The Bruce Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, yes. . .cloakative crocitation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lie back, me hearties, and think of England.

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

In 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrived at the South Pole, Honduras became the world’s first American-backed “banana republic”, Irving Berlin penned “Alexander’s Rag Time Band”, and Moravian academic Joseph Alois Schumpeter coined the term “economic development”.

Nearly as momentous in that year, more than a century ago, the University of Cambridge published the eleventh edition of “Encyclopaedia Britannica, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information”, on diaphanous folio, in sturdy leather embossed with gold leaf.

All 29 volumes of that remarkable work of scholarship, a gift from my father,  occupy a place of pride on my dining room bookshelf, a joy as much to behold as to peruse. Almost.

Where else, nowadays, can one find a 15,000-word article on the history of fasting, prepared by the Rev. John Sutherland Black, M.A., LL.D.?

“When entirely deprived of nutriment the human body is ordinarily capable of supporting life under ordinary circumstances for little more than a week,” the eminent cleric reports. “In the spring of 1869, this was tried on the person of a ‘fasting girl‘ in South Wales. The parents made a show of their child, decking her out like a bride on a bed, and asserting she had eaten no food for two years.”

But, as the good doctor informs us, “Some reckless enthusiasts for truth set four trustworthy hospital nurses to watch her; the Celtic obstinacy of the parents was roused, and in defence of their imposture they allowed death to take place in eight days. Their trial and conviction for manslaughter may be found in the daily periodicals of the date; but, strange to say, the experimental physiologists and nurses escaped scot-free.”

It’s hard to imagine stumbling across anything as delightfully arcane, erudite and bluntly witty on Wikipedia. But, then, the noble Britannica belongs to a more elegant age, when knowledge and reading were more important than information and scanning.

After 244 years, the 2010 edition of the esteemed trove – whose contributors  have included Thomas Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky – will be the last available in print. Its president, Jorge Cauz, says sales of hard copies have been negligible for some time. He says the future is purely digital. He says, “We knew this was going to come.”

It’s heartening to know the lofty Britannica will not vanish from the Earth. Still, one wonders how it will change in the brutally competitive online cosmos. Will its editors tolerate the sort of lengthy musings they once embraced?

Musings, such as Robert Maynard Hutchins’ 1952 celebration of literature: “Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.”

Or will they succumb to the bits and bytes of cyberspace, where attention spans are short and original insights are mere foot soldiers in the relentless march of commodification?

In 2009, Ian Grant, managing director of Britannica UK told an interviewer:  “Wikipedia is a fun site to use and has a lot of interesting entries on there, but their approach wouldn’t work for Encyclopædia Britannica. My job is to create more awareness of our very different approaches to publishing in the public mind. They’re a chisel, we’re a drill, and you need to have the correct tool for the job.”

What, now, is Britannica’s job, and what are its tools?

Six years ago, comScore Networks Inc. ranked Wikipedia – with 43 million unique visitors in one month, alone – ninth in its list of top U.S. web sites. More recently,  media watchers have described it as the most influential platform of its kind in the world.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Christmas Evans, an early 19th century Welsh preacher: “A Nonconformist minister, regarded as one of the greatest preachers in the history of Wales.”

What’s the source?

None other than: “Chisholm, Hugh, editor (1911). Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition). Cambridge University Press.”

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.

On the subject of bridges and the burning thereof, former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith’s resignation letter – which was published in the New York Times last week and has since become an overnight sensation among the twitteratti – smells more like a job application than the charred timber of a once-charmed career.

In fact, it’s disappointingly reasonable.

“It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success,” he writes. “It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. It wasn’t just about making money. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization.

“I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years.”

He’s right. That does sound surprising to a skeptical publican like me. It’s hard to imagine “culture” playing a bit role, let alone a “vital part”, at a firm whose shenanigans were so entrenched and for so long that they helped bring down the entire western financial industry in a conflagration of wanton greed.

But, I digress.

