Category Archives: Government

May 06 2015
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Government, Politics

In praise of laziness

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Cathy Rogers, MLA for Moncton and the province’s social development minister, is exactly right when she says, in so many words, that hiking the provincial portion of the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is the easy way out of New Brunswick’s fiscal fiasco and economic swamp.

So what’s wrong with that?

Why must we endlessly review our options through the nearly Calvinist lens of public sacrifice (do better, be better, go forth and die in penury and virtue), rather than embrace the rather obvious, less dramatic proposition that a two-percentage point hike in the HST – boring though it may be – would, in four years, help balance the budget and send our international creditors into a well-deserved, deep and abiding slumber.

Ms. Rogers, by contrast, would rather we first figure out how to run ourselves as a proper citizenry than pay the bills. As for the HST, she says, “it’s like asking for a bigger allowance without first learning how to manage our allowance better.” Calling it a “quick fix” and a “lazy way to find a solution”, the minister would rather we put our shoulders to the wheel just as the wheels fall off the semi-tractor trailer that is the rusting, heaving, wheezing truck of state.

Of course, she’s not the only one in this Liberal cabinet who’s willing to stand in the middle of the road, proclaiming loudly, only then to skirt to the curb, squeaking quietly.

There’s also Donald Arseneault, Minister of Energy and Mines, who thinks that a year-long examination into things we already know about shale-gas development in the province is a profoundly responsible use of public money and time, (though he has allowed in his quieter moments that just such an exercise might actually hurt New Brunswick’s economic prospects).

Ms. Rogers’ conundrum is, however, particularly perplexing. On the one hand, she declares that she is opposed to raising the HST today, but is willing to consider the prospect a year from now. Meanwhile, so-called “wealthy seniors” should be prepared to pay more for their nursing home costs to. . .you know. . .help balance the books before the government musters the political courage to do the smart thing: boost consumption taxes for everyone on discretionary items (not food, not fuel oil, not shelter, not kids’ clothing or daycare).

Still, who are these “wealthy seniors” of whom she speaks?

“We know that based on income 87 per cent of seniors cannot afford the daily cap (of $113 a day),” the Saint John Telegraph-Journal quoted her saying last week. “We can take something from this, but not everything. It is an indicator. We have to wait until we get more data to get more details on liquid assets.”

And while we wait for “more data”, New Brunswick’s new, wholly invented, politically contrived demographic – the wealthy senior – lives in fear of a government that has not yet determined who or how best to bilk him.

Nice work, if you can get it.

Always trust Government of every ideological stripe to render the straightforward, complicated; the clear, obfuscated; the fair, inequitable.

It’s called spin and it stinks.

More than this, it depends, for its effectiveness, on enormous amounts of energy, busy work and low cunning. In other words, it’s the opposite of “lazy”.

Somehow, in this universe, the sin of lassitude means telling the evident truth, doing the obviously right thing without breaking a sweat, and smiling easily without ever worrying about night terrors.

If these are my choices, I’ll take lazy man’s way out every day of the political week.

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May 04 2015
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Economy, Energy, Government, Idiocracy

As the fracking follies continue. . .

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It’s always heartening to realize that those we elect to high, public office hold each other to the same standard of comportment as do the rest of us. After all, if we can’t count on the statesmen among us, we can surely depend on the ready, nearly endless, supply of clowns.

And so it was last week when New Brunswick’s Tory energy critic, Jake Stewart, had this to say in the House about the Liberal government’s decision to extend a partial, four-year payroll refund, reportedly worth $150,000, to internationally based Clean Harbors’ Saint John operation:

“I am sure that the minister of Energy and Mines and the premier are very excited to have this company, one of the leading suppliers of hydraulic fracturing waste treatment and disposal services in the Bakken, Marcellus, and Utica shale formations, established in New Brunswick. . .It is interesting to learn that this government is providing taxpayer-funded assistance for existing staff to a company that has such a high level of expertise in the treatment and disposal of hydraulic fracturing waste when the same government, just months ago, implemented policies that actually prohibit this industry in which Clean Harbors is a leading service provider.

To which Premier Brian Gallant gamely responded, “I understand his (Mr. Stewart’s) frustration. I understand why he is so confused. The members opposite are so fixated on fracking that they cannot fathom that we can create jobs, even though there is a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing. The member cannot fathom. . .that a business like Clean Harbors can create jobs in the province, even though there is a moratorium.”

With which, in turn, Gary Kelly, vice-president of business sales for Clean Harbors, naturally agreed (of sorts). He told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal: “We felt that there was a need here. A few years ago one of the competitors closed up shop, so we felt there was an opportunity.”

Added Economic Development Minister Rick Doucet: “The company is tied in very well with the industrial sector in Saint John – with the pulp and paper industry and with the oil industry. . .Any company, especially a world-class operation such as this, located in 50 places around the world and with 13,000 people working for it, that stands and wants to open up shop in New Brunswick and wants to represent New Brunswick is a bonus for us.

“Clean Harbors has a very broad range of services that it offers in the sectors – the cleaning services and products, the recycling of oil into base, the blending of lubricating oils, the high-pressure and chemical cleaning, and the disposal of hazardous waste.”

In other words, for a polluting province, such as New Brunswick, Clean Harbor is an economic, jobs-generating boon. Its record is apparently sterling; its knowledge about these matters, exquisite.

So, then, the path seems clear: Ask this company what it would do to meet one or more of the provincial government’s requirements for lifting the ban on hydraulic fracturing. It couldn’t hurt, and it might even work to ease this absurd toothache that is the shale-gas debate.

It might, at least, serve to bring Conservative and Liberal interests in Fredericton closer together on what must surely be their joint interest, which is nothing more or less important than the economic and social integrity of the province both groups profess to love and cherish.

Or, perhaps, I am finally, fatally naïve, after all.

Maybe all we in the peanut gallery terminally expect of our so-called democracy are the clowns masquerading as statesmen.

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Apr 08 2015
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Economy, Government, Politics

How hawks and doves circle

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The move was as much symbolic as practical. How better to prove to Canadians that the federal, Tory regime is on the right, fiscally hawkish course than by selling its last, remaining stock in the giant auto company it bailed out when it was on a far more fiscally dovish flight path?

With that, Finance Minister Joe Oliver proclaimed the end of an era this week, authorizing his government’s divestiture of 73 million common shares in General Motors to Goldman, Sachs & Co. “We have eliminated a market exposure for Canadian taxpayers and returned GM to private-sector ownership, having supported its continued contribution to the Canadian economy,” he declared in a statement.

What a difference eight years makes to the leadership sensibilities of the governing classes. We may recall the bad, old days of global, financial collapse in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, when the still tender-footed Harper majority was, like the normally counterpoised Obama administration, committed to economic stimulus not austerity, spending rather than restraint.

At that time, allowing the big automakers, GM and Chrysler, to fail was unthinkable on either side of the 49th parallel. Indeed, less than a year after Parliament Hill and Queen’s Park banded together to drop a combined $14 billion on the crippled manufacturers, then-federal Industry Minister Tony Clement declared, “This was not a decision we took lightly. But, at the end of the day, we knew that if we did not participate, what was at risk was not just the (direct) jobs but all the other parts manufacturers and other industries that go into having an auto sector in this country, and that has been estimated to be over 400,000 jobs that were at risk.”

He was probably, if frustratingly, correct. Now, it appears, the nation’s economy has recovered well enough to justify liquidating the government’s auto assets (reportedly worth about $3.5 billion) just in time to balance the budget later this month, roughly half-a-year before the next general election.

All of which may only prove that hawks and doves really can occupy the same airspace, depending on which way the political wind blows.

Still, the larger issue that concerns many economists in this country is whether a hell-bent rush to book a balance in the public accounts, come what may, is rational (or even possible) in the medium-to-longterm. The GM cash-out may not be, technically, a windfall, but something about it feels awfully like found money (“Don’t worry, Mabel, we’re saved from perdition; I just found Uncle Harry’s collection of gold nuggets buried in a coffee can down by the river).

Meanwhile, storm clouds are once again gathering in the broader economy – which is expected to grow only fractionally over the next quarter – a point that Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz made clear in an interview with The Financial Times last week. “When the oil shock came, it was clear we would no longer be able to close the output gap by 2016, but by 2017,” he was reported to have said.

“Since we had some firepower, we took some insurance and cut rates. . .The first quarter of 2015 will look atrocious, because the oil shock is a big deal for us. . .

In theory lower oil prices mean (putting) more money in consumers’ pockets, but. . .if an oil company cancels (an investment) project, laying off a worker, that guy will not have the money to buy a new pickup truck.”

A balanced budget is a desirable objective for any lawmaker, but not when there are girders in the economy to support – and certainly not when all such book entries are manufactured for more symbolic than practical reasons.

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Apr 01 2015
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Economy, Government, Politics

Follow the bouncing budgetary balls

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As the Government of Canada coordinates the release of its signature piece of election-year propaganda, the federal budget, provincial finance ministers are scrambling to contain the public relations disasters that are their own annual spending plans.

Rarely in the nation’s history have the fiscal conditions of the regional partners in Confederation contrasted so sharply with that of the national one – a circumstance that does little to inform Canadians about the true state of the union they occupy.

Yesterday, New Brunswick’s fine, young Liberal government brought down its first budget since assuming office last fall, becoming the latest in a string of provinces (Quebec, Saskatchewan, Alberta) to swallow its bitter medicine in one, quick gulp.

Oh to be in British Columbia in the springtime. That province is doing so well these days, it managed to double its forecast budget surplus of more than $400 million in fiscal 2014-15 to nearly a billion bucks ($879 million).

The same cannot be said for Alberta, which has just posted a deficit of $5 billion, despite having raised $1.5 billion in new taxes. According to a CBC report, “The reaction . . .is mixed: relieved that there was no increase in the corporate tax rate, and concern that Albertans will have less disposable income in a time when the economy is weak.”

In Quebec, the preoccupation is with runaway debt. That province’s 2015-16, $100-billion budget is freckled with nips and tucks in almost every department, but especially in the big-ticket portfolios of health care, education and social services. “We are making reforms, we are doing things differently,” the province’s Treasury Board chairman Martin Coiteux told the CBC. “It’s not that we are reducing services. We are looking at ways to live within a budget envelope which is relatively smaller than what we would like, but this is this the required step to rebuild our room to manoeuvre.”

  And, according to a report by The Canadian Press last month, “The Saskatchewan government has brought forward a budget that attempts to put the brakes on spending increases and peels back tax incentives for middle-class families, graduates and the potash industry. . .A global oil downturn is putting the squeeze on the province’s bottom line, but Finance Minister Ken Krawetz noted that there are no new personal income taxes or fee increases.”

Now, stroll down the banks of the Rideau Canal, Blackberry on full news-alert mode from the nation’s capital, and you’ll observe that the fiscal backstory appears altogether different. Canadians aren’t mired in debt. Nay, it’s quite the contrary. Our supremely responsible, circumspect and economically gifted federal government is preparing to bring down a (nearly) balanced budget with about $4.5 billion in goodies for individual voters.

Indeed, from places like New Brunswick, Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the stern warnings of penurious governments bear almost no resemblance to the rosy messaging wafting through Ottawa’s halls of privilege and power, following the bouncing ball from provincial script to federal talking point can give a guy whiplash.

Still, there’s some reason to think that many of the differences between national and provincial bean-counters are illusory. After all, only one pot of sovereign money is  spilled or filled in this country, as circumstances require. What one branch of government giveth, another taketh away just as keenly. The Bank of Montreal has already noted as much in a recent report. As BMO economist Robert Kavcic told the CBC “most of what Ottawa will be returning to one taxpayer’s pocket, the provinces will take out of the other.”

So much, then, for a vote-friendly federal budget.

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Mar 27 2015
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Business, Government, Oil and Gas

Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?

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The sweepstakes that is the oil and gas sector is dominated by short-game players – those who build and boom and inevitably bust and break the bank to survive until the next cycle comes round to titillate the itinerate wildcatters of the corporate world.

In their wake, of course, people lose their jobs, houses, bank accounts, and any semblance of stability and security. If you don’t believe me, just look what $48-a-barrel oil is currently doing to Alberta’s economy. It’s now cheaper to leave the stuff in the ground; two years ago, such a proposition would have been heretical to the financial institutions that happily floated low-interest debt to exploration and drilling companies.

In this volatile segment of the natural resources sector, things change – and they change fast. Understanding precisely how this calculus works has never been a strong suit of any provincial or territorial government in Canada. The words “protecting the downside” has rarely issued from the mouths of energy-rich premiers (not, at least, since the days of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, who had the good sense to siphon billions of dollars from the petro-economy into a “heritage fund” in the mid 1970s to, again, protect against the inevitable downside associated with oil and gas development).

Of course, here in New Brunswick, which sits on a potential resource of 70-trillion-cubic feet of shale gas, we don’t endure this particular problem. Oh, lucky us! For, as we hem and haw over the proper “social licenses” that our long-term debt purchases in place of responsible tight-play development, our collective complacency about the future keeps us warm, cozy and competitively irrelevant on a planet that, oftentimes, prefers to face its challenges head on.

But should we ever choose to join that planet, we would do well to rip a page from Norway’s playbook on managing a vast oil and gas industry without falling prey to the temptations of short-game profiteering, gambling and other parlor tricks of chance.

A nice piece by Susan Ormiston, posted on the CBC news site last week, explains fulsomely how that Scandinavian country of five million souls got its energy portfolio right decades ago.

“Norway today sits on top of a $1-trillion pension fund established in 1990 to invest the returns of oil and gas,” she writes. “The capital has been invested in over 9,000 companies worldwide, including over 200 in Canada. It is now the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. By contrast, Alberta’s Heritage Savings Fund, established in 1976 by premier Peter Lougheed, sits at only $17 billion and has been raided by governments and starved of contributions for years.

Quoting Rolf Wiborg, a former oil and gas engineer with the Norwegian government, Ms. Ormiston reports, “For the last 10 years, when nothing went into the Alberta fund, and we put a lot of money aside, the profit went out of Canada.”

The result: Every citizen of that cold, northern country is a technical millionaire. Meanwhile, every citizen of this cold, northern country. . .well, isn’t.

The secret, Wiborg says, is simply that Norway “doesn’t change” its “policies with the changes in the oil price – you can’t do that. Lougheed’s government in Alberta knew that. They made policies, then they left them behind.”

Meanwhile, the Government of Canada, which counts on a certain stipend from the oil and gas sector to balance the national accounts, not only changes its polices routinely; it changes the date of its budget based on the fluctuating price of this transparently hostage-taking commodity.

It is time, perhaps, for Canada to start playing the long-game with its natural resources.

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Mar 03 2015
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Education, Government

Wherefore art thou higher education

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When the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission stipulates that university enrolment in this region is down, the proper response is not: Oh, how dreadful!

The proper response is: Really, who cares?

It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming for years, if not decades. In fact, according to its own spin the MPHEC cobbled itself together in 1974 as “an arm’s-length  organization accountable to the ministers responsible for post-secondary education in the Maritime provinces.”

At that time (and presumably since then), it assisted “institutions and government in enhancing the post-secondary learning environment. . .The commission’s primary orientation in carrying out it duties is to give first consideration to improving and maintaining the best possible service as lifelong learners.”

So, then, how has that worked out for everyone?

The MPHEC is clear on the question. Its press release last week was as declarative as it was morose:

“Overall. . .the number of people from the Maritimes enrolled in the region’s universities has dropped by 16 per cent (down 8,904 students) since 2003-04. Over the same period, Maritime universities have recruited more students from elsewhere in Canada (up 11 per cent since 2003-04; 1,429 students) and more international students (up 77 per cent since 2003-04; 4,500 students).

What’s more, “Program choice has shifted. . .Enrolment in the Arts and Humanities has decreased by 31 per cent since 2003-04. Students from the Maritimes and international students are more often choosing programs that have a clear connection to the labour market such as health, business or engineering.”

Indeed, “The greatest impact of increasing international student numbers has been on business programs. International students now represent nearly one in three students enrolled in business.”

All of which leads some reviewers of the MPHEC data to conclude that universities in this region are, at some fundamental level, failing local students, communities and, by extension, the economy, by not making our young and earnest “job-ready”.

But, again, when did we ever really care about that?

Was it when successive provincial governments failed to make good on their promises to fund the coordinated development of early childhood development?

Was it when those same governments succumbed to political pressure and voided their attempts to redesign secondary and post-secondary institutions into a more productive, educationally engaged, socially relevant system of practical colleges, polytechnical schools and institutes of advanced education (each serving different, various and crucial needs of diversely talented and interested students)?

Or was it when we – policy makers, politicians, pundits – failed to notice how and why other jurisdictions in the world do so much better educating their children as they prepare them for economically productive careers?

In Finland, for example, “The principle underlying pre-primary, basic and upper secondary education is to guarantee basic educational security for all, irrespective of their place of residence, language and economic standing. Finnish early childhood education and care includes various systems and possibilities to arrange family affairs.”

That comment comes from Liisa Heinämäki of the Finland’s National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health STAKES, Jyväskylä Satellite Office.

And here’s the happy result for her country: The highest post-secondary placement in the developed world; the finest academic attainment scores on international tests anywhere; and a culture that does not consider education a chore to endure but a joy to embrace.

If we truly care about changing the dynamics of higher education in the Maritimes, we’d best start at the beginning.

After all, shouldn’t we know our own minds before we complain about how universities train those of our children?

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Feb 12 2015
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Business, Government, Technology

It’s a whole new game for the Hub City

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I despise the phrase, “game-changer”.

The words conjure, in me, images of small boys on a football pitch, bullied by larger boys stealing the ball, kicking shins, shoving urchins into the mud, scoring on empty nets and then triumphantly celebrating their victory as a well-earned win, marked fetchingly in the “if-you-can’t-stand-the-trampling-stay-out-of-our-way” category of crooked competition.

Sort of like Wall Street in 1929, 1987, 2001, 2007 and anytime soon (pick a year) coming to an RRSP near you.

But every once in a long while “game-changer” seems to be an appropriate description for small cities with big appetites and even larger ambitions to beat the bully-boys at their own game.

So, then, witness, last week’s launch of Fibre Centre in uptown Moncton (somewhere amidst the nine-foot drifts of snow and ice and Centennial Park, where the more placid of our urban ilk still appreciate a mid-morning ski outing on Nordic trails).

There, hundreds of business and political elites gathered to hear the great news: Greater Moncton carved another notch in its belt as one of North America’s most competitive cities with the first “network-neutral colocation and interconnection facility providing a three-way junction point linking submarine and terrestrial dark fiber assets in Atlantic Canada.”

And before you shrug your shoulders and mumble “uh, come again”, the new technology works this way: For the first time anywhere in the region businesses of every size, complexity and stripe – along with public and private institutions, governments and public organizations – will have seamless access to the world through unused (ie., ‘dark’) fibre-optic cables which just happen to flow through Moncton.

The secret: There’s a lot of state-of-the-art, digital pipe going begging in these parts, these days.

“Moncton now has a physical access point to the mass of fibre optic networks that pass through, but heretofore have not actually been able to directly interconnect with each other here,” said Ukrainian businessman Iouri Litvinenko, Fibre Centre’s co-founder. “Facilities such as these have proven to breed economic development globally.”

Added the firm’s other co-founder, American tech entrepreneur Hunter Newby: “Fibre Centre is a neutral meet point for networks of al kinds. We are not a carrier, or network operator, ourselves but rather (we) own the building, known as a ‘carrier hotel’, and provide the managed real estate environment, known as a ‘meet me room‘, as well as data centre space, where all networks can colocate and openly interconnect with each other.”

Four years in the making, the deal’s the official launch podium featured Ben Champoux,, CEO of Greater Moncton’s economic development organization, 3+ Corporation; James Lockyer, chair of 3+; Gaetan Thomas, CEO of NB Power; George LeBlanc, Mayor of Moncton; Newby; and, of course, Brian Gallant, premier of New Brunswick.

Said Gallant: “This is a phenomenal opportunity. . .We should all be very proud of this firm’s decision to choose Moncton. Arthur C. Clarke (the late science fiction writer) once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I can tell you that Fibre Centre has a lot of magic.”

For his part, Mayor LeBlanc noted that the news burnishes Moncton’s reputation as one of the continent’s truly smart cities. “All digital roads lead here. . .or, rather, almost all,” he quipped. We, at the city, are happy to be Fibre Centre’s first customer.”

So, then, is this a game-changer for a community that has been switching up the rules for itself ever since the railway left and the nation’s retail behemoths took a powder?

Consider that nowhere in eastern North America is there as comprehensive and technologically sophisticated hub of fibre optic cable than here.

Also consider that nowhere in eastern Canada would an announcement like this draw hundreds of people to a spare auditorium, providing no parking, in sub-zero temperatures, surrounded by mountains of frigid white.

Game-changer, indeed.

I’d call it a game-opener.

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Feb 11 2015
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Government

When less means more, at least politically

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New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant has decided to chop his annual salary by 15 per cent this year. His fellow cabineteers – all 12 of them – have agreed (if that is the right word) to follow suit, each taking pay cuts of ten per cent.

Sure, these are symbolic gestures at a time when the province struggles with structurally high yearly deficits and a long-term debt of some $12 billion.

But what’s wrong with that?

No, these voluntary rollbacks won’t rescue New Brunswick from fiscal quicksand. And, no, they won’t put money back into the pockets of hard-working men and women who run businesses, struggle to make their payrolls and watch their limited financial resources fail to meet their own, and others’, expectations.

But, we have to start somewhere. And where better to begin more visibly than right at the top of the public sector, where ministers of the Crown hold the keys – in more ways than merely symbolic – to everyone’s safety deposit box?

Besides, when was the last time you witnessed a private-sector fat cat, having seen the communitarian light, announce that he (or she) will gladly undergo self-administered liposuction in order to protect at least the appearance of fairness and equity in his or her corner of the corporate steppe?

I didn’t think so.

On the other hand, it does happen, if rarely.

Writing in the February 9 edition of The New Yorker magazine, financial columnist James Surowiecki, reported, “It’s no secret that the years since the Great Recession have been hard on American workers. Though unemployment has finally dipped below six per cent, real wages for most have barely budged since 2007. Indeed, the whole century so far has been tough: wages haven’t grown much since 2000.

“So it was big news when, last month, Aetna’s C.E.O., Mark Bertolini, announced that the company’s lowest-paid workers would get a substantial raise – from twelve to sixteen dollars an hour, in some cases – as well as improved medical coverage.” Indeed, “Bertolini didn’t stop there. He said that it was not ‘fair’ for employees of a Fortune 50 company to be struggling to make ends meet. He explicitly linked the decision to the broader debate about inequality, mentioning that he had given copies of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century’ to all his top executives. ‘Companies are not just money-making machines,’ he told me last week. ‘For the good of the social order, these are the kinds of investments we should be willing to make.’”

So, perhaps, the better question is: When was the last time you heard a corporate fat cat talk like a progressive reformer?

The case of Mark Bertolini may only be the exception that proves the rule.

But, in the New Brunswick government’s case, they, too, seem to have figured out that a public gesture can go a long way – that they’d better be prepared to demonstrate a little personal austerity in the assemblies of decision-making before they start chopping frontline workers’ wages and salaries and raising taxes, as they most surely will.

Apart from anything else, it’s a move they can make without engendering a shred of controversy. (Take that Tory opposition). Fundamentally, though, it stands as a statement of principle – a guiding norm for the tough years ahead.

Sacrifice, it connotes, is no sacrifice at all as long as something durably good causally results: a healthier public balance sheet; a smarter, leaner, nimbler government sector and, by extension, civil service; a province, whose citizens, businesses and institutions are, for once, united in joint service to one another and not divided by the absurd venalities of intra-regional entitlements and juvenile, extraordinarily costly, preoccupations with local oneupmanship.

Governments rarely lead the way, point to the horizon. But when they do – and do it convincingly – their efforts can produce remarkable effects.

Their symbolic gestures, especially the good ones, tend to etch a path of memory in the popular imagination, where reality finally takes root.

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Feb 03 2015
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Government, Politics

Is it in Gallant we trust. . .or just the “Life of Brian”? 

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It is not entirely clear to me what Premier Brian Gallant was thinking as he composed his first State of the Province address and chose, last week, to launch with a quote from the 13th-century Catholic friar, Francis of Assisi (a.k.a., Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone).

But if grabbing attention by conflating the secular woes of the current age in New Brunswick with those of pre-Renaissance Italy was his endgame, the Grit honcho may have been on to something – even if that something amounted to enduring irrelevance amongst the body politic.

“Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible,” he began, parroting the buono parola of the late, great saint and animal lover (take care, Mr. Premier; moose fences could, again, become an election issue, fours years hence).

For those who subscribe to the power of magical thinking, it was a truly awesome  overture. For the rest of us who don’t, it was a truly brilliant distraction.

After all, in the other words of the original Franciscan monk, “It is not fitting, when one is in God’s service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look,” because, presumably, “If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”

Of course, if He does, then he has never looked better.

Standing before an elbows-to-elbows crowd of maybe 1,000 gawkers (read: citizens), the young premier was GQ-ready in composure and presentation. Reportedly, he even memorized his speech, so as to appear. . .well, authentic.

“Decisions are going to be made to put our finances in order,” he said. “We have tough choices before us. . .It can be made by 13 people in a cabinet room, or they can be made with 750,000 people working together.”

What’s more, he said, “We have to have the resolve to tackle these challenges once and for all, I can tell you that our government has the political will and has the resolve to take these challenges on.”

Yes, he said, “We need to get people out of our hospitals.”

Yes, he affirmed, “The (provincial government) program review is purely pragmatic.” (In other words, civil servants: no hard feelings).

And yes he declared, “We have to get away from the status quo. . .When we have our finances in order, we can focus on the kind of things we need to do to help make our province the best place to raise a family. If we want to achieve these. . .things, the status quo is not an option. . .To move forward, away from the status quo, we need to make some tough decisions.”

As for his reliance on St. Frank (no, not you McKenna), he said, “That quote (by F. Assisi) sums up what New Brunswick has to do, in my opinion. . .Do what’s necessary. Then do what’s possible. Then, suddenly, we are doing and accomplishing things we never thought possible. . .I think New Brunswickers are ready for tough choices.”

Does he now?

Faith, folks, is a many-splendored marvel.

It can move people to extraordinary feats and exemplary behaviour.

Or, it can persuade erstwhile able-minded individuals to abandon their reason to the big-rock candy mountain of redemption through sacrifice.

Even St. Francis might agree: the devil is in the details.

It’s not enough that the premier delivers homilies. That’s what election campaigns are for.

