The Bruce Report

The truth is, I haven’t been feeling the love for ages. Not since 2006, when I began catching dear, old Dad casting withering glances my way, shaking his head from side to side. Every once in a while, he’d barge into my room and demand to know if my attitude was improving. Was I still feeling defeatist?

At first, I thought I was imagining things; that his evident disappointment masked a genuine desire to make a man out of me; that he only had my best interests at heart.

Now I know he just wanted me out of the house.

“Here’s a bus ticket, junior. . .Don’t write till you get work.”

Depending on who you are and where you live in Canada, the Harper government’s first majority budget is either a welcome declaration that small really is beautiful or a bruising incarnation of social Darwinism.

For Atlantic Canada, the message seems to be: It’s a jungle out there and only the fittest deserve to survive.

In its post-budget analysis, the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC)concludes: “The $5.2-billion reduction in (federal program) spending represents almost 7% of the $75 billion in operating expenditures under review. It will lead to a reduction in federal employment of 19,200 jobs or 4.8% of federal employment nationally, implying the employment reduction in Atlantic Canada could be as much as 2,300 jobs.”

And that’s not all.

The East Coast region accounts for about a fifth of military employment in Canada. The budget shaves about $1.1 billion, over two years, from the Department of Defence. Other cuts include: $11 million to Marine Atlantic, $67 million to Charlottetown-based Veterans Affairs, and $79 million to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Now is also not the time to get old in Atlantic Canada.

“The age of eligibility for Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) is being increased from 65 to 67 years of age, starting in 2023,” APEC reports. “Currently, Atlantic Canada receives about 8.5% of OAS payments because of its large share of seniors age 65 and older.”

Meanwhile, the Atlantic Investment Tax Credit for resource and manufacturing sectors will no longer be available to mining and oil and gas companies, which amounts to a cut of some $85 million. And changes to the Scientific Research and Experimental Development Program will trim $10 million in credits available to firms in this region.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. First Nations communities are set to receive a boost. The five per cent tariff on crude oil imports, which deleteriously affects the regional economy, will disappear. Young Atlantic Canadians will benefit from a new skills development strategy. And the Canadian Coast Guard is getting a makeover.

In fact, despite its many claw-backs and haircuts (dropping the poor, benighted penny is probably the most amusing), the salient aspect about this budget is almost heartening: lucidity. Those who insist it’s a shell game, a dishonest attempt to muddy the already murky waters of government policy are missing the point.

Unlike its predecessors, the Harper government is telling a clear story with a simple narrative: Ottawa is not our daddy; Canadians are perfectly capable of making their own way in the world; and while the centre will continue to support the least fortunate among us, the rest of us are pretty much on our own, regardless of our various regional challenges and opportunities.

In this story, less is not more; it’s just less. Get used to it.

Naturally, millions will despise this transformation. Millions of others will adore it. But whether you love it or loath it, you can’t complain that you don’t know the mind of this government, just as you can’t expect to change it.

“This is why the Conservatives were elected, to prudently manage public finances in a tumultuous time,” reads an editorial in one of Canada’s self-styled national newspapers. “In the end, it’s up to Canadian firms and individuals to make this a more innovative country.”

After all, though we may not like the trip, we now have our tickets to ride.

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 first official words from the new leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition were not about poverty, the environment or soaking the rich.

The first words Thomas Mulcair uttered, as the NDP’s freshly minted honcho, were about jobs. Or, more precisely, the Tory government’s allegedly lousy record of maintaining them.

In Question Period a few weeks ago, he hammered the Conservatives for allowing aircraft hangers in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal to close, eliminating thousands of positions, even though federal law insists that they remain open.

“They (the government) can enforce the Act, save these jobs and do something for a change,” he said. “Why won’t they act?”

Later, he elaborated for Ottawa reporters: “Throughout our (leadership) campaign we’ve been concentrating on jobs. We’ve been concentrating on the failure of the Conservatives to apply basic rules of sustainable development. That’s had a devastating effect on the manufacturing sector; the loss of hundreds-of-thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs.”

Remarking about the Conservatives’ predilection for launching ad hominem attacks against their political rivals, he quipped: “They are very good at defining their adversaries. So we’re going to start to define them.”

Welcome to the “new” NDP, the one last month’s conventioneers in Toronto selected to lead them over the next three years: Tough-minded, focussed, strategic, relentless, and oh-so prickly.

No more group hugs or sentimental prattling about progressivism. No more mincing appeals to the better angels of human nature. No more kumbayas.

How long this clear-eyed approach will last, given the party’s underwhelming endorsement of Mulcair on the weekend (it took four ballots to make him leader), is anyone’s guess, but these very early days suggest that something close to a tectonic shift – more glacial than ground-shaking – is taking place in the ranks.

In fact, depending on who you poll, Mulcair’s greatest strength is also his weakness: To the delight of ambitious centrists, and the disdain of tradition leftists, he talks, thinks and comports himself much like his arch-enemy, Stephen Harper.

Both men are political chess masters, able to plot their progress several moves at a time. Both are quick-witted and short-tempered. And, according to insiders, both are archly patrician and intolerant of internecine dissent (though Mulcair says he’s “mellowed” since becoming a grandfather).

Most important, to the chagrin of the ideologues in their respective bases, both leaders are pragmatists.

Mulcair’s stated determination to “modernize” the NDP is code for making it broadly electable. That means abandoning those rubrics that continue to marginalize the party in the minds of many, if not most, Canadians.

“There is no time to lose,” he stated in his victory speech at the convention. “With the reckless Conservatives budget cuts we know are coming next week, Canadian families expect the Official Opposition to stand up to Stephen Harper and hold him to account. And this is exactly what the NDP will continue to do, every single day. We won’t rest until we defeat the Harper Conservatives in 2015 and form the first New Democrat government.”

Notice, he’s not talking about socialism.

Still, he’ll have to travel even farther down Main Street if he wants the West (which he needs to become prime minister), where Harper’s Conservatives reign supreme – something the latter know all too well as they toss red meat to their pit bulls.

Reporting in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago Gloria Galloway wrote that Mulcair’s debut in Question period was “preceded by an attack in the form of a member’s statement from Jeff Watson, a Conservative MP from Southwestern Ontario. Mr. Watson had so much to say about the new NDP Leader than he ran out of time and his microphone was cut off.”

So said Watson about Mulcair before being electronically muzzled: “This hug-a-thug, soft-on-crime leader will return Canada to policies favoring the rights of criminals over those of victims.”

Such charges are absurd, but they’ve also proven effective against principled men like Stephane Dion and, most recently, Michael Ignatieff whose typical responses were defensive.

Mulcair seems far less inclined than these political casualties to take the bait his enemies throw at him. They are, as he says, good at defining their adversaries.

So, too, it seems is the new leader of the NDP.

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.

Weather is not the only sign of summer’s early kiss this year; a sudden outbreak of a disease that’s normally prevalent in the silly season now afflicts certain federal cabinet ministers, who can’t seem to keep their traps shut for all the feet they’re swallowing.

Pity poor Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney, who assessed his own department’s staff in separate letters to the editors of different newspapers a few weeks ago.

In one, a missive to the Chronicle-Herald, he criticized the NDP for voting against government measures for retired servicemen and women. “The NDP’s actions have proven that they would rather protect a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy than support maintaining benefits for our veterans,” he wrote.

A few days later he had this to say to his “bloated, inefficient bureaucracy” in a screed published in The Charlottetown Guardian: “I want to assure Veterans Affairs staff that they are valued and I am committed to making changes in the department that aim to better assist our veterans and their families.”

He can’t have it both ways, jeered Liberal MP and Veterans Affairs critic Sean Casey: “Isn’t he aware that we have the Internet on Prince Edward Island? How the minister can publicly say there’s a bloated bureaucracy within the department and then heap praise on the employees when he’s in their market, it’s mind boggling.”

Not to the minister’s duly appointed spokesman it isn’t.

“Minister Blaney values the hard work of employees who are devoted to ensuring veterans and their families have the care and support they need,” explained Codie Taylor in most brazen example of political spin since Dean Del Maestro suggested the robo-call affair might well be “an honest mistake.”

Still, this was mere prelude to the main event of silliness Human Resources Minister Diane Finley publicly unleashed at a press conference in Halifax the other week. Blasting Nova Scotia’s NDP government’s request for a federal increase in the number of skilled immigrants permitted to work on the massive naval shipbuilding contract, she seemed downright beside herself with something approaching dudgeon.

“With 42,000 Nova Scotians looking for work, the provincial government is already calling for the federal government to allow foreign workers to come to Canada to perform work on the ships,” she crowed. “Why would we want to bring in people from outside when we have people here who need the jobs and who can do them?”

There was only one problem with this otherwise flawless reasoning. As Nova Scotia Immigration Minister Marilyn More correctly implied, many of the jobless minions to whom Finley refers can’t do these jobs because they haven’t yet been trained in the hard arts of welding and metal shaping.

Meanwhile, and until they are, somebody’s got to build the ships.

“I’m not sure what Minister Finley is basing her conclusions or her comments on,” More told reporters. “It’s my understanding that there are approximately 1.4 million unemployed people in Canada. Is she suggesting that Canada should close its doors to immigration?”

Nope. Just the ones Immigration Minister Jason Kenny wants shut to keep out people who could be actually useful to regional economies. The others – the ones reserved for the world’s millionaire elite who, one might logically presume, would be here already if they truly had a hankering to build the bright and ballyhooed Canadian future, Version 2.0, as advertised – will, as always, remain wide open.

So much politics. So much hot air.

Of course Canada endures a shortage of skills for the work that’s available. The Harper government’s own websites attest to this fact, just as others recognize the crucial contributions newcomers make to economic stability and growth.

Naturally, this isn’t the talking point these days.

Still, it never seems to occur to the trenchers of this – indeed, every – government that their partisanship is as diaphanous as nightie on a summer night.

Would it kill them to drop the rhetoric, just once, and conduct themselves in a manner that more closely resembles the comportment of the non-celebrities who gave them their jobs?

You know, the ones who pay for their seasonal bouts of foot-in-mouth disease?

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.

If Thomas Mulcair, the bright, fearless, irascible front-runner in the race to rule the house that Jack built, wins the NDP leadership on Sunday, political observers say his feat will be a “game-changer”.

If he fails and his more socially progressive rival, party President Brian Topp, succeeds instead, this, too, will be a game-changer.

So will a bigger hole in the ozone layer, another traffic accident involving Lindsay Lohan, the patch of rust on my rear, passenger-side bumper, and the fact that I forgot to buy cream for my morning coffee. Game-changers. All of them.

Investopedia.com characterizes a person endowed with this winning quality as “a visionary”. Specifically, he or she is someone who “uses creative innovation to alter their business plans, or conceives an entirely new plan by exploring new locations and different products.” Alternatively, a game-changer can be a set of circumstances that contrives to alter “the way something is done, though about or made.”

Clearly, Investopedia.com is behind the curve. It certainly isn’t a game-changer;  these days, one needs only self-identify (another expression that makes my teeth itch) as a “man-handler of custom” to be one. A game-changer, that is.

Consider the laughing Trilby on the Weather Channel who, earlier this week, predicted unseasonably warm temperatures in southern New Brunswick. “I don’t mind going out on a limb,” she chirped. “I’m a game-changer.”

Then there’s the patron of a Moncton coffee shop who was overheard explaining to his companion why he’s decided to leave the car at home and walk to work. “It’s simple,” he declared, without a trace of irony. “I’m a game-changer.”

Google the phrase and in precisely 0.25 seconds, you’ll pull up more than 52 million results – everything from GameChanger.net to a Time magazine special on “innovators and problem-solvers that are inspiring change in America” to a dissertation on whether Google is, itself, a game-changer.

My favourite, though, must be former CNN anchor Greta Van Susteren’s January 10 blog post, in which she asked her faithful readers: “Can we drop the word ‘game-changer’ for a week? It has been overused in describing politics. . .What do you think?”

I think it’s an excellent idea, but not very practical.

“Game-changer” is one of those memes that’s born and bred for the Internet. Like “action plan”, “outside the box”, “going forward”, “goal oriented”, and “world class”, it manages to inspire confidence without denoting meaning – qualities that guarantee its ubiquity in the metasearches that continuously, silently trawl cyberspace for content.

In fact, the only way to halt its march towards lexicological dominion – to change the game, as it were – its to invent a new one to take its place in the hearts of minds of the reliably lazy, easily amused, legions of keyboard-tapping zombies.

Fortunately, the good folks at squidoo.com – a sort of social network for polymaths – provides plenty of rich options in its collection of “Weird Words”, which may, or may not, actually exist in any language.

For example, am I really a game-changer for predicting the weather correctly?

Or am I just using my “jobbermole” (brain) without “juvament” (help) from “japers” (inferiors)?

Similarly, am I a game-changer for walking to work?

Or do I merely “dwang” (agonize) too much about the fact that I’m a “dangwallet” (spendthrift). Truly, am I a dwanging dangwallet?

And if Mulcair should get his party’s nod, will the consequent, pro forma celebration really amount to a game-changer?

Or should it be described more accurately as “cloakative” (superficial), despite the evident “crocitation” (crowing) to the contrary.

Ah, yes. . .cloakative crocitation.

I foresee a bright future for a phrase of such near-perfect political utility in 21st century Canada.

It could even be a game-changer going forward out of the box in this, our goal-oriented, world-class kakistocracy (government by the worst people).

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 minds of Canada’s admiralty are rarely addled. Still, one wonders what intoxicating brand of grog the nation’s naval nabobs imbibed back in 1998 when they purchased four sub-par submarines, for about a billion bucks, from their chortling counterparts in merry old England.

Specifically, British parliamentarian Mike Hancock – who represents the riding of Portsmouth South, where the boats were built – wants to know: “Why were the Canadians daft enough to buy them? My God, it’s a sad tale isn’t it? ‘Buyer beware’ should have been painted on the sides of these submarines.”

Hancock, a Liberal Democrat, has been complaining about the deal for 14 years. Recently, he tabled questions about it at Westminster before granting the CBC an extensive interview last week, in which he mused, “why we sold them to you knowing there were intrinsic problems,” before addressing his own quandry: “It’s either incompetence on behalf of Canadians, or sheer, smooth-talking salesmen from the Ministry of Defence (MOD) here in Britain.”

What’s odder, perhaps, is why a British national and a member of that country’s Commons appears more incensed about the mess than we do.

“I’m appalled we’ve done a dumb deal with an ally like this,” he railed. “If this was the Americans, we’d say good luck and serves you right. But as it’s Canada, I think there are a lot of questions to be answered.”

In fact, the benighted careers and conditions of the four subs – HMCS Chicoutimi, Corner Brook, Windsor and Victoria – have been open secrets in this country for some time.

In 2002, Windsor left its berth in Halifax on a two-week mission, but was forced back to port after it struck a leak. That same year, the navy discovered a dent in Victoria’s hull the size of a hubcap (apparently it had escaped the inspector’s attention before the cheque-signing ceremony).

Then, in 2003, the defence department announced that the overall price of its purchase would rise to nearly $900 million, from the negotiated $750 million, thanks to the many structural problems – including cracked diesel exhaust valves on all the boats – it was encountering.

In 2004, when a fire broke out on Chicoutimi’s maiden voyage, injuring eight crew and killing one, the navy mothballed the fleet while it conducted an inquiry. Two years later, DND announced that Chicoutimi’s repair wouldn’t commence until 2010.

According to a CBC investigation, “In their 13 years of Canadian service, the subs have spent less than three years at sea. . .None of the subs is capable of firing a Canadian torpedo. . .The real cost for the Windsor that year alone (2010) was $47 million. It is not known how much has been spent in total on the four subs.”

All of which causes Hancock to wonder why we haven’t asked for our money back. “I think you should be making a case for it.”

But this only exposes the soft underbelly of Canada’s foreign policy towards its unofficial motherland, which is, simply put: Don’t be impudent.

After all, it’s hard to conceive of Defence Minister Peter MacKay launching a frontal assault on his colleagues in the MOD while his fellow cabineteer, Foreign Minister John Baird, dashes about Ottawa replacing Canadian works of art with pictures of Her Majesty, the Queen, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee.

Equally, how likely is a contretemps over defective submersibles in a year when Canada is expected to play a substantial, diplomatic role at the London Olympics, the official web site of which affectionately encapsulates this country’s history in six words: “France, Britain, noisy neighbours, Neil Young.”?

And let’s not forget the $23 million taxpayers are giving the federal government to properly commemorate British triumphs in the War of 1812, a conflagration that, according to an official web site, “marked a turning point. . .without which there would be no Canada.”

Nope, on the matter of rum deals for decrepit submarines, it’s far better to swig a little grog and lie back.

Lie back, me hearties, and think of England.

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.

For a group that’s been told, on pain of private tongue-lashing, to keep its collective trap shut, the community of government scientists in Canada is an awfully noisy bunch.

Incensed by the heavy-handed ways the feds have stoppered the flow of information about publicly funded research, the Canadian Science Writers’ Association and its confederates in the World Federation of Science Journalists co-signed a letter that called on the prime minister to restore “a policy of transparent and timely communication.”

That was in February, just in time for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, during which a symposium, “Unmuzzling Government Scientists: How to Re-open the debate”, shone a flood light on the “Canadian problem”, which, in turn, prompted the internationally respected journal, Nature, to pick up the gauntlet in a strongly worded editorial headlined “Frozen out”.

“Since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party won power in 2006, there has been a gradual tightening of media protocols for federal scientists and other government workers,” it charged. “Researchers who once would have felt comfortable responding freely and promptly to journalists are now required to direct inquiries to a media-relations office, which demands written questions in advance, and might not permit scientists to speak.”

Under the weight of such negative publicity, one would reasonably expect a chastened and embarrassed government to reverse course. Wouldn’t one?

Don’t count on it.

In fact, though this particular government’s grip on what it considers “official” information is unusually strong, relations between the state and science have never been durably felicitous. Just ask the Church of Rome which took 500 years before getting around to pardoning Galileo for questioning its authority.

But we don’t have to go that far back or afield to get the point.

When Progressive Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker scuppered the Avro Arrow program in 1959, his government destroyed thousands of research documents and slapped a gag on engineers that makes the current muzzle seem, by comparison, threadbare. And the results were lamentably predictable.

“After the Arrow was cancelled, Avro laid off 14,000 workers,” said a CBC report on the 50th anniversary of the program’s cancellation. “Many of Avro’s former engineers went on to careers at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where they worked on the Apollo program that put the first men on the moon. Others joined the American or British aerospace industries, and some helped develop the Concorde supersonic jet.”

All of which may only prove that brainpower recognizes no borders, just as some governments, motivated by populist resentment against expertise, brook no lectures from the learned class.

Still, federal scientists today are justified to be miffed and for entirely practical reasons. If I had several advanced degrees in a highly technical field of study, I wouldn’t want to check with a twentysomething media relations officer, who may or may not hold a diploma in communications arts from the University of Nowhere-in-Particular, before I opened my mouth in public.

Indeed, says the Science Writers’ Association letter, “Many federal scientists are world-renowned experts in areas such as climatology, agriculture, environment, energy solutions, infectious disease, nanotechnology, engineering, and health care. Their important research in support of public health and security, environmental protection, and economic development costs taxpayers billions of dollars, and is valuable to scientists worldwide. Clearly Canadians have the right to learn more about the science they support and to have unfettered access to the expertise of publicly funded scientists. . .It makes for a more informed public, for a healthier democracy.”

Of course it does.

But, despite this government’s intractability, there’s no real danger of ill-informing the public. The dissemination of scientific knowledge is a global project, boasting many avenues both on and off the Internet far beyond the reach of state manipulation.

And as for building a “healthier democracy”, federal scientists in Canada are already productively engaged in this noble pursuit precisely because they refuse to keep their traps shut about the muzzles that, at least in this one important respect, aren’t working.

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.

When we turn our jaundiced eyes to the rank profanity that seems to have overwhelmed the public square in recent years, we tend to credit, for its inspiration, the Internet’s anonymous goons and nameless vulgarians.

But this pays short shrift to Rush Limbuagh, the right-wing, American talk radio icon, the apotheosis of celebrity, who earns millions of dollars a year commanding the attention of millions of mostly like-minded listeners?

He certainly needed no encouragement from cyberspace last week before launching a vile attack on a young woman whose only crime was to seek, in Congressional testimony, an amendment to Georgetown University’s health plan?

The 30-year-old law student wanted the school to cover the cost of contraception. So, naturally, Limbaugh wanted to see her in flagrante delicto.

“She goes before a committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex,” he spewed. “What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps. The johns. . .We want. . .the videos online so we can all watch.”

Within hours, Limbaugh issued a mealy-mouthed mea culpa, saying he didn’t mean to be rude, which still wasn’t enough to stop many of his sponsors – ProFlowers, Citrix Systems, AOL, and the Cleveland Cavaliers, among them – from abandoning ship. Even British rock legend Peter Gabriel instructed the potty-mouthed pundit to stop using his song, “Sledgehammer”, during the show’s credits.

Meanwhile, the blogosphere lit up like a witch-burning with comments like this: “Hey Libbys!!! Do all of you have thin skin? I do remember everyone in the media calling Sarah Palin names. But it’s OK for a Lib to say mean, hurtful things, but God forbid a conservative talk show host that has no power of making laws upsets you when he calls it like he sees it!”

And this:

“Please define ‘libbys’ so we know if we need to respond. Seems like you are using ‘liberal’ as a swear word. Recommend that you stop following the hate promoters and name calling dolts, who pass themselves off as being worth listening to.”

All of which might only have been another day in the gutter that is private radio, except for the fact that this kind of sordid speech is catching on – not in the parlors of privilege, but in the ultimate cage fighting arena that was once Main Street.

Somehow, for many otherwise “decent” folk, appalling discourteousness has become a virtue. And, the more appalling, the greater the virtue.

“Civility in America should be an inalienable right,” wrote Jack Leslie, chairman of the international public relations firm Weber Shandwick, last year. “Americans have a right to defend their names and explain their actions and opinions, but the increasing

unruliness is worrisome and demands attention and new solutions.”

In a study, entitled “Civility in America 2011”, Leslie and his co-authors observed: “Without a doubt, the past 12 months have been tumultuous when it comes to how civility has played out on the national stage. Several high-profile events accentuate how civility has infiltrated our everyday conversation and sense of well-being – Donald Trump’s ‘birther’ investigation of President Obama, Chicago Bulls’ Joakim Noah swearing at a fan on camera, online comments about CBS war correspondent Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Tahrir Square and Charlie Sheen’s radio rants.”

Still, before we, in the apocryphally polite kingdom of Canada, begin clucking our disapprovals, we might want train our jaundiced eyes on the Houses of Parliament, where our duly elected members are consumed with publicly recriminating their opposite numbers on everything from privacy legislation to automated phone calls.

Surely, the Internet teaches us nothing about crass, coarse and despicable behaviour we didn’t already know in our profane, infantile hearts.

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.

Against the dirty tricks of Richard Nixon’s White House, the “robocalling” proclivities of certain partisan operatives, who may or may not work for certain political parties in Canada, appear quaintly prankish.

Lest we forget the appalling abuses of that paranoid administration in the sullen decade that followed the swinging sixties: Lies, graft, theft, influence peddling, fraud, money laundering and murder most foul (if not of persons, then of reputations rendered irreclaimable).

Watergate ruined a generation of voters who realized, to their abiding dismay, that there was no level to which a politician wouldn’t stoop, no gutter into which he wouldn’t plunge, to secure and maintain his grip on the machinery of public office.

And there is a direct line of descent from this shameful episode in American history to the pervasive cynicism that permitted the savings and loans debacle of the 1980s and ‘90s, the tech bubble of the early aughts, and the financial chicanery of 2007, which brought the world to the brink of a second Great Depression.

All of which is to say that, in a democracy, the true measure of any political scandal is the degree to which it tortures people’s faith in public institutions and, therefore, their definition of ethical behaviour in private life.

What did the fictional villain Gordon Gekko say in that Oliver Stone movie about Wall Street a few years back?

“The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. . .Greed is good.”

The question that now consumes Parliament is: Who made the rules that licensed a bunch of freelance troublemakers in as many as 39 Canadian ridings during last May’s federal election?

Who gave them permission to mislead voters about the location of ballot stations, the disposition of some candidates and the political affiliations of others?

Anyone? No one?

More importantly, perhaps: What impact did these shenanigans have on the integrity of the electoral system, the democratic process?

It’s not yet clear. Neither are individual memories.

I think I recall, for example, two or three late-night phone calls from shady-sounding characters demanding that I inconvenience myself in some ludicrous manner to support a local candidate, the intent of which, of course, was to annoy me into voting for his or her opposite number.

But the tissue of my recollection is threadbare. I remember far more lucidly a dream I had at around that time, when news of these intrusions were just breaking. It involved a talking computer, a la “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and it went like this:

“Hello, Alec. My name is HAL.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Whose Dave?”

“It can only be attributable to human error, Alec.”

“Look, I’m going to hang up now.”

“This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it, Alec.”

“Are you nuts?”

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do, Dave.”

“For the last time, my name is Alec.”

“Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”

In any case, I voted for the candidate of my uncoerced choice: no harm, no foul.

Still, I can’t claim the same for anyone else. There may yet emerge real examples of democracy derailed. Elections Canada is investigating, as it must, and those found culpable should be fined or jailed.

There’s nothing trivial about any attempt – either masterminded or spontaneous – to usurp the rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens.

I suspect, though, that the actual effects of these juvenile misadventures on our broad system of representation are far less deleterious than many of the injured claimants (Liberals, Greens, Conservatives, et al.) profess.

We may find, installed in Ottawa, a Parliament not so full of dirty tricks, as silly ones.

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.

Spring comes early to Washington, D.C., in this year when presidential ambition stoops to conquer the indifference of a weary electorate.

Already, eight months before the November ballot, Americans are warming to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his rise in the polls no mean feat given the hammer blows he’s absorbed over the past four years.

According to a recent AP-Gfk opinion survey (with an error margin of plus or minus 4.1), 57 per cent of eligible voters think Barack Obama “understands the problems of ordinary people”. A further 61 per cent believe he “will keep the country safe”. Another 56 and 78 per cent, respectively, say he’s “strong” and “likable”.

Of course, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “there are lies, damn lies, and then there are polls.” But even that formidable wag might have to concede an astonishing reversal of fortune in the affairs of a man who, only a year ago, commanded marginal public approbation and who now would handily beat any of the Republican candidates vying for his job in the fall.

In fact, from the beginning, this has been the Grand Old Party’s campaign to lose, and they’ve been managing that particular expectation with convincing style.

None of the contenders – Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul – compares well with his predecessors. It’s hard to imagine the late Ronald Reagan or the first George Bush arguing about the evils of contraception. As for poverty, Newt thinks it’s habit forming, like cigarettes or booze.

But even this fractious, off-putting nonsense cannot entirely explain Obama’s latent popularity. Something else is at work. Writing in a recent edition of The Atlantic, Senior Editor James Fallows (who was a speech writer for former President Jimmy Carter) puts it this way:

“What I’ve concluded is that Obama has shown the main trait we can hope for in a president – an ability to grow and adapt – and that the reason to oppose his reelection  would be disagreement with his goals, not that he proved unable to rise to the job. As time has gone on, he has given increasing evidence that the skills he displayed in (his first) campaign were not purely a fluke.”

Fallows cites three tangible accomplishments of Obama’s first term: Avoiding an economic catastrophe even worse than the one the United States and the world have been through; a demonstrable rescue of the nation’s image overseas; and health-care legislation that, despite its polarizing effect on the political landscape, will cover millions of previously uninsured people.

Of these, it’s impossible to know which posterity will honour most. But it is clear that Americans are beginning to feel more comfortable in their own skins. And the February report from the administration’s Council of Economic Advisors reflects this:

“The economy is continuing to recover from the most severe downturn since the Great Depression. Despite numerous adverse headwinds – both domestic and international – that threatened the recovery, the U.S. economy displayed notable resilience in 2011. Private non-farm employment growth averaged 174,000 jobs per month in 2011, and 218,000 jobs per month over the past three months (ending in January 2012). Private employers added more than 2.1 million jobs in 2011, the most in any year since 2005. . .Thanks, in part, to the President’s efforts to rescue the American auto industry, manufacturing companies have been adding jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. On net, 400,000 manufacturing jobs have been added in the past two years.”

All of which suggests, if nothing else, that the current occupant of the White House is at least addressing what most Americans care about. And it has nothing to do with political posturing, name-calling or fear-mongering.

“The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift,” Obama told a Washington crowd the other week. “ And we will act – not only to create jobs, but to lay foundation for growth.”

It may not yet be the late Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”, but it’s shaping up to be springtime for Barack Obama.

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 man in black hovers at the threshold of wakefulness, making offers he knows I cannot refuse.

“Privacy is illusory,” he says.

“Allow me to relieve you of your delusions,” he says.

“Keep your windows locked, if you like,” he says.

“I have a key to the front door,” he says.

Yet, this is no dream, no paranoid fantasy, no apocalyptic fable for the digital age. This is Canada, where the rights and freedoms forged in the foundries of a 145-year-old democracy threaten to topple under the weight of state imperiousness.

The men and women we thought we hired to keep us safe from unpardonable intrusions on our liberties have, instead, decided that security trumps choice and that secrecy is a privilege that should be conferred only on the mechanics of government.

And why not?

No one’s business is truly their own anymore.

Not when Facebook prepares to raise $100 billion through an initial public offering, promising potential investors big returns from the sale of user profiles to hungry advertisers and market researchers.

Not when the ubiquitous Google gets ready to launch a new privacy policy that will, in effect, strip their users naked.

According to an item in The Week, a compendium of news from around the world: “So much for ‘don’t be evil,‘ said Raakhee Mirchandani in BostonHerald.com. Google’s unofficial motto is now a cruel joke – that is, if you value your privacy. The company is rolling out an aggressive new policy on March 1, allowing it to combine data on users from all its platforms for the first time. Google will ‘cross-pollinate’ information from searches, emails on Gmail, YouTube videos, posts on Google+, and even applications on Android smartphones to create a ‘complete picture of who you are, what you read, where you are going, and what you’re up to.’”

The federal Department of Public Safety’s bill C-30 makes no such grandiose promises. It merely purports to give the cops better tools to track and trap perverts who troll for children online. In this, the new requirements it places on internet service providers are no different than those already installed in the United States and Europe. In fact, says Minister Vic Toews, “This is done as a matter of course.”

Still, the net is large and the slope slippery.

Writing in ITBusiness.ca recently, technology reporter Nestor Arellano points out, “There is no shortage of research which indicates that implementation of an online surveillance regime in the European Union and the United States have been fraught with flaws, abuse and costs.”

Indeed, he says, “A report released by the U.K-based civil liberties group, Big Brother Watch, paints a troubling picture of how law enforcement agents handle data that passes through their hands. The organization found that between 2007 and 2010,

243 police offices and staff received criminal convictions for breaching the country’s Data Protection Act (DPA); 98 police officers and staff were terminated for breaching DPA; and 904 police officers and staff were subjected to internal disciplinary procedures for breaching DPA.”

All of which suggest that similar abuses in Canada are not only possible, but likely. That’s not because law enforcement and government types are inherently evil, but because they are insufficiently equipped to appreciate the importance of personal privacy to the integrity of the code we take for granted in this country: Freedom is not a bargaining chip.

Curtailing it, however, does cost money.

The CBC reports that the price tag for requiring internet and telecommunications providers to collect and retain customer information will top $80 million. And that’s just for starters. The long-range cost of maintaining the system will probably exceed $10 million a year.

And, so, with Orwellian elegance, the nightmare continues.

“Put your cash on the table,” says the man in black as he rifles through your life.

“I don’t work for free,” he says.

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.