Silver Donald on Sunday

This blog is history

2009-03-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

Hi, all:

I'm abandoning this blog in favour of a blog embedded in my web site. To continue receiving these posts, click here and sign up for a feed: http://www.silverdonaldcameron.ca/columns

See you there!

Cheers,
Don

Silver Donald's Rustic Restaurants: Eastern and Northern Nova Scotia

2009-02-22T08:25:00.000-08:00

February 22, 2009

Last week, I shared readers' suggestions about excellent year-round restaurants in small towns on the South Shore and the Valley. Today, guided by readers, we take a gastronomic tour of northern and eastern Nova Scotia.

Joan Czapalay reports that Reid's Bakery and Restaurant in Middle Musquodobit “has been run as a family restaurant since the 1880's. There is the Temperance Pledge mounted on the wall (which backs on to the NSLC). The bread is home-made, turkey or chicken for the House Club is freshly roasted, there are pots of homemade jam available, and the molasses jug stays on the table.”

My friend Bill Fisher suggests Kennedy's Restaurant in Middle Stewiacke, while Mary Anne White cites Fletcher's in Truro. Also in Truro, Judy and Arnold Forsythe praise Murphy’s Fish and Chips, while Herald gardening guru Jodi DeLong proposes lunch at The Wooden Hog, “where the crab and salmon cakes are regularly sold out. Their homemade soups are fabulous and so are their desserts.”

Heading westward, Joan Czapalay notes Diane's Diner in Five Islands for “great clams and chips, very good pan-fried haddock” and free country music. And in Amherst, try Duncan's Pub, suggested by CBC producer Mary Munson for its tasty and affordable lunch specials, and Old Germany, on Church Street, nominated by Madelyn LeMay. When one of her children was studying music at Mount Allison in nearby Sackville, NB, Madelyn writes, she went to Old Germany whenever she could.

“One of the owners is the cook, the other serves - and the food is incredibly good,” she writes. “I would highly recommend the spinach appetizer, which I can't reproduce no matter how hard I try, the specially-made sausage, and for dessert - my kid would highly recommend the quark and custard! And if you are looking for the best, and least expensive fresh stollen ever for Christmas, your search is over.”

Stollen, aka Weihnachtsstollen, is a German fruitcake, and a quark is a subatomic particle, a piece of software and a central European fresh curd cheese. But you knew that, didn't you?

East of Truro, several good restaurants adorn the five towns of Pictou County. Rod Desborough likes The Dock, an Irish pub on George Street in New Glasgow, for fine seafood chowder and soda bread. My fellow scribe Al Farthing singles out Cafe Italia, “owned, staffed and operated by three really hardworking, charming young women, ” and also the Eastside Family Restaurant opposite the hospital. “Been there for ages, never changes,” says Al. “Their specialty is Chocolate Cake with boiled icing. People come from far away for that.”

In Pictou, deputy mayor Ken Johnston endorses Sharon's Place Family Restaurant on Front Street for “reasonably priced home cooking in an old fashioned diner setting.” In Stellarton, Gord MacPherson says that whenever he returns from working out west, he heads immediately for The Pantry Kitchen on Foord Street, whose fish and chips are “the best I've ever had.”

Mary Munson likes Gabrieau's in Antigonish while Lloyd Daye directs our attention to the Days Gone Bye Bakery and Eatery in Guysborough, owned by Aldona and Fabian Gerrior, where “everything on the menu is homemade and very reasonably priced.” In Canso, in the very far east, Joan Czapalay praises The Last Post for great haddock dinners.

In Cape Breton, Nancy MacLean applauds the home-made food at the recently-opened Bayside in Whycocomagh. Taiya Barss, one of my favourite artists, nominates The Cedar House on the main highway across Boularderie Island, for “fish cakes, their own baked beans, and the plate I always get, the hot turkey sandwich. They also sell loaves of their own bread, containers of their baked beans, and a variety of cookies to take home. Mmm,mmmm.”

And finally, Eileen Coady points out a “little gem” on the Cabot Trail at North East Margaree called the Dancing Goat Bakery and Cafe. Opened in 2006 by a returning Margaree man named Marvin Tingley, the bakery offers assorted breads, “old-fashioned cookies including Cape Breton 'Fat Archies,' and some delightful dessert cakes and cheesecakes.” The cafe provides delicious soups, hearty sandwiches, decadent desserts, assorted coffees and teas – and glassworks by a local artist adorn the front window.

Bon appetit. In Gaelic.

-- 30 --

Silver Donald's Rustic Restaurants: South Shore & Valley

2009-02-16T09:45:00.003-08:00

February 15, 2009

Last month, I asked readers to tell me about good year-round restaurants in small Nova Scotian towns. Here's the first of two reports, covering the Annapolis Valley and the South Shore.

In Hantsport, Judy and Arnold Forsythe recommend the R & G Restaurant on Wednesdays for their fishbits, served with fries, garden salad or potato salad. Down the road in Wolfville, Margaret Archibald likes The Front Street Cafe, especially the fresh haddock and the bread pudding.

Also in Wolfville, with a second location in Kentville, is Paddy's Pub and Rosie's Restaurant, recommended by Robert MacNeil and others for “good food, good service and great beer brewed in house.” He and others also admire The Port, a spacious “gastropub” in nearby Port Williams, with a great menu featuring its own beers as well as local foods, notably beef and cheeses. The Port, writes chef Michael Howell, is “a collaborative community investment” with more than 40 community shareholders.

Two readers praise Vicki's in Coldbrook, which Angela Leighton describes as “a little 'hole in the wall' in a small strip mall just past Valley Volkswagen, with haddie bits and home fries to die for.” Belle Darris ranks Vicki's fish and chips “the best in the province. And don't get me started on the pies...” Vicki's recently expanded, and also includes a small fresh fish market.

In Berwick, two readers favour the Union Street Cafe -- which is on Commercial Street. My niece Sharon Kendall describes it as “quaint and cozy,” with owners who frequently host east-coast musicians. To satisfy Marjorie's haddock addiction, however, Sharon suggests Kellock's, across the street. Harvey Freeman champions a third restaurant on Commercial Street, the Driftwood Take Out, which, despite its name, actually has tables and booths, and seems to be Berwick's lunch-time hot spot..

In Middleton, journalist Scott Milsom dines at The Capitol Lounge and Grill, located in the former theatre. Calum MacKenzie, however, avoids his Friday-night cooking obligations by taking his wife and her 97-year-old Mum to Pasta Jak's on Main St. He particularly approves “the salmon and haddock dishes, pan fried and slightly browned.” Further west, Jack Swan nominates the 35-seat Lawrencetown Restaurant, whose specialties include a Saturday night bean and scalloped-potato supper.

Numerous readers passionately endorse Chez Christophe in Grosses Coques, on the French shore, where chef Paul Comeau specializes in traditional Acadian dishes like rappie pie and fricot au poutines. The restaurant was the home of Comeau's grandfather, and patrons may eat in the original kitchen with the old kitchen stove. All the seafood dishes are splendid, says Dr. Gerald Boudreau. Comeau's seafood lasagna is “uniquely delicious,” and his rappie pie with local clams is “simply heavenly.” Claire Boudreau contends that Marjorie “will adore not only the haddock, but everything else on the menu.”

In Yarmouth, Pierre Belliveau suggests Chez Bruno, just up the hill from the ferry wharf, while Margo Riebe-Butt favours Mern's for “really great home cooking” including a notable lobster poutine. Eileen Coady nominates Rudders Seafood Restaurant and Brew Pub, located in an old warehouse on the Yarmouth waterfront, for its fish cakes, pub steak, Acadian rappie pie, hot lobster sandwiches and coconut creme pie. Marjorie and I agree. In 2004, we moored our boat at nearby Killam's Wharf, and walked to a memorable dinner at Rudders.

