Nov 27 2014
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Government, Politics

Taking off the gloves four years later

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Say what you will about Shawn Graham. But the man doesn’t back down from a fight, even when he’s almost certain to lose.

The former Liberal premier of New Brunswick was back in the news last week, and in a contemplative mood, sitting down for an interview with The Daily Gleaner’s Michael Staples.

Reflecting on the signature debacle of his one term in office – the failed bid to sell NB Power to Hydro-Quebec for a cool $4 billion in 2010 – he said: “That was one of my biggest regrets as premier that we weren’t able to get that deal done for the benefit of future generations.”

Does he still think it was the right thing to attempt, even though a goodly number of his fellow citizens did at one point want to roast him on a spit?

“We would not have tried as hard as we did and spent the political capital if we didn’t think it was the right direction for the province to move and the utility to move,” he said.

Does he blame the public for failing to appreciate the obvious benefits of such a move?

“You never want to to shock the public and, unfortunately, we didn’t have the benefit of time to educate the public on the significant challenges facing the utility,” he said. “People say it may have been the best possible deal but the communications was terrible. I recognized that, but there were challenges on how we could inform the public.”

In retrospect, though, I wonder if that’s strictly accurate.

Since Mr. Graham’s time away from public life, the province has welcomed into –and booted out of – office the Progressive Conservative government of David Alward, another one-term wonder.

The Tory regime was, for all appearances, dramatically different that its predecessor Grits in the way it handled the public.

Where the Graham government was perceived to be guarded, uncommunicative and even secretive, the Alward team was deliberately consultative, inclusive and even  chatty. And yet both suffered nearly identical fates at the hands of unmoved and unconvinced electorates.

Indeed, if we were to put Messrs. Alward and Graham in a room together, with no fear of being quoted before the great unwashed, and ask each of them to be completely honest, what are the chances that these two gentlemen might actually agree?

The single, biggest problem New Brunswick faces, they might say, is not the condition of its power company (which is actually pretty good these days).

It’s not the looming cost of rebuilding (or retiring) the Mactaquac dam.

It’s not public pensions overuns, illiteracy, innumeracy, childhood obesity, crime, mental illness,drug addiction, poverty, income inequality, or permanent, structural unemployment.

It’s not the $300-500-million annual deficit, nor is it the $12-billion long-term debt.

No, the biggest problem New Brunswick faces, the former premiers might concur in a moment of fearless candor, is that the province is rapidly becoming ungovernable.

Doing the unpopular thing (like attempting to sell the power company under cover of darkness) doesn’t seem to make any greater difference to the public’s generally low opinion of politicians and their games than doing the generally appealing thing (like refusing to raise the HST by a measly percentage point) – even though both moves, under the proper circumstances, could make eminent, good sense.

Frankly, far too many of us in this province find it impossible to conceive of a day when the economic engines and commercial levers freeze for good. It;s never happened before, We’ve always managed to pull through, demanding and pretty much getting everything we’ve asked our politicians to deliver.

And on those occasions when we don’t get what we want, we through the bums on the street, a move, if repeated often enough, tends to produce a political class schooled in the twin arts of supplication and pandering.

Neither, I hasten to add, are Messrs. Graham’s and Alward’s particular failures as politicians.

Still, it would useful to our long-term prospects if we could learn how to keep our leaders around long enough that they might do the right thing in the right way for change – even if the right thing isn’t immediately or especially popular.

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Nov 27 2014
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Economy, Energy, Oil and Gas

The perils of East Coast pipeline politics

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On the energy front, perhaps we should not have been so quick to assume that Maritime economic priorities neatly dovetail with those of Ontario and Quebec. After all, when have they ever?

Indeed, if there was a time when political leaders in New Brunswick considered  TransCanada’s eastbound pipeline project a slam-dunk, that time is over, which leaves the province’s new Liberal premier Brian Gallant with yet another post-election migraine.

