The Bruce Report

On the subject of bridges and the burning thereof, former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith’s resignation letter – which was published in the New York Times last week and has since become an overnight sensation among the twitteratti – smells more like a job application than the charred timber of a once-charmed career.

In fact, it’s disappointingly reasonable.

“It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success,” he writes. “It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. It wasn’t just about making money. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization.

“I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years.”

He’s right. That does sound surprising to a skeptical publican like me. It’s hard to imagine “culture” playing a bit role, let alone a “vital part”, at a firm whose shenanigans were so entrenched and for so long that they helped bring down the entire western financial industry in a conflagration of wanton greed.

But, I digress.

There’s a way to quit a job, and there’s a way to quit a job. HR professionals will tell you to be polite and graceful. And they have a point. Of course, so did your mom when she told you to turn the other cheek on your playground tormentors.

How’d that work out for you?

Personally, I prefer the Johnny Paycheck approach to elevating an avian creature in one’s upraised right hand when heading for the door. Naturally, the Internet brims with examples of this particular exit strategy.

Consider a few reader posts to workplace happiness guru Alexander Kjerulf’s web site. There’s no way to determine whether they’re genuine or merely apocryphal. Still, they’re trenchant:

“Dear Boss. . .Thank you for offering me a new contract for the next working year. Unfortunately, I won’t be accepting it. . . I now realize that people like you should not be working with staff or children. You are a bully and you are fat!”

Then, there’s this:

“Dear [redacted]. . .I am giving you my two weeks’ notice of my intent to leave your employ. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the enjoyable time I spent working (for you), but sadly I have been brought up not to lie.”

And this, my favorite:

“Dear Boss. . .I am certain that the subpoena you sent to my home was a mistake. The computer I took from the office is still in the parking lot where it fell out of the window of our 32nd floor office when the chair broke through the glass and caught on the power cord of the computer. I know it’s still there because I used the confidential file folders to sweep up the broken glass from the monitor as I didn’t want. . .to get any glass. . in the already flattened tires (of) your Mercedes.”

Infantile, certainly. Satisfying, indubitably.

Still, one doesn’t want to make a habit of this sort of thing – not in a world where long-term employment, in which mom and dad secure their happy homes with incomes sufficient to meet their families’ needs, is fast becoming a fable told to comfort youngsters at bedtime.

Perhaps, then, the Goldman Sachs expat is only exercising the better part of his discretion when he concludes his missive thusly:

“I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm – or the trust of its clients – for very much longer.”

In other words, Mr. Smith needs a job.

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.

At 81, the third-richest man in the world still writes like an angel.

For more than five decades, Warren Buffet, the virtually clairvoyant American investor (he’s known as the “Oracle of Omaha”), whose fortune is estimated at $61 billion, has dispensed his wisdom in annual missives famous as much for trenchant prose as cogent reasoning.

His 2011 letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – the investment house he operates with his longtime partner Charlie Munger – is no exception.

“More than 98 per cent of my net worth is in Berkshire stock, all of which will go to various philanthropies,” he begins. “Being so heavily concentrated in one stock defies conventional wisdom. But I’m fine with this arrangement.”

So, presumably, are Berkshire’s other charter shareholders who have realized a compounded annual gain of 20 per cent since 1965 – which is only to say nobody ever went broke following Buffet’s advice or example.

Fortunately, he’s generous with both at a time when plundered bank accounts testify to some of the more pernicious mythologies of capital gain in the aftermath of the financial collapse.

One of these is the latter day gold rush, which Buffet thinks is understandable but, frankly, misguided.

This shiny metal, he says, belongs in a category of investments that will “never produce anything, but that are purchased in the buyer’s hope that someone else – who also knows that the assets will be forever unproductive – will pay more for them in the future. Tulips, of all things, briefly became a favorite of such buyers in the 17th century.”

Specifically, he observes, “What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis.

As ‘bandwagon’ investors join any party, they create their own truth – for a while.”

But here’s the problem:

“Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.”

Now consider “pile B”, which costs the same.

“For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?”

Indeed, as Buffet jokes, you can fondle your cube of gold, but it won’t respond.

What will are “productive assets”, such as businesses, farms and real estate, because, “Whether the currency a century from now is based on gold, seashells, shark teeth, or a piece of paper (as today), people will be willing to exchange a couple of minutes of their daily labor for a Coca-Cola or some See’s peanut brittle.

“In the future the U.S. population will move more goods, consume more food, and require more living space than it does now. People will forever exchange what they produce for what others produce. Our country’s businesses will continue to efficiently deliver goods and services wanted by our citizens. Metaphorically, these commercial ‘cows’ will live for centuries and give ever greater quantities of ‘milk’ to boot.”

It may be easy for some to dismiss these conclusions as unimaginative. But it’s worth remembering that the world’s current circumstance owes much to the effects of unregulated, unhinged imaginations that conjured “wealth” out of thin air and then sold derivatives on the rumour of endless “growth” based on non-producing assets that were, in fact, liabilities.

Buffet enjoins us to keep our eyes clear and our minds free of the free-floating fear that undermines our collective recovery.

In this, he not only writes like an angel; he stands among them.

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.

On the downslope into spring, a middle-aged man’s fancy heavily turns to thoughts of five-year guaranteed investment certificates and other low-yield bond issues that, when needed, might cover the cost of maintaining the roof over his head, if not much else.

It is February and the annual statements from fund managers and investment houses pile unopened on my kitchen counter, a mocking tribute to the grand joke of the modern age. (Did you hear the one about compound interest?)

I never expected to get rich. The gene that controls that particular skill has been switched off in my family since Napoleon met his Waterloo. But I do, sometimes, feel fortunate for having had the perspicacity to sire children when I was barely one myself. I can’t imagine how my retirement prospects might measure up if my kids were only now entering college.

On the other hand, I never expected to retire. How old is too old to make some kind of living scribbling words on a page or a website?

The pension debate that now sunders Canada points to the emergence of two new solitudes in this country: Those with a guaranteed ticket to ride into their sunset years in the manner to which life has accustomed them, and those without; those with defined benefit plans (read: “gold-plated”), and those with defined contribution plans (read: “tin-plated”).

And yet, the advantages of the latter, we are routinely informed, can easily outweigh those of the former. According to an online squib from Sun Life Financial: “(They) are popular because they offer you choice and flexibility. . .You determine which investments your contributions are invested in from a selection of investment options available within your plan. This allows you to create an individual portfolio suited to your own investment goals and tolerance for risk.”

But, if this was ever true, the financial meltdown of 2008 effectively clawed back such winning qualities from most people’s portfolios. Nowadays, to make a buck off these self-directed, registered securities, you have to posses the intestinal fortitude of Donald Trump and the financial acumen of Warren Buffet.

Still, there is a third solitude whose membership rarely merits attention. StatsCan reports that more than 2.6 million Canadians were self-employed in 2008, representing 15.4 per cent of the total labour force, up from 13.8 per cent. The percentage is even greater in the Atlantic provinces.

This may help explain why a recent TD survey finds that more individuals in this region, than in any other, are not planning to retire when they are nominally eligible.

When asked why they will continue working past the age of 65, nearly 40 per cent said they won’t have enough money. More interesting, perhaps, are their other reasons. Almost 60 per cent said that work gives them “a sense of purpose” and that they “still have goals to achieve.”

This may be music to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ears as he launches more trial balloons on possible changes to various national pension plans and old age supplements. But it also underscores a fundamental difference in attitudes between those who pull a pay-cheque and those who cut their own.

Folks like me have a hard time imagining what retirement looks like. We have the same problem with the concept of “unemployment” or, more precisely, unemployment insurance.

Both seem apocryphal, like big rock candy mountains spouting fountains of free champagne.

If work is life and life is work, then work ends when life ends. Doesn’t it?

Increasingly, and whether we like it or not, Canada’s demographic tectonics are rearranging the landscape of labor. A shortage of skilled workers, the notorious unreliability of market-driven savings instruments for retirement, and the government sector’s risible unwillingness to guarantee anybody much of anything anymore will lead (force?) more people into self-directed second careers.

There, they may mutely observe the investment statements that accumulate on their kitchen counters like dispatches from an alien world.

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.

The blade of the knife I hold in my hand is, from guard to point, precisely seven inches long. The tapered, serrated edge is composed of pattern-welded steel, and guaranteed not to rust. Now, stand still, while I plunge it into your back.

That’s one way to interpret the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producer’s CAPP) decision, earlier this week, to proactively disclose the minute details of the hydraulic fracturing process its members use to stab the good earth in their relentless search for sweet shale gas.

Another is to appreciate an industry’s valiant attempt to regulate itself with guidelines that will, among other things, “advance and communicate technologies and best practices that reduce the potential environmental risks” of a drilling technique that has separated New Brunswickers into three camps: yes, no and maybe.

But however we choose to view CAPP’s overture – with skepticism or thanks – it does suggests that oil and gas producers in this country are finally beginning to comprehend the utility of traditional public relations, something about which they’ve been, until now, stunningly ignorant.

Of course, the point of this kind of exercise (take it from an on old hand) is not to win friends and influence people who would rather see you boiled in a vat of your own ill-gotten oil. It’s to provide your “promoters” – in this case, government – with enough ammo to tip the mushy middle of opinion in your favour.

In this case, CAPP has done its homework.

Its website displays a page, last updated in September, which sets out its “guiding principles for hydraulic fracturing”. These include: safeguarding the “quality and quantity” of surface and groundwater; measuring and disclosing water use; developing “fracturing fluid additives with the least environmental risks”; and “support the disclosure of fracturing fluid additives.”

The new so-called “regulations” take these and ostensibly give them teeth. So sharp, it seems that CAPP President Dave Collyer doesn’t wince when he declares in a news release: “The hydraulic fracturing operating practices demonstrate the Canadian natural gas industry’s continued efforts to ensure responsible resource development and protection of Canada’s water resources.”

He adds without a trace of irony: “Shale gas can and is produced responsibly every day across Canada and the United States with almost 200,000 wells fractured in Western Canada over the last 60 years. With increased focus on fracturing from coast-to-coast, the Canadian industry wants to be at the forefront of transparency and to establish clear and consistent practices across the country.”

In fact, shale gas is not produced “responsibly” everywhere in North America. The industry’s recklessness and regulatory sleight of hand has caused egregious damage to dozens of small communities in the northeastern and southwestern U.S. Collyer must know this. But his project is to turn the page on a brighter, friendlier future. And his timing couldn’t be better.

Increasingly, as the importance of manufacturing declines, jurisdictions are pinning their economic hopes on natural resources. The prices of everything from oil to manganese are dear. Emerging powerhouses, such as China, are boosting extraction of rare-earth minerals, which are used to make lasers, superconductors and components for the aerospace industry. Meanwhile, less intrusive, renewable forms of energy – once, so promising – are relegated to the back burners of the Third World.

The circumstances, then, clearly support a communitarian approach to shale gas development – an industry that’s freshly renovated to house the ark of public acceptance, if not actual sympathy.

Still, any industry’s determination to regulate itself is notoriously fickle. The conflict between the profit motive and social responsibility is pervasive. Invariably, the former wins most of the skirmishes until the “guidelines”, themselves, become meaningless. Even a generous interpretation of CAPP’s new policies must concede that the organization and its members face a monstrously difficult job both communicating and enforcing their “principles and practices” at every drill head.

Of course, that’s what government is for – another institution that’s fond of periodic marketing makeovers, and playing with knives.

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.

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.