Scott Milsom thinks that Harris's Quick and Tasty is in “Dayton, on the northern edge of Yarmouth,” while Joan Czapalay places it in Hebron -- but both recommend its seafood and pies. Author Laurent d'Entremont is a regular at the Dennis Point Cafe in Pubnico. He likes their sweet potato fries, and he vigorously applauds the seafood at the nearby Red Cap Restaurant. Marjorie agrees.

Further up the shore, Mary Anne White likes The Two Chefs in Bridgewater. In Lunenburg, Joan Czapalay suggests breakfast at Large Marge's Diner, while Madelyn LeMay favours Historic Grounds for lunch. Deborah Gass reports that The Trellis in Hubbards, within walking distance of the wharf, offers art on the walls, music on Thursday and Friday nights, and good haddock too.

That's it, gastronomes and travellers -- our readers' recommendations for year-round restaurants on the South Shore and in the Valley. Next week, eastern and northern Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton.

Bon appetit!

-- 30 --

Living Under Cover

2009-02-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

February 8, 2009

“The guy never went outside at all,” said my friend. “Not for a month or maybe two months. The story was in one of the papers here. He went to the theatre, shopped for food and clothing, did his banking, ate out, all kinds of stuff. He even went to Toronto and New York – and he never went outdoors.”

“He went to New York without going outdoors?”

“He went by train. The Gare Central is underground, right under your hotel. ”

We were in Montreal, strolling along the underground passageways which are said to constitute the second-largest underground city in the world, after Moscow. I had been working in Montreal for a week. I was staying at Le Reine Elizabeth, on the Boulevard Rene Levesque, and most of my meetings were on Sherbrooke Ouest, 20 minutes' walk away. The streets were choked with snow and lethally slick with ice – but I wore just a sweater as I walked past coffee shops, jewellers and haberdashers in perfect comfort.

It occurred to me that the underground network made Montreal a safer city than any other in Canada, particularly for senior citizens. Walking outdoors in the winter is a really hazardous activity for seniors. Every year, hundreds fall and break their arms and legs and hips – a significant factor in the Orange Alert at the Halifax Infirmary ER last month. Old bones don't knit quickly, and many never really recover.

The danger was brought home to me a year ago, when I suddenly found myself lying on the ice beside my car. I had taken my key out, and I was about to unlock the door – and then I was on my patootie. I don't remember slipping or falling. It was like a jump-cut in a film. One moment I was up, the next I was down. A few bruises aside, I was none the worse for the experience – but it got my attention.

Young seniors – from 60 to 80, say – often sidestep this problem by going south. You find them all over the southern US, Mexico and the islands, robust and happy, sailing and golfing and swimming. But after 80, snowbirding loses its appeal. At 85 or 90, people don't feel much like travelling, and don't travel as comfortably. They'd rather stay home, close to friends and family and doctors. And that puts them most at risk from winter conditions at precisely the point when they're least able to deal with such challenges.

In Montreal, they're fine. Their apartment buildings connect to the Métro, and the Métro takes them to the under-cover city downtown. They really don't have to emerge until spring.

So at 80, should I live in Montreal?

Why not downtown Halifax? The city already has the beginnings of a covered downtown, with pedways and tunnels running from the Prince George Hotel to the waterfront casino, and branching into apartment buildings and office towers. We don't have to burrow underground. We can just extend the pedway system to link the whole downtown, from Cogswell to the Via station. A large part of Calgary's downtown is connected that way.

In Montreal, I noticed, some of the covered space was captured simply by putting a roof over the space between existing buildings. What was once a back alley becomes a connecting courtyard with a Starbucks coffee shop. In other places, a short tunnel between buildings converts two musty basements into prime retail space. Halifax probably has a score of locations where connections like that would work.

And, although a Métro doesn't seem very practical in rock-ribbed Halifax, we could bring back the downtown streetcars, looping down Barrington and up Water Street, with stations right inside such major buildings as Scotia Square and the Westin. Alternatively, could we use a light elevated rail system like the one that connects the terminals at JFK Airport

I'm no planner, and these notions may be unworkable. Fine: let's hear better ones. The point is that we're about to have a tsunami of seniors, and it would be good for them – and for everyone else, too – if we made it possible to live a safe and active life in the middle of the city all year round.

We know it can be done. Vive le Montreal!

-- 30 --

The Big Lie about Deficits

2009-02-02T07:15:00.000-08:00

February 1, 2009

The Big Lie theory was enunciated by Adolf Hitler.

The masses, said Hitler, in “the primitive simplicity of their minds..more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.” We all tell small lies, and people easily recognize them. But real whoppers, frequently repeated – the Holocaust never happened, for instance – often succeed, because people cannot believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Was Hitler right? Consider this whopper: conservatives handle money prudently, while “tax-and-spend liberals” are financially irresponsible. That's the exact opposite of the truth – but this Big Lie has been so often repeated by the right that it's rarely even questioned.

Look, for instance, at the recent interview between Maclean's editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Talking about upcoming deficits, Whyte asks, “Do you think it's fair to say that the big-spending liberals of Canada and North America are taking advantage of the political situation to drive through more of their ideological agenda?” And Harper's reply concludes, “That is a significant risk, which is why I think it's important to have a Conservative government managing this kind of program.”

Whyte purports to be a journalist, but he performs like a Conservative shill. His question is drenched in falsehood.

Pierre Trudeau, a big Liberal spender, did leave Canada with a hefty debt. But Mulroney's Conservatives, as Jean Chretien once commented, “took Trudeau's $160 billion federal debt... and 'reduced' it after eight years to $450 billion and climbing.” Mulroney's last annual deficit was $42 billion – higher than even Harper's current proposals. A full 94% of the deficit, Statistics Canada reported, was due to Mulroney's tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals, and to his government's high interest-rate policies.

Slashing ferociously, Chretien's Liberals routed the deficit in their first four years, and ran fat surpluses thereafter. In the US, the “tax-and-spend liberal” Bill Clinton inherited a record $290-billion deficit from Ronald Reagan and George the First. He balanced the books in his second term and bequeathed a $236-billion surplus to George Dubya. By 2009, Dubya – a self-described “fiscal conservative” – was projecting a record deficit of $482 billion, largely due to irresponsible tax cuts and reckless military commitments. And that was even before the meltdowns and bailouts.

In Nova Scotia, the Hamm government inherited an $11-billion debt, much of which derives from the spendthrift Tory regime of John Buchanan. The Tory story contends that Hamm balanced the budget in 2002, and that all subsequent provincial budgets have been in surplus. In addition, an $830-million offshore windfall was applied to the debt. The bottom line, notes Halifax accountant Ian Crowe, is that the debt magically “shrank” from $11 billion to $12.3 billion. Wha --?

I nominate for the Solid Brass Award the newly-minted Tory Senator Stephen Greene, who uses the spectre of deficits to flog Nova Scotia's NDP. At a recent nomination meeting, Green reportedly compared Darryl Dexter to the communist rulers of North Korea and Cuba, and urged Tories to “remember the havoc under NDP Premier Bob Rae in Ontario.”

Ah yes, Bob Rae, the Ogre of Ontario. As Rae took office in 1990, Ontario was already heading into recession and projecting a $700 million deficit. Rae tried to blunt the recession's impact using even larger deficits. He failed. But if recession-fighting deficits were bad policy then, why are the federal Tories embracing them now?

And what about Manitoba's NDP Premier Gary Doer, running ten budget surpluses in a row while cutting taxes and improving social services? Anybody remember the balanced budgets of Allan Blakeney and Roy Romanow in Saskatchewan? And the looting of the Saskatchewan treasury by the Tories under Grant Devine, which sent the deficit to $1.2 billion and landed a dozen Tories in the slammer for fraud?

Canada's greatest socialist, Tommy Douglas, held off implementing medicare for 15 years, until he was sure that Saskatchewan could afford it. Why? You can't build social democracy, Douglas argued, if the bankers can stop you by calling your loans. That's not a problem for right-wing governments – but it gives left-wing governments a lively allergy to deficits.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is spreading a Big Lie.