According to a Globe and Mail report last Friday, “Quebec Environment Minister David Heurtel sent a letter to (TransCanada) chief executive officer Russ Girling laying down seven conditions (the company) must meet to win the province’s support for the (Energy East) project. With his letter, Mr. Heurtel established conditions similar to those adopted by British Columbia Premier Christy Clark for Enbridge Inc.’s controversial Northern Gateway pipeline that would deliver oil sands bitumen to Kitimat for export to Asia, though his tone was somewhat more agreeable than Ms. Clark’s has been”.

Specifically, “Mr. Heurtel’s conditions include the need for public acceptance of the project, for proper consultations with First Nations, and for clear economic and fiscal benefits for Quebec, as well as assurances to gas customers. Mr. Heurtel also cited a National Assembly resolution demanding the government assess the impacts of ‘upstream”’GHG emissions – those produced by extracting the oil – for the pipeline that would carry 1.1 million barrels a day of western crude to market. But he was vague on whether the government will assert the right to block the pipeline.”

Ontario, too, wants environmental assurances and pledges from TransCanada that its newfound interest in shipping western bitumen through its territory en route to Saint John’s refinery will not overwhelm priorities to make supplies natural gas available to central Canadian industry.

Meanwhile, Premier Gallant is scrambling to put the new developments in the best possible light. “I will meet with Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard to talk about the fact that we are certainly behind the project,” he told reporters on Friday. “For us, what’s important is to assure when we can do it in the most safe and secure way possible. It’s one of the reasons why I read about the project at length two years ago. When we put the project into motion, I was already aware that we can do this in a secure way.”

Of course we can. But that’s not really the point. These days, pipelines are symbols of industrial rapacity and environmental carelessness. As such, they are marvelous for galvanizing public opinion against any expansion of the fossil fuel industry, as Maude Barlow, no shrinking violet on the subject, demonstrated last year.    

Regarding the Energy East proposal, the national chairperson for the Council of Canadians, told her interviewer from the North Bay Nugget,  “I want to let communities know not to be pressured to make a decision or risk not getting the benefits of the pipeline. I can tell you there are no benefits. There’s no argument for this pipeline. It’s an export pipeline and we don’t need it. . .We get the risk and (oil companies) get the reward,” adding “I would like to know what are the big jobs, because this pipeline is for export. It’s about greed. They’re playing with a potential environmental catastrophe that environmentalists have been warning about. . .It’s so much more dangerous (than any other oil) and it’s crossing watersheds and many waterways around the Great Lake Region that are already being threatened. We certainly don’t need to add to that threat.”

Naturally, TrabsCanada couldn’t let that go. It responded with its own statement:

“Quebec and New Brunswick currently import more than 700,000 barrels of oil every day – or 86 per cent of their refinery needs – from countries such as Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. At current oil prices, this is over $75 million drained out of the Canadian economy – every single day. Energy East proposes to connect Western Canada’s resources to Eastern Canada’s needs. Greater supplies of domestic crude would improve the financial viability of eastern Canadian refineries by giving them access to less-expensive, stable domestic supplies.”

Of course, for Mr. Gallant, it could be worse. He could start talking enthusiastically about shale gas.

Let the protests commence.

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Nov 21 2014
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Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, yet, what do we have?

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

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

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

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

Nice words.

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

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

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Nov 20 2014
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Economy, Government

New Brunswickers: It’s time to go big and stay home

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Recent research out of the University of New Brunswick suggests that time never courses backward but only and inexorably moves forward until time, itself, has nowhere else to go in the deep, dark, mournful realm of all creation.

Sort of like the New Brunswick economy, if you think about it.

Still, as they say, misery loves company.

Now look who’s entering the cosmic pity party: the Province of Ontario with its $12.5-billion annual deficit and its $300-billion debt. (Not for nothing, on Tuesday morning just after sunrise, the mercury in Toronto barely cracked 18 below).

So, then, what else is there for us on our sea-bound coast to do but welcome our fellow travellers in penury, paucity and poor fiscal management from the centre of the formally gilded universe? Indeed, let us sympathize with, not rejoice over, their plight (which, on the East Coast, would be a feat of saintly sentimentality).

Once upon a time, Ontario was the undisputed king, among Canadian provinces, of economic opportunity. It was the place, Stompin’ Tom Conners insisted, where the “Maritimers are told. . .They always get a pot full, but they never get a pot of gold.”

When I was but a mere pup growing up in the Yorkville neighbourhood of central Toronto, newspaper editorialists routinely derided the “windbreaker-and-mutton-chop” crowd (that is to say, under-employed Maritime men) who hung out down the road a piece by the railway lands, at Front and Spadina, hoping to score a few bucks worth of day labour before the shelters closed for the night.

Now, they’re at it again, except this time, 40 years later, there are no more railway lands and the ones who beg for tuppence are not Maritimers; they’re true, blue Ontarians at the corner of Yonge and King who haven’t yet managed to pull together enough large change to book their flights to Alberta, the new centre of Canada’s economic universe, where money, don’t you just know, flows as freely as oil in the streets of Fort Mac.

According to David Parkinson, the Globe and Mail’s economic reporter, writing in the Tuesday edition of that venerable publication, “In Ontario, the key takeaway (from Finance Minister, Charles Sousa’s fiscal update on Monday) was that the province’s struggle to rein in its chronic budget deficits is getting harder. (Mr. Sousa) reported that revenue for the 2014-2015 fiscal year, ending March 31, now looks to be more than $500-million short of what the province had budgeted last spring. The tepid provincial economy is growing even more slowly than the government had hoped, and that is slowing tax revenue.”

In fact, Ontario, economically speaking, has been a shadow of its former self since the 2008 recession all but eviscerated its once unassailable manufacturing base. Once, this sector accounted for 28 per cent of the province’s GDP growth; today it’s responsible for a paltry 11 per cent of annualized 1.4 per cent expansion. And that’s not likely to change in the near, even long-term future.

All of which inspires many economists to wonder whether Ontario will ever fully recover its economic mojo. Already, it has become a “have-not” equalization province, claiming $3 billion a year in domestic aid from Ottawa.

Sound familiar?

Here, in beautiful New Brunswick, we endure rolling, yearly deficits of between $300- and $500-million on a structural debt of $12 billion. Demographically (Ontario’s population is 15 million; ours is 750,000 on a good day) that actually puts us deeper in the fiscal soup than our cousins in Upper Canada.

Where Ontario’s manufactures have taken near-mortal blows, New Brunswick’s resource industries have suffered the death of a thousand cuts. In both places, exports – the lifeblood of the national economy – have been moribund for years.

None of this is fatal, of course. Imagination, innovation and hard work can, and does, reverse pernicious outcomes in the lives of people, communities, provinces, and even nations.

But as long as we insist on being bystanders to our fate – as long as we elect governments that propagandize the virtues of abandoning our homes to become vassals of other, more economically robust jurisdictions – we are forever doomed.

In this, at any rate, time does not progress or regress.

It simply stands still.

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Nov 19 2014
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Energy, Environment, Politics

Canada’s climate chickens now come home to roost

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For months, even years, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has insisted that he is as environmentally friendly as the next guy, and so is his government.

In fact, with the leader of Canada’s largest trading partner, he has played a high-stakes game of truth or dare. Just as soon as U.S. President Barack Obama announces a convincing program to dramatically reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, he has said, so will he.

Now that the former has done just, to the surprise of the developed and developing world, alike, it remains to the latter to answer the only question that matters on an inexorably warming planet: Now what, Captain Canada?

Indeed, the policy change south of the border, announced last week, is not merely surprising; it’s stunning. The new U.S.-China joint agreement would see the Yanks cut GHG output 26 per cent from 2005 quantities by 2025. The previous commitment had been a reduction of 17 per cent by 2020, a target the Americans are, in any case, quite likely to hit.

The Chinese, meanwhile, have thrown themselves into a multi-billon-dollar build-out of renewable energy technologies and production facilities (including, it should be noted, nuclear) – an initiative that should help them fulfill their new pledge to cap the production of GHGs to levels comparable with the United States by 2030.

Why this accord, and why now?