And the time has passed for a 750,000-member consultation team. If anything, we New Brunswickers have proven over the past 18 years that we really don’t play well together in our various sandboxes of privilege and entitlement.

The time now is for a true, bullet-by-bullet strategy to rescue the province from its dangerous fiscal morass, taking careful consideration of the long-term investments that actually contribute to sustained and durable prosperity (early and public-school education comes to mind).

We don’t need a preacher, delivering sermons as a trendy, Sunday-morning vicar might. We need a secular democrat possessed of a clear-eyed vision for the next 25 years of public administration.

In the end, he will not be remembered for his magical oratory. He might even be reviled by many who once believed in him.

As for the rest of us, let us judge him by the actions he took to rebuild this economy – not by his saintly words.

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Feb 02 2015
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Democracy, Government, Politics

Are government workers servants or syphons of prosperity?

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Do civil servants in Atlantic Canada earn too much money for what they do? Are too many of them routinely showing up at the public trough?

These are two, separate questions, and as provocative as they are, they tend to conflate in the hands of traditional, market-driven advocates who are convinced that small government – in the absence of no government, at all – represents the best of all possible worlds.

Almost no one, these days, talks about efficient government, a notion that once held a place of prominence in the thinking rooms and chat parlors of the early 1960s across North America – and, of course, never again.

But does efficient government mean fewer workers doing less work or a greater number of workers doing more important work?

The Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) is convinced that the regional economy will be improved by radically cutting its various civil services.

“In all four Atlantic provinces, the public sector workforce is significantly larger, relative to population, than the national average,” writes Ben Eisen, director of research, and Shaun Fantauzzo, policy analyst, at AIMS, in a recent commentrary.

“Furthermore, the gap in average compensation between public and private sector workers is larger in the region than in most other parts of the country. As governments across the region seek to identify strategies to control deficits and net debt, working gradually to reduce the public sector wage bill is one option that deserves careful attention.”

Additionally, they contend, “according to recent data from Statistics Canada, in 2013, the civilian public sector in Canada accounted for 18 per cent of all jobs nationally. By comparison, this figure is 23 per cent in Atlantic Canada, where all provinces exceed the national average on this metric. In Prince Edward Island, the figure is 23 per cent, in Nova Scotia it is 22 per cent and in New Brunswick it is 20 per cent. In Newfoundland and Labrador, 28 per cent of all jobs are found in the civilian public sector, the highest level in the country.”

To which an unaligned observer might wonder: So what?

Don’t these folks who work on the public dime also pay taxes, buy houses, enroll their kids in day-care programs, contribute to charities, underwrite the cost of their children’s university educations?

Are they not, in so many regards, just like the rest of us?

It’s not the salaries and benefits they earn, or even their numbers, that should concern us. It’s what they do with their time in the course of their daily duties. And that has everything to do with the frigid, disingenuous corporate culture they endure and to which they are too often inured.

Successive federal and Atlantic provincial governments have, in recent years, forced their bureaucracies to carry the water buckets of public opprobrium. After all, why not? Civil servants are easy targets, easily manipulated to do their political masters’ bidding on pain of various employment adjustment programs and other vile euphemisms for: “You’re fired and you have five minutes to clean out your desk.”

Now, we perceive in New Brunswick a wholly cynical move to buy public approval  by curtailing the legal bargaining powers of unions that represent civil servants.

Or, as the province’s duly appointed Czar of strategic review, Health Minister Victor Boudreau, told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal not long ago: “What happens in settling some of these wages is a bit of what they call a leap frog, where one province settles with a particular union. . .and then in the next province, their contract is up six months later, so they want to be two per cent higher than the province that just settled.”

Again, so what?

Should we not wheel this issue back to the central discussion where it belongs?

Which civil servants in Atlantic Canada earn too much money for what they do? Which ones arrive at the public trough with little or nothing to show for their slight effort to make an appearance?

The issue is not, ultimately, about big government versus small government.

It’s only about good government.

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