Sep 20 2015
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Economy, Media, Politics

Whose party is this?

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It should surprise exactly no one in New Brunswick that political parties do their level best to differentiate themselves from their opponents by any means necessary. After all, this province, New Brunswick, has been staging periodic vote-fests longer than almost any other jurisdiction in Canada.

Rarely, however, have the substantive policy differences among the three, leading federal camps – Conservative, Liberal and New Democrat – been as vanishingly small as they are today. And this presents New Brunswickers – owners of one of the nation’s least robust regional economies, and one of the most burdened by debt and deficit – with a special chore: Choosing who among these federal courtesans is most likely to doff his cap to the ancient regime of this country; the East Coast.

Shall we all just hold our breath?

New Brunswick’s social and economic challenges are both specific and articulated: High unemployment; low commercial productivity; high rates of illiteracy and innumeracy; low interest in anything remotely resembling renewable energy technology; high levels of disaffection with public institutions; low tolerance for civil-service cutbacks; high disdain for politicians, in general; low sympathy for elected representatives who purport to get things done by upending the status quo.

Under the circumstances, then, why would any party that seriously seeks power vary in form or substance from any other – except, of course, in what they tell the great unwashed at election time?

What they tell us now could fill a thimble for relevance and actual change.

Here come the Tories, barking at New Brunswickers that their jobs-ready, economic action plan has, over the past eight years, saved this province from perdition. Their implied motto is simply this: It could have been worse.

Here come the Grits, insisting that New Brunswickers will be much better off than they have been if only they will giddily throw themselves into the red tide that will surely swamp the Maritimes. Their message is: It can be better, though exactly how. . .well, we’ll get back to you on that.

Finally, comes the third rail (which, incidentally, looks an awful lot like the first and second), the NDippers. They want us to believe that New Brunswick and the rest of the Maritimes are overdue for a massive transformation. Let us, then, agree to abolish the Senate and see how well that works out for us.

Oddly enough, that was an essentially Conservative idea not so very long ago, and even a Liberal one for an Ottawa minute when Justin Trudeau kicked out every Grit senator from his sitting caucus, again, not so very long ago.

As for New Brunswick’s particular social and economic woes, no federal party has yet made a convincing case that this province’s hard and trenchant issues matter more to them than found money on a summertime beach along the Bay of Fundy (which, like substance in political rhetoric, is also rare these days).

What actually distinguishes each federal contender from the other is a media play; crafted and acted before cameras, packaged for YouTube, and meant to be taken with a large barrel of salt.

Jobs are good, so say we all. Unemployment is bad, so say we all. Innovation and productivity must be the urgent concern, so say we all.

Crime? Boo!

Victims? We feel their pain.

Health care? Of course, it’s necessary.

Literacy, numeracy, trust in public institutions? Yup, we have our work cut out for us on that, too.

Still, choose me. I wear the red sweater, or the blue one, or the orange one. The difference is immense.

Even if it’s all the same to you.

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Sep 20 2015
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Personal History

In the garden of possibility

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With the sweet reflection of late middle age, I will mark the 20th anniversary of my first day of permanent residence in New Brunswick this coming October. This thought astonishes, as much as terrifies, me.

When did that happen? It seems only a week ago when my wife and I trundled down the highway from Halifax, with a trunk full of clothes and books, to set me up in a dingy hotel room on the banks of the Petitcodiac.

There I was with a drawer brimming of socks and underwear and 24 bottles of the cheapest beer our dwindling bank account could support. We were 35 years old and – having lost our first life thanks to a sectoral recession that effectively made economic nomads of every journalist I ever knew in this region – looking for a new, main chance.

Eventually, we found an apartment to lease, then a house to rent, then, finally, a home to own. And we’ve never been happier.

Here is where we finished raising our children; supporting their dreams and ambitions, cradling their professional aspirations, delighting in their marriages.

Here is where we also fell desperately in love with our four grandchildren.

To be clear, none of this was supposed to happen. We were doomed, we had thought, to an endless circuit of small-town opportunities, operating almost like grifters from the Dirty Thirties: Hey folks, roll up and check out the three-card Monte table that is the confidence game of our talents.