There’s a way to quit a job, and there’s a way to quit a job. HR professionals will tell you to be polite and graceful. And they have a point. Of course, so did your mom when she told you to turn the other cheek on your playground tormentors.

How’d that work out for you?

Personally, I prefer the Johnny Paycheck approach to elevating an avian creature in one’s upraised right hand when heading for the door. Naturally, the Internet brims with examples of this particular exit strategy.

Consider a few reader posts to workplace happiness guru Alexander Kjerulf’s web site. There’s no way to determine whether they’re genuine or merely apocryphal. Still, they’re trenchant:

“Dear Boss. . .Thank you for offering me a new contract for the next working year. Unfortunately, I won’t be accepting it. . . I now realize that people like you should not be working with staff or children. You are a bully and you are fat!”

Then, there’s this:

“Dear [redacted]. . .I am giving you my two weeks’ notice of my intent to leave your employ. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the enjoyable time I spent working (for you), but sadly I have been brought up not to lie.”

And this, my favorite:

“Dear Boss. . .I am certain that the subpoena you sent to my home was a mistake. The computer I took from the office is still in the parking lot where it fell out of the window of our 32nd floor office when the chair broke through the glass and caught on the power cord of the computer. I know it’s still there because I used the confidential file folders to sweep up the broken glass from the monitor as I didn’t want. . .to get any glass. . in the already flattened tires (of) your Mercedes.”

Infantile, certainly. Satisfying, indubitably.

Still, one doesn’t want to make a habit of this sort of thing – not in a world where long-term employment, in which mom and dad secure their happy homes with incomes sufficient to meet their families’ needs, is fast becoming a fable told to comfort youngsters at bedtime.

Perhaps, then, the Goldman Sachs expat is only exercising the better part of his discretion when he concludes his missive thusly:

“I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm – or the trust of its clients – for very much longer.”

In other words, Mr. Smith needs a job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having nothing better to do with their time and our money, federal officials have, once again, turned their attention to the plight of the East Coast inshore fishery and, once again, found it desiring a fix.

What kind of fix, they don’t say. Rest assured, however, “tough decisions” are coming as, Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield reminds us, the industry is in a “serious state.” Forsooth, he laments, “It has gone from second in the world in seafood exports down to eighth place.”

But, if that is a problem, a bigger one is the fact that “it” doesn’t actually exist. At least, not the way Ashfield and his band of bureaucrats and marine biologists, incongruously bound to their Ottawa desks, think it does.

When tinkering with industrial policy, governments invariably deploy a monolithic model for comprehending exquisitely complex, nuanced factors – a practice that reliably earns them scorn from the private sector and contempt from the voting public.

And, arguably, no other sector of the economy displays greater intricacy – with its thousands of harvesters, hundreds of processors, dozens of species, boatloads of rules and regulations, and footlockers of marine science – than the one that still pays men to go down to the sea in boats or factory trawlers, as the case may be.

Indeed, which fishery does Fat City seek to mend?

Is it the one where large corporations, with their large capital investments, technological innovation and vertically integrated economies of scale post solid profits at the expense of less competitive entrepreneurs?

Is it the one where legions of coastal fishermen are effectively subsidized to eek out a subsistence at the expense of the nation’s employment insurance program and, thereby, provokes western criticism of eastern “defeatism”?

Is it the one where onshore processors complain of being locked out of the harvesting game by government policies that insist they can’t both fish and cut bait – a regulatory regime which, they say, threatens their viability?

Or is it the one that undermines all: A poorly conceived, perennially dispatched system for assessing the condition of the fish stocks on which everyone depends?

According to the Canada-Newfoundland Fishing Industry Renewal Discussion Paper, released in late 2006, “The total landed value and product value of all species in Newfoundland and Labrador has declined by approximately 25 per cent in recent years due primarily to declines in the crab and shrimp fisheries. During the same period, harvesting and processing costs (i.e. fuel, capital, etc.) increased resulting in a ‘cost-price’ squeeze.”

