The Bruce Report

In my effort to avoid perceiving the world through rose-tinted glasses (especially now, a week after Valentine’s Day), I continue to marvel how a “holiday” that celebrates love, but is named for a martyred Christian, sticks to the zeitgeist like cheap perfume.

Was there ever a more cloying excuse to make a thorough ass of oneself.

Okay, I grant you, St. Patrick’s Day comes close, but at least that occasion makes more apt use of the famous quip by American poet Ogden Nash: “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” (The famous wordsmith also offered the best advice ever conceived to Valentine-besotted sweethearts: “To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the loving cup, whenever you’re wrong, admit it; whenever you’re right, shut up.”)

Perhaps it’s the time of year, when the wind whips down from the North Pole to freeze our feet of clay. We need a. . .let’s call it. . .“pick-me-up” to remind us that spring – when a young man’s fancy truly turns to thoughts of love – is just around the corner.

More likely, though, it’s a global conspiracy, manufactured by greeting card companies and their willing dupes in the mass and social media, to separate us from our pocket change before we notice that the chocolates we obtained for our significant others actually taste like boiled cabbage.

And when I say “global conspiracy”, I mean it. Check out this report from Associated Press:

“Iraq’s capital is embracing Valentine’s Day this year with a huge public display of affection in what its residents say is the nation’s most amorous celebration of the holiday ever. . .After decades of war and dictator rule, and with improving security, Iraqis say that are able to relax and enjoy. . .Others believe the recent burst of text messages, mobile phones and use of the Internet among Iraqi youth has helped foster romance.”

It’s a phenomenon one might properly term an “Arab Spring-In-Their-Step” which is also tracking in that unlikeliest of hedonistic nations, Iran.

“Although the ruling clerics and hardline politicians have been waging a campaign against what they call ‘decadent’ cultural imports,” says the AFP news service, “the Christian day dedicated to amorous displays has so far survived. Part of the reason could be the sheer number of young adults in the country: 60 percent of the 75-million-strong population is under the age of 30.”

In fact, I begrudge these displays – coming as they do from benighted circumstances – less than I do the more familiar groaners dutifully retailed in the west to substantiate the day and its surrounding weeks with actual meaning.

“Why, exactly, do we put up with it every year?” the Globe and Mail asks in an editorial. “The bottom line is, few people have ever been unhappy to be told, ‘I love you,’ by the one they love.”

No kidding, Sherlock. But wait, there’s more:

“It is genuinely difficult for even the most clear-eyed and unromantic person not to acknowledge – and even benefit from – Valentine’s Day. This occurs either through a collaborative disdain for a day that reaffirms a couple’s values and, hence, their bond, or via the more usual route of love notes, fancy dinners and other gifts exchanged in the spirit of the day, with or without a knowing wink.”

Collaborative disdain? Spirit of the day?

Leave it to the good, gray Globe to reclassify sentimental hogwash as social utilitarianism. Then again, it assures us, “There are worse things that can happen to us in February.”

Indeed, there are. There is, for example, the $26 billion settlement U.S. mortgage lenders agreed, earlier this month, to pay a million American homeowners they ripped off during the financial meltdown – homeowners that should have receive, if life were fair, about ten times that amount.

The industry licked its chops and called its “generosity” an early valentine, because nothing says “I love you” like a check for two-grand when your bank wants 20.

Perhaps, an American economist was on to something, after all, when he anonymously posted this devotional in the Twitterverse last Friday:

“My love is elastic, my commitment too big to fail.”

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.

Tiny Okotoks, Alberta, may enjoy the incongruous distinction of being the nation’s fastest-growing “metropolis” (43 per cent between 2006 and 201, according to the latest census released Wednesday), but it’s Moncton that wins the prize for sheer audacity.

Statistics Canada reports that despite its lack of natural resources, English-language universities, and major manufacturing operations, the Hub City is, officially, Atlantic Canada’s most rapidly agglomerating urban centre, and New Brunswick’s largest.

In fact, with a resident growth rate of 9.7 per cent since 2006, Moncton (population: 138,644) easily outpaced Saint John (4.4 per cent to 127,761), Fredericton (9.3 per cent), Halifax (4.7 per cent to 390,328), Charlottetown (8.7 per cent to 64,487), and St. John’s (8.8 per cent to 196,966).

