Jun 03 2015
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Economy, Energy, Oil and Gas, Politics

Lies our province tells them

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When I go abroad, I never fail to remind my felicitous hosts that New Brunswick enjoys the finest temperatures in the western world: Here, it never drops below zero, and, here, it never rises above room temperature.

Gosh, friends, it hardly ever snows.

I also tell my international confreres that the province where I currently hang my many toques bustles with sustainable, environmentally benign industries; its rural communities are economic dynamos that support entrepreneurial vigor and verve; its cities are jewels of downtown, cultural development; its public accounts are balanced; and, oh gee-whiz let’s just be honest, its future is as bright as the North Star on a late November night.

When I yak this way the English think I’m mildly amusing; the Scots couldn’t care less. In fact, only the Irish know that I am lying through my rose-colored shot glasses (after all, in their post Celtic-tiger phase, they should know blarney when they hear it). Fortunately, for representatives of this provincial government, the Americans are just a wee bit more gullible.

For, when New Brunswick’s cohort of trade officers and assorted politicos tells a Texas crowd of energy poo-bahs just how wonderful shale-gas development opportunities in New Brunswick might someday become, they may as well be speaking to a roomful of kindergartners. (Oddly enough, that’s exactly how New Brunswick’s cabinet members prefer to address the citizens who elected them on just about every subject anyway).

As John Chilibeck of the Saint John Telegraph-Journal reported earlier this week, “a moratorium on fracking hasn’t stopped the New Brunswick government from advertising the potential for a shale gas industry in the province. At an energy conference in Houston, an officer with Opportunities New Brunswick recently set up a booth showing a poster of shale gas formations in North America, including the possibility of deposits in New Brunswick.”

Did someone not get the memo?

It reads something like this, courtesy of the provincial government’s own website on the matter: “The moratorium (on fracking) will not be lifted unless there is social license in place; clear and credible information about the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on our health, environment and water, allowing us to develop country-leading regulatory regime with sufficient enforcement capabilities; a plan that mitigates the impacts on our public infrastructure and that addresses issues such as waste water disposal; a process in place to respect our obligations under the duty to consult with First Nations; a mechanism in place to ensure that benefits are maximized for New Brunswickers, including the development of a proper royalty structure.”

That’s a fairly tall order and, if I’m not very much mistaken, you can’t put it on a poster even if your eat-and-have-cake heart desires to.

Lamentably, Energy and Mines Minister Donald Arseneault appears to struggle with the conundrum. Responding to the news, he noted, somewhat confusingly, “Putting a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing doesn’t mean you can’t have conventional drilling as well. And a moratorium does not mean you have to stop promoting the province as a place to invest. We can’t hide from the fact we have a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing.”

Fine, but then why advertise to an international audience the province’s vast shale-gas reserves – resources that can only be obtained through fracking – when we have not yet crafted a commercially viable plan for lifting the injunction on the very technology that makes the business rational?

When this government goes abroad, it should remember that truth is a far better drawing card for investment than the banal and wretched alternative.

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Jun 02 2015
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Business, Energy, Government, Oil and Gas, Politics

Might there be a future after oil

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As the Gallant government in New Brunswick laudably attempts to enshrine renewable energy as a way of policy, if not exactly life, in the province, a new study illustrates just how economically efficacious planetary survival is becoming in jurisdictions around the world.

Forget, for the moment, the nauseating push-me-pull-you debate over petroleum resources. Consider, instead, a report (brought to my attention by my good friend Yves Gagnon, P.Eng., D.Sc., and professor of engineering at Université de Moncton) from the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Its annual number concludes that this segment of the sector “employed 7.7 million people, directly or indirectly, around the world in 2014 (excluding large hydropower). This is an 18 per cent increase from the number reported the previous year. In addition, IRENA conducted the first-ever global estimate of large hydropower employment, showing approximately 1.5 million direct jobs in the sector.”

What’s more, “The 10 countries with the largest renewable energy employment were China, Brazil, the United States, India, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, France, Bangladesh and Colombia. . .The solar PV industry is the largest renewable energy employer worldwide with 2.5 million jobs, followed by liquid biofuels with 1.8 million jobs, and wind power, which surpassed 1 million jobs for the first time. The employment increase extends across the renewable energy spectrum with solar, wind, biofuels, biomass, biogas and small hydropower all seeing increases in employment.”