The uncomfortable truth is that too many people are chasing too few fish in Atlantic waters, a circumstance that undermines the industry’s competitiveness and its ability to provide a decent, sustainable living.

And it is Government – favouring policies that have encouraged over-capacity in the interests of creating and maintaining jobs regardless of how impoverished these positions actually are – which has been responsible for this.

Now, Ashfield says he’s determined to “modernize”, which is a euphemism for picking winners and losers in a dubious attempt to fix the mistakes his predecessors in public office have made.

Nevertheless, he strongly implies, what was once a social fishery should, by right, become, by fiat or evolution, a market-driven one.

“We simply can’t make things better by appeasing one segment of the fishery based on who makes the most noise,” the minister told reporters last week. “The facts are that more than half our fishermen are in their late fifties and our young people are deciding with their feet to get out of the business.”

That’s probably the clearest indication yet of where his sympathies lie. But sentiments do not often inform successful policy making.

As long as Ottawa refuses to admit its own culpability in creating the mess that is the East Coast inshore fishery – as long as it denies the legitimate interests of the small-time owner-operators it previously encouraged and rejects any suggestion of a coordinated license buy-back; as long as it shows only a passing interest in the condition of the resource it’s constitutionally obligated to manage – any fix it imposes will be as doomed as the Northern Cod.

Just so, the East Coast electoral chances of a certain federal government.

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 difference between what is economically fanciful and commercially possible depends almost entirely, these days, on a barrel of Alberta crude.

For now, if you want a good job that will pay enough to settle the student loans you took to earn a degree in comparative religion, learn how to drive a truck and move to Fort McMurray. If you don’t, then stay on the East Coast where the unemployment rate just topped 10 per cent (again).

But some in high places are beginning to run the much harder calculations that just might link emerging macro-economic opportunities in the western black-gold rush more durably to the systemically impoverished, fiscally fossilized Atlantic provinces.

Some are beginning to dream of an eastern pipeline.

“Much work obviously needs to take place with Irving Oil,” Premier David Alward told a blue-chip business audience during a speech in Toronto last Wednesday. “But. . .the dialogue is starting. I think that is healthy and it is important to have.”

So does Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith, who echoed these sentiments in her own speech to the Economic Club of Canada the following day.

“As we look to move our oil sands to market,” she said, “the next step would be to build a pipeline to the deepwater port in Saint John, N.B. Let’s upgrade more oil sands in Canada using existing facilities across the country. This would increase the use of domestically produced crude. Then, we could export the remainder into new markets using an Atlantic marine route.”

That provincial leaders from two such vastly dissimilar regions can reach concordant and mutually beneficial conclusions is only slightly less remarkable than the number of true Canadian heavy weights who are lining up to stamp the concept – which remains something more than a whim, if still something less than a scheme – with their own imprimaturs.

Writing in the Globe and Mail last year, Derek Burney, former Canadian ambassador to the United States, urged moving western Canadian oil to the East Coast over existing rights. This, he explained, “holds two major benefits for Canada. First is the displacement with domestic supply of relatively expensive imports of foreign oil, some of which comes from the politically uncertain Middle East.

“Few Canadians realize that Eastern Canada (except Newfoundland) still relies on imported foreign oil. Moving product from west to east can be done relatively simply with few regulatory hurdles. It requires reversing certain existing pipelines. In the longer term, it may mean constructing a new pipeline from Montreal to Atlantic Canadian ports.

Secondly, he said, “opening access for western Canadian crude to eastern Canada and East Coast ports has the huge added advantage that it can provide certainty of supply to potential Asian customers. Canadian crude and bitumen, whether or not refined in Canada, could be shipped by tanker from Montreal or other East Coast ports through the Panama Canal to Asia.”

There are, of course, sound reasons why this may never rise above the status of pipe dream, not the least of which is the notoriously complex business of oil pricing. The current cost advantage Alberta crude enjoys in world markets (about $20 per barrel) may not last. And competitive pressures could make domestic and international distribution prohibitively expensive.