The double-digit expansion of what ought to be considered Alberta hamlets (Okotoks‘ population is a mere 24,511) is easily explained by their proximity to oil-rich cities, such as Calgary.

Moncton’s stellar performance, however, is a tad more complicated; it represents a broader trend that now seems inexorable across the country.

Canada is becoming if not predominantly urban then certainly urban-dependent. And nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced than it is, ironically, along the lightly peopled, traditionally rural East Coast, where the populations of smaller communities, such as Miramichi, Edmundston, New Glasgow and Cape Breton have declined by between 1.1 and 2.5 per cent over the past five years.

Moncton’s allure – its schools, jobs and cultural amenities – is sufficient to pluck increasingly young and ambitious workers from the hinterland of northern New Brunswick just as its affecting quality of life and economic opportunities continue to attract newcomers from around the world.

All of which raises serious questions for policy makers and legislators as they grapple with deep annual deficits and even deeper levels of public debt in this and every other province of the region.

To what extent should governments invest in small towns and their resident, often failing, industries when the exodus to the larger centers of population is a documented fact of life in 21st Century? If the purpose of public services is to furnish people with the programs they need to survive where they live and work, shouldn’t those services now concentrate in the cities?

In fact, these are questions for all levels of government to answer.

Ottawa’s recent experiment with economic stimulus funding attempted to distribute development money fairly and equitably without much regard to the demographic transformation underway. That’s one reason why underpopulated communities across the Atlantic region possess one more rink, splash pad or soccer field than they can use.

New Brunswick’s efforts to resuscitate industrial leadership in the rural north is, while laudable, deflecting attention (and money) from the real loci of self-sustaining prosperity: Saint John, Fredericton and, of course, Moncton.

Indeed, the sorry and steadily crumbling state of municipal infrastructure is not merely a challenge for the Atlantic region.

According to a Canada West Foundation report not long ago, “Urban infrastructure has become a serious issue. The combined infrastructure deficit of the six big western Canadian cities (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, and Winnipeg) for the 2003 fiscal year totalled $564 million, which is a conservative estimate. On a per capita basis, Winnipeg had the largest annual infrastructure deficit ($298), followed by Edmonton ($188), Regina ($167), Calgary ($150), Saskatoon ($147) and Vancouver ($87).”

Meanwhile, the group declared, “Estimates of the total municipal infrastructure debt in Canada have been as high as $57 billion. Estimates of the infrastructure debt for all governments in Canada (federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal) could be as high as $125 to $130 billion.”

And the problem has only deepened over the past five years of census taking.

As New Brunswick’s elected officials scramble to reset the button on the province’s economic future, they’d be wise to start where, increasingly, the real action and opportunities are: The metropolis.

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 I say, hypothetically, that a particular peace officer – the enfant terrible, let’s say, of a local neighbourhood beat – is a rabble-rousing, trouble-making bully, then said cop might have reason to haul my butt into court.

But he wouldn’t have a ghost-in-the-machine of a chance of persuading his buddies to bust open my door, brandish a warrant, abscond with the tools of my trade, and haul my aforementioned butt off to jail.

Then again, I’m not Charles LeBlanc, the Fredericton-based gadfly and social activist who cooled his heels in a provincial cell (for six hours last week before being released) on suspicion of criminal libel.

Apparently, the blogger had written something nasty about one of the capital city’s finest. And some policemen, though not all, suffer from a painful condition known as paper-thin dermatitis.

Of course, this was not LeBlanc’s first run-in with the law and its political masters. Over the years, he has garnered a well-earned reputation for noisy, intemperate, epithet-laced speech. It’s cost him access to the Legislature, public support and credibility. On January 16, just days before the raid on his apartment, he pleaded guilty, in a separate incident, to disturbing the peace.

But like him or loathe him, LeBlanc is not the issue. Due process is.

Invoking Section 301 of the Criminal Code – which states, “everyone who publishes a defamatory libel is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years” – is not only heavy handed; it’s absurd.

The standard for a charge of this kind in this country is so high, it’s practically impossible to prove (which is one reason why four provinces have already declared it unconstitutional; that is, its prosecution is more likely to render mischief than justice).

To obtain a guilty judgement under this section, the Crown must show, without a shadow of doubt, that the defendant knew he issued defamatory (meaning: false) statements. And with the stakes as grave as they would be, why would anyone freely admit they were aware they were lying when they mouthed off?

The best a prosecutor can expect, under these circumstances, is a concession of well-rounded ignorance from the indicted party: “I do not know what I said was wrong; nor do I know what I said was not right.”

All of which explains why libel cases are almost exclusively the province of civil court, where the wiggle room is wide, settlements are common and punishments are invariably monetary.

Still, even if criminal libel were the appropriate avenue in this case, the investigation would have to be spotlessly clean, above reproach, devoid of even the appearance of conflict. That’s a somewhat difficult feat to achieve when the allegedly offended party is a member the police force that’s collecting evidence on his behalf. (Sheesh, don’t cops have lawyers?)

“Some people are sick of Charles LeBlanc and they are happy to see something some down on him,” Fredericton City Councillor Jordon Graham posted to his blog  earlier this week. “And other people are concerned about the statement of the police force going after somebody who has clearly been on their hit list for quite some time.”

Precisely. It’s not merely the perversion of the law that should concern Fredericton Police Chief Barry MacKnight; it’s the appearance of perversion in New Brunswick’s seat of democratic government.

There’s also the chilling effect on public perceptions of civil liberties. Is LeBlanc the canary in the coal mine? When does “scratching an itch,” as Graham trenchantly muses, become a clear, if unintended, expansion of police powers at the expense of free speech. Should we all now expect a knock at the door from an angry cop, incensed by our portrayal of him in the public square, armed with an arrest warrant?

Likely, cooler heads will eventually prevail and the issue will settle with someone in a position of adult responsibility remembering what dear, old mother used to say.

Something about sticks and stones.

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.

Apparently, the largest encyclopedia in human history, the venerable and omniscient Wikipedia, never heard of the escape button located in the upper left quadrant of the more than four billion keyboards currently in use all over the the world.

If it had, its long-gone Wednesday “blackout” of its site to “raise awareness” and protest pending legislation by U.S. Congress, which it says “could fatally damage the free and open Internet,” might have worked.

As it was, I obtained access to the online tome – when I should have been denied entry – simply by pecking “esc” repeatedly before the splash page loaded fully. Within seconds, all four million articles lay waiting for my perusal.

Indeed, I used this “workaround” to determine what the compendium, itself, says about workarounds. To wit: “A bypass of a recognized problem in a system. . .typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution is needed. . .brittle in that they will not respond well to further pressure from a system beyond the original design.”

Yeah, sure. Wiki wishes.

But my real point is that I am, by no one’s definition, a code maker. Hell, I can’t change the ribbon in a standard typewriter. (Remember that old-fangled contraption? Ask your grandfather).

Still, after 20 years of cruising the Internet for fun and profit, even I know how to break a block activated by simple JavaScript. And if didn’t, I could have found out easily enough just by trolling other antechambers of cyberspace.

“You can still use the site by creating a new Ad Blocking Rule in Adblock Plus,” one geek helpfully advises.

“You only really need to block the JavaSript,” another assures. “NoScript does the job as well.”

In fact, Wikipedia’s somewhat lackluster gatekeeping is an object lesson for all who seek to control the flow, disposition and use of Internet content, including, ironically,  those who the encyclopedia and other providers and browsers now oppose: A few Republican politicians and their friends in the entertainment industry who want to punish or shut down online thieves of copyrighted material (mostly, movies and music).

In the crosshairs are two bills introduced before Congress last year – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) – that would give content owners the legal tools with which to choke off business to sites they claim infringe on their rights. The targets of their ire are, for the time being, foreign pirates, which are not subject to U.S. law.

So far, so good. As a so-called creative worker myself, my bank account rises and falls by the number of times I can persuade a client to pay for what I happen to be thinking on any particular day.

But, as in so many contentious cases, the devil is in the details. The proposed legislation recognizes that its grasp is effectively limited by its reach in overseas markets. To solve the problem, it requires U.S.-based providers and browsers (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Flikr and the almighty Google) to “play ball” and censor its worldwide connections on demand and without judicial oversight.

Or, as one online source explains: “If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of ‘The Dark Knight’, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull ads and finances from it and – most dangerously – that the site’s Internet Service Provider prevent people from even going there.”

Hence, Wikipedia’s decision to protest this week by “going black” for 24 hours.

Yet, the larger and more important question is: What makes anyone think that either SOPA or PIPA, as they are currently configured, will actually work any better than Wiki’s brownout did?

The proposed Acts are ludicrously blunt instruments that are far more likely to damage the myopic lawmakers who now support them than a “free and open Internet.”

Beyond this, they are virtually unenforceable, and any law that can’t be enforced gets what it deserves: It gets ignored as tens-of-thousands of online denizens operate their various workarounds to popular acclaim.

Online piracy is a real problem. But its solution (if there is one) lies in forging sensible, nimble and nuanced partnerships among those who create and those aggregate and distribute content.

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.

Dawn refuses to break in the long, dark night of the Canadian labour movement’s soul. And even those who cling to the notion that a fair wage for permanent work is not only a human right, but necessary to a productive and competitive economy, question whether morning will ever come.

In a stunning move last week, breathtaking for both its arrogance and sheer aplomb, the trans-national owner of Ontario-based Electro-Motive Canada, told the union representing more than 400 workers to accept a 50 per cent pay cut, no cost-of-living adjustment and a higher co-payment for health coverage.

Take it or leave it, Caterpillar Inc. of Illinois said. Unsurprisingly, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) rejected the “offer”, prompting the corporate giant, which posted a third quarter profit in 2011 of $1.1 billion (USD) on sales and revenues of nearly $16 billion, to lock out its workers on New Year’s Day. (In a cruelly ironic twist, the company reported in a news release that its financial results were, in fact, “record breaking”.)

“I don’t recall it ever happening where a company in that situation came at workers to cut their wages in half,” mused a clearly astonished Mike Moffat, a professor of labour at University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business.

Truly, wondered CAW president Ken Lewenza, “How do we negotiate?”

But it was Electro-Motive employee Paul Dona who hit the nail squarely on the head when he said, “It’s not just about the union. It’s about the whole country. Where the hell’s it stop?”

Where, indeed?

These are hard times not only for Canadian workers, who have seen their manufacturing jobs vanish in unprecedented numbers, but for the organizations that have historically represented them and negotiated their salaries and protections.   Although union membership has actually increased since 1997 (by about 19 per cent or 660,000), density, or membership as a proportion of the labour force, has dropped.

“Total employment grew faster than union membership, rising by 23 per cent over the same period (1997-2007),” explains Pradeep Kumar, Professor Emeritus of Industrial Relations at Queens’s University, in a 2008 article published by Our Times magazine. “Thus, union density declined. The continuing losses in the private sector and male unionization rates were most noticeable.”

What this tells him and other experts is that “the labour movement has been facing a new environment, one that includes mass plant closures and the relentless privatization of public assets and services, with global warming as a backdrop, threatening to deprive much of humankind of a secure future.”

But it goes deeper than this.

With notable exceptions, Canadian unions, particularly in the private sector, have been sidelined into near irrelevance thanks to deregulated markets that have hastened the concentration of capital in global conglomerates. The same forces that have merged smaller companies into larger ones – competition from low-cost, emerging nations; reduced government oversight; even right-wing, ideological triumphalism – have dismantled the social contracts between owners and employees that bargaining units once effectively defended.

To an extent, labour representatives, themselves, have exacerbated their woes. “Organizing . . .workers is critical to the survival of the. . .movement,” Kumar writes. “It is particularly important in the current environment where employment in non-union workplaces is growing faster than in unionized workplaces, and unions find themselves running just to stay in the same place.”

But, he says, “the organizing rate over recent years (2000-2005) is now less than one-half of the average in the 1980s and early 1990s. Data also suggests that the decline in organizing is pervasive across jurisdictions and is not limited to the number of newly organized employees, but is also evident in the number of certifications granted and the number of applications filed.”

All of which spells doom for the future of progressivism in this country. And that’s a shame, for despite their occasional indulgences and excesses, unions have always been the most reliable advocates for the dignity, and central role, of work.

What governments and corporations too often fail to appreciate is that good, long-term jobs are not the by-products of economic growth; they are the building blocks of it, if only because people pay the taxes that keep governments in the black and corporations reasonably certain of the public perks they can expect to reap.

Who remains to remind us of this as our nights, indentured to faceless institutions, grow longer?

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 often that municipal officials in the Greater Moncton area make pugilistic buffoons of themselves. Still, you have to hand it to them: When they do, they do it with gusto, if not panache.

Of course, that’s not much comfort for members of 163 households, representing 500 people, in Dover Estates, who have been without city water for a week because their subdivision’s owner and Dieppe Council, or its bureaucracy, can’t seem to agree on who owes whom how much for services that may or may not have been rendered and consumed over the past five years.

It’s complicated.

In one corner is Norman Berube who reportedly claims he told the city more than four years ago that he neither wants nor needs its water, as his own wells are more than sufficient to supply his subdivision.

In the other is local officialdom which insists that the good fellow owes it money – as much as $700,000 – for water its system has carried, under contract, to the property since 2007, regardless of Berube’s preferences.

Flailing about in the middle, where the body blows and sucker punches come fast and furious, are the residents (some of whom own their domiciles), who, after mutely witnessing this spectacle lo these many moons, received all of ten days’ notice before Dieppe turned off the tap.

Berube may or may not be within his rights to hook up the subdivision to his own cisterns (though, in the absence of a formal environmental assessment by the provincial government, probably not). And there is some question about the cash he collected, formally earmarked for public water bills, from residents.

But these are legal matters that do not, in any way, concern innocent bystanders whose only crime has been to pay their obligations on time. And the city’s light-hearted apology (one source told me an official actually had the temerity to claim that he and his confreres had been well within their jurisdiction to provide only 48 hours notice of shut off) amounts to nothing more than crocodile tears; a brand of cynical arrogance we don’t expect, and should not tolerate, from what has been, more often as not, an enlightened branch of government.

For years, if not decades, this urban area’s municipal fathers and mothers have distinguished themselves by the good examples they’ve set for their peers in other centers: Productive and cooperative approaches to the restoration of the Petitcodiac River, innovative and serious-minded action on sewage treatment, and savvy “smart-city” strategies for technological and cultural improvement of downtown districts, among other worthy initiatives.

By contrast, the Halifax Regional Municipality has lost count of the number of  black eyes it has given itself careening into the doors it has slammed in its own face – everything from dodgy expense accounts, to failed concert promotion schemes, to absurdly stringent property development regulations, to a waste-water treatment plant that seems capable of doing everything except treat waste water.

Meanwhile, the Greater Toronto Area’s council is so polarized by ideological extremism, it’s a miracle that basic services – garbage collection, public transportation, parking, parks and recreation, and neighbourhood policing – do not implode under the weight of various elected officials’ putrid self-regard. After all, this is a city whose mayor thinks that “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” is part of a left-wing conspiracy to dislodge him from his suburban driveway and abscond with his wife and children.

Still, matters here might be progressing towards a resolution more typical of the area’s traditional esprit de corps.

The Dover Estate’s new residents association has persuaded the subdivision’s owner to, at least, meet with them. This week, they will also sit down with the local Rentalsman, officials from the provincial departments of environment and health and, finally, Dieppe councillors, themselves.

Then, perhaps, there will be no need to banish the clowns from the only ring where intelligent, sensitive representation thumps short-sighted, officious arrogance every time: The ballot box.

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.

Something evil slithers this way, a creeper that saps our strength and strangles the promise of Canadian peaceableness. Only Ottawa, blessed by uncommon insight, can rescue us from the enemy. For, crime is on the march.

Except, it isn’t.

A Statistics Canada report earlier this summer settled the issue. Not only are we more secure than we’ve been in half-a-century, all types of crime are down. In fact, the agency declares the overall rate of offense is 17 per cent lower than it was a decade ago, a finding that moved Steve Sullivan, executive director of Ottawa Victims Services, to suggest that “if the government is telling taxpayers it is going to spend millions and billions of dollars on getting tough on crime, I think the it at least has to have some evidence that it is addressing a real problem. Neither these statistics nor the other surveys we have would suggest that we are in some kind of crime wave.”

None of which is motivating changes of government hearts, of course. The omnibus justice bill seeks to renovate and expand federal penal institutions at a cost of more than $2.1 billion. This, at a time when the budget for the Correctional Service of Canada – which has increased 87 per cent since 2006 – is expected to jump to $3.1 billion by 2013.

Still, there’s another form of crime, which rarely merits the attention of this country’s law and order types, that’s far more socially and economically deleterious than all the rank illegalities combined.

In its recent How Canada Performs analysis, released in July, the Conference Board of Canada declared, “The richest group of Canadians increased their share of total national income while poor and middle-income individuals lost ground since 1993. Even though income levels for the poorest group of Canadians also rose minimally, the gap between the rich and the poor in Canada widened. . .While the poor are minimally better off in an absolute sense, they are significantly worse off in a relative sense.”

But structural income inequality is not just a crime against the poor; it’s a blow to the economy, itself, as it robs the country of skills that would otherwise enhance industrial productivity and global competitiveness. It also places an enormous and unnecessary burden on the social programs corporate and personal income taxes support. And the greater the disparity, the greater the burden.

According to the Center for American Progress, “The costs to the United States associated with childhood poverty total about $500 billion a year, or the equivalent of four per cent of GDP. Each year, childhood poverty reduces productivity and economic output by about 1.3 per cent of GDP. It raises the costs of crime by 1.3 per cent of GDP. It raises health expenditures and reduces the value of health by 1.2 per cent  of GDP.”

Meanwhile, The Conference Board estimates that the chasm between the real average incomes (based on a statistical median) of the richest group of Canadians and the poorest grew from $92,300 in 1976 to $117,500 in 2009. It did so just as labour productivity rates plummeted, university enrollment plateaued and spending on public schools dried up. The link should be obvious to anyone serious about public policy.

Canada doesn’t need new prisons to warehouse a fictional surge in the number of criminals who populate our nightmares. It requires a new and honest effort to distribute educational opportunities – early childhood and adult learning programs, and work training initiatives to address specific labour shortages in the marketplace – to the least prosperous among us.

Without this commitment, we law-abiding scions of respectability have only ourselves to blame for the evil that slithers toward 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.

Canada’s self-proclaimed national newspaper has seen the enemy and he is handcuffed to a tent of Turkic design, in a downtown Toronto park, bleating, “I can’t leave, because I don’t have a key for this thing.”

Oh, once brave and noble occupier, what’s happened to your swift and mighty sword? Did you lose it somewhere between the yurt and the porta-potty?

Or have you, so soon, grown weary of your fate, the fate of all of society’s temporary lodgers: To become, in the end, unwilling nomads at the hands of those who pine for a stroll in the rolling glen without having to see or smell you?

Le’s face it: The so-called Occupy movement, which began on Wall Street in September and spread around the world faster than a web virus, is a bust. Highjacked by presumption, pretension and absurdity, it ranks right up there, for cluelessness, with the children’s revolution in Australian footwear.

But is that any reason for the Globe and Mail’s editorial writers to pounce like bullies in a school yard?

“The Occupiers are the immediate menace,” they declared last week. “Never mind what they denounce. Not only should they be obliged to dismantle the. . .barbecues. . .they’ve set up. . .and leave between the hours of midnight and 5:30, as ordered by a judge – they should be told to get out altogether.”

The Globe’s provocateur-in-chief Margaret Wente followed with a few choice words of her own about the “infatuated” press corps. “The media couldn’t help projecting  their romantic fantasies on the occupiers,” she wrote in her regular column. “The media speculated that perhaps we were witnessing the first stirrings of a global movement, led by a new generation of Internet-empowered youth demanding fundamental reforms to the excesses of capitalism.”

Instead, thundered the newspaper’s editorial board, “Women are sworn at in the ugliest terms, simply for walking their dogs. Men are assaulted. Porta-potties stink. Smoke hangs in the air from open fires. Protestors brawl, smoke marijuana in the open.”

Hmmmm. . .swearing, brawling, odious plumbing, and the public inhalation of several varieties of sweet ganja. Sounds very much like a Saturday night on Yonge Street (or so they tell me).

Still, I take the Globe’s point (mostly). Such uncivil behavior is intolerable and should be dealt with accordingly. That’s why we employ police officers: To insulate us, when they can, from miscreants.

Where we depart company, however, is at the suitability of the term, “immediate menace”. If much of the western world’s journalist-apologists oversimplified and overestimated the Occupy movement’s composition, motivations and, therefore, likely impact, so, now, does the current crop of mainstream-media decriers.

The easiest thing in the world is to paint every member of a social or political protest with the same black brush. The problem is you usually run out of tar before you’re done, because there’s too many to which the bitumen just won’t stick.

Most of the occupiers who remain are not so much public enemies as village idiots – frequently annoying to members of the unaligned general public, but occasionally useful reminders that all is not well and good in our capitalist Camelots.

And whether or not you appreciate or admire their tactics (at least those of the serious-minded many among them), you must concede the uncomfortable truths lurking behind their complaints.

The developed world is splintering. The very wealthy are getting richer, faster than everyone else. Those who engineered, either deliberately or through sheer incompetence, the financial calamities that continue to destabilize whole nations have never had to answer for their actions. Putatively democratic governments (principally in the United States, but also elsewhere) have bailed out poorly regulated banks and investment houses so religiously, and to such an extent, that there’s no money left to pay down public debts, let alone cover the costs of social programs to which average citizens believe they are entitled.

The occupiers’ abiding shame (if that is the word) is not their alleged appetite for menacing old ladies in parks, but their inability to articulate legitimate grievances that should concern everyone.

For this, they shouldn’t be reviled; they should be pitied as you would a chained man whose lost the key to his own handcuffs.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

A young woman leans into traffic along Moncton’s Main Street, where the seat of municipal government throws a long shadow against the autumn afternoon. Her placard bears a message that’s both plaintive and inscrutable. “Occupy,” it insists, “the truth.”

I want to pull over and ask her what she means. Which truth, and how does one reside in verisimilitude?

The Globe and Mail argues that the recent death of a protester at the Occupy Vancouver site “has done incalculable damage to a global protest campaign that suddenly finds itself at a crossroads.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that business is booming at the periphery of a phenomenon that has spawned “T-shirts, coffee mugs and other merchandise. . .The U.S. patent and trademark office has received a spate of applications. Ray Agrinzone, a clothing designer, who launched theoccupystore.com, said: ‘There’s nothing wrong with turning a profit.’”

In fact, say many “occupiers”, there is. It’s the concentration of wealth and widening gulf between the rich and the rest that’s bringing the developed world to its knees. Greed isn’t good; it’s the articulation of evil.

Still, others on the streets and in the campsites stake claims to at least some of capitalism’s largess. They come not to destroy money, but to redistribute it. Economic revolution isn’t the goal; fairness is.

Such are the apparent contradictions of a movement that has deliberately eschewed centralized leadership, agendas, platforms, and collectively endorsed demands – leaving some pundits scratching their heads and wondering what is the truth beneath the passion that has swept across the unquiet land.

And yet, writes Commentator Gary Younge in the guardian.co.uk, “Their aim is not to challenge the existing order directly but to highlight its inequalities and inequities in the hope that the public will be galvanized to transform it. The Occupy movement has provided a large tent in which a range of previously atomised struggles can now camp.”

In this sense, it derives its strength not from the power of its personality, but from precisely the opposite: Its defiant lack of brand. It gives wings to the yawning certitude, common to everyone not lucky or slick enough to have materially benefitted from the recessionary wreckage, that the economic firmament is now engineered to rook them.

But can such an inchoate assemblage of grievances possibly endure? Not according to the Globe’s Gary Mason, who writes: “Many of those originally attracted. . .by the promise of the Occupy movement represented have since left, turned off by a leaderless structure that makes any progress slow and the increasing presence of insurgents with no vested interest in the cause.”

This, of course, assumes the presence of a specific “cause”, or, indeed, an actual “movement”.

From the beginning, the salient feature of this process has not been its progression, but its stasis. It has called on people to stop, listen and think, rather than rush, bluster and act. It has urged the “99 per cent” of humanity who remain locked outside the gilded gates of the industrial-political complex to “occupy” their field positions and declare, in effect, that they are not moving (at least, in the figurative sense of the word).

And when participants inevitably dust themselves off and return to their quotidian  responsibilities and distractions, others will emerge to take their place, if only because society’s current ills will continue to provoke a predictable response among the deeply disenchanted, disenfranchised and disappointed.

All of which suggests that the Occupy phenomenon is fast becoming a permanent, if largely peaceful, preoccupation of those who cling to the notion that democracies require popular support to survive.

This is, surely, one of the truths the young woman outside Moncton City Hall wants passers-by to discover. Others may include the perils of unchecked power, the dangers of an unexamined life, the importance of citizen engagement, and the value of unhurried reflection in the pursuit of even a semblance of happiness.

I want to ask: Is this what she means?

But, the light changes, and I’m down the road wondering whether she’ll be there tomorrow to answer.

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.

We Canadians fancy ourselves the most generous people on Earth. We’re not. The honour goes to Malta, whose residents, according to the World Giving Index, routinely hand out gifts of cash and time to registered charities.

Still, we do finish a close second, tying with Ireland, among 153 nations surveyed last year, which is, under the yoke of world financial conditions, no mean feat. It confirms that “giving” is a permanent quality of our collective northern soul – like resilience, pluck and a peculiar affection for ice hockey.

Now, for reasons not entirely transparent (though not altogether unexpected), the federal government is beginning to tinker with this fine chemistry by openly questioning its relationship with the non-profits it funds and whether or not they can be made to function more accountably – that is, profitably.

A Globe and Mail article, published on Friday, states: “The government’s lead minister for the changes said financing will come with more strings attached in an effort to ensure that organizations deliver promised social gains. . .‘Right now, we ask (them) to take on these jobs. We give them money to do it. Thy receive the money whether they achieve their objectives or not,’ Diane Finley, Minister for Human Resources and Skills Development (said). ‘Now all we’re saying is, All right, we still want you to do this, but you get more money if you actually achieve the objectives.’”

There is certainly nothing wrong with duly elected representatives insisting they get value for the public dollars they spend. But there is also something both strange and familiar about this “if it ain’t broke, fix it” approach to social engineering.

Crime is down in virtually all categories, yet we appear determined to incarcerate ever-increasing numbers of people in ever-flowering federal and provincial pens. Filling out the long-form census troubled virtually no one, yet we’re expected to be grateful that this “onerous burden” has been lifted from our shoulders. Registering our long guns served law enforcement efforts mightily well (according to cops), yet we must now genuflect in praise for those who have seen fit to cancel the requirement.

Even odder, perhaps, is the fact that Finley is using, as her model, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s enormously unpopular “Big Society” program that expects the private sector (individuals and corporations) to pick up the charitable fund-raising and good-works slack during his self-imposed reign of government austerity.  But, as Steve Richards, chief political commentator for The Independent, wrote earlier this year, “Sometimes the state is a necessary binding agency even if it is an inefficient one. Only in Britain is there an enduring fantasy that services can improve with less investment.”

Not “only” in Britain, it seems.

There is no credible evidence that points to federally-funded, Canadian non-profits wasting vast amounts of taxpayer money en masse. What’s more, charities account for a comparatively insignificant share of overall government expenditures, they already function with extensive private-sector involvement, and they apply their programs almost exclusively at the local level.

If anything, imposing strict, uniform return-on-investment performance standards on them – measures with which they are unfamiliar and largely ill-equipped to execute –   is more, not less, likely to increase the public cost of their programs.

So, what’s the point?

Speaking to the Globe, Marcel Lauziere, president and CEO of Imagine Canada, may have touched on something when he said, “Everyone wants new partnerships, new ways of looking at things. If it’s code for, ‘We’re getting out of it, and we’re going to let other people deal with it,‘ then I think that’s a bit of a problem.”

Is Finley’s brave new scheme, then, just candy coating for a more sinister agenda? Is it merely another expression of this government’s disdain for any public function that does not involve guns, bombs, jet fighters, jail time, or militant warbling?

One thing is indisputably clear: If the Tories do manage to dump more of their  progressive, socially redeeming duties on private individuals and corporations, cash-strapped Canadians will no longer fancy themselves the most generous people on Earth  – or even want to.