The Bruce Report

The little city that could. . .didn’t on Monday night.

On Monday night, Moncton had the opportunity to, as Mayor George LeBlanc might say, roar like a lion.

“For me, Moncton has the biggest heart in all of New Brunswick,” he mused after learning he had trounced his opponent Carl Bainbridge enroute to his second four-year term of office. “Moncton has the heart of a lion.”

But as municipal election day in the province drew to a close, it seemed painfully clear that the lion was only yawning.

LeBlanc’s convincing victory, notwithstanding, turnout in the Hub City was a pathetic 33 per cent of eligible voters, well below the provincial average of 40 per cent (itself, nothing to crow about) and the 53 and 45 per cent Dieppe and Riverview, respectively, managed to post.

Still, is anyone surprised?

Voter turnout in this country and in other mature democracies has been spiraling downward since the middle of the last century. Canadawide, federal electoral participation was highest, at 79 per cent, on March 31, 1958, and lowest, at 59 per cent, on Oct. 14, 2008. In the U.S., public involvement peaked at 65 per cent in 1960 and tanked at 52 per cent in 2010 (Congressional races).

Political scientists see the trend as a consequence of rational factors. People, they explain, have become dissatisfied with the performance of their elected representatives. They’ve grown cynical about the malevolent political culture that ceaseless pandering to extreme views has bred.

Other pundits insist it’s the calcification of our democratic institutions that’s to blame. Local politics, they declare, is no more responsible or representative than provincial and national puppet masters are prepared to allow. The country’s three-tiered system of government is antiquated, costly and dysfunctional.

In this context, the very thought of voting is exhausting; the act, itself, a pantomime celebrating futility.

And yet, our institutions continue to mirror our more hopeful expectations.

“The right to vote is a fundamental democratic right that is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Elections Canada reminds us on its website. “It is the cornerstone of democracy. When we vote, we choose the representatives who will make the laws and policies that govern how we live together.

The legitimacy of a government lies in the fact that it is elected. Low voter turnouts may call into question this democratic legitimacy.”

While democracy involves much more than holding elections every five years, voting is a powerful way to send a message to governments and politicians. The more votes, the more powerful the message is. In other words, every vote counts.

Compared to other forms of political participation, voting does not require a lot of time or effort – in other words, it is one of the easiest ways to have a say in how your society is governed.”

In fact, there’s nothing especially easy about voting, and there shouldn’t be. Exercising one’s mandate as a citizen of a free country, untroubled by the shackles and yokes other societies routinely slap on their miserable populations, should be a cause for reflection, education and discussion. It should invoke the powers of conscience and intellectual independence that are denied to millions, even billions, of people around the world, and which we take for granted.

If, as many complain, our leaders are vain and ineffectual and our system is rusted through with corruption, our privilege and duty are to find and promote alternatives and vote these into power, under the rule of law upon which we rely for our freedoms.

If we don’t, if we stand back from the malodorous fray, holding our noses, we invite the world’s dictators, oligarchs and bully boys to sit at our tables and eat our lunches as they make off with the family silver and what’s left of our illusions about human dignity.

The little city that could. . .didn’t.

On Monday night, Moncton did not get out the the vote, which is disappointing given the community’s passion, energy and entrepreneurial commitment to freedom in all its glorious guises.

It’s not the end of the world, of course.

But neither is it the beginning of a new one.

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 picture that accompanies the story “Watchdogs of Parliament forge closer ties,” posted to the Globe and Mail’s website on Monday, features a smiling Stephen Harper marching past a saluting security guard.

It’s a subtle, but sly, dig at a prime minister who once bitterly wondered, within earshot of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, why reporters did not stand when he entered a room – at a Right Honourable servant of the Crown who once arranged to have a military processional formally acknowledge his noble presence, a distinction that was more properly the Governor-General’s to receive.

Here, finally, the man in charge receives the respect he believes he so richly deserves from a clearly besotted serf, even though parliamentary sentries are not required, or encouraged, to salute anyone in the course of their duties.

Still, Harper might gather his laurels while and wherever he may, for, as the article reveals, those whose job descriptions are more to bury Caesar than to praise him are steadily and quietly growing stronger behind the mantles of power.

According to the Globe, “The eight agents of Parliament – independent watchdogs that include the Auditor-General and the Commissioner of Elections Canada – are working more closely together than ever before.”

Documents the newspaper obtained under access to information legislation reveal a two-year-long evolution, characterized by increasing cohesion among the individual offices fueled by “meals, sometimes at Ottawa’s Rideau Club, to discuss mutual issues.”

However you parse it, this can’t be good news for Harpertown. Consider the sleepless nights these agents, operating alone, have caused senior politicians and their chief lieutenants in recent moths:

Auditor-General Michael Ferguson is blowing the lid off the F-35 fighter jet fiasco, openly questioning whether government members had deliberately misled Parliament about the program’s overall costs.

Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand remains hot on the trail of the so-called “robo-calling” affair, which may or may not implicate operatives of the reigning Conservative Party in an unseemly attempt to thwart the democratic process.

Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson finds Industry Minister Christian Paradis in a conflict of interest over ex parte communications with ex-Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer.

Meanwhile, Commissioner of Lobbying Karen Shepherd is demanding that fines be levied against un-credentialed lobbyists with connections to the sitting government.

Individually, these watchdogs are mere superheroes. Together, they’re “The Avengers”, which is a hugely entertaining notion given that their empowerment was the last thing the Tories wanted to incubate when they called for studies, last year, to examine ways to render their offices more “efficient” and less provocative.

In fact, says the Globe piece, research documents – whose authors interviewed senior government officials, but not parliamentary officers – concluded: “Agents are seen by some to be weakening and even delegitimizing the parliamentary system, notably with respect to the role of committees and individual parliamentarians in the oversight of government. . .Senior officials believe the agents feel the need to justify their existence by finding problems. While they agree it is important to expose wrongdoing, it was noted that this can go overboard and big public issues can be made out of small, relatively normal problems.”

But if this is how government mandarins and their political masters truly feel, then who outside the Ottawa beltway could not help but welcome a stronger and more effective role for the watchdogs?

What, pray tell, is the current role of parliamentary committees “in the oversight of government” when the government, itself, has rendered these bodies either toothless or dyspeptic? Far from “delegitimizing” the system, the agents are virtually alone in, at least, attempting to restore its dignity.

As for the concern that agents need to justify themselves by finding problems, I would point out that this is no more and no less than we expect of them. Their job is exactly that: To find problems.

Once found, ours – that is to say, the vote-making taxpayers’ – is to decide what to do about them: Doff our caps to the troublemakers in Parliament, or select an altogether different gesture with which to demonstrate the degree of our respect.

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.

It’s hard enough being a Canadian environmentalist these days without having to worry about the Machiavellian maneuvers Alberta’s newly anointed Progressive Conservative government is executing to bedazzle a befuddled public.

To the astonishment of pollsters and some defiantly deluded members of the right-wing Wildrose Alliance, Allison Redford’s red Tories returned to power with a healthy majority earlier this month and immediately began rewriting the narrative on their province’s controversial, bitumen-producing oil sands.

The old talking points in defence of Canada’s black gold went something like this: The world needs our crude and anyone who says otherwise is either an imbecile or worse, a traitor. Real patriots understand that nothing is too precious to be sacrificed on the alter of economic development under the northern lights of Big Sky Country.

The new messaging is, in deference to understatement, somewhat less belligerent, to wit: Alberta, like the rest of this great country of ours, cares deeply about the environment. That’s why the oil sands needs a social license to proceed; a clear recognition from the world that we are extracting this vital resource responsibly.

The latter position is that of Brad Hughes, the province’s freshly minted energy minister who told the Globe and Mail a few days ago, “There are strategic challenges we face around our ability to develop the natural resources we have, do it in an environmentally appropriate way and tell the rest of the world how we are doing that in an environmentally appropriate way. . .so that we have a social license to continue to develop our resources.”

He went on to say, “This is a great gift we have received. It’s not of our own creation, but to make the most of it is our obligation. The fact we are so fortunate imposes upon us a higher level of obligation of performing well.”

All of which must have caught defeated Wildrose leader Danielle Smith like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming minivan full of hippies. Ditto for federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, whose dictum for dealing with “radical environmentalists” (that is to say, anyone who doesn’t agree with him) is to issue ad hominem attacks early and often.

In fact, the Harper government’s position on the oil sands (for God’s sake, don’t call them “tar sands”) remains stubbornly hardline. Its omnibus budget bill C-38 streamlines the environmental regulation process and, some say, makes it easier for industry to obtain a favourable hearing at the committee table.

Meanwhile, the ever-dutiful federal Environment Minister Peter Kent swings away at environmental groups, telling the CBC, “Essentially what our government is doing through the finance committee is investigating allegations that offshore funds have improperly been funnelled through – laundered if you will, that’s a fairly accurate word  – through Canadian organizations that have charitable status to be used in ways that would be improper given that charitable status.”

It’s enough to give any self-respecting environmentalist an identity crisis, especially now that infant terrible David Suzuki has left the main stage to pursue his personal green agenda behind the scenery.

Who can a nature boy or girl believe? Eco-cons like Harper, et. al.? Or Johnny-come-softies like Hughes? The targets are not only in constant motion; they’re not even in the same rhetorical arena anymore.

Consider, however, that nothing the Redford government did during its previous term actually mitigated the sometimes appalling ecological effects of the oil and gas industry’s progress in Alberta, and we’re tempted to take its newfound vow to be a better friend of the earth with a grain of tar sand.

Indeed, Hughes still refuses to consider a carbon tax, telling the Globe, “Look we are where we are today. What we need to do is ensure that, going forward, we are developing our resources in as environmentally appropriate a way as we possibly can.”

More likely, the provincial minister’s good cop to his federal counterparts’ bad ones is simple, effective, political strategy: Keep you opponent guessing, never show him your real colours, divide his ranks, and then conquer.

Machiavelli would, indeed, approve.

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 shock to me wasn’t that Elections New Brunswick carelessly spilled the personal information of more than half-a-million voters into the public domain. The shock to me, at least in retrospect, was my reaction to the news: “Ho-hum; another day, another security breach.”

In fact, it took me a full day to work up a head of steam over what would have instantly sent me, only scant years ago, into a spinning rage. For the transgression, though unintended, was appalling.

People, whose salaries and pensions we pay, acknowledged last week that they provided confidential information about 553,000 residents – almost every voter in the province – to the people we elect to, among other things, prevent this sort of imbecility from happening.

According to BNI’s Shawn Berry, writing in the Telegraph-Journal last Thursday, “The details. . .sent out included dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and even some telephone numbers. This list (Elections NB) transmits to MLAs and political parties every spring is supposed to only include the name, address and. . .gender.”

A Halifax security consultant Berry contacted, one David Fraser, confirmed that this type of information is gold to identity thieves, the fastest-growing cadre of cyber-criminals in the world, who need only a name, home addresses, date of birth and license number to fraudulently create a bank or credit card account.

True, Fraser averred he didn’t think this particular case is “a big deal” as the information “went to a relatively closed group of individuals who also probably have motivation to do the right thing. There’s no reason to believe it was anything other than an inadvertent error.”

And, true, Ron Armitage, the province’s voter information systems manager, took one for the home team when he apologized: “I take the integrity of individual privacy very seriously and I deeply regret having made this error. . .I obviously take full responsibility and feel badly.”

But, is this supposed to make me feel better?

Business and technology reporter Arik Hesseldahl rang the alarm in 2010 when he wrote, in a piece for AllThingsD.com (a website owned by Dow Jones), “The year. . . opened with Google’s disclosure that it had come under attack in China, an apparent attempt to penetrate the Gmail accounts of certain activists and journalists. It ended with the WikiLeaks affair, which stemmed from the alleged theft by an Army private of classified documents stored on a government network. And let’s not forget in mid-year came the story, as fascinating as it was sobering, of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed by parties unknown that penetrated and ultimately damaged equipment used in the Iranian nuclear program.”

Just as sobering was the headline on the story: “2010 was the year the Internet got scary. Get used to it.”

And, to a great degree, we have. We’ve grown accustomed to the imprecations of the online world as it curses our “right” to privacy and plots to “open-source” our personal lives. Meanwhile, credit card companies issue press releases about compromised data on millions of account holders as if they’re announcing another hike in the minimum monthly payments they require.

Under these circumstances, what’s another unwittingly botched voter list between bedfellows in the strange, new land of digital chicanery?

Fortunately, both Premier David Alward and his colleagues across the aisle seem to appreciate the true gravity of their shared situation.

“We have been given something we shouldn’t have,” the former told the provincial legislature last week. “So, we will give it back.”

Added Liberal Leader Victor Boudreau: “I gave a very clear directive to my caucus this morning and we communicated it to our staff that all copies of these (voter information) discs are to be returned to the Opposition office and I want to return them to Elections New Brunswick in one bundle to make sure they are all accounted for.”

Still, said provincial privacy commissioner Anne Bertrand, “I’m always concerned when there’s a possible breach of of personal information. We don’t know the full extent of the breach right now.”

And, likely, we won’t until some idiot with my name shows up in a dingy corner of cyberspace peddling no-frills paraphernalia for the pot-smoking crowd.

That’s if I’m lucky, if no longer complacent.

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.

In the imaginary congress of the stoner’s pipe dream, George Shultz, Richard Branson, Bill Maher and Tommy Chong will solve the world’s problems over a bag of organic kettle corn. But their first order of business will be to pass their Dutchie to the left hand side, taking great care not to Bogart the blunt.

Indeed, the list of prominent figures around the world calling for an end to the so-called war on drugs, beginning with the effective legalization of marijuana, is more striking for its diversity than its size.

A February letter from the Global Commission on Drug Policy addressed to Prime Minister Harper, the Canadian Senate and copied to “Canadian Premiers and Leaders of the Opposition” bears the signatures of Louise Arbour (former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), Fernando Cardosa (former President of Brazil), Cesar Trujillo (former President of Colombia), Ruth Dreifuss (former President of Switzerland), and Thorvald Stoltenberg (former Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs).

In their missive, they declare, “Our Commission includes global leaders such as former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan; former US Secretary of State George Schultz; and business experts such as Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Paul Volcker.”

Their clear intent, of course, is to purge the enduring debate of rhetoric, ideology and political pandering and persuade Canada’s leaders to “adopt an evidence-based approach to controlling cannabis. . .by taxing and regulating [its] use under a public health framework. . .as [these models] have great potential to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and safety of Canadians.”

They have a point.

Far from curtailing illicit use of narcotics, the drug war has enriched and emboldened the global underworld’s kingpins, much as prohibition consolidated and empowered America’ s mafias during the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The Commission states that between 1998 and 2008, opiate use around the world rose 34.5 per cent, while cocaine and cannabis use increased 27 per cent and 8.5 per cent, respectively. This, despite costly law enforcement programs, especially in Canada and the United States, to incarcerate growers, producers, dealers and consumers.

In contrast, the Commission says, “In the 1980s, Switzerland implemented a new set of policies (including heroin substitution programs) based on public health instead of

criminalization. The consistent implementation of this policy has led to an overall reduction in the number of people addicted to heroin.”

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, “Research into the effects of [a] policy of diversion from custody into treatment programs clearly demonstrated a reduction in offending following treatment intervention. In addition to self-reports, the researchers in this case also referred to police criminal records data. The research shows that the numbers of charges brought against 1,476 drug users in the years before and after entering treatment reduced by 48 percent.”

These aren’t arguments to which either Stephen Harper or U.S. President Barack Obama are entirely unsympathetic. Both must recognize, if not publicly, that the “war on drugs”, like the “war on terror”, is an artifact of political posturing.

But, they are stuck with it beyond reason or rationality precisely because it is a distinctly North American creation that has, over the past 50 years, informed public policy, generated medical consensus and brainwashed countless teachers, preachers and social workers into believing in the primacy of the criminal justice system.

Any other approach, any alternative, is, by this logic, irresponsible.

Still, how much more irresponsible is a piece of legislation (Bill C-10) that throws pot smokers, caught with as little as four plants, into jail for three years? How much more irresponsible is spending tens-of-billions of dollars pursuing violent criminals whose profits rise in direct proportion to the preciousness of the supply they control on the black market?

As the Commission says, “The clear path forward to best control cannabis in Canada and other jurisdictions throughout the world is to move away from failed law enforcement strategies and to pursue a public health approach aimed also at undermining the root causes of organized crime.”

This is hardly a stoner’s pipe dream; it comes courtesy of the most level-headed among us.

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.

It’s poignant, perhaps, but the most objective, dispassionate coverage of Ottawa’s $115-million cut to the federal portion of CBC’s operating budget is from the CBC, itself.

Everyone else, it seems, is determined to interpret the austerity measure as proof of either the Harper government’s abiding hatred for the public broadcaster, or precisely the opposite.

One recent online report, aggregating commentary from a variety of Canadian news sources, quotes Heritage Minister James Moore saying the cut will actually serve the CBC’s best interests because it will force the network to become leaner and, therefore, more culturally relevant and fiscally responsible. (And we all know how that works, don’t we children?)

Besides, he added, the reduction – which also eliminates the annual $60-million top-up to the CBC’s budget – is only equivalent to about 10 per cent of the broadcaster’s $1.1-billion taxpayer-funded stipend.

And that, he jabbed, is a whole lot better than the shabby way the dirty, rotten Liberals treated the CBC when they were kings of the castle: They slashed $414 million from its budget, leaving it “downsized, underfunded and abandoned.”

Putting this another way: The Tories are only plunging their knife 25 per cent as deeply as the Grits did, which is just about the same fraction by which they are slashing budgets everywhere else in government-supported circles. (Alas, this doesn’t apply to Katimavik or International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, which are now mere memories).

Still, while the twitterverse, blogosphere and various facebookvilles are ablaze with opinion for and against the venerable institution, the CBC, itself, chooses the high road best channeled by its senior Ottawa correspondent, Terry Milewski, who says: “We’ve been through this a few times before, and we’ve survived.”

Practice makes perfect, after all.

And yet, there is something different about this round of haircuts, something almost perfunctory. It’s as if bashing, belittling and then chopping the CBC has become a legitimate social and political pastime, regardless of fiscal urgency or, in fact, the ideological stripes of the sitting government.

An institution once celebrated as essentially Canadian is now considered, by a growing constituency, largely unnecessary and, so, largely undeserving of the public shekels it gets over the objections of watchers of Sun TV.

When the CBC apparently stopped talking to Canadians is mystifying. Down here, on the East Coast, the land where Harpertime forgot, the broadcaster still plays a crucial and beloved role connecting rural communities to the cities and to each other. No medium does a better job covering local news, features and events than Radio One. No broadcaster spends more time supporting Atlantic Canadian artists, writers and musicians.

But if this federal government, like all the ones that have preceded it, really wanted to mess with this proven format – if it was determined to reinvent the CBC – it would have cut a lot more than $100 million from its funding. That it didn’t suggests that it understands the political currency associated with keeping it alive, if only just.

Why would you kill something, when you can torture it every so often to the amusement and approbation of a significant voter base? It’s like money in the bank.

Of course, even the sturdiest beast can endure only so many thousand cuts before it expires. Ottawa’s announcement provoked Mother Corp.’s inevitable response last week. According to the Vancouver Sun, “Across Canada, 650 full-time CBC jobs will be eliminated. This includes 475 this fiscal year, a further 150 jobs in the 2013-2014 fiscal year and the remaining in 2014-2015. Those 650 jobs – split equally between French and English services – amounts to about nine per cent of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s work-force. That includes 150 management jobs.”

They also come only three years after the broadcaster laid off 800 people in the shadow of the economic recession.

“It’s not a fun day,” CBC president Hubert Lacroix said. This will result in “a very different public broadcaster.”

It wasn’t an especially objective or dispassionate remark. But it was poignant.

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.

It may be the only time since Confederation when a New Brunswicker has scared the pants off Ottawa bureaucrats. It only remains to be seen whether, in the worthy opinion of Canada’s Auditor-General, their elected emperors also wear no clothes.

Mighty Mike Ferguson, lately of Fredericton, currently ensconced as the nation’s top forensic accountant, has made a fine meal of the Harper government’s plan to buy 65 F-35 Lightening jet fighters from the Americans.

In his first official report last week – variously described as “scathing”, “scorching” and “withering” – Ferguson slammed almost everyone involved in the scheme. But he reserved his archest criticism for the Department of National Defence which, he says, failed to inform Parliament properly about the program’s actual costs.

“We have significant concerns about the completeness of cost information provided to parliamentarians,” the A-G writes. “In March 2011, National Defence responded publicly to the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report. This response did not include estimated operating, personnel, or ongoing training costs.

He continues: “We observed that National Defence told parliamentarians that cost data provided by U.S. authorities had been validated by U.S. experts and partner countries, which was not accurate at the time. At the time of its response, National Defence knew the costs were likely to increase but did not so inform parliamentarians.”

Ferguson also had harsh words for bureaucrats who apparently kited their projections of the industrial benefits that would accrue to Canadian firms:

“We found that briefing materials prepared by the departments for decision makers and ministers did not explain the basis for the projections, or the consequent limitations involved in relying on those projections for decision making.

Moreover, he observes, “In the majority of cases, only the most optimistic scenario was put forward, rather than a range of potential benefits that reflected the inherent uncertainties in the projections. We are concerned, because these projections were used to support key decisions related to Canada’s participation in the JSF Program and the purchase of the F-35 aircraft.”

Finally, the watchdog raised serious questions about the fairness of the procurement process, itself:

“In our view, many of the steps and documents used to support the government’s decision were of little consequence, because the key questions of whether to procure the F-35 and whether to run a competition were effectively determined by decisions taken much earlier, calling into question the integrity of the process.”

Indeed, he writes, “Not only were they of little consequence, they might also have been unnecessary if National Defence had sought government approval at an earlier stage to be completely exempt from the requirement to fit the procurement into one of the specified exceptions to competitive tendering.”

The bottom line: “Practically speaking, by 2010, Canada was too involved in the JSF Program and the F-35 to run a fair competition.”

That, dear reader, is what they call the fat lady singing.

Still, this contretemps is far from over. Per his mandate, Ferguson carefully avoids implicating elected government officials in his charges of bungling, maladministration and apparent prevarication. That, however, didn’t stop NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair from going for the throat of his arch nemesis.

The Auditor-General’s report is a litany of poor public administration, bad decision making and lack of accountability by Conservative ministers,” he thundered in the House of Commons. “But the key question to the prime minister is: How could he allow Parliament to be intentionally misled on the F-35s? Either he knew, and it’s unconscionable, or he didn’t know and it’s incompetence. Which is it?”

To his political credit, Harper refused to bite and limited his response to a tepid assurance: “The Auditor-General has identified a need for greater independence and supervision over some of the activities of the Department of Defence. The government will put that supervision in place before we proceed.”

He best see that they do. It doesn’t look like New Brunswick’s own Mike Ferguson is going anywhere any time soon.

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.

It’s one of those editorial pranks, both cloddish and cloying, that all too frequently defines Canada’s one, true gospel of preening self-regard: The ritual Globe and Mail smack-down.

In a recent edition, veteran columnist Margaret Wente, the triumphant “baby boomer” representing the upper crust of generational privilege, acknowledged she belongs to a cohort that had everything handed to them on various platters made of precious metals: jobs, money, houses, inheritances, universal health care, government-underwritten retirement plans.

That’s right, she said, she and her pals feasted, for decades, at the lavish banquet laid on by Canada’s welfare state, gorging themselves on the entitlements their parents purchased for them with thrift, discipline and deprivation.

Sorry, eh?

In the other corner, Globe staffer Dakshana Bascaramurty, the oppressed “millennial” representing the underclass of an over-educated labour market of 20-somethings, complained she can’t buy a house or even afford a bigger apartment because people like Wente stole the keys to the castle long ago. The young scribe is none too fond of her employer, either:

“I got a job soon after I graduated from university, but still had to go through the process of two internships  and a contract at The Globe and Mail before I got a staff position. By then, management had closed the defined-benefit pension plan to new employees. Fantastic.”

It’s not, like, fair. . .you know?

I sure do. But, then, a lot of things aren’t fair.

Is it fair that I am, thanks to some genetic lottery, the shortest adult male in my family? Is it fair that my basement leaks worse now than it did before I had it fixed? Is it  fair that I spent $900 on a snowblower last fall and only got to use it twice this winter?

Here’s another thing I don’t think is fair: Having to fork out 40 bucks a month for the privilege of reading canned copy that’s been cooked over an open flame of pandered resentment until done to tastelessness.

“Should we boomers feel guilty?” Wente wonders. “I think so. We like to say we earned it, and I guess, in part we did. But we also won the birth-year lottery. Perhaps we shouldn’t cling so stubbornly to our entitlements. Perhaps we owe something to to the future. Perhaps it’s time to pay it forward.”

Perhaps? Either do it or don’t do it. But for God’s sake: Shut up, already. That goes for you, too, Bascaramurty.

“Listen we’re not dumb,” the poor lamb insists. “We know we need austerity measures to counter the enormous cost of our social programs. We’re just resentful that we already have to start saving for our own retirement, even as we pay for the mistakes of the older generation.”

In fact, we don’t need “austerity measures” at all. That’s just what this and every federal government since Jean Chretien’s has been drilling into Canadians until the baloney has become baked brie.

There is plenty of money in the kitty to cover the cost of publicly funded retirement programs. Just as, with a little ingenuity and cooperation among various levels of government and medical establishment, there is enough to pay for a decent standard of health care for everyone who is alive today.

The problem is we elect people who don’t actually have our best, or even basic, interests in mind. They talk about jobs, and they buy fighter jets. They moan about winnowing standards of education and labour skills, and they pay for foreign wars that have nothing to do with either national security or domestic tranquility.

Meanwhile, they practice the dark art of mass-media distraction: By all means, blame the bombastic boomers, cudgel the whining millennials.

Divide, conquer, divide again, conquer again, until they slice up the generational pie – with the able assistance of outfits like The Globe and Mail – into so many pieces, we’ll never run out ways to blame each other for our birthdays.

Don’t imagine, for a moment, that government indifference and business avarice play a leading role in maintaining our various inequalities, regardless of our generations.

That just not a self-important enough conclusion to merit consideration.

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.

In the offices of some rich entrepreneurs of a certain age and a more circumspect generation, pennies hang framed behind glass as if to remind visitors that wealth, like life, is fleeting.

Restaurant owners display the first buck they ever made above their cash registers to demonstrate their gritty, enterprising souls. But, it’s almost a rule that the more financially muscular you are, the lower the denomination you honour in the capitalist cosmology.

The late K.C. Irving – it is said – was fond of observing: “Look after the pennies, and the dollars will look after themselves.”

Or was that a favorite rubric of U.S. oil industrialist John Paul Getty’s?

It hardly matters. Both were fabulously adept managers of money.

I, on the other hand, collected pennies like marbles. That is to say: carelessly.

When I was a kid, my monthly ritual before Mammon was to dump my coffee can full of loose coins onto my bed and roll around until the copper stuck to my skin. This little devotional, I imagined, would someday secure my position at the top of the big, rock candy mountain of moolah, even as the pennies dropped from my body and vanished into the cracks beneath the baseboard.

Not surprisingly, I never made a dime.

In one of his less controversial maneuvers last month, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty struck the death blow to the penny. It is “a currency without any currency in Canada,” he declared. “It costs us 1.5 cents to produce a penny. . .They take up too much space on our dressers at home and far too much time for small businesses trying to grow and create jobs.”

Noting that Ottawa spends about $11 million a year minting the lowly coin, NDP MP Pat Martin was ecstatic. “This feels pretty good,” he said. “Finally, some common sense from government.”

Now, the Americans are reviving the debate over their own monetary midget.

President Barack Obama wants Congress to authorize changing the composition of the coin, thereby reducing its cost.

Others, like Jeff Gore of Citizens for Retiring the Penny, want nothing to do with it. “Pennies are now worth so little that people often don’t pick them up off the street, despite the lucky-penny adage,” he blogged not long ago. “As Harvard professor of economics Gregory Mankiw points out, ‘When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful.’”

Still, as Matthew Eggers of Americans for Common Cents argued in a recent online post: “The alternative to the penny is rounding transactions to the nearest nickel. But that will make goods and services more expensive. Since the objective of any business is to maximize profits, most prices would be rounded up – and research suggests that consumers would spend an additional $600 million a year as a result.”

In fact, like everything else government enshrines (the metric system, daylight savings time, bad haircuts on Parliament Hill), we’ll probably get used to our newly penniless circumstances.

Of course, we’ll no longer know what we mean when we call our landlord a “penny pincher”, or offer our significant other “a penny for her thoughts”. Meanwhile, our penny loafers will become just loafers.

And when some scoundrel empties our bank account with a debit-card scanner, we’ll have to come up with something other than, “I don’t have two pennies to rub together”, to mourn our loss.

Indeed, we’ll have to abandon whole phrases, entire vernacular talismans on the virtue of thrift and the impermanence of wealth.

We will no longer be “in for a penny, in for a pound” or the corollary, “penny wise and pound foolish”.

To be sure, “a penny saved is a penny earned” will no longer refer to the fiscal sages, but to the monetary morons, among us. And as we won’t be looking after the pennies, the dollars really will have to look after themselves for once.”

All things go extinct. Yet, we might pity the censured cent for its passing, and turn  to the eager beaver that occupies the next rung on the currency ladder.

“Watch your back, nickel. You’re next.”

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 the very moment a New Brunswick potato exporter touched down at Ottawa’s Macdonald-Cartier International Airport, after having spent a year in captivity in a foreign country on a warrantless charge for an unproven crime, Canadian federal officials were busy congratulating themselves for his liberation.

Occasionally, they mentioned his name; but mostly, they mentioned theirs.

“On behalf of the Government of Canada, I am pleased that Canadian consular officials have helped secure the release of Mr. Henk Tepper,” Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Diane Ablonczy declared in a statement the other week. “Our government has been quietly and persistently working through diplomatic channels to resolve his situation.”

His “situation” had been his 12-month-long incarceration in Beirut on charges of shipping rotten potatoes to Algeria and then lying about it in “forged” documents – charges that he, his family, his lawyers and, frankly, the evidence collected by the RCMP, had consistently and vigorously repudiated.

But, desiring to smooth international relations, Ablonczy felt compelled to accentuate the positive in Mr. Tepper’s otherwise unexcellent adventure abroad. “Canada’s ambassador to Lebanon and consular officials displayed an unwavering commitment to assist Mr. Tepper,” her news release emphasized before adding, “Canada is also appreciative of the responsiveness of our partners in Lebanon.”

It now seems clear – thanks to some enterprising reporting by a sister newspaper – that polite but persistent diplomacy was the right strategy after all. Cool heads managed to save faces that would have burned red in the public firestorm ignited by angry recriminations on both sides of the world.

Still, questions remain, the most important of which is whether the federal government allowed the crisis to meander needlessly before it formally harnessed up its team of negotiators.

Writing in the Telegraph-Journal, Adam Huras quotes New Brunswick Senator Noel Kinsella, a key figure responsible for Tepper’s release, thusly: “I had been dealing on a technical basis with the case all along and then exerting, as a senator from New Brunswick, concerns and questions with the Government of Canada. I was satisfied with the government’s efforts, then this thing kind of dragged on. From a human rights perspective, I became concerned.”

One inference from this is that Ottawa had been working on Tepper’s behalf all along, but not effectively. The other is that it had let the file grow cold, for whatever reasons, before rousing to action in the face of stinging public criticism.

Certainly, New Brunswick Senator Pierette Ringuette considers the latter the most likely interpretation of events. In December, she characterized Tepper’s situation as intolerable and “senseless”, which “could have been resolved weeks – even months – ago. All the Lebanese have been waiting for is a clear request from Ottawa to send our farmer home.”

Indeed, even as Tepper arrived home, Ringuette reiterated her charges of federal foot-dragging on a CBC News broadcast. “This took a long time because of the non-availability our own government,” she said. “Not more than a month ago, (Minister of State) Ablonczy told (Interim Liberal Leader) Bob Rae and (New Brunswick Liberal MP) Dominic LeBlanc, in certain terms, that they (the government) expected the Lebanese government to send Mr Tepper to Algeria, not here.”

What turned the tide, she insisted, was “the representation that we made, the facts that we brought to their attention, and I think also the long friendship between the Canadian people and the Lebanese people.”

Naturally, government officials shot back. Referring to Ringuette, Ablonczy spokesman John Babcock said, “The senator’s actions in late 2011 directly inhibited the progress of Mr. Tepper’s case. . .Quiet diplomacy prevailed and Mr. Tepper is free.”

In fact, who actually did what for the Drummond-based owner of Tobique Farms is now less important than his restoration to his family, friends, community and business, which has been under court-ordered protection from its creditors thanks to his forced and prolonged absence from the province.

Still, a public rush to grab credit for resolving an unhappy foreign affair is not only unseemly. It invites legitimate scrutiny and raises troubling questions about Canada’s commitment to the welfare of its citizens who find themselves travelling in harm’s way.

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.