That wasn’t actually true, of course, but for years it felt that way. Would we ever land, ever know friends again? Would we ever root ourselves, finally?

One hard, March day in 2006, we surveyed the gravel driveway that was our backyard at that time. We peered at one another and wondered aloud: Does this wreckage have to look this way, be this way, spite us in its ugliness and uselessness?

Within 24 hours, we were out there with shovels and spades, digging deep into the ground, building beds for planting, making room for roses and weeping crab trees, ditch flowers and campanula, bleeding hearts and day lilies, witchy yarrow and supernatural dahlias.

It was, to be sure, one of the biggest leaps of faith we had taken together since our marriage at age 20: Can we make this impossible garden thrive?

When you look at your life over half-a-century, you don’t tend to imagine it as a script played out for other people’s edification or. But it is. It always will be. We are as responsible to one another as we are to the plants in our various gardens.

We either tend our kids and our parents with affection, or we face the certainty of their withering souls. We either tend our communities with love and faith, or we risk losing them to random acts of hopelessness, crime and dissolution.

Coming to Moncton taught me this in the reaches of a backyard garden where everything now blooms (with a little help from organic fertilizer).

As William Blake once wrote long ago, “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.”

In this province, at this time, we can either allow our flowers to prosper or we can abandon all hope to the terrifying proposition that aging necessarily equals retreat, that the status quo, with all its weeds, will inevitably choke the life from this fragile planting bed.

Or we can remake ourselves.

We can be young again.

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Sep 20 2015
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Culture, Economy, Education, Society

How to enter the “thought-market”

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The vaunted academy is, let’s face it, not what it used to be – if it ever was.

I still remember college barkers gathering at my high school’s gymnasium in mid-1970s Halifax, pushing their various institutions’ alleged merits like so many army recruiters.

“If you want to be all you can be, then Saint Mary’s is the place for you, son. We’ll set you up for a real career in commerce, or applied basket weaving – whichever you prefer.”

Not so fast boyo, enthused the clean-faced man from Dalhousie’s development department (read: public relations):

“Have we got a deal for you. Take a full course load in business administration and you can be out and making money within 26 months – earlier if you opt for the co-op placement program.”

Row after row of pot-bellied, middle-aged men wearing bad suits and worse ties – refugees, I always imagined, from the advertising departments of local radio stations – would make the same pitch: A university education is only as valuable as the degree to which it advances your chances for material comfort later in life.

Do you want a good house, a fine car, a reliable job with a fat pension? Go to college.

Do you desire a thick retirement package, a gold watch at the end of your socially useful professional career, a rewarding set of hobbies you can afford to pursue? Well, then, by all means, sign on the dotted line, fork over a few hundred bucks, and you’re on your way.

I always likened these salesmen for academe to boatmen on the River Styxx, reaping young minds and sending them into their own, private Hades long before their time on this mortal coil was up.

The names of the barkers have changed, along with the body shapes and sartorial styles, but the message, alas, has remained largely the same: Higher education in this country, region, province is an economic imperative; not an intellectual one, certainly not a spiritual one.

In fact, it could be all three if governments, public and private school boards, and university administrators would agree to convene regularly to remind themselves that their true purpose is toproduce citizens who think critically, empathically and imaginatively about the world they inhabit and will, someday, lead.

Making kids “job-ready” in a marketplace where jobs change daily is a chump’s game. Making them “thought-ready”, on the other hand, is simply wise public policy. The fearless, innovative, cheerful and indefatigable will always change society ­– mostly, history demonstrates, for the better.

That means we must begin to remove the crypto-vocational aspects from the university system and return to courses and programs that build the intellectual muscle this planet needs to solve its direst problems – problems that a classical education in math, science, history, literature, and language directly address.

According to the recruiters at my high school, before the Internet made wiseacres of us all, I was a true disappointment. I chose a university course of study that mixed physical sciences with social ones (geology, biology, politics, philosophy, classics). I labored at it for years, failing, succeeding, failing again, and succeeding again.

When I was finally done, finally “job-ready”, I found that I was utterly unequipped to make the big salary, buy the big car, and live in the big house.

I was, however, “thought-ready”.