What this should tell us is that there is a good, clean, profitable life beyond fossil fuel; and that only a pervasive failure of public imagination keeps us tethered to a petro-past (of course, it is entirely possible and probably necessary to stand before history as reluctant hypocrites, paradoxically deploying oil and gas resources, inasmuch as they are used to build and sustain renewable energy technologies and infrastructure).

In any case, perhaps New Brunswick’s first-term Liberal government has received the global meta-message loud and clear. According to Energy Minister Donald Arseneault last week, new legislation tabled last week “gives NB Power the authority to deal with local entities on a smaller scale so that the economic benefit, the job creation and any money made from these investments will stay here in the province.”

He added: “There are all sorts of projects. There’s a biomass project and we have one in Dalhousie where they are interested in putting a turbine in the Charlo dam for one megawatt. And there are a lot of community wind projects. This is a way to create economic activity.”

It is, but as the IRENA report points out, none of it is easy: “In the coming years, renewable energy employment growth will depend on the return to a strong investment trajectory, as well as on continued technological development and cost reductions. Stable and predictable policies will be essential to support job creation. Finally, in a year when negotiators in Paris aim to carve out a global climate agreement, the broader policy framework for energy investments will also move to the forefront.”

And this is, of course, where the wheels have always fallen off the renewable energy cart: sustainability costs money; and the return on investment is more often a long-term proposition for governments and industry.

When was the last time anybody in the public or private sector openly mused about the value of durable benefits paid at some point in a fluid future?

When was the last time anyone dared utter the words, “social dividend”, as justification for sensible economic development?

Still, New Brunswick’s government appears to be heading down the only track that does, in fact, promise long-term rewards in the energy sector.

And that’s laudable, indeed.

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Jun 02 2015
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Business, Energy, Oil and Gas, Politics

The origin of facies

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Shall we see a reason to dither, to fuss or bother about shale gas development any longer? Or shall we move on and direct our righteous anger to more eminent calamities in this province – the hopeless young, the fatalistic elderly, the imperilled poor, the overtaxed, the house-proud, the land-poor, stray dogs and cute cats without homes to wreck?

Let’s face it, fracking as a nexus of public opinion in New Brunswick is as dead as a dry well. We don’t want it; we never will.

Sure, we will always want cheap oil and gas; we will just want it shipped in pristine containers that never leak, never smell, never foul the big, rock candy mountain that is this superbly self-aware part of the world.

And sure, we will always want what big-box stores offer: plastic, vinyl, more plastic, more vinyl. Never mind that 88 per cent of everything you can spend a dollar-and-a-half to buy is composed of petroleum derivatives – from shampoo to cigarettes, from sundresses to sandals.

Nope, folks, we are fated to play out the roles our human natures dictate. We want what we want, and the cheaper the better. That’s called evolution. Look it up. It’s the one principle that tethers all ideological tribes together, forever.

“My position is well known and I respect (New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant’s) approach, because I do think it’s thoughtful and considerate,” former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal recently. “What I like now is that there is a specific process in place (for shale gas development). It would be my hope, whatever the conclusions would be, that we would arrive at it expeditiously. I wouldn’t want to see (this issue) hanging around us for many years. I’d like to see us deal with it as quickly as possible.”

He is absolutely right, of course. Still, to say that Mr. McKenna’s views on this subject have ‘evolved’ in recent times is to say that Mr. Gallant won the past provincial election thanks, in part, to the federal Grit, anti-fracking machine operating just barely behind the veil that young Justin Trudeau wears to hide his pretty face from the voting public.

Once upon a time, Mr. McKenna had this to say to me about shale gas in New Brunswick: “We have in situ now, calculated by Corridor Resources Inc., 67 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s bigger than western Canada. It’s a huge deposit. If 10 per cent is exploitable, that’s enough to create a revenue source for New Brunswick for decades to come.

“All in, it would result in about $15-20 billion in investment and 150,000 person years of work. And for governments, it would result in between $7-9 billion worth of royalties and taxes. The way I look at it, the real win comes when we take our indigenous shale gas in the province and hook it into the Canaport liquified natural gas (LNG) facility in Saint John.”

In other words, New Brunswick’s shale reserves could change the conversation about the province’s anaemic economy forever. They could transform the region into a jurisdiction whose wealth rivals that of a Saudi Arabian principality.

So, shall sleeping wells lie?

This province is justly famous for its ability to come a short way in a long time. Shale gas once represented an even chance to transpose this historically proven equation. No more. We must look to other, more socially acceptable ways to keep ourselves from starving and freezing in our own homes.

As Mr. McKenna might advise, we must adapt, if not exactly evolve.

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Jun 02 2015
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Politics, Society, Wealth

Tory relevance is not retiring

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For strategic brilliance and tactical cunning, look no further than the Conservative Government of Canada. In an election year, these are the days that try the souls of federal Liberals and New Democrats, alike.

Against their own advice of only a year ago, the Harper Tories have executed a stunning reversal of policy in announcing that they will, after all, allow individuals to top-up their Canada Pension Plans (just in time, naturally, for the fall general election).

Said Finance Minister Joe Oliver last week: “To build on our current world-class system, we intend to consult with experts and stakeholders during the summer on options for allowing voluntary contributions to the Canadian Pension Plan.”

“However,” he added, “our government will not force Canadians into a mandatory, job-killing, economy-destabilizing, pension-tax hike on employees and employers. We believe that Canadians are best placed to decide how to save for their retirement with voluntary options, rather than have tax hikes imposed on them.”

That said, messing with the CPP – an arrangement between the feds and the provinces – would be a remarkable example of progressive politics for a party that has despised all such connotations in everything it has done to date.

And if this is not simply another vote-getting ploy – but an actual commitment should the Tories win another majority in October – it could amount to one of the biggest advances in social policy since Tommy Douglas tread the fair earth of western Canada so many decades ago.

Now, to be clear, a “voluntary” codicil to the current fed-prov agreement is a far cry from a “mandatory” requirement that employees and employers dig deeper into their pockets to fund old-age retirement benefits. It is not, for example, even close to the system that the UK currently enjoys – a system that tops up the state-benefit program with an ancillary fund that effectively raises the post-retirement incomes of low-wage earners to 40 per cent of the median, national average.

Still, it’s a start, and not a moment too soon.

Canada is facing a demographic crisis that all evidence suggests is leading the largest population cohort (those between the ages of 53 and 55) into structural poverty within 15 years.

Late-blooming equity accounts, overspending, debt restructuring, falling wage levels, winnowing economic opportunities for adult children, the various predations on retirement savings of capital markets – all have conspired to make a minefield of a future that once looked like the Elysian Fields.

Still, not everyone is convinced of the federal government’s good intentions. According to a Globe and Mail story, the NDP’s finance critic called the move a “deathbed conversion.” Indeed, he said, “you can tell when the government’s serious about something: They ram it through an omnibus bill. When they’re not serious about it, they launch a series of consultations.”

That’s fair enough. But what if – just this time – the Tories are serious about this thing of theirs; this entirely uncharacteristic overture to protect the future of the nation’s citizenry from the neglect and impotence that present-day capital markets promise routinely?

Even the remote hope that average wage-earners might obtain a measure of control over their retirement savings by plugging into a virtually fool-proof, government-guaranteed vehicle – as opposed to a predatory, capricious financial sector where certain public administrations actually pay criminally liable investment banks to stay afloat – is a genuine comfort to those who don’t occupy the one-per cent of the income population.

That’s why, of course, Mr. Oliver’s modest proposal is also masterful politics, timed like a bank vault on Canadian election time.

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Jun 02 2015
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Business, Economy

Crowing all the way to the bank

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For ripping off the global economy between 2008 and 2012 – contributing to the worst recession since the Dirty Thirties, throwing millions of people out of their work, their homes and demolishing their sense that, in the end, universally applicable golden rules of fair play and decency trump the periodic predations of barbarians digging beneath the gates of civilization – some of the world’s biggest banks have just received slaps on their wrists.

Naughty, naughty boys you are. Oh, please don’t make us admonish you again. It hurts us to cut your allowance. Now, go forth and play nice.

According to a recent New York Times article by Ben Protess and Michael Corkery, the U.S. Justice Department has reckoned that Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Bank PLC and Royal Bank of Scotland PLC conspired to commit “multiple crimes” in the five years following the Great Financial Collapse of 2007 by “manipulating foreign currencies and interest rates”. These once-venerable institutions employed pinheads who executed “a scheme that padded the banks’ profits and enriched the traders who carried out the plot.”

