The Bruce Report

Wading into the debate over early French immersion in New Brunswick is a little like walking barefoot into a snakepit. Which is exactly what an ad-hoc committee comprised of the province’s leading Francophone businesspeople, educators and cultural figures did the other week – with the predictable results.

After insisting, in an “open letter to Anglophones”, that early French immersion is emblematic of New Brunswick’s status as Canada’s “only officially bilingual province” – and chastising Shawn Graham’s government for precipitously dumping the program in favour of new “Intensive French” and “Core” curricula in the English primary and secondary school systems – it called for a moratorium on further government action until 2009 when, presumably, cooler heads might prevail.

Within days, however, the Saint John Telegraph-Journal published an editorial which said, among other things: “The Anglophone school system today runs counter to the equality of opportunity Premier Louis J. Robichaud proclaimed more than 40 years ago. While the segregation produced by early immersion has been limited to Anglophones, it does no good for the Francophone community. The streaming produced by early immersion is creating a unilingual underclass, with all the resentments one might expect among those who have been denied the opportunity to learn a skill that is essential for government employment. Provide all students access to an effective education.”

By juxtaposing the words, “Robichaud”, “segregation”, and “underclass”, the newspaper effectively co-opted the rallying cries of the previous generation of Francophone activists who fought successfully for fairness and equity in a system that had been patently unfair and inequitable. Now, it seems, is the time for the poor, downtrodden Anglophone. The pendulum swings, and the moderates had better duck lest they lose their cooler heads.

In fact, this is one of those rare wedge issues that manages to divide Anglophones, Francophones, and cultural warriors of all linguistic stripes and proclivities. If there is such a thing as a no-win, zero-sum public policy option, this is it. Still, the bottom line is simpler than it seems.

Early French immersion is indisputably the best, most effective way to teach English kids their second language. Buckets of research all over the world support this conclusion if only because youngsters learn faster and more enduringly than teenagers and adults. But, here’s the thing: So what?

I can make an equally persuasive case that, under the right circumstances, home schooling produces more literate, numerically accomplished, and civically engaged students than institutionalized classroom learning. Unless, however, my government supports my efforts, recognizes my credentials, and fast-tracks my demonstrably superior pupils to circles of higher education, my argument means nothing.

The problem with early French immersion in this province, at this time, is that it is not working for most people (except as a publicity stunt for those wedded to the theory, if not the practice, of linguistic achievement). That’s a huge shame, to be sure. But it’s also the cold, hard truth. The majority of English children are stuck in the profoundly dysfunctional core program and are, as a result, falling behind in every academic area that matters to a world in which brain power increasingly supplants raw power as the gold standard of economic success. Math, science, history, geography, and, yes, language, are languishing in understaffed, under-equipped, overburdened schools.

Those who do have access to early French immersion have it because their circumstances are efficacious: they are the right age for admission; they live in cities or built-up rural areas; they have money; they come from doting, nurturing parents. This renders them a fortunate minority in a publicly and pathetically funded school system. In effect, they benefit from a private education in everything but name.

The issue is not about language, per se, but education and equal opportunity. The provincial government’s determination to improve access to French instruction runs tandem to its desire to elevate the quality of learning across the board. The assumption that its withdrawal from early immersion amounts to a repudiation of those crucial victories won during the Robichaud era is flat wrong.

If anything, it supports them.

A new study showing that Moncton and Fredericton are the second and third most tax-friendly communities in the country is indisputably good news for a province desperate to attract new businesses and international investors to its shores. But let’s not pat ourselves on the back just yet.

Earlier this week, KPMG LLP, the international accounting firm, which has carved a niche for itself by ranking the developed world on a sliding scale of “cost competitiveness”, concluded that Canada has the third-lowest taxes in the Group of Seven industrialized nations. The levies analyzed included those on corporate income, goods and property, and capital and labour.

Within Canada, St. John’s was found to offer the best tax environment, followed closely by New Brunswick’s Hub and capital cities. “If you look at places like Moncton and Fredericton. . .they’re way lower than places like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto,” KPMG’s Greg Weibe said in a news report. “That really creates a competitive advantage compared to other cities in Canada.”