-- 30 --

The Cheerful Little Restaurants

2009-01-25T10:42:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2009

The sauerkraut was bright, crisp and tangy, and the sausages were robust and spicy – just what I wanted. The waiter was an attentive, good-humoured middle-aged man named Burt – the only male server for miles around, he said.

“How's your haddock?” I asked. Marjorie has extensive knowledge of pan-fried haddock.

“Perfect,” said Marjorie.

“This place is a find,” I said. It was noon-hour, and the restaurant was packed.

We were in Bridgewater, at Waves Seafood and Grill – an undistinguished-looking store-front in a thoroughly ordinary strip mall. The décor was clean and simple, but far from fancy – booths, tables, vinyl floor with pools of meltwater.

But the patrons were voluble and happy, and no wonder. The service was first-rate, the food was excellent, and the menu bespoke the location. You could get any of the staple lunches of small-town restaurants – chops, liver, the always-safe clubhouse sandwich. But we were in Lunenburg County, you, so the menu also offered seafood, sauerkraut, sausage – food that reflected the taste that Lunenburgers brought from Germany 250 years ago.

“There are other restaurants like this around the province,” I said. “There's a little place called Crofter's in New Glasgow. It's in a little strip mall on the Stellarton Road. Good solid food, historical photos on the walls, and an unobtrusive Scottish character, as befits New Glasgow. Great staff, great value.”

That's not just my opinion. When I later went prowling online, I found Crofter's described as “cozy, interesting and friendly.”

“I don't know what we expected,” wrote one happy patron, “but this restaurant exceeded our expectations. Good fresh seafood, good steak, helpful hostess, attractive, pleasant and efficient waitress, good ambiance.”

“I remember Crofter's,” Marjorie said. “The pan-fried haddock was really good. And what about the Fleur de Lis in Port Hawkesbury?”

Same story – a simple but welcoming little restaurant in a strip mall, with excellent food which reflects the proprietors' Acadian origins. The last time I was there, a happy lunchtime crowd made it hard to get a seat. I had Acadian fish-cakes with homemade baked beans and thick slices of bread – delicious, hearty and affordable. Marjorie was equally pleased with her meal. In a wild spasm of experimentation, she chose the haddock burger.

And again, the online comments agree. “Oh, this is such a good little restaurant,” writes one patron of the Fleur-de-Lis. “Easy to miss because it's tucked away in the shopping strip mall---near Sobey's. But oh the food is good especially the apple or blueberry crisp. We always eat there when we are in Cape Breton which is at least twice a year. Don't miss this place!!!”

And I was charmed by another Web endorsement from a much younger critic: “i love this restaurant since my mo owns it, (brenda chisholm) i am candice chisholm and I am 13 years old. I guarantee that you will have food at its best from this restaurant so if you go, please enjoy”

You bet, Candice.

These three restaurants are open all year, as is The Knot Pub in Lunenburg, acclaimed as one of Canada's best pubs – and who am I to argue? Once again, The Knot knows where it is – in a German-rooted seaport – so the interior is all rope and blocks, navigation lamps, flags, casks and nameplates. The sauerkraut and seafood is excellent, and so is the house beer, a “Knots Ale” brewed by Propeller. (And, says Marjorie, so is the haddock.)

These cheerful little restaurants are all located in market towns – small communities, but large enough to sustain a year-round business. They're in high-traffic locations with ample parking. They're attuned to their markets, catering to local tastes and budgets. They compete very successfully with fast-food chain restaurants – and they've been around for a while.

I'm sure there are similar restaurants in comparable towns that I'm less familiar with – Amherst, Kentville, Yarmouth. (In fact I'd like to hear about such restaurants; if you have one to suggest, drop me a line at sdc@silverdonaldcameron.ca ). Unpretentious, reliable and welcoming, these little restaurants have all built loyal, local followings, and they lift the heart of a winter traveller who's lucky enough to find one.

-- 30 --

Allan Blakeney: A Genuine Public Servant

2009-01-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2009

“There are disadvantages in being in government in a small province,” writes Allan Blakeney in his recent memoir, An Honourable Calling (University of Toronto Press, 2008). “But there advantages, too. One of them is that the smaller scale allows one to plan and bring about many changes in a short time.” Denizens of Province House, please pay attention.

Blakeney hails from Bridgewater, NS, but he made his mark as NDP Premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982. His adopted province, he comments, has a long history as “a social laboratory for Canada.” In 1944, it gave us North America's first democratic socialist government, headed by the legendary Tommy Douglas, who soon brought in universal hospital insurance, followed in 1962 by Canada's first medicare program. Canadians today regard medicare as a defining feature of our country – but it was fiercely opposed at the outset, and it only came about after a bitter month-long strike by the province's doctors.

Blakeney was a minister in Douglas' cabinet, and in Woodrow Lloyd's after Douglas moved on to become the first federal leader of the NDP. He succeeded Lloyd as party leader in 1970, and became Premier after winning the provincial election of 1971.

Does it make a difference which party is in power? You bet it does.

Ross Thatcher's outgoing Liberal government had instituted user fees in medicare, and barred strikes in essential services. In its first two weeks in office, Blakeney writes, the NDP reversed both decisions – and also “we removed the medicare tax for people over 65; we reduced hours of work before overtime provisions kicked in; we gave extra protection to farmers against the seizure of their land and machinery by creditors; and we removed charges against the estates of patients who had received treatment for mental illness.”

That was the first fortnight. Blakeney's NDP later implemented Canada's first 40-hour work week, along with longer annual vacations, equal pay for women, and maternity and bereavement leave. It introduced Canada's highest minimum wage – and although business objected, as it always does, profits went up. “Employees who get good wages spend their money,” says Blakeney, “ and – big surprise – employers do well.”

The NDP's vision has always included an enhanced version of universal, comprehensive and accessible medicare that would include drug costs and dentistry, a vision still unfulfilled nationally. More than 30 years ago, however, Blakeney's Saskatchewan had both.

In 1971, Saskatchewan had the lowest per-capita ratio of dentists in Canada, and many families lived more than 50 miles from the nearest dentist. The government created a corps of 400 “dental therapists”with two years of training to provide routine dental services and dental hygiene instruction to all school children. The program was both effective and popular.

Pharmacare, meanwhile, made prescription drug coverage available to everyone. At its heart were “standing offer contracts” with major drug manufacturers based on public tenders for six-months' supplies of approved drugs. The tenders drove basic drug costs down, but pharmacies received an agreed mark-up and a dispensing fee. Normally, the province paid for the drug, and the patient paid the dispensing fee. The plan covered over 90% of the people using prescription drugs in the province.

Blakeney's government was ultimately defeated by Grant Devine's Progressive Conservatives. Blakeney led his party into one more unsuccessful election before retiring. Meanwhile, the Devine government dismantled the dental plan, turning dental care over to private clinics. It also modified the drug plan, says Blakeney, by introducing “financial barriers, with the result that fewer than 20 per cent of the potential beneficiaries received financial support.”

The dental program was never reinstated, although the pharmacare program was later revived. Blakeney notes that the same principles could guide a comprehensive national pharmacare scheme which would produce “massive savings for Canadians, either as taxpayers or patients or both.”

In office, Blakeney confronted many other major issues of late 20th-century Canada -- the National Energy Policy, the Constitution, uranium, native affairs, NAFTA, potash, rural decline and more. What dominates his book, though, is the deep decency of the man and his political philosophy, his in-the-bones vision of a society at once rational, prudent and caring. Canada owes a great deal to Saskatchewan – and to the Nova Scotian who was once its premier.

-- 30 --

Disgracing Our National Game

2009-01-18T15:08:00.000-08:00

January 11, 2009

When I was eleven, all I wanted was to be Max Bentley, “The Dipsy-Doodle Dandy from Delisle.”