And the rewards have arrived apace, without force, as they have for my own children who cherish, above all, the notion that the critical knowing of things is the road to wisdom, even as the world does not always recognize the importance of either.

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Sep 20 2015
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Society, Trade, Wealth

An ode to our aging trades

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I sit on my front porch in the old west end of Moncton as the eastern sun threatens to set, and watch while two men who must be ten years my senior – 65 years each, if a day – rebuild the front of my neighbor’s house.

They take their time, because doing things right, plying the skills they were taught when they were young, doesn’t mean just something: It means everything.

“Now, that’s a handsome job,” I say as I gambol up the street to inspect.
“Well, thank you,” the man in the orange t-shirt replies.

“No, I mean it,” I say. “That’s a truly magnificent job.”

The man in the blue shirt looks at me as if I’ve never seen a job site before. I explain that I once worked for a master carpenter in Toronto, a long time ago, and nothing he ever did could compare to the work these guys were executing for their relatives in this time, on this street.

Would he and his partner be interested in replacing my back deck, I wondered aloud?

“Oh no,” they chime almost in unison. “We’re retired.”

More’s the pity; for as time marches on for this province, for this region of Canada, retirement seems especially poisonous to the long-term economic future of the body politic.

I long ago abandoned any notion of “retirement”. The concept seemed to me, as a small businessman and owner-operator, not only impractical, but also irresponsible. After all, if I manage to retain all the skills my particular craft demand, shouldn’t I be obligated to continue for as long as my physical and mental health support?

According to David DeLong, an American speaker and labour-force consultant, “Many executives today worry that skill shortages threaten their organization’s ability to grow and innovate. A recent survey I designed for one manufacturing sector found that almost 60 per cent of managers responding thought skill shortages were already hurting their firm’s productivity and quality.

“But, despite a seriously aging population in the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world, only four per cent of this same group saw the aging workforce as an immediate threat to performance. Most expect the effects of aging Boomers to come 3-5 years. About 20 per cent don’t see the aging workforce as a concern at all.”

And, really, why would they?

Those of us who have survived one, two, three, four and five horrible recessions know a thing or two about surviving the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth. In fact, in a weird and wonderful way, we relish these downturns.

We are young enough to recall what real fear feels like and old enough to remember how we overcame the daily terror.

Now, we “old folks” stand and deliver the lessons of experience – the tutorials necessary to bring a youthful, hopeful provincial government to heed the narrow truths behind its own broad rhetoric.

In truth, we will not prosper in the long range until will embrace the importance of small victories against the gathering darkness of global recession in the short range.

That means investing in the little enterprises whose owners – likely elderly folk who know a thing or two about surviving and thriving – are incapable of giving up, going dark and sending themselves into the retirement they say they crave.

“I’m really too old for this,” the man in the blue shirt says.

“Me too,” the man in the orange shirt says.

“So,” I say, “You’re done, then.”

The smiles arrive: “Oh no, we’ll be back. . .We will always be back.”

Sep 20 2015
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Politics

See how they run

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It’s early days yet, and anything can happen. Still, political junkies across Canada are noticing a trend within the electorate they haven’t witnessed in years, maybe even decades: Citizens actually intend to vote this time around at the ballot box.

That’s good news, if only because it suggests that those who are ultimately responsible for the condition of their democracy – John and Jane Q. Public – are taking their pickings (meager as they might be) seriously.

If we obsessive-compulsives are correct (and, dear reader, there’s no guarantee that we are – remember what actual pollsters had to say about recent provincial elections in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, in which they got their forecasts so wrong even American late-night comedy shows took a break from lampooning the absurdities of U.S. politics to highlight those of ours), then this could be the biggest election turnout since the early 1960s, when upwards of 80 per cent of eligible adults cast tickets.

As a matter of more than mere interest, the lowest voter turnout on record in this country was in 2008, in the depths of the Great Recession, when barely 59 per cent of the eligible population deigned to visit their polling stations. Oddly, though, those most committed to the democratic plebiscite at that time were those who ultimately had the least to gain: New Brunswickers, of whom a higher percentage than the national average showed up to vote.

As things track now, this province appears ready to repeat that performance a little more than a month from now, though the result would be anything but conclusive.

According to a CBC analysis, “It appears the federal horse race may have reverted to its three-headedness again, as two new polls suggest a narrowing of the gap separating the three parties. But one of the surveys provides some insight into what and who is capturing voters’ attentions, and what effect it might be having. The CBC Poll Tracker still has the NDP in the lead with 33.5 per cent support, followed by the Conservatives at 29.1 per cent and the Liberals at 27.3 per cent. The Greens are averaging 5.5 per cent support, while the Bloc Québécois stands at 15.3 per cent support in Quebec.”

Added the public broadcaster: “This is a bit of a reversion to where things stood before the publication of two polls that suggested strong numbers for the New Democrats. These surveys by Forum Research and the Angus Reid Institute, both out of the field a week ago, put the NDP at 40 and 37 per cent support, respectively, among eligible voters. It boosted the party in the average, but the four polls that have been published since have put the NDP between 31 and 34 per cent support. That is where the party was polling prior to the release of these two bullish surveys.”

However New Brunswick “votes” and whatever the national impact this may produce, the province can at least pat itself on the back for its determinedly engaged citizenry.

As Elections Canada points on its web site, “The issue of voter turnout is taking on greater importance in public discussion in Canada and elsewhere. Observers increasingly link declining participation in elections to some of the more fundamental problems of modern democracy.

Indeed, notes the organization, “If the social and political forces that are driving turnout down are of a longer-term nature, the problem of low voter participation could continue to plague the political system for years to come.”

That, at least, does not appear to be one of New Brunswick’s myriad problems. For once.

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Sep 20 2015
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Climate, Economy, Energy

Whither our energy future?

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When New England’s state governors and Atlantic Canada’s provincial premiers gather, as they are inclined to do every so often at a suitably picturesque venue along the northeastern seaboard of this continent – where they may gaze into each other’s eyes, which mirror their own – they most often talk of stronger trade ties, better cross-border relations and, of course, energy agreements, always energy agreements.

So it was earlier this month in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where the usual suspects assembled to conduct their usual business for their usual day. The evidence that these meetings produce anything truly tangible or productive is scant, but they do tend to generate good headlines.

Here, for instance, New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant’s assertion that the province must push ahead on an export-oriented LNG terminal to handle all that natural gas in the ground he’s not pulling up around here (because, don’t you know, it could be perilous to his political health) ran above the fold in provincial newspapers.

What didn’t is a piece which postulates that New Brunswick is ideally suited to chart an entirely different course for its energy future and, possibly, for the entire northeast and rest of Canada.

So, then, here is that piece:

Almost nowhere in Canada does the wind blow more constantly and hard than it does along New Brunswick’s coasts. In fact, a wind map produced in 2007 by scientists at the University of Moncton definitively proved that steady breezes could support nearly all of this province’s in situ energy demands, and then some. Wind is, obviously, a zero greenhouse-gas-emission option. More than that, the research required to commercialize it would rejuvenate the high-tech manufacturing sector here, providing good-paying, year-round jobs to (at least) complement seasonal employment in traditional resources industries.

Similarly, almost nowhere in this country do the tides ebb and flow with greater power and regularity than they do in the Bay of Fundy. For decades, the western world has owned the ingenuity (if not always the technology or the will to develop it) to produce thousands of megawatts of clean, emissions-free power.

Scotland is, arguably the market leader. Last year, Edinburgh-based Atlantis Resources Limited announced that its “MeyGen, the world’s largest tidal stream development, has agreed terms for a funding package to finance the construction of the first phase of its ground-breaking 398MW tidal array project in the Pentland Firth, Scotland. When fully completed, the MeyGen project will have the potential to provide clean, sustainable, predictable power for 175,000 homes in Scotland, support more than 100 jobs, reduce carbon emissions, and deliver significant, long-term supply chain benefits for UK economy.”

Of course, if we don’t believe in Scotland, what shall we then say about Sweden? According to recent piece in The New Yorker by staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, “In some parts of Europe, what has been called ‘conscious uncoupling’ (between gross domestic product and greenhouse gas emissions) is already well along. Sweden, one of the few countries that tax carbon, has reduced its emissions by about 23% in the past 25 years. During that same period, its economy has grown by more than 55 per cent.”

Oddly enough, the steam engine found its first industrial purchase in New Brunswick where in the early 18th Century it was modified to produce the timber that built the British navy.

Innovation was good enough for us then, when our political leaders didn’t simply gaze placidly into each other’s eyes; when they took a main chance and changed the world for the better at that time.

Now that we know better, will they change it again?

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Aug 31 2015
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Business

Give sober review to trade laws

It would take something like beer to upend the Constitutional status quo of this country – if, of course, it ever does.

Consider the strange case of Gerard Comeau who was caught crossing the border from Quebec into New Brunswick with 14 cases of beer and three bottles of liquor in 2012. According to an antiquated Prohibition-era law, that’s a big no-no.

Mr. Comeau is now on trial for violating the New Brunswick Liquor Control Act, which states that individuals are allowed to bring one bottle of wine or liquor or 12 pints of beer into the province at any given time.

According to a CBC analysis of the historical context underlying the case, “The Canadian law regarding the shipping of alcohol was meant to thwart bootleggers, and led to a gradual devolution of federal responsibility to the provinces in matters relating to liquor. Each province established an agency that oversees the distribution, sale and consumption of wine, beer and spirits.”

The CBC piece quoted Mark Hicken, a Vancouver attorney who specializes in interpreting Canada’s quirky interprovincial trade regulations, thusly: “A lawyer down in California once said to me, ‘You can’t understand any North American liquor laws unless you trace them back to Prohibition.’ You look at any regulatory structure in North America and if it was examined in a global perspective, you’d look at it in stunned disbelief, like ‘What is going on here?’ It really does go back to the Prohibition mentality of control.”

Added Mr. Hicken: “The shipping laws were brought in to stop the inter-provincial bootlegging traffic following the repeal of Prohibition at different times and in different provinces. Today, the major reason for the continuation of those laws is money – the liquor boards want to maintain absolute control over all liquor in their jurisdiction so they can levy a liquor board mark-up on it.”

Bingo, and that, sadly, is the lay of the land for so many other brands of goods and services in Canada.

Without commenting on the merits, or demerits, of the specific case against Mr. Comeau, I will say that this nation’s arcane, out-dated and just, plain bizarre interprovincial trade rules are stunning incongruities at a time when federal officials are successfully negotiating, or renegotiating, sweeping commercial agreements with the United States, European Union and the Asia-Pacific. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“As we approach the 150th anniversary of Canada’s founding in 2017, we still have some unfinished business to deal with,” University of Prince Edward Island political scientist Peter McKenna has recently written. “It comes in the form of pernicious and persistent internal trade barriers between provinces.

“There is no disputing that the founding partners of Confederation had in mind unfettered trade and commerce between them. In fact, section 121 of the Canadian Constitution states: ‘All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.’”

Now, we face the very real prospect of welcoming European cheese into our local marketplace where Canadian-made craft beer and wine from outside our resident province are outlawed.

Does this make any sense to consumers or producers? The answer is as obvious as its corollary: interprovincial trade barriers benefit, most reliably, cash-strapped provincial governments.

But even when they don’t, the sheer inertia of the status quo virtually guarantees that nothing changes, despite the well-meaning noises various premiers make about finally getting things done.

Will the Comeau case make a difference?

I’d cheer that efficacious outcome.

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Aug 29 2015
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Culture, Democracy, Government

Our ignorance is their bliss

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Knowing what we know today, is it likely we’ll forget it all by tomorrow?

Human nature inveighs against the better angels of our civilized character. Memory doesn’t so much serve us, as pester us.

Consider, for example, higher education in New Brunswick.

For decades, we assumed that a broad, liberal course of study – in the undergraduate years – would prepare students in this province to take their places in the productive working world. They might go on to specialize in any number of disciplines: law, medicine, business management, architecture, theatre, even (gasp!) journalism.

Now, we require them to choose their paths in society before they even know their own minds – to, in effect, forget their youthful passions in the service of actuarial accounts that determine who will be useful, and who will not, to the common weal. Memory is the sentimental enemy of the current political good; so get with the program, kids.

Similarly, we imagine that life for New Brunswickers aboard the good ship Stephen Harper has been either uniformly splendid, or utterly awful. Again, our capacity for accurate recollection fails us.

Once, not so very long ago, the prime minister toured these environs and declared, in so many words, that Atlantic Canada must fight its culture of “defeatism”. We screamed and cried, as we are wont to do. But was he entirely wrong in his sentiments? We said he was.

On the other hand, within scant years, Mr. Harper made it perfectly clear to New Brunswick that Ottawa would guarantee a culture of defeatism here by eviscerating social programs, capping health-care transfers and knee-capping local MPs in his own party if they dared speak truth to power. Was he entirely right? We said he was.

Does memory serve, or merely pester?

Why have we forgotten about the enormous potential of renewable energy technologies in this province? What happened to wind, tidal and biomass, fading into our collective memory of hope and grace? What about early childhood education, universally accessible to all in New Brunswick? Was it just a dream, a faint memory of a better future, idly conjured in the past?

All of which raises the question: If we know what we know today, is it inevitable that we’ll forget it all by tomorrow?

If human nature inveighs against the better angels of our civilized character, shouldn’t we conjure stronger angels to shepherd our finest instincts? If memory doesn’t so much serve us, as pester us, oughtn’t we banish the tyranny that accompanies habitually following those who desperately want to erase that which we would otherwise remember? (Spoiler alert: the babies we elect to high office).

In fact, I adore the memories that pester me. I love remembering when a boy or girl could expect a straight shot at a decent job for life, thanks to a tax-payer-funded training program.

I relish thinking about my own (non-tax-payer-funded) apprenticeships at Canadian Press, CFDR Radio in Dartmouth, and Atlantic Insight Magazine in Halifax. These are images from my life, lessons I have learned, cherished recollections of a society that – while not perfect, by any measure – embraced the ever-spinning wheel of history; past, present and future.

I grew up at a time when Tommy Douglas’ words still resonated: “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.”

Indeed, we are made of sterner stuff than the current basket of expectations that Ottawa and Fredericton retails daily: Believe what we tell you, try not to think too much; your ignorance is our bliss.

Blow it to bits, friends; and never forget.

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Aug 29 2015
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Democracy, Politics

Our dwindling democracy

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Some who reside in the Greater Moncton area don’t give a chocolate-coated fiddlehead about the Mike Duffy affair.

According to one straw poll I conducted by cell phone between the hours of 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. on a recent Saturday afternoon, as I careened out of town for a weekend of fun in the sun at an undisclosed Maritime location, which is, I hasten to add, not my primary residence.

I should also say that the five people I interviewed comprise a statistically meaningful sample of Canada’s voting public exactly zero times out of 20, with a plus-or-minus margin of error of precisely 100 per cent (in other words, about average for national pollsters in recent elections).

I posed only one question, providing survey respondents with the opportunity to rank their five main issues from one to five, in descending order:

“What would you say is your most pressing concern in this absurdly long, already tedious, election cycle? Is it (a) Duffygate; (b) unemployment; (c) the economy; (d) global warming and Canada’s reaction to it; and (e) the weapons-grade stupidity evinced by all but the tiniest fraction of politicians of every stripe in the soon-to-be-again Great White North?”

The results were compelling, if not especially unexpected.

All five respondents declared unequivocally that political stupidity was their most urgent worry. Comments ranged in tone and perspicuity from, “I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. . .did I mention that I hate them?” to, “you know, it’s probably not their (politicians’) fault; inbreeding causes a lot of problems elsewhere in society too.”

Coming in a close second was the economy. One respondent observed: “So, here we have in the Harper government a regime that once insisted the best thing it could do was to stay out of the private sector’s way, and yet it now runs on a platform extolling the virtues of its economic hegemony.”

Third on the hit parade of grievances was unemployment – or rather, underemployment. “I came to this province on the promise of green fields of opportunity,” said one interviewee. “I figured my advanced degree would make me a fine candidate for good-paid work in New Brunswick. Now, I drive a cab in Moncton.”

Fourth was global warming.

Assorted remarks included: “I went to a beach in New Brunswick and I almost froze my feet off”, “I went to a beach in New Brunswick and I almost had heat stroke”, “Oh. . .wait, I think I see an asteroid about to destroy all of us. . .Funny how it looks just like Mike Duffy.”

In Ottawa, far away from what matters to most people down here, the Senate moils and roils to reclaim its significance, the trials of important others proceed apace.

The world here now begins with irrelevance, marches towards false gravitas and ends in self-importance. The regions of this country do not matter; neither do the cities or towns we call home. And the Mike Duffy affair, which should concern us, simply doesn’t rise to the occasion.

We are, all of us, victims of our own distractions, our own obsessions, our own grievances. There is almost nothing left in the collective piggy bank of charity, forgiveness and grace; nothing with which to rebuild the world we so recently broke.

But should we, in our minds, with our hands and hearts so easily abandon the struggle to understand what goes horribly wrong in the National Capital Region?

To our abiding shame, we have begun to care nothing about the condition of our own democracy, with a margin of error of exactly zero.

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Aug 29 2015
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Climate, Humour

Lost in the barrens of Moncton

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Anyone who hasn’t endured shock therapy to erase the memory of last winter along the East Coast will surely greet the latest forecasts of the coming fall with a mixture of fear and loathing.

Yes, dear reader, we are heading for another prelude to snowmaggedon: A Maritime autumn of brilliant colours, sparkling skies, pumpkin pies, and then a picture of me standing on a glacier that was once my driveway in downtown Moncton, shovel in hand, maniacal grin fixed to face, wild eyes cast heavenward, and a guttural invocation issuing from trembling lips.

“Really? I mean, really?”

Last February, my wife and I spent a balmy 11 days in nearby Charlottetown looking after our kids’ kids (ours had skipped off to Costa Rica for a well-deserved sojourn involving horseback riding and beach combing). What began as a routine “mission impossible” for us, the grand parents, quickly devolved into a mission from hell.

The snow began on a late Sunday and didn’t stop until mid-Tuesday. When it was over, 90 centimeters of the white stuff had fallen within 36 hours. Roads were impassable. Shovels were pilfered. The city was at a standstill. Only stores of milk and games of monopoly kept us going.

Finally, it was time to travel back to Moncton, there to see what obscenity the weather had wreaked on the home front. As we careened up our street, which had been reduced to less than one lane of traffic, we agreed it could have been worse. After all, our city had received a mere 66 centimeters in that particular tempest. We would take the win – until, of course, we attempted to hike the heat.

Here’s the thing about natural gas furnaces: They like snow and ice about as much as my wife and I do. The only difference between them and us is that they shut down, while I am inclined, in prone position, to dig out the various inflow and outflow valves so as to guarantee not freezing to death in my own house – in, by the way, yet another blizzard.

And so it continued for weeks; and, if the predictions are correct, it will continue apace this winter. That’s climate change for you, or, perhaps, just the luck of the meteorological draw.

Accuweather has done its studly job of scaring the stomachs of weak-kneed New Brunswickers of late. Its forecast for the region, issued last week, posits: “A majority of the Arctic fronts will be directed into northern Quebec, Labrador and the Maritimes this fall, resulting in some early periods of chilly weather. This pattern will also help reduce the threat of a landfalling tropical storm or hurricane into Nova Scotia. Newfoundland will continue to see cooler and wetter conditions into the fall with several storms intensifying just offshore.”

Meanwhile, says the weather service, the El Nino phenomenon in the equatorial Pacific, “continues to intensify. . .and we expect this current episode to be one of the strongest. . .on record by the upcoming winter. . . .Strong El Nino’s typically produce unusually mild winters across western Canada. Farther east, the impacts are less certain, but tend to favor reduced snowfall around the Great Lakes region. Current indications are that this upcoming winter will not be nearly as cold as last winter across eastern Canada.”

As for Atlantic Canada. . .well, we’re not so lucky as to be so certain. Still, maybe our permanently hard winters represent an economic opportunity: winter tourism, anyone?

After all, if snowflakes were dollars, all New Brunswickers would be millionaires by now.

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