Well, yes and no. In reality, many factors play into the thinking of site selectors and relocation-oriented businesses. A low tax rate isn’t even the most important one. An available, motivated and skilled workforce is. And, on this score, New Brunswick and the rest of the Atlantic Provinces still have some work to do.

Says a recent report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), “It is very disturbing that 3.7 per cent of positions in [New Brunswick’s] small- and medium-sized (SME) business sector remained unfilled for four months or more in 2006. This was up from 3.1 per cent in 2004. In total, this equates to 11,000 vacant positions. Further, a CFIB survey suggests that the SME community expects hiring difficulties to continue, as 71 per cent of New Brunswick owners feel it will be harder to

find employees in the next five years.”

What’s most troubling, according to this research, is that SME owners (who, not incidentally, operate 97 per cent of all businesses in the province) blame their hiring difficulties on a pervasive and deepening shortage of skills, rather than workers. “It’s important to note that 20 per cent report only a shortage of labour,” the CFIB said. “A skills shortage is when there is a lack of candidates with the required education or experience applying for jobs.”

All of which puts two of the province’s major self-sufficiency initiatives – extensive tax reform and post-secondary education renewal – into exquisitely ironic conflict. Businesses and workers want lower taxes at a time when the cost of everything is rising. Meanwhile, individuals want good, high-paying jobs – the kind that most SME’s are struggling to fill. This requires major investments in higher education and public training programs paid with, you guessed it, taxes.

How can New Brunswick both have its cake and eat it?

Some suggest the federal government should kick in billions of dollars in new funding for universities and community colleges. But, given the temper of the times and Ottawa’s newfound affection for “provincial autonomy”, that’s about as likely as Prime Minister Harper replacing Jack Layton as NDP honcho.

Others see the wisdom in imposing a new carbon tax, which is, at least, not an income levy. But, given the reception Stephane Dion is being accorded for his proposed version, such a move in New Brunswick could be tantamount to political suicide for the  Graham government.

Still others (including me) wonder why the nation’s federal and provincial regimes remain so determinedly opposed to increasing the HST by one or even two percentage points. Doing so would pour much needed liquidity into the system, keep income taxes low, and provide sufficient funds to pay for all the other “competitive advantages” that attract relocating businesses and foreign investors.

It may not be the perfect solution, but it’s better than patting ourselves on the back.

Just when you thought it was safe to nurse your grudges far from the pollster’s prying eyes comes a survey that declares fully 71 per cent of Canadians are peeved about something these days.

Gas prices, taxes, the environment, Afghanistan, China, the weather – it’s all stone for the axe we’re grinding this summer. According to Canwest News Service, which commissioned the Ipsos Reid poll, “we are a nation united by our simmering [discontent]. Of the 1,022 people surveyed, 62 per cent say they are angry about inaction on environmental issues, 53 per cent are angry about taxes, 51 per cent are upset about neighbourhood crime and 47 per cent are upset by Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.

“On the eve of the Beijing Olympics, 43 per cent are even angry about the Chinese government’s crackdown in Tibet.”

In fact, Canwest reports, we’re not just annoyed; we’re frustrated. “A significant proportion of the public (35 per cent of the survey sample) are bottling up their anger because they can’t do anything about it,” says Ipsos Reid senior vice-president John Wright. “We expected to find fed-up people, but not pent-up people. It’s like having natural gas in the air, and if there is a spark of some kind, it can explode.”

All of which may explain why the minority Tory government in Ottawa will not likely deliver a Throne speech when Parliament resumes in September. Given the country’s foul mood – and Stephane Dion’s mounting credibility as an eco-warrior – now’s probably not the best time to provoke a general election.

Still, I have to wonder whether we’re becoming a nation of whiners. After all, compared with most of the world, we’ve rarely had it so good. Here, violent crime is an aberration. Democratic principles still gird our system of self-government. Our economy is awash in petro-dollars. We’re largely insulated from runaway inflation. Unemployment is down. Employment is up. And, the Bank of Canada predicts, robust GDP growth will return as early as the first quarter of 2009. 

