The Bruce Report

Today, Robert Downey Jr. became “Ironman”. 

Today, George W. Bush declared that he’s “Aquaman”.

Today, Hillary Clinton said, “Hey wake up and see my magic lasso; I am Wonder Woman.”

Today, Barack Obama said, “I’m Captain America.”

Today, 100,000 people died in Myanmar.

Today, 500,000 Americans lost their homes to big banks.

Today, George W. Bush sent $600 to every middle income-earner in the U.S.

Today, Hillary Clinton said that she would “obliterate” Iran if she was provoked.

Today, Barack Obama said that he would talk to terrorists, but not to his pastor.

Today, 15 million Americans fell below the poverty line.

Today, 4 million Africans starved to death.   

Today, the “Ironman” movie earned $100 million worldwide.

Today, Robert Downey Jr. is a superhero.

How long before Kelly Lamrock, New Brunswick’s besieged Minister of Education, finds himself at the receiving end of another barrage of useful advice pertaining to the waste receptacle into which his policies should be inserted?

Having “endeared” himself to many Anglophones and Francophones over the past few weeks on the matter of early French immersion in the province’s English school system, the brave (foolhardy?) MLA now wants to elevate educational attainment rates by testing the bejeezuz out of those who consistently fail to make the grade in national and international assessments.

Referring, last week, to New Brunswick’s abysmally poor showing in a recent Canada-wide achievement exam, the minister said: “In the light of repeated low academic scores, we must act urgently and at as early an age as possible. If we intervene now before kids get into kindergarten, we’re not wasting time coming up with a plan after they’ve already arrived and are struggling. Indeed, a child who cannot read by the end of Grade 2 is at risk, not only of dropping out, but, more importantly, of losing [his] passion for learning and belief that [he] can learn. This plan is about insisting on better results in literacy, math and science.”

Specifically, “this plan” is about assessing the progress of children, through standardized evaluations, at the pre-school level, and in Grades 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 11. Once implemented in September, the program will make New Brunswick’s public school system the most thoroughly scrutinized in the nation. And then what?

Some are already sceptical. According to Monique Caissie, vice-president of the province’s francophone teachers association, “adding more tests is not the answer. Studies show that this is really not the way to go. Instead, we should focus on adding more resources and staff so that teachers can spend more time and attention on working individually with students.”

But, in a way, they are both correct.

Standardized tests, when properly and intelligently administered, are excellent means for obtaining crucial information about what works, and what does not, in any type of school system. From these, one hopes, wise policies flow. Curricula can be adjusted. Instructional techniques can be sharpened.

On the other hand, examinations go only so far without a financial commitment commensurate with the pedagogical challenges that need addressing. What good are tests if the provincial government’s approach to classroom reform remains clay-footed? What utility is there in conducting regular assessments absent of the political will to spend money on real, tangible solutions?

One solution that strikes me as indisputably sensible is a comprehensive program of early childhood education offered by both the Anglophone and Francophone school systems. The National Education Association in the United States finds that, “high quality early childhood education represents one of the best investments our country can make. Research shows shows that high quality education before a child turns five yields significant long-term benefits. One study found that individuals who were enrolled in a quality preschool program ultimately earned up to $2,000 more per month than those who were not. Young people who were in preschool programs are more likely to graduate from high school, and to own homes

“Other studies show similar results. Children in quality preschool programs are less likely to repeat grades, need special education, or get into future trouble with the law. Early childhood education makes good economic sense, as well. A high-ranking Federal Reserve Bank official pegs its return on investment at 12 per cent, after inflation.”

Of course, to work in New Brunswick, any form of ECE must be provided universally without consideration for specific linguistic, economic, or geographic circumstances. It would, in fact, cost millions, if not billions, a year to maintain. Moreover, the program might take decades to produce convincing results.

There you go, Mr. Lamrock: Another eminently smart, thoroughly untenable idea. And it’s not even yours.

You’re welcome.

I have always admired, if not always supported, the New Democratic Party for its “Grapes of Wrath”, mud-slinging sensibility, its determination to defend the little guy against the rapacity of big business and moneyed interests in government.

But, really, what the heck is Jack Layton talking about these days?

In a truly weird performance in Parliament earlier this week, the left-wing leader peppered federal Conservatives with questions that belonged more properly in a high school debate.

