Category Archives: Government

Feb 14 2014
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Business, Economy, Government

Inequities in the do-nothing budget of 2014

 

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For proof that George Orwell was right, look no further than the 2014 federal budget. There, indeed, all men are created equal, though some clearly appear to be more equal than others.

As, increasingly, modern legislatures confer “personhood” on multinational corporations, we may reasonably consider car and truck makers direct, if not actual flesh and blood, beneficiaries of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s munificence. How else would you characterize the $500-million top-up to the Automative Innovation Fund, created in 2008, the last time Chrysler and General Motors came poor-mouthing to Ottawa, caps in hand?

“The automotive industry is among Canada’s leading employers and exporters and is a key contributor to our economy,” the budget sonorously declared. “The sector also directly employs more than 115,000 Canadians in Southern Ontario and across Canada from automotive assembly to parts production.”

Never mind that successive Federal and Ontario governments have had to repeatedly bribe the major manufacturers into keeping their operations in Canada more or less intact. Or should we forget the $3 billion in loans and “non-repayable contributions” both levels of government arranged for the carmakers, courtesy of taxpayers, in 2009?

Back then, the companies complained bitterly about the financial meltdown and the great vanishing act of ready credit. But that was a smokescreen, and not a very thick one. North American automakers, then and now, wouldn’t know good productivity tools if they arrived at their front doors in a fleet of Nissan Sentras.

And, still, their temerity is breathtaking.

Apparently, an additional five-hundred-billion bucks might not be enough to satisfy the ravenous appetite some corporations have for found money. As the Globe and Mail reported this week. “Chrysler Group LLC is seeking a contribution of at least $700 million from the federal and Ontario governments in high-stakes negotiations about the future of its Canadian operation.”

Naturally, that’s a threat – the standing operating procedure of businesses that have grown too big and self-important to fail. They strap governments over barrels because, while they may enjoy legal status as people, they’re the sort of people we typically recognize as sociopaths who have no expectation of ever growing consciences. If they can get away with something, they will.

Alas, twas ever thus and ever thus shall be.

Not so, perhaps, for some of the pricier talent – the genuine humans – who actually occupy the upper management ranks at the car companies. Mr. Flaherty now seems less committed than several of his Cabinet colleagues, to the absurdly wrong-headed and patently unfair income-splitting device for rich folks, for which the budget was overtly paving the way.

“I’m not sure that overall it benefits our society,” he said to his eternal credit this week. “It benefits some parts of the Canadian population a lot, and other parts of the Canadian population virtually not at all. . .I think income splitting needs a long-hard analytical look.”

In fact, it’s already had at least one. Back in 2011, the C. D. Howe Institute concluded, in a special commentary on the subject, “The gains would be highly concentrated among high-income one-earner couples: 40 per cent of total benefits would go to families with incomes above $125,000, and the maximum annual gain from federal splitting would exceed $6,400. The maximum gains from provincial splitting would range from zero in Alberta to $5,750 in Ontario.”

What’s more, the Institute said most households wouldn’t see a dime, while the annual cost to the national accounts would likely exceed $2.5 billion. In other words, “income splitting would fail to achieve its ostensible horizontal equity goal.”

That’s economic-speak for “not fair”.

Still, Mr. Flaherty’s deathbed conversion on the issue (he is widely rumored to be drafting his exit strategy from federal politics) is not likely to convince many of his confreres. The ghosts of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are far too comfortable haunting the Conservative corridors of Parliament Hill to brook any collective change of heart among the living.

For them, all men are not created equal.

They never have been and they never will be.

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Feb 05 2014
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Government

Countdown to ‘debt-a-geddon’ in New Brunswick

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New Brunswick’s debt clock counts down, by the millisecond, to eternity, tallying a number so vast it beggars comprehension.

Still, there it is on one of the Canadian Taxpayer Federation’s (CTF) websites. Now $11,551,675,188.79; then $11,551,675, 204.44. In a few minutes, it’ll roll over at $11,551,676,000.00 and the nauseating cycle will begin again.

Granted, the CTF is not what you might call a fun bunch. In fact, among all the deeply earnest interest groups and think tanks in Canada (and there are a lot of these taking up office space in charming cold-war-era, cinder-block edifices along the Ottawa-Gatineau corridor), it has always seemed, to me at least, the one most likely to suffer whatever passes in the institutional world for a nervous breakdown.