In contrast, the United States is fracturing along so many fault lines, it is one, big financial failure away from sinking into the blue Atlantic. There, millions are losing their homes, jobs, and self-respect while oil companies rake in record profits. And, despite Barack Obama’s stellar, overseas performance last week, eight years of Bush administration has seriously – perhaps permanently – compromised American influence across the planet.

But for truly gut-wrenching levels of human misery, look no further than Darfur, Sudan, Burma, and more than a dozen other war-ravaged, famine-plagued, rights-curtailing, torture-embracing jurisdictions where the weak and victimized don’t complain about their “pent-up” frustrations. They pray, and sometimes fight, for change as if it were a matter of life and death, because, in most cases, it is.   

Against this backdrop, what right do we have to complain about our own impotence? We’ve built a society that is the envy of the world, and we possess what few others elsewhere enjoy: choice.

Don’t like high gas prices? Drive less. Don’t like the cost of California lettuce or Idaho potatoes? Grow your own. Upset by human rights violations either here or abroad? Get involved. Contact your local member of parliament. That’s your right and responsibility.

For heaven’s sake, this is Canada in the summertime, and for all but the poor and disenfranchised among us (to whom, I hasten to add, we are also responsible) the living is almost embarrassingly easy.

As it happens, I, myself, am a world-class griper. Here are some of my pet peeves as the weather turns from merely beautiful to utterly glorious: My dahlias seem a little faded this year; my two cats aren’t getting along; my bike’s odometer is on the fritz; and my wife insists that Elton John puts on a better show than the Eagles.

And, oh yes, pollsters.

The woman at the other end of the line seemed almost querulous. When, she demanded to know, was I last in Germany? I’ve never been, I assured her.

“What about your wife?”

“She’s never had the pleasure, either.”

            “Then,” sir, “I think you have a problem.”

            For reasons I can’t quite explain, my heart fell. The caller was phoning from the fraud department of a major credit card company, and the way she talked made me think I was in big trouble.

            “What kind of problem?” I ventured meekly.

            “I have a report of someone purchasing $465 worth of leather goods from a boutique in downtown Hamburg with your credit card, three days ago. You are, um, absolutely sure that was not you or your wife?”

            I would have laughed had the conversation not been so bizarrely unsettling. The best I could muster to address her question was, “What kind of leather goods?”

            “I believe they were gloves, sir.”

            “Well, madam, I can assure you that all of our gloves are present and accounted for and that, to the best of my knowledge, none are from Germany.”

            And that, I reckoned, was that. Except it wasn’t. In the succeeding days, I had to fill out forms and affidavits testifying that I was, indeed, who I said I was. Here’s my social insurance number. Here’s my mother’s maiden name. Here’s where I was born, raised, educated. Only then was I absolved of responsibility for covering the cost incurred by the unidentified hand model from western Europe. 

            The experience got me wondering: How much of my personal information is out there, bouncing naked around cyberspace? More disturbing, perhaps: How much personal information must I routinely divulge to ensure that putative authorities believe that the guy who stares back at me in the mirror every morning is actually me?

            We have become a society of open books. What’s worse, we’ve constructed entire industries on the premise that complete disclosure of even the most arcane facts about our private lives is what greases the wheels of market capitalism. Those who resist are malcontents, maybe even criminals. What are they hiding? We have a right to know.

            Two items in the recent issue of Harper’s Magazine speak directly to the point. One is a quasi-amusing trifle in which the CEO of a leading cyber-theft protection company in the United States is reported to have challenged fraudsters to crack his technology by successfully stealing his identity. Thirteen months later, one did.

            The other is a lovely essay by Contributing Editor Garret Keizer in which he writes: “Central to the deterioration of our right to privacy is a metastasizing obsession with the privilege of access. We like to say that this privilege extends to all of us and that it is fundamental to the workings of a democratic society, but who are we kidding. ‘Access’ for the majority applies less and less to the information required for self-governance and more and more to the prurient trivia desired for self-abuse. It also has less and less to do with consent.”

