Jul 07 2015
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Economy, Idiocracy

Arrrrg word!

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Is recession a natural phenomenon, attached to the human species the way the weather attaches to Earth, itself? Or, is it a conjurer’s trick of the imagination – a self-fulfilling prophecy – fated to repeat the more we utter its name?

Economic schools of thought are divided on the subject, though the literature and lore is abundant.

In a recent post to The Drum, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s online screed-fest, editorialist Greg Jerhico writes, “After such a long time without a recession, no treasurer would wish to be the one to preside over such an event. For (Australian Finance Minister) Joe Hockey, the path away from recession lies with his hope that the budget measures for small businesses will enliven investment in the non-mining sector. And given the current poor state of investment in that sector, his measures will need to work.”

Adds Mr. Jerhico: “Economists love to call recessions. The standard joke about economists and recessions is the one made by (the late American economist) Paul Samuelson that some economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions. . .Australia has not had a recession since June 1991, which was the last time there were two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth in seasonally adjusted terms.

“Of course, such a definition is utterly stupid, and really should be thrown out as soon as possible. Any definition where an economy could shrink by 0.5 per cent in one quarter, rise by 0.1 per cent in the next, and then shrink by 0.6 per cent the quarter after and not be in a recession is complete lunacy.”

If this doesn’t sound familiar, it should. According to a Globe and Mail piece, headlined “Economy’s dip stokes recession fears”, last week, “The latest reading of Canada’s economic health suggests the economy’s oil-induced coma extended into the second quarter, renewing fears of a mild recession and casting doubt about the country’s capacity to recover from the severe oil price slump.

Statistics Canada reported Tuesday that real gross domestic product (i.e. adjusted for inflation) shrank by 0.1 per cent in April from March. The economy was hit by a 3.4-per-cent drop in oil and gas extraction – the sharpest one-month drop in nearly four years, adding to declines in March.”

Australia is the southern hemisphere’s Canada; both are great, global lodestones of natural resources.

The Aussies have their extraordinary reserves of precious metals, rare-earth minerals, iron ore, coal; whereas, we Canucks can dine out on the fact that we are the largest exporter of unrefined petroleum products in the western world.

But a funny thing happened to both nations on their way to their respective commodity markets: The stalls were closed.

Now, Canadian and Australian pundits are concurrently convinced that recession is, again, a virtual certainty in both nations. Although they are separated by about 12,000 kilometres of ocean, they still share practically every doomsday instinct that is the common weal of two peoples forged by Anglo-Saxon principles of crime, punishment and – not for nothing – blowing the biggest of free lunches geology and history ever displayed before man.

Do we extract natural resources and denude the good earth solely for private pillage, or do we leverage our talent for plunder to obtain better, more efficacious, ends? What safe, reliable, environmentally benign technologies can we invent – from the wealth we extract from the ground – that will preserve and protect the biosphere on which billions of species depend, including our own?

This is the dialectic our times, of our condition. The answer is either our progression or our final recession into oblivion.

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Jul 07 2015
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Economy

It’s all Greek to us

We could sell the snow. There's plenty of that

We could sell the snow. There’s plenty of that

New Brunswick, fiscally considered, is not Greece. But are we getting there?

Canada’s second-smallest province, by population, endures a long-term- debt-to-GDP ratio of 32 per cent. That means dunning, theoretically, every man, woman and child in this province roughly $15,000 a year (more than $35,000 if you consider the federal shortfall).

Greece, in contrast, is Europe’s 14th-most populous country. Its debt now stands at an astounding 180 per cent of annual economic production.

For a while, this nation was relatively robust: Its tourism trade was second to none in the world; its agricultural and resources sectors were among the strongest in the Mediterranean region. Now, it is all but bankrupt.

Last week, the country’s government ordered the banks to shut down (to prevent a run on deposits); this week, the national treasury defaulted on a critical loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund; and just yesterday all heck broke loose on international stock markets as fund managers and moneyed investors around the world sent exchange prices tumbling by triple digits – all because a middling nation with unsustainable leverage couldn’t pay its bills.

