the less one tends to agree with its sponsors and proponents. The most contentious issue is the attack on vouching, which would very likely undermine the democratic rights of First Nations citizens, students in transition and residents of old-folks homes, among others.

In fact, according to an Angus Reid Global poll last month, “Canadian support for changes to the Elections Act proposed by the Harper government is highest among those who aren’t aware of the issue. Among those who are familiar with the contents of the Fair Elections Act, 44 per cent say they support it and 56 per cent are opposed. However, among those who are only aware of the issue in passing or who are just not paying attention, that support rises to 53 per cent, while 47 per cent say they’re opposed.”

How this breaks down along party lines is instructive, of not especially unexpected. “When it comes to awareness and political affiliation,” the pollster reports, “awareness is highest among past Liberal and NDP voters (25 per cent and 24 per cent respectively) followed by past Conservative voters (18 per cent).”

Meanwhile, the survey indicates that Canadians, in general, are fed up with the Conservative government’s fetishistic tinkering with the cogs and gears of a system that is not, essentially, broken. Angus Reid Global interprets its poll results bluntly: “Canadians do not trust the motives of the Conservative government in introducing the proposed legislation, and do not feel the Harper government’s impact on the democratic process has been positive.”

Not that Mr. Poilievre hasn’t done his level best to knock some sense into our recalcitrant noodles. In an opinion piece for The Globe and Mail earlier this week, he decried his critics’ “hyperbolic” reaction to the Bill, which, he insists is “common sense. “Canadians instinctively understand that these changes are reasonable and fair. That is why they have not shared the critics’ hysteria.”

Again, though, that’s not entirely accurate.

Yes, a group of international scholars have grabbed headlines by claiming, in an open letter to national media, that “the governing party in Canada has proposed a set of wide-ranging changes, which if enacted, would. . .undermine the integrity of the Canadian electoral process.”

And, yes, an assemblage of Canadian academics recently echoed these sentiments when they publicly stated, “Beyond our specific concerns about the Bill’s provisions, we are alarmed at the lack of due process in drafting the Bill and in rushing it through Parliament.”

But, increasingly, what fills the letters and comment pages of print and online versions of major media are the grumblings of the the hoi polloi, i.e., the Great Unwashed. i.e., you and me.

“The Harper government’s latest assault on democratic ideals and practices with its proposed Fair Elections Act, while roundly criticized, is at least consistent in its semantic tactics with earlier attacks, notably in the 2006 Federal Accountability Act,” writes Neil Burk of Nepean, Ontario. “As the fair Elections Act has nothing to do with fairness principles, the Accountability Act is unaccountably silent on accountability principles.”

His screed appeared in the Globe’s letters section on one of two days this week during which the newspaper published nine archly critical, and well-written, letters from readers.

No, no, all you professor of political science, fear not.

From the recent evidence you may deduce that the condition of democracy in Canada is just fine, after all, thank you very much.

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Mar 25 2014
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Government, Idiocracy, Politics

And now for something completely different: good news for New Brunswick. . .sort of

 

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New Brunswick may be drowning in debt. In fact, practitioners of the wooly science of fiscal forensics may have already pronounced this province dead on arrival. But don’t we just do a bang-up job reporting our woes to the rest of the world?

The C.D. Howe Institute says we deserve a little praise for a change. Specifically, Colin Busby of The C.D. Howe Institute tells the Saint John Telegraph-Journal that, according to his annual study on government spending overruns in Canada (also known as “The Pinocchio Report”), this province does “reasonably well” predicting its financial condition. We are, in a phrase, “middle of the road”, which is better than road kill, I suppose.

What’s more, we’re brutally honest with ourselves and the rest of the country about the hobo clothes we’re forced to wear. “New Brunswick is one of the jurisdictions where you can clearly find comparable numbers,” Mr. Busby says. “You simply find what the budget promises were and then find the numbers in the public accounts and compare them. That’s a positive story for New Brunswick.”

Still, he adds, “When it comes to spending overruns and the ability to hit budget targets, either overshooting or undershooting (New Brunswick) is not in the range of Ontario and the federal government who have done a significantly better job in terms of holding to what they promised in their spring budgets.”

Here’s how the numbers shake out: Over the past 10 years, cumulative overruns, expressed as fractions of 2013/14 budgeted spending, were highest in Saskatchewan (36 per cent), Alberta (26 per cent) and Manitoba (22 per cent), lowest in Canada, overall (one per cent), Ontario (five per cent) and Nova Scotia (seven per cent).

New Brunswick overspent by $1.2 billion over the past decade, which is bad. On the other hand, averaged out over the period, we came in less than 15 per cent off our annual targeted goals, which is good. Sort of.

For a finance minister, there is, I’m guessing, a certain comfort in knowing, with any degree of accuracy, just how badly off your jurisdiction is in the scheme of things. It’s a little like being sentenced to an indeterminate jail term. At least you know you have a cot; let’s just hope your bunk buddies in the bond market aren’t complete psychos.

But, in the larger context, how instructive or useful are these sort of statistical parlour games?

That New Brunswick manages to “present well” is vastly less important than its moribund economy, the structural instability of which makes accurate budget forecasting a near impossibility (a fact which suggests that the province’s reasonably fair reporting record is more a function of good luck than good prognostication).

Meanwhile, the Conference Board of Canada forecasts continued stormy economic weather for the province. “Prospects for New Brunswick’s economy will remain dim for at least one more year,” it said in its revised winter outlook earlier this month. “Cuts in the potash industry, and the closing of the Maple Leaf Food plant in Moncton, will limit economic growth to 0.8 per cent in 2014.”

How will this affect the next round of budget promises?

An even more intriguing question is whether a fully functioning shale gas industry, which should make us all filthy rich, will also make our elected officials filthy liars, though through no fault of their own.

The C.D. Howe Report notes the paradox common to provinces rich in natural resources: Their budgets are even farther from target than are those of patently poor provinces, such as New Brunswick. Economic instability, it seems, cuts both ways.

“Jurisdictions that are more dependent on natural resources showed sizable positive revenue biases: Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and labrador and Alberta all had biases of eight to 10 per cent,” the Institute noted. The natural-resource dependent jurisdictions that more affected by commodity-price swings also had low accuracy scores.”

So, then, the more money a jurisdiction has sloshing around in oil and gas wells, the less veracious are its budget forecasts.

What a delicious irony.

Still, if I had to choose, I’d rather the province I call home be recognized for the power of its industry, than the accuracy of its numbers-crunchers.

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Mar 19 2014
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Government, Politics

Will it be ‘icons and idols’ or ‘flesh and blood’ that we honour?

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There’s nothing wrong with erecting statues to commemorate soldiers killed in battle. In fact, many people think that a 100-foot-tall monument called “Mother Canada”, her arms  spread wide, her gaze fixed upon the eastern horizon, plunked smack-dab in the middle of Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail at one of it finest promontories, is a terrific idea.

The chances are, of course, that those folks don’t live anywhere near the site for the planned memorial, a private-sector venture driven out of Toronto, which has already received Parks Canada approval and the enthusiastic endorsement of at least two federal cabinet ministers.

In fact, if those folks did live in or around the Green Cove cliff area of Cape Breton, they might wonder, as does Gordon Rideout, president of the Royal Canadian Legion branch in nearby Ingonish, if anyone has checked a map.

It’s not that he thinks the statue, itself, is a bad idea. It’s just that, he told the CBC in January, it’ll be in the wrong place.

“You’re in the middle of probably one of the most beautiful national parks in the country,” he said. “What’s going to happen here. . .is that the Cabot Trail. . .will have to be rerouted. There’s going to be an information centre there. There has to be, of course, washroom facilities and everything else put in there. And it’s just going to spoil one of the most overlooked places on the trail. . .I just don’t want to see a major reconstruction of that area. It’s going to turn it into a small Disney World.”

South Harbour resident Claudia Gahlinger goes farther. Though she’s all for remembering the sacrifices of Canada’s servicemen and women, she can’t help note the irony swirling about the project.

“We all know that we’ll be fined if we’re caught taking even a stick or stone from the park,” she told the CBC. “Yet this private foundation is going to be allowed to pave over, rearrange and, in effect, own an entire hectare.”

The foundation to which she refers is the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation, a charity established and run by Toronto business executive Tony Trigiani who got the idea while traveling through Canadian war memorials in Italy recently. “It’s going to be magnificent,” he told the Toronto Star late last year. “The views from the Cabot Trail are going to be spectacular.”

Indeed, Mr. Trigiani, they are already, and your massive, well-meant intention  – fully realized in granite or marble or limestone, or whatever they build statues out of these days – is not going to change the appearance of the North Atlantic ocean from the top of that cliff.

But it may help to speed unsettling changes that are already underway in the way we order our public priorities over the next few years.

Both Leona Aglukkaq, the federal minister responsible for Parks Canada, and Peter MacKay, Minister of Justice, have boarded Mr. Trigiani’s bandwagon, which is scheduled to arrive on the East Coast, toting a $30-million building fund, sometime in the next two years, or so.

Their support has, in no small measure, to do with the fact that neither they, nor any of their other colleagues in cabinet, will have to pay for it.

But more than this, the project comes at a time when the federal government’s devotion to military commemorations of every variety – icons and idols – seems to be achieving a sort of zenith that is perilously close to eclipsing the needs of military personnel – flesh and blood – who have not fallen, but have, rather, survived to endure the awful physical and emotional ramifications of their living sacrifices.

“The key message. . .is that improvements are required to specific New Veterans Charter programs to help Veterans and their families successfully transition to civilian life,” Veterans Ombudsman Guy Parent stipulated in a blunt and wide-ranging report last year. “The most urgent shortcomings to address are those that affect the economic financial support provided to Veterans, especially totally and permanently incapacitated veterans who are vulnerable financially. It is simply not acceptable to let veterans who have sacrificed the most for their country – those who are totally and permanently incapacitated – live their lives with unmet financial needs.”

To be sure, statues are convincing and enduring ways to honour those who have fought and died in wars.

As for what to do with the living, starting a decent conversation usually avoids tragic misunderstandings on this earthly coil.

The feds might want to ask the bemused residents of Cape Breton about that.

Then again, statues don’t talk back.

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Mar 17 2014
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Business, Economy, Government

A two-step made for New Brunswick’s forests

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The twinned announcements last week of a new provincial forestry strategy and a massive series of plant upgrades at J.D. Irving (JDI) Limited’s flagship pulp mill is a textbook example of how government and industry should execute a minuet – with slow, metered steps calibrated to the economic rhythm of the times.

Of course, the dance Premier David Alward’s Progressive Conservatives and JDI are presently performing to generally enthusiastic and receptive audiences – who perceive the dawn of a new day for, arguably, the province’s most important commercial sector – is not without its critics.

Some conservationists in the province are outraged that the Department of Natural Resources’ new strategy boosts the size of the total allowable softwood harvest on Crown land to four million cubic feet a year (about a 20 per cent increase from the current allocation).

“I’m shocked,” Graham Forbes, a forestry professor at the University of New Brunswick, told the CBC last week following the government announcement. “The reduction of the amount of protected land to 23 per cent (from 28 per cent) is not what we could call sustainable forest management. It’s an abject fail. It’s not sustainable.”

Even some industry players have cast a slightly jaundiced eye over the plan.

“We are guardedly optimistic,” Mike O’Blenis, vice-president of the New Brunswick Forest Products Association, told the Telegraph-Journal last week. He had been hoping – vainly, it’s now clear – for an increase in the hardwood allocation. Still, he said, “the devil is in the details. . .There is a lot of detail that has to be worked through with government and with stakeholders to put this plan into place and it is going to take some time for all that detail to come out.”

Still, what’s clear is that JDI’s announced $450-million modernization program (part of a bigger $513-million investment program at the company) for its west Saint John pulp mill will crate hundreds of new and badly needed jobs in the province over the next two years.

What’s also indisputable is that the upgrades (all of them privately financed) are tied directly to the provincial government’s decision to increase the amount of wood available to commercial harvesting. This pledge, according to Jim Irving, co-CEO of JDI, is crucial because, as he said at the announcement, “our ability to to invest and grow jobs depends on the certainty of the competitive wood supply. . .Premier, you’ve got our commitment, and I can tell you the JDI team will deliver.”

This is no mean feat at a time when governments across the western world appear either unable or unwilling to leverage the public resources they control to generate durable, measurable and responsible regional industrial benefits for everyone.

According to the New Brunswick Forest Products Association’s web site, “forestry has been the cornerstone of the New Brunswick economy for decades. More than 20,000 families are supported by the. . .sector. With more than 11,600 people directly working in forestry related jobs, our people produce 30 per cent of total manufacturing output (in) the province.”

Other facts, courtesy of the Association, include the $1 billion in salaries forest sector employees earned in 2010. Moreover, “as of 2010, the sector directly contributed just over five percent to the provincial GDP. At 5.1 per cent, that makes the forest products industry in New Brunswick more important to the provincial economy than in all other provinces in Canada. Total direct GDP in 2010 for the forest products sector was an estimated $1.4 billion in current dollars. The industry has significant indirect GDP multipliers of between 0.5 and more than 1.0 depending on the area of activity. Including direct and indirect effects, the GDP in 2010 was between $2.2 billion and $2.5 billion.”

And yet, for all of this, the sector has endured exceptionally tough years. Over the past decade, the number of milling operations in the province has dropped by 60 per cent. Since 2008, the number of jobs have dropped by 50 per cent.

Apart from the predictable criticisms about the relationships between governments and industries – that they either go too far or not far enough – last week’s twinned announcements demonstrates that in New Brunswick, of all places, government and industry can face the music together as productive dance partners.

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Feb 21 2014
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Government, Politics

Waiting for the end times in an Ottawa strip club

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Tomorrow is an auspicious day on the calendar for humanity, even for denizens of Fat City (a.k.a. Ottawa), for February 22nd is when the world literally goes straight to hell.

Or as the Daily Mail reports, “The wolf Fenrir is predicted to break out of his prison, the snake Jormungand will rise out of the sea and the dragon of the underworld will resurface on Earth to face the dead heroes of Valhalla – who, of course, have descended from heaven to fight them.”

Well, after all, why not? The Mayan apocalypse proved to be a big fat nothing last year, and we’re certainly overdue. Here, according to RationalWiki.org are a few other calamities, predicted but not (yet) delivered:

In March 2003, U.S. president George W. Bush “claimed that Operation Iraqi Freedom was necessary ‘to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.’ (Plan no longer in progress.)”

In 2008, American vice-presidential candidate Sarah “Mama Grizzly” Palin said she believed belong to the “Final Generation” who will “see the End Times during her lifetime. Thankfully, over 9 million Americans disagreed.”

That same year, the Large Hadron Collidor was supposed to produce a black hole that would swallow the planet in one gulp. Yeah. . .still waiting.

Under the circumstances, then, we might give the Vikings a crack at starting the world over. Says the Mail, “Ragnarok is a series of events including the final predicted battle that results in the death of a number of major gods, the occurrence of various natural disasters and the subsequent submersion of the world in water.”

In fact, “legend has it the sound of the horn will call the sons of the god Odin and the heroes to the battlefield, before Odin and other ‘creator gods’ will be killed by Fenrir.”

Spookily, the Norse “believe the Ragnarok is preceded by the ‘winter of winters’, where three freezing winters would follow each other with no summers in between.” Meanwhile, “all morality would disappear and fights would break out all over the world, signaling the beginning of the end.”

Now, that’s sounding almost familiar, and for reasons I can’t quite quantify, the Barefax Gentlemen’s Club suddenly springs to mind.

That’s the Ottawa nudie bar and strip joint where suspended Canadian Senator Patrick Brazeau now works as a day manager. Carmelina Bentivoglio, the daughter of the establishment’s owner, told the Toronto Star that the former Conservative appointee to the Upper Chamber aced his job interview a couple of weeks ago and now he’ll be spending his time,“scheduling, hiring, firing, inventory – just like any other job.”

Well, not quite like any other job. It’s nothing like the job he had at the Senate before he was suspended in November for allegedly bilking taxpayers for expenses to which he was not entitled. Even before his ouster, Red Chamber officials had dunned him nearly $50,000 to recover at least some of his seemingly ill-gotten booty.

Then came the cops who, earlier this month, charged both Mr. Brazeau and his former senatorial colleague Mac Harb with fraud and breach of trust. According to an item in the Star, “The Mounties allege that Brazeau fraudulently claimed his father’s home in Maniwaki, Que., as his primary residence, although he was rarely seen there and lived primarily just across the river from Ottawa in Gatineau, Que.”

The Star also reported that media scuttlebutt indicates that “Brazeau and his estranged wife have been missing mortgage and loan payments and may now face losing their house in Gatineau. . .The disgraced senator is also facing charges of assault and sexual assault as a result of an incident last February.”

Still, apparently he’s not letting any that get him down. A nice piece by veteran CBC political correspondent Rosemary Barton, posted to Mother Corp.’s website, finds the disgraced politico in a philosophical frame of mind.

“Brazeau says he’s doing OK,” she writes. “His health is better, he’s learning the ropes on his second day. He doesn’t seem thrilled with his new job, but neither is he embarrassed. ‘It is what it is,’ Brazeau says, ‘I’ve got four mouths to feed,’ referring to his children. I ask how people are treating him so far. ‘Better than at my old job,’ he quips.”

Yes, indeed. Just another wintry day in Fat City before the world finally goes straight to hell.

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