The Bruce Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice makes perfect, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, eh?

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

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

It’s not, like, fair. . .you know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not surprisingly, I never made a dime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.