The Bruce Report

If I were in charge of the Canadian department of jingoism, I wouldn’t rattle my patriot swords over the War of 1812.

But our prime minister considers himself an expert on this conflict, now two centuries dead and buried, with the infant United States, and he asks his fellow countrymen and women – as he does on so many matters – to get with his program.

“The War of 1812 was a seminal event in the making of our great country,” his epistle on the official government website states. “On the occasion of its 200th anniversary, I invite all Canadians to share in our history and commemorate our proud and brave ancestors who fought and won against enormous odds.”

Elsewhere, in the commemorative puffery, he stipulates with grave certainty, “Canada would not exist had the American invasion of 1812-14 been successful.”

That’s a little like saying if my grandmother had a beard, she’d be my grandfather.

To declare that this nation – or any other nation – would not exist if history had been different is to utter a simple truism. In fact, as the feds get ready to spend $30 million on plaques and statues and sundry memorials, the word “unnecessary” comes to mind on more than one occasion.

The most definably Canadian aspects about this clash are the myths spun about its causes, combatants and effects – or, just about everything. As the late Pierre Berton once pointed out (in a Canadian Encyclopedia essay), “The real origins were in the conflict that raged in Europe for two decades after Napoleon Bonaparte. These wars caused Great Britain to adopt measures that greatly aggravated the United States.”

Specifically, the former slapped restrictions on the latter’s maritime trade to continental Europe and used it’s naval might to enforce them. This, coupled with rising sentiments of “manifest destiny” in some quarters of the American Congress, persuaded then-President James Madison to declare war on imperial Britain.

Canada, which was not yet “Canada” at the time, became the North American battlefield of an essentially foreign contest of will and power. Indeed, no Canadian ever took up arms to fight and, as the prime minister’s missive states, win.

In a review of American historian Donald Hickey’s book, “Don’t Give Up the Ship! The Myths of the War of 1812”, Lieutenant-Colonel Terry Loveridge, an infantry officer who teaches at the Royal Military College, offers a choice bit of wisdom about the importance of historical veracity.

“Lest Doctor Hickey’s American credentials worry the reader,” he writes, “our own Donald Graves, a ‘proud  descendant of Loyalists’, provides an important Foreword. Graves reminds us that we are approaching the bicentennial of the War and that there undoubtedly will appear entire shelves of books attempting to capitalize on the ‘most confusing and misunderstood event in the history of both Canada and the United States.‘ The implication is that many of these works will be cashing in on accepted and acceptable mythologies. For Graves, this book offers the reader a solid inoculation against the substitution of heritage for history.”

Exactly. But governments are rarely, if ever, in the business of explaining the nuances and complexities of the past. That’s why we have a department of heritage and not history. Heritage serves the cloying, sentimental purposes of politics.

“Events surrounding the 1812-15 armed conflict laid the foundation for Confederation and established the cornerstones of many of our political institutions,” claims the commemorative website in a wildly imaginative stretch.

For a sturdier connection to reality, I would suggest a  closer examination of the the rebellions of the 1830s in the Canadas, and the arrival of responsible government in Nova Scotia. And while we’re selecting bloody battles on which to hang our national identity, we might consider the astonishing achievements of this country’s ground and air forces in World War I.

In any event, I can think of a lot of good things to do with $30 million right about now. Rewriting history isn’t one of them.

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 in the frozen north have basked in the warmth of our own self-regard ever since the American industrial behemoth fell to its knees at the end of the last decade.

Our leaders have congratulated themselves, not unjustifiably, for their prudence and perspicacity, qualities that have managed to spare the country’s economy from the ravages of global recession and financial dislocation.

Our “fundamentals” have been strong, they have repeatedly insisted. Our banking system has been both supple and resilient. As a result, our unemployment rate has been more-or-less fixed to a largely manageable 7.5 per cent, while our chief economists have achieved near rock-star status among the world’s free-market geeks.

But success can also be insidious, as ruin is sometimes the only crucible in which real hope distills.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a report that’s both stunningly candid, in its assessment of that nation’s current predicament, and refreshingly sincere about solutions.

