Category Archives: Politics

Mar 24 2016
Leave a comment
Economy, Politics

Opening the spigot

DSC_0180

To describe the federal Liberals’ first budget, as “massively” beneficial to New Brunswick is to engage in the sort of hyperbole that typically induces sudden, involuntary eye rolling among the non-politicos in the reading public.

Still, House Leader and Member of Parliament for Beausejour Dominic LeBlanc may have a point. In interviews with the Saint John Telegraph-Journal this week, he said, “There will be greater flexibility in how (infrastructure) funds are allocated. One of the things that we heard is that many of the smaller communities cannot match the one-third model.”

He was referring to the standard agreement that divvies up the cost of any given public works project equally among Ottawa, the provincial government and municipal authorities – a regime that many officials in New Brunswick have repeatedly said they can’t afford.

Added LeBlanc: “It disproportionately disadvantages the smaller municipalities that don’t have the tax base. The provincial government, in the case of New Brunswick, will have difficulty on some of the larger mega projects that we are hoping to do in the next few years.”

So, he declared, “We’ll (Ottawa) pay more and there will be ways for the province to access money that’s more favourable than the current model. The one-third straight jacket will be loosened to reflect the financial need of some municipalities and provinces.”

Boil it all down, and it seems that the New Brunswick government will have access to more than $8 million in public transit infrastructure money (not a lot, but still better than a boot in the pants). That’s to say nothing about its share of the $2 billion Low Energy Carbon Fund, the $125 million Green Municipal Fund, whatever’s left in the former Harper government’s Building Canada Fund, and $52 million earmarked for three ferry services in the Atlantic region, including the perennially imperiled Saint John-Digby service.

Indeed, the munificence of the Trudeau government doesn’t end with bricks and mortar.

There’s the new Canada Child Benefit that will remit more than $8,000 a year to most New Brunswick families with two children under the age of six. Mr. LeBlanc predicts this measure, alone, will pour more than $200 million into the provincial economy over the next 12 months.

There are also changes to the Employment Insurance program – key to the economic well being of seasonally employed regions of the province. The budget effectively reverses the broadly unpopular restrictions imposed by the former Tory government in Ottawa on claims, commute times for work and wait periods for payments.

All of which leaves the strong impression that in the early spring of 2016, munificence is Mr. Trudeau’s middle name.

On the other hand, fellows like Scott Armstrong, the Conservative critic for Atlantic Canada, are not entirely offside when they question the Liberal government’s spending priorities (though sour grapes may be the federal opposition’s choice of liquor these days).

“For all their talk about creating growth,” Mr. Armstrong told the T-J, “there’s no talk about a jobs plan. I think it was recognized by everyone that infrastructure is a way to create jobs, but from looking at what they decided to do, they put their other spending priorities out in front and infrastructure and job creation on the back burner.”

In reality, the larger risk this budget carries is the uncertain effectiveness of its measures to re-energize regional and national economies before the next inevitable recession, when the $30-billion deficit it now engineers balloons to some unspeakable level.

At that point, what’s now described as “massively” beneficial might well be viewed somewhat differently.

The devil, of course, will be in the details.

Tagged ,
Mar 24 2016
Leave a comment
Democracy, Government, Politics

The wisdom of the crowd

IMG_0129

When protesters shut down access roads to a Donald Trump rally in Arizona recently, prompting the improbably coiffed billionaire and reality-show host to instruct the interlopers to “go home” to their “mommies”, media broadcasters readily assumed those in his audience stood solidly with him.

I’ll wager, though, the truth was a little more complicated.

If I had conducted a straw poll onsite and at the time, I’m almost certain a third of the participants would have said the protestors should be arrested and tried for public nuisance, another third wouldn’t have cared much, and a final third would have shrugged their shoulders and mumbled something about every person’s right to free speech, even the disagreeable variety.

Politicians (especially candidates for office) and members of what was once classified so quaintly as “The Fourth Estate” expect black and white responses from John and Jane Q. Public on any issue – large or small, consequential or insignificant, even though they almost never get them.

Yet, the mantra is wearingly familiar: You are either for us or against us. You can’t be both. You certainly may not cradle any notion that democracy, in practice, is anything but fractious and polarizing.

It’s the same assumption that the chattering classes in the Atlantic Provinces make about the East Coast hoi polloi right around election and budget times, when the partisan bunting luffs ever so vigorously in the hot air.

Lately, however, in my travels around New Brunswick, a different picture of average members of the body politic emerges – one that’s more nuanced than monolithic. It suggests that most people are willing to entertain often-radical points of agreement to reach consensus on how to solve the persistent problems that afflict regional society.

Surprising are the number of voting citizens who firmly believe, regardless of their party affiliations, that forging much closer economic ties between provinces is a durable way to cut public deficits and debts.

They also think that the amount of government spending is less worrying than the lack of material return on each dollar invested. They are, for example, more likely to concur with the proposition that small-p politics should play no role in allocating (or curtailing) resources to higher education.

In fact, they are broadly convinced that entrepreneurship and innovation are functions of literacy and numeracy (not the other way around); that culture and the arts are engines, not byproducts, of prosperity; and that health care planning lacks only from a paucity of imagination among public officials who refuse to consider delivery models other than those prescribed by the status quo.

Most striking, perhaps, are the definitions people embrace for that long-abused rubric – the favorite of every politician, wearing his or her partisan colours proudly, who ever went to Government – leadership.

The notion that good leadership is “strong” or “unwavering” – that it springs, unbidden, from the souls of the anointed few who assume elected office; that it is impervious to the corrupting influences of circumspection and changing conditions – is, most average folks contend, ludicrous.

Rather, good leadership is about “respect” and “listening”. It’s about “setting an example” for others to emulate. Yes, it’s “decisive” and “consistent”, but it’s neither “rash” nor hidebound.

Few, it seems, are alarmed about peaceful, deliberate protest – except, of course, politicians and other members of the chattering classes who attend them.

Few are prepared to concede the point that holding an opinion precludes changing one’s mind.

These are the principles around which effective governments must finally rally if we have any chance of solving the problems that plague our various societies.

Tagged
Mar 23 2016
Leave a comment
Business, Economy, Politics

Leading sheep to a dog’s breakfast

IMAG0604

One of my favorite jokes about economists goes a little like this:

“Man walking along a road in the countryside comes across a shepherd and a huge flock of sheep. Tells the shepherd, ‘I will bet you $100 against one of your sheep that I can tell you the exact number in this flock.’ The shepherd thinks it over; it’s a big flock so he takes the bet. ‘973,’ says the man. The shepherd is astonished, because that is exactly right. ‘OK, I’m a man of my word, take an animal.’ Man picks one up and begins to walk away.”

Then, suddenly: “‘Wait,’ cries the shepherd, ‘Let me have a chance to get even. Double or nothing that I can guess your exact occupation’. Man says sure. ‘You are an economist for a government think tank,’ says the shepherd. ‘Amazing!’ responds the man, ‘You are exactly right! But tell me, how did you deduce that?’

“‘Well,’ says the shepherd, ‘put down my dog and I will tell you.’”

That comes courtesy of the Wharton School of Business, via the Internet. My only edit would be that, in the end, the “man” refuses to reveal his true identity. After all, no self-respecting economist I’ve ever known can ever get enough pooches whose entrails are healthy enough with which to predict the future of humankind.

All of which suggests that New Brunswick’s corps of economists must be the smartest professionals of their ilk anywhere in the world. Not only have they unanimously deduced (in a bevy of Brunswick News Inc. organs) that the provincial economy is failing, they have picked up the right animal to prove their point (it’s a sheep, in case you missed the metaphor).

Said New Brunswick’s Chief economist David Campbell (who is actually a good friend of mine), the degree to which the labour market in the province is winnowing is alarming. In fact, noting a recent Statistics Canada report earlier this month, the 6,000 jobs we lost in February, amounts to the “size of your capacity to meet the labour needs of your economy.”

Added Craig Brett, an economist at Mount Allison University: “I don’t usually put much stock in month-to-month unemployment figures for small provinces. . . But a trend like this over several months is worrying.”

So concurred David Murrell, an economics professor at the University of New Brunswick: “I think there has to be a dynamic provincial economic plan that has to be followed and I don’t see it realized.”

No kidding. Currently, the overall unemployment rate in the province is a hair’s breadth shy of 10 per cent, up from 9.3, 8.9 and 8.7 per cent in each of the previous three months. The workforce participation rate is lower than it’s been since the early days of the global financial crisis of 2007-08.

What’s to be done? That, lamentably, is a question no economist can answer convincingly. The issue is not actually within their various wheelhouses of expertise. They can tell us that elected leaders are leading the rest of us, like sheep, to a dog’s breakfast. But changing the menu is ultimately up to the rest of us, and that process starts with asking hard questions, and demanding good answers – not only of the people we send to office, but of ourselves.

What, exactly, are the collaborative economic, commercial, social, and fiscal tools that we need to wield among us to build the durable, sustainable, prosperous society that befits neither sheep, nor dog, but just us: we helpless, hopeful, humans?

Tagged , , ,
Mar 23 2016
Leave a comment
Politics

Polling the pollsters

DSC_0078

The urgent news of the day for New Brunswick is in. It’s now time to close the shutters, batten down the hatches, head to bed with a nice cup of steamed hemlock. For, the pollsters have spoken.

Those who moil for meaning in the nether reaches of the online world – the Internet, blogosphere, social media – have tendered their latest profile of public opinion about Canada’s most youthful premier.

Now we know, and now we may sleep, comfortable in the knowledge that half of this province’s grown-ups think Brian Gallant is just swell; the other half isn’t so sure.

Says Corporate Research Associates of Halifax: “The New Brunswick Liberal Party continues to be preferred, with just under one-half of New Brunswick decided voters supporting (45 per cent, down from 55 per cent in November 2015).

“Meanwhile, one-quarter back the PC Party of New Brunswick (27 per cent, compared with 25 per cent), while two in ten residents support the New Democratic Party (18 per cent, up from 12 per cent). Green Party support is stable (eight per cent, compared with seven per cent), while two percent of voters back the People’s Alliance (compared with one per cent).

“The number of residents who are undecided rests at 29 per cent (compared with 25 per cent), while seven per cent refuse to state a preference (compared with nine per cent), and five per cent support none of the parties or do not plan to vote (compared with three per cent).”

Of course, I’m reasonably certain that, should I turn the tables on the polling industry, itself, public responses would track along predictable lines.

Question: How much do you trust polling data?

Answer: About as much as I trust politicians.

Question: How much do you like being bugged by pollsters while eating supper or beating a deadline?

Answer: About as much as I like answering the door on a sweet, sultry Sunday afternoon.

According to writer Nate Cohen in the New York Times in January, “The polling industry has been hit hard by high-profile misfires in recent years. Exactly why the polls err often remains a mystery. Potential sources for error abound: The initial samples could be biased, the likely-voter models may not reflect the actual electorate, or voters could make last-minute decisions that make even an accurate poll wrong on Election Day.”

Mr. Cohen also references a Pew Research report that declares: “Polls have failed to accurately predict winning candidates in several recent elections, including the 2015 race for governor in Kentucky, several 2014 U.S. races for Senate and governor, the 2015 British general election, the 2015 Scottish referendum on independence, and the 2015 referendum in Greece on acceptance of the European Union’s terms for a bailout. In the 2012 U.S. presidential election, many surveys underestimated the share of the vote that Barack Obama would receive. Errors in modeling the likely electorate are suspected of contributing to many of these polling failures.”

Or could the problem simply be the intellectual triangle pollsters, politicians and the press have managed to forge over the past few decades? After all, these are the only “audiences” who seem to benefit from periodic public opinion surveys.

We, the great polled, couldn’t care less; except, of course, enough of us are more than willing to offer an opinion when gently pressed to do so.

Is Brian Gallant the greatest thing since sliced bread? Sure. Nope. Doesn’t matter. You’ve answered the question, done your civic duty. Now go to bed as images of real and important matters fail to dance in your heads.

Tagged , , ,
Mar 23 2016
Leave a comment
Democracy, Energy, Environment, Politics

Juggling the balls of climate change

 

FullSizeRender

New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant’s determination to be on the right side of history may be one of the signature features of his term in office.

And, why not?

Political leaders far older than he struggle daily to balance the competing and often conflicting demands and expectations of the people they represent. It is only the hubris of youth that convinces such jugglers that they, above all others, can keep all the balls in the air and, so, astonish and mollify a disparate and peevish crowd of voters.

Sometimes, it works just fine.

Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy (elected at age 44) had his Camelot and moonshots, his Peace Corps.

Current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (elected at age 44) has his clean-technology agenda and climate-change avowals, which he hopes will bring this nation closer to its true identity as an advocate for green sensibilities the world over.

Again, why not?

The problem, of course, is reality. It pulls and pushes, warps and wrinkles even the noblest aspirations. In the public sphere, fear and alarm masquerade as legitimate, dissenting voices. Paid lobbyists practice their smooth alchemy; industry associations exert their influence; and poorly educated citizen groups caterwaul from the sidelines of relevance.

The result is almost always inevitable: The political juggler drops the balls; bold, youthful aspirations fall to the ground; and the status quo remains intact.

I can’t confirm that this is happening in New Brunswick, but I will say that we’re getting there.

Fresh off the plane from Vancouver, where he met with his provincial counterparts and the prime minister, Mr. Gallant now vows he will “consider” pricing carbon in the province. As the Saint John Telegraph-Journal reported recently, the premier is “now listing a hike in the gas tax among an ‘array’ of carbon-pricing mechanisms the province could choose in efforts to strengthen its role in a pan-Canadian climate change plan.”

But, if Mr. Gallant was ever serious about ameliorating the effects of global warming in New Brunswick – and aligning himself to federal priorities on this issue – why was his campaign for office scrupulously devoid of such considerations? Why was his most recent provincial budget largely silent on these matters?

The province’s Climate Change Action Plan 2014-2020 offers little explanation.

“In New Brunswick, the impacts of climate change have already begun to appear,” it reminds us. “Temperatures are rising, high-intensity precipitation events are becoming more common, sea levels are rising and inland and coastal areas are experiencing greater rates of erosion and more frequent flooding. In other words, New Brunswick’s ‘normal’ weather is no longer what it used to be, and more change is anticipated in the future.”

As for “visions, principles and goals”, the report has this to say: “The actions put forward in New Brunswick’s Climate Change Action Plan 2014-2020 recognize that: Decisions must be based on reliable and accurate information; decisions must consider the implications of long-term climate predictions and their anticipated impacts on future generations; and that all New Brunswickers share the responsibility of responding to climate change and should therefore be informed and engaged.”

No kidding Sherlock. We know this. The only reason why this province has not embraced a truly effective policy to battle climate change has to do with competing interests that constantly agitate for keeping the province’s economy tethered to the past.

If Mr. Gallant and his crew are serious about transforming this small corner of the world, he and they will have to cross over the line into the right side of history, where no political jugglers need apply.

Tagged ,
Mar 23 2016
Leave a comment
Culture, Economy, Politics

Up in smoke

IMG_0650

For those who insist that public attitudes move with only glacial speed, a quick review of some of the hot button issues of the past generation serves to rebut the assertion – none, perhaps, more convincingly than recreational drug use.

This may explain why members of New Brunswick’s medical establishment are urging the provincial government to exercise all due circumspection as it ponders ways to deliver the federal government’s presumed (not yet announced) framework for legalizing marijuana. “There should be a discussion about it,” Paul Blanchard, executive director of the New Brunswick Pharmacists’ Association, told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal earlier this month. “The province shouldn’t be acting unilaterally. We would certainly hope that whatever decision they are making they’re doing so with health consequences in mind.”

Mr. Blanchard’s comments came on the heels of news that the provincial government’s liquor Czar, Brain Harriman, has been spearheading research by liquor boards across Canada to investigate the merits of a new world order for the sale of legal, regulated weed in retail outlets.

“It’s a health concern,” Mr. Blanchard said. “I’m certain that the provincial government is looking at other jurisdictions. . .and seeing there is an opportunity on the sales tax side. But we think there are also some health consequences here that need to be factored in.”

To be fair, he has a point. Some recent, credible research has found that adolescent and teenage pot smoking raises the risk of developing some form of mental illness later in life (which form, I presume, depends on the number of brain cells you manage snuff out in callow youth).

Still, the speed with which the conversation about illicit drugs has evolved in recent years is astonishing.

In the most recent issue of Harper’s Magazine, writer Dan Baum notes in his provocatively titled piece, “Legalize it all: How to win the war on drugs”:

“In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first ‘war on drugs’ and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. “I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. . .At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of . . .questions that he impatiently waved away. ‘You want to know what this was really all about?’ he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. ‘The Nixon White House. . .had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . .We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against either (hippies and black people). . .but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

The times. . .they, are, indeed, a changing.

