The Bruce Report

There must be something in the water. Or perhaps the unusually long, hot, sultry summer has cast a spell of muted complacence over a sizeable majority of New Brunswickers.

But whatever’s going on, a new poll confirms that 60 per cent of us think that everything in the purple violet province, just 27 days before what had been shaping up as a bitterly contested election, is just swell.

What’s more, the survey by Corporate Research Associates (CRA) undertaken for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal suggests the peaceful, easy feeling crosses all gender, demographic, geographic, linguistic, and income barriers. As CRA’s president Don Mills – a man not prone to overstatement – averred, “Given the level of dissatisfaction with the Graham government in the past year, I would have thought this would not be the case.”

Yeah, no kidding.

Still, it’s entirely possible the result is less an endorsement of the ruling Liberals’ policies and programs as it is a tacit acknowledgement that, compared with almost every other part of the world, life here is pretty darn good.

After all, we’re not beset by religious or sectarian violence. Improvised explosive devices do not kill our children. Our streets are safe, our nights are calm. Our politicians are (mostly) honest. Our businesses are (generally) prosperous. Legions of us still have jobs, or can find productive work. The bottom line: Things could be worse; a whole lot worse.

If these factors do, indeed, explain the prevailing “don’t worry, be happy” attitude, they imply a welcome degree of civic comprehension of serious issues elsewhere on the planet. Paradoxically, they also convey a deep suspicion and repudiation of politics as an agent for progress closer to home.

The past four years have comprised the “Big Idea” era in New Brunswick. “Transformational change” and “self-sufficiency” were the buzzwords of choice underscoring the government’s determination to reform, in equal measure, post-secondary education, early French language instruction, health care delivery systems, and energy. But apart from its well-intentioned (and cleverly timed) tax cuts, the Grits’ efforts to fire the public’s imagination on the grandly imagined future – to whet its appetite for innovative, systematic, institutional reinvention – have fallen like stones in still water.

The most we want from our public officials, it seems, are limited, strictly necessary measures to steady the course of provincial affairs. And that means no substantial cuts in public services and, crucially, no tax increases of any kind. The future, we insist, will look after itself, somehow and someday.

Perhaps we are right. But others, like Don Mills, are not wrong to point out that an $8-billion debt, a $750-million annual deficit, is nothing that should feed New Brunswick’s emerging contentment. “There’s a very strong sense in the survey New Brunswickers don’t really think they play a role in the debt of New Brunswick,” he told the Telegraph-Journal. “It’s almost as if it’s someone else’s problem.”

Of course it’s not, anymore than a credit card is the bank issuer’s burden to bear. Sooner or later the piper must be paid, as the sovereign debt crisis in Europe now wretchedly demonstrates. There, scores of formerly happy, highly paid, well-fed public- and private-sector employees are suddenly without jobs, pensions and homes all because international bond holders panicked over national accounts and demanded restitution and recompense.

Fortunately, New Brunswick is nowhere near this unhappy state of affairs. But the principle of fiscal prudence is universal. And without new taxes and deep spending cuts, the only remaining instrument in our particular toolbox is robust economic development – something successive governments in this province have prosecuted only haphazardly and with limited long-term success.

More archly (and ironically), it is another big idea of which the general public may yet grow weary as it debates the efficacy and optics of greasing foreign direct investment, rural versus urban needs, and the wisdom of prioritizing some business sectors over others.

Be well for now, New Brunswick.

Our complacency will last only as long as do our real opportunities for growth.

The subtle art of character assassination requires equal measures of high principle and low cunning. To be truly effective, the political candidate must always appear magnanimous as he systematically besmirches his opponent’s reputation.

Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward appears to have the second part of this equation down cold. As for the first, his barrage last Thursday – the first full day of the provincial election campaign – shows him lacking a certain, essential polish.

“Today is the start of the final chapter of the worst government New Brunswick has ever had,” he declared before a crowd of supporters near Fredericton. “Shawn Graham wants to take the next four years to make you forget the last four years. But we will not let him hide from his government’s record. We will not forget the mess that he made of our province.”