As different as are their respective political conventions, economic institutions and societies, the U.S. and China still share one embarrassing habit in the arena of energy production: their relatively heavy use of coal, a fossil fuel that makes oil and particularly natural gas seem, by comparison, pristine.

According to the Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions, “In the United States, coal is the third-largest primary energy source, accounting for 18 per cent of all energy consumed in 2012 with the electric power sector accounting for 91 per cent of U.S. coal consumption.

“With the highest carbon content of all the fossil fuels, carbon dioxide emissions from coal combustion represented 24.5 per cent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2012. . .Globally, coal is one of the most widely distributed energy resources with recoverable reserves in nearly 70 countries. The U.S., China, and India are the top producers and consumers of coal. Worldwide, coal supplies 29.7 per cent of energy use and is responsible for 44 per cent of global CO2 emissions.”

Of course, given the most recent news from the front lines of the global-warming wars, some sort of U.S.-China compact on the issue was not entirely unexpected.

Earlier this month, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its fifth word on the subject in as many years. It makes for chilling reading.

Reported the Guardian: “The new overarching IPCC report builds on previous reports on the science, impacts and solutions for climate change. It concludes that global warming is ‘unequivocal’, that humanity’s role in causing it is ‘clear’ and that many effects will last for hundreds to thousands of years even if the planet’s rising temperature is halted.”

Added Bill McKibben, a climate crusader of the first and most popular order, in the piece: “For scientists, conservative by nature, to use ‘serious, pervasive, and irreversible’ to describe the effects of climate falls just short of announcing that climate change will produce a zombie apocalypse plus random beheadings plus Ebola. . .Thanks to the IPCC, no one will ever be able to say they weren’t warned.”

No, they won’t, Mr. Harper. So, again, what say you?

The federal government’s reduction target, even before the new agreement between its two biggest export markets, was doomed from the outset. Only the rosiest prognosticators suggested that a 17 per cent cut in GHGs from 2005 in this country had a hope in Hades of materializing by 2020. The reason is simple.

This government’s political and ideological capital is invested entirely in the success of the western tar sands. That’s where it wants derelict Canucks from the East and the Centre to work. That’s where it wants to find its tax revenues and corporate royalties.

It cares very little about anything else that might have been considered, at some point in the elegiac past, authentically Canadian.

The Tories’ current conundrum is that the world, through the U.S. and China, is beginning to turn a corner (late, perhaps) that might well leave their atavistic thinking behind, along with their government.

They just might be thinking about using the fuel in the ground to build the infrastructure necessary to, one day, abandon it forever, except as seed for renewable manufactures.

Then what, Captain Canada?

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Nov 18 2014
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Climate, Humour, Weather

An immigrant’s guide to the Great White North

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Dear newcomer, from a warm part of the world, rest assured that Canada is a safe and happy place. Our national statistics agency reliably assures us that we boast among the lowest crime rates in the G20, the highest “happiness” index in the developed world, and the greatest per capita consumption of mindless TV shows and comfort food in the modern era.

Now, about our annual deep freeze.

No doubt you caught a piece the other day in this country’s self-anointed national organ of news and popular opinion. The headline, if I’m not mistaken, was: “Teaching Immigrants to endure – even embrace – Canadian winters.”

The front-page Globe and Mail article by Ingrid Peritz went a little something like this: “Pauline Perrotte stood before her class and asked her pupils, all newcomers to Canada, what kinds of rumours they’d heard about Canadian winters.”

It should be said, of course, the Ms. Perrotte is an expat from the south of France who alighted on these frigid shores barely a year ago to teach immigrants how to cope with the Great White North’s signature season. “People hear about blizzards and ice storms, and they start worrying about their families and children,” she declared. “We try to reassure them, tell them that winter is a magnificent season and that adjusting to it is part of their integration.”

None of which stopped a woman from Iran, in her class, from fretting: “You need to wear eye glasses, because your eyes can freeze.”

Another emoted: “It’s as cold as a refrigerator.”

No, objected a fellow pupil from Mauritius, “It’s colder.”