At issue is the appearance of impropriety in (you guessed it) Tory campaign expense reports. This time, though, the imbroglio has nothing to do with the so-called “in-and-out” scheme in which the Conservatives are alleged to have passed off national expenses as regional or local costs. This time, the errant government is being queried about research and polling expenses, and their reimbursement, during and immediately following the last general election.

According to one news report, “Many Conservative candidates have told Elections Canada that they paid substantial amounts of money – usually $15,000 or $20,000 – for election surveys or other research that appears to have been directly offset by the national party.”

About which Layton blustered, “There seems to have been some sort of pattern which is why we’re asking questions. It looks more like an out-and-in rather than an in-and-out. We’re not exactly sure what it was. . .[but] it seems to have happened at an odd time so we think there certainly are some questions that have to be answered about it.”

There’s just one problem, Jack: It’s not illegal.

Even Elections Canada, which is pursuing its in-and-out investigation with all the zealousness of an Eliot Ness, thinks the transfers are proper (or, at least, not improper). Moreover, other opposition party members suggest that the amounts reimbursed are entirely consistent with sums candidates in tight races would spend on public opinion surveys and related research.

So, where’s the smoking gun?

To be fair, Layton is not claiming he’s found any evidence of wrong-doing. He’s just, you know, looking; the same way I might look for my boots in the bathtub though the likelihood of my finding them there is slim to none.

There are, perhaps, better ways for Canada’s “third party” to occupy itself. A rigorous review of its own accomplished history might be a good start. How about Tommy Douglas and Medicare, or David Lewis and an affordable housing strategy, pension indexing, and the Foreign Investment Review Agency?

What about Ed Broadbent and democratic reform, regional economic development and a more equitable deal for women in the workplace? What about Alexa McDonough and the fight to save Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan and the nation’s unemployment insurance system?

Since assuming the reigns of leadership, Layton and his cohort have managed a few impressive coups of their own. In 2005, they negotiated an amendment to the federal government’s budget in exchange for NDP support in the minority Parliament.

The manoeuvre effectively deferred $4.6 billion in corporate tax cuts, directing the money towards reducing education costs, cutting pollution, building affordable housing, installing more transit infrastructure, increasing foreign aid, and erecting new protections for pensions in cases of employer bankruptcies.

Of course, you may not like New Democrats, or anything they stand for. But one measure of a truly representative democracy is the degree to which its opposition parties make relevant nuisances of themselves regarding rights its citizens too often take for granted. This is what the NDP has always done peerlessly well.

The Harper government has proven itself extraordinarily adept at marginalizing the legitimate, mainstream concerns of millions of Canadians – everything from early childhood education, to funding for arts and culture. It has successfully portrayed its political opponents and their supporters as weak, dissolute and unequal to the task of federal governance. 

Now is not the time to assist them by kicking up dust over a manufactured issue. Now is the time to sling some real mud – the kind that actually sticks.

So, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and those stuck in the middle are going nowhere fast. Gee, you don’t say. Here’s another shocker: It tends to snow in January.

In fact, the only thing amazing about Statistics Canada’s recent report from the 2006 census on income disparities over the past 25 years is the amazement with which its findings are being received by the so-called chattering classes.

Says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: “In 2005, we were at the end of a decade of strong growth, and people were worse off than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, which were recession plagued decades. You’d think that with a tight labour market the opportunities would increase for people under 35 and for newcomers. But that just doesn’t seem to be the case.”

Adds Tony Frost of the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business: “I had thought that the middle are not getting richer as fast [as the wealthy], but this data shows that the middle are not getting richer at all. That’s stunning to me.”

Come on folks! Haven’t you been paying attention? Or have your six-figure salaries, tenured positions and comfortable homes blunted your powers of observation?

On this continent, the middle class has been running scared since the good, old “morning in America” days of Ronald Reagan. And you don’t have to be an economist to know why: The wholesale dismantling of once-reliable manufacturing industries; the rise of contract and part-time services, supplanting their more secure (and costly) full-time counterparts; the prevalence of offshore and “nearshore” labour pools serving domestic producers; and a patently inequitable tax regime which favours the wealthy minority at the expense of the poor saps who comprise the vast, unhappy majority.

