The Bruce Report

A tradition no less honourable than resolving to do better and be better in the New Year is the annual running of the mouths found in all the finer salons of power and politics across this great land and beyond.

A story in London’s Daily Mail from December 31 boldly predicts that Britain, once “Great” but now merely little in the panoply of global commerce, will reemerge a powerhouse of grand proportion by the middle of the century.

Indeed, by 2050, the home of blood pudding, warm ale, druidical henges, and Paul McCartney will be “the biggest economy in Europe with one of the wealthiest populations on the world. . .The UK will jump from being the sixth wealthiest country in the world to third, based on national income per head. Only people in the United States and Canada will be more prosperous.”

Or so claims Goldman Sachs, about which U.S. Senator Carl Levin declared in 2010, “Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs were not simply market-makers, they were self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis.They bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got the credit rating agencies to label them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold and profiting at the expense of their clients.”

Yeah, those guys. No hard feelings, eh?

Still, one wonders how Goldman’s rosy prognostications about the upward march of personal riches square with another report carried by the same newspaper on the same day, which concludes that the “number of Britons saving into private pensions has  dropped to its lowest level in more than a decade.”

The figures, released by the National Association of Pension Funds, “expose the extreme financial pressures facing households during the economic downturn” and show that “just 38 per cent of working-age people are putting money aside for retirement, raising the likelihood that they will have to work until they drop.”

In a codicil that will not surprise anyone in this country, the report also points out the “growing apartheid” between private and public-sector wage-earners.

In the U.K., if you work for the state, you qualify for a minimum, annual pension of about $12,000 (CDN), which isn’t much. But it’s a whole lot more than zero, which is precisely what two-thirds of that nation’s commercial workers have tucked away in company plans.

So, then, what are the folks at Goldman, and others of its ilk, talking about through their gold-plated choppers when they forecast a future, 40 years from now, so utterly fanciful even Nostradamus would have chuckled to ponder it?

The telling lesson the financial meltdown and consequent recession of 2008 taught the citizens of planet Earth is not that life is unfair (we already knew that). It isn’t that poor people outnumber wealthy ones (again, that’s obvious).

The teachable moment arrived, with a sickening thud, when we realized that even the most prudent, careful and responsible among us – indeed, any one of us – could become someone else’s lunch meat in the blink of a wandering eye.

We don’t trust the likes of Goldman Sachs, whose agents and operatives raped and pillaged our savings and investment accounts. Why would its research department think we’d credit its bright-new-world scenarios, even for a moment?

Our decidedly Canadian frame of reference is now the envy of every thinking Briton. We, also, entertain our fair share of running mouths. But, our soothsayers are refreshingly boring.

“We’re preparing the next budget, the next steps of Canada’s economic action plan to create jobs and growth, and also to continue seeing our deficit decline,” Stephen Harper intoned on Christmas Day. “So, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

That’s about as far into the future as I care to peer.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

Every year at around this time, regardless of the economic weather, public officials dutifully draft peons to that noblest of all savages, the small business owner.

He or she, they insist, is the sturdy bulwark of society, upon whose broad shoulders rest the fair dreams of the hapless wage-earner and (therefore, somehow) the wealth of nations. The entrepreneur, cut from the tough cloth that unassailable character and wizened experience weaves, stands ever at the ready to compensate for the waste, venality and shabbiness of the corporate world – his and her mind never straying far rom that single, virtuous goal of job creation.

Or, as Stephen Harper opined in an official statement last Monday, “Each year, Small Business Week acknowledges and celebrates the hard work and dedication of small business owners. Small businesses are a powerful driver of our economy and employ millions of Canadians. Their contributions are more important than ever given the fragile state of the global economy.”

Aw shucks. Do go on. . .

“Our Government is doing its share to support the efforts of small businesses to create jobs and growth in Canada. We are reducing red tape, keeping taxes low and have declared 2011 the Year of the Entrepreneur – highlighting the role entrepreneurs are playing in the success of our country. On behalf of Canadians, I thank small business owners and entrepreneurs for their continued efforts to keep the Canadian economy strong.”

As a member of this honourable league, going on now for 22 years, what I should say is, “Don’t mention it.” And that’s all I should say.

But the entrepreneurial life confers upon its practitioner certain habits of mind and comportment that are hard to break. One of them is candor. And to be perfectly frank, politicians know as much about small-time enterprise, and its impact on the economy, as they do about anything else. That is to say: Not much.

For more than a generation, elected representatives of every ideological stripe  (aided by their spin-doctors and handlers) have paid homage to entrepreneurs as a constituency, extolling their achievements as the byproduct of their common purpose. In this process of co-option, the politicians have grossly oversimplified the motivations of the self-made man and woman and wildly misrepresented the true nature of his and her contributions, which are not at all macro-economic.

Writing in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, columnist Charles Kenny notes that in the United States, “The notion that small business is the force behind prosperity is not true. . . .In 2007, there were around 6 million companies with workers on the payroll. Ninety percent of those businesses employed fewer than 20 people, according to analysis of the latest census data by Erik Hurst and Ben Pugsley of the University of Chicago. Collectively, those companies accounted for 20 per cent of all jobs. Most small employers are restaurateurs, skilled professionals or craftsmen (doctors, plumbers), professional and general service providers (clergy, travel agents, beauticians), and independent retailers.

Furthermore, he observes, “These aren’t sectors of the economy where product costs drop a lot as the firm grows, so most of these companies are going to remain small. And according to Hurst and Pugsley’s survey evidence, the majority of small business owners say that’s precisely their intent – they didn’t start a business for the money but for the flexibility and freedom. Most have no plans to grow.”

To be fair, some do, and those that expand are often spectacularly successful because economies of scale (labour and input costs, access to capital for investment and marketing) tend to favour larger operations. But Kenny’s point is well taken. In Canada, as in the States, while most businesses are small, they account for only a meagre proportion of meaningful employment. That’s one reason why knowledgeable economic developers have stopped associating job creation with entrepreneurial moxie.

Still, public officials are obliged to spin their comforting platitudes. But if they really wanted to pay folks like me a favour, they might want start telling the truth about entrepreneurship’s true value to society, which has to do with the skills it teaches: Self-reliance, productivity, creativity, determination and the ability to detect the aroma of bovine fecal matter whenever and wherever it wafts.

Had the Irving yard in Halifax failed to win the big prize in the federal government’s shipbuilding sweepstakes, you can bet that calls for immediate cessation from Confederation would have dominated the regional blogosphere from North Sydney to Yarmouth, from Moncton to Edmundston.

As it is, the men and women who go down to the sea in boats have earned a generational reprieve from the vicissitudes of yesteryear. And the only thing that’s now on the minds of marine steel-shapers, underwater welders, dry-dock foremen, construction engineers, project managers, and pipe-fitters is: We’re back, baby!

It’s trite to say that Christmas came early this year for a traditionally important, if sadly declining, Maritime industry, but Irving Shipbuilding’s $25-billion contract to supply the Canadian government with the next generation of combat vessels is both history-making and game-changing for the entire region.

To begin with, it is the single, largest federal procurement since the end of World War II. It comes – perhaps counterintuitively – at a time of government cutbacks and widespread austerity measures in all departments. (On the day the contract was awarded, the feds announced 42 layoffs at the Moncton-based Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency). And, notably, it’s worth more than half the value of the much-vaunted, national Economic Action Plan, the first phase of which ends in March.

Most stunningly, though, this is the only instance in living memory when politics didn’t decorate Fat City’s decision-making apparatus. The Harper government, determined to stay above the fray until the eleventh hour, assigned 20 senior bureaucrats the task of adjudicating the bids from Irving, Vancouver’s Seaspan Marine Corp., and Quebec’s Davie Shipyards strictly on merit. A “fairness monitor” supervised the panel’s commitment to objectivity. In the end, the process worked.

That Irving deserved to win is indisputable. It not only scored higher than its competitors, it managed to demonstrate a long and successful record in the industry, having built the nation’s existing frigates and marine supply vessels. Currently, it’s constructing patrol ships for the Canadian Coast Guard. “We have been building ships right along for the last number of years,” Jim Irving, CEO of Irving Shipbuilding, told the Telegraph-Journal following the Wednesday announcement. “Even in the lean years, we were building ships for ourselves, which allowed us to keep our management intact and our skilled workforce up.”

The economic impact on Nova Scotia is profound: Three decades of guaranteed job creation, hundreds-of-millions of dollars in GDP growth, countless spin-offs, and a plethora of new reasons for skilled young people to remain along their sea-bound coast. But the boon for New Brunswick, where the company once headquartered its shipbuilding operations, is also great.

“There are about 115 New Brunswick suppliers here with us, helping provide goods and services for the yard,” Irving said. “It will grow because this is going to be a long-term contract and the benefit of that is that suppliers  will be able to improve their technology, train their people, or find new product lines.”

Naturally, there will be challenges. Stick-handling the often conflicting priorities of the various government departments that have skin in this game (specifically, Defence and Public Works and Government Services) won’t be easy. Neither will meeting the often brutal schedules contracts of this complexity and dimension invariably require. And some observers continue to harbor doubts about the size and sufficiency of the workforce on the East Coast.

Still, these hurdles – if they actually exist or transpire – belong in the category of “good problems” to face. They frame the structure of progress over the next 30 years and elevate the importance of competitive capacity, not just in shipbuilding but in every small or large business that stands to benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the massive investment.

At the moment, of course, these concerns barely register. Nor should they. The future will take care of itself. Today is for rejoicing: We are back, indeed.

If Premier David Alward truly intends to consult people about shale gas exploration in New Brunswick, he might want to start by asking a seismic survey company what it thought it was doing the other day when it bulldozed over the democratic privileges of Sussex Town Council.

In an apparent fit of haste, Seismotion Inc., acting on behalf of Windsor Energy Corp., executed a testing program within the community’s municipal boundaries before councillors had actually voted on the matter. This, despite the fact that the company had initially asked for the town’s approval as a prerequisite for commencing the work.

The precipitous deed provoked the predictable outrage among local burghers. “It’s a blunder, a big blunder,” fumed Mayor Ralph Carr. “They should not have done that. . .I feel let down by the industry. Period.This is a black mark. . .This did not help their cause at all – our level of trust has been diminished.”

Added Councilman Mark Wright: “To sit here and say I’m frustrated with what’s happened. . .is an understatement. We have followed due process. . .It’s the authority of the municipal entity to say yay or nay. The perception is this company is not above board . . .They do what they want, when they want.”

Even Natural Resources Minister Bruce Northrup seemed alarmed, declaring to one newspaper reporter, “Windsor Energy has not been living up to the commitment that the government has asked them to adhere to. . .This decision was Sussex council’s to make. It was their prerogative. . .Within a municipality, the company (has) to have the permission of the mayor and council.”

As for Windsor Energy’s take on the controversy it sparked, CEO Khalid Amin told the Telegraph-Journal, “We would have liked their permission and we wanted it. I understand they feel short-changed. I understand they are very pro industry.”

Still, he respectfully demurred, “Legally we don’t need to have Sussex council’s consent because we have the consent of the New Brunswick Highways Corporation. . .For us, this was a financial decision. . .You’re paying by the hour whether you like it or not – either you stand there and do nothing or you shoot.”

The economic justification for embarrassing the town and undermining its representatives’ elective authority is both insulting and transparently ludicrous. Already two days ahead of schedule, the company would have “lost” less than $100,000 by delaying the work – a fact its executives surely must have know when they asked for the formality of a citizen thumbs-up in the first place.

But the incident does raise several other important questions at a time when public concern about hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is reaching a feverish pitch, not the least of which are: What controls can the provincial government effectively impose on an industry it has already decided offers New Brunswick the best chance of economic salvation; and what rights do individual communities actually possess in the face of such a juggernaut?

This particular fracas over fraccing suggests, if nothing else, that the dice are loaded in favour of the house even before drilling begins. Northrup may complain – to his credit – about Windsor’s heavy-handed, dismissive approach, but it’s not clear he’s even correct when he insists municipalities have the last word on exploration programs in their immediate environs. The Province, it seems, can allocate jurisdictional license for such activities along the public roadways it owns, regardless of their location within town limits. Or can it?

At the moment, no one in government appears fit or able to resolve the conundrum. And without clarity on this most basic issue, how credible is the premier’s claim that he will impose the “toughest standards on the continent” for the shale gas industry in New Brunswick?

Already an incipient political nightmare, hydraulic fracturing needs no further demonstrations of its corporate masters’ abuse of community standards to become a fully formed terror for this or any government – certainly not one as coarse, counter-productive and unnecessary as Windsor Energy’s autocratic embrace.

What is there to cheer in these grim days of public debt, political mismanagement and boundless, bureaucratic mediocrity, when opportunity taps at the doors of vacant homes and offices before it moves on to other, more promising pastures?

Still, if New Brunswick, whose population barely surpasses Mississauga’s, authors its own misfortune with depressing reliability, it also manages to occasionally and pleasantly surprise, as it did yesterday when UNB unveiled its plans for a new innovation and entrepreneurship facility.

The Pond-Deshpande centre (named for businessmen Gerry Pond and Gururaj Deshpande, whose gift makes the scheme possible) is modeled on a program Deshpande, a UNB alumnus, financed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, which has reportedly supported more than 90 technology projects and helped start 26 businesses that employ more than 400 people.

What sets this and its Fredericton-based iteration apart from the overcrowded field of think tanks, incubators and enterprise centres is a specific focus on making innovation marketable and, therefore, viable. Or, as Leon Sandler, the New Brunswick organization’s executive director, explains, “It’s a new segment of entrepreneurship. What you are seeing across the United States and across the world now is a huge emphasis on building technology commercialization programs at universities.”

In fact, there is nothing especially novel about technology commercialization. It’s been carrying along happily for decades, in places like Silicon Valley and North Carolina, to say nothing of the industrial heartlands of Germany, France and Japan. Even here, along the frequently reviled Canadian East Coast, governments have been underwriting innovation programs for university research, with varying degrees of success, since the turn of the century.

But the Pond-Deshpande centre represents something new and enormously beneficial for New Brunswick and, indeed, the entire region. First, it charts a course away from the brutal cycles of traditional economic development, in which strategies for investment and expansion too often clash with factors beyond local control. And, second, it demonstrates the presence of what I like to call “willing money” – funds that are neither leveraged or coerced from the private sector on the often flimsy promise of short or medium-term returns; only given on the understanding that they will fertilize the growth of new, commercially successful industries that might, in time, transform the economic landscape with self-perpetuating opportunities.

The late, great Wallace McCain understood precisely how this worked when, during his final decade, he literally gave away his nearly incomparable fortune to half-a-dozen institutes of higher learning in Atlantic Canada and elsewhere. In life, he ran his businesses not solely, or even principally, to “make money”; but, rather, to make more options available for pursuing new ways of creating wealth. He instructed his beneficiaries that his financial legacy should accomplish no less for younger generations of aspiring scholars, teachers and business leaders.

Too often, New Brunswick finds itself staring down the barrel of its own six-shooter, wondering how it, so frequently, misses the targets of job creation, economic renewal, industrial diversification, poverty reduction, end educational attainment. As it does, it repeatedly fails to apprehend the truth of its circumstances, which is, simply, that they are neither unique nor permanent. Dozens, if not hundreds, of jurisdictions around the world have faced – continue to face – much tougher challenges than ours. (Spend a little quality time in Athens or Rome for a refresher course on the consequences of fiscal and political profligacy).

The Pond-Deshpande initiative confirms what we should already know about ourselves in this global, intensively technological age: There are no limitations to the growth of good ideas; there are no problems the educated and disciplined mind cannot solve; and there are no borders around brain power.

And where the money is willing, there is always a way to the most promising pastures of all – the ones we tend for the present and the future, in our own backyards.

If I had more money than God Almighty, I might also want to be uncommonly generous with it. But it’s a safe bet I wouldn’t broadcast my predilections on the opinion page of the New York Times. Somebody just might take me up on the offer.

Clearly, Warren Buffett – one of the five wealthiest men on the planet, boasting a net worth of forty-billion bucks, give or take – is nothing like me. Having amassed a fortune the size of a small country’s gross domestic product through decades of deft stock picking, he’s angling for a new job: Whistleblower.

In his extraordinary Times commentary last Sunday entitled “Stop coddling the super-rich”, the octogenarian uber-titan of the financial world does what no other man in his position (or even close to his position) would ever do. He tattles on himself and, by extension, all his other recession-proof buddies at the top of the monetary food chain.

“While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks,” he writes. “Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as ‘carried interest,’ thereby getting a bargain 15 per cent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 per cent of their gain taxed at 15 per cent, as if they’d been long-term investors. . .These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, as much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.”

To appreciate just how uncommon such a revelatory reflex is among the olympian ranks of capitalist overlords, imagine Caesar telling the Roman Senate he’d rather share power and have weekends off to play in the garden, or Napoleon telling Wellington he couldn’t make it to Waterloo owing to a prior obligation hosting his nephew’s birthday party. This kind of candor simply doesn’t happen, except, of course, it has. And in Buffet’s case, the disclosures get better and better.

“Last year, my federal tax bill – the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf – was $6,938,744,” he confesses. “That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 per cent of my taxable income, and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 per cent to 41 per cent and averaged 36 per cent.”

This tells me that Buffet earned, personally, about $40 million 2010, of which he pocketed a cool $33 million. But don’t worry. He doesn’t like it any better than you do:

“For those making more than $1 million – there were 236,883 such households in 2009 – I would raise taxes immediately. And for those who make $10 million or more – there were 8,274 in 2009 – I would suggest an additional increase in rate. . .My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”

There’s no word yet on what his economically endowed compatriots think of his screed. But when you’re as rich as he is, who needs friends, anyway. More interesting (and more dangerous to the cult of greed) are his reasons: Higher taxes do not, as the Tea Party insists, dampen growth. “I have worked with investors for 60 years,” he writes.  “I have yet to see anyone shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money. . .To those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.”

Still, nothing prevents Buffet from taking himself up on his most generous offer, taxing himself more aggressively than any authority ever would

There’s something sweet about that: Something about the putting of money where mouths usually flap.

Even as New Brunswick settles into the steady-state of mid-summer, when all that calls for urgent attention is the lawn or that second martini, clouds begin to rumble on the western horizon, where autumn waits to intrude.

How shall we mark the first anniversary of the Alward government, elevated to power on a crest of anti-Liberal sentiment? Will we celebrate its perspicacity and alacrity? Will we commemorate its determination to tackle the issues that threaten our collective progress in an increasingly competitive, treacherous and unpredictable world?

Or will we stare blankly at the morning newspaper and wonder how long we, and the Progressive Conservative ladies and gentlemen we elected, have been asleep.

In a sense, this province could not have asked for a regime more finely tuned to its own attitudes and preoccupations. We ask little, except not to be bothered with ill tidings and our leaders’ consequent plans to meddle with the status quo. We demand to be left alone until, of course, a river floods a town or a lightening bolt burns down a barn. Then we expect the parliamentarian’s swift and certain action, accompanied by a cheque for our troubles.

Governments of all ideological stripes and temperaments are generally good at dealing with sudden disasters. Still, some calamities move slowly, gathering strength and complexity as they form, hiding from plain view until they surround us and we can no longer avoid them.

New Brunswick’s estimated $9-billion debt and $850-million annual deficit are like this – insidious draw downs on future prosperity. So are the province’s perishing population, stagnating rural economies, lifeless public education system, increasingly costly and ineffective health care regime, and brokered dependence of federal transfers. These are the sort of problems that require dramatic, even transformative, changes in the way we conduct our affairs. But we don’t care for such terminology. And this government knows that. In fact, it’s counting on it.

Months after the Tories promised to reform public pensions – to make them more fair, equitable and sustainable – the Department of Finance still has not finalized the terms of the review process, let alone drafted relevant policy. “We are working on the terms of reference, and that work is ongoing,” Finance Minister Mike Ferguson tells the Telegraph-Journal. “We haven’t gotten it in front of government for approval. It’s complex work and there are several potential options with different pros and cons that need to be considered.”

Actually, it isn’t all that complicated, unless you fail to appreciate the unuanced inappropriateness of requiring taxpayers to pay for wildly lucrative retirement packages they, themselves, cannot access.

Meanwhile, the cost of government continues to rise as the Progressive Conservatives refuse to cut deeply into union-protected jobs that burden the system with obvious administrative redundancies. Yet, district education councils, titularly charged with manufacturing the next generation of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs, are being told to trim their budgets in the spirit of good citizenship. Everyone must pull his weight, after all; though some more arduously than others.

If this government’s actions on cost-cutting have been tepid, so, too, has its commitment to raising revenues.

Invest NB – that bold, new experiment in business prospecting – is only now getting around to advertising for officers. It remains devoid of anything resembling a strategy or tactics. Rather, it seems content to trundle along with only the broadest of mandates – a mandate that doesn’t differ materially from its much-maligned doppelganger, Business New Brunswick.

We now compete favourably with Alberta for offering the lowest corporate tax rate in Canada. But how, exactly, has this profited us in the absence of aggressive, targeted efforts to promote our advantages to the world that lies beyond our borders?

A truly effective government at this moment in the province’s history must be one for all seasons – not just the contented, pleasantly distracting summertime.

Autumn looms with thunder, calling us to arise: Wake up and get to work.

Economists, who routinely fly their kites as high as they can get them, love to catch the breeze of popular sentiment. And here, there and everywhere, the wind blows long, hard and hot for tax cuts for the super-rich.

This is how University of New Brunswick numbers-crunching professor David Murrell suggests this province’s economic woes can be salved (if not solved): by reducing the levies against incorporated entities to nil. That is, zero. It would, the good fellow insists, capture the imagination of the world, which has only just been waiting for a jurisdiction of 750,000 souls to come to its senses.

In a recent interview with the Telegraph-Journal Murrell declares this: “I think the province takes in $140 million or $150 million a year in from corporate income taxes, so that would be quite brash in doing it [reducing]. But I would at least think of going in that direction because New Brunswick has to have a signature policy that gets corporate attention. I believe the best way to create jobs is to attract corporations to set up here.”

The proposal is self-defeating.

If we want (and we do) more and better foreign direct investment in this province, we must always understand the nuances of site selection. New Brunswick already boasts one of the most cost-competitive environments for business in the developed world: A ten per cent tax after levies, adjustments and capital interest draw-downs apply. This regime in this province provides small and large businesses, alike, with the kind of wiggle room only a Russian autocrat could love. And what has it won us?

Atcon failed under the burdens of its obligations, costing New Brunswick taxpayers millions. Umoe Solar was a multi-bucks non-starter with its hand deeply probing the public’s front pocket. Scores of other foreign enterprises have started and stopped here, hiring and firing scores of skilled workers – workers who have taken their talents elsewhere, hoping to build futures for themselves and their families in all points west, south and European.

A no-corporate-tax regime in New Brunswick would not provide this province with more and better opportunities; it would burden an already dysfunctional economic development department of government with more reasons to screw up, as it has so magnificently, so evidently, over the years.

No, far better is a policy that recognizes that citizens are individual players in the economic systems they create; that people are what our economy is supposed to protect; that the future here depends on a combination of fair and equitable taxation and prudent public spending. When the latter meets the former, we can talk. Until then, we’re simply left with the fear-mongering opinions of the loony right, as in:

”Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” (A tweet from Sarah Palin on July 18, 2010)

And this:

“If you’re oriented toward animals, bestiality, then, you know, that’s not something that can be used, held against you or any bias be held against you for that. Which means you’d have to strike any laws against bestiality, if you’[re oriented toward corpses, toward children, you know, there are all kinds of perversions. . .pedophiles or necrophiliacs or what most would say is perverse sexual orientations.” (Rep. Louis Gohmert, member of the U.S. Tea Party Caucus, arguing that a hate crimes bill passed by Congress would lead to Nazism and legalization of necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality, Oct. 6, 2009).

Our public conversation has degraded to the vanishing point. We no longer know how to talk to one another. The great, western democratic experiment risks losing its standard bearers. Meanwhile, economists trouble themselves with inventing talking points not even they believe at a time when entire classes of skilled workers in North America are on the dole, or worse.

Tax cuts for the wealthiest among us?

That’s just another obvious excuse for avoiding the fiscal, monetary and economic problems that afflict the rest of us. And these are, in the clear light of day, low skills, high unemployment, and pervasive, rampant street-level poverty.

These are the kites, where the wind doesn’t blow, that never fly.

Business may be, as Premier David Alward asserted earlier this year, “on the move in New Brunswick,” where enterprising opportunities are urgently transforming “every sector, in every part of the province.”

But if they are, don’t thank the various government agencies tasked with accelerating this progress. They proceed along somewhat more glacial timelines.

Six months ago, the Tory regime, flush with electoral success, proudly announced a new economic development creature to “provide a fresh, strategic approach to creating jobs and attracting investment in the province.”

Invest NB would be everything its lame-duck predecessor, Business New Brunswick, was not: Aggressive, savvy, innovative. Crucially, its private-sector board of directors would keep the organization honest and focussed on a four-part mandate: promote the province to potential investors; pursue commercially viable partnerships; extend financial assistance to qualified ventures where appropriate; and manage the public’s money prudently.

Today, the entity is a Crown corporation without evident portfolio: Its political masters reticent to paint its shape in anything but the broadest strokes; the identities of its directors embargoed by a ludicrously protracted screening process; its president, Robert MacLeod, side-stepping criticism that his appointment was a quid pro quo for having served as the premier’s campaign co-chairmen; its key staff only just hired.

In fact and for the moment, Invest NB, with an annual budget of $13.5 million, appears more status quo than bold departure. It does not replace moribund or ineffective counterparts, but merely joins them (specifically, Business New Brunswick and the Northern New Brunswick Initiative). It has yet to articulate a workable vision, let alone a tactical approach to making and hitting targets.

What measures its value to the economy? How many and what types of jobs does it seek to secure? Which industries will it prospect for opportunities?

All in good time, its supporters in government argue. Still, time is running out for a province that carries an embarrassingly and unsustainably deep deficit and debt – a province where businesses, despite Mr. Alward’s optimism, continue to struggle against global assaults on their competitiveness.

The idea behind Invest NB is a worthy one. It acknowledges that governments and their minions are not especially well-equipped to negotiate business opportunities on behalf of the people they represent. Certainly, not alone. They need the advice and leadership of industry to manufacture durable jobs and avoid debacles like Atcon and Umoe Solar. In this respect, then, it’s only sensible to select one’s expertise carefully and deliberatively.

But while this government executes its economic development agenda in this cautious manner, it ignores a governing principle of private enterprise, which is to strike when the iron is hot.

Over the past half-year, nothing has prevented the Province from tapping the minds of hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, including those of the New Brunswick Business Council with which it is intimately acquainted. These folks have been petitioning various governments for years on matters both economically general and specific. Had the premier’s foot soldiers moved as expeditiously as they boast, exploiting such intellectual resources, Invest NB might now have a hopper full of opportunities to pursue, and the big announcements would not concern the mundanities of staffing and directorships, but the two or three large, job-generating companies the organization managed to attract.

In this climate, talking points and key messages don’t justify the creation of another agency that, for all its putative differences, represents no real progress on the long, hard road to economic independence and prosperity in New Brunswick.

Devoid of Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore resources and lacking Nova Scotia’s industrial diversity, this province possesses only its wits and willingness to break the mould of a demonstrably unsuccessful approach to offshore business investment and development.

If Invest NB is ever to achieve its nimble mandate, it must first melt the glacier that traps its feet in ice.

New Brunswick’s redoubtable energy minister, having returned from a fact-finding tour of the American southland where shale gas operations are resuscitating thousands of formerly dying communities, hopes to shred the misconceptions that plague the industry’s development in this province.

Ever since Craig Leonard’s boss, Premier David Alward, announced he would not erect unnecessary barriers to exploring the Frederick Brook formation, near Elgin (where, it is thought, as much 67 trillion standard cubic feet of gas lay trapped in sedimentary layers), opposition has been gathering a head of public steam.

The controversy concerns the technology that uses jets of water to liberate the gas from the country rock – a process called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which many environmentalists and some geologists contend contaminates drinking wells with toxic slurry. The actual science on the subject is far from definitive, and Leonard, for one, dismisses the hyperbole out of hand.

Speaking to reporters after a speech to the Saint John Board of Trade last week, he insisted, “When the director of the [U.S.] Environmental Protection Agency states very clearly that she doesn’t know of any situations that there’s been a proven link between hydrofracking and any issues with water, that’s a pretty strong message that people have to pay attention [and] understand that hydrofracking is not the high-risk enterprise that people are trying to make it out to be.”

Fair enough. Still, there are many varieties of risk in any industrial enterprise, as a recent New York Times investigation, published in banner style on its front page yesterday, reveals. And, if the reporter Ian Urbina is even partially correct, the real problem with the shale gas boom may be more fiduciary than ecological.

In 4,000 words, The Times presents the results of its research; its findings as compelling as they are troubling. “Natural gas companies have been placing enormous bets on the wells they are drilling, saying they will deliver big profits and provide a vast new source of energy for the United States,” Urbina begins his piece. “But the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells.”

On the face of it, the content of these communiques are, indeed, damning.

“Money is pouring in [from investors even though shale gas is] inherently unprofitable,” The Times quotes an unidentified analyst with PNC Wealth Management. “Reminds you of the dot coms [bubble].”

Added another from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company, “The word in the world of the independents is that shale gas plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work.”

Urbina stops short of accusing the gas companies of deliberately misleading investors and government departments, from which they hope to extract big subsidies for continued development. But one petroleum geologist and former Amoco employee he consulted suggests that six major producers in Texas are overestimating the volume of their commercially exploitable reserves by anywhere from 73 to 350 per cent. “This kind of data is making it harder and harder to deny that the shale gas revolution is being oversold,” Art Berman declared.

Of course, these putative revelations do not, in any way, attach to those companies currently exploring in New Brunswick. But they do at least suggest that provincial government’s responsibility is not limited merely to regulating hydrofracking; it’s also obliged to assess the viability of the industry, itself, especially if, as it has said, shale gas production could be just what the doctor ordered for dozens of small, struggling, rural communities.

History proves that nothing is more anathematic to long-term sustainable economic development than reliance on primary resources when commercial exploitation is not first girded by innovation, technology and, most importantly, the capacity to accurately determine the quantity and quality of the raw materials.

Without this perspicacity, plants inevitably close, unemployment balloons, tax revenues shrink, and, before you know it, we’re right back where we started: Wondering how our misconceptions had led us so depressingly astray.