Bentley belonged to an extraordinary family of five hockey players from Delisle, Saskatchewan. Three Bentleys made the NHL, and two – Max and Doug – made the Hall of Fame. Max was a star centre with the mighty Toronto Maple Leafs, Stanley Cup winners in four years out of five. A magnificent stick-handler and play-maker, Max was NHL scoring champion two years running.

But how could I become an ice-hockey star in Vancouver, a city with no ice? Instead, our gang played on the street with roller skates clamped to our shoes. We wore shin-pads, hockey gloves and Maple Leaf sweaters. We were Max Bentley, Syl Apps, Teeder Kennedy, Turk Broda, the greatest team on earth.

And if we got hurt, so what? One time I fell and broke a front tooth on the concrete. The dentist treated it the following Saturday. That afternoon, Billy Weeks took a swipe at the puck. His stick glanced off mine, and flew into my face. There went my other front tooth.

It was, absolutely, an accident. Billy was aghast. We never, ever fought, for the excellent reason that if we did, the gang would disperse and the game would be over, perhaps permanently. Unthinkable.

I no longer follow hockey, but I retain a visceral love for it. But the death of 21-year-old Don Sanderson after an on-ice fight heats up a simmering disgust dating back at least to Todd Bertuzzi's vicious attack on Steve Moore in March, 2004.

Enough, already. Enough. If you want to play hockey, emulate masters like Bentley or Gretzky. If you want to fight, become boxers.

Yes, I know that hockey players have always fought. Four players apparently died in 1904 alone, and numerous others have been killed, crippled or disabled over the years. In one notorious incident in 1933, Boston's Eddie Shore hit Leafs' star Ace Bailey hard from behind, smacking his head on the ice, fracturing his skull and ending his career. Todd Bertuzzi did the same for Steve Moore five years ago.

So hockey violence has a long tradition. So what? Bear-baiting once was groovy. Christians vs Lions was boffo entertainment in imperial Rome. In 1840, the founder of this newspaper, Joseph Howe, settled an argument by duelling. Should that fact help me if I shoot a critic this afternoon?

Fighting is not, as some of its defenders claim, just a natural outcome of rough, fast sports. It's not tolerated in college hockey, in European hockey or in other contact sports like football and soccer. After the 1920s, hockey mayhem apparently declined until the league expanded in the 1960s, so we didn't hear much about fighting in Foster Hewitt's wonderful radio broadcasts of the 1940s. The six-team NHL of the 1940s only had room for players who could skate, stick-handle, pass and score. A swollen NHL could accommodate louts who specialized in bruising and bashing.

Don Sanderson's death is being blamed on bad luck, and on the fact that his helmet popped off during that fatal fight. Again, so what? If you go to rob a corner store and the proprietor winds up dead, you're guilty of murder even if you didn't really mean to snuff him. Sanderson didn't fall on the ice by accident. He fell in the course of a fistfight. No fight, no death.

The NHL could readily put an end to this. In 1927, Boston's Billy Coutu attacked a referee, and the NHL expelled him for life. Bravo. The courts could help, too. Todd Bertuzzi's sentence for assault was a conditional discharge and a year's probation. If he had maimed someone in a tavern, would he have escaped the slammer?

And if all else fails, Parliament could pass a simple amendment to the Criminal Code providing that anyone committing a criminal offence during a sports competition would be banned from organized sports in Canada for 10 years. Let Todd Bertuzzi play in Anaheim or Pittsburgh – but not in Calgary or Ottawa. That would quickly reduce his value.

This is our elegant national game. The goons dishonour it. We have every right to stop them – and we should.

-- 30 --

Stop, Thief! That's My Country!

2009-01-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

January 4, 2009

What I want to know is, by what authority are these monkeys doing this stuff?

The monkeys are the governments of Canada, the USA and Mexico – and what they are doing is, basically, stealing our countries, welding them together, and giving them to global corporations. Their instrument is the Security and Prosperity Partnership – which, astonishingly, continues to fly below the public radar screen, though its nature and purpose are perfectly well-known.

The SPP began in 2005, in – appropriately – Waco, Texas, where George W. Bush met with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. (Remember him?) The three agreed to “fast-track” the economic integration of the continent. In 2006, meeting in Cancun, the trio – Martin now replaced by Harper – created a North American Competitiveness Council, made up of 10 big-business CEOs from each country, who undertook to meet annually with senior government officials to discuss the corporate sector's erotic fantasies about the new continental economy.

Notice that there's no parallel Council of Citizens or Small Businesses. The governments are taking advice only from the CEOs of Ford, Lockheed, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Chevron, General Electric, Wal-Mart, Bell Canada, Scotiabank and the like.

They're movin' right along. An Alberta professor named Dr. Janine Brodie recently presented a paper on “Executive Power and the Privatization of Authority.” Now there's a phrase. Brodie quotes Paul Cellucci, the former US Ambassador who berated Canada for not going to war in Iraq, as saying that “10 years from now, maybe 15 years from now we're gonna look back and we are going to have a union in everything but name.”

Did you vote for that? No? Then by what authority are these monkeys doing this stuff?

Last fall, my friend Wendy Holm, an agrologist and writer in BC, reviewed the report of a Competition Policy Review Panel appointed by the Harper government to identify the changes that Canada needs to make in preparation for full scale North American economic integration.

For starters, the Panel thought Canada should smile upon mergers of large Canadian financial institutions. We were being needlessly cautious, since “appropriate regulatory safeguards already exist to protect prudential soundness, competition and the public interest."

Ah. Right. Those would be the safeguards which worked so well for Bear Stearns, Lehmann Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc., and so efficiently protected the public interest that the US taxpayer is now on the hook for something like a trillion dollars. The Panel also recommended that, when considering big mergers, the "net benefit to Canada" test be dropped.

Breathtaking. Canadian householders and taxpayers are already paying for innumerable corporate bungles – and the government of Canada is not even supposed to ask whether such financial engineering is in the public interest?

The Panel goes on to suggest that Canada should neuter its Competition Act, welcome increased foreign competition generally, reduce corporate taxes, and open up Canada's airline, uranium and telecommunications sectors to increased foreign investment. These worthies also thought that Canada should harmonize product and professional standards and legal requirements with the US. In other words, if we have tougher health and safety standards than the US, ours should be weakened.

Did you vote for that? I thought not. So by what authority are these monkeys doing this stuff?

As an award-winning agrologist, Wendy Holm focuses on food and agriculture. She sees the SPP as a direct threat to Canadian farmers (who would lose the protection of supply-management regimes) and to Canadian consumers.

“Canadians have not put a priority on farm and food policy because as a nation we have never gone without,” Holm writes. “Embarrassingly, Canada remains one of the few nations in the world that does NOT have a national food policy. But things are quickly changing, and community discussions around peak oil, peak food, food security, food safety, food miles, food sovereignty and food democracy are moving that change forward.”

Under the SPP, such discussions will be pointless. Canada will have lost the right to create or enforce national policies in areas like food, energy, and investment. Removing that right is precisely the objective of the SPP.

Did we elect these monkeys to give away the country? No? Then by what authority are they doing this stuff?

-30-

Dr. Atomic

2008-12-28T04:16:00.000-08:00

December 28, 2008

On July 15, 1945, as the first atomic bomb in history seared the desert sky, Robert Oppenheimer thought: "I am become Death: the destroyer of worlds."

The line comes from the Bhagavad-Gita, and it's included in the libretto of Dr. Atomic, a phenomenal opera about Oppenheimer and the invention of the bomb. I saw Dr. Atomic in Halifax, at one of several Empire theatres in the province that offer high-definition broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera productions. Next month, Empire and the Met will offer operas by Puccini, Berlioz and Gluck. The schedule is at http://www.empiretheatres.com/empireevents/ Seeing grand opera live, on the big screen, with superb sound, is a glorious experience – and it's the only way most of us can ever really see it.