All of which raises a question: If we can so quickly reimagine the universe on the dubiously redeeming subject of drugs, can we also apply this flexibility of mind to the fundamentally pressing issues that have vexed us for generations?

Shall we declare a war on poverty?

Only this time, we won’t rest till we win.

Tagged , ,
Mar 08 2016
Leave a comment
Humour, Politics

Avoiding the ‘T’ word

IMG_0261

To the best of my knowledge, New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant has been silent on the guy, whom some oddsmakers now insist, could become the next president of the United States.

On the other hand, the Dread Pirate Donald has had plenty of things to say about Canada – mostly benign, if not exactly kind.

For one thing, he insists, he will not “build a wall” on our shared border to prevent legions of illegal Canadian immigrants from flooding into the Red, White and Blue (as if, pal!). For another, he says he “loves” us (if only on camera).

Of course, what he actually knows about the sparsely populated, monstrously sized geography just north of him could fill a plug in one of his artfully coiffed toupees. But let’s give him the benefit of our doubt.

Better yet, let’s imagine that once he assumes residency in the Oval Office, he will reach out his manicured hand and seek to shake that of Mr. Gallant’s. How would that conversation transpire?

President Trump: “Brian? It is Brian isn’t it? You know I really like that name. . .Reminds me of ‘Life of Brian’. . .You know. . .the Monty Python movie. . .though I gotta say, I preferred John Cleese doing silly walks. . .Hey, did you ever see the one about grandmas beating up thugs on the streets of London?. . .You know, they really had something there. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with America. . .So, Brian, what did you want to talk to me about?”

Premier Gallant: “Uh. . .you phoned me. . .”

Trump: “So I did, so I did. Well, now, Brian. . .I’ve met your President Jason Treacle. . .”

Gallant: “I think you mean Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. . .”

Trump: “Trudeau. . .huh. . .Listen, is he any relation to that Doonesbury comic guy Gary Trudeau?”

Gallant: “Not that I’m aware of.”

Trump: “That’s good. . .good. . .good. I don’t care for that Gary character. . .Kind of a pinko, if you get my drift. . .Now listen Bri-Bri – by the way, you can call me the Trumpenator – what do you think about getting some good, patriotic Americans up to that Cape Breton of yours? I think it could be a win-win for both of us. . .I hear you have some great golf courses there and, as it happens, I build golf courses. . .So, you can see the. . .what’s that darn word?. . .Synergies?. . .You can see the synergies going forward, right?”

Gallant: “Sure, I guess. . .Except that Cape Breton doesn’t belong to New Brunswick. It’s a part of Nova Scotia. . .so. . .”

Trump: “Details, details Bri-Bri. . .Listen, I didn’t get to be president of the United States by sweating the small stuff. You gotta start thinking extra-box-like. . .I just made that up. Start being a boxless person, and you, too, could become president of the United States someday.”
Gallant: “I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed.”

Trump: “Don’t worry, I’m working on an app for that. . .By the way, can I land one my helicopters on this Cape whatchamacallit? I only ask ‘cause I got a lot of helicopters.”

Gallant: “Sure, I suppose.”

Trump: “Good. Oh, by the way, you’re fired! Ha, ha, ha. . .See what I did there? Geeze, I kill myself sometimes.”

News headlines from Canadian Press confirmed that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “intends to steer clear of contentious topic during” his U.S. visit this week: Donald Trump.

Indeed, in this circumstance, perhaps silence is golden.

Tagged , ,
Mar 07 2016
Leave a comment
Humour, Politics

For the man who has everything

 

It will be Canada’s first shot at the head table in 20 years. In fact, a state dinner with the putative leader of the free world is no small honour for a greenhorn prime minister of the Great White North. So, the order of the day, off the main menu or a la carte, is simply: Don’t blow it Justin.

Specifically, don’t use the salad fork to cut your rubber chicken. Don’t haul out a bottle of Niagara vino and invite your hosts to dump their overpriced French Bordeaux in favour of it. And, for heaven’s sake, scrupulously avoid lecturing anyone about Canada’s superior health care system and gun laws.