            And this, it seems to me, is the important point. When did privacy become an unseemly luxury in societies (both American and Canadian) founded on the principles of independence, mutual respect, and civil discourse? When did marketing surveys, terrorism watch lists, and state-sanctioned eavesdropping become synonymous with freedom, justice, and tolerance?

            It’s true, institutional incursions into the private lives of citizens are as old as western democracy. But, arguably, they’ve never been more systemic or successful; and in their success, they have taught whole generations to trust the multitude of Big Brothers out there just waiting to buy, sell, and trade personal information like so many pieces of gold and silver.

Still, if the injuries these practices inflict – increasing, as they most certainly do, the likelihood of credit card and identity theft – don’t worry. A healthy dollop of up-to-date data in the hands of a stranger with access to the Internet will heal the wounds.

Until, of course, the next time an officious woman you’ve never met makes a note on her credit report: “Subject never been to Germany. Send dossier to Lufthansa for inclusion in new points-rewards program.”

The economy is going to perdition. Gas and food prices are soaring. Housing and credit markets are crashing. But here on the back deck, where we sip our wine and watch the fireflies dart among the dahlias and cone flowers in the fading dusk, it is mid-summer, and things could be worse.

We light the lawn torches and observe, as we do most July nights, how the evening transforms this urban garden into a refuge for the weary and dispirited. During the day, the colours and textures are almost oppressively lovely. The eye can find no rest; the mind, no peace. It is only when Morpheus descends with his cohort of assorted pixies and elves that the brilliant hues blend into a muted sameness, and the hard edges of quotidian woes dissolve to fairy dust. And, oddly, there is clarity.

What do they – our protectors of the public trust – think when night comes?

Does U.S. President George Bush actually believe, as he says he does, that history will remember his eight years in office fondly? Does he honestly reckon hundreds-of-billions of dollars spent to fight two intractable wars was money well spent, and that the cost in human life was worth the price?

Or does he admit, as he wanders the Rose Garden in the day’s waning hours, that his administration has been a tragic experiment in American imperialism, and privately pray it’s not too late for someone to burnish his nation’s lustre in the world?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he wants to strengthen and renew the obligations of the public sector to the average tax-paying citizen. Does he actually believe this is possible in a system that is absurdly over-burdened with federal bureaucrats determined to protect their turfs?

Or does he concede, as he watches the sunset from the porch at 24 Sussex Drive, that parliamentary power yields less real control over national affairs than he had ever imagined before blustering his way into office more than two years ago?

Liberal Leader Stephane Dion insists that Canadians are ready to pay a carbon fee to offset the green house gases we produce. Does he really think an across-the-board levy like this will endear him to middle-class consumers who do most of the living and working and tax-paying in this country?

Or does he acknowledge, as he strolls through his darkening neighbourhood, that it probably won’t, and that without making some dramatic policy changes to this otherwise noble program, he’ll likely lose the next election?   

And what of New Brunswick Premier Shaw Graham? He’s determined to render his province economically self-sufficient in less than two decades. Does he really think he has the time and electoral mandate to achieve the goal when his financial resources are stretched to the bone and his senior ministers are running off madly in all directions pursuing what they believe is right and proper, but not necessarily practical and effective?

Or does he accept, in some quiet, dusky corner of his home, the proposition that he must focus his government’s energies on lowering income taxes, attracting industries and building an environment for new, home-grown innovation and entrepreneurship?

Indeed, things could be worse. Our leaders could be immune to moments of self-doubt, resistant to change, unwilling to admit their mistakes. They could be temperamentally unequipped to stray from the paths they’ve charted for themselves, and for us. They could be content to watch the economy unravel, blaming its dissolution on too much regulation, too little regulation, greed, charity, stupidity, elitism, the weather – anything but themselves.

Still, I’d like to think they do as we do when trying to understand the day: Find a garden in mid-summer, wait for night, and pray for clarity in the dark.