Apparently, “The traders were supposed to be competitors but. . .they colluded to manipulate the largest and yet least regulated market in the financial world, where $5 trillion changes hands ever day.”

These criminals may have pilfered as much as $1 trillion from global markets, and yet the highest law enforcement agency in the United States has seen fit to level fines against these carpetbaggers (all of whom have plead guilty) in the collectively paltry amount of $5.6 billion – a book entry, given the value of their ill-gotten gains. No one is actually accountable. No one goes to jail.

Still, as the Times story reveals, the dimension of hubris was breathtakingly brazen:

“To carry out the scheme, which went for five years through 2012, one trader would build a huge position in a currency and then unload it at a crucial moment, hoping to move prices. Traders at the other banks agreed to, as New York state’s financial regulator put it, ‘stay out of each other’s way.’

“The banks also misled their clients about the price of currencies, the federal and state authorities said, imposing ‘hard mark-ups,’ which one Barclays employee described as the ‘worst price I can put on this where the customer’s decision to trade with me or give me future business doesn’t change.’ Or, to put their mission in the starkest of terms, the employee said: ‘If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.’”

How exquisite is this, how predictably reliable are our runaway capital marketeers?

In fact, this sort of aberrant, sociopathic behaviour along the virtual highways that connect Wall and Lombard Streets should now be boring. But the sheer scale of the larceny sheds a bright light on the fundamentals that underpin growing income and wealth disparity, not only in the West but everywhere in the world.

When a small cartel of “players” can and do game global markets for their own fun and immense profit without fear, what hope remains for the rest of us who, playing by the rules, assume that our small chest of treasures in capital markets will keep us safe, housed, clothed and fed?

And, here’s the final insult, courtesy of the Times report: “For the banks, life as a felon is likely to carry more symbolic shame than practical problems. . .The banks have obtained waivers from the Securities and Exchange Commission that will allow them to conduct business as usual.”

Laughing all the way to the bank, indeed.

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May 26 2015
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Business, Communications

Crazy for crowdfunding

 

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Once upon a time in a land far, far away, I presented a prospectus to my parents that argued, among other things, that a trip to London, England, with my 18-year-old girlfriend would be, for me, an edifying sojourn.

On the back of a dinner napkin, I laid out the particulars: Travel makes the callow youth wiser and tougher; life, for a time, in a different country connects the footloose to the ground on which he must tread for the rest of his life and, therefore, makes him a better financial risk in the future; and, most importantly, “c’mon, Mum and Dad, I want an adventure.”

To my astonishment, the parental units fell for it, and, in no time at all, my future wife and I were winging it, courtesy of British Airways, to the U.K. just in time to catch Joe Strummer and The Clash playing live in Hyde Park.

An item a couple of years ago in the Financial Times of London reported that “Crowdfunding is a new and emerging way of funding new ideas or projects by borrowing funding from large numbers of people.”

With all due respect to The Times, no it isn’t.

Although, the numbers from which I drew resources were not especially large, I was effectively crowdfunding when Silicon Valley and Menlo Park were still apple orchards.

Still, The Times persists in its inimitable way of explaining simple things in the most complicated and convoluted terms possible:

“In these (crowdfunding) markets, any individual can propose an idea that requires funding, and interested others can contribute funds to support the idea. These markets have recently emerged as a viable alternative for sourcing capital to support innovative, entrepreneurial ideas and ventures.”

In fact, “A novel aspect of crowdfunded markets is the nature of the publicly observable popularity indicators typically recorded and published within the marketplace. For instance, the information on prior investments in crowdfunded markets typically includes a time stamp and the specific amount contributed, or both. These values contribute to what is often referred to as a project’s current ‘funding status’. This status encompasses prior funding decisions made by others regarding a particular project, indicating the total funds raised, the number of contributors, and the duration over which that funding has taken place.”

Meanwhile, “Most crowdfunding offerings don’t involve an ‘ownership’ stake. Hence, equity sales are prohibited by regulatory bodies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US. Recently, however, regulation is in the works to ease such constraints and enable equity stakes.”

In New Brunswick, it seems, the barriers have just come down. According to a piece in The Saint John Telegraph-Journal last week, “The province’s Financial and Consumer Services Commission has decided to allow crowdfundig for equity, opening up the doors for small businesses to sell shares online. Under rules announced by the commission, startup companies can raise a maximum of $250,000 per crowdfunding campaign, with up to two campaigns per year.”