Not that any of this is likely when Mr. Trudeau assembles with his wife and entourage behind the Rose Garden this week in Washington. After all, he’s too smart to blow a free lunch, as it were.

He knows that, at the moment, everyone, including U.S. President Barack Obama, positively adores the cut of his jib. (Why, even the Dread Pirate Trump, whose own Republican Party is figuring ways to make the usurper in their midst walk the plank, has issued a few blandly nice comments about this country’s decidedly Liberal, political honcho).

Still, for Mr. Trudeau, none of this settles the question: What do you give a man who has everything?

Indeed, ‘gifting’ between heads of state is a long, honoured tradition in this and other corners of the globe. Late last year, a Bloomberg Politics report had this to say about the practice:

“The late Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz lavished the president (Obama) and his family with six gifts with more than $1.3 million. They included a men’s watch for the president, which was estimated to cost more than $18,000, and a ‘diamond and emerald jewelry set including earrings, necklace, ring, brooch, and wristwatch’ for Obama’s school-age daughters.’”

Meanwhile, according to the news item, “Various Chinese officials were also generous: President Xi Jinping gave Obama two computer tablets. Many gifts are traditional offerings – fountain pens, vases, cognac, and the like. Others demonstrate pride, including French wines or traditional garb of a given country. In the past, though, Obama has also received wackier fare, including 20 baseball caps with his face on them, as reported by Yahoo.”

Oddly, there’s very little literature on the subject of official state gifts from Canada’s Prime Minister to America’s Commander in Chief (although the satirical, online magazine The Lapine once had a field day ‘reporting’ Stephen Harper’s bequest of a two-year-old beaver named ‘Slick’).

Certainly, the circumstance demands immediate redress. Mr. Trudeau could choose from a cornucopia of obvious trinkets and delicacies with which to honour Mr. Obama: A plank of pricey salmon from British Columbia; a hockey puck from the 1972 showdown between Team Canada and the former USSR, a cutting of winter ice from the Rideau Canal preserved in a summer cooler.

None of these, though, strike me as novel or even emblematically Canadian in the second decade of the 21st Century.

Might I suggest an alternative?

Somewhere in the back country of New Brunswick, a little distillery with a big international reputation, produces the best gin that has ever passed these (or anyone else’s) lips. As this province helped hand a convincing electoral victory to Mr. Trudeau last fall, it would apropos to ship a case of Distillerie Fils du Roy’s ‘Thuya’ to the White House.

There, behind the Rose Garden, may the two world leaders sip away their worries, plot world peace, and admire the cuts of their respective jibs.

Tagged , , , ,
Mar 05 2016
Leave a comment
Climate, Economy, Energy, Politics

Squaring the circle

DSC_0242

Psychologists define cognitive dissonance as the ability to suspend disbelief in two or more fundamentally contradictory positions – sort of like a juggler who never drops the ball and, so, never faces the gravity of common sense.

I, for example, may be an ardent environmentalist even though I drive a gas-guzzler that gets lousy mileage because it’s easy on the old bank account. I happily park my tank and fill it too.

In the absence of any proof of sentience among this planet’s non-human residents, we naked apes are nature’s primo practitioners of cognitive dissonance – none better among us, perhaps, than politicians.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with provincial premiers to discuss the federal government’s plans to hasten the Canada’s transition to a low-carbon, clean-technology economy. Prior to the conference, regional leaders evinced broad consensus on the priorities: It looks good on paper; let’s see how we can make this work. In less time than it takes to change the oil in an SUV, however, the typical fault lines emerged.

Reported the CBC on the eve of the first ministers’ gabfest in Vancouver on Wednesday: “There are more than a few bruised thumbs and discordant notes already. Indigenous groups have complained the invitation list was not wide enough, while Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has levelled a series of broadsides at the federal Liberals’ promised carbon pricing.

“When asked about potential tensions Wednesday, Trudeau responded. . . ‘I expect that premiers and indeed all representatives are going to do the job they were elected to do, which is to stand up for their communities, stand up for their regions and ensure that we are working together in ways that grow the economy right across the country while protecting the environment. There is little substitute for sitting down and actually rolling up our sleeves and working together.’”

Yeah, how’s that working out for you?

Half way through the conference, the Prime Minister intimated, rather darkly for a putatively ‘sunny ways’ leader, that however the premiers decide, the feds will impose its own pricing structure on carbon.