The Stats Can survey merely, and unsurprisingly, attaches numbers to this sorry tale. Between 1980 and 2005, the median earnings of full-time Canadian workers increased by a whopping $53 (from $41,348 to $41,401). Meanwhile, the incomes of the nation’s richest people rose by 16.4 per cent, as those of its poorest fell by 20.6 per cent.

Of course, there’ve been many moments over the past 25 years when governments could have stepped forward with enlightened policies designed to redress the more egregious imbalances. But those moments passed, as they inevitably do when political considerations undermine economic ones and ideology trumps common sense. 

When public servants should have been shoring up economic capacity, for example, they were occupied in pandering exercises, gesticulating before their electoral bases. When they should have been helping businesses diversify, expand, develop and acquire new, productivity-enhancing technologies, and train and educate employees, they were consumed with gun registries and “age of consent” and foreign military adventures and Christian “rights” and Muslim “rights” and any other sort of “rights” which might yield them votes at the 11th hour of their feckless mandates.

And where was corporate Canada? Was it investing wisely and prudently to secure a future for innovation and sustainable growth? Was it analyzing the enormous potential in cutting-edge R&D, environmental industries, and emerging, high-value export markets? Or was it hording its boom-time windfalls, and speculating on tech bubbles and real estate bubbles and inadequately collateralized credit markets?

Still, let’s dare to imagine a day, not very far away, when the state of our interlaced economies float to the top of the public and private sector agendas where they belong. On that day, collaboration, ingenuity and utility replace self-aggrandizement, venality, and cynicism as principles of effective governance.

The poor begin to achieve that to which they aspire: dignity, respect, opportunity. The middle class gets its mojo back and begins to grow. The rich consume the fruits of their colossal success without complaint or coercion. And everyone is as content as any hard-working, imperfect democracy can make possible.         

Now that really would be amazing.

“Ontario will soon be a have-not province, and is poised to start collecting equalization payments in two years, economists at Toronto-Dominion Bank say.” – The Globe and Mail, April 29, 2008.

Dear Ontario:

I was sorry to hear about your financial difficulties, but don’t worry too much about your impending fall from grace. Once you get used to grovelling for the coupons that fall from every tax dollar you send to the nation’s capital, you can still have a good life. Sort of.

Naturally, you’ll need to grow a hide as thick as a Rhinoceros’ to deflect the barbs your fellow Canadians will sling at you. Some of the insults will seem particularly egregious: “welfare bums”, “defeatist whiners,” “slack-jawed, pogey-loving Ontarians”.

Still, you must endeavour to ignore these slights as you resign yourself to the mysteries of an equalization formula which divine that you, who produce 40 per cent of the country’s GDP, deserve an annual charitable donation.

I note, with some concern, that your energy minister Dwight Duncan is not quite on board. He continues to fuss over the fact that each year you contribute $20 billion more to federal coffers than you receive from Ottawa through its various wealth-sharing programs, including equalization. I believe his exact words are: “The formula is flawed. We will be paying ourselves with our own money.”

If I may be so bold as to suggest that this type of reasoning is unhelpful. For one thing, it makes too much sense.

You may still be one of the wealthiest jurisdictions in the entire developed world, but compared with Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan you’re a poor cousin. And in Canada, we help our family members who fail to measure up, even when our family members are driving Mercedes and living in multi-million-dollar homes.

For another thing, your Mr. Duncan implies that equalization should be constantly reviewed to ensure that it accurately reflects the real differences in economic capacity between provinces. In other words, richer regions should not be forced to hand over so much that, during tough times, they risk falling below an arbitrary benchmark; and poorer regions should not be shackled to generations of so-called handouts simply because they can never match the stunning, if circumstantial, success of the oil-drenched west.

But this only suggests that Ottawa’s approach to economic development should be even-handed and apolitical. And, of course, we know it is not.

Over the past couple of years, the Harper government has spent tens of millions of dollars on oil and gas development in Alberta, trade corridor infrastructure in British Columbia, and other mega projects in the lands of the setting sun. Meanwhile, its investments in you, Ontario, have been commensurately small (based on your population and industrial profile).

Out here on the eastern fringes of the Great White North, we kind of know how that feels. Once upon a very long time ago, the Maritimes were Canada’s economic engines. We built the financial institutions and supplied the engineering and managerial know-how necessary for the nation’s tremendous expansion. In this country, wealth and opportunity always seem to flow west. History is only repeating itself.

In the end, Ontario, being a have-not province isn’t so bad. The hours are good. No one really expects much of you. And, once a year, you get a cheque whether you want it or not. So, sit back, relax, enjoy yourself. You deserve it.

In fact, now might be the time to take that long-postponed vacation. I understand that Newfoundland and Labrador is just dying to see you. Apparently, it’s come into a bit of money recently (something having to do with offshore oil revenues making it a have province by 2009), and it’s fairly itching to blow some of it on its less fortunate partners in Confederation.

As I say, you can still have a good life, once you get used to it.

Your pal,

New Brunswick

I’ve always found that leading and lagging indicators are unreliable gauges of economic health. If you really want to measure the depth of the hot water in which we Canadians occasionally find ourselves, you have to tabulate the number of mixed metaphors and bizarre analogies analysts employ to describe the nation’s reducing circumstances.

Back in the early 1990s, for example, I only knew we were in a recession when an official at a major bank blustered: “Holy trash cans, Batman, it’s as if the Joker and the Riddler had a baby, dropped it on the doorstep of Canadian manufacturers and screamed, ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner, suckers?’”

By this standard, the current crop of superlatives seems mild. Commenting on  frantic efforts to rebuild institutional capital positions severely compromised by the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, Bank of America honcho Kenneth Lewis said yesterday: “It’s too early to strike up the band and sing that happy days are here again.”

Indeed, added Morgan Stanley chief John Mack, the mortgage mess “is in the eighth inning, maybe even the top of the ninth.” In fact, insisted Oppenheimer & Co. official Terry McEvoy, credit problems are now spreading to conventional business and real estate lending, indicating that “the industry is in the early innings of the credit cycle.”

But if none of this sounds all that bad, bear in mind that analysts have just begun to trot out the baseball clichés (a sure sign of darker days ahead). And if history is any guide, soon will come the nautical references to “sinking ships”, “torpedoed expectations”, “business depth charges”, and “gun-boat economics”.

So, how doomed are we?

Most Canadians are only now waking up to the rumblings on the horizon of global markets. The comparatively high value of our currency, relative to the U.S. dollar, has cushioned consumers from the full impact of sharply rising prices on everything from gas at the pumps to flour at the grocery store. That’s about to end as the loonie reaches parity, once gain, with the American sawbuck.

Then, of course, there is the continuing crisis in worldwide credit markets, which affects local economies in specific and deleterious ways. Banks around the world have already conceded losses of up to $300 billion (USD) on mortgage-related investments. Some experts predict these could deepen to $1 trillion before the so-called “cycle” completes.

The bottom line is that financial institutions don’t lend money they don’t have – not to homeowners, or businesses, or even governments. And illiquidity on this scale can wreak havoc on industries attempting to expand and compete both domestically and internationally.

Complicating matters is the fact that the traditional source of economic prosperity, cheap oil, is getting scarcer. This condition is not a product of tough times, but rather an abiding contributor to them.

All of which points to a long and painful recession in developed countries as governments attempt to ameliorate the effects by issuing treasury bills to shore up the balance sheets of major lenders and tinkering with interest rates to prevent both runaway inflation and its evil twin, “stagflation”.

Frankly, there’s not much any individual can do about this. The world’s economies are so intricately linked, so reliant on credit, so wedded to the practice of “mark to market accounting” (the act of raising money against an asset on the basis of its future valuation) that even the most innovative, efficient and coordinated response is not likely to avert a sustained downturn.

The only curative, it seems, is personal. The word “frugality” rarely appears in the literature of government policy and economic prediction these days. It’s been trumped by our love affair with limitless growth. Planet Earth may be small and constrained. But, the argument goes, our imagination is immense and eternal.

However we developed this strange, paradoxical idea, we now we reap the “benefits” of its application: pain, poverty, dislocation, failure.

Holy recession, Batman!

Public accountability is one of those phrases, like “military intelligence” or “unbiased opinion”, that signifies essentially nothing but which can be, in certain circumstances, well. . .“seriously funny”.

Take, as examples, the separate but equally winsome performances of the New Brunswick and federal governments in recent days. Concerning two high-profile issues of so-called transparency, neither seems to know what it’s doing, but both are delivering routines worthy of the Keystone Cops.

In the case of Premier Shawn Graham’s Liberals, a $21.4 million-top-up of a private pension fund for provincial nursing home workers is provoking howls of derision. Everyone from the Opposition Leader to the Deputy Auditor General is calling the decision “unwise”, “unprecedented”, even “strange”.

Worse, perhaps, the provincial government refuses to fully disclose its reasons, citing restrictions on its candour contained within the Pension Benefits Act. About the only thing Finance Minister Victor Boudreau allows is: “Nursing homes would either have had to declare bankruptcy and close their doors, or the nursing home administrators were going to have to collapse pension benefits to all their employees. We felt we had to step in to protect our seniors.”

Fair enough, but nothing in the Act limits the government’s ability (or, in fact, dilutes its responsibility) to explain in the fullest way possible what, exactly, is going on. Why are nursing home pension accounts in such lousy shape? What’s the justification for using public money to protect private interests? What, if anything, is being done to prevent another bailout six months or a year from now? Remember, this is a government that says it has no money for core programs, let alone rainy day funds.

Still, this is nothing compared with the comedy of errors currently playing to rapt audiences in the nation’s capital. The inelegantly dubbed “in and out” scandal involves an alleged attempt by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to pass off national campaign expenses as regional or local costs during the last federal election.

Supposedly, it worked this way: Tory headquarters transferred money to 67 candidates, and then instructed them to send it back as payment for advertising. Except, it is charged, the locals didn’t actually spend said dollars on their individual election efforts. Instead, the funds may have been used to sweeten the value of the national campaign’s media buy, which, if true, would have exceeded Elections Canada limits to the tune of $1.3 million.

Throughout, the Conservatives have insisted they have done nothing unethical or illegal, and have employed their formidable powers of deflection to make the case that the Liberals comported themselves in exactly the same way prior to the polls two years ago. The claim is not, in fact, accurate; but even it were, it’s a discreditable, ludicrous and hilarious defence for a government that campaigned and won on the strength of its commitment to “open, ethical and accountable” public administration.

Even funnier are the shenanigans of the past week: An RCMP raid on Tory headquarters in Ottawa, after which some party faithful all but characterized the nation’s police force as Elections Canada’s private goon squad; a last-minute attempt by senior Conservative officials to spin the national media their way; bitter recriminations against electoral officers who are lawfully obliged to get to the bottom of the mess; and a stiff-necked refusal by members of Harper’s inner circle to lay all of their cards on the table.

Governments make an enormous fuss over the notion of public accountability. They latch onto it like a fundamentalist grips a bible. But in the muck and moil of political life, it’s frequently the first casualty of failed conscience.

If nothing’s wrong in the administration of programs, policies and tax dollars, why hide behind specious interpretations of regulations and conventions to justify keeping silent? Why behave as if something is, in fact, horribly askew?

It seems silly; oxymoronic, if you will, with the emphasis on the word, “moron”.

You filibustering Cro-Magnons and freshwater swabs! You lily-livered bandicoots and abecedarian iconoclasts! Scoffing braggarts! Prattling porpoises! Squawking popinjays! Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles, what a bunch of steam-rolling, body-snatching Ostrogoths you really are!

Now that, Messrs. Michael Murphy and Jeannot Volpe, is how you curse.

I realize how demeaning it must be for you to take instruction from a character invented by the Belgian writer Herge in the early part of the last century (the crusty, dipsomaniacal Captain Archibald Haddock in the “Adventures of Tintin”). But, seriously gentlemen, when it comes to the fine art of slinging well-turned mud, you need help.

Mr. Volpe, in the provincial legislature last week, you referred to the Health Minister and his boss, Premier Shawn Graham, as versions of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. What were you thinking? Not only are these despots extraordinarily well-respected throughout the Latin world, their economies actually work. Are you trying to get Handsome Guy Chuckles and his cavalcade of callow cavaliers re-elected?