In the 160-page document entitled, “The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States,” Commerce Department officials, in concert with the National Economic Council, all but state that America’s hegemonic dominance in the world is over. And, they concede, this decline is almost entirely self-engineered.

“The U.S. economy reigned supreme in the 20th century, becoming the largest, most productive, and most competitive in the world,” they correctly observe. “Amazing new technologies were invested and commercialized; the workforce became the most educated in the world; and incomes soared while a large middle class thrived.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to complacency: Uncle Sam got lazy.

“As the 21st century approached, however, alarms began to sound. . .Incomes stagnated and job growth slowed,” the authors write. “Other countries became better educated and our manufacturing sector lost ground to foreign competitors. Observers have expressed concern that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership have been eroding at a time when many other nations are actively laying strong foundations in these same areas.”

Such ruminations are neither novel nor particularly penetrating. For years, if not decades, think tanks and academic institutions have been warning about the decline of the American industrial empire. But they are exceedingly rare coming from an instrument of the U.S. government. And it’s hard to imagine the current crop of polticos in Ottawa assuming a similarly confessional tone – harder, still, to envision their response along the following lines:

“One way to approach the question of how to improve the competitiveness of the United States is to look at the past and examine the factors that helped unleash the tremendous innovative potential of the private sector,” the officials suggest. “Among these factors, three pillars have been key: Federal support for basic research, education and infrastructure.”

The corollary is, of course, that government not industry, with its short-term focus on profit and shareholder value, points the way toward economic salvation. And when you consider the umber of commercial innovations that are creatures of public investment, it’s an argument that’s hard to dismiss.

The integrated circuit, the Internet, broadband, national highway systems, air travel, rail transport – indeed, everything we now take for granted as the essential lubricants of modern, industrial progress – all began with government-supported research and development.

Try telling that to the conservative cabal that holds much of popular sentiment in both the United States and Canada in its icy grip. The enemy of prosperity, they insist, is public-sector waste. And, to extent, they are correct. But to extrapolate from this no legitimate, responsible role for government in economic expansion is simply to deny history and abandon the future.

Ottawa’s objective to cut the fat from its various departments is prudent and reasonable. To be truly effective, however, it needs to redirect its resources and bolster the real pillars of the Canadian economy: basic research, education and infrastructure, without which even the most frugal society becomes less competitive, even as it grows more complacent.

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

As Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver draws a line in the tar sands, daring well-financed “radical groups” opposed to Alberta oil development to cross, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May wags a scolding finger at the petro-lobby and their willing dupes in high government office.

And so, dear viewer, another episode of “Dynasty: Canadian Style” unfurls, chocked full of the sort of hyperbole we expect from a prime-time soap opera.

Casting himself in the role of patriot, warning his countrymen of the dark forces at work to upend their sovereign right to poison the planet, the Honourable Mr. Oliver writes in an open letter this week: “There are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.”

He speaks specifically about the regulatory review, currently underway, to ascertain the environmental, economic and social implications of building a new pipeline west to the Pacific coast – a review that, he says, could be “hijacked” to achieve a “radical ideological agenda. . .These groups seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects.”

What’s worse, “They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.”

Enters from stage left Order of Canada recipient, former Sierra Club of Canada executive director and sitting Member of Parliament Ms. May with a predictably dissenting opinion:

“Dear Joe. . .I respect you and like you a lot as a colleague in the House. Unfortunately, I think your role as Minister of Natural Resources has been hijacked by the PMO spin machine. The PMO is, in turn, hijacked by the foreign oil lobby. You are, as Minister of Natural Resources, in a decision-making, judge-like role. You should not have signed such a. . .rant.”

For anyone who has been faithfully following the arc of the plot lo’ these many months, May’s choice of words is telling. “You should not have signed such a rant,” clearly suggests that Uncle Joe is not a willing participant, but rather a government foil, stripped of volition: a good soldier simply following orders.

On the other hand, the senior factotum might say the same thing about her.

