The Bruce Report

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.

Like all authoritarians who blithely elevate their own opinions above everyone else’s, technocratistas in this country observe the strike at Canada Post as proof of their unassailably good judgement: The public mail is costly, inefficient and irrelevant; therefore, kill it and move on.

After all, they argue, better alternatives to the men and women who, in the absence of labour actions, permit “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” to stay them “from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” abound in the unblinking realm of online communications.

There’s email and instant messaging. There’s Facebook, Linkedin and Youtube. There’s Flikr, Scribd, Reddit, Kaboodle and Dnhour. And, of course, there’s the ubiquitous Twitter which enables, among other things, a certain American member of congress to send junk shots of his private parts, in the flash of a salacious grin, to an unwitting college girl he’s never actually met. Just try that with “snail mail”.

But should even these marvelous, modern means of reaching out and touching someone fail to impress, there’s always the private courier industry, which may charge a bit more than the postal service but which also guarantees next-day, even same-day, delivery. When could any Crown corporation lay credible claim to the same?

Still, if these observations are correct, if Canada Post is a dinosaur surviving long past its due date with extinction, then why are so many citizens worried about the rolling work stoppages currently under way? The service certainly seems relevant enough to inspire both supportive and enraged outbursts in the pages of daily newspapers across the country – a testament to the fact that many small businesses and rural communities rely heavily on their letter carriers for invoices, cheques and bills.

That Canada Canada Post is in serious trouble is obvious. Late last year, and without much fanfare, the organization announced “Postal Transformation”, an initiative its website described as a “multi-year program that includes major investments in equipment, technology and processes that will provide reach and access to our customers, across both physical and electronic channels, more targeted communications and opportunities to build customer relationships.”

By January, the transformation seemed stalled as customers began to complain about late delivery and no delivery to both residences and boxes. So furious was one Moncton city councillor, he lambasted Canada Post in the local press, stating that if it can’t function efficiently, it should be sold to the private sector. “This is a serious issue,” Pierre Boudreau fumed. “It affects the economic well being of our citizens and our businesses. There is no justification – none – for having a letter mailed from Moncton, to Moncton, arriving 10 days or more later.”

For its part, the corporation attributed the glitches to growing pains. In a letter carried by this newspaper and the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, Gilles Volpe, Canada Post’s director of NB/PEI Operations had this to say: “In late October, we made some changes to our delivery routes in Moncton. These changes were required to secure service for the long-run, but they have led to some short-term challenges. Why are we making the changes? Because the amount of letters we deliver has dropped by more than 11 per cent over the last four years. Our costs are going up, while our revenues continue to drop.”

With this last statement, Mr. Volpe nailed the problem, albeit unwittingly, in one: Canada Post is, as it’s currently configured, uncompetitive. And its sanguinely uncompetitive response has been to reduce the quality of its service for the “short-term”, rather than improve the function of its business and the perspicuity of its oversight and planning. In the process, it has demanded that its employees work harder and for less money than their collective contracts allow. No private enterprise in the world would acknowledge such an approach as anything but a precursor to bankruptcy.

Clearly, if this once venerated service expects to survive amid instant electronic communications and encroaching couriers, it had better figure out what value it can offer the marketplace, apart from the dubiously edifying spectacle of workers driven to distraction and customers forced to negotiate around its turmoil.

But none of this translates into irrelevance, merely corporate incompetence.

Killing that is clearly the best way to finally move on.

George Wallace Ferguson McCain, who died on recently at 81 after a 14-month battle with cancer, was the last of a peculiar breed of hard-scrabble, stunningly successful Maritime entrepreneurs.

With his older brother Harrison (who passed away in 2004), he built what has become the world’s leading purveyor of frozen french fries, employing thousands of people in 130 countries on six continents and posting annual sales in excess of $6 billion. But his most enduring legacy may be the lessons his life teaches current and future generations of businessmen and women along what has been notoriously and erroneously described as the defeated East Coast of Canada.

Born into neither wealth nor poverty in Florenceville, N.B., Wallace was raised on a steady diet of his parent’s high expectations. His father, Andrew Davis (A.D.) McCain, was a successful potato broker. His mother, Laura, was a community organizer and, later in her life, an astute stock picker. Both enjoyed formidable reputations for rectitude and fortitude. For Wallace and his siblings (three brothers and two sisters), this meant daily discipline.

It wasn’t sufficient that they do well in school, attend church regularly, and generally set an example for their friends and neighbours; they had real work to do. They chopped wood, picked potatoes and slopped feed. The boys were expected to learn the basics of their father’s business; and so they ran errands, tallied inventory, ferried produce and laboured at the production lines. The girls were expected to master the art and science of running a busy household; and so they knitted, sewed, cooked, baked, and learned to run a budget. In the McCain household life was about showing up and doing what needed to be done.

“If you’ve ever worked on a farm, you know that cows have to be milked every day,” Wallace’s wife Margaret, a former Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, once said. “You can’t just wake up one day and decide not to milk the cow. It doesn’t work that way. It certainly didn’t at A.D.’s and Laura’s place.”

Harrison and his younger brother applied these virtues when, as young men itching to make their own way in the world, they launched their frozen-fry operation. As Wallace once said, “The fact was we knew next to nothing about the business. Running with something that was new and had potential was very appealing to us, certainly. But our corporate vision was more along the lines of ‘this sounds like fun, and the fries sure tasted good, so let’s go.’”

Their early R&D efforts were equally nervy. “I’d identify companies whose operating systems and results interested me,” Wallace recounted in the 1990s. “I’d call up the general manager or vice-president and tell him I was a Canadian businessman with a factory of my own and that I’d appreciate an opportunity to see for myself how it was done right. Boy, it worked every time.”

At McCain Foods’ 50th birthday party in 2007, the co-founder – no longer an employee, but still a major shareholder as well as chairman of Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods – offered the following observations about his life in private enterprise: “I’m 77 years old. One of the things that has kept me pretty young over the years, I think, is that I’ve always kind of thought the past was boring and it’s really the future where the excitement is. . .McCain Foods can never be driven looking through the rear view mirror. Like any organization with a vibrant future, it has to be willing to renew itself. Of course that means change – sometimes painful change and sometimes people don’t like change, but inside that change is opportunity.”

He ended his remarks quoting Sophocles: “One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

The message to Atlantic entrepreneurs was clear to any with enough wit to perceive his meaning: Work hard, don’t be afraid, never give up, and always keep your eyes on the horizon. For this, and all the splendid days Wallace McCain gave this region and the nation, he will be missed.

Check out the following link and then follow the dots to my cover story, feature and column. You won’t be sorry. It’s the best magazine in the region. . .http://www.abmonline.ca/

A two-tiered minimum wage – one for kids under 18; and a higher one for everyone else – may be corrupt, exploitative, illegal, or just plain dumb. But what it isn’t is fiscally useful even if you own a restaurant or a franchise clothier. In fact, if you do, you probably have bigger fish to fry than the young ones who come begging to buss your tables or dress your mannikins every summer.

Still, there it was: A nice, big kite launched last week on an updraft of hot air in St. Stephen as Finance Minister Blaine Higgs, in a pre-budget consultation with community leaders, tried to keep a straight face as he blurted this fat remark regarding child labour: “There has been some talk. . .there might be some consideration for some early entry wage. What do you think about that?”

Speaking for myself and, apparently, many readers of the province’s daily newspapers, not much.

Blasted one: “Do you even want to bring up the legal ramifications of such stupidity. Paying someone less for doing the same work as everyone else because of their age. What could possibly go wrong?”

Fulminated another: “I cannot believe someone would propose something so ridiculous. Does the government not realize that this move would actually cost it tax dollars. Now I’ve heard it all.”

What puts humor to the pain in this manufactured debate is that kids under the age of 18 in this country have never earned minimum wage from the lousy jobs on the slop lines and box rooms they have occupied. And what puts pain to the humor of their situations is that they never will.

This country’s values work according to an ancient standard of mentorship and apprenticeship – an old-world construction that persists, but which also requires energy, commitment, devotion and faith. Such virtues are in short supply these days as those of us who have made the world to rot are too busy worrying about our RRSPs, our longevities, our legacies, and our laconic, lugubrious lives as long as we cling to them in the fading gardens of our souls.

But when the garden is alive, when it brings forth fronds and shoots and buds and blossoms and blooms and fruits, we become all over again. We become ourselves as we made ourselves when we were young.

And if we know this, why can’t we make it true for the next generation of people who issue from us, look to us, depend on us? Why can’t we mitigate their rage?

A two-tiered minimum wage is an abomination. It would sanctify an underclass of workers based solely on their age. It would broadcast to the brightest among us that they are the least worthy among us; it would convince the rest of us that we can, without guilt, fear or retribution, abuse them because, and for no other reason, they are young.

Worse, perhaps, we were once them.

Once, we were the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the lonely and the poor. We made our ways through the subterranean tunnels of the early 1980s to become the problem we sought to solve. Finally, we became the enemy of ourself: a generation of self-absorbed, narcissistic, computer-addicted morons which now thinks that the value of human labour is worth one dollar, calibrated to a point on the calendar, in the fine Province of New Brunswick.

If you’re over 18, you get $10; if you’re under 18 you get $9.

And yet, wonders Finance Minister Higgs, would this work? Would this make us all happy? Would we finally retire the topic of serious spending cuts? Would we decide to transmute a raise in consumption taxes and fiscal prudence into a draconian levy against the least robust members of our society, only to see them flee in anger again?

Would we do all of this for a two-tiered minimum wage that has nothing to do with   solving the province’s systemic fiscal problems, but everything to do with political calculation and accommodation?

Would we so easily abandon our children to their minimum rage?

The last time the “Atlantica” movement merited a headline in a major metropolitan daily newspaper, Brian Lee Crowley was ducking slurs and rotten eggs on a busy, downtown Halifax street.

That was in the summer of 2005 when the then-leading exponent of regional economic union (he is now the Ottawa-based head honcho of something called the Macdonald-Laurier Institute) failed to convince a coterie of young patriots that he wasn’t hellbent on selling the Atlantic Provinces to the United States. As I recall, he japed, “They wouldn’t have us anyway.”

Unamused, the little gang of anti-globalists chased him to his car just in time to witness his speedy getaway. It was, to say the least, a most ignoble performance – albeit, a patently prudent decision – by a man former Globe and Mail Editor-in-Chief William Thorsell once called “the finest writer on public policy in Canada today.”

Then again, Atlantica has always had a way of reducing otherwise stalwart, serious-minded citizens on both sides of the geo-political-ideological fence to cartoon characters. Ah, Atlantica – dear, old Atlantica – the home and native land of Wile E. Coyote, the roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer D. Fudd.

Who can resist your charms?

Well, Bill Denyar, for one. He’s the president and C.E.O of the Atlantic Provinces Chambers of Commerce (APCC) who asks in a recent column in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, “Is it time to rebrand Atlantica?”

Specifically, he muses, “Nearly 20 years ago, Atlantica was a call from APCC for economic union. Today we talk about regional co-operation rather than economic union, but it’s really the same idea. For practical purposes, the region includes Atlantic Canada  and our immediate neighbors. But maybe defining Atlantica as a region has caused confusion and blurred our focus. As I look back, Atlantica has always been about regional co-operation. It was a concept, a mindset, a way of thinking about regional co-operations, not a geographical region with defined borders.”

Of course, the first casualty of any rebranding exercise is history.

In fact, in the early aughts of this century, Atlantica wasn’t a just “a way of thinking”; it was a living, breathing, distinctly bordered territory that included Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, eastern Quebec, all of New England, and parts of upstate New York. At least, it was in the “mindsets” of the 12 people who believed their opinions were worth their weight in gold.

When the gold became lead – during two ridiculously expensive, verbose and incoherent conferences in 2004 and 2005 – delegates, including the region’s leading business and political lights, began to wonder what folks like Brian Lee Crowley were crowing about anyway.

Did they actually expect a consensus on international, interstate and interprovincial union of any sort to emerge in stifling conference rooms festooned with powdered cakes and coffee? Come to think of it, what did these folks want from us? Approval? Money? Legitimacy?

The shrewdest and most nimble among the invited assemblies checked their watches, headed for the washrooms and – when the coast was clear – slipped out the back door, cackling all the way to their Range Rovers.

Ultimately, “Atlantica” was a solution looking for a problem. And Mr. Denyar nails the point beautifully when he now writes, “We don’t need to sell the problem. Atlantic Canadians know we have big economic problems – an aging population, outmigration and rural de-population, huge provincial debts and current deficits, along with spiraling health care costs.”

Indeed, he wonders, “Have we failed to show the link between these economic problems and regional economic cooperation as a promising part of the solution? Accomplishing regional economic cooperation means governments must work together to reduce barriers to trade, set meaningful priorities for investment in infrastructure, and make rules more consistent and effective.”

Well, wonders of wonders: A perfectly articulate argument expressed without recourse to goofy rubrics and buffoonish behavior.

How’s that for a brand?

Peter Kent, the former journalist and TV news anchor who traded in his press pass for a seat at Stephen Harper’s cabinet table, is an honest broker of Conservative government policy – if, by honest, we interpret true believer.

In fact, in his comportment and public pronouncements, there is almost nothing disingenuous about the guy. There’s no hidden agenda, no sour calculations for personal gain, no cynical horse-trading of principle for political expediency. He is what he appears to be: Everyone’s favorite uncle who, every so often, blurts the most outlandish nonsense to the amusement of friends and relations.

And so it is that Canada’s new minister of the environment (he replaces John Baird who had been placeholding since Jim Prentice abruptly abandoned the post late last year) promotes a philosophy of ecological stewardship that somehow manages to embrace both libertarian and Orwellian ideals in defence of Alberta’s indisputably dirty and damaging oil sands development.

Speaking to Globe and Mail reporter Steven Chase the other day, Mr. Kent stated that the project – which has been crucial to the economic well-being of the west and Canada, in general – is “ethical” because the country, itself, is ethical. Specifically, he said: “It is a regulated product in an energy superpower democracy. The profits from this are not used in undemocratic or unethical ways. The proceeds are used to better society in the great Canadian democracy. The wealth generated is shared with Canadians, with investors.”

The implication, of course, is that other leading oil-producing nations – Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela – are, compared with Canada, unethical and so, therefore, is their oil. They use their petro-dollars to subjugate, repress, torture and murder. And that’s something the United States should consider before its legislators cave to pressure from green propagandists determined to force us to clean up our act and get serious about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s an exquisitely tortured argument that does resonate with some people. But if the issue is actually the oil and not the regimes that produce it, how does this natural resource acquire anthropomorphic qualities of virtue and morality except through the human agency required for its extraction?

Indeed, if we’re all beating up the planet to get at the good stuff, who cares whether some of us are angels and some of us are demons? If I’m determined to commit suicide, do I worry about the character of the guy who sells me the gun?

If, however, I am determined to live well and happily, I very much care about the long-term environmental health of my community, province, region and nation that purport to be among the most ethical in the world. And I will want to resist the negligence, complacence and distracting self-justifications that transform oil and gas development into a weapon against my best interests and finer aspirations.

Still, Mr. Kent is ready to rebut. “Oil-sands production accounts, I think, for five per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions,” he says. “It’s less than one-tenth of one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and barely one per cent of the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions by American coal-fired power generators.”

“Less than”? “Barely”? So what, then? If it’s no longer, strictly speaking, an “ethical” source of energy, it is the lesser of many different evils?

Consider that this one mega-project enjoys more public investment and business-friendly regulations on environmental impact than every other energy project in the country combined, including nuclear, hydro and, yes, coal. Its “finished” output supplies American power generating stations with the filthy means to pollute and degrade for generations.

Meanwhile, the countless gallons of fresh water it uses in extraction and refinement are essentially unreclaimable – except for those that leak from its trailing ponds to poison local waterways, kill wildlife and threaten the lives and livelihoods of Canadians unfortunate enough to reside too close to its belching engines.

And yet, says Kent, “It is not our intention to discourage development of one of our great natural resources. We know it can be developed responsibly.”

I don’t know what’s more worrisome: A minister of the environment who behaves like a flack for the oil industry, or a duly elected official who actually believes the nonsense that spills from his mouth when the media glares and the public rolls its eyes in amusement.