Oddly, the slight quiver in his voice as he threw down the gauntlet suggested that even he might have thought the words pouring from his mouth were needlessly hyperbolic. The worst government New Brunswick has ever had? How, exactly, does one go about quantifying such a claim? Is it worse than those of Bernard Lord, Frank McKenna and Richard Hatfield, each of which suffered from periodic bouts of boneheaditis?

Of course, voters expect this sort of trash talk in contemporary political campaigns. Few who run for public office, however, can afford to load their biggest guns with disputable superlatives mere minutes after the official commencement of hostilities. After all, where does Mr. Alward proceed from here? Soon, the talking point must be, “The worst government in the history of mankind,” before it becomes, “Not since life began, billions of years ago, has New Brunswick endured a worse government.”

The Tory partisan would have found easier targets at which to lob his rhetorical grenades had he moved to higher, less pregnable, ground where he might have opined something like, “It’s always sad when promises go unfulfilled and rashness masquerades as leadership, but working with you we will give New Brunswick back its future,” or “I won’t kid you, the past four years will make the next four years tough on everyone, but the future is always the undiscovered country and we will discover it bravely, determinedly and together.”

Still, it’s entirely possible Mr. Alward was simply rattled, even angered, by the results of new poll that show the Liberals five points ahead of the PCs, with 41 per cent of popular support. Given the shellacking Mr. Graham received during the NB Power/Hydro-Quebec debacle only a few months ago, his resurgence does seem jaw-droppingly implausible. But, again, such are the vagaries of politics, something which Mr. Alward seemed wholly ill-equipped to reconcile when asked to explain the development. “What we have seen is that the irresponsible behaviour of this government has damaged people’s confidence in the political process,” he told reporters last week. “They don’t feel that any political party is going to make a difference.”

Naturally, this would only make sense if people continued to reject all parties in the election. But the Tories are the only ones actually losing ground. Apart from the Grits, both the NDP and the Greens are showing small, though respectable, advances.

Mr. Alward is right about one thing: People in this province are fed up with politics-as-usual, especially when the issues of debt, energy, social entitlements and economic development loom as large as they do. This helps explain why fully 41 per cent of us remain either undecided or undeclared at this (it should be noted) very early stage in the campaign.

At this point, the Tory leader’s choice seems clear. If he can’t, or won’t, step up his political repartee, he should studiously avoid deploying goofy generalizations and strangled outrage in its stead.

What’s the tactical approach to getting the province out of “the mess” he so inelegantly, if correctly, describes?  

If he can’t do this with alacrity and evident confidence, then the only character he’s in danger of assassinating is his own.

It’s not clear what Prime Minister Stephen Harper would have done had two Tupolev TU-95 bombers not skirted the perimeter of Canadian airspace on Tuesday. Perhaps he might have laid in a call to his Russian counterpart.

“Vlad, baby, come on! Work with me here. All I’m asking for is an innocent, little fly-by. Nothing major. I’ve got an image to maintain.”

As it was, Mr. Putin – no stranger to publicity stunts, himself – had already obliged our fearless leader (unwittingly, to be sure), by providing him with the perfect scenery for a hammy bit of political theatre. “Thanks to the rapid response of the Canadian Forces,” Mr. Harper told a throng of troops stationed at Resolute Bay in the High Arctic, “at no time did the Russian aircraft enter Canadian sovereign space. The first responsibility of government is to take care of our security. Nothing comes before that.”

He then climbed aboard a military-issue Zodiac to spend a little quality time with Leading Seaman Deirdre Dorian (of Prince Edward Island, no less), via communications link, as she frolicked about the sea bed below. One can only surmise the tenor of their conversation. Perhaps, something along the lines of: “Check us out, rest-of-the-world: Ownership is nine tenths of the law and we have at least two of our 32 million feet firmly planted on the ocean floor.”

Of course, most experts agree, there is virtually no chance of Russian territorial aggression against Canada by air, land or sea. In fact, these days, they’re supposed to be our geopolitical friends or, at worst, “frenemies”. But this isn’t the point.

As global warming melts the increasingly less frozen north, all eyes are turning to the shipping, trade and natural resources opportunities once locked below the ice. And Harper is absolutely correct to stake a strong claim there in the interests of national progress and well-being. What’s more, I’ll take stagecraft to sabre-rattling any day of the week.