Meanwhile, as if oblivious to the climate-change winds that are beginning to blow around the world, the New Brunswick government is agitating for its own offshore energy accord with Ottawa. In fact, according to one news report in Brunswick News, “Energy Minister Don Arseneault said during budget estimates for his department that about $300,000 is being dedicated this year to hire consultants and research the geological data required to lay the groundwork for securing an offshore accord.”

Here’s how the good fellow justified the decision in an interview with reporter Chris Morris: “Everyone around us has an accord. Quebec is on the verge of signing one. We have to watch that very closely, because we have to protect our territory as well. It doesn’t mean that tomorrow we would have offshore drilling and whatnot, but we want to protect our territory.”

And, you know, whatnot.

Still, I wonder whether such provincial lobbying (and the $300,000 price tag assigned to it) would not be more productively deployed by hitching New Brunswick’s economic fortunes to the federal government’s most recent, eminent cause, which has almost nothing to do with developing traditional oil and gas resources, and almost everything to do with making the most of what we already possess to create a clean-energy, clean-technology society on the East Coast.

As Ottawa moves to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint, provincial premiers nod compliantly even as their feet remain stuck in the muck of fossil fuels. Dissonance, it seems, remains cognitively, stubbornly us.

Tagged , ,
Feb 28 2016
2 Comments
Economy, Government, Politics

Becoming a debtor’s paradise

DSC_0034

Suddenly, the Great White North, recently famous for its probity and prudence the world over, appears ready to throw itself off a fiscal cliff.

What was forecast to be a small budget deficit in 2016-17 and 2017-18 now looks very likely to balloon to $25 billion in each of those two reporting years. The causes depend, of course, on whom you consult.

The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau blames its predecessors under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who, they say, underplayed the effect of falling oil prices even as they systematically told Canadians a far rosier tale of the nation’s basic economic strength than was probably justified.

The Opposition Tories, meanwhile, insist that the incoming Grits simply blew the budget by promising to pay for things they could never hope to afford (and, in the process, scrupulously avoided informing Canadians about the fundamental flaws in their accounting logic).

Indeed, there are a few skeletons in the fiscal closet that neither political party is especially keen to reveal.

For starters, the Conservative government never did have a handle on this whole business of running productive surpluses. It had a notion – and not a great one – that it could fool the country into believing that book entries in ledgers and cutbacks to essential programs, like infrastructure, would generate durable black ink in the public accounts for years to come.

Forget about crumbling roads, highways, bridges, canals, and military materiel. That was always someone else’s problem to solve. (It would have been theirs’, but electoral history spared them the humiliation of admitting to their own three-card-monte version of responsible government).

Secondly, the Harperites saw the writing on the oil sands years before they admitted they might be obliged to adjust their deficit and debt projections. In fact, the claim that no one saw cheap oil and gas prices coming down the pike as far back as 2012 is simply incredible.

At that time, the Americans were already moving aggressively towards oil and gas independence precisely because the Saudis and other OPEC nations were goosing their own production schedules and slashing margins at their state-owned facilities to squeeze western producers between a rock and a shale bed.

As for the nascent Trudeau government, it could never achieve its goal of simultaneously holding the line on deficits and opening the spigot. Anyone who thought it might. . .well. . .I own a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in taking off my hands.

In New Brunswick, we might properly wonder why we’re so concerned about our own province’s annual deficit, especially if the feds are so willing to increase the national one.

After all, Ottawa’s yearly shortfall could now increase by a per-capita factor of $1,000 (measured against the country’s population). That’s about 40 per cent less than ours in this East Coast jurisdiction.

But there is a difference, and it’s an important one.

Ottawa enjoys economies of scale that New Brunswick does not. The federal government has 33 million people whose open pockets they can pick. This province, meanwhile, still relies on the legal apparatus of transfers and Equalization from the ‘Centre’ with which to cover its debts.

Now, multiply that by 10 provinces and a territory or two, and you begin to get a sense of why a federal deficit is an entirely different animal than a provincial or territorial one. The former suddenly, if lamentably, becomes necessary.

If we want Ottawa’s books to balance, then we ought to begin in our towns, cities and regions. The fiscal cliffs are, in the end, our own to avoid.

Tagged , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →