Category Archives: Society

Mar 03 2015
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Communications, Politics, Society

Exactly why twitter is so aptly named

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With nearly 300 million twits mouthing off each and every day on what must be the most pudden-headed social-media platform ever created for, again, 300 million twits each and every day, one might have hoped that the mayor of New Brunswick’s capital city and the current president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities would have curbed his lip, or, at the very least, sit on his hands.

But, alas, no. Here’s what Freddy Town’s burgermeister, Brad Woodside, had to say about linguistic duality in New Brunswick on his Twitter feed last week:

“Bilingualism I understand, duality makes no sense. This should be on the table Mr. Premier as we look to save money. You asked.”

Indeed, Brian Gallant did ask. He just didn’t expect such an idiotic response.

Or, maybe he did. The young premier is, after all, proving himself to be an able political warrior – routinely stripping the veneer from his partisan opponents to reveal their true colours. Care for a game of bait and switch, anyone?

Poor, old Mayor Woodside. He knows not what strife he causes for himself by attempting to condense an extraordinarily complex and controversial subject into 140 characters or less. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. #Dumb@brucescribes.

Still, he’s in good and much more illustrious company than his own.

Twitter has been luring otherwise smart and accomplished public figures into thoughtlessness for nearly ten years. There’s just something about the freedom to whip off any stray thought that seems irresistible to those who should properly put down that tenth cup of coffee and head straight to bed.

According to a recent story in The Daily Mail online edition, “Shortly after it emerged that (former Republican governor of Florida) Jeb Bush had hired Ethan Czahor as his campaign’s chief technology officer, the Hipster.com co-founder set out to do some spring cleaning on his Twitter. But it was already too late to discreetly delete a handful of ‘jokes’ the Santa Monica product manager had made where he calls out ‘sl**s’ and frets about gay guys at the gym.

“‘New study confirms old belief: college female art majors are sl**s, science majors are also sl**s but uglier,’ one deleted tweet read, with an expired link. Other deleted tweets include a couple gay panic jokes Czahor made about working out at the gym. ‘When i burp in the gym i feel like it’s my way of saying, ‘sorry guys, but i’m not gay,’ another said.” 

Charming.

But no more so than former U.S. federal legislator Anthony Weiner, who, in 2011, tweeted what he apparently considered was the best of himself in tighty-whities. (“I did not have sex with that pair of underwear,” he was overheard, possibly apocryphally, to have insisted in private).

Meanwhile, that same year, occasional funnyman Gilbert Gottfried reportedly tweeted in the aftermath of the tidal wave that wrecked coastal Japan: They (the Japanese) don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.”

Then, there’s actor Jason Biggs who freelance San Diego writer Alex Matsuo reports, “found himself in hot water after he tweeted from his account @JasonBiggs,

‘Anyone wanna buy my Malaysian Airlines frequent flier miles?’ This tweet occurred 65 minutes after it was announced that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had crashed. Followers began to reply with their disgust over Biggs’ words.”

In this offensive company, Woodside is quite likely bush league.

Still, here’s a tip, mayor: When you want to issue an incendiary statement about linguistic duality in this province, don’t tweet it. Write an Op-Ed.

Then, put down that coffee, and get some rest.

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Feb 10 2015
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Society

The great elastic travelling band

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They go out. They come back. They go out again. They come back again.

In fact, about the only Atlantic Canadian I know who hasn’t, at one time or another, been lured to the sweet, black oil pitches of northern Alberta is Yours Truly (and that’s only because I have absolutely no skills).

Still, in our bones, we who possess a familial connection to the East Coast of this great and wise country understand something about tides – about how they ebb and flow; about how they pull everything not fixed down with steel wire and granite boulders into their backwash; about how they cast it all up again above the high water mark, where it’s treacherously tough to make a living, at least for long.

Or, perhaps we need a new metaphor for this ancient phenomenon.

Call it the “Great Elastic Travelling Band”, in which Maritimers and their confreres in Newfoundland and Labrador are stretched to the limit of their finances, and patience, by the constant pull and snap of the national petro-economy that, in entirely unintuitive ways, wrecks homes, communities, relationships, futures.

Have you seen Fort Mac recently? It’s not a pretty sight – and not for its lack of municipal infrastructure. There and in Calgary and Edmonton, house prices have plummeted by 10, 20, 40 per cent since the beginning of the year. The “for sale” signs have been blooming as fast as oil prices have been bottoming.

Naturally, the market value of this commodity, essential to the elastic traveling band, has been nudging upwards in recent days – from $46 a barrel to $52 on February 5, before settling back to $50 by the close of trading.

But this is a pittance, bought and paid for by those who have left this coast behind. The band snaps back, as much as it can.

“In all likelihood, there will be less employment in Alberta, therefore less people moving out to Alberta, less migrant workers going back and forth,” the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council’s senior policy analyst Fred Bergman announced last week. “Within two years of the previous oil price dip in mid-2008, annual out-migration to Alberta from Atlantic Canada had decreased by about 6,000 persons.”

Now, given the volatile state of oil and gas development out west, the out-migration rate from this region to theirs could be a third of recent years. That’s nothing to say of those who will inevitably choose to flood ‘down home’, where the deficits are as high as a zoo animal’s eye.

All of which is marvelous; just about as much as it is dreadful.

After all, what shall we do with all these returning ex-pats?

New Brunswick has a structural unemployment rate of between 10 and 15 per cent – not because the province’s private sector can’t fill the jobs it produces, but because, in the absence of skilled workers, it’s no longer generating employment opportunities even incrementally, let alone en masse.

As a result, profitable companies here (if they want to remain profitable) retrench, reorganize, and reinvent. Life becomes smaller, less adventurous, more studiously attached to the thinning margins of the bottom line.

Meanwhile, as Atlantic provincial governments attempt to deal with the fiscal consequences of their regional, economic doldrums, their motivation to stimulate commercial opportunities become necessarily muted.

At some point, once the elastic is stretched too far, and for too long, it simply refuses to be pulled or snapped.

We’re not quite at that point, yet, here on the East Coast. But we are heading perilously close to that place of economic perdition where nothing we try, or endure, improves our long-term lot.

This is the first of many columns to come in which I will attempt to articulate a cogent vision of the alternative: a prosperous and socially equitable province; a fair and democratically responsive politic; a vibrant and sustainable economy.

Before, that is, we all go out, and never come back again.

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Jan 29 2015
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Economy, Education, Government, Politics, Society

Let’s get serious about early childhood education

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If the federal government is truly concerned about the welfare of women and children, then it should rethink its social policies before it pours good money after bad.

The current thinking in Harpertown posits a minefield of ideological presuppositions that is as breathtaking in its scope as it is in its peril: That young children benefit only when mum is chained to a doorknob in her kitchen; that women find their best, truest selves only when raising a brood with Captain Canada’s monthly cheques (about enough to cover the cost of novice hockey-league membership); that dad should, but should not necessarily be forced to, engage in raising the children he sired in the first place.

Did I say “Harpertown”? Let’s properly call it “Pleasantville”.

Pleasantville is now spending tax dollars to hike the children’s fitness tax credit; arrange for income-splitting among worthy, affluent families; and double down on the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) for children under age six, to wit:

“As of January 1, 2015, parents will receive a benefit of $160 per month for each child under the age of six – up from $100 per month. In a year, parents will receive up to $1,920 per child.”

That notice comes directly from the Canada Revenue Agency, by way of the Prime Minister’s Office. What it doesn’t bother to mention is that these election goodies will cost, all tallied, upwards of $7 billion a year – just about as much as a truly scientific, comprehensive, empirically designed program of national, government-subsidized early childhood education.

In a 2013 syllabus on the broad effects of early-years instruction, TD Bank Group’s senior vice president and chief economist Craig Alexander had this to say: “There is a great deal of evidence showing overwhelming benefits of high quality, early childhood education. For parents, access to quality and affordable programs can help to foster greater labour force participation. But more importantly, for children, greater essential skills development makes it more likely that children will complete high school, go on to post‐secondary education and succeed at that education. This raises employment prospects and reduces duration of unemployment if it occurs.”

In fact, according to his research, “for every public dollar invested in early childhood development, the return ranges from roughly $1.5 to almost $3, with the benefit ratio for disadvantaged children being in the double digits.”

Indeed, around the world, the happiest results correlate with the earliest starts.

A recent OECD report states that in Sweden “The system of pre-school education is outstanding: (a) in its fidelity to societal values and in its attendant commitment to and respect for children; (b) in its systemic approach while respecting programmatic integrity and diversity; and (c) in its respect for teachers, parents, and the public. In each of these categories, the word ‘respect’ appears. There was trust in children and in their abilities, trust in the adults who work with them, trust in decentralised governmental processes, and trust in the state’s commitment to respect the rights of children and to do right by them.”

In Finland, the OECD concludes, “The early childhood education workforce has several strengths, such as a high qualification level of staff with teaching responsibilities, advanced professional development opportunities and favourable working environments. Staff with teaching responsibilities are well educated and trained with high initial qualification requirements. Professional development is mandatory for all staff; and training costs are shared between individual staff members, the government and employers. Working conditions in terms of staff-child ratio are among the best of OECD countries.”

All of which confirms that early childhood education is not the expensive experiment that cynics decry. On the contrary, it is a plausible, workable application for meeting some of our hoariest, long-term social challenges.

The sooner this federal government understands that this nation is not, as its political operatives like to assume, a blank canvas for partisan portraiture, the sooner we can get on with investing good money where it belongs: In the future of our kids, who will return dividends that Pleasantville can’t begin to imagine.

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Jan 16 2015
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Democracy, Society

Monkey see, monkey do when we ignore democratic institutions

The gorilla in the Senate is biding his time

By all means, throw up your placards, raise your standards high, moisten all the blowhorns your lips desire. Still, know that without the public institutions a free and open society demands democracy is as brittle as an oak leaf in a January wind.

Five million people marched across the streets of major capitals in Europe last week to support the laudable and necessary principles of free speech and expression. They locked arms – jews, muslims, christians and atheists, alike – to send a message to the brutalists of the world that they will not be silenced by threats or bullets. They chanted the mantras of democracy lovers everywhere: all must be heard and heard must be all.

But when they returned to their cozies and alcoves, to their apartments, flats and houses, to their mansions and villas, they faced the same conundrum they had left only hours earlier: a growing and appalling gulf between those who have and those who have not; and, even worse, a conviction that the mechanisms and apparatus of the democratic principles they cherish are hopelessly ruined.

And the spiritual disease is spreading rapidly and everywhere.

“As each U.S. election cycle rolls by, public life seems to grow more rancorous, frayed and fragmented, with the 2014 midterms being no exception,” writes Pooja Gupta  in a recent online number of the Journalist’s Resource (which bills itself as a project of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Centre and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. . . an open-access site that curates scholarly studies and reports).

“There is a palpable sense that something deeper is at work in America, some sea change in the underlying patterns of life. . .A 2014 study published in Psychological Science, Declines in Trust in Others and Confidence in Institutions Among American Adults and Late Adolescents, 1972-2012, (finds that) trust in other people has sharply declined since the 1970s, reaching historic lows in 2008 and in 2012. In 1972-74, 46 per cent of American adults reported that they trusted most people. This dwindled to 33 per cent in 2010-12. Conversely, 51 per cent of American adults reported skepticism in others in 1972-74, increasing to 62 per cent in 2010-12. These results were mirrored among high school seniors, whose trust in others dropped from 32 per cent in 1976-78 to 18 per cent in 2010-12.”

What’s more Gupta reports, “Confidence in institutions also hit an all-time low in 2012 for both adults and high school seniors, after highs in the late 1980s and early 2000s and lows in the early 1990s, late 2000s, and early 2010s, with trust in the military being the only notable exception.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Canadians’ confidence in their own Parliament has been dwindling for years. Data, current to January 2013, from the Conference Board of Canada suggest that citizens of this country believe their politicians deserve nothing better than a “gentleman’s C” in the performance of their duties. This represents a precipitous drop from heady levels recorded in the 1960s.

What accounts for the malaise? Apparently, your guess is as good as mine.

Or, as the Conference Board blue-skies, it could be that over-educated young ones – you know, the ones who can’t find jobs thanks to an economy that’s monolithically geared to produce oil, gas and low-paying retail jobs – are pissed off.

It could be that too many people are otherwise engaged updating their social media profiles hoping that their legions of followers give a hoot (they don’t).

It could be that all these factors, both social and economic, have left a bitter taste in the mouths of those who have been, over the past decade or two, sold a bill of goods by politicians who like to think they know what they’re talking about, but who are, all too often, only lightly interested in the good of the many at the plausible expense of their own meagre reserves of power and influence.

But if these factors have soured us on our system, then it remains to us, and only us, to rebuild it or replace it.

Our public institutions – a sound and principled bureaucracy, a sage and independent judiciary, a Commons and Senate ever vigilant against incompetence, prevarication, waste and corruption – are the monkey bars of our democracy. They are the skating rinks and splash pads of our civic commitment.

By all means, raise your standards high for our shared principles of justice and liberty. But don’t ignore the social architecture that will raise them even higher and, in fact, keep them there.

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Jan 12 2015
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Democracy, Law, Society

Tragic lessons from the desks of Charlie Hebdo

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If the barbarians who slaughtered 12 people at France’s satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, last week thought they were killing free speech at the point of their automatic rifles, they were sorely, absurdly mistaken.

Nothing ignites the fire of democracy in the belly of open – too often, casually complacent – societies than the massacre of innocents.

And, make no mistake, despite their habitual, even offensive, run at the world’s religions, the editors, writers and political cartoonists who died at the hands of a cadre of Islamic fundamentalists were, by any reasonable comparison with their assailants, utterly guiltless.

The wits and wags of Charlie Hebdo used their minds and pens to poke holes in the dangerous dogmas and priggish pomposities of their targets of derision. They didn’t grab guns and blow away their ideological nemeses like so many deer caught in the headlights of fanatical blood-lust.

As the still-civilized world mourns the obscene events in Paris, it also stands firm and united in its determination to, again, enshrine the principles of a free press as a requisite condition of an unfettered and enlightened society.

Canadian editorial cartoonists – marking the passing of four of their French peers – have come forward, joining their voices with hundreds of others around the world.

As CTV reported on Thursday, “In Halifax, Michael De Adder and Bruce MacKinnon both drew poignant pieces for the murdered. De Adder’s cartoon showed a hand writing out the words, ‘freedom of speech,’ with extremists trying to stop the hand from completing the words. . .MacKinnon’s showed a tattered French flag flying at half-mast, with a pencil serving as a flagpole.”

Said Bruce: “As negative and traumatic as this is, it has the opposite effect because it proves our relevance. It shows that what we do has an effect and does matter.”

Added Mike: “I’m actually more jazzed to continue what I’m doing.”

Their colleague, Edmonton Journal cartoonist Malcolm Mayes, praised his fallen, overseas comrades for their courage in the face of numerous threats over the past several years from would-be – now confirmed – Islamic terrorists.

To CTV, he said, “They weren’t cowed, they weren’t afraid. They stood their ground and that’s what people have to do in the face of threats like this. . .I’m not going to change the way I draw or change my opinion because someone threatens me.”

Opined Terry Mosher (a.k.a. Aislin), who made his professional bones afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted on the editorial pages of the Montreal Gazette: “Satire is poking fun and questioning hopefully all of our institutions and our attitudes. Nothing is ever 100 per cent right. So the whole purpose of satire is to test your system and see if we can poke fun at these things and question them – obviously, I believe in that very strongly.”

Sadly, too many young, radicalized thugs around the world simply do not share similar values. Even more lamentable is that some of them possess the means and the opportunity to wreak havoc – on the societies that have accepted them without much compunction – at will.

We can, of course, react with force – hunting down likely perpetrators George W. Bush-style, throwing them into internment camps, subjecting them to state-sanctioned torture, and conveniently forgetting where we left the keys to their locked cages.

We can, naturally, launch drones to blow up their enclaves and, in the process, a few thousand innocent bystanders and call that “collateral damage”.

Or we could take to the generally safe streets we call home – as millions have over the past few days since the Charlie Hebdo tragedy – and declare that freedom is a universally accessible commodity; that speech is the mechanism of democracy; that live ammo is the last resort of a peaceful, productive civilization just as it is the first of an authoritarian, paranoid one.

We could take a breath and remember to get back to the hard, sometimes perillous, work of promulgating the worthy, essential notion that the free expression of ideas defines us as thinking humans, not killers or murderers or vile barbarians.

Those who died at the offices of Charlie Hebdo understood this. They weren’t martyrs. But they were heroes of democracy, and our memories of them will live longer than those we now revile of the savages who ended their lives.

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Jan 03 2015
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Society

The more things change. . .

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No generation is immune from the hubris of exceptionalism; we imagine that the march of human progress is inevitable and forever upwards as we naturally strive to better ourselves and our societies.

Still, history is a cruel headmaster.

How far have we come in, say, 100 years, or 50? How much changed is the world of 2015 – the world of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Vladimir Putin’s virtual annexation of the Crimean Peninsula – from the one the late encyclopedist, James Trager, described in 1979?

The author of “The People’s Chronology” had no favorite years, preferring, instead, to view all of civilization’s pageant through a slightly warped lens. Indeed, 1915, was, in his estimation, remarkable only for its consistency.

“The Great War in Europe,” he wrote, affecting the diarist’s first-person narrative, “grows more intense. Casualty lists mount for both sides on the eastern and western fronts and a German U-boat blockade of Great Britain begins February 18.”

Later that year, an enemy sub would sink the English passenger liner S.S. Lusitania, sending nearly 2,000 passengers and crew (including 128 Americans) to their watery deaths in less than 18 minutes, provoking such outrage in the United States that public neutrality towards the European conflict would soon shift convincingly to widespread saber-rattling.

Meanwhile, as Trager noted, “British income taxes rise to an unprecedented 15 per cent as the Great War drains the nation’s financial resources.”

Yet, all was not exclusively mired in, or tainted by, battlefield follies:

“The Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and research is founded by the University of Minnesota with a $2.5 million gift from C.H. and W.J. Mayo of the Mayo Clinic at Rochester, Minn. . .The disposable scalpel is patented by U.S. inventor Morgan Parker. . .Long-distance telephone service between New York and San Francisco begins. Alexander Graham Bell, now 68, repeats the words of 1876 (‘Mr. Watson, come here. . .’) to Thomas Watson in San Francisco. The call takes 23 minutes to go through and costs $20.70.”

From 1915, flash forward 50 years, and consider the actual substance of the advances: one great war had ended, only to lay the foundation for another. Europe at been destroyed and restored twice in the span of two generations. American power,  which had been rising steadily since the turn of the 20th century, was now ascendent.

In 1965, Trager wrote, “U.S. bombers pound North Vietnamese targets in retaliation for a National Liberation Front attack on U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam. Washington announces a general policy of bombing North Vietnam. . .Some 125,000 U.S. troops are in Vietname by July 28 and (U.S.) President (Lyndon) Johnson announces a doubling of draft calls.”

Meanwhile, the American president “asks the UN to help negotiate a peace, but U.S. troops take part in their first major battle as an independent force in mid-August and they destroy a Viet Cong stronghold near Van Tuong.”

Again, though, as in 1915, there were peaceable – sometimes even noble – distractions.

“President Johnson,” Trager reported, “outlines programs for a ‘Great Society’ that will eliminate poverty in America in his State of the Union message and he signs a $1.4 billion program of federal-state economic aid to Appalachia into law.”

The move was blessed, perhaps, by perfect timing. By 1965, the number of people on welfare in New York City had swelled to half-a-million. That number, wrote Trager, “will grow to 1.2 million in the next 10 years and by 1974, the city’s welfare agency will account for $3.4 billion of the city’s $12 billion budget.”

Today, we greet the dawning new year with strange mixture of trepidation and deja vu. We don’t exactly know where we are going, but we sure know from whence we came, and though the players and locations continue to change down through the generations, the game remains essentially the same.

We still fight our vainglorious wars and pay for them with money extracted and  diverted from our more tranquil, constructive obligations to each other.

In this, we are not unique.

If, however, we finally determined to change the rules of the game we’ve been playing ever since we began to stand upright on an African savannah, that might just make this generation exceptional, after all.

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Dec 31 2014
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Climate, Politics, Society

The good, the bad and the merely okay of 2014

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To despise, revile and ridicule the year that was is a taunting temptation. So too, is the impulse to celebrate, rejoice and exult. Rarely, do we find, in repose, the clarity to declare that the past 12 months of our brief lives were. . .well, just fine, thank you very much.

They weren’t spectacular; but neither were they calamitous. They weren’t elegiac; but neither were they prosaic. They produced (if we were lucky and studious) just enough to help us keep calm and, as the saying goes, carry on.

In fact, in New Brunswick, there was much to mark merrily in 2014, starting with the orderly transfer of democratic power (a miracle, by every standard, on this vicious orb).

The young and energetic Liberal Leader, Brian Gallant, replaced the slightly older, but equally energetic, David Alward as premier of the province. The latter receded gracefully into the background of politics, after one term in office, as the former rode the crest of a wave of support appropriately reserved for honeymooners.

Premier Gallant promised in his campaign to restore the legal apparatus for a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive options. Within a month of assuming office, he did just that. According to a CBC report in late November, “The premier promised in the election campaign to review Regulation 84-20, which requires women seeking a hospital abortion to have two doctors certify it as medically necessary. The review identified barriers to abortion services, according to Gallant.

“It also requires the procedure to be done only by a specialist, whereas other provinces allow family doctors to perform abortions. The so-called two-doctor rule has been in place for two decades, supported by previous Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments.

“Identifying those barriers was an important step towards eliminating them,” Mr. Gallant stated, adding that the new rules will no longer insist that two doctors guarantee that the surgery is medically warranted. As the CBC reported, “This will put reproductive health procedures in the same category as any insured medical procedure, according to the government.”

Indeed, the premier noted, “We have identified the barriers and are proceeding to eliminate them in order to respect our legal obligations under the Supreme Court of Canada ruling and the Canada Health Act regarding a woman’s right to choose.”

Lamentably, that’s where the innovation ended.

As for natural resources, the new premier has been equally faithful to his campaign promises (much to the surprise of every scribbling pundit in the province, including Yours Truly). He will not, he says, sanction any form of fracking as long as he remains unconvinced about the technology’s safety and environmental soundness. And, for now, he remains unconvinced.

This decision could cost New Brunswick tens-of-millions of dollars a year from a mature industry that has never polluted the air, spoiled the soil or poisoned the water table. It might even inspire a wholesale exodus of oil and gas industries from this province at a time when the budgetary deficit clings perilously close to $400 million and the long-term debt hovers around $12 billion.

Still, Mr. Gallant is adamant. And, for that, at least, he should be respected. As an elected representative, he is sticking to his guns. How he intends to pay for his multimillion-dollar infrastructure build over the next four years remains an open question – and, for now, a question for another time.

In the end, as New Brunswick’s social contract appears progressive, its economic future looks very much like its present and recent past: unspectacular, uninspired and fundamentally unproductive.

For all the good this province’s new government purports to arrange for its citizens, all who might pay for such noble intentions find cold comfort at the curb to which they’ve been kicked.

For all the bad this province’s new government hopes to avoid, all who might benefit from such principled injunctions obtain higher costs at local fuel depots fed by foreign oil and gas.

As for the rest of us, the merely okay with the status quo, we’ll just keep calm and carry on, hope for the best and imagine that at this point in our brief lives we are, indeed, just fine.

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Nov 27 2014
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Education, Poverty, Society

No higher duty

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That we, as Canadians, have become vassals of our own stupidity is not nearly as shameful as the ritual sacrifices we make to maintain this status before the gods of politics who guarantee to keep it that way.

Now, we learn (not for the first time) that we are more than willing to sacrifice our children on the altar of standard public policy, for a few dollars here and there, rather than risk beginning the world again with national educational programs that would, in all likelihood, re-invent our communities, our economy – indeed, our entire society – for the better.

For the second time in as many weeks, the news about the condition of Canada’s kids is out, and it’s far from encouraging.

“Since the House of Commons adopted the unanimous resolution to seek to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000, child poverty rates have increased.”

This comes from the Human Development Council, based in Saint John. Its 2014 New Brunswick Child Poverty Report Card, released this week also observed: “In 1989, when the resolution was passed, 1,066,150 children (15.8 per cent) in Canada lived in poverty. In 2012, both the number and percentage of children living in poverty had increased to 1,340,530 (19.2 per cent).”

Meanwhile, as I wrote last week, 28 per cent of kids in this province are fat; 40 per cent get practically no daily exercise at all. Seven to 13 per cent of those in middle and high school smoke cigarettes either occasionally or regularly. Nearly five per cent admit to taking methamphetamines, at least once in their tender lives.

The injury and hospitalization rate for children in New Brunswick is almost twice the national average (41.4 cases per 10,000 inhabitants, compared with of 25.8 for the country as a whole). And, as if these facts weren’t bad enough, there are the morbid metrics about ritual abuse to consider.

As the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris reported last Wednesday about the seventh, annual “State of the Child Report” from the province’s Child and Youth Advocate Norman Bosse, “Two in three girls in New Brunswick say they have been bullied. The rate of children and youth who are victims of family violence in New Brunswick is much higher than the national average (365 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to the national average of 267).”

Then, there’s this appalling finding: “The rate of New Brunswickers charged with sexual offences involving children is much higher than the national average (seven per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 4.3 per 100,000 inhabitants for Canada as a whole).”

It’s a truly chilling comfort to know that these are not just New Brunswick or Canadian phenomena; they are endemic around the world. According to some estimates, more than 600 million children on this planet live in abject poverty, subject to all the predations that civilization proscribes (I’d bet the number is, in fact, much higher).

Still, as the income gap between the working poor and the occasionally industrious rich widens everywhere, so does our empathy for those whose circumstances we can barely recognize. We steadily become a society of them against us – our team opposed to the dreaded others.

Our communities become gated, our moats around our compounds grow, our appreciation of democracy and the communal importance of our public institutions withers, and those who manage to ford our fortifications to knock on our doors, looking for a charitable contribution or, more likely, gainful employment, risk a taser shot to the head, or worse.

There is something we can do about this, of course.

We can stop building walls around ourselves by refusing to buy what our mainstream political parties are selling in return for our votes.

We can start engaging in the political process at the provincial and national levels to secure not our narrow self-interests, but our common good.

And what, for the future of our economy, our society, our very souls, is more commonly good than the welfare of our children?

After all, they are us, and in their tearful, hungry, terrified eyes, we become them.

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Nov 21 2014
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Society

Parent, pedagogue, pastor, politician: Our kids are not all right

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The statistics on children’s welfare in New Brunswick are in and they are heartbreaking.

Twenty-eight per cent of kids in this province are fat; 40 per cent get practically no daily exercise at all. Seven to 13 per cent of those in middle and high school smoke cigarettes either occasionally or regularly. Nearly five per cent admit to taking methamphetamines, at least once in their tender lives.

Meanwhile, the injury and hospitalization rate for children in New Brunswick is almost twice the national average (41.4 cases per 10,000 inhabitants, compared with of 25.8 for the country as a whole).

And, as if these facts weren’t bad enough, there are the morbid metrics about ritual abuse to consider.

As the Telegraph-Journal’s Chris Morris reported on Wednesday about the seventh, annual “State of the Child Report” from the province’s Child and Youth Advocate Norman Bosse, “Two in three girls in New Brunswick say they have been bullied. The rate of children and youth who are victims of family violence in New Brunswick is much higher than the national average (365 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to the national average of 267).”

Then, there’s this appalling finding: “The rate of New Brunswickers charged with sexual offences involving children is much higher than the national average (seven per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with 4.3 per 100,000 inhabitants for Canada as a whole).”

What, in the name of God, are we doing?

That’s the question Janelle Vandergrift, a social policy activist, asks in her recent blog post for the Huffington Post Canada, to wit:

“Twenty-five years ago this month, our (Canadian) government unanimously made a promise to end child poverty by the year 2000. A promise that has been is broken – today the number of children living in poverty in Canada is the equivalent to the population of Calgary.

In a country as wealthy as ours, one million children currently experience poverty and all that comes with it including poorer health outcomes, educational disadvantage, poor nutrition, and exclusion.”

She continues: “Most would agree that child poverty is an appalling Canadian reality. In fact, eight out of ten Canadians believe the federal government has a role to play in ending child poverty. . .If we hope to make any progress on reducing poverty in Canada, a focus on kids is critical. Not only does Canada have human rights obligations specifically to children, but ending child poverty would have positive implications for the future of our society and the future of those children. Childhood is a particularly influential time: kids who grow up living in poverty are more likely to experience health problems throughout their lives, have lower incomes and be in trouble with the law. Ending child poverty will help to break the cycle of poverty.”

And, yet, what do we have?

A federal government that seems to think that the best way to raise a kid is to give his or her parents a paltry sum each month to cover the cost of whatever the “true experts on child-rearing” deem appropriate.

Provincial governments that are so woefully underfunded they can’t begin to wrap their bureaucratic minds around the notion of an integrated, universally accessible, evidence-based, publicly funded system of early childhood education.

Health-care providers who would relish the opportunity to agitate on behalf of children, but for the muzzles their various administrators, government factotums and political operatives fix to their mouths.

Sill, Mr. Bosse sings a muted tune of hope. “Twenty-five years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, New Brunswick can and must serve as a model of respect for child rights by giving children a voice, guaranteeing equal opportunities for all children, and providing them with a safe place where they can realize their potential,” he writes. “If we get better at having a coordinated effort around key areas, we will get better at doing the other things, as well.”

Nice words.

We adults always make nice words when the evidence of our collective failure, neglect and outright malice is too painful to face.

It’s time we stop breaking our hearts, and start building our communities all over again.

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Oct 03 2014
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Demographics, Society

What’s so trendy about getting old?

It is the dawning of the age of senescence, and the evidence of society’s fallen arches is everywhere – on the covers of major magazines, at the top of Google’s list of most popular searches, with fashionably silver-haired talking heads, leading the nightly news.

Of course, we’ve seen this coming for some time. It’s been decades since the wiser demographers among us issued their first warnings about the geriatric crunch we now face. That most populous of generations, the post-war baby boom, would one day cease to be young, and the rallying cry for millions of arthritic ex-hippies would become, “You can’t trust anyone under the age of 50”.

Still, the Atlantic magazine’s October issue’s main story makes it official: As we’re all living longer, it’s now cool to be gramps.

  “Since 1840, life expectancy at birth has risen about three months with each passing year. . .If about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of this century, American life expectancy at birth will be 88 years,” writer Gregg Easterbrook notes in his piece, “What Happens when we all live to 100?”

What happens, indeed?

As Easterbrook points out, “Longer life has obvious appeal, but it entails societal risks. Politics may come to be dominated by the old, who might vote themselves ever more generous benefits for which the young must pay. Social Security and private pensions could be burdened well beyond what current actuarial tables suggest. If longer life expectancy simply leads to more years in which pensioners are disabled and demand expensive services, health-care costs may balloon as never before, while other social needs go unmet.”

On the other hand, he writes, “If medical interventions to slow aging result in added years of reasonable fitness, life might extend in a sanguine manner, with most men and women living longer in good vigor, and also working longer, keeping pension and health-care subsidies under control. Indeed, the most-exciting work being done in longevity science concerns making the later years vibrant, as opposed to simply adding time at the end.”

It’s a sort of glass-half-empty-full proposition, which is a safe call if you happen to reside in a relatively affluent, vibrant jurisdiction that offers plenty of professional and cultural opportunities to younger, well-educated workers.

But what if you don’t?

“The proportion of people aged 65 and older was highest in the Atlantic provinces and lowest in the territories,” Statistics Canada reported last month. “Among the provinces, the highest proportions of seniors were in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (18.3 per cent in both cases), while Alberta (11.4 per cent) recorded the lowest. The nation’s youngest population lived in Nunavut, where seniors made up 3.7 per cet of the population.”

Meanwhile, “Population aging was most rapid in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the proportion of people aged 65 and older rose by 9.5 percentage points (from 8.2 per cent to 17.7 per cent) between 1984 and 2014. Population aging was also rapid in New Brunswick and Quebec (+7.8 percentage points for each province) over the last 30 years.”

As laughably hip as the mainstream media likes to make growing old appear, economists pose serious questions about social and economic costs an aging, steadily less productive workforce impose on the generations coming up behind it.

“Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established,” writes Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a 57-year-old oncologist, bioethicist and vice-provost of the University of Pennsylvania, in an Atlantic piece, which accompanies Easterbrook’s.

“Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower. It is not just mental slowing. We literally lose our creativity. About a decade ago, I began working with a prominent health economist who was about to turn 80. Our collaboration was incredibly productive. We published numerous papers that influenced the evolving debates around health-care reform. My colleague is brilliant and continues to be a major contributor, and he celebrated his 90th birthday this year. But he is an outlier – a very rare individual.”

As for the rest of us, not so much.

That neatly explains the meaning of Emanuel’s article, the title of which I’m even tempted to endorse: “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

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