Still, there are times when a photo opportunity is not a politician’s best buddy.

U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama’s recent widely publicised and assiduously documented jaunts around the world have caused no end of consternation to her husband’s handlers. The pictures and video clips of her, her little girl, and her entourage gambolling about Europe and various points south have besmirched her once squeaky-clean reputation. Or so says an ANI newswire report:

“Mrs. Obama’s approval rating plummeted after her highly criticized, luxurious Mediterranean vacation with her nine-year-old daughter. According to the poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal/NBC, only 50 per cent people have a positive impression of her, as compared to 64 per cent people who felt positive about her in a similar April 2009 poll. The 46-year-old wife of US President Barack Obama has been labeled negative by critics for staying in the luxurious Costa del Sol in a hotel that has rooms costing up to $2,500 per night. Even though White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs [clarified] that the Obamas paid for their personal expenses, Michelle has been described as a ‘modern-day Marie Antoinette’ for going on such an expensive vacation while thousands of Americans are penniless, reports The New York Daily News. In fact, the Washington Examiner reports that Mrs. Obama’s popularity is now lower than her predecessor Laura Bush’s was at its lowest.”

All of which proves that photo-ops should be deployed only when one has something important to say or do. Shopping for exotic curios doesn’t qualify unless, in the effort, one manages to bump into a cure for cancer or a sure-fire method for putting people back to work.  Which brings us to New Brunswick in the here and now, or something I like to call, “Election 2010: The Road to Ruin.”

May I humbly suggest that Messrs. Graham and Alward each limit their public appearances to, perhaps, one a week – at least until they’re able to offer policy planks more substantial than absurd notions about NB Power’s heretofore hidden financial strength or vague balms about the multiplier effects of obscure economic development initiatives.

Until then, they’re simply not ready for their close-ups.

Beneath the empty promises and sanctimonious slogans, the bitter attacks and petty rivalries, lay the unalterable truth of every election: Someone must lose.

You could also argue the corollary, but that would deny the obvious conclusion that, in democratic societies, winning is only a theoretical construct. Just ask Premier Shawn Graham who having swept into office with a convincing mandate four years ago is now fighting for his political life in a province whose citizens have rejected his policies with depressing regularity.

Post-secondary education reform, French language instruction for English-speaking youngsters, health care delivery, the sale of NB Power to Hydro-Quebec, government salaries and pension allowances, Point Lepreau – you name the issue and, chances are, it reeks of widespread public opprobrium. Such are the perils of office, purchased by electoral success.

Still, if the past term has been tempestuous for the reigning Grits, the next promises to be a veritable hurricane for whichever party claims victory a month hence if only because the easy choices have vanished. Just the brutally hard ones remain.

New Brunswick is living on borrowed time and, more troubling, money.  

By now, everyone in this province with access to a newspaper or the Internet knows that an $8-billion public debt is thoroughly unsustainable. It undermines our ability to pay for an aging population’s health care, a sound and relevant educational system, poverty-busting programs, skills and language training, cultural and athletic events, municipal infrastructure, economic development, and commercial enterprise. And it is a material disincentive to foreign direct investment, immigration and international trade. Meanwhile, federal transfers – without which we cannot currently function – are set to tumble in the years ahead.

What do we do?

Governments, like everyone else, can perform only two rational functions to return black ink to their balance sheets: Cut spending and raise revenue. But, as not all spending in this province is easily trimmed – indeed, the single, largest line item is health care – New Brunswick is left with narrowed, painful options.

To date, however, the two major parties in this election have studiously avoided addressing the gorilla directly. Graham talks gamely about cutting taxes and trusting in the steady improvement of business conditions to replenish public coffers, which is a little like saying the solution to economic malaise is economic development. Sure it is, but how? What’s the plan, Mr. Premier?

Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward, bless his cotton socks, wants to roll up the province’s sleeves and really “get into” plotting the future of New Brunswick with a purportedly unprecedented degree of civic consultation. Somehow, it seems, this involves freezing power rates for three years and applying the utility’s profits (profits?) against its $4 billion debt load.

These are silly notions, more dangerous for the hard issues they skirt and the tough questions they avoid. Are taxes – all classes, including property and municipal levies – reasonable given the current fiscal crisis? Are we spending too much on health care, or too much on the wrong sort of things (like free Viagra prescriptions for septuagenarians)? Are we spending too little, or unintelligently, on post-secondary education, job training and real-world skills development, interprovincial trade reform, and municipal economic development and infrastructure?     

Though many non-essential public services must be trimmed or even slashed, particularly those that are redundant or duplicated elsewhere in the provincial bureaucracy, many erstwhile “crucial” ones must be scrutinized for the actual social and economic value they provide. How can they be made more productive and cost-effective without compromising their quality?

In other words, someone is going to lose something over the next four years. It’s lamentable, but it’s also inevitable in a province that has run out of easy choices to make about its future, or those it selects for the unenviable duties of government in the lean years ahead.

That all are entitled to their opinions is the great girder of modern democracy. But when fancies subvert facts (or worse, replace them) in the marketplace of ideas, the framework of free expression begins to resemble something akin to participatory “idiocracy”.

A new book, recently reviewed by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, examines how power in society has shifted away from governments and public institutions and into “private-sector companies, unelected judges, lobbyists, think-tanks, political consultants, pollsters, and the media.” According to the report, author Donald Savoie of the University of Moncton argues “power has become more fluid and considerably more difficult to locate. Its location. . .is anything but clear.”

Indeed, if information is the recognized currency of the global economy, and opinion is a sub-set of information, then Dr. Savoie’s observation may explain why those who nurture strong beliefs – regardless of how patently flawed or obviously wrong these are – have gained enormous traction, influence and, yes, power over the past several years.

The Fox News Network is the number one current affairs T-V channel in the United States. Its nightly ratings far exceed those of its competitors CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC. And yet, almost nothing about Fox News is. . .well, news. It retails a special brand of “truthiness” (a term some attribute to American satirist Stephen Colbert, who defined it as “something that seems like truth, the truth we want to exist”).

For many, the truth they want to exist about U.S. President Barack Obama is that he is, at once, a communist, a fascist, a terrorist sympathizer, a Muslim, and an illegal alien who was born in Africa. Cold, hard facts that prove he is none of these things (though these are abundant and available) do nothing to dissuade a small, but growing, minority of Americans, who insist they know the real deal about their Commander-in-Chief.

For many, the truth they want to exist about Abdul Raul, the New York City Imam who is spearheading a project to erect a community centre two blocks from Ground Zero, is that he’s an Al Qaeda spy and organizer bent on finishing the job his compatriots began nearly a decade ago. Never mind that only six months ago, every news organization in the country hailed him as a peacemaker and a voice of moderation. Never mind that Manhattan is already home to hundreds of Mosques and hundreds of thousands of citizens who practice Islam without threat, incident or calamity.

Such primacy of conviction over reason, instinct over insight, also underscores why increasing numbers of North Americans think evolution was a mere theory, dinosaurs were God’s handiwork some 6,000 years ago, global warming was a fraud perpetrated two decades ago by a cabal of grant-hungry eggheads, and Liberals were created by Satan to serve as handmaidens to the coming Apocalypse.

Am I exaggerating? Check out any one of millions of blogs, Facebook pages, and twitter feeds that now trade in the conspiracies-are-us version of 21^st Century reality. In fact, the ubiquitous nature of the web and its social media platforms encourage the dissemination of utterly baseless claims to truth, elaborate fictions posing as credible facts, as much as it democratizes communications and enables useful political action.

Ours is a filterless society, emboldened by the genius of our technologies and enamored of the power these have granted us. We no longer vote for individuals to inspire or lead us, to represent our best interests in our legislatures and parliaments. We “friend” them; we select them to parrot our ludicrous and uniformed notions, prejudices, fears and obsessions.

This is how a boatload of Sri Lankan refugees off Canada’s West Coast becomes a politically opportune occasion for pontificating on our national security grievances, the dangers of immigration, and our fatally broken borders. None of it is real. But who cares?

As long as we can say whatever we want, whenever we want, for as long as we want, who’s to stop us from becoming a nation of free-speaking, democratic idiots?

Quebec’s meddling in the affairs of its neighbours may profoundly annoy Atlantic Canadians, but it’s hardly surprising. La belle province sports a long history of promoting its interests, at others’ expense, through back channels.

The latest example is a letter Premier Jean Charest recently sent to the Prime Minister’s Office objecting to Newfoundland and Labrador’s and Nova Scotia’s joint application for federal funding to construct an undersea power cable between their two provinces. Apparently, granting such a request would constitute an unfair subsidy to the two Atlantic provinces.  

If that’s a joke, it’s a good one. Over the years, successive federal governments have poured countless billions of dollars into Quebec’s aerospace and defence industries. They have propped up its dairy and pork producers, and extended preferential treatment (read: extra-equalization formula) to many of its state-supported social programs. 

Less amusing, perhaps, is Quebec’s peculiar definition of equity in the delicate balance of provincial interests that proscribe Confederation. It has built its energy behemoth – arguably, the most successful in the nation – on the bones of a patently unfair, 65-year-old deal that permits it to resell power from Labrador’s Upper Churchill facility and reap the profits with no consideration for Newfoundland. And, despite repeated injunctions, it refuses to renegotiate the arrangement.

It also refuses to entertain the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador’s recent request to wheel hydro-electric power from the Lower Churchill River through its transmission lines, a move, it surmises correctly, that would introduce competition to its currently hegemonic lock on U.S. and Ontario energy markets.

No province is ever expected to act against its own interests. But Quebec’s heavy-handed approach to inter-provincial relations leaves a bad taste in the mouths of even its most ardent admirers, one of whom, it’s entirely correct to say, is not Newfoundland and Labrador’s easily angered, eminently quotable premier.

After learning about Charest’s attempted fiat, Williams was practically beside himself last week, spouting a string of trade mark “Dannyisms”. What gives Quebec the right, he thundered, to interfere?  Specifically: “What gives Quebec, or the Government of Quebec, or the premier of Quebec, the right under any circumstances to object to an application for funding by other provinces that have nothing to do with Quebec? They don’t want us to go through Quebec, and now they don’t want us to go anywhere. I think these are really very predatory practices and I don’t like it, and I’m not going to put up with it.”

Nova Scotia Energy Minister Bill Estabrooks echoed these sentiments in a CBC interview: “In my opinion, the premier of Quebec should mind his own business. He’s dismissing a very valid idea which comes from two provinces that have worked very carefully in terms of giving a reliable energy service to our provinces.”

And not just “their” provinces. An undersea power cable would be the first step towards a true Atlantic energy grid – supplied with clean, renewable hydro-electricity – that could reduce costs for all classes of consumers in all parts of the region. It would also vastly improve the East Coast’s position as an international energy exporter, stimulating robust economic development in all partner provinces.

Quebec’s purpose, of course, is to savagely curtail these opportunities any way it can. Its aborted bid last year to buy the major assets of NB Power has left it in a bitter, petulant mood. If Charest can’t secure access to the U.S. northeast through New Brunswick, then nobody can – certainly not dear, old King Danny for whom he holds no special regard.

In all of this, the federal government appears to be playing its cards exactly as it should. Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly told Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter that Quebec has no “veto” on matters that quite properly fall within the framework of national decision-making. Which may be another way of saying the feds will consider the joint funding application on its own merits.

If so, then Charest’s meddling is moot, if no less annoying for the squalling, squawking selfishness it represents.

It is probably the shabbiest move thus far of New Brunswick’s political season, but Progressive Conservative MLA Jeannot Volpe is not completely wrong to question the seemingly off-the-books pension allowance the ruling Liberals sustain for the widow of one of the province’s most beloved premiers.

What is indisputably unacceptable, however, is his and his colleagues’ (in both major parties) apparent refusal to review the efficacy of their own fat retirement packages – something they promised taxpayers they’d do before the end of the current legislative session.

Still, in a stunningly crass maneuver and entirely oblivious to their larger moral obligations, on Tuesday the Tories set their favorite attack dog at the throat of Jacqueline Robichaud – the 75-year-old former wife of the late Louis J. Robichaud – who receives a government-sanctioned stipend of $2,000 a month.

At issue, declared Volpe, is neither the amount nor the identity of the recipient. It’s the apparent illegality. “There’s nothing wrong with the person asking for it,” he crowed to reporters. “The problem is there’s no authority that I can see where the money should be coming from.” Moments later, he ratcheted up the rhetoric: “While many taxpayers do not have the means to plan for retirement and others in the private sector have seen a major decrease in their benefits, friends of the Liberals receive pensions to which they are not entitled.”

The Grits, and others, responded with predictable outrage. Finance Minister Greg Byrne insisted the payments, dating back to 2007, comprise “a special case”. It’s true, he conceded, under normal rules, the spouse of a deceased MLA is not entitled to benefits if the two married after the latter’s term of office (Louis Robichaud was premier of the province in the 1960s; he and Jacqueline wedded in the 1990s).

But, he insisted, the arrangement was approved by Cabinet, authorized by the Financial Administration Act and funded through the general account. “To question the eligibility of the spouse of a former MLA is beyond the pale,” he thundered. “It brings into question the leadership of the party.”

Not to be left out, the NDP’s campaign director, Dominic Cardy, added: “It is astonishingly sleazy that the Alward Conservatives would try to score political points by making an election issue out of a widow’s pension. Any allegations about wrongdoing involving a private citizen should be dealt with privately.”

All of which seems just a tad self-serving. After all, these are taxpayers’ monies, and, until now, the public has been deliberately excluded from that which Mrs. Robichauld clearly feels are personal matters. When contacted by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, she said, “I don’t know why I shouldn’t receive it. . .They passed a law and they said I’m allowed to receive the pension. I don’t know – is someone trying to make trouble for me?”

It’s a good question, which might properly occur to any one of us these days. 

Frankly, I worry far more about the muck-raking and hay-making machine that provincial politics has become in recent years than I do about my paltry contribution to a senior citizen’s retirement fund. If she needs it, let her have it. Just don’t hide it. And, once revealed, don’t turn it into an election issue on the despicable and breathtakingly stupid notion that any of this means anything to anybody, except an unjustifiably embarrassed old woman.

The Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives are now months overdue in reviewing their 2008 decision to hike the base salaries of MLAs to $85,000 from $45,757 and pour millions more into public pensions. According to a CBC report last March, “The New Brunswick plan now pays a $30,000-a-year pension after eight years of service, up from $16,500, and $76,000 after 20 years, almost double the previous $41,000 under the old guidelines. The cost of funding the plan has grown by nearly $1 million a year, according to a 2009 actuarial evaluation.”

If compensation must become a campaign platform, let Mr. Volpe’s scrutiny begin here. Again, he will not be completely wrong by raising a few inconvenient questions.

He’s tall, intelligent, principled and affecting. He’s an internationally renowned scholar of history and public affairs. He is genuinely interested in the condition of his nation. He speaks well, both on the spot and off the cuff. To the camera, he smiles when he must, and scowls when he should. He is, by some standards, the near-perfect candidate.

And yet, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, whose approval ratings have rarely broken 30 per cent, is set to make history as one of Canada’s great, political underachievers.

This is partly his fault. His peculiar brand of substance and style is so decorous he sometimes strikes his fellow citizens as bookishly inattentive. He can, occasionally, resemble that respectable uncle who shows up on Christmas Day to deliver a homily on the rights of man just as his nephews and nieces are running out the door to test their new toboggans. He’s not much fun. Then again, who is, these days, on Parliament Hill?

Historically, Canada is not particularly well known for its surplus of political charisma, but the current slate of Ottawa-bound elders would make a convention of particle physicists roaring good company by comparison. (A neutron walked into a bar and asked, “How much for a drink?” The bartender replied, “For you, no charge.” Well, you get the idea).

Still, Canadians have not traditionally punished their politicians for the vice of nebbishy stolidity. In fact, we’ve generally admired this quality. Legions of us despised former U.S. President George W. Bush because he appeared to us the reckless cowboy, dangerously unfamiliar with the responsibilities of his office, and the pivotal role his nation plays in the affairs of man. We adore Barack Obama, from afar, for exactly the opposite reason. Ironically, though, we remain politely disengaged from the political life of our own country.

If leaders like Ignatieff fail to inspire us, it’s largely because the broad concept of Canadian leadership has somehow lost its power to move us in any direction except sideways. We’re no longer enamoured of the good in our public service, but of the good enough. And in even this, “enamoured” may be too strong a word, given our recent ambivalence toward exercising our democratic rights.

According to a report released by Elections Canada last year, only 58.8 per cent of registered voters in this country cast ballots in the 2008 general poll, the lowest turnout in history. A CBC item summarized the findings as follows: “A survey conducted for the agency found that 57 per cent of those who didn’t vote blamed ‘everyday situations’ – such as being on holiday, being too busy, family obligations or work schedules – for their failure to cast ballots. Thirty-six per cent cited negative attitudes toward politics or political parties, including 14 per cent who said they were too apathetic and eight per cent who said they were too cynical to bother voting. The survey also found considerable public interest in making it easier to vote.”

Making it easier to vote? The only thing easier in a peace-loving, affluent society such as ours is falling out of bed. Still, the survey points to the essential paradox of our time: We don’t vote because we don’t trust the system or politicians our actions install; we, therefore, purchase, through our inaction, the very system and politicians we claim to despise.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does suggest that the real problem with Michael Ignatieff is not his mind or character, his ideas or ambitions, his resonance or dissonance.

It’s the talisman he – and every other elected representative in Ottawa – has become over the past few years: the ugly, disengaged, irrelevant official, mining the bedrock of public discontent for specks of political gold.

And as we made him and all the others in our own image, we have to wonder: Who are Canada’s truly great, political underachievers, after all?

Some overly keen fans of political campaigning now characterize the thrust and parry of the Grit-Tory polka to the polls next month as one of the nastiest in New Brunswick’s history.

Clearly, some overly keen fans of political campaigning need to get out more.

Nasty was former Prime Minister-for-132-days Kim Campbell’s mean mock of Jean Chretien’s Bell’s Palsy-distorted facial expressions in the run-up to the 1993 federal election. Nasty are the wholly disreputable claims some Tea Party activists south of the border are making about U.S. President Barack Obama’s citizenship.

But depicting Premier Shawn Graham, on some website, as a golden-haired Pollyanna, spouting platitudes about the bright side of life? Photo-shopping an image of Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward, stuffing his mouth with French fries to convey contempt for his 2008 decision to support pension increases for MLAs?

Dumb, infantile and embarrassing they are indeed. But nasty? I’ve provoked more character-assassinating exchanges with members of the general public just by walking my son-in-law’s dog around north-end Halifax.

Still, as much as I loathe the brutal nature of American-style politics, the irresponsible and truly injurious practice of ad-hominem verbal assaults, there is something weirdly disturbing about the fact that our leaders seem unable to distinguish between the monumental and the merely juvenile in their political attacks. It suggests, at some level, that those who seek our votes with lame-brained taunts and teases are either dismissive of, or blind to, the important issues that frame our future.

I’m all for church suppers. I also support safe food and clean water, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. We, of good conscience, can debate how best to have our holy cakes and eat them too. But, honestly, is this an election issue worthy of a province with much bigger things on its mind?

Several pundits note that New Brunswick is at a crossroads. In fact, aren’t we always? Our challenge has never been in recognizing and acknowledging our tough choices. It’s been in understanding which road leads to prosperity, and which to perdition. Which principled sacrifices and innovations pay the toll to the former? Which lazy, blinkered habits of elected office guaranty our arrival at the latter?

By now, everyone in this province with access to a newspaper or the Internet knows that an $8-billion public debt is thoroughly unsustainable. It undermines our ability to pay for an aging population’s health care, a sound and relevant educational system, poverty-busting programs, skills and language training, cultural and athletic events, municipal infrastructure, economic development, and commercial enterprise. And it is a material disincentive to foreign direct investment, immigration and international trade.

But even a grade-schooler comprehends basic arithmetic. When the minuses outnumber the pluses, you wind up with deficits. Governments, like everyone else, can perform only two rational functions to return black ink to their balance sheets: Cut spending and raise revenue. As not all spending in this province is discretionary – indeed, the single, largest line item is health care – New Brunswick is left with narrowed, even, painful options.

Though many non-essential public services must be trimmed or even slashed, particularly those that are redundant or duplicated elsewhere in the provincial bureaucracy, many essentially crucial ones must be scrutinized for the actual social and economic value they provide. How can they be made more productive and cost-effective without compromising their quality and efficacy?

And then, of course, there is the miasma of tax reform, a conversation no political party ever wants to have with anybody unless it’s discussing reductions. To be sure, across-the-board hikes on business and personal income levies are not only optically disastrous; they don’t work. They have a proven tendency to drive people and enterprises from every jurisdiction where they’re introduced. But a modest, judiciously applied, increase in consumption taxes would return tens-of-millions a year to provincial coffers.

These are the big issues this fall’s crew of political hopefuls have yet to address in their respective bids for elective legitimacy. Until they do, and with some authority and courage, it’s impossible to take any of their supercilious sideshows seriously.

Nasty?

I wish they were on matters of real substance for a change.

A democracy whose government refuses to heed the will of the majority as routinely as it embraces the narrow interests of a vocal fringe is no democracy at all; it is, by ambition and practice, an elected oligarchy.

In the waning days of a long, hot summer, Canada is coming perilously close to that which its history, traditions and civic sensibilities utterly despise: a nation ruled by a smug, self-satisfied coterie of partisan strong men whose coarse manipulation of facts and rational argument supplants intelligent debate and resists effective opposition.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet have, for years, waged a stunningly successful campaign against the twin concepts of expertise and collaboration in political culture. Their hard line, right-wing mentality has extolled the virtue of certitude in all matters of state, as bias and presumption have proscribed the meritorious, once meretricious, qualifications for public office. Meanwhile, reasonable dissent has become the province of eggheads, elitists and other assorted traitors.

In this context, the controversy over Ottawa’s decision to eliminate the mandatory requirement that a fraction of Canadians fill out the long census form next year is not, as the Harperites would have us believe, an inconsequential salvo launched by malcontents. It cuts to the very heart of democratic meaning and responsibility in a tolerant, pluralistic and informed society.

More than 200 organizations – representing teachers, economists, businesses, activists, progressives, moderates, conservatives, and liberals – have implored the federal government to reverse its tack. Without this periodic statistical evaluation, they argue, fiscal, monetary, social, industrial, education, and health policies will suffer.

But just as recently as yesterday, Harper and Industry Minister Tony Clement – pointing to the support they’ve received from a grand total of three rabidly reactionary think tanks – clung to their entirely discreditable claim that Canadians don’t want their government to insist they do anything under penalty of law.

This specious argument conveniently fails to acknowledge that no resident of this country has ever served time for failing to answer any portion of the census. It also makes light work of the actual, numerous and eminently enforceable obligations of citizenship, which are already installed. How voluntary is paying taxes?

Still, the indignities of this government don’t stop there.

Although as much as $500 million in unused federal economic stimulus money could vanish by the March 31, 2011, deadline, arbitrarily set by the Department of Finance, both Harper and his fiscal czar Jim Flaherty are adamant about turning off the taps when the clock strikes midnight. Again, they say, most Canadians have told them to buckle down and get the multi-billion-dollar budget deficit under control. But, again, most Canadians have said nothing of the sort.

In fact, provinces, territories, cities, towns, and villages across the country sat by anxiously waiting in the spring, summer and fall of 2009 while the federal government struggled to roll-out its inadequately staffed “shovel-ready” programs. Faced with stiff opposition from its discontented libertarian base of voters, the Harperites moved with only glacial speed to execute a recession-busting program it had, itself, invented.

Now, “most Canadians” face the distinct possibility that many of their already cash-strapped communities must pony up the balance of payments for projects the feds refuse to grandfather, not for practical reasons, but for ideological ones.

Where do the responsibilities of this government fall?

Are they on the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor refit in New Brunswick, where Atomic Energy of Canada Limited – a federal Crown corporation – appears wholly unequal to the task?

Are they on municipal infrastructure now crumbling thanks to years of neglect and abuse at the hands of indifferent men happily ensconced in their silos of political self-interest and complacency?

Are they on the hearts and minds of the people – all the people – it was elected to represent fairly, evenly, rationally, and inclusively?

Or are they on itself – a supremely disengaged cabal of oligarchs fretful about nothing, except one thing: The next general election.