The craze for crowdfunding in the small business sector ever since the financial meltdown of 2008 is, of course, perfectly understandable. Traditional lenders – banks and credit unions – are typically tight with their money. In Atlantic Canada, effective venture and angel capital is practically non-existent.

Still, crowdfunding also carries inherent risks, the biggest of which is that it is a broadly unregulated market built on trust and instinct (paradoxically, two of its biggest draws).

All of which is great, until Mum and Dad want to know what happened to their money while junior was. . .ahem. . .edifying himself.

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May 26 2015
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Municipal Affairs, Politics

More wheel-spinning for event center

Permanent winter for a Moncton events centre?

Permanent winter for a Moncton events centre?

All hail another day, another means test for the, as yet, unrealized Moncton Event Center. How has this facility become a white elephant even before it’s been born? For an answer, look no farther than the New Brunswick government and its new “major projects funding policy”.

This policy stipulates, among other things, that a “major project” must be financially sound, socially efficacious, internally fire-proof from failure (either acts of a capricious God or the mendacities of His human agents) and, most importantly, pervasively good for the community in question, the province the community occupies, the country the province calls home, the world the country must endure, and (though not stated explicitly), the cosmos Carl Sagan talked about when he famously called all of us “star dust”.

Specifically, the new policy stipulates the following as law:

“To facilitate regional cooperation and ensure proposals for new recreation infrastructure and major renovations are both feasible and sustainable, the principles outlined below will be used when reviewing projects seeking government funding:

“Applications for recreation infrastructure projects seeking RDC funding must (1.) Include a Needs Assessment Consideration – should be given to the following: a) location of the proposed new as well as existing infrastructure; b) Infrastructure in adjacent communities; c) demographics of the community and surrounding area (both past and anticipated for the future); and d) community plans.” Then there’s “(2.) Include a Business Plan – a Business Plan that demonstrates the viability of the project is a requirement.”

Blah, blah, blah. . .

Here’s the kicker anyone actually needs to know as reported by the Moncton Times & Transcript more than a week ago: “Another policy criteria states successful projects must leverage funding or investment from federal, local or private sources and must demonstrate all required financing is in place before receiving money from the province.”

So, then, what exactly has changed? Isn’t this precisely the same circumstance Moncton faced before the provincial government introduced its newly vaunted Regional Development Corporation Guiding Principles for Recreation Infrastructure Investments (or RDCGPRII, to, you know, just shorten the long hand a tad)?

The story rarely changes in government relations. One level starts with a proposition that it can’t possibly behave responsibly until and unless another does. The second one, in due curtsy-cue, insists that it can’t act appropriately until the first one comes forth with its hand and begs for a minuet around the dance floor. Since both are, essentially, wallflowers, the band plays on, the parents and chaperones get depressed (or drunk), and everyone wakes up with hangover in a giant hole in the ground where an event center ought to have been built before politics became the true name of the tune.

Hey, kids, I have a few ideas. Now that summer threatens, why don’t we, in the Hub City, repudiate any idea of petitioning governments or their factotums.

That vast, ugly, dirt-strewn, 11-acre tract of land in the middle of Moncton can be repurposed in a variety of efficient ways. As the city owns it, thanks to our municipal taxes, so do we. By extension, we could. . .well, just occupy it.

Call it a commons, but don’t bother sodding it over. No, no, we like our suburban mansions far too much to also pay for a downtown park. Let’s just transform it into a free parkade, a place to spin our wheels and, when we’re done, moor our Ford 150s and Ram 1500s until we’re good and ready to take them home to our various “Pleasantvilles”.

Why not?

It beats letting government tell us what to do with our very own elephant graveyard.

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May 26 2015
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Economy, Health, Politics

How a fiscal leopard changes spots

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New Brunswick’s former Finance Minister Blaine Higgs, God love him, has always been a straight shooter. Except when he hasn’t.

Whilst in Tory office for all of four years, he inveighed against the provincial government’s tendency towards profligacy, calling for deep and painful cuts in the public service.

He suggested that everything “must be on the table”, and that included a serious review of his government’s tax policies – even going as far as intimating, off the script, that a prudent hike in the HST might save New Brunswick years of unnecessary fiscal pain at the hands of international bond holders who held – and continue to hold the province’s $12-billlion long-term debt in abeyance.

He talked darkly about streamlining the educational system; about cutting services to rural citizens; about rationalizing the way we pay for basic infrastructure, like roads, highways, sewer systems and pubic meeting spaces.

Apart from a few trims to the fiscal petticoat that hides a multitude of sins in this province, he largely failed and largely through no fault of his commitment or character. The political winds within his own party of silos and principalities were simply not in his favour. (Have they ever been for any sitting provincial finance minister in any province of this country)?

Still, now that the man is drifting freely in the soft winds of a durable New Brunswick spring – far from from the tethers of Cabinet discipline that once constrained him – one must wonder at the temerity of his latest proposal, a proposal that he must know has no chance of finding purchase in Canada’s only bilingual province.

Conflate New Brunswick’s two health authorities, he says, into one fully bilingual one. Why? “Because,” he told the Saint John Telegraph-Journal last week, “we don’t have a choice. In order to provide the quality of health care we need in the province, we need to look at how we can work more closely together, not further apart.”

Leaving aside, for the moment, just how breathtakingly ambitious – both politically and administratively – such a move would prove, the obvious question arises: If Mr. Higgs feels this strongly now, having prowled the perimeters of the political wilderness for seven months, why didn’t he speak up (as he did about public service cuts, education and infrastructure) just as forcefully when he had a better chance to use his position to win friends and influence people on an important matter of public policy?

Answer: Because, on this file alone, he would have been burned like a bad bagel, kicked to the backbenches and consigned to vacant seat in the “independent” section of the legislative gallery by the whips and goons of his own party. And he knows it.

Of course, on the face of it, his proposition to merge the province’s health authorities is fatally flawed, if only because it can’t work. The law stipulates in excruciating detail that health, like education, is a central plank in the Equal Opportunity platform that has guided New Brunswick politics since the late 1960s. Dismantling this apparatus would be tantamount to declaring war (real or imagined) on the rights of Francophones.

Beyond this, though, Mr. Higgs’ late-game candor conveniently ignores the real problem with health care in this province, which is not linguistic “duality” but service “duplication” and the fact that nobody in government or health authorities seems to know (or, perhaps more accurately, cares to think) about how to both profitably privatize and regulate certain elements of geriatric and long-term care and, in so doing, remove huge costs from critical-care facilities.

Methinks, politics will always win out when its erstwhile gunmen aim low and shoot from the lip.

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May 22 2015
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Culture

One columnist’s excellent adventure

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I always knew I left the employ of the Globe and Mail too soon. Now, I have real evidence that my failure to become a national columnist of weight, gravitas and fulsome wordiness has robbed me of the opportunity to obtain contact highs in the rocky mountains of Colorado.

There, we find the Globe’s Margaret Wente, provocateur-cum-commentator extraordinaire, hanging with some producers of perfectly legal pot, (“In the Weeds”, May 16, 2015).

God, what an assignment!

Give a Russian sailor a bottle of vodka, a credit card and tell him that downtown Halifax in the springtime is his for the plundering, and. . .well, that’s just about the only circumstance that beats what dear, old MW recently encountered in Denver, which is, by the way, “magical at dawn.”

I’ll bet it is, but do go own Ms. Wente: “Along the western horizon, the snow-capped mountains are bathed in pink from the glow of the rising sun. The sky is turning purest blue. The air is crisp and clear, and you can see forever. What a great place to get stoned.”

She goes on (and on, and on, and on. . .hey, is that my hand in front of my face, or just another snow-capped mountain?): “In Colorado, recreational marijuana was legalized on Jan. 1, 2014. Denver now has more pot stores than it has Starbucks. Anyone over the age of 21 can walk into a store and choose from hundreds of varieties of flowers, nibbles, marijuana-infused drinks, oils, ointments and pain patches, as well as a growing array of wax and other supercharged hard-core products. There’s even a sex lube for women, which promises to deliver the most mind-blowing experience of your life.”

Okay. . .too much information even for the stoners among us. Still, I get her point. She’s having fun “researching” this business. More power to her.

Except, of course, until recently, Ms. Wente belonged to a strident cohort of Canadian commentators who adamantly refused to accept the logic propounded by sociologists, psychologists, several important lawmakers (both former and current) and almost every cop who ever ran a beat.

For years, they have insisted that decriminalizing marijuana, regulating it as a controlled substance, would save millions of dollars in tax-funded law-enforcement costs and just about as many kids from underserved, breathtakingly damaging incarceration courtesy of the state.

Here’s what The Times of Israel (no friend of progressive social policies) said just the other day: “Signalling a possible shift in attitude towards the recreational use of marijuana, police chief Yohanan Danino called for the government to reassess its current policies in light of growing calls from lawmakers and the public against prohibition of the drug.”

Reported the Times: “Speaking to high school students in Beit Shemesh, Danino told them they will be ‘surprised to hear’ current police policy on cannabis. ‘More and more citizens are demanding marijuana use be permitted,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time for the police, along with the state, to reevaluate its traditional position.’”

So do I. And so, now, does Ms. Wente. Sort of.

“I inhale. . .gingerly,” she writes. “After two or three draws, my cough subsides and I feel relaxed and happy. My entire body seems lighter. The effect is like three or four glasses of chardonnay, but without the heavy, woozy feel. It’s nothing like the stoned sensation I remember, when all I wanted to do was curl up into a fetal position and eat jelly doughnuts.”

Then, she heads home to Toronto, to the waiting arms of her husband who, without a bag of pot at the ready, presumably kisses her on the cheek.

Now, that’s a contact high worth keeping.

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May 21 2015
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Culture, Humour

One columnist’s excellent adventure

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I always knew I left the employ of the Globe and Mail too soon. Now, I have real evidence that my failure to become a national columnist of weight, gravitas and fulsome wordiness has robbed me of the opportunity to obtain contact highs in the rocky mountains of Colorado.

There, we find the Globe’s Margaret Wente, provocateur-cum-commentator extraordinaire, hanging with some producers of perfectly legal pot, (“In the Weeds”, May 16, 2015).

God, what an assignment!

Give a Russian sailor a bottle of vodka, a credit card and tell him that downtown Halifax in the springtime is his for the plundering, and. . .well, that’s just about the only circumstance that beats what dear, old MW recently encountered in Denver, which is, by the way, “magical at dawn.”

I’ll bet it is, but do go own Ms. Wente: “Along the western horizon, the snow-capped mountains are bathed in pink from the glow of the rising sun. The sky is turning purest blue. The air is crisp and clear, and you can see forever. What a great place to get stoned.”

She goes on (and on, and on, and on. . .hey, is that my hand in front of my face, or just another snow-capped mountain?): “In Colorado, recreational marijuana was legalized on Jan. 1, 2014. Denver now has more pot stores than it has Starbucks. Anyone over the age of 21 can walk into a store and choose from hundreds of varieties of flowers, nibbles, marijuana-infused drinks, oils, ointments and pain patches, as well as a growing array of wax and other supercharged hard-core products. There’s even a sex lube for women, which promises to deliver the most mind-blowing experience of your life.”

Okay. . .too much information even for the stoners in our midst. Still, I get her point. She’s having fun “researching” this business. More power to her.

Except, of course, until recently, Ms. Wente belonged to a strident cohort of Canadian commentators who adamantly refused to accept the logic propounded by sociologists, psychologists, several important lawmakers (both former and current) and almost every cop who ever ran a beat.

For years, they have insisted that decriminalizing marijuana, regulating it as a controlled substance, would save millions of dollars in tax-funded law-enforcement costs and just about as many kids from underserved, breathtakingly damaging incarceration courtesy of the state.

Here’s what The Times of Israel said just the other day: “Signalling a possible shift in attitude towards the recreational use of marijuana, police chief Yohanan Danino called for the government to reassess its current policies in light of growing calls from lawmakers and the public against prohibition of the drug.”

Reported the Times: “Speaking to high school students in Beit Shemesh, Danino told them they will be ‘surprised to hear’ current police policy on cannabis. ‘More and more citizens are demanding marijuana use be permitted,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time for the police, along with the state, to reevaluate its traditional position.’”

So do I. And so, now, does Ms. Wente. Sort of.

“I inhale. . .gingerly,” she writes. “After two or three draws, my cough subsides and I feel relaxed and happy. My entire body seems lighter. The effect is like three or four glasses of chardonnay, but without the heavy, woozy feel. It’s nothing like the stoned sensation I remember, when all I wanted to do was curl up into a fetal position and eat jelly doughnuts.”

Then, she heads home to Toronto, presumably to the waiting arms of her husband who, without a bag of pot at the ready, kisses her on the cheek.

Now, that’s a contact high.

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