But sometimes Chicken Little is right; the sky really is falling. Certainly, the CTF’s online presence is the stuff of waking nightmares for the fiscally prudent.

According to the press release that accompanied the organization’s debt-clock launch this week, “In December 2013, the Department of Finance predicted the net debt of the Province would grow by $587.2 million. That means the debt is growing by $1.6 million every day, $67,031 per hour, $1,117 per minute or $18.62 every second.”

In fact, the amount the provincial government allocates annually to service the the debt (interest payments) exceeds the budgets of all but three ministerial departments. That’s a whopping $660 million down the drain each and every year till deadbeat-a-geddon arrives with its four court-appointed officers of the apocalypse: accountant, lawyer, trustee, and bailiff.

Of course, New Brunswick isn’t the only province of Canada that sets the CTF’s tongue clucking.

“The (CTF) released new documents obtained through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that reveal some materials purchased for the Bluenose were sold to the (Nova Scotia) government at a whopping 43 per cent mark-up,” the organization announced last month. “These big mark-ups are just the latest in a series of questionable uses of taxpayers’ money.”

Meanwhile, in Ontario, the CTF wants the provincial government to give serious thought to its myriad recommendations for producing “new revenues and savings of over $13 billion, more than enough to balance the budget in 2014. The recommendations also include a legislated debt-repayment schedule to force the government to pay down Ontario’s $272.8 billion provincial debt.”

Yet, of all the provinces, New Brunswick always seems to earn the CTF’s sharpest opprobrium. Is that because, of all the provinces, New Brunswick has, for the moment, the least going for it, economically and industrially, and the most difficulty bridling its public spending? “You can only borrow so much before you go broke,” the Federation’s Atlantic director Kevin Lacey is fond of saying.

That’s certainly correct. But it is government’s enormous borrowing powers – the ones they grant to themselves and redeem in markets all over the world – that is precisely the problem. Unlike people, private enterprises and institutions, they don’t easily go broke, a structural protection that, paradoxically, deepens the injury and prolongs the misery until, hey presto, one day you wake up and it’s Greece. Gee, now how’d that happen?

New Brunswick road back to fiscal health is hard, but clear.

On the expense side of the ledger, cut program spending wherever costly duplications and redundancies are found; consolidate essential services wherever possible; and shrink the size of the civil service and of government, itself.

On the revenue side, the options are far more limited. Still, robust commercial activity is the only durable source of legal swag for public coffers. To thrive, the private sector needs reliable infrastructure, a skilled and educated labour force, a comprehensible regulatory environment, and, naturally, a reasonable tax climate.

Oddly, enough, as New Brunswick Finance Minister Blaine Higgs struggles with his debt burden, his federal counterpart Jim Flaherty is merrily on his way to balancing the nation’s books, and then some.

In fact, he’s so confident he’s politely ignoring the International Monetary Fund’s advice to loosen up the purse strings and start investing in strategic initiatives that might make the Canadian economy more competitive for the good times that surely follow.

Thanks, but no thanks, fellas. In a year or two, we’ll be sitting on a surplus of two or three billion bucks.

And you know how vast, incomprehensible numbers blind us, here in Canada, to everything else, especially practical common sense.

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Jan 30 2014
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Government, Politics

How to build a just society in no easy lessons

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Unless we surrender to the increasingly strong suspicion that our North American democracies are shams – that the institutions we support to protect our rights and freedoms in Canada and the United States are hopelessly compromised by money and power – we must believe, somewhere in our souls, that the right men and women can still change the states of our respective unions for the better.

For me, and millions of others, one of those men was once Barack Obama, the 44th president of the stars and stripes. In fact, flickers of his former greatness were on display during his annual address earlier this week in Washington, D.C.

“What I believe unites the people of this nation,” he said, “regardless of race or region or party, young or old, rich or poor, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all – the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead.”

Candor, thy name was Barack:

“Let’s face it: that belief has suffered some serious blows. Over more than three decades, even before the Great Recession hit, massive shifts in technology and global competition had eliminated a lot of good, middle-class jobs, and weakened the economic foundations that families depend on.”

Meanwhile, he continued, “after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better.  But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by – let alone get ahead. And too many still aren’t working at all.”