As a seventh-generation Canadian who knows all about the weather of this northern-most reach of the “New World”, I’ll take each of these concerns in reverse order.

Mr. Mauritius, Canadian winters are certainly not colder than a refrigerator. They are colder than the vacuum of space that surrounds the robotic probe somebody just landed on a comet orbiting the sun the other day. And, my friend, darker. . .much darker.

Ms. Perrotte, winter here is not “a magnificent season.”

Indeed, despite what you’ve heard (or been propagandized to instruct), eight or nine months of the year, in which frozen rain, snow, sleet, ice pellets, and drenching slop fall for hours, days and, sometimes, weeks on end, cannot reasonably compare with. . .well, Cuba.

I like Cuba. In February, Cuba is a friend of mine. I imagine I’ll go there one day when my neighbour’s snow blower doesn’t blow a pin, or my back doesn’t prevent me from boarding a plane that’ll get delayed or cancelled thanks to. . .you guessed it. . .the Canadian winter.

As for the woman from Iran who thought glasses would protect her eyeballs from freezing, think again dearie. Frozen pins and cones in the thick of the white is practically a brand statement at Quebec City’s winter carnival (spectacles, notwithstanding).

Having dispelled the rumours and myths about our finest season, here’s a little more advice, anecdotal though it may be, to warm the cockles of your hearts in this black-side-of-the-moon season.

Never throw away your Halloween pumpkins. Simply repurpose them as creepy heads to top your several dozen snowmen. When spring arrives, sometime in July, pop them off, peel them down and cut them up. The soup is terrific. Trust me.

Likewise, never look a crappy mountain bike in the tires. For budget-savvy Canadians, these puppies are godsends. You can pick them up, for a song, at any police auction, ride the bejeezus out of them all winter long, save yourself a fortune in gas, and when that first breath of spring comes wafting in, abandon them in a Walmart parking lot where snow ploughs are sure to bury them under a small mountain of grey slush and ice. In due course, they will emerge, like rusty daffodils, to find their way to yet another police auction.

Hey, babies. . .in Canada, we’re all about the recycling.

The bottom line, newcomers, is that there is a way to survive the Canadian winter.

Tough out the cold and the dark, knowing that the warmth and the light is just a calendar flick or two away.

After all, the summers are our best two months of the year, especially if you’re fond of mosquitos.

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Nov 17 2014
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Education, Politics

And now for something completely different: Good news from New Brunswick

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A reader writes, and I paraphrase: “While I agree with you about New Brunswick’s economic troubles and fiscal morass, why don’t you write something inspirational that offers some solutions? Why do you have to be such a jerk?”

I get love notes along those lines from time to time. I’m used to them, like this one from a few years back: “You disgusting, pompous prig! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”

Which only serves notice that you should never forget your bartender’s birthday.

Still, I am not such an unreconstructed curmudgeon that I can’t recognize good news in this province when it becomes evident.

Consider, for example, a new report out of the Atkinson Centre, a research pod at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. It says that this fine province has managed to improve its grade for the environment and services it provides to early childhood educators by a factor of two since 2011.

Specifically, it says: “In New Brunswick, the mandate for early childhood services merged under a new Department of Education and Early Childhood Development in April 2011. A new action plan, Putting Children First, details initiatives through to 2015 and builds on Be Ready for Success: A 10 year Early Childhood Strategy for New Brunswick (2008).”

At that time, “commitments included strengthening the capacity of communities to support families and young children through the integration of early childhood and family support services. In partnership with the Margaret and Wallace McCain Foundation, the Government of New Brunswick piloted Early Childhood Development Centres to inform program practice and help guide policy-makers in the building of an inclusive and accessible, family-centred child care and education system.”

Then, earlier this year, “the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development released The Linguistic and Cultural Development Policy: A Societal Project for the French Education System. This report was the result of a broad consultation to support the Acadian and Francophone community in meeting the challenges of the linguistic minority context.”