Such market threats are not new. They lurk in the shadows that existing pipelines cast today, as do the environmental protests over the Keystone and Northern Gateway projects that, in fact, now prompt ruminations about an eastern alternative.

“In New Brunswick, we know we can’t rely on business as usual to maintain the quality of life we cherish,” Alward declared last week. “So we are reaching out to new partners to help create the growth and prosperity our citizens deserve and expect.”

Whether the “citizens” of New Brunswick – consumed as they are by the potential  depredations of shale fracking – will appreciate their premier’s solicitude depends entirely on how they feel about a barrel of Alberta crude.

It’s one thing to have it pay a student loan far on the western frontier. It’s quite another to have it sloshing around your down-home back door.

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 Immigration Minister Jason Kenney evokes a glittering, new future for newcomers to Canada, eschewing those who would run convenience stores and welcoming those who would become “high-value innovators”, he ignores one inconvenient truth: They’re already here, running convenience stores.

“We want the next Bill Gates or the next Steve Jobs,” he told the Globe and Mail last week. “We want those folks with the brilliant ideas that are going to generate sustainable jobs for a long time to come. We want to create a policy which is more likely to attract entrepreneurs in areas like technology, energy and environmental innovations. These areas have a lot more potential than just running a kiosk at the mall.”

He’s right. But nothing in Kenney’s pronouncements – nothing about his latent enthusiasm for as-yet undefined, unarticulated programs to woo the world’s biggest brains – changes the fact that this country doesn’t know what to do with the ones it has, apart from patronizing their bodegas and gift shops.

According to a 2008 Statistics Canada survey, “42 per cent of immigrant workers aged 25 to 54 had a higher level of education for their job than what was normally required, while 28 per cent of Canadian-born workers were similarly over-qualified. . .The share of immigrants with degrees who were over-qualified was 1.5 times higher than their Canadian-born counterparts.”

Not surprisingly, in 2010, the unemployment rate for new immigrants (people who have been in the country for five years or less), averaged 15.8 per cent, compared with  7.5 per cent for Canadians who were born here.

All of which drew this warning from a Globe editorialist last year: “Companies that fail to capitalize on the skills of new immigrants are aggravating Canada’s productivity woes by erecting employment barriers that hamper innovation and economic growth. If foreign-born workers continue to experience the promise of prosperity as hollow, this country risks losing the global war for talent as Brand Canada is tarnished abroad.”

It is one of our crueler national ironies that a country which bills itself as the freest, safest and most solicitous in the world is also one where immigrants often find their new lives as challenging and disappointing as the ones they left behind.

They endure batteries of tests and credit and criminal checks just to gain admittance. They liquidate their holdings and spend money to secure their applications for residency. And, once landed, many know they will never again practice their professions in quite the same way because their skills aren’t wanted or their credentials aren’t recognized.

As Moncton-born, Toronto-based immigration lawyer Leigh Lampert told me a few years ago, “There are many highly-skilled, well-educated people living in Canada whose skills are desperately needed, but who end up working in jobs that require fewer skills and less knowledge.”

Indeed, he remembered accompanying a relative to a gastroenterology resident at a Canadian hospital. The physician, an immigrant, had been fully qualified in Europe, but she was, nevertheless, “forced to redo her entire medical education here. This seems ridiculous.”

So does, in fact, the immoveable bedrock of the actual landing apparatus in Canada. The so-called “permanent residency application process” sounds harmless enough, until you perceive its structural inequities.

Currently, the federal government – notwithstanding its promised changes – maintains several categories through which it checks, judges and otherwise weighs immigrant candidates. Foreign direct investment is one. Spousal or family petition is another. But two of the more commonly employed are the individual worker and business owner/investor designations.

In the former, a legally incorporated Canadian business sponsors a prospective immigrant employee. In the latter, a foreign “entrepreneur” typically applies to start or finance a private enterprise in a specific city, town or village. In either case, approved applicants are, in effect, “streamed” into their new roles as permanent residents. And there they stay, without option or appeal.