Finally, he said, “our job is to reverse these trends. . .But what I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require Congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still  – and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Bully for him. Now, if we could only believe him. And not just him; if we could only believe every messenger of prosperity and ambassador of hope who comes along in a great while to lift the polity’s flagging spirit.

Still, if we really think about it we must concede that, ultimately, the

the failure is not in them, but in us. After all, if we don’t expect excellence in ourselves, how can we expect it in our elected officials or even recognize it when we see it?

What we do expect, of course, is voluminous: our appetite for material things to be sated; our thirst for comfort and ease to be slaked; our opinions to be revered; our attitudes to be certified; our privacy to be protected even as our personal lives are publicly acknowledged as utterly, absorbingly fascinating.

That’s us in the peanut galleries of the continent: John and Jane Q. Public both having and eating their cakes

We demand a clean environment, but not if it means leaving the car in the driveway once in a while.

We require good health and long life, but not if it means laying off the sugar and  taking a little exercise from time to time.

If successful politicians pander to us, it’s only because, despite growing joblessness and social inequities, we in the new west remain eminently, adorably pander-able. (So do the Europeans, though their triggers are different).

On the other, if we are are genuinely interested in improving the condition of our respective democracies then we should begin by admitting that we are addicted to the short-term habits of mind bequeathed to us by several generations of rampant consumerism and disposable values, fungible for cash in any money market.

Fair and just societies endure when their citizens take the long view and embrace  qualities and virtues common to most, if not always all: compassion, courage, honesty, intelligence, discipline, and even erudition.

In every election we designate certain people to reflect our values in the public square. But more than this, we select a specific culture of service to democracy. In this respect, the right men and women do change our systems of government, for better or worse, every day.

And they are us.

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Jan 29 2014
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Government, Politics

Running our democracy on auto-pilot

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On both sides of the 49th parallel, citizens pause, if only for a frigid winter’s moment, to reflect on the political bargains they’ve made and the consequences of disenchantment.

In the American Capital last night, President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union Address, a show the pundits unanimously panned in their previews.

This lame-duck Commander in Chief, they declared, has dropped the ball in practically every zone of the playing field. Now, even his once-ardent admirers have turned their backs on him.

What could he possibly say that would reduce the bitter partisan bickering and undo the gridlock in Congress?

In Ottawa on Monday, after one of the longest recesses in some time, Parliament reassembled just in time to receive the federal government’s 2014 budget. And oh, political observers clucked, what a deliberately dull, strategically boring, document that will be when the nation gets a look at on February 11, a month ahead of schedule.

But, then, what else would it be in the run-up to an election?

“It’s an opportunity to just get going early out of the gate and set the tone,” Michele Austin, a former Conservative operative and a top flack at Summa Strategies in Ottawa, told the Globe and Mail. “I’m not convinced that the Olympics has a lot to do with it (the budget’s early release). . .This is a bridge budget. It’s taking people to a surplus budget.”

Meanwhile, Kul Bhatia, an economist at Western, told the CBC, “The indications are that the fiscal situation is better than they’ve let it be known. This is based on some information that they have that is not in the public domain – that’s my hunch.”

Increasingly, we are told, the people we elect ostensibly to safeguard our system of government think of us as customers. That would make them used car salesmen and women, kicking the tires of democracy and pronouncing them sound.

The customer, of course, is never wrong, but sometimes he doesn’t read the fine print – the exceptions to the warranty, the nullifications to the contract we figuratively sign when we dare to vote.

Just like the pre-owned auto we drive off the lot, the government we get is often only just good enough. What qualities it lacks won’t bring it to a grinding halt. But neither will the absence of certain cherished virtues stave off a creeping sense of buyers’ remorse in the living rooms of the nation.

On this score, recent public opinion polls tell a convincing tale.

“Just 21 per cent of likely U.S. voters believe the federal government today has the consent of the governed.” That’s according to a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. “Sixty-three percent  do not believe the federal government has the consent of the governed today; 16 per cent per cent are not sure.”

Here in Canada, we’re not much happier with our elected lot. In a piece published online earlier this month entitled, “Democracy and the death of trust,” EKOS Research Associates founder Frank Graves declared, “The rise of mass education, along with more critical media and a more cynical pop culture, has produced a more aware and less trusting public – a shift which poses huge challenges to governments and democratic institutions.”

That may, indeed, be true. But it is also true that we, the unelected drivers of our democracy, must shoulder most of the blame, for it is we who routinely install public servants demonstrating only the profoundest gaps in imagination, only the most thorough absence of courage.

Do we limit ourselves and the well-being of our society by deliberately curbing our expectations of the political class?

What do we actually want? Is it a tax free bank account with the twice the allowable contribution level? Is it a topped-up child tax credit? Is it a national budget surplus of $4 billion?

Or is it better, more open-handed cooperation among political parties – and levels of government – on matters that actually resonate with all Canadians: education, health care, infrastructure?

In the end, all the truly hard decisions fall to us. That is our part of the bargain we keep for posterity.

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Dec 16 2013
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Government, Politics, Society

New Brunswick gets it right on drug plan

Maybe it, like health, will recover

Maybe it, like health, will recover

Three years ago, David Alward made catastrophic drug coverage one of the linchpins of his election campaign. The other was capping the Harmonized Sales Tax at 13 per cent. Thus began, perhaps, the premier’s complicated relationship with what economists term “inputs and outputs.”

Specifically, one actually needs to raise revenue before one increases spending or one tends to go broke pretty darn quickly.

Most householders in New Brunswick get this simple arithmetic. A $500-million annual deficit and a $11-billion long-term debt against the province’s accounts suggest that our elected lawmakers are not as perspicacious as the people they represent.

Still, every so often, a case can be made for a spending program in the absence of a new and ready source of revenue to cover its costs – especially when the administration of such a program will likely prevent the state’s extensive financial hemorrhaging in the future.

Indeed, such a case can be made for the Tory government’s comprehensive drug plan, announced last week, and its specific codicils for catastrophic prescription coverage. Apart from opposition Liberals in the legislature, most interested groups in the province seem sanguine about what they observe in the fine print, which splits the cost of the $50-million (per annum) plan almost evenly between consumers and the Province.

“We’re pleased to see this happening – it’s a moment in history for New Brunswick health care,” Anne McTiernan, CEO of the Canadian Cancer Society in New Brunswick, told the Telegraph-Journal last week. “It will make a huge difference on a go-forward basis for New Brunswickers. It will address both the financial barriers for people accessing important drugs.”

Added Barbara MacKinnon, president and CEO of the New Brunswick Lung Association, for the same piece: “This is an excellent plan. Although it is going to cost, it is really going to keep people out of the hospital. . .If you can get the right diagnosis, the right prescription drug plan, then you are not going to have a stroke.”

In fact, this plan is not likely to financially hobble anyone – not the province which is, arguably, already on skid row, or individuals whose premiums have been scaled to their incomes.

According to the Department of Health, “For individuals earning a gross income of $26,360 or less and families earning a gross income of $49,389 or less, the premium will be approximately $67 per month per adult ($800 per year). For individuals earning a gross income between $26,361 and $50,000 and families earning a gross income of between $49,390 and $75,000, the premium will be approximately $117 per month per adult ($1,400 per year). For individuals earning a gross income between $50,001 and $75,000 and families earning a gross income of between $75,001 and $100,000, the premium will be $133 per month per adult ($1,600 per year). For individuals earning a gross income of more than $75,001 and families earning a gross income of more than $100,001, the premium will be $167 per month per adult ($2,000 per year).”

Meanwhile, “Children 18 and younger will not pay premiums but a parent will have to be enrolled in the plan.  All plan members will be required to pay a 30-per-cent co-pay at the pharmacy up to $30 per prescription.”

There’s even a bone or two tossed to the approximately 80 per cent of New Brusnwickers who hold private drug coverage, to wit: “From May 1, 2014, to March 31, 2015, some New Brunswickers who have private drug plans but still incur high drug costs or need access to a drug covered under the new plan but not through their private plan may join the New Brunswick Drug Plan.”

After that, the province mandates that all private group drug plans “must be at least as comprehensive as the New Brunswick Drug Plan.” That means they must provide comparable coverage in terms of prescriptions and costs.

It has taken three years to craft a program that make sense. But, as Health Minister Ted Flemming points out, if it’s the right plan, it’s worth the wait.

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Dec 16 2013
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Business, Government

Canada Post’s long-running vanishing act

The edifice must fall, though this seems unfortunate given the size of the mailbox

The edifice must fall, though this seems unfortunate given the size of the mailbox

Canada Post and I have been playing this game of “now you see me, now you don’t” ever since a letter carrier lost his marbles some years back and emptied the contents of his bag – which included two rather significant items addressed to moi – into the Petitcodiac River before dematerializing, never again to be spied in these parts.