The factors that contributed to the “Greek Crisis” (now in its fourth year) are complex. They include socio-economic mismatches involved with merging trade agreements and currency standards into the European Union, and political and fiscal traditions within Greece, itself, which have not tolerated high capital streams from public sources of revenue. (English translation: Though the country maintains comparatively high marginal and progressive rates, Greeks, themselves, are expert tax avoiders).

According to an article in The Economist two months ago, “Greece emerged from recession in early 2014, but its escape from contraction was short-lived. Figures released on February 13th showed the Greek economy still growing year on year, but shrinking in the final three months of 2014. Since 2008, the Greek economy has shrunk by about a quarter. Although not quite as deep a downturn as America’s Depression, Greece’s recession was more prolonged and is likely to take more time fully to recover from. Recent downturns in the euro area seem like minor hiccups in comparison.”

In fact, Greece’s pre fiscal-crisis conditions appear troublingly familiar to residents of New Brunswick, struggling to reconcile their own ambitions with backward circumstances. In Greece, The Economist states, “Even before the crisis struck, (the country) was a laggard. In 2008 only a third of households had the Internet, the lowest share in Europe. Levels of youth unemployment and government debt were already among the continent’s highest. Since then, the gap between Greece and the rest of the euro zone has grown. Unemployment has more than tripled to 26 per cent, and three-quarters of the jobless have been out of work for 12 months or more. Over a third of Greeks are considered to be at risk of poverty.”

The degree to which a country, region or province is a victim of forces beyond its control is a subject for bitter debate. But people who buy the proposition that individual initiative makes no difference to the health of the polity are very often the same ones who expect unchanging standards of public services long after the state has run out of money.

That is certainly the case in Greece, where the leftish government has resisted all efforts by its international lenders to impose austerity measures, while keeping its outstretched hands, palms up.

New Brunswick’s annual deficit and debt are absurdly high for a province of its size.

The question remains: How long can we afford to flirt with our own Greek problem?

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Jul 07 2015
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Culture, Democracy, Law, Politics

Freaky. . .well, any day

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Canada, it goes without saying, follows the Unites States like a puppy unable to keep up with its mother. Politically, culturally and even economically, we’re always running at least ten paces behind the world’s acknowledged trendsetter.

A recent case in point comes courtesy of The New Yorker magazine. In his piece, “Prison Revolt”, Bill Keller writes, “Criminal-justice reformers like to say that if a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has served time. . .These days, it is hard to ignore a rising conservative clamor to rehabilitate the criminal-justice system.

“Conservatives are as quick as liberals to note that the United States, a country with less than five per cent of the world’s population, houses nearly twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners. Some 2.2 million Americans are now incarcerated – about triple the number locked up in the 1980s, when, in a panic over drugs and urban crime, conservative legislators demanded tougher policies, and liberals who feared being portrayed as weak went along with them.   In this historical context, today, Mr. Keller points out, “African-Americans are nearly six times as likely as whites to be incarcerated, and Latinos are more than twice as likely. More than 40 per cent of released offenders return to prison within three years.”

The piece essentially chronicles the odd, even counter-intuitive, rise of social conscience among some the most bloody-minded hardliners in the United States and, essential, asks the question: What’s going on here?

As Mr. Keller writes, “Several Republican Presidential candidates – Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz – have been embraced by Right on Crime, a campaign to promote ‘successful, conservative solutions’ to the punitive excesses of American law and order. In February, the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which serves as an audition for right-wing Presidential aspirants, featured three panels on criminal-justice reform, including one called Prosecutors Gone Wild.”

Meanwhile, “Bernard Kerik, who was Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner and served three years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, now promotes an agenda of reforms, including voting rights for ex-felons. The libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch are donating money to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to help insure that indigent defendants get competent legal representation, and they are co-sponsoring conferences on judicial reform.”

What seems to be driving this progressive trend within this formerly regressive segment of American society is a number of factors, some of which are easy to understand. State prisons cost a lot to maintain; keeping people out of jail saves taxpayers money. Then again, there does seem to be a genuine interest in social utility. As Mr. Keller quotes one Republican figure, “It’s human dignity that really motivates us.”

Now, flash over to the Great White North, and what do we observe? This federal government is tearing pages from the Republican playbook and burning them on a pyre of law-and-order moralism that properly belongs to the Richard Nixon era.

Despite seeing rates of violent crime plummet to 40-year lows, Ottawa’s majority lawmakers prefer to throw more people in overcrowded prisons for increasingly feeble offences. They insist that Canada’s city streets are not safe even though such claims are demonstrably false. And, naturally, they castigate those who disagree with them, calling their critics sympathizers and colluders of and with the “evil-doers” in our midst.

All of which feels uncomfortably sophomoric in a nation that once lead the world in grown-up behaviour – especially now, as we must look to the United States for the latest trends in social maturity.

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Jul 07 2015
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Arts, Politics

Monuments or monstrosities

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Nothing so divides a citizenry than the idols its government choose to worship on its behalf. Time, of course, has a funny way of levelling the peaks and valleys of what, initially, seems like a ferocious debate of eternal consequence.

When the French built their Eiffel Tower in 1867, it was derided by the intelligentsia as, “this truly tragic street lamp”, “this belfry skeleton”, “this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed”, “this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney”.

In fact, Parisian artists published a formal complaint in the popular newspaper Le Temps, an excerpt of which read: “We come, we writers, painters, sculptors, architects, lovers of the beauty of Paris which was until now intact, to protest with all our strength and all our indignation, in the name of the underestimated taste of the French, in the name of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower which popular ill-feeling has already christened the Tower of Babel.”

Nowadays, this formerly “monstrous” edifice is, arguably, France’s most loved symbol of Gallic civilization, the signature icon of the City of Lights.

What, I wonder, will we one day say about the so-called “Mother Canada” monument, the 24-metre-tall brainchild of a Toronto businessman who, having seen the graves of Canada’s war dead in Europe, thought it would be a swell idea to erect a statue in honour of them along one of the prettiest and ecologically significant coastlines in the country, Cape Breton’s north shore?

Indeed, what will eventually think about a memorial to victims of communism planned for a highly visible site in the heart of Ottawa’s government district, right next to the Supreme Court complex?

At the moment, and in both cases, the chattering classes are enraged (though the hoi polloi generally wonder what all the fuss is about).

Writing in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald recently, veteran columnist Ralph Surette was almost beside himself at the sheer effrontery of the Harper government’s moral and material support for Mother Canada.

“For those who still don’t fully understand the game, the ‘Mother Canada’ controversy should provide some enlightenment,” he needled. “The discovery that Parks Canada has furnished $100,000 to the project – after swearing that the statue in Cape Breton Highlands Park was a purely private project – blows the lid off the scheme. The political engineering on this comes from the Prime Minister’s Office.

“This is Stephen Harper building yet another monument to himself. It’s not just the money. The fact that the rules governing national parks have been casually trashed to accommodate the project has the PMO’s fingerprints all over it. No use hollering at Parks Canada bureaucrats. Like everyone else in government, they’ve been reduced to yo-yos of the PMO, detached from their guiding principles.”

As for the victims of communism memorial, controversy also attends. According to a recent editorial in the Toronto Star, “The problem with the project isn’t its size – though the original design was in fact far more intrusive than it needed to be. As we have written before, the issue is the very idea of turning a prime site in the middle of Ottawa’s government precinct over to a politically motivated memorial that does not speak to Canada’s own history.”

There is, of course, another solution to the various contretemps:

Stop erecting idols altogether.

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Jun 29 2015
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Politics

Welcome to New Torytown

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It is, perhaps, a measure of just how conservative Canadians have become over the past decade that Thomas Mulcair is still considered, in many quarters, a socialist threat to all that is worthy.

In fact, there’s almost nothing leftish or wobbly in this leader of the federal New Democrats; if anything, he represents an almost “Clintonian-Blairish” shift to the centre of the political spectrum. And it seems to be working out fine for him.

Writing in iPolitics earlier this month, EKOS Polling chairman and founder, Frank Graves, noted, “Just as it looked like we were setting into a three-way tie, the NDP appears to be opening up some daylight between itself and the Conservatives ­– who are still stuck at sub-30 – and the listless Liberals, still drifting downward in a significant erosion of their support. New Democrats should be jubilant. Liberals should be very concerned. But the worst news here may be for the Conservatives.”

\The pollster added: “NDP and Liberal fortunes are inextricably connected; they tap a shared pool of promiscuous progressive voters who are now looking more favourably at the NDP for a variety of reasons – the election result in Alberta, dissatisfaction with Justin Trudeau’s qualified support for C-51, and a rising sense that the New Democrats are a plausible option to dislodge the current government.”

What’s more, Graves observes, “We do know that those outside of the diminished Conservative base are increasingly receptive to some form of government arrangement between the progressive parties.”

That’s probably because Mr. Mulcair is sounding more and more conservatively avuncular,and less and less radically agitated, these days. Consider his comments at a recent gathering of the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto.

“As our country’s financial capital – hosting 40 per cent of corporate headquarters in Canada – Toronto’s business community has its finger on the pulse of the entire Canadian economy,” he began. “And, looking at the performance of our economy over the past number of months, there is reason for concern.

“The first quarter in particular has some alarming news. Gross Domestic Product took the deepest plunge in nearly six years ­– down by 0.6 per cent. Business investment – down. Exports – for the second quarter in a row – down.

Household spending – the lowest growth in nearly three years.

“And BMO’s overall revised projection for 2015 sees the slowest growth for Canada’s economy, outside of recession, in the past thirty years. But as worrisome as these first quarter trends are, they don’t tell the whole story.

They don’t give us a sense of what’s happening to Canada’s middle class – the best measure of a well-functioning and diversified economy.”

Then came what has become the NDP’s rallying cry in recent weeks: “In 2015, middle class families are working harder, but falling further and further behind. Over the last 35 years, while our GDP has grown 147 per cent, income for the typical Canadian family has actually shrunk by 7 per cent.

And household debt is up – way up ­– hitting a record 163 per cent of disposable income. The Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, calls that ‘a significant risk to Canada’s financial stability’.”

Suddenly, Mr. Mulcair is sounding like a kinder, gentler version of Stephen Harper. The former’s focus on the middle class may be apocryphal (after all, who really believes that socio-economic rhetoric ever produces durable results), but it is politically cunning. He is, in effect, eating the prime minister’s lunch; Mr. Harper’s emphasis on “hard-working families” seems almost clunky by comparison.

Mr. Mulcair may be Canada’s first federal Progressive Conservative in more than a decade.

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Jun 26 2015
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Culture, Democracy, Privacy, Security

Oh privacy, rest in peace

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The assaults on our personal space, our thoughts – both grand and small – have become, in recent years, the principle battleground of democratic debate.

Do we deserve our privacy, or shall we surrender it to the onslaught of media? Do we expect full accountability from our elected leaders, or shall we give them a free pass even as their spy agencies harvest every morsel of information about us for uses not yet articulated?

We have become a “live-in-public” polity. Anyone who doubts this might cogitate for a while on the way mainstream celebrities (and their Twitter monkeys) manage their various images through social media.

Consider, for example, the strange case of Ashton Kutcher – a Hollywood actor of some fame and fortune. He reached out to his fans a couple of months ago to beg their support for his mindful campaign against the paparazzi that plague him and his loved ones.

According to a Fox News report in May, “Ashton Kutcher has taken to social media to blast news outlets for publishing paparazzi photos of his 7-month-old daughter, Wyatt. The actor publicly slammed publications on Twitter after photos emerged of a casually dressed Kutcher carrying his baby girl in his arms, with a clear view of her smiling face. The paparazzi pics were taken while Kutcher and partner Mila Kunis were visiting the seaside town of Carpinteria, Calif., with Kunis’ parents.”

Tweeted Mr. Kutcher: “Why is it so hard for publications to respect that I would like the identity of my child kept private for safety reasons?”

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because you have 16 million followers and you can’t stop talking about yourself.

The actor’s dilemma mirrors our own. In a world where professional value becomes a commodity through personal revelation (even if the cry is for privacy) reason is antiquated. And what becomes antiquated becomes suspect. Suddenly, your business is mine, and mine is yours.

Naturally, you and I have never met, never shook hands, never looked each other in our bloodshot, media-savvy eyes. We’ve never actually conducted a private conversation about what really matters to either of us. We just tweet in series of 147 characters of callow, bland absurdities.

As we do, of course, the world is cloud-banking every stupid thing we say for only one reason: Our love of the confessional pyre, the altar of unsolicited solicitude, to which we happily supplicate ourselves, turns its cranks; and, in so doing, manufactures more ways to penetrate our secret spaces.

We claim our right to privacy in public even as we squander it, undermine it, and, finally, render it meaningless by opening our big, fat mouths about the utterly inconsequential just in time for the next crop of spin-doctors, operating on both private and state allowances, to turn our choice words against ourselves.

It happens all the time. Whole networks in the mainstream media are dedicated to unveiling the “larger” truth behind a pebble of personal information “leaked” to them, lest the pillars of democracy topple in the absence of some celebrity’s full disclosure about the style and shape of his underwear.

And, of course, just like Mr. Kutcher, we lap it up, even as we despise it.

In a Daily Mail Online piece from 2011, the actor “became the first Twitter user to reach one million followers. But, it seems, Ashton Kutcher has finally fallen out of love with Twitter. The 33-year-old actor handed over the control of his account to his management team.”

Really, who could have blamed him?

But, then, what’s stopping the rest of us?

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Jun 26 2015
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Humour, Trade

Who you gonna call?

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It was only when I noticed the albino mushrooms growing from the black seam in the ceiling above the kitchen pantry that I began to momentarily panic.

I climbed the stepladder, butter knife in hand, determined to cut them down without becoming a hapless victim in some real-life iteration of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. They slipped into my trembling paw like dollops of rancid margarine, their spores coating my knuckles.

Two-year-old granddaughter Ruby, her gaze fixed firmly on the objects of my revulsion, promptly announced through the Popsicle planted in her mouth: “Poppy, yucky; fix it!”

I would if I could, dearest, but the Internet – try as it might – does not provide an instructional video for feckless scribblers on advanced plumbing. As for the leak in the bathroom almost directly over your head. . .well, let’s just move your chair to another location, preferably across the street.

Naturally, I elocuted all of this in my “inside voice”. Outwardly, I made a frantic round of calls to old contractors and tradesmen of my acquaintance who had, over the years and on more than one occasion, saved my sorry derriere in this “vintage” property I assumed more than a decade ago.

“Is Jim home? No? He’s gone to Alberta? You don’t say. Okay, thanks. . .No. . .No message.”

“So, Frank is retired? And he closed up shop? No forwarding address. . .Right, thanks very much anyway.”

“Waddya mean Ed disappeared without a trace? You think what, again? You think aliens abducted him, and they’re now using him to build party decks on Alpha Centauri?”

As it happens, I’m not alone in my all-but-vain search for quality trades. Where once, in New Brunswick, they were as plentiful as the rain in spring, they’re now like dust in the wind. And not just here.

Two years ago, Forbes Magazine writer Joshua Wright penned this: “For the last three years, according to ManpowerGroup the hardest segment of the workforce for employers to staff with skilled talent hasn’t been registered nurses or engineers or even web developers. It’s been the skilled trades – the welders, electricians, machinists, etc. that are so prevalent in manufacturing and construction.

“In 2012, 53 per cent of skilled-trade workers in the U.S. were 45 years and older, and 18.6 per cent were between the ages of 55 and 64. (We are using the Virginia Manufacturers Association’s definition of skilled trades, which encompasses 21 particular occupations.) Contrast those numbers with the overall labor force, where 44 per cent of workers were at least 45 years old, and 15.5 percent of jobs were held by the 55-to-64 demographic.”

Conditions for tradesmen and women in Canada aren’t much better. Three years ago, Rick Spence, writing for the Financial Post, observed: “Despite rising unemployment in 2009, a Statistics Canada study that year found 24 per cent of Canadian companies weren’t able to find ‘the right talent’ to fill the jobs available.”

Fortunately, my granddaughter and I are luckier than most. Through a reputable, locally owned building supply company we found a fellow by the name of Josh – a sturdy, durable man with a penetrating wit and exhaustive knowledge of the “right” and “wrong” ways to rebuild a bathroom and, one imagines, just about everything else.

He, in turn, employs a carpenter by the name of Adam – whom I would trust to erect a cathedral composed entirely of locally sourced hemlock – and a plumber by the name of Elliot – whose knowledge of metallurgy and water density is almost mystical.

I’m no longer panicking – at least, not at at the moment.

Jun 26 2015
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Business, Politics

Facing the angry voter

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At this rate, the Hollywood-handsome premier of New Brunswick will need a political facelift before he again addresses his increasingly grumpy public on camera.

Canada’s paparazzo of pollsters – which evidently doesn’t take summer holidays, even as the objects of its scrutiny gently wend their way through the barbecue circuit – reports that Brian Gallant now enjoys a mere 27 per cent approval rating, down from 40 per cent only three months ago.

According to a news release from the Angus Reid Institute, posted to its website, the once-telegenic politician “ends his first session in government bruised by the implementation of his campaign promises and blemished in the eyes of his electorate. An. . .analysis of quarterly online survey results from more than six thousand Canadian adults shows Gallant, first sworn in last October, has seen his approval rating from respondents in his province plummet 13 points in the last three months.”

Only Manitoba’s Greg Selinger is more politically odious among Canadian premiers: Twenty-three per cent of his fellow citizens in that province give him a qualified thumbs-up.

As for Mr. Gallant, Angus Reid vice-president Shachi Kurl seemed almost gob-smacked, telling the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, “At some point the honeymoon always ends, but this is a dramatic drop. To dive 13 points is not something we tend to see over one quarter.”

In fact, though, if you are a resident of New Brunswick you might understand the Liberal premier’s precipitous fall from grace over such a short period. As is typical in this province, the reasons have both everything and nothing to do with the man, himself.

Had former Progressive Conservative Premier David Alward survived the most recent election, the odds are strong that he would be facing a fate similar to Mr. Gallant’s. His polling numbers stuck in the cellar, his political life would be dominated by a series of excessively long and tedious defences of his decisions.

That’s because, for some time now, voters have been nursing sore grudges not so much against the men and women who occupy elected office, but with the standard operating procedures of the political process, itself, which they fundamentally believe has perverted and corrupted every good intention. In this circumstance, no public figure has managed to hold the popular imagination for long.

Neither does party affiliation seem to matter. The public shuffles them them like so many deck chairs on a sinking cruise ship – a habit which goes a long way towards explaining why the policy differences between (if not major announcements of) the Bernard Lord Tories and the Shawn Graham Grits were vanishingly small and why you need an expert on constitutional law to explain the few ways in which the major party leaders today significantly part company.

Beyond this, though, the public has come to expect, with some justification, that most, if not all, political promises are either banal or unrealistic, or both.

Year after year, we witness fiscal posturing from MLAs from the left, the right and the swollen middle. We are told we must get our “financial house in order”, lest the robber-barons of the Wall Street’s bond markets make off with our chickens and the pots that contain them. And, yet, what actually changes? Where is the descriptive vision of a future that never seems to come, as one day dawns pretty much as every other.

Indeed, Mr. Gallant may well need more than a political facelift when he returns from a summer of pressing the flesh.

Whatever that is, one thing’s guaranteed: It won’t be popular.

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Jun 26 2015
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Economy, Municipal Affairs, Politics

A centre will build growth

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Was it only just the other day when New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant appeared less than convinced by the multiplier effect in economic planning – specifically, by the wisdom in pouring public money into a new downtown events centre for Moncton?

My, what a difference a day makes – even though that day has taken three months to properly arrive. With his government now willing to invest $21 million in the form of a forgivable loan toward the estimated $107-million construction cost, Mr. Gallant is leaving himself precious little room for political wiggle, as the momentum for the project clearly swings forward.

In April, Mr. Gallant stated a commentary carried by this newspaper, “Much has been said about the Moncton Downtown Centre. . .To create jobs and have strong social programs we must invest our money strategically. . .This principle is an important one that requires us as a government to do our due diligence when making decisions. This includes the decision on whether or not to financially support the Moncton Downtown Centre. . .It isn’t responsible to rush into a $107-million project.”

Last week, his chief cabinet lieutenant Victor Boudreau was whistling a  somewhat different, and happier, ditty. “I am here to say the City of Moncton’s application has not only been reviewed, but approved. To date, discussions on this project have been a bit of a moving target. It is our hope our commitment to invest in this project will allow the City of Moncton to leverage funding from other partners.”

From the beginning (at least since 2010, when the City commissioned its first, full economic impact study), the issue was always whether or not a new multi-purpose event centre would become a catalyst for economic and commercial growth and diversification throughout the urban area and even beyond.

Two years ago, New Brunswick’s senior economist David Campbell – who was an independent economic development consultant at the time – told Moncton City Council that a new centre will annually “attract between 317,000 and 396,000 people. . .generating between $12 and $15 million in spending.” In the process, he declared, it will “support retail, food service, accommodation and other services in the downtown,” where it “should also support residential growth.”

In fact, the urban core “generates nearly 11.5 times as much property tax revenue, compared to the rest of Moncton, on a per hectare basis.”  

Still, not everyone was encouraged by last week’s funding announcement. Kevin Lacey of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation told this newspaper the province’s poor finances clearly argue against these sorts of discretionary infrastructure builds. “The government has hiked taxes, cut teachers and hospitals are in troubl., And the government is spending money on a hockey rink today?”

It’s a nice line, sure to generate buzz in all the right constituencies. But it’s not especially accurate.

There’s very little doubt in the calculating mind that a mix-use sports and entertainment facility (if it is large enough, designed well enough and comes deliberately equipped with cultural spaces) will, as Ben Champoux, CEO of Metro Moncton’s 3+ economic development agency, persuasively points out, take “the game” to a “much higher level. . .An announcement like this gives us the tools to turn around and (show) the can-do attitude that we have. . .As a result of this project, other projects going on in Greater Moncton that are tied to this one, there is more than a quarter of a billion dollars  right now in the pipeline of projects.”

Indeed, those are economic multipliers that any smart politician must be only too happy to endorse.

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Jun 26 2015
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Culture, Society

Loose lips sink drips

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Some (possibly, even, most) men, regardless of their evident educational and professional achievements, simply don’t know when to shut up. Fortunately, daily journalism’s silly season – which starts right about now and endures till Labour Day – is made for such fine, upstanding company.

Consider, for example, Sir Tim Hunt, the eminent British biochemist, Nobel Laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society, on the subject of women. According to published reports, he had this to say at a science journalism conference in Korea last week: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. . .You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

Naturally, having taken it on the chin in the Twitterverse for his “shockingly sexist” remarks, the good doctor quickly reversed himself – sort of. On BBC 4, he declared that he was “really sorry” for his commentary. “It was,” he admitted, “a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists.”

Still, he insisted, “It is terribly important that you can criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them. If they burst into tears it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth. Science is about nothing except getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes the science.”

Especially, it seems, weepy, willowy females.

But if members of the “fairer sex” don’t belong in the lab, can they find a home in the military? Indubitably, says Canada’s top soldier, General Tom Lawson. If, that is, they can negotiate around all the drooling, male Neanderthals in their midst.

Speaking to the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge last week, the Chief of Defence Staff – who retires later this year – decried the presence of sexual harassment and assault in the ranks. It is, he said, a “terrible issue” that “disturbs the great majority of everyone in uniform.”

It is also, he added, more or less inevitable: “It would be a trite answer but it’s because we are biologically wired in a certain way and there will be those who believe it is a reasonable thing to press themselves and their desires on others.”

Once again, the social media was swift to react, forcing the general to effectively revise, if not altogether redact, his observations. In an apology, he called his words an “awkward characterization. . .My reference to biological attraction being a factor in sexual misconduct was by no means intended to excuse anyone from responsibility from their actions.”

What is it about a microphone, a camera, a captive audience, and an opportunity to mouth off that makes ordinarily smart people say dumb things? Of course, situational foot-in-mouth disease is not an affliction exclusive to men, but a disturbing prevalence of tripe in the popular culture attributable to boys seems to be about girls.

There are, of course, consequences – sometimes serious – for issuing such banalities. The new debate du jour is whether Professor Hunt deserved to be forced from his positions at the Royal Society and University College London.

Arguing in a letter to The Times, celebrity biologist Sir Richard Dawkins declared, “Along with many others, I didn’t like Sir Tim Hunt’s joke, but ‘disproportionate’ would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.”

One wonders whether the good doctor got it only half-right. Sometimes, the boys in the lab also cry.

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