And you, Mr. Murhpy – what persuaded you to characterize the Opposition Leader as one of the “Madawaska Mafia”? Everyone knows that the descendents of the Sicilian “Black Hand” were among the most successful entrepreneurs in North America. Are you looking across the aisle for a candidate to replace your cabinet colleague at Business New Brunswick? Do you have an offer a certain somebody can’t refuse.

Naturally, I assume neither of you meant to support the other’s game, albeit vain, attempt to build political capital.

This seems clear, Mr. Volpe, from your wounded faun routine in which you declared, “My family is from Italian background, and the roots are very deep. My 82-year-old mother called me first thing this morning. Because of that, it is not a good thing for [Murphy] to say.”

Likewise, Mr. Minister, your testy rejoinder spoke volumes: “[Volpe] referred to me as a vicious, third-world dictator, and I didn’t complain. It’s all just rhetoric; a tempest in a teapot. I’m used to [him] saying whatever comes into his mind. He is a publicity stunt waiting to happen.”

Still, if I may be of some service.

The time has come for leading elected representatives in this province to articulate their insults, cast their aspersions, and otherwise undermine their brethren in the assembly more accurately and, frankly, more creatively.

Why, for example, say “Mafioso” when you really mean “buccaneer”, “vampire”, “egoist”, “tramp”, “trollop”, “crook”, “harlequin”, “parasite”, “pockmark”, “coconut”, “brute”, “guano-gatherer”, and “bougainvillea”?

Why say “dictator” when you crave to blurt “ruffian”, “numbskull”, “savage”, “heretic”, “villain”, “corsair”, “pyrographer”, “blackguard”, “artichoke”, “fat-face”, “bashi-bazouck”, “beetle”, and “ectoplasmic byproduct”?

In fact, Mr. Murphy, consider the enduring impact of telling Mr. Volpe that he is nothing but a “Carpathian caterpillar, a miserable molecule of mildew whose opposition members are, collectively, hardly better than a thundering herd of zapotecs let loose by a nitwitted ninepin.”

For your part, Mr. Volpe, imagine the cheers from the peanut gallery when you respond: “Mr. Speaker, as much as I respect the honourable Health Minister, I must point out that he is obviously a dictatorial duck-billed diplodocus, a puffed up punchinello, and a blundering barbecued blister on the body politic.”

On the other hand, you could both shut your traps and get down to the business you were elected to execute: Building an economy which encourages its young professionals, tradesworkers and skilled immigrants to (what’s that word?) stay; establishing the province’s credit-worthiness in (what’s that phrase?) the global marketplace; forging promising, new trade relations with the other provinces of this (what’s that stereotype?) unpromising corner of Canada.

But if you do persist in behaving like a couple of “sea-gherkins, road-hogs, invertebrates, shipwreckers, torturers, carpet-sellers, fancy-dress freebooters, sea-lice, troglodytes, turncoats, jellied eels, and marmalukes” remember what good, old Captain Haddock had to say about politicians.

“Words fail me.”

David Hay, the sometimes beleaguered president of NB Power, is an awfully smart guy.

He’s a lawyer, a former investment banker, and the chief gatekeeper of New Brunswick’s energy apparatus.

So believe me when I say I pity the poor fellow who must stand before New Brunswick’s regulators to defend a three per cent rate hike after having forecasted a $69 million surplus this year.

Of course, that’s a mere trifle compared with his performance in front of a Moncton business audience 12 months ago, in which he explained that NB Power’s colossal $96 million profit that year was entirely accidental.

It seems, he said, rivers ran so high, they boosted hydro production which, in turn, generated a power dividend which, in turn, was sold for cold, hard cash. Hence, the windfall. 

It was a strange, discomfiting message to send: First of all, if we make a profit, it’s an act of God; secondly, any profit we make is none of your business. After all, we have better things to do with your money than, say, give it back to you.

Fundamentally, though, I don’t blame Hay. I don’t envy him. But I don’t blame him.

He’s just doing what any executive in a semi-deregulated power utility that depends on commodity spot prices of non-renewable energy sources would do – play all sides against the middle, and hope for the best.

Indeed, how are you supposed to reliably predict what to charge customers when you can’t reliably predict your own costs from quarter to quarter?

No, if anyone’s to blame, it’s the geniuses who believed, more than a decade ago, that merging private sector management and public sector accountability models would produce the best of both worlds – and not the worst.

The business of power is enormously complex.