Opera, says John Adams, the composer of Dr. Atomic, has “a curious ability to handle life's biggest themes in a way no other art form can approximate” – and his theme here is the towering story of the twentieth century. Dr. Atomic evokes Faust, or Genesis, or Prometheus – legends of creation and destruction, of pride and aspiration and the mortal perils of the quest for knowledge, stories that question the very essence of human experience.

But this story is not ancient myth or drama. This is history. In outline, we all know the story – the brilliant scientists, led by Oppenheimer, sequestered in the deserts of New Mexico, working furiously to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis and the Japanese. In less than a month after their first successful test, atomic blasts vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those explosions brought an end to World War II, and a beginning to an era of terror which persists to this day. Before Hiroshima, wars took place on well-defined battlefields, often far across the seas. After the bomb, Armageddon lurked behind every headline, and any city might be the next Hiroshima. As a child in the Cold War, I went to sleep dreading a brilliant white flash in the middle of the night that would be the last thing I would ever see.

In Dr. Atomic, Oppenheimer is sung by Gerald Finley. The central figure in the opera, Oppenheimer was a dazzling intellect – a top-rank theoretical physicist, a brilliant administrator, a linguist and a keen lover of poetry who learned Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original. Peter Sellars' libretto for Dr. Atomic is built from government documents, testimony and internal communications within the Manhattan Project – but also from the poets that Oppenheimer loved, notably Baudelaire, Donne and Muriel Ruykeyser.

The atomic scientists were well aware that the new weapon would cause almost unimaginable destruction and suffering, and they wrestled with that knowledge even as they pressed onward with the project. Oppenheimer himself was deeply troubled by the moral implications of the work that so consumed him, and the opera's first act concludes with Finley's passionate delivery of an aria based on Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV:
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend...

The blast in the desert permanently changed the human relationship to the world. For the first time, humans were manipulating the very fabric of reality, transforming matter into energy, releasing powers far beyond their own comprehension. Oppenheimer's scientists worried that an atomic blast might set off a chain reaction that would in a flash consume the planet's atmosphere.

I am become Death.

Before the Manhattan Project, humans believed the world was beyond our power to harm. The fish and the forests would always regenerate. The atmosphere and the oceans were so vast that our effluents could not really damage them. After the bomb, that illusion was impossible. We went on to find many ways to endanger ourselves and the planet – poisonous chemicals, genetic engineering, greenhouse gases. The bomb opened Pandora's box, and changed the terms of human life forever.

"In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish," Oppenheimer once said, "the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Yes, and so have we all. Doctor Atomic delineates nothing less than a second Fall, from a second Eden. It's a mighty achievement, an unforgettable revelation. A grand opera, in every sense of the term.

-- 30 --

'Tis the Season...

2008-12-21T08:19:00.000-08:00

December 21, 2008

I wish you a Merry Christmas. And a Happy New Year. I really do.

But what would make Chistmas merry, and New Year's happy? Good question. Two-thirds of Americans apparently dread the holiday season, because it will simply add more stuff to their lives. Christmas gifts have become the social equivalent of anti-matter. Far from delighting the recipients, Christmas gifts depress them.

I stumbled across this information in Bill McKibben's provocative book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. In it, McKibben asks a simple question: “Is more better?” Do objects and possessions really make us happy? If not, then why pursue “economic growth,” which really means the creation of still more objects and possessions?

These are heretical questions – particularly to economists, whose odd semi-science rests on the assumption that we can tell what makes you happy (or “maximizes utility,” in econo-speak) by looking at how you spend your money. Economics assumes that people are rational and make rational choices. If you're buying a leaf blower, then, presumably you've judged that of all the things you could possibly be doing at this moment, buying a leaf blower is the most satisfying.

Buying stuff makes you happy. The more stuff you can buy, the happier you'll be. That's the fundamental assumption of economics.

But it's not so in the real world. In 1991, McKibben reports, “the average American family owned twice as many cars, drove two and a half times as far, used twenty-one times as much plastic, and traveled twenty-five times farther by air than did the average family in 1951.” The economy had tripled since 1950, and the size of new houses had doubled since 1970.

So those families were two or three times as happy, right?

Wrong. The proportion of Americans who say they are happy has slipped steadily since about 1950. In all the industrialized countries, increasing prosperity has been accompanied by decreasing happiness. Japan and the UK have seen huge increases in per capita incomes, but no increases in happiness. The New York Times reports that people born in the world's wealthiest countries after 1955 are “three times as likely as their grandparents to have had a serious bout of depression.” Between 1955 and 1988, British national income rose sharply – and so did rates of crime and divorce.

And we have so much junk that a whole new industry has arisen to take care of it. One of the fastest-growing businesses in North America is self-storage.

Another whole series of studies has come at this question backwards, asking people to describe the factors that contribute to a high quality of life. About 70% give great weight to such intangibles as family life, equality, recreational opportunities, job satisfaction. The best predictors of happiness include robust health and a good marriage. Money and possessions rank very low.

So how did we get mesmerized by the notion that happiness comes from steadily rising incomes and a steadily expanding economy?

Because it's true – but only to a point. Money and possessions do bring happiness – but (says the research) only up to about $10,000 per capita. That's $40,000 a year for a couple with two kids, enough to provide decent shelter, an adequate diet, all the basic amenities of life. Beyond $10,000 per capita there's no reliable correlation between money and happiness.

But our perceptions haven't caught up with reality. We've become rich, but we behave as though we were still as poor as the novelist Hugh MacLennan, growing up in Glace Bay during World War I. One of his most beautiful stories, “An Orange from Portugal,” conveys his joy and wonder at the sight of a single fresh orange at Christmas.

We need a new way to celebrate Christmas, a fresh tradition that recognizes the deeper needs of affluent people. We don't need more stuff. We need time with beloved people, silence for spiritual reflection, engagement with art, connection with nature.

I wish you a Merry Christmas. And a Happy New Year. And the wisdom to seek happiness not in the malls and the big-box stores, but in places where it can actually be found.

-- 30 --

Green Wheels: Car-sharing Comes to Halifax

2008-12-15T17:37:00.000-08:00

December 14, 2008

“People ask me if I don't feel worried about starting a business just at the beginning of a recession,” says Pam Cooley. “I tell them No, because I think this business is really going to help people get through the recession, so I think it's going to do very well.”

Pam is president and co-owner of CarShareHFX, which opened up in Halifax earlier this month. The other owner is general manager Peter Zimmer. In essence, their service gives you the use of a car whenever you need one – but without the cost and hassle of owning one. More than 40,000 Canadians already belong to car-sharing services, and the number is growing rapidly.

Small wonder. On average, North Americans spend 19% of their incomes on their cars. As our belts tighten, more and more people are reducing their use of cars – living near their work, telecommuting, car-pooling, using public transit, cycling and walking. But for toting groceries or visiting the suburbs, cars remain almost indispensable.

Enter the car-sharing programs. With CarShareHFX, members pay a flat annual fee – about $250 – and an hourly rental ($10 an hour to use a car in peak periods, $3 in the small hours of the night). That's it. The fees cover everything – gas, insurance, maintenance, even a MacPass for crossing the bridges – and are charged monthly to your credit card.

The cars – Hondas, Kias and Toyotas, including the hybrid Prius – all have automatic transmissions, air conditioning, child seat anchors, stereo systems, an emergency kit and 24/7 roadside assistance. As CarShareHFX grows, Pam and Peter hope to add bio-fuelled vehicles, prestige cars and sports cars as well as workhorses cargo vans and pickups.

To use the service, the member reserves the car online or by telephone. Cars are located in seven central locations now – six on the peninsula of Halifax, one in downtown Dartmouth, with more to come as membership grows. At the appointed time, the member goes to the shared car and places a little electronic “fob” over a transceiver inside the car window. The door unlocks. The ignition key is inside, tied on a lanyard so it won't be accidentally taken away. Vroom. Go.

Most people, says Pam, find that they spend about as much on their car-sharing membership as they used to spend on their car insurance alone. Using a car only when they really need one, they drive far fewer miles in a year – and the one car, with its one parking place, can serve about 20 drivers. The effect on congestion, parking and emissions can be spectacular. CommunAuto, Montreal's car-share service – the first one in North America – reckons that 250 cars in its fleet take 3500 cars off the road..

In fact, car-sharing has become so mainstream that green property developers in cities like Ottawa are including car-share memberships in the amenities of their condos, and providing space for car-share vehicles to park right inside the building. Some foresee a day when the developer's obligation to provide parking will be sharply reduced for buildings which incorporate car-sharing in their design.

Car-sharing also has significant advantages for businesses of all sizes. For larger companies, it preserves the organization's capital while giving employees guaranteed access to a fleet of vehicles, with every trip logged and tracked in detail. Home businesses can also husband their capital while impressing their clients by arriving at meetings in a sparkling new car.

Capital Health and the Nova Scotia Community College are already members of CarShareHFX. The province is also interested, and for the government which passed the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, car-sharing should be a no-brainer. Likewise with the Halifax Regional Municipality. In Philadelphia, says Pam Cooley, 55,000 people car-share – and the biggest member is the city.

But the concept will work far beyond the big city – as it does, for instance, in Nelson, BC, pop. 9300.

“Eventually, we'd also like to provide the service in smaller Maritime towns, and even in rural areas,” says Peter Zimmer. It's quite feasible, says Pam Cooley. The key factors are simply “enthusiasm and demand.”

Nurture the planet and save money, too. Does it get much better than that?

-- 30 --

The Vanishing Prime Minister

2008-12-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2008

I fear it's all my fault. Six weeks ago, on October 18, just two days before the federal election, I made some innocent observations about the probable results.

“Consider the results of recent polls,” I wrote, “which show the Harper crowd at about 35%, the Liberals near 25%, the NDP around 20%, the Greens at 12% or so, and the Bloc somewhere under 10%. Do the math. If those percentages were reflected in seats, then any two of the first three would have enough support to challenge the Conservatives, and to ask the Governor-General for an opportunity to form a government.... And the centre-left parties don't have to merge in order to rule. They only need to learn the tricks of coalitions and voting alliances, like politicians in other multi-party legislatures like those of Germany, Ireland, Italy, France and Israel.”

I didn't know that the opposition leaders read this column so carefully. And now look what I've done – pulled the rug from under the government, turned up the heat on the Governor-General, and detonated a constitutional crisis.

Delightful.

What I didn't predict, of course, was that the Prime Minister would precipitate the new era by popping his own head into the mouth of a lion and daring it to chew – an action rooted in his own cold cleverness and his appalling lack of judgment. (If he had had his way, remember, our soldiers would be fighting in Iraq and Maher Arar would still be in a black hole in Damascus.) This self-inflicted crisis could be a career-terminating move. His main appeal to his party was that he could win. Without that aura, he's gone.

The government has gained a few weeks of life by persuading the Governor-General to prorogue Parliament – the first-ever use of prorogation as a survival technique. The Prime Minister presumably hopes that the opposition coalition will implode between now and late January – aided, no doubt, by late-night offers of Cabinet posts and Senate seats to any wavering Liberals. Shades of Stronach.

Meanwhile, the Harperites will try to whip up the Canadian public to smite Stephane Dion for trying to do exactly what Harper tried to do in 2004, and Stockwell Day in 2000 – join with the dreaded socialists and the separatists to take power without an election. And if his government is nevertheless defeated in January, Harper might even try to persuade the Governor-General to call another election.

In politics, six weeks is forever, and Harper could yet wriggle through. With a leadership contest underway, the Liberals are ill-positioned to govern, and the cracks in the glue that binds the coalition are easy enough to see.

Still, if the coalition parties can stay focussed on what they share, they may well be able to stick-handle their way to power, and they might make a respectable government. They have powerful incentives to make their partnership work, and substantial common interests in areas like the economy and the environment.

The arrangement is risky for the NDP, which will have to tolerate policies it fundamentally detests, like corporate tax cuts and the Afghanistan mission. But the NDP may be surrounded by what Pogo the peerless possum once called “insurmountable opportunities.”

The NDP's political achievements – which include policies like pension reform, tax reform and medicare – have always come from controlling the oxygen supply of Liberal minority governments. The trap is that if the policies work, the Liberals get the credit and the NDP gets trampled in the subsequent stampede to majority government.

But a coalition could be different. The NDP would have its own ministers within the cabinet. If those ministers were deft and nimble, they could make a real difference – and also capture the credit for their achievements.

Not the least of their achievements would be ridding us of Stephen Harper.

“You know,” said a friend last week, “I'm beginning to loathe this guy almost as much as Mulroney.”

Hold on now, buddy. That's a big claim. I admit that Harper has united both the right and the left, strained the fabric of the nation and single-handedly rendered the population bilious and apoplectic. But challenge Mulroney? Buddy, that's a big, big claim.

-- 30 --

How to Save the Auto Industry

2008-11-30T16:37:00.000-08:00

November 30, 2008

Here they come again – corporations chanting their familiar mantra of economic blackmail. After decades of irresponsible, stupid and sometimes criminal behaviour, the North American auto companies are beseeching taxpayers to rescue them. If we don't open the financial faucet, plants will close, jobs will vanish, the sky will fall. Give generously! Give now!

Why? This has always been a rogue industry, especially General Motors. In 1949, GM, Standard Oil of California and Firestone were convicted of criminal conspiracy for buying and dismantling numerous inner-city electric rail systems, forcing commuters into automobiles and busses. From 1923 to 1986, a consortium that included GM conspired to market a toxic and unnecessary gasoline additive called tetraethyl lead, on which GM held the patent. By 1986, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 5000 Americans were dying every year of heart disease due to the effects of lead.

By then the oil shocks of the 1970s had revealed that the era of cheap oil was ending, and anyone with the intelligence of a squirrel was taking action to hedge against the next oil shock. People insulated their houses, installed alternate sources of heat, took the bus and turned down the lights. Denmark closed its roads on Sundays, and then reinvented itself as the world capital of wind power. The Japanese created magnificent small cars. And the US government instituted a measure called CAFE, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, designed to cut exhaust emissions while doubling fuel efficiency.

Detroit's reaction? GM built a fleet of 1100 fully-functional electric cars in the 1990s – but it then recalled and destroyed them. It abandoned the small-car market to the import brands. Instead, noting the relatively lenient CAFE standards for light trucks, the Big Three concentrated on building poorly-engineered, highly-profitable “sport-utility vehicles,” obese gas-swilling cars that could qualify as trucks.

Then the oil price zoomed. The demand for big dumb vehicles crashed. And now these leering boobies want us to save them from the predictable consequences of their own folly.

Sure, boys. But on our terms, not yours. In truth, this is a magnificent opportunity.

The Canadian and US governments should buy a big slice of these companies – but require that they leap-frog the international competition by radically redesigning the automobile. We can serve the industry, the consumer and the environment at once by transforming the automobile into a totally-recyclable “product-of-service.”

Whuzzat?

A product-of-service is an alternative to the illusion of “ownership.” We are all transients on the planet; in truth, we own nothing. What we really buy are services, not products – not an automobile, for instance, but the convenient mobility that an automobile provides.

But one can use a car without owning it. We can just lease our cars directly from the manufacturers – but with a requirement that they take the car back at the end of its useful life and recycle every part of it. And the lease could include all the costs of the car.

Think how different the car would be, if the manufacturer was fully responsible for it, and knew it would eventually be coming back. Cars would be assembled with a view to being disassembled. The manufacturers would strive to make durable vehicles, with components that could easily be recycled or re-used. They would become fanatical about servicing cars and cutting their costs of operation – including the costs of their emissions. Consumers would never be ambushed by unexpected repairs. Insurance coverage could be tied to mileage. It would all be in the lease.

With its gluttonous appetite for resources and its toxic wastes, the automobile is the very emblem of our false relationship with the planet – but it could become the first major example of economic sanity and environmental sustainability. This is a unique opportunity. The auto industry is on life support. It's in no position to bargain. Public investment could keep all those employees at work and ensure the survival of the industry – but in return, the industry should be required to devote itself, for once, to the well-being of workers, consumers, and the planet.

-- 30 --

The Genuine Progress Index - At Last!

2008-11-27T07:24:00.000-08:00

November 23, 2008

Here's a choice for you.

Suppose I offered you an opportunity to double your income, while your expenses went up only by 80%. In your new situation, however, you would have no access to the voluntary services provided by charities and service clubs, or by friends and family. Divorce would be three times more common. The quality of your air and water would be worse. The crime rate and the addiction rate would be far higher, while access to recreational and cultural services would be much lower.

Would you be better off?

Almost every economist and every government agency on the planet would say Yes -- you're earning more and spending more, and that makes you richer. I would say No -- what you've lost in health, security and informal social support is worth far more than your modest financial gain. And that's the difference between the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Genuine Progress Index (GPI).

As the Faithful Reader knows, the GDP simply measures the dollar value of the goods and services exchanged in an economy. Bad things -- like crime, pollution and divorce -- make it rise, while a clean environment and unpaid services literally don't count.

For the last dozen years, a little research organization called GPI Atlantic, based in St. Margaret's Bay, has been developing a Genuine Progress Index for Nova Scotia. (Disclosure: I've occasionally done some writing for GPI.) The GPI assigns positive value to things like “natural capital” -- a healthy environment, for example -- and to unpaid work like housework and volunteer community service. Conversely, the GPI deducts the cost of undesirable things like crime, illness and pollution.

Last month, GPI Atlantic released its completed accounts, a summary of key indicators in 20 social, economic, and environmental areas. We are now among the very few jurisdictions in the world which actually know whether or not they're moving in a desirable direction.

The good news is that, measured correctly, Nova Scotia is a wealthy province. We have a strong civil society, high rates of volunteerism, robust family relationships, high levels of home ownership, and relatively low levels of household debt, for example. The wealth that is normally uncounted makes Nova Scotia a good place to live. That's why many tradespeople commute to Alberta rather than migrating there.

The bad news is that as our GDP rises, our real wealth often erodes. Over the past decade, for instance, Nova Scotia women have achieved more equitable pay rates, but they're working longer hours and women do most of our volunteer work. The resulting decline in volunteerism between 1998 and 2005 “cost the province $370 million in lost voluntary services in 2005,” says GPI, “and will cost a similar amount every year that the shortfall persists.”

The decline particularly affects vulnerable groups like the elderly, the young, the disabled and the homeless. It will also harm arts and culture, after-school activities, environmental groups and churches. The result will be higher rates of crime, drug abuse and the like -- which will be reflected in rising social and economic costs. The problems will be compounded by the incipient recession, since GPI Atlantic's studies have shown that the loss of jobs and income during economic downturns also increases social unrest, illnesses and crime, especially robbery.

To avoid those ill-effects, says GPI's Executive Director, Ron Colman, Nova Scotia should “reduce and redistribute working hours rather than laying people off.” It should also upgrade its infrastructure, and “build a more resilient and self-reliant local economy.” Yes, those actions will cost money -- but inaction will cost us even more.

The same is true with environmental issues. Nova Scotia's pioneering solid-waste program once seemed unaffordable -- but it actually created jobs and businesses, and now saves Nova Scotia at least$32 million annually. By the same token, meeting the greenhouse gas reduction targets in the province's ambitious Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act will ultimately save us more than $800 million.

If you don't know where you're going, said Yogi Berra, you'll probably end up somewhere else. The Genuine Progress Index tells us where we're going -- and how fast we're getting there. It's a compass pointing towards a satisfying and sustainable future. Getting there is up to us.

-- 30 --

Memories of War, and the Music of Peace

2008-11-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

The bullet, said Johnny Mauger, went in one side of his friend's head, but it didn't quite come out the other. Johnny tapped his temple. The bullet made a little bulge, like a pimple, right here. His voice was soft and sad as he remembered his friend, another young kid from Cape Breton, dead in a European trench.

Johnny's story is in The Crimson Flower of Battle, a television documentary that my friends Charlie Doucet, Scott Macmillan and I created in 1995, telling the stories of the men and women of Isle Madame during the war which had ended exactly 50 years earlier. The vets will never talk to you, their families said. Johnny absolutely refuses to talk about the war. But when I asked him, Johnny thought for a moment and then he said Yes. He and his comrades were getting old, and they needed to record their stories.

What stories they were. Boys of 16 on convoy ships, watching other ships exploding, the water burning, dying men screaming. Ships entering Liverpool after Dieppe with their scuppers running red with blood. Ace pilots telling themselves they were shooting down airplanes, not men. Slave labourers from Petit de Grat building the airport in Hong Kong.

Funny stories, too. Being captured by the Germans three times in a single day as the front line surged forward and back. Flying a plane under -- that's right, under -- the Eiffel Tower. Looking beneath your tank after an air raid, and discovering a schoolmate from Arichat hiding there. Love stories, and war brides from England and Holland living quietly in Isle Madame.

I loved those people, their quietness, warmth and humility. And Johnny was right. Thirteen years later, very few survive. I remember them every November. Indeed, I remember them all the time.

On November 2, we celebrated Muriel Duckworth's 100^th birthday with a fund-raising concert for Oxfam at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax. The concert -- called Stand Up! Speak Out! -- began with a reception featuring 100 birthday cakes. The crowd was a virtual roll call of Nova Scotia's movement for peace and justice.

The Women of We'koqma'q opened the show with drumming and singing. They were followed by the Truro Youth Singers, the Aeolian Singers, the Gaia Singers, the Raging Grannies and Four the Moment. The show included Muriel's own words about peace and justice, about opera, about marriage and children. We heard a moving tribute to Muriel's husband, the late Jack Duckworth. The afternoon concluded with a song written for Muriel by Rose Vaughan and Cheryl Gaudet.

The concert reflected Muriel's lifelong opposition to every form of injustice -- racism, sexism, poverty, disease, exploitation of all kinds. But no cause is nearer to her heart than peace. She and Jack Duckworth were pacifists during World War II, which demanded great courage, and she has been a passionate, tireless peace activist all her life.

As the Faithful Reader knows, every Christmas Marjorie and I give minor gifts to the people we love, and a larger gift to a worthwhile charity. This year, in Muriel's honour, we'll give that contribution to Oxfam's Jack and Muriel Duckworth Fund for Active Global Citizenship.

The days after the concert rightly belonged to the veterans. But I kept feeling an imbalance in the remembrances, a ghostly absence in the documentaries and newspaper stories and silences. I wanted people like Muriel Duckworth at the cenotaphs, to remind us that even a just war represents a tragic human failure -- and that in most wars, the nobility of the soldiers greatly outstrips the nobility of the cause. There are soldiers on both sides, after all.

I remember December 31, 1999, watching on television as the new millennium arrived in a wave that rolled clear around the globe. From every nation, in every language, in song and speech and poem, when the human race declared its most profound wish for the new millennium, we spoke -- we, the people of the earth -- with a single voice. What we want, we said, is peace.

That wish should be part of our remembrances. We best honour the ones we lost to war when we dedicate ourselves to peace. Then, and only then, we can tell our veterans this: You did not suffer in vain.

-- 30 --

Silver Donald Cameron's interview with Stephen Clare is now running on www.haligonia.ca

President Obama and the Rainbow Family

2008-11-09T05:52:00.000-08:00

November 9, 2008

Sometimes we're ambushed by our own emotions.

I had no idea how deeply and personally I cared about the election of Barack Obama until I found myself weeping on election night. I don't believe that I allowed myself to hope for so much. But a huge weight lifted off me – a weight I hadn't even known was there. This is a personal moment of liberation, and to understand it, you have to know something about my rainbow family.

Every week I write about things I care strongly about – but I never write about my children. For one thing, they didn't choose to have a writer for a father, and they are entitled to privacy. But just once, after Obama's astonishing triumph, I need to talk about them.

I have four sons and a daughter, and the five of them have four nationalities. They are all Canadian, but by birth, one son is American, another is Danish, and my daughter is British. They live all over the place – the West Coast, the Prairies, Ontario, the United States.

Two of my sons are adopted. The wee Dane was five months old when we met. I was courting his mother, and we used to say that all three got married together. The other adopted son is black, born in Halifax to an inter-racial teenage couple. He was nine months old when he joined my earlier family, more than 40 years ago. His partner is a white woman, but he has two adopted black children.

One of my white sons married a proud and lovely Jamaican woman, and their union gave me a delightful grandson, now 19. The colour of Barack Obama's skin reminds me of my grandson's, and my son's. My daughter-in-law is more the colour of Michelle Obama, and her excitement and joy at Obama's candidacy was inspiring.

Another white son married an enchanting Peruvian woman of Inca, Spanish and Chinese ancestry. Her parents cherish their “gringo” son-in-law, and consider us “co-parents” through the marriage of our children -- a marvellous Latin American concept. That marriage has given me an adorable olive-skinned grandson.

This rainbow family – Danish, French, Irish and Scottish, with a generous component of African and vivid highlights of native, Hispanic and Asian – this Canadian rainbow family did not come about by accident. My first wife and I were not freedom riders and civil disobedients, but we lived in California in the 1960s; we were of that generation and we shared its dreams.

Later, as students in England, we became close to an Afro-American couple from Arizona, and talked for long hours with them about the gap between our races, and how our generation might close it. Those talks gave us courage to adopt a heart-melting boy who had been born into that gap – and we did it as much for our own sakes as for his. We wanted another child, but we also wanted our white children innoculated against racism by growing up with a much-loved brother from another place in the human spectrum.

But my children and grandchildren cannot be equal while there are still places that some can go and others cannot, ambitions that some can achieve and others cannot, filters that cast aside people of colour just because they are people of colour. The unidentified weight on my shoulders is the weight of racism, and Obama's triumph liberates me, too, by affirming that there is no weight that cannot be lifted, no moat that cannot be crossed, no door so heavy that it cannot be prised open with skill and dedication and love.

Our family, like others, has known failure, sadness and loss. But we have loved and honoured the whole spectrum of humanity, and I am helplessly grateful for the experience. Our rainbow family prefigures a brighter, better world, a world we ardently wish to inhabit, a world in which everyone on earth is a part of a single, vast rainbow which is the human family.

When a black man can be President, that world I want for my kids seems immeasurably closer. And that's why I wept on election night.

-- 30 --

In Herald Square

2008-11-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

November 2, 2008

In Herald Square, the air is thick with sound. Yellow taxis hoot, sirens wail, engines rumble. Thumping music spills from the open windows of passing cars. Street vendors shout: Buy bottled water! Shish kebabs! Silk scarves! Hot dogs! Bus tours, T-shirts, jewellry! A grey-bearded black man plays the trumpet beside an iron fence. Blue smoke from the barbecue carts drifts through the air, challenging the watery sunlight. Rivers of people flow over the crosswalks, shouting, arguing, bellowing into cell phones, gesticulating, laughing, snapping digital photos, eating, smoking, fiddling with the earbuds of their iPods.

It's the last Sunday in October, but the leaves are green, the air is warm, and some of the people crowding the sidewalks wear shorts and T-shirts. Pigeons, self-possessed as policemen, peck at food scraps between the metal chairs. Here's a table of young Asians, there's a table of young black tour guides. A ragged old man shuffles along, clutching a greasy backpack of sad small treasures. Here comes a Muslim couple, he in a suit, she in a head scarf. Crossing in front of them are a couple of Orthodox Jews, bearded, black-suited, topped by broad black hats. What languages am I hearing? Yiddish, Farsi, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, Urdu?

“It's overwhelming,” says Marjorie. She's never really been to Manhattan before, and the sheer energy of the place astounds her. With a few hours to spare before our plane to Halifax, we've taken the train from JFK airport into Penn Station. There's Madison Square Garden. That's the Empire State Building. Images from television, vivified by sounds, smells and sunlight. It's electrifying. I once spent a lot of time here, and I love it. There are lots of other cities, but there's only one New York.

We go into a tacky T-shirt shop. The olive-skinned proprietor wears baggy pants, a smock, a full grey beard, a skull-cap. A Turk? A Kurd? An Afghan? I can't guess, and I don't ask. He has six or eight Obama T-shirts, but nothing showing McCain. Why not? He shrugs. Can't get them. If he could, he'd sell them.

McCain is missing, but Obama surrounds us. Change we can believe in! Change we need! A black guy with a tiny curbside table is selling Obama publicity materials – bumper stickers, lapel buttons, window signs, ribbons. Amazing. Where I come from, you don't buy that stuff. Politicians give it away.

We buy some quesedillas in a Latin-American cafe. After we eat, Marjorie goes into Macy's, the original store, six floors of temptation fronting on the square. I settle down on a chair under the trees with a mocha coffee. At the next table, a young Indian woman taps intently on her laptop. A couple of bald, tattooed young men are playing chess.

It occurs to me that this is Barack Obama's America, this humming multicultural bazaar, and it's evidently thrilled at the prospect of an Obama presidency. If Obama walked through Herald Square – brown, hip, lean, cool – he'd fit right in. If John McCain walked through it, he'd look like a time-traveller.

If Obama wins – and, given that the last two presidential elections were stolen, I wouldn't be overconfident about that – he'll be the first world leader who truly inhabits the 21st century. He's out-pointing McCain because he's a better thinker, a better speaker, a more stylish media presence – and he's a full generation younger. He's outspending McCain not because he's wealthy – he's not – but because he and his supporters are masters of cyber-organizing and online fundraising. McCain, on the other hand, really is wealthy. He thinks he owns 13 homes – he can't really remember – and he has a net worth of $100 million. But he can't find the “enter” key on a computer. Won't do. Not in 2008.

Like Jack Kennedy, Barack Obama represents an intergenerational power shift, and a new suite of values. After facing the race issue head-on with a brilliant speech last March, Obama has campaigned as though race didn't matter. To his generation, it doesn't. They revel in diversity, change, creativity, communication. Here they are in Herald Square, people of the rainbow, cyber-folk in a flickering world, and the future belongs to them.

-- 30 --

A World Without People

2008-10-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

October 26, 2008

What would happen if human beings suddenly evaporated, vanishing off the face of the earth in the blink of an eye?

That's the question posed by a fascinating, disturbing documentary film called Aftermath: Population Zero, created by Cream Productions of Toronto and recently broadcast on Global. The DVD is available from National Geographic, whose channel broadcast the show last March.

The show postulates that, on a pleasant June morning, people simply vanish instanteously, like a bubble bursting. Poof! Cars have no drivers, planes have no pilots, ships no crews, power plants no operators. All over the earth, vehicles crash, burn and sink. Coal-fired generating plants run out of coal, and within 85 minutes the only functioning power plants are nuclear.

Starving pets soon escape their owners' homes and forage for food. Within a week, big dogs devour all the small ones. Zoo animals pass through useless electric fences. Tigers and elephants roam the streets.

Water pumps fail. Sewage floods the streets. Dogs and tigers fan out into the country, dining on un-milked dead dairy cows. Beef cattle survive nicely. Mice invade the supermarkets, and their population explodes until the cats find them. Raccoons, squirrels and skunks move into abandoned houses and nest in the furniