The Bruce Report

In the four decades since “Limits to Growth” hit the bookstands, legions of scientists have spent several hundred happy hours dismissing, defusing and debunking its apocalyptic predictions about the fate of the earth and civilization’s inevitable collapse.

As recently as this year, a commentary in the Globe and Mail reported on a “retrospective analysis” by Charles Kenny, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, who declares that industrial output is “nowhere near” the study’s “doomsday scenario.”

On the contrary, he says, the planet’s resources will persist because “the world economy is becoming increasingly lightweight. Industries consume fewer mineral resources for each dollar of output. As much as two-thirds of global economic activity consists of outputs that don’t. . .weigh anything at all – things such as entertainment, education, finance and health care.”

The commentator, himself, observed, “This shift toward a lightweight economy parallels the rise of service industries – from a 53-per-cent share of the global economy in 1970 to a 71-per-cent share in 2010.”

Yet, a new analysis suggests that the authors of that 1972 work, published at the zenith of white, liberal guilt, were chillingly close to the mark.

According to an item in a recent edition of Smithsonian magazine, “Australian physicist Graham Turner compared real-world data from 1970 to 2000 with the business-as-usual scenario (and) found the predictions nearly matched the facts. ‘There is a very clear warning bell being rung here,’ he says. ‘We are not on a sustainable trajectory.’”

In fact, Turner reports that each and every trend line – food per capita, services per capita, global pollution, remaining non-renewable resources, population, and industrial output per capita – is tracking as expected towards a crest, followed almost immediately by a fall sometime between 2020 and 2030.

How much verisimilitude we choose to lend these observations depends entirely on how much faith we have in the business of prognostication. After all, the world is not a simple organism whose behaviour often, or even ever, conforms to our ideas about cause and effect; a lot can happen in the span of ten years.

Still, one detects the reemergence of a familiar theme in the urgent, and perennially provocative, conversation about the future of the planet – one that insists the current pace of economic growth is unsustainable and, as there’s nothing we can do about it, we’d better get used to a slower lifestyle.

That, at least, appears to be the central argument of Jeff Rubin’s new book, “The End of Growth”. He’s the former chief economist at CIBC World Markets who penned “Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller” a few years back. This new work is his follow-up.

In a Globe and Mail blog post, Rubin writes that while the planet will never run out of oil and gas, humanity will exhaust recoverable reserves of the cheap stuff. That spells the end of growth as we know it.

“The relationship is straightforward,” he says. “Economic growth is a function of energy consumption. With national economies around the world once again forced to pay more than $100 (U.S.) for every barrel of oil consumed, a critical question must be asked – what happens when the world’s most important source of energy becomes unaffordable?”

A run on shoe leather, perhaps? Bicycles for everyone?

Not quite, but Rubin doesn’t think a low-growth, or even no-growth, world shouldn’t frighten anyone. He points out that some of the happiest people are those who  take things in their decelerating stride.

Naturally, he, like the “Limits to Growth” gang before him, is not without his critics. Still, he remains adamant, dismissing Canada’s present preoccupation with Alberta oil, for example, as “insignificant”.

Indeed, he says in a recent Financial Post interview, “I don’t care if there are billions of barrels in Eagle Ford, Bakken, the tar sands, the Brazilian sub-salt, the Arctic deepwater, Orinoco. That’s not really the point. If the prices needed to get that oil out of the ground are triple-digit prices, it’s as if those resources don’t exist because the economy won’t be able to afford to burn it.”

All of which may only prove that one man’s apocalypse is another’s rapture.

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 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.

One of the world’s most exalted consulting firms, KPMG, tells us that Moncton is Canada’s most affordable place to make a living. And it is, especially if you happen to be the bottom-feeder who plundered my bank account in the wee hours of March 25, Daylight Robbery Time.

Sunday proffered a typically marvelous spring morning in the Hub City. My wife and I had just spent a pleasant hour breakfasting at one of the more popular north-end  eateries, when I went to pay the bill.

“That’s odd,” I remarked to no one in particular. “My debit card isn’t working.”

I settled the tab with a Visa, and hopped over to my credit union. The bank machine, there, spat out a paper record which read: “Unauthorized usage; balance, $0.”

In something just shy of a panic, I asked my wife to try her card. “It’s all good,” she announced in due course. “There must be something wrong with your pin number.”

We pulled away from the curb, breathing more easily. I grabbed the transaction slip and mused about the good old days when money was something you stuffed in a mattress. That’s when I noticed all was not good.

The balance showing was significantly less than the amount I knew, for a fact, was in the account only 36 hours earlier: hundreds of dollars less, in fact.

Back at home, we fired up the Internet. Surely, this was a mistake; nothing more nefarious than an irritating convergence of various online banking glitches and cyberspace snafus that sometimes occurs but which is easily sorted.

No such luck as the awful truth hove into view on the remorseless computer screen: Since Friday night, somebody had lifted close to $1,500, in five sums, each fraudulent debit marked with the same unfamiliar memo, “Plus withdrawal”.

We racked our brains. Could we have suffered joint and temporary amnesia somehow, and made two withdrawals for identical amounts of $336.64? And what was that $501.96 debit about? Or the ones for $150 and $167? Had we engaged in some besotted orgy of consumerism and simply decided to forget?

No, we agreed, this was impossible. We had been “compromised”.

I love that word, “compromised”. So clinical, so dispassionate. Analogous terminology in a cancer ward might be “condition”. As it is, “compromised” is official banker-speak for “mugging”, which is what we had apparently endured without even knowing it was happening.

And we’re not the only ones.

The polite, efficient RCMP officer, who took our complaint, reports that debit-card theft in the Hub City is a growing, if not yet epidemic, problem. More than 50 people have filed reports about missing funds since the beginning of the month.

According to the Canadian Bankers Association, we, in this country, are among the biggest per capita users of debit cards in the world. It also reports that this particular variety of fraud happens “when thieves ‘skim’ or swipe the information off the magnetic stripe on the back of your card to create a duplicate of your card. They also have to capture your PIN to access your account. Debit card fraud can also happen if your card is lost or stolen and you haven’t taken steps to protect your PIN.”

Current chip technology eliminates the problem. But where some retailers do not offer this convenience, the dreaded swipe is the only recourse and, as my wife and I discovered, the road to financial perdition, if only for a few unhappy hours.

As I settled into a deep, troubled nap Sunday afternoon, the phone rang. It was an employee of my financial institution who wanted to assure me that my card had been cancelled and the pilfered funds were being reimbursed. Apparently, she and her colleagues had been in all weekend dealing with several “compromised” accounts.

As my misery loved company, I finally began to relax and, once again, think splendid thoughts about good, old Moncton town.

Still, that ratty mattress in the basement was looking downright beautiful by suppertime.

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 Moncton’s city councillors want to know what a first-class cultural venue looks like, they should check out London’s Southbank Centre, a 21-acre civic playground that hugs the Thames like a holiday beach.

Erected in 1951 to host the Festival of Britain – a post-war “tonic for the nation”, as one politician at the time described it – the complex has since grown to incorporate the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery.

Today, it’s the largest arts centre in Europe, attracting more than three million people a year with 1,000 musical, dance, literary and educational programs. And though it has about as much to do with sports as an orchestra does with a football pitch, it will play an essential role as a public meeting place during this summer’s Olympics.

Last Christmas, my wife and I spent an unseasonably sultry evening strolling its lively spaces after dark.

We had just emerged from a performance of something called “Sasha’s Snow Show”, a garden-variety European pantomime involving clowns, confetti, oversized balloons and enough saccharine to send us straight to the well-stocked bar on the lower mezzanine.

There, to my immense relief, a band played rock while patrons danced beneath spinning glitter balls. Over in a far corner, a dozen people gathered for what appeared to be a poetry reading but, after closer examination, was actually an impromptu seminar on the reigning government’s social agenda.

Soon, we were hungry and, looking for a quick bite, we boarded the singing elevator to the ground floor. “Down-down-down-down-down-DOWN”, came the pre-recorded voices of the Centre’s resident choir over the intercom. We decided to experiment. “Up-up-up-up-up-UP,” they trilled as we headed to the fourth.

It was close to midnight when we hit the street – the broad, gabled avenue where skateboarders, booksellers, readers, diners, lovers gathered to pursue their separate interests in a mall of convivial chaos.

And I thought of Moncton and its own downtown dreams.

The Hub City is not London, of course. We are 138,000 to their eight million. We have one chance to realize our urban potential. They have dozens. But the Southbank Centre, which was born from social necessity, does offer us useful lessons.

Too often, in Atlantic Canada, civic centres – ostensibly designed as magnets for people – become sterile edifices cut off from the streets they’re supposed to enhance. They become the very barriers to pedestrian engagement they were conceived to dismantle; their meeting spaces more like chambers of privilege for boards of trade, their rooms more like soundproof silos for chambers of commerce.

Moncton City Council’s decision to option the Highfield Square property for a new sports and entertainment facility – the jewel in its crown of downtown plans – is an encouraging step in the right direction. And Mayor George LeBlanc is correct to point out that while the development will not be easy to execute, “it is the perfect site for our new centre as it has frontage on Main Street. The location is a significant gateway to our downtown, and is within walking distance of neighbourhoods, many restaurants and other amenities in our downtown.”

But if and when the city manages to raise the funds to cover the estimated $100-million cost of construction, it will enter a fateful phase in the social contract it maintains with the public. Years of speculation, planning, talking, arguing, negotiating will evaporate as the tough business of putting bone and flesh to an idea begins.

What will it look like?

Another monument to a drive-through culture, so specifically “purposed” that it neither charms nor improves the urban landscape? Another architectural compromise in the standard operating practices that have undermined the development of public spaces in regional cities for decades?

Or will it reveal something new, something fresh, about our attitudes to the citizen square? Will it become our own vibrant, recreational, cultural playground – where everyone is welcome – along the banks of the Petitcodiac?

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.

Before the wise and ardent boosters of dear, old Hub City get carried away, speaking of a day when happy citizens fill the civic core with the gentle roar of conviviality, they might want to get out more than they evidently do.

A typical Sunday morning stroll along Moncton’s main drag requires the ambulatory dexterity of a mountain goat and the cast-iron stomach of a Peruvian ungulate. There, amid the smashed beer bottles and bodily fluids, go I.

Or I did last weekend, when it occurred to me that a city only gets the downtown it deserves, which is in Moncton’s case – judging by the soiled condition of its otherwise lovingly arranged cobblestones – a clear and present shame.

My wife and I spent Christmas in London, one of the world’s true cosmopolitan centres. It’s currently home to eight million souls of every ethnic, religious and economic persuasion. The American writer Henry James once described it as  a “giant animated encyclopedia with people for pages”.

But here’s the thing: At no point during my eight-day stay did I encounter a single cigarette butt, empty wine box, spent condom, or crust of vomit. None of the lamentable detritus of so-called urban life – the products of bad health and worse manners – obstructed me on my merry way to gawk at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

I can offer no explanation for such winsomeness in country that’s not especially renowned, as is Switzerland, for its public probities, except one: pride of place.

In his municipal revitalization manifesto, “Great Outdoors”, Boris Johnson, London’s mayor, puts it this way:

“Public spaces are part of what defines a city. They are the places where people come together to meet, talk, eat and drink, trade, debate or simply pass through. They shape the way communities and neighbourhoods mesh together. They inform the way everyone sees the city, and they contribute to the lives of its residents and the experiences of its visitors.”

Conversely, he says, “Shabby and hard to use public spaces can form barriers between people and places, create the impression that an area is struggling and unloved, and usher too many people into their cars to hurry through and away. While huge resources are focused, rightly so, on improving our housing and transport infrastructure, in recent years too little has been happening to make our network of outdoor spaces fit for the future.”

Sound familiar?

Bill Budd, the executive director of the Greater Moncton Planning District Commission, says: “The great potential of the downtown’s development is attainable as long as that change begins within five, six years.”

Respectfully, but no. That change must begin today, and not in the drawing rooms and planning chambers of City Hall and of its architectural operatives. It must begin in the hearts and minds of residents who decide that their downtown, like their backyards, actually belong to them.

Otherwise, all the blueprints for glittering convention centres, condominiums, apartment buildings, and sidewalk cafes are less useful than wall paper.

Bad habits are hard, but not impossible, to break. And, as always, good ones begin at home.

Instead of waiting for the city to clear the snow from your sidewalk, do it yourself. Rather than dumping your fall compostables onto the street, counting on the timely arrival of the leaf fairy, stuff a bag or two. And if you’re not metered, don’t use a hose to clean your driveway. Grab a broom. It’s cheap. I own three.

As the Lord Mayor of London observes about his own city, “It is often the local schemes that will have the greatest impact on quality of life.”

No less is true here if we somehow manage to find the pride that animates a new level of respect for our downtown, and choose to keep our public spaces as comely as we do our private 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.

Having once been poor, I don’t find anything morally uplifting in a social condition that turns a tin of tuna into a luxury item. Then again, I’m not a university researcher with way too much time, and other people’s money, on my hands.

Thanks to a new paper – the work of not one, but two teams of social scientists ensconced at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management – we now know that the richer you are, the more likely you are to be a dirty, rotten scoundrel.

So, naturally, the poorer you are, the more amply endowed you are with all the fine, golden-rule tropes and behavioural proclivities that make your dear, old Ma proud to call you “sonny.” (Unless, of course, she’s a Member of Parliament, in which case you might want to ask her what happened to all the tins of tuna).

Still, the real purpose of this study is not to extol the virtues of penury, but to vilify the characteristics of affluence in classic, leftish, liberal-guilt-trip fashion. The central conclusion is: “The increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favorable attitudes towards greed.”

That stunningly original observation comes from Paul Piff, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UC Berkeley and the paper’s lead author, who adds: “These findings have very clear implications for how increased wealth and status in society shapes patterns of ethical behaviour, and suggest that the different social values among the haves and the have-nots help drive these tendencies.”

Tell that to Bill and Melinda Gates or Warren Buffet or Ted Turner or Margaret McCain, each of whom have had more money than God and each of whom are now productively engaged in giving away their billions to causes even these California crack pots would consider worthy.

But lest we invite such exceptions to disprove Piff’s rule, let us, instead, attend to the research methodology, itself.

In one experiment, the “scientists” hired students to hide behind bushes at a busy San Francisco intersection and surreptitiously record which drivers were more polite than others. They identified an individual subject’s socio-economic class by the car he piloted. Expensive luxury cars were four times more likely than beaters to cut people off. Therefore, rich people are unprincipled goons. Enough said.

Well, not quite.

In another field test, according to a UC Berkeley news release, “participants were assigned tasks in a laboratory where a jar of candy, reserved for visiting children, was on hand, and were invited to take (one) or two. Upper-class participants helped themselves to twice as much as did their counterparts in other classes.”

Maybe, they were hungrier. Who knows?

In fact, neither of these misadventures in empiricism passes the laugh test.

I’m not exactly destitute, and I drive a really cheap car. I’m not exactly rich, and I have leased a Mercedes. I have noticed that I am far more deferential to my fellow road mates while seated in the latter, and for two reasons: One, I want everyone to appreciate just how cool and collected I am behind the wheel of a Merc; and, two, I’m scared to death I might scratch the thing.

This reveals as much about my bank account as it does about my ethical standards – which is, in either case, not much.

A more intriguing study, done a few years back by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, concludes that avarice – which infects poor and rich, alike – may not be as responsible for bad behaviour as we may like to think. “Conduct described as unethical and blamed on ‘greed’ is sometimes a consequence of market competition,” the professor observed.

What’s more, he rather controversially posits, one man’s pitchfork is another’s halo, depending on the relative amounts of filthy lucre they happen to have on them at any given time: “While child labour might be a bad idea in a world with good access to capital markets and educational opportunities, for many families in the developing world, the alternative to child labor is malnutrition and disease.”

If my choice is between being poor and good, and rich and bad, I’ll take Door No. three: Getting richer and better all the time.

And I’ll sleep just fine, thank you very much.

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.

It’s not the first time a band of American advocates, whose ideological stripes ought to complement those of the reigning Tories, has told the Government of Canada’s  imperious moralists that they wear no clothes.

Last summer, a group of conservative jurists and Republican legislators from Texas, the erstwhile “hang ‘em high” state, advised Harpertown that its tough-on-crime agenda was wrong-headed, counter-productive, and unnecessarily costly.

They should know, they insisted, because they tried it before falling flat on their bankrupted behinds.

Far more sensible than locking people up and throwing away the key for relatively minor offenses would be investing in community initiatives, prevention, education and sustainable sentencing: A reversion to the more enlightened prescript of letting the punishment fit the crime.

Now, an organization that calls itself Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) is entreating Ottawa to abandon its holy war on drugs for the elegantly simple reason that it doesn’t work, and never has.

In a letter addressed to the Senate, copied to “Prime Minister Stephen Harper and all Canadian Premiers”, and signed by three retired chiefs of police, three former customs and IRS agents, three retired municipal and superior court justices, four former state prosecutors and assistant attorneys general, and a bevy of corrections officers and cops, LEAP writes:

“We are respectfully asking you to endorse the taxation and regulation of marijuana in Canada. We also emphasize that the Prime Minister’s recent comments on the issue, stating that marijuana law reform in Canada would cause your country a  ‘great deal of trouble’ at the U.S. border and inhibit Canada-U.S. trade, are inaccurate and alarmist.”

In fact, the group states, the opposite is true.

“Marijuana policies in the Unites States have become much more progressive than those in Canada. For instance, 16 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have passed laws allowing some degree of medical use of marijuana, and 14 states have taken steps to decriminalize marijuana possession.

“In November 2008, voters in Massachusetts adopted a state-wide marijuana decriminalization law by a margin of 65 per cent to 35 per cent. On September 30, 2010, then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law S.B. 1449, a bill that decriminalizes the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. The bill reduces simple possession from a misdemeanor to an infraction. This law treats possession of less than 28.5 grams of cannabis like a traffic ticket, punishable by a $100 fine.

“We assume this news will not make you consider closing the borders with the United States.”

LEAP is, of course, utterly correct. So are four former B.C. attorneys general when they say, as they did in their own letter to Premier Christy Clark last week, “We are fully aware that British Columbia lost its war against the marijuana industry many years ago. . .The case demonstrating the failure and harms of marijuana prohibition is airtight. The evidence? Massive profits for organized crime, widespread gang violence, easy access to illegal cannabis for our youth, reduced community safety, and significant  – and escalating – costs to taxpayers.”

It’s no coincidence, of course, that these and other protests by those who have actually prosecuted the hyperbolically dubbed war on drugs in North America (and whose credibility and dispassion are, therefore, beyond question) coincide with the federal government’s determination to impose mandatory minimums, come what may, on pot smokers and others who, for every rational reason, do not belong behind bars.

That’s why, despite such informed opposition, we should not expect this government to soften its stance against the dreaded weed.

Appearances, notwithstanding, this is a crew that invariably takes its marching orders from its collective gut, which its pandered right-wing base routinely feeds and waters with one humble donation, one extreme sentiment, at a time.

Legalizing, regulating and taxing a substance that the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention states is downright benign, compared with  either tobacco or alcohol, is politically risky business precisely because it makes too much sense.

Who cares if it, once legitimized, promises billions of dollars a year in tax revenues and equal amounts in savings to the criminal justice system?

We’ll stick with the transparent absurdity of our naked ideologies.

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.

As millions of Canadians fulminate over the Harper government’s determination to track their travels through cyberspace, millions more think nothing of providing social networking sites with the right to merchandise their very identities.

Granted, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’ simple-minded justification for Big Brother’s snooping into the lives of law-abiding Canadians is infuriating. (No, Mr. Toews, just because I disagree with your tactics for fighting kiddie porn doesn’t mean I’m a latent pedophile).

And, yes, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s utterly baseless attack on the NDP for masterminding a Twitter campaign against his cabinet colleague is perplexing. (Unless, of course, you’re a conspiracy theorist who clearly knows that the smears were orchestrated by the Conservatives, themselves, to tap the pressure surrounding their pending lawful access legislation).

But if you really want to bark at those who actually do hold the keys to your “Dear Diary”, take a good, long look in the mirror. You won’t find Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg standing at your shoulder. But that’s only because he doesn’t require your services anymore.

In fact, the 27-year-old, Harvard-educated J. Edgar Hoover of the Web 2.0 world has amassed so much free, personal information from his 865 million “friends” across the planet, he’s ready to take this “private” trove formally “public” with an initial share offering worth more than. . .wait for it. . .$100 billion.

According to The Week, a compendium of international news, “My, how far Facebook has come, said Michael Wolff in the London Guardian. . .When the stock sale is held, the company will have enough cash ‘to buy whatever it needs’, and extend its reach into our lives even further. Soon, a billion users could be logging on to watch movies, hear music, play games, make phone calls, buy new shoes, or do virtually anything inside this private universe.”

Of course, none of this would be possible without you and your desperate desire to be admired, respected, loved, or just plain noticed by complete strangers who, if they thought about it, don’t really care whether that extra toe on your left foot is a genetic gift from your lute-playing ancestor in the court of King Henry VIII.

Still, as The Week observes, “Every time users freely share about themselves and their desires. . .every time they share a link, click a ‘like’ button, visit a website, or change their relationship status, it becomes part of Facebook’s file on them, which enables businesses to target individuals with specific advertising.”

If you don’t mind the ceaseless bombing run of Internet marketers pitching hair replacement therapies and naturopathic remedies for everything from bi-polar disorder to erectile dysfunction, then bully for you.

But Facebook’s pending IPO foretells a geometric expansion of the spider’s web.

A hundred billion bucks, most market observers concede, is a ludicrously large sum for a company that only now generates an annual profit of about $1 billion. To monetize such an investment, networking site will have to deploy even cannier strategies to demand even more specific and sensitive information from its voyeuristic users who will, naturally, comply.

Indeed, it’s not too ludicrous to imagine that, at some point, unscrupulous governments might make profitable mischief of this astonishing, largely unregulated resource, as they flex their Orwellian muscles to discover pretty much anything they please about their hapless citizens.

“We live in public” has become the popular mantra of the age. It’s entirely possible Minister Toews and company appreciate this truism better than their critics suppose. After all, what’s the big deal about requiring the country to surrender some of its privacy rights if the cause – fighting child pornography – is a noble one? Hell, we already sacrifice much more for far less. And we’re stunningly happy to do so.

As we correctly castigate political leaders who may now threaten the interests we elected them to protect, we would also serve ourselves marvelously well by reviewing the faustian deals we continue to make with parties not so similarly enjoined.

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.