At least that’s how the story – authentic or apocryphal – goes.

Naturally, the guy’s fate became the subject of much speculation around the neighborhood. Some said he had headed west to run a roadside diner along Provincial Highway 63, just outside Fort McMurray. Others insisted he had signed aboard a fishing boat in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Whatever became of him, we agreed, it had to have been more agreeable than delivering the mail.

As for me, ever since his disappearance, I’ve taken care to scrutinize his successors, of which there have been many.

I usually start by commenting on the weather, and gauging the response.

If the carrier remarks, “Oh you bet it’s frigid, but winter doesn’t last forever,” I grin and return to my work.

If, on the other hand, he starts shaking and ranting about his dental plan, which doesn’t cover the cost of removing the microphones the NSA installed in his mouth, I retreat slowly and, when the coast is clear, dash out to rent a box at the local post office.

It is stunningly good to know that I will not be needing to perform this semi-regular ritual for much longer.

Citing rising costs and dwindling demand, Canada Post has announced that it is phasing out home delivery service in urban centers. By 2019, you and I will have to fetch our own letters, magazines, cheques, bills and summonses by trundling down to one of many neighborhood boxes, the type you see littering the landscape of suburbia.

And I say: That’s fine by me.

Unlike many of my fellow citizens – who, I am certain, will shortly flood this newspaper’s editorial offices with outraged screeds and mournful odes to loss – I do not possess a single, sentimental bone in my body when it comes to Canada Post.

Lest we forget, this is the organization that introduced “Postal Transformation”,   an initiative its website described a few years ago, as a “multi-year program that includes major investments in equipment, technology and processes that will provide reach and access to our customers, across both physical and electronic channels, more targeted communications and opportunities to build customer relationships.”

Within weeks of its implementation, however, the transformation seemed dead on arrival as customers screamed about late delivery and even no delivery. So furious was one Moncton city councillor, he pilloried Canada Post in print, declaring that if it can’t function efficiently, it should be privatized. “This is a serious issue,” Pierre Boudreau said. “It affects the economic well being of our citizens and our businesses. There is no justification – none – for having a letter mailed from Moncton, to Moncton, arriving 10 days or more later.”

Fortunately, service recovered. But Canada Post’s bigger problem is that it is rapidly becoming irrelevant in a world where, increasingly, vital transactions occur over the Internet. Nowadays, even email is often considered passe, as texting and social media communications platforms proliferate. The post office? What’s that gramps?

The sad fact is, the volume of mail in Canada has been dropping by an average of four per cent a year since the beginning of the century. Over the past four years, alone, the annualized decline has been closer to 10 per cent.

Beyond this, Canada Post’s responses to its challenges have always seemed oddly retrograde. The idea that any organization can improve financial performance and the quality of service by making it harder for people receive their service in a timely fashion is, frankly, insane.

Speaking directly about the corporation’s latest home-delivery gambit, former Canada Post CEO Michael Warren told The Globe and Mail last week, “This is a very risky strategy to go very hard on service cuts. . .and then hope that’s going to give you a short-term fix for your borrowing and pension-plan obligations.

Ultimately, this may be the last phase of a game Canada Post has been playing with itself, lo these many years: Now you see it, now you don’t.

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Dec 09 2013
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Economy, Government, Politics

Burning down New Brunswick’s fiscal house

New Brunswick is surely on the horns of a dilemma

New Brunswick is surely on the horns of a dilemma

 

We’ve knelt around this bonfire before, watching the flames grow higher, hungrier. The kindling is the first to go, then the wild alder branches, and finally the great stumps of driftwood, charred black, vanish in the inferno.

Inevitably, we reach the point of knowing that time is short and we’re running out of fuel. Still, we can’t seem to move. Our feet and hands are stuck in the sand, to be followed, any day now, by our heads.

“Net debt is one of the most important measures of the financial position of the province,” New Brunswick Auditor general Kim MacPherson reminded us, with the patience of a camp counsellor, last week in her annual report. Although she’s led this sing-a-long for months, we still can’t remember the words.

“For the year ended 31 March 2013, net debt increased by $931.8 million to $11.1 billion. Net debt has increased $4.3 billion since 2007. The 2013-2014 Main Estimates budgets for an increase in net debt of $594.4 million for the year ended 31 March 2014. Based on 2013-2014 Main Estimates, net debt of the province could be in excess of $11.6 billion for the year ended 31 March 2014.”

We interrupt her just long enough to toss another log from our dwindling stash onto the fire. Excuse us, Ms. MacPherson, you were saying. . .

“This continued increase in net debt represents a very disturbing trend. An even higher demand will exist on future revenue to pay past expenses. Such continued negative trends impacted the Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the province’s bond rating from AA- to A+ in 2012. This rating change will ultimately result in more

expensive borrowing costs. As well, New Brunswick’s increased borrowing may constrain future borrowing capacity and affect future provincial operations and delivery of services. The A+ rating remained unchanged in 2013.”

That does sound serious, Ms. MacPherson. Do go on. . .

“Another way to assess the significance of the size of the province’s net debt is to compare it to the net debt of provinces with similar populations as New Brunswick in absolute amount, per capita and as a percentage of GDP.  Comparable provinces include Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. . .Over the last five years, within this comparable group, New Brunswick has had one of the highest increases in net debt (45 per cent) The rate of Net Debt growth has also increased in the past year (growing by nine per cent).”

You don’t have to be Finance Minister Blaine Higgs to realize that all is not well in the purple violet province, where the annual deficit now looms large at $538.2 million. But, it helps. He may be the only citizen of New Brunswick who isn’t stoking the all-consuming fiscal fire.

“While it is true that our expense reductions have prevented a much larger deficit, we cannot turn a blind eye to the revenue challenge that our province now faces,” he said following Ms. MacPherson’s report to the Legislative Assembly. “No one is immune to the fiscal situation we are facing in this province and we are asking our stakeholders to be prepared to discuss how we can get back to balanced budgets.”

Translation: Hey stakeholders, be prepared for more cuts.

In Higgsian terms, is New Brunswick’s infrastructure “bigger than it needs to be”? Is he correct when he says “we need to work on that”?

Is the solution, effectively, to downsize our infrastructure and with it our appetites and expectations?

Says Mr. Higgs: “When you look at he situation we have in the province with declining enrollment in our schools and the number of schools we have. . .if you look at the number of hospitals we have for a province our size. . .you look at the roads we maintain for a province our size. . .we have to look at serious changes in how we do business and how we can deliver services on a continuous basis in a more effective way. . .How do we give the best education unless we have the critical mass there to do that and do that reasonably?”

Of course, right-sizing the province would be the antithesis of “politics-as-usual”.

Then again, this is the one highly combustible commodity that we, in New Brunswick, should be happy to see finally go up in smoke.

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Dec 03 2013
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Government, Politics, Security

All our spies have come in from the cold

The light of democracy is dimming

The light of democracy is dimming

Former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden’s suggestion that this country’s espionage establishment colluded, perhaps illegally, with its U.S. counterpart to spy on allied nations – in peace time, away from the mayhem of battle, during the G20 summit in Toronto – is troubling.

But no more than what appears to be a growing consensus of reaction in Canada, as we trip over the shards of our democracy to pat ourselves on the back for our newfound swagger: good, old guts and glory to the rescue.

“If it wasn’t for our laws, and police forces and military employed to enforce those laws, the world as we know it would implode on itself,” a letter writer to a recent edition of The Globe and Mail observes. “To be able to monitor and catch the bad guys, we have to know what they’re doing and thinking. Of course we are going to spy. The bad guys are spying on us.”

Against which, this corner of the peanut gallery offers no argument. Only a complete naif would suggest otherwise. The distressing bit comes in the next sentence: “The media should be praising Canada for allowing the U.S. to spy. How else can we keep the world sane and without violence?”

Once upon a time in this country and in others, polite company considered spying on one’s friends to be. . .well, impolite, especially if such surveillance was also explicitly illegal. (The Government of Canada, it should be noted, denies any of this sort of wrongdoing). The whole cloak-and-dagger business, while a necessary evil, wasn’t something about which to crow like a cockerel in heat.

We were proud of our diplomats who helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We were proud of our prime ministers, such as Lester Pearson who was instrumental in creating United Nation Peacekeeping. We were proud of our scientists, engineers, teachers, and environmentalists; of our clergy, philosophers and writers. From time to time, we were even proud of our politicians – those who were able to muster the courage to shatter the status quo in the interests of a more civil society.

We certainly weren’t proud of the means by which our clandestine operatives obtained the ends of their shadowy missions either abroad or at home.

Times, however, have changed. They have become more discernibly black and white, as the once vast grey zone of dialogue, discourse, negotiation and conciliation in politics has vanished as utterly as has the middle class in society.

Today, we we are forced to choose between good and evil, rich and poor, criminals and victims, strength and weakness, resistance and compliance, national pride and wobbly thinking in the loathsome salons of the liberal elite.

Today, in this country, loose, unapproved talk about defending the environment from the depredations of a careless commercial sector – once a splendid exercise in participatory democracy – is tantamount to treason, punishable by several lashes of a government official’s tongue.

The oil must flow as surely as the pipelines must be built. As for the safety and security of the communities through which we send our dirty crude, leave that to the men in charge. They know best.

Today, from this country, international affairs gets bundled and exported to the world as a byproduct of something called “economic diplomacy”.

Gone is the emphasis on poverty reduction, human rights, child welfare and disease control. Welcome a new, golden age of liberalized trade for Canadian companies seeking to plant their corporate staffs in emerging markets, including those of China and India, Russia and Brazil.

Through these adventurous small and medium-sized businesses, Canada will achieve the greatness it so richly deserves and could never hope to acquire under any other sort of government than one that truly understands the prideful heart that beats strong and true in the breast of all “real” Canadians – those who, let’s just say, do not vote for Hollywood-handsome, marijuana-smoking mop-tops.

In this fresh impression of the cosmos, Canada’s spy agencies are not cabals of itinerant villains; they are chambers of patriots and heroes, as long as the information they obtain about our “friends” continues to elevates the nation’s interest.

And, apparently, by any means necessary.

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Nov 18 2013
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Government, Media, Oil and Gas, Politics, Society

No room for pleasantries in real politics

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Despite his occasional partisan bluster – a necessity of elective office, regardless of one’s political flavour – the premier of New Brunswick is a genuinely nice guy who actually cares about other people’s feelings.

In fact, until recently, about the only way to get an authentic rise out of David Alward was to suggest the he and his government ministers were aloof to the concerns of their fellow citizens, content to play king and courtiers in their castle made of sand above the high water mark on Freddy Beach.

“It bugs me,” the pastor’s son (who is a certified psychological counsellor, a former community developer and an active rural hobby farmer) once interrupted himself in mid-interview with yours truly. “I don’t know how anyone could describe us as closed or uncommunicative or not inclusive.”

The truth, of course, is that openness has all but typified the premier’s political oeuvre since he came to govern one of Canada’s defiantly ungovernable provinces in 2010. Where his predecessor, Liberal Premier Shawn Graham, protected his counsel like a NSA agent under house arrest, Mr. Alward has done a contortionist’s job at public events, and in private meetings, explaining, in often exquisite detail, his plans and priorities; in effect, his thinking.

And that may be his biggest problem.

On Friday, the premier was in a rare uncompromising, even antagonistic, mood. Lashing out at anti-shale gas activists in the province, he declared that they represented the point of the spear aimed directly at the heart of natural resources industries here.

“This is not just about SWN (Resources Inc.) being able to develop,” the Telegraph-Journal quoted him. “This not just about Rexton or Kent County and SWN. Mark my words that the same groups that are against seeing SWN move forward with exploration are against projects like Sisson Brook or other potential mining projects we have in New Brunswick. They are against seeing pipelines come across our country to Saint John and creating the prosperity (they) can.”

The denouement of his point was simply this: “The question the New Brunswickers should be asking is ‘what is our vision for our province’? . . .Do we want to have our young people living here in our province building their lives here or are we condemning them to having no choice of where they are going to live in the future?”

These are, indeed, the questions. They have always been the questions. It’s just too bad that Premier Alward has waited until now – less than a year before the provincial election – to pose them with such cogency and force.

In fact, had he spent more time over the past 18 months unapologetically supporting industry’s efforts to ascertain the economic potential of shale gas (indeed, of all promising avenues of natural resources) – and commensurately less time defending his government’s decisions and convening public panels in vain attempts to win friends and influence people – the conversation in this province might now be profoundly different, and radically more productive.

The bottom line is that Mr. Alward’s generally laudable instinct to consult ‘the people’ has also been a lamentable liability of his leadership, and on more files than natural resources.

The awful state of the province’s books – its rolling $500-million deficit on a long-term debt of $11 billion – is not, strictly speaking, the premier’s fault.

Still, in a way, it is.

By refusing to consider raising the provincial portion of the Harmonized Sales Tax, because he promised ‘the people’ he would consult them first, in the form of a referendum, he effectively tied the hands of his Finance Minister and severely compromised New Brunswick’s fiscal recovery from the Great Recession.

Had he forced the province to swallow this bitter, but necessary, pill early in his mandate, the public accounts would have been far healthier than they are today, providing the governing Tories with more and better options for health, education and social policies.

It might even have influenced the debate about shale gas by having eliminated much of the monetary hysteria that now underpins it.

Make no mistake: The consultative, empathetic premier of New Brunswick is a genuinely nice guy.

But, oftentimes, as the saying goes, nice guys finish. . .well, not first.

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Oct 28 2013
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Government, Politics

Still life in the old chamber

August bodies in abeyance

August bodies in abeyance

The Senate, many Canadians seem to believe, is entitled, corrupt and well past its best before date. And given the roiling expense scandals now underway, who can really blame them?

“One could say it’s a great soap opera,” Marilyn Trenholm Counsell, a former senator, herself, told CBC Radio’s New Brunswick rolling home show last week. “Of course, it isn’t a soap opera. It’s real and it’s hurtful.”

She’s right, of course.

Deriding the Upper Chamber has become everyone’s favorite parlor game. “On a daily basis evidence piles up that reveals our upper house to be neither useful nor necessary. An incessant string of scandals and disgraceful behaviour by senators has turned the red chamber into a national embarrassment,” Macleans magazine opined earlier this year. “Its functionality has been eroded to nothing with little prospect for change, despite claims from the Harper government to champion Senate reform.”

To others, however, this conclusion, while not entirely unjustified, seems conveniently rash.

Most of the Senate’s business is in committee. It’s here where, in the words of Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson, the chamber’s “heart and soul” rests. According to an information circular posted to the CBC’s website a couple of years ago, “committees discuss important social, economic and political issues and this forum is where senators hear from interested citizens.”

Indeed, “Most bills, prior to third reading, are referred to committees where they are examined closely. In the Senate committee stage, public hearings are held, the bills are studied clauses by clause, and a report on the bill is prepared and presented to the Senate. Committees, which function as study groups, include 12 to 15 senators.”

Ms. Trenholm Counsell, who also served for a time as New Brunswick’s Lieutenant-Governor, elaborated on this to good effect in her recent radio interview.

“I worked as hard in the Senate as I did anywhere else. Wonderful work is done; the committee work,” she said. “I worked on. . .studies. I worked on a study on early childhood development. I burned the midnight oil quite often.”

In fact, she observed, “It is so interesting historically. Some bills have had upward of 100 amendments. The history and the tradition has been that those amendments have been accepted. . .I think we need the studies that come out of the Senate.

“In the House of Commons, they may bring in two or three people at the committee stage to speak to a bill. In some of the great bills that have come to the Senate, we might have had as many as 100 witnesses right across this country come in and speak to the substance of the bill. From there we made amendments which, by and large, were accepted. So, the legislation was better, much better. And that is because you had the great people. . .I am worried that this greatness is going out of the thing.”

She’s not aone.

Expense scandals, aside, the Senate’s growing partisanship, its evolution into a rubber stamp for the sitting government is contributing to its compromised stature. If its historical utility was related to its function as a check on the excesses of the Commons, to its role as what John A. Macdonald famously termed a chamber of “sober second thought”, the politics of modern times might easily render these expectations both quaint and antiquated.

Still, some signs are encouraging. As the Globe and Mail reported last week, “Senators pressed the government about why a federal spy agency has been probing telecommunications in Brazil, seeking clear answers about the activities of Communications Security Establishment Canada. Asking whether the spy agency has sufficient oversight, both Liberals and Conservatives in the Red Chamber demanded more information on Thursday about CSEC and its interest in Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.”

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, for one, appeared untroubled by his party affiliations when he pointedly commented, “Canada is the only country not to have any legislative oversight of any kind for its national-security services.”

All of which is to ask: Is there yet life in the Upper Chamber?

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