Fundamentally, though, “considerable attention is paid to the early years (birth to age 8) when the foundations for language and learning are established. The plan commits to ensuring equal access to services in French, including a single entry point in both urban and rural areas; the creation of a single file for each child, whatever the number and type of services received; and enhanced linguistic support to the professionals working in the francophone community.”

Overall, the 2014 survey gives New Brunswick a score of 8, compared with 4.5 three years ago, for its performance on the early childhood education front. That puts this least fiscally promising province in Canada, if not at the head of pack, at least in the crowd of first finishers. Or, as Atkinson Centre spokesperson Emis Akbari told the Telegraph-Journal last week, “It is not just about how much money is invested. It is about governance, funding, access, the learning environment that kids are exposed to and accountability. New Brunswick has moved ahead in quite a few areas.”

And that’s just great. I’m seriously happy about this happenstance, so don’t get me wrong when I say: Now what?

It seems to almost everyone in this business that the provinces are doing all the heavy lifting – all the weight-training the federal government decided to reject in 2006.

How long, then, can “have-not” jurisdictions, such as New Brunswick, be expected to cover the cost of providing, in its own region, what should be a national, publicly subsidized, universally accessible system of early childhood education?

Instead, this country’s parents are, just now, promised enriched monthly child benefits without the infrastructure, care, expertise and consistency that such investments would otherwise lever in a more sensibly arranged society.

The longterm social and economic advantages of a structured, comprehensive system of early childhood education, integrated into every public school system in Canada are so patently obvious, the fact that we’re not rushing to introduce one is just one of many patent absurdities that lace our evidence-hating proclivities in this erstwhile great nation.

On the other hand, I don’t want to be a jerk about this.

After all, too many federal, public officials already evince this personality trait far better than I ever could.

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Nov 14 2014
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Economy, Government, Politics

A financial tale of 14 solitudes

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Predicting years of fiscal health for the Canadian economy is like forecasting a warm winter for the customarily Great White North.

In some places across this vast country, conditions will be delightfully luscious; in others, downright lugubrious.

That said, according to news reports, the federal government is set to announce a trifecta, and maybe more, of solid annual surpluses totalling about $15 billion. If it manages to pull off such a feat, Harpertown will likely go down as one of the nation’s most prudent, careful administrators of other people’s money in modern times. And, indeed, bully for it.

“Strong job growth and tight spending will allow Finance Minister Joe Oliver to confirm Ottawa is poised for years of budget surpluses,” the Globe and Mail declared this week. “That scenario – which is the result of near historic lows in both government spending and revenues as a percentage of the economy – fits with Conservative pledges of low taxes and smaller government. It also presents a clear challenge for the opposition New Democrats and Liberals, both of whom have promised to increase spending in big-ticket areas.”

Still, the slow-and-steady expenditure strategy of the Tories, coupled with tax-rate moderation, are not without their perils.

For one thing, they depend on continued economic recovery over the period of promised surpluses. With a national unemployment rate of 6.3 per cent (substantially better than the predicted 6.6 percent for the last half of 2014), the Feds are happily confident that they’ve called labour market trends correctly.

But this assumes that the participation rate (the number of people actively looking for work) will remain robust overall. In some places, like Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, it will. In others, like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec, the story is dramatically different, especially among young people – a cohort that is, increasingly, discovering that gainful work is harder to find than to actually perform.

Then there’s the hoary problem, once again looming on the horizon, of global economic uncertainty and weakening commodity prices for some of Canada’s most important resources – namely oil and gas. For about a year, this country’s petroleum producers have enjoyed a rare respite from OPEC pricing, thanks to steady demand from the United States and a low currency valuation, relative to the U.S. dollar.

Again, though, that could change if the Harper government’s recent trade deals with the European Union and, particularly, China, eliminate the advantageous export implications of the loonie’s float in world currency markets.

Apart from any of this macroeconomic mumbo-jumbo, though, there is the socio-economic stratification of Canada’s domestic economy to consider. Call it our 14 solitudes, one for each province, territory and, of course, Ottawa, itself.