“Our regulatory system must be fair, independent, consider different viewpoints including those of Aboriginal communities, review the evidence dispassionately and then make an objective determination,” he writes. “It must be based on science and the facts. . .We do not want projects that are safe, generate thousands of new jobs and open up new export markets, to die in the approval phase due to unnecessary delays.

Unfortunately, the system seems to have lost sight of this balance over the past years. It is broken. It is time to take a look at it.”

Oh Joe, May rejoins, there you go again!

“The repeated attacks on environmental review by your government merit mention. . . Your government has dealt repeated blows to the process, both through legislative changes, shoved through in the 2010 omnibus budget bill, and through budget cuts. . .The idea that First Nations, conservation groups, and individuals opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline are opposed to all forestry, mining, hydro-electric and gas is not supported by the facts. I am one of those opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline. I do not oppose all development; neither does the Green Party; neither do environmental NGOS; neither do First Nations.”

In fact, as both combatants acknowledge, a regulatory process is in place and commissioners will hear from 50 interveners representing all sides of the debate as well as 4,000 individual presenters. So, the idea that the system is broken, compromised or otherwise rigged thanks to either Big Oil or environmental activists is hardly credible.

But facts make poor drama. Political theatre is far more entertaining.

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.

Most Canadians believe the recession never ended. Technically, economists and bank presidents argue, most Canadians are wrong and they’re not doing themselves any favours by clinging to the myth of economic calamity.

The textbook definition of a recession goes something like this: When a nation endures two consecutive quarters of falling gross domestic product, which is the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period, that nation can be said to be “recessed”.

A full-blown depression is something altogether different and more serious. It is characterized by years of unemployment and underemployment, price deflation, financial instability, and even political turmoil.

Canada’s recession ended some time in 2009. Since then, the country’s economy has actually expanded. But try telling that to 70 per cent of the citizenry who, according to Michael Marzolini, chairman of Pollara Strategic Insights (a Toronto polling company), are convinced that the long, slow slide to perdition is a more-or-less permanent fact of life in the second decade of the 21st Century.

In fact, a growing constituency of the populace seems to think the economy is mildly depressed and is unlikely to regain its health without radical reforms in both the public and private sectors. And, says Marzolini, this phantasm could work its evil magic on the corporate and consumer landscape in the months and years ahead.

“Public attitudes toward the economy usually drive events,” he observes in a Globe and Mail article published last week. “They impact on people’s collective spending, investing and saving. The perceived reality is often a self-fulfilling prophesy.”

On the other hand, who can blame them.

Following a blue-chip meeting of economists from Canada’s top five banks the other day, the major media were bursting with tales of doom. “What does 2013 look like?” speculated Avery Shenfeld, chief numbers cruncher for CIBC World Markets. “Not a whole lot better than 2012. As the U.S. defers fiscal tightening for another year, 2013 is set up for huge fiscal tightening to hit the U.S. economy.”

Fiscal tightening is economics-speak for government spending cuts and/or tax increases, which are usually deployed when a nation is growing too fast for its own good (how quaint, under the circumstances). That they should be used during comparatively tough times testifies to the dimension of the sovereign debt crisis in both Europe and North America.

All of which suggests that Canadians are not wrong to part company with the soothsayers, who can’t seem to agree on anything even on their best days. Whether or not the “R” word befits the times, the signs of dissolution are everywhere.

New Brunswick’s Labour Market Analysis Branch now says the province is shedding thousands of high-paying jobs, replacing them with low-skilled positions in the accommodations and food services sector. In a little more than six months, employment in professional, scientific and technical services has dropped by 3,000 while jobs for hotel staff and restaurant workers have increased by 3,600.

Meanwhile, the province’s crummy track record of attracting and retaining immigrant talent prompts one expert to ponder the alternatives.

“Right now, there are twice as many 50-year-olds in New Brunswick,” Michael Haan, the Canada Research Chair in Population and Social Policy at the University of New Brunswick, told the Telegraph-Journal last week. “We have an aging population and this aging population is going to require care; they’re going to want to shop; they’re going to want to have their feet done and everything else. There is actually a growing need in lesser skilled areas of the labour market.”