You’ve got generating facilities to worry about. . .transmission lines to care for. . .grids, loads, interconnectivity with other jurisdictions. . .And that’s just before coffee break.

Private companies worry about one thing: shareholder returns.

Public entities worry about another: service to citizens.

Nine times out of ten, they mix about as well as oil and water.

But when they do, through some alchemy of dovetailing interests, you get the absurd drive to turn citizens into customers – except they’re customers who have no other choice but to buy from the resident monopoly.

You get a former public utility that’s now an under-performing semblance of a private enterprise.

In the end, no one’s happy.

For NB Power, the solution is not simple or easy, but it is necessary.

The actual cost of generating electricity must be reflected in the bills it issues to all customers. If those costs are egregious, then at least we know what they are.

And as consumers, we can do a couple of things: reduce our consumption of power, and our carbon footprint on the planet; insist that our elected representatives aggressively invest in renewable forms of energy; and demand that our utility’s first responsibility is to the citizens it serves, and not the shareholders it conjures.

Frankly, you don’t have to be an awfully smart guy to figure that one out.

Et tu, Brute?

These days, Donald Savoie comes not to praise Shawn Graham, but to bury him.

In three archly critical newspaper stories published over the past week, the Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the University of Moncton slammed the provincial government for being, among other things, disorganized, unfocussed, accident prone, and timid.

Last week, he stated that the Liberal regime has lost sight of its self-sufficiency agenda under a mountain of lengthy, sometimes dubious, studies: “There’s a report every second day on the table. We’re throwing a lot of money around at consultants. I have yet to see a government with 182 priorities be successful.”

He then followed with a barrage against proposed health care reforms, urging the province to be “bolder” in its thinking: “We should go to Ottawa and say we’re a small province; we’re ideal for a pilot project [a private model]. Let’s give it a go. Take the handcuffs off. We’ve got to start a revolution in terms of health care.”

And on Monday, he blamed the hide-bound, over-built Department of Business New Brunswick for failing to attract new industries and generate good, lasting jobs: “We need to think differently. Unless we create opportunities, we’re not going to have that many people around. For the [public service] to be engaged, it has to be as aggressive, as creative, as the private sector is.” 

It’s an astonishing reversal for a man who served on Graham’s transition team less than two years ago, and who told me, not long ago: “Sure, this [the self-sufficiency] agenda is terribly ambitious. This has to be a part of it. Making it work is going to be tough. Is it realistic? Who knows? Who in their right mind would not be sceptical? But what is the alternative? If we don’t do this, what is our future? We can’t go on being dependent on [equalization] payments. Ottawa is slowly and surely turning off the transfer tap. . .I just want the nose of this airplane called New Brunswick pointing up.”

But is he now correct?

The Graham government has committed a classic political blunder. Afraid of appearing smug and self-satisfied (like its Conservative predecessor), it has careened too far in the other direction, promising to simultaneously fix everything that hinders New Brunswick’s progress. In fact, it’s an impossible task for which the only return is exactly what it is generating: widespread suspicion and disgruntlement.

Nor is Savoie alone in questioning the utility of some of the government’s recent decisions. What, for example, does tinkering with the English public school system and post-secondary education have to do with generating a self-sufficient province? As fiscal measures, they will actually cost money. As policy manoeuvres (and I might agree with them in principle), they fail to articulate any convincing link to more robust economic development. And surely this, if nothing else, is what self-sufficiency is all about.

Perhaps the most damning criticism is of Business New Brunswick. By now, it should be the fountainhead of the public sector’s reservoir of innovation and ingenuity. It should be the source of daily stories about new industrial formations, clusters, expansions, relocations, and job creation. It isn’t.

Without the means to increase the amount of revenue flowing from the private sector, any talk of self-sufficiency is so much hot air. And so is the palaver about new  education, health, and social programs: The school system will languish; effective trades-training programs will founder; health care will shrink and degrade; literacy programs will wither; communities will falter; and people will continue to leave for more economically muscular parts of Canada and the world.

If the Graham government proceeds along the course it has charted, it will squander its noble intentions – and the province’s future – with ignoble busy work and officious irrelevancies.

Maybe this is what Savoie is really talking about. Maybe he comes not to bury the young premier, but to wake him up