It’s one thing for the Centre to judge itself well and fully solvent. It’s quite another to extend that merry conclusion to the circumstances that frame the provincial and territorial partners in Confederation.

The federal government’s success has come, in large part, due to its determination to hold the line on Constitutionally mandated spending on public health care, education and Employment Insurance. The burden of this approach on rich provinces has been negligible. The same can’t be said for those whose populations of ready, skilled workers are shrinking, even as their ranks of aging retirees are swelling.

As ever, the numbers tell the tale.

While Ottawa amasses enough lucre to predict three or five years of $2-5-billion annual surpluses, New Brunswick is facing, in all likelihood, three or five years of mounting annual deficits nearing $400-500-million in each fiscal period. Each pernicious term merely expands the provincial government’s already bloated $12-billion long-term debt, effectively crippling any meaningful, government-supported economic development (investments in innovation, higher education, even early childhood education).

The same pattern repeats in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec and even, astonishingly, in oil and gas-rich Newfoundland and Labrador, which will lose its dubiously valuable “have” status  soon if it’s not careful.

So, yes, bully for Ottawa. It has managed to balance its books to the benefit of every Canadian.

It remains to be seen, however, which Canadians will benefit most from such probity – who will enjoy the warmth, and who will be left out in the cold.

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Nov 12 2014
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Economy, Government, Politics

In New Brunswick, all roads are leading to nowhere

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When we reach the end of our ropes, I wonder if we’ll ever look back and reckon the moments when we might have done something but, defiantly, didn’t.

Of course, looking back is what we do peerlessly well in this province.

If a sense of entitlement, broad anger, bold arrogance, and a slavish devotion to dead leaders is any indication, then sentimentality and nostalgia are our greatest market capitalizations – the ones we offer to the world.

The problem is, simply, that the world isn’t buying any of it.

In fact, the world is beginning to laugh its collective butt off at the spectacle of New Brunswick’s quasi-serious posturing to become anything but a welfare state in, paradoxically, one of the richest, most economically accomplished nations on Earth.

Here, in one corner, is a series of single-term governments vowing to balance their budgets and retire their long-term debts over periods in which they have no mandates.

They choose to do this by keeping one of the nation’s largest civil service rolls, relative to the general population, largely intact, and nibble around the edges of gold-plated public pensions, for fear of inspiring any more court challenges to their electoral credibility.

Here, in another corner, is the current Liberal government inveighing against a proven, effective, efficient and reliably responsible form of gas extraction in New Brunswick, even as it welcomes, arms open, the construction of a pipeline, carrying some of the dirtiest crude oil on the planet, from Alberta’s tar sands (yes, folks, not oil sands) to an East Coast refinery in Saint John. Throughout, the distinction fails to make any difference to public policy.

Look there, in another corner, and you’ll find one local burgermeister battling another for scraps from the federal government’s now-ancient Economic Action Plan.

One wants a hockey rink and will do anything to persuade Ottawa, and the provincial government, that he has the best interests of his community’s fat, bloated, Internet-addicted youngsters in mind (even as the federalistas do their level-best to keep the next generation of voters firmly planted in their cushy chairs with appeals to low-cost providers of full-spectrum, online infotainment).

The other wants a soccer pitch and will bend over backwards to convince Harpertown, and Freddy Beach, that his motives are pure, even though his ulterior angles have more to do with boosting his electoral prospects, year after year after unchanging year, than they do with true, durable, sustainable community development.

Meanwhile, the old people keep dying; and the young ones keep leaving.

Away, the youth cry, away. Maybe, they allow, they’ll come back when things get better, when life improves.

When, I wonder, will that great regeneration occur?

Now, we are reliably informed, New Brunswick’s unemployment rate has dropped for the first time in a very long while. That should be good news. But statistics can also be cruel mistresses. Read between her lines and you understand that fewer people in this part of the country are actually looking for work, so impoverished are the opportunities for gainful employment here.

Now, according to economic think tanks, this province’s major capital projects are in limbo, because if we can’t guarantee that we’ll capitalize on what is literally in our own backyard, we are unlikely to persuade anyone else to invest there.