Jason Kenney’s brave, new world promises a more perfect assimilation of immigrant skills and the “higher value” technical needs of their adoptive nation.

But tell that to the Korean store proprietor, once an engineer, who now asks you if you want matches with that package of smokes you’ve just bought.

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.

There we go again, eating the lunches of Alberta oil barons until we leave nothing but the silver spoons dangling, oh so lonesomely, from their pouting pusses.

We scrofulous, pogey-loving, rubber-booted East Coasters just don’t know when to stop. And we never will as long as there are fat cattle in the industrial paddocks of the west and federal government cowboys willing to send a few steers down home.

Or, as the National Post’s Terence Corcoran complained last week, “We start today with some of Ottawa’s subsidies to business. Almost $1 billion is earmarked for next year’s distribution through the four regional development agencies.”

These would be the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) – which has been around since 1987 – and three others (one of which, incongruously enough, is actually located in the land of black gold).

As to ACOA, Corcoran marvels, it “has its own Minister of State, Bernard Valcourt, who in January distributed a typical news release about $1.1 million to support Atlantic Canada’s cruise industry.”

Shocking, isn’t it? A whole million bucks and change that might be otherwise deployed to underwrite the expense accounts of tar sands entrepreneurs. And that’s not the half of it – not by a long shot.

“The (ACOA) estimate for next year: $307 million,” he clucks. “Politically, these agencies seem to exist mostly to give local Canadian politicians and Cabinet ministers an opportunity to issue press releases on the latest cash handout.”

Well said, sir: A palpable hit, sir!

But let’s not ignore the Fraser Institute’s Niels Veldhuis and Charles Lamman. They, too, have a bone to pick with rapacious, federally funded economic development programmers out to plunder the public pocketbook and hurl the nation into the deepest recession since. . .well, the last one.

“A comprehensive examination. . .would structurally change the federal government, much like the Liberal reforms of the 1990s,” they wrote in the Financial Post last week. “Easy targets for deep cuts, or outright elimination, would include regional development spending, business subsidies, green-energy initiatives, subsidies to the CBC, spending by Agriculture Canada, and public-sector wage and benefits premiums. . .With a majority government and support from average Canadians, now is the time for Mr. Flaherty and the Conservatives to deliver a budget that sets Canada back on the right fiscal path.”

Truly, it is a wonder to behold the poorest region of this country – home for less than 10 per cent of the population, the destination for the smallest per-capita federal transfers and subsidies – exerting such a mightily deleterious influence on the richest regions of this country.

Still, it’s always nice to see the western pundits talk about eastern affairs. It would be even nicer, of course, if they knew what they were talking about.

If, as their arguments seems to suggest, governments spend too much money on wasteful job-creation programs in Atlantic Canada, then how do we square this with the vast sums of public cash spent elsewhere in the country – billions of dollars, without which there would be no auto and autoparts sector in southern Ontario, no agricultural and agrifoods industry on the prairies and no aerospace and high-tech component industry in Quebec?

While it’s true that regional economic development initiatives have not always worked equally well everywhere in the country, the federal track record in Atlantic Canada has been demonstrably good.

Many more small- and medium-sized enterprises here have flourished, than haven’t, thanks to sensible and timely access to public capital for start-up, expansion, modernization, research and development, marketing, exporting, technology commercialization, training and, of course, job creation.

Atlantic Canada does, indeed, face problems – some of them, serious.

Our provincial debts and deficits are unsustainably large. Our industrial productivity rates stubbornly lag those elsewhere in the country. Our population is aging. Our kids are leaving.

But we don’t solve these problems by abandoning the tools that have actually served our efforts to become more competitive and economically sustainable. Effective public policy appreciates the many roles good government play.

It certainly doesn’t pander to the punditry of paranoia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t count on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course it does.

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

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

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