Reflecting on the previous four days from my vantage of 30,000 feet, enroute to Halifax from St. John’s, I had to admit I’d had a damn fine time. Where else can you see icebergs in late June, and complete strangers who become your dear friends if, of course, you can hold a tune till four in the morning? Maybe Las Vegas. But the icebergs there are made of Styrofoam.

Petty Harbour, NL, is one of those heartbreakingly beautiful places, the kind that frustrates a camera lens with its stubborn grandeur. I had forgotten until my hosts reminded me that this was the set location for two of my favorite movies in the 1970s: “John and the Missus” and “Orca”.

The former told the story of a recalcitrant local who refused to move himself and his family to a bigger town. The latter was a high-jinx remake of “Moby Dick”, involving a deranged fisherman and a vengeful killer whale. I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ve always thought the two films together say everything you need to know about mainland perceptions of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Still, if bullshit is the common currency of Hollywood and provincial tourism departments, authenticity is what you see out of the corner of your eye when no one thinks you’re looking. And the Avalon Peninsula is steeped in the stuff: Witless Bay, Cape Spear, Bay Bulls, Trepassey, and, of course, the capital city.

Is there a more vibrant and congenial urban area than St. John’s anywhere in Canada? This is a place where cab drivers go out of their way (and off the meter) to show you the sights. This is a place where the density of fine, downtown restaurants rivals, and even surpasses, Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood. This is where music-making is as natural as breathing, and drinking as natural as. . .well, drinking.

We gathered, my wife and I, in our hosts’ well-appointed living room as the guests began to arrive at their house around the corner from Petty Harbour. Fathers, mothers, aunts, brothers, bearing guitars, and mandolins, and spoons, and drums.

For hours, we listened to men, whose registers bore an uncanny resemblance to the late Stan Rogers, sing and play for the simple love of having their voices heard. No apologies for miscues or dropped lyrics, but plenty of wisecracks and laughing. No performing, just breathing.

There came a time at just around 2 a.m. when I grabbed a 12-string and, to my utter astonishment, belted out Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”. In retrospect, it should have been the single, most embarrassing moment of my adult life. It wasn’t. And on the plane ride home, I wondered why.

I wondered whether the great travel writers – Robert Louis Stevenson, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connolly, among others – were right when they described their journeys to unfamiliar places as tonics for contempt, privilege and presumption. I wondered whether real courage was nothing more than the determination to meet people on their own terms in the places where they live and work. And I wondered whether Canada, as it passed through its 141st birthday, truly understood any of this. 

“What are you thinking about?” my wife asked at 30,000 feet.

“I’m thinking about home,” I replied.

“Don’t worry about the garden,” she said. “Moncton got rain while we were gone. I’m sure everything is fine at home.”

“No,” I laughed, “not that home. The other one.”

The Earth shifts on its axis. The poles reverse. Alice drops down the rabbit hole to kiss the feet of the Cheshire Cat while the rest of Wonderland scratches its collective head. If “Alice” is Ontario, the “Cheshire Cat” Newfoundland and Labrador, and “Wonderland” Canada, then welcome, dear reader, to the quantum economics of the Great White North, where anything and everything is now possible. 

Not long ago, Alice was happy and engorged. She observed her role in Wonderland as eternally crucial to its progress. After all, she owned all the big banks, the stock exchanges, the major manufacturers, and most of the politicians in Ottawa. “What’s not to like,” she loved to say as she shoved auto-pact dollars into her gaping maw. “This will go on forever, and I will be beautiful until the oceans boil and the mountains crumble. I will last until the end of time.”

Then spoke the Walrus (that cabal of economic prognosticators known as Statistics Canada). “Not so fast, Alice,” it said. “Yours is an export economy. You depend on willing foreign customers whose currency must remain appreciably richer than yours. That’s easy money for you. But what if things were to change? What if, someday, your cheap goods cost more than, say, China’s or India’s? Then, of course, there’s oil – as in, you don’t have any.”

And so it came to pass that Alice, who had a tendency to horde her riches, failed to make the necessary investments in research and development, new technologies, employee and management training, and high tech sector diversification – indeed, the very things which might keep her economy thrumming through even the toughest times. Tens of thousands of her workers abandoned her for the tar sands of Alberta, the coastal vistas of busy British Columbia, the big sky country of sunny Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile, on Wonderland’s most easterly fringe, the Cheshire Cat sat counting his petro-dollars as one major oil company after another queued up to option the exploration and drilling rights of vast, offshore resources. Meet the new Alice, said the Walrus. “Newfoundland and Labrador has stepped into a new era of prosperity,” StatsCan declared in May. “Driven by export growth, notably that of crude oil, the province’s economy led the nation in terms of growth in nominal gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007, at 13.4 per cent. Its growth of 76 per cent between 2002 and 2007 also topped Alberta’s gain of 73 per cent.”

What’s more, “Newfoundland and Labrador has reversed its long-term trend of a declining population. In the last two quarters of 2007, the number of people moving into the province was the highest that it had been in 30 years. At the same time, out-migration slowed, resulting in the population increasing for the first time in 15 years.”

As for the region formerly known as Alice? Down the rabbit hole she went. A report from Toronto-Dominion Bank in April warned that Ontario – which is expected to post economic growth rates four per cent below the national average next year – is poised to receive federal equalization payments for the first time, securing its status as an officially “have not” province.

Indeed, the Earth shifts on its axis and the poles reverse. But that’s not the end of this cautionary tale. Ontario’s ignoble fall from grace illustrates, if nothing else, how precarious and unpredictable the foundations of western economies have become in the era of global trade and runaway commodity prices. Truly competitive jurisdictions must marshal an arsenal of policies and strategies designed to breed innovation and commercial diversity even when neither seem particularly necessary. Those that don’t will watch their advantages vanish, like a quantum bubble, in the blink of an eye.

Newfoundland and Labrador is riding high atop an energy wave. But some day, the oil that’s fuelling the province’s regeneration will come at too dear a cost – economic, environmental, social – to sustain double-digit growth year after year. The time is now, not later when the grease pots run dry, for massive infusions of capital in higher education, knowledge-intensive industries, and value-added manufacturing and services for export markets other than the United States.

Fortunately, the formidable Danny Williams seems to get it. He concluded his April 29 budget address thusly: “Among our greatest dreams as a province is to stand on our own feet in this federation as masters of our own domain. Our concerted efforts have at last positioned Newfoundland and Labrador to take an important step upward from ‘have-not’ status to a higher plateau of sustainability. We are not squandering these opportunities but managing them wisely to ensure we do not slide back into decline but instead leave our children a legacy of sustained growth and freedom from debt.”

Failing this, what are the perils?

Just ask Alice, and remember what the Walrus said.

This column originally appeared in the July-August 2008 edition of Atlantic Business Magazine. For the best in business journalism on the East Coast, visit: www.atlanticbusinessmagazine.com

The last time the New York Times bothered to publish anything about a Canadian, Conrad Black was on his way to the hoosegow, there to play shuffleboard on the dime of the U.S. taxpayer.

But, in an uncharacteristically effusive dedication last week, “America’s newspaper” heaped praise on Louise Arbour, the recently retired United Nations high commissioner on human rights. “Ms. Arbour, 61, a former Supreme Court judge in Canada and, before that, the chief prosecutor of the UN tribunals for war crimes in Yugoslavia  and Rawanda,” it said, “has been doing a job with a mandate that many would call impossible.”

Namely: Galvanizing world opprobrium and directing it not merely against the planet’s assorted thugs, brutes and tin-pot dictators, but against the very people who hired her and, presumably, expected her to behave like the smug, well-to-do westerner they thought they had sponsored.

In fact, over the past four years, Arbour (no shrinking violet) has castigated the Canadian government for its lack of involvement in humanitarian hot spots – Darfur, Sierra Leon, Palestine – and all but accused the Bush administration of war crimes in Iraq and at the Guantanamo detention camp in Cuba.

For her unrelenting honesty, she has been called every name in the book: fool, idiot, ignoramus, terrorist sympathizer, and worst of all, (gasp!), Canadian.

Still, she told the Times, “It’s a small miracle to see how far we’ve come since the 50 years of silence after Nuremberg. All things considered, in human rights law we have achieved more in the past 15 years than in the previous 50 in taking personal criminal accountability to where it is now.

If that’s true, it’s because of people like Arbour. Indeed, over the past half-century, Canadians – if not always their governments – have played leading roles in the advancement of human rights abroad. It’s why some, like the members of the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ), bemoan the nation’s perceived loss of standing in the world. Recently, the organization called on the federal government to remain strong in its support of the International Criminal Court.

“Canada cannot have it both ways: it can either choose to be complacent about the rolling back of human rights, or it can choose the path that most Canadians are proud of – an emphasis on the prevention of war crimes and torture through justice, and respect for human rights,” said CCIJ member Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was tortured in Syria after being falsely accused of having ties to terrorism. “The world needs leadership from Canada.”

Added another CCIJ representative, Lloyd Axworthy: “Canada was a leader in the development of international justice mechanisms like the International Criminal Court. We need strong continued support for these mechanisms, and we also now need investigations and prosecutions in countries like Canada for torture and other crimes. We look at Sudan, Colombia, Myanmar - and many other countries - and we know that human rights abuses have not gone away. Justice can help to break the cycle.”

For her part, Arbour has kept the faith, despite the absurd complexity of her task. As she told the Times: “I recently had a meeting with a group of Congressional aides [U.S.], and they complained, ‘Why aren’t you criticizing Myanmar instead of spending your time criticizing the United States?’ Elsewhere, when I raise human rights concerns with presidents or prime ministers, the first response I get is, ‘Why aren’t you in Guantanamo? Why are you coming here?’”

If the mandate of the UN high commissioner for human rights is “impossible”, it is nonetheless crucial, if only because it reminds those who would abuse, torture and murder their fellow men and women that the rest of the world is watching, and taking names and numbers.

One can only hope that Arbour’s successor will embrace the job half as ardently as she has these past four years.

After glancing at the gargantuan headline on yesterday’s front page, one might have assumed the outbreak of war in the tri-city area. Has Saint John finally invaded dear, old Greater Moncton? Has Fredericton moved to squash the Hub City’s industrial might once and for all?

In fact, the reality is nearly as startling. After decades of studies, environmental assessments, foot-dragging, false starts, bitter recriminations, threatened lawsuits, and archly political public relations campaigns, a provincial government is now ready to put its money where its mouth is on the future of the benighted Petiticodiac River.

Premier Shawn Graham’s Liberals are committing upwards of $20 million – $8 million this year, and $12 million in 2009/10 – to begin the long-delayed fix. According to a report in this newspaper, the money will be spent on the first phase of a multi-year restoration, which is anticipated to end in 2015 and cost a total of $68 million.

The initial work involves “project planning and site preparation”, including “drainage improvements, waterline relocation and dike construction”. As well, “the gates will open in the spring of 2010, allowing fish passage.”

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of this decision on the collective mood of the community. While a vocal minority of residents have agitated against efforts to replace a piece of the causeway between Moncton and Riverview with a bridge – arguing that the consequent changes would erode property values, pose an immediate threat to riverbank settlements, and probably not produce the desired environmental benefits – most have supported the campaign to liberate New Brunswick’s third-largest waterway because both the science and the law say remediation can, should, and must be done.

And so it must, and not just from an environmental perspective. The virtual damming of the Peticodiac in 1968 has, by some estimates, cost the city tens of millions of dollars in lost tourism and recreational fishing revenues. It has also strained municipal budgets at peak flood times when the river is incapable of accommodating natural run-off below the artificially bloated head pond.

It’s unlikely that the province’s move will result in noticeable improvements – either to the ecology or the economy of the area – any time soon. Experts suggest it may take ten, 15, even 20 years before the Petitcodiac recovers 82 per cent of its pre-causeway-era grandeur. Still, it’s a start, and a convincing one at that.

For all the incessant yakking about “transformational change” in the Legislative Assembly over the past two years, here, finally, is a tangible example of the stuff; and a compelling reason to believe that governments, when motivated by a majority of the people they represent and bolstered by credible, peer-reviewed research, will not merely nod their heads sympathetically, but act decisively.

Would that were true with half-a-dozen controversial files now cluttering the desks of the province’s education, health, economic development, and natural resources ministers. But I digress in my all-to-familiar, cranky fashion.

Graham’s decision is not only a victory for the Moncton area; it is a triumph of conviction over expediency, reaso

There can be only two reasons why Stephane Dion’s proposed carbon tax has provoked howls of derision from every point on the political spectrum: Either it is a profoundly dumb idea; or the Liberal Party of Canada has lost any ability it once had to enlighten a wary electorate about a sensible, if complex, fiscal policy.

In whichever case, it bodes ill for the nation’s Loyal Opposition now struggling to secure a beachhead against an unrepresentative, yet tactically gifted, Conservative minority. Since assuming office two years ago, the federal Tories have gleefully broken every rule in the Miss Manner’s book of political etiquette. And, in large measure, they’ve succeeded at the expense of their centre-left nemeses.

Consider, for example, how the Prime Minister’s Office has curtailed media access to key officials without generating a peep of protest outside the ranks of the National Press Gallery. Consider how government operatives have hobbled the function of parliamentary committees, whose leadership they fear and mistrust, without igniting an ember of popular discontent anywhere in the country.

This regime has gutted funding to crucial social and cultural programs, undermined the integrity of free-speech legislation, made massive gifts of tax money to demonstrably successful energy conglomerates, ignored the environmental depredations of big businesses, and rewarded its buddies in Quebec and the West with economic development money they neither need nor deserve.

And what’s been the reaction of most Canadians? Ho-hum, it could be worse. After all, it could be a (gasp!) Liberal hanging us up by the heels, flogging us to within a inch of our monetary lives, and telling us how much better we’re going to feel once the pain subsides and the wounds mend.

The brilliance of Stephen Harper’s approach to governance is diabolical. As long as he drapes the issues of the day in the raiments of policy and procedure – as long as they remain “parliamentary” in scope – he can present them to a disinterested public as quaintly decorous, but hardly relevant to our daily lives, even though they are, in fact, crucial to the proper functioning of our democracy. Similarly, he can spin legitimate criticism of his mangling our fundamental rights and freedoms as so much political obstructionism or worse, opportunism and cynicism.

Now onto this fertile, disingenuous ground steps Dion and his carbon tax, an issue, if there ever was one, tailor-made for the practical magic of Harper’s public relations machine. Here’s another example of “tax-and-spend” liberalism, it crows. Here’s “voodoo economics” at its worst. Here’s a blatant attempt to “screw” this great country’s hard-working, long-suffering common man.

Never mind that the Conservative government considered a similar consumption levy not too long ago. Never mind that it has not yet put forward a reasonable alternative to its own once-cherished policies, let alone anyone else’s. And never mind that it has not bothered to explain the principles girding its objections.

Naturally, with so much blood in the water, the ardently socialist Numbskull Democratic Party must pile on. Dion is off his rocker, it bellows. He wants to punish the poor, the rural, the bike-less. What’s another word for Liberal? You know it brother; it’s Conservative. Now pass the bean dip, up the revolution, and let us count the ways we’re different in the comfortable parlour rooms of our conscience.

But we expect this, don’t we? Hawks and doves circling in the wind nobody really cares about harnessing. Scorpions and turtles basking in the sunshine nobody bothers to collect. The real shame is that the Liberals may have the kernel of a good idea. What that is, however, is anyone’s guess. They’ve been too busy fighting rearguard political actions to explain precisely how a carbon tax on consumers will benefit the environment, stimulate development of sustainable energy technologies, and remain “revenue-neutral” in the long run. Articulating this is, if nothing else, a litmus test of true leadership.

Last week, a woman claiming she works for Stephane Dion left a message on my answering service. She wanted to know if I’d be willing to learn all about his “Green Shift” policies. I returned the call, and left a voice mail stating that I’d be delighted to talk to her or anyone else about this fundamental issue. I even gave her my cell number.

It’s been six days, and I’m still waiting to be enlightened.