Or, as Atlantic Provinces Economic Council President Elizabeth Beale said last week in Saint John, “The investment activity coming into (Newfoundland and Labrador) to develop the large oil and gas fields. . .has completely revolutionized their economy and it has driven up very strong wages. Consumer spending there is very high. Employment income has grown. Young families are moving into the province because there are jobs now where there weren’t in the past, so, obviously, if you don’t have that kind of investment, you are going to see things proceed on a much slower path. . .It doesn’t mean nothing is going to happen. . .Good things can still go on here (in New Brunswick), but it does mean you have lowered your horizon in terms of your expected growth in the province.”

And, in the process, we have lowered the horizon on our province’s future.

On that, too, we might someday look back in jaw-dropping wonder.

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Nov 11 2014
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Business, Energy, Environment, Government, Oil and Gas

A moratorium that’s missing in action

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Something has put the swagger back into Steve Moran’s step. The CEO of Corridor Resources is pulling his best impression of Mad Magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, these days. What, him fret?

“We’re a little bit worried about the short term, but over the long term, no, we’re not as concerned,” he told the Telegraph-Journal last week, regarding the New Brunswick government’s decision to slap a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing in shale gas development.

“We think government officials understand the potential of the resource here and we think that once they feel they have addressed their issues in terms of health and safety that they will come around and that we’ll be back to work. . .We are confident that, over time, we will work our way through this moratorium.”

All of which raises an interesting question: What moratorium would that be?

The new Liberal government of Brian Gallant has been threatening to level a temporary ban on fracking since long before their election win.

Indeed, it’s not too hyperbolic to say that more words have been expended on the potential perils to human health of hydraulic fracturing than there has been gas extracted from the ground.

Here’s the new premier on the subject two weeks ago: “We believe there should be a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing due to the lack of information concerning the risks to our environment, our health, and our water. I think it’s important for people to know what we’re concerned about – it’s the process of extraction called hydraulic fracturing.”

Now, here’s Energy Minister Donald Arseneault just last week at the New Brunswick Exploration, Mining and Petroleum conference: “We have a clear mandate from the people and a very consistent message over the last two years that we want a moratorium on the shale gas industry. We had a clear mandate on election day to move forward on that and that’s what we are going to bring forward in the near future.”

Again, when, exactly, would that be?

In reality, it is not at all clear that the Liberals have received a “clear mandate from the people” on this issue. Some surveys conducted before, during and after the election campaign indicated that the public in this province is deeply divided on hydraulic fracturing. If anything, the edge seems to go to the pro-gas lobby as long as the industry can provide credible, verifiable assurances about its safety practices and environmental stewardship.

Neither is it clear that Messrs. Gallant and Arseneault are singing the same tune, let alone from the same song sheet.

There’s a big difference between slapping a ban on the shale gas industry, as Mr. Arseneault is mumbling about doing, and carefully parsing the distinction between hydraulic fracturing and other methods of resource extraction, as Premier Gallant is wont to do.

One definitively slams the door; the other leaves it open just a crack.

Of course, in this parade of mixed messages, Mr. Aresneault has been a marvelous band leader.

On the tricky position into which any sort of moratorium would put Corridor Resources and its gas customer Potash Corp., the minister weaved for the Telegraph-Journal earlier this month:

“The last thing we want to do is potentially put certain operations in jeopardy. For me, PotashCorp is a major player in New Brunswick. It’s a concern for me. It doesn’t mean that it gives everybody a green light, but it’s definitely in the back of my mind that I’ve got to be conscious and responsible going forward.”

As to the fate of PotashCorp’s new Picadilly mine without ready supplies of fracked natural gas, Mr. Arseneault said, “Those are the questions we are going to be asking the company. If we didn’t impose a moratorium, what is the activity they have planned for the next couple of years? Having a moratorium, how will it impact their operation? Will it impact potash? We haven’t settled on a specific menu other than we know there will be a moratorium.”

But, I wonder if that’s even certain anymore.

Indeed, Steve Moran, is there something you’re not telling us?

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