It’s not entirely clear how a policy that encourages legions of foot-rubbing Mexican matrons to pick up and move to New Brunswick will bolster the province’s flagging competitiveness. The suggestion, however, does underscore the absurd economic conditions in which we find ourselves.

Canada may not be in a technical recession. But the point is moot.

The structural problems and misfires that speak to a persistent failure of imagination and courage among those who dominate private and public capital in this country are sufficient to depress even the Polyannas 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.

The man Stephen Harper set loose last summer on a monarchy-loving crusade through Ottawa’s public spaces to hang portraits of the Queen – to no discernible purpose other than to impress her visiting grandkids – is once again functioning at his incomprehensible best.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says his freshly minted Office of Religious Freedom – promised in the Tory election platform last spring – won’t play politics among immigrants. Presumably, the good fellow can do that all by himself.

Less clear is what it will do other than add a layer of bureaucracy to a government that seriously imagines that cutting taxes and raising spending is a credible route to fiscal prudence. Not even the formidable Mr. Baird seems entirely certain about the specifics of the new enterprise, apart from the fact that it will cost taxpayers about $5 million a year, of which $500,000 are earmarked for “operations”.

In a year-end interview with Canadian Press, he intoned, “Freedom of religion is one of the first things in the Charter. It’s one of the first things in the Bill of Rights. It’s front and centre in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It’s an essential human right. I don’t see any concern about that at all.”

But, when asked again for an explanation of the new office’s workings, he spluttered, “It will be promoting religious freedom. . .persuasion, lobbying, putting light. . .promoting,” before adding, “Ours will be a made-in-Canada approach.”

As opposed to what? A made-in-Fiji approach?

Baird was on no surer footing when discussing the lamentable result of religious intolerance around the world. Referring to Egypt’s persecution of Coptic Christians, he observed, “If you’re one of the 54 Copts who was killed at this time last year, it’s pretty uncomfortable for you and your family too, whose only sin was being Coptic.”

Yes, murder can be so inconvenient.

In fact, despite the minister’s genuine, if woolly worded, concern for victims of sectarian violence, there’s no credible reason to establish a separate (and separately costed) unit inside a department that already endorses, through official ratification, the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which stipulates: “The rights enunciated in the present Covenant will be exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

If, however, Baird hopes to go farther than these words allow – if he intends to walk softly and carry a big scepter around the world – he is flirting with the kind of foreign policy disaster no fundamentally secular democracy can afford. After all, one man’s religious freedom is another despot’s license to imprison, torture, maim and kill.

Still, it’s more likely the minister intends to tear a page from the U.S. State Department’s play book. There, the religious freedom office purports to “monitor religious persecution and discrimination worldwide, recommend and implement policies in respective regions or countries, and develop programs to promote religious freedom.”

What’s more, its website says, “Given the U.S. commitment to religious freedom, and to the international covenants that guarantee it as the inalienable right of every human being, the United States seeks to promote freedom of religion and conscience throughout the world as a fundamental human right and as a source of stability for all countries; assist emerging democracies in implementing freedom of religion and conscience; assist religious and human rights NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in promoting religious freedom; and identify and denounce regimes that are severe persecutors on the basis of religious belief.”

In other words, do what Canada has always done, and to more popular and persuasive effect than the United States, in the world: Set an example made legitimate by its peaceful, orderly, tolerant and just traditions, institutions and laws.

All of which returns us to the beginning. If we already do these things, why do we need a new office to codify them?

The only man who might know the answer is Baird, himself.

It’s too bad he doesn’t seem to understand the question.

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 comes as no great surprise that corporate CEOs are different from you and me. After all, they have more money and, in the words of a popular song lyric from one of the recent decades of ostentatious greed, money changes everything.

But the degree to which Canada’s executive fat cats have evolved into a species wholly unfamiliar, at least by common anthropological standards, is staggering and the subject of a fascinating, little study by one Hugh MacKenzie.

He is a researcher and spokesperson for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa. He holds a Masters in economics from the University of Wisconsin and runs his own consulting business. And he believes, with all his Wobbly, lefty heart, that the vast sums major companies pay their most senior employees is not merely irritating to those of us not similarly blessed; it actually threatens to upend the principles of justice and fairness that underpin society, itself.

“What the data say loud and clear is that Canada’s CEO elite 100 have left the rest of us behind in their gold dust,” he writes in his fifth annual survey of executive compensation. “Those with incomes in the stratosphere no longer live in the world occupied by the rest of us. They live on another planet, in a world largely created by them, that few of us would recognize if we stumbled into it.”

His data is, indeed, compelling.

Overall, Canada’s top CEOs pulled down a median $8.4 million in salaries, bonuses and stock options in 2010. The range was broad – from $62 million to Magna International chairman Frank Stronach to $3.9 million to Bombardier’s Pierre Baudoin. But, taken together, this club of 0.1 percenters reaped 189 times more than the average Canadian wage earner.

In fact, a CEO who enjoyed a compensation package valued in the mid seven figures pocketed by noon on January 2 what the typical working Joe (or Jane) must spend the entire year to accumulate.

What’s worse, perhaps, is that the gap is widening, reversing the trend since the end of the Great Depression, and taking the very rich further and further away from the quotidian concerns of the common majority.

“Their total average compensation. . .in 2010. . .represents a 27 per cent increase over the average $6.6 million they pocketed the year before,” MacKenzie writes. “How much longer can Canada sustain a trend that polarized America and has spilled over into our own borders without seeing the well-documented effects of inequality – social unrest, rising crime rates, diminished trust, as well as worsening health. . .issues?”

It’s a good question. Some recent research seems to corroborate the notion that having too much money is bad for you and, by extension, everyone around you.

According to an article in the Economist last year, “Experiments by Paul Piff and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, suggest. . . it is the poor, not the rich, who are inclined to charity. One interpretation of all this might be that selfish people find it easier to become rich. . .Dr. Piff, himself, suggests that the increased compassion which seems to exist among the poor increases generosity and helpfulness, and promotes a level of trust and co-operation that can prove essential for survival during hard times.”

Fundamentally, though, such obscene income disparity is a public policy concern if only because it’s been allowed to proliferate in clubby secrecy on the backs of the taxpaying public.

There is nothing fair or competitive about a closed market for executive compensation that treats salaries for services like commodities on a brokered exchange. This system actually strips long-term value from shareholders and tethers executive decision-making to short-term gains, which is, if nothing else, a clear conflict of corporate interest.

This condition ripens even further when CEOs obtain the bulk of their largess from stock options which are taxed like capital gains at a fraction of their actual value and provide executives with publicly underwritten boons that are often unrelated to their job performance.

At a time when so many people are suffering, so many governments are reeling under unsustainable debt loads, so many public services are falling to the predations of a brutal age, Government’s role should be clear.

Tax the fat cats back into recognizably human form.

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 tradition no less honourable than resolving to do better and be better in the New Year is the annual running of the mouths found in all the finer salons of power and politics across this great land and beyond.

A story in London’s Daily Mail from December 31 boldly predicts that Britain, once “Great” but now merely little in the panoply of global commerce, will reemerge a powerhouse of grand proportion by the middle of the century.

Indeed, by 2050, the home of blood pudding, warm ale, druidical henges, and Paul McCartney will be “the biggest economy in Europe with one of the wealthiest populations on the world. . .The UK will jump from being the sixth wealthiest country in the world to third, based on national income per head. Only people in the United States and Canada will be more prosperous.”

Or so claims Goldman Sachs, about which U.S. Senator Carl Levin declared in 2010, “Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs were not simply market-makers, they were self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis.They bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got the credit rating agencies to label them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold and profiting at the expense of their clients.”

Yeah, those guys. No hard feelings, eh?

Still, one wonders how Goldman’s rosy prognostications about the upward march of personal riches square with another report carried by the same newspaper on the same day, which concludes that the “number of Britons saving into private pensions has  dropped to its lowest level in more than a decade.”

The figures, released by the National Association of Pension Funds, “expose the extreme financial pressures facing households during the economic downturn” and show that “just 38 per cent of working-age people are putting money aside for retirement, raising the likelihood that they will have to work until they drop.”

In a codicil that will not surprise anyone in this country, the report also points out the “growing apartheid” between private and public-sector wage-earners.

In the U.K., if you work for the state, you qualify for a minimum, annual pension of about $12,000 (CDN), which isn’t much. But it’s a whole lot more than zero, which is precisely what two-thirds of that nation’s commercial workers have tucked away in company plans.

So, then, what are the folks at Goldman, and others of its ilk, talking about through their gold-plated choppers when they forecast a future, 40 years from now, so utterly fanciful even Nostradamus would have chuckled to ponder it?

The telling lesson the financial meltdown and consequent recession of 2008 taught the citizens of planet Earth is not that life is unfair (we already knew that). It isn’t that poor people outnumber wealthy ones (again, that’s obvious).

The teachable moment arrived, with a sickening thud, when we realized that even the most prudent, careful and responsible among us – indeed, any one of us – could become someone else’s lunch meat in the blink of a wandering eye.

We don’t trust the likes of Goldman Sachs, whose agents and operatives raped and pillaged our savings and investment accounts. Why would its research department think we’d credit its bright-new-world scenarios, even for a moment?

Our decidedly Canadian frame of reference is now the envy of every thinking Briton. We, also, entertain our fair share of running mouths. But, our soothsayers are refreshingly boring.

“We’re preparing the next budget, the next steps of Canada’s economic action plan to create jobs and growth, and also to continue seeing our deficit decline,” Stephen Harper intoned on Christmas Day. “So, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

That’s about as far into the future as I care to peer.

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.

To appreciate just how touchy people of every political stripe and ideological bent become when the target of their concerns is clean and accessible water, look no farther than the front page of this newspaper over the past few months.

An inter-jurisdictional spat between the City of Dieppe and the owner of a trailer park unites 500 residents, who have virtually nothing else in common, in acrimonious action to protect their rights to potable water.

Moncton City Council’s decision to slap a moratorium on fluoridation earns it plaudits from cab drivers, construction workers, bar owners, teachers and physicians (though many dentists are unimpressed impressed).

And then there’s the rolling shale gas controversy.

It doesn’t take a Maude Barlow, that ubiquitous Canadian agitator against all things corporate, to remind people of their nearest worry. But her commentary does tend to put the issue in high relief, as it did a couple of years ago when she told an international audience the following:

“The water crisis is perhaps the most urgent ecological and human threat of our time and the first – and most devastating – face of climate change. More children die each year of water-borne disease than war, HIV/AIDS and traffic accidents combined. In their recent World Water Development Report, 24 agencies of the United Nations confirmed what those of us working in the field already knew: that the global water crisis is getting worse by the day and threatening millions more people every year.

“The problem,” she continued, “is that we humans have seen the Earth and its water resources as something that exists for our benefit and economic advancement rather than as a living ecological system that needs to be safeguarded if it is to survive. We have polluted, diverted and displaced so much water from where it is needed for a healthy hydrologic cycle to function, that whole parts of the planet are drying up.

“We are just beginning to understand the devastation of this drying to the ecosystem and other species as we humans continue to rob the Earth of the water it needs for survival. The human water footprint surpasses all others and endangers life on Earth itself.”

Her conclusion: “The path to a sustainable water future is difficult but clear. First, water must be seen as a commons that belongs to the Earth and all species alike. It must be declared a public resource that belongs equally to all people, the ecosystem and the future. It must be preserved for all time and practice in law as a public trust and a human right. Clean water must be delivered as a public service, not a profitable commodity.”

In fact, the debate now raging in New Brunswick over shale gas is nothing if not about water.

A recent poll conducted by Corporate Research Associates reveals that people in this province are more or less evenly split on the subject, with 45 per cent “completely or mostly” supporting the endeavor and 45 per cent opposing. Ten per cent were noncommittal.

But when the question turned to the possible environmental implications of the hydraulic fracturing process – which employs large amounts of water, mixed with chemicals, to extract natural gas from the country rock – a revealing 83 per cent said they worried about the practice even with stiff controls in place. Indeed, 58 per cent of respondents insisted that the environment trumped commerce.

All of which strongly suggests that the provincial government’s focus, as it attempts to sell residents on the economic benefits the industry promises, should not be on establishing a framework for good corporate citizenship – a conceit no one believes will protect the water supply.

Rather, it should be on regulations that credibly back up the Alward team’s rhetoric about environmental protection. If they truly intend to install the toughest rules in North America, let’s see them do it before concerns about New Brunswick’s water becomes their political Waterloo.

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 business leaders and politicians decry the widening gap between labour and skills in Canada – a phenomenon for which they, themselves, are at least partly to blame – new research suggests that the salient workforce trend over the next several years will be a slow-motion plunge to the bottom of the jobs barrel.

In its most recent “Report Card”, the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council says that over the past decade industry in this region has created nearly four times as many low-wage jobs than higher-end ones. The think tank defines these dead-end “opportunities” as positions that pay well below the already winnowed average of $40,000 a year.

APEC’s senior economic David Chaundy adds: “In the private sector, the creation of 14,300 high-wage jobs in construction over the decade was not sufficient to offset the loss of 28,500 positions in manufacturing. . .The net creation of 11,000 new jobs in high-wage industries between 2001-2010 came from an expansion of the public sector, which added 13,000 jobs in public administration and education.”

And that’s the good news. Almost no part of the country, with the possible exception of the National Capital Region, can expect the public sector to continue to pick up the slack.

Says APEC: “Looking forward public administration and education will not be a major source of high-wage job creation in the Atlantic region. . .as federal and provincial governments focus on deficit-reduction, and school enrollments are projected to decline. Meanwhile, in the private sector, flat housing markets and major project activity will limit high-wage job growth in construction and professional services over the next few years, except in Newfoundland and Labrador.”

But even there, where $40-billion in major energy programs are gearing up to provide historic boons to the once-benighted eastern tip of Canada, the signs of impending doom are everywhere.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail last month: “Employers across the province are having trouble hiring tradespeople for new projects and other positions, even as thousands of people continue to leave home to find employment elsewhere – notably in Alberta’s oil fields – and even as Newfoundland suffers a 13.2-per-cent jobless rate.”

It’s a circumstance about which Premier Kathy Dunderdale can only observe glumly, “We know it’s a problem.”

In fact, the condition of the country’s immigrant workforce suggests that the problem is not passing but may be structural.

A study by the Royal Bank of Canada finds that if the nation’s foreign-born workers were properly compensated for their actual skills (if, in other words, they were working in the high-end jobs for which they are qualified), their collective income would be $31 billion higher than it is. That’s worth, roughly, 2.1 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

As the bank’s CEO Gordon Nixon told the Globe, “If we are going to continue to flourish and grow as a country, we’ve got to be very receptive to foreign capital, to foreign thinking and to foreign skills to maximize our potential, I think it is very important that we have that macro discussion, particularly against a backdrop of high unemployment and financial global economic turmoil.”

Indeed, it is. But “we” have had that discussion. We’ve been having it for years and, it now seems clear, we’re no further ahead. In fact, we’re behind.

If we are determined to avoid becoming a region – a nation – of clerks, waiters and other ignoble varieties of counter help, the holy grail of governments at every level must be investments that make advanced learning affordable and relevant to both the existing and future jobs and skills market.

That means spending on science and technology programs, but also on trades. It  means the private sector must part with some of the cash it’s been hoarding since downfall of global financial markets and establish training programs for the workers it needs to remain competitive.

Without this clear-eyed commitment, the job market won’t be the only feature of the economy that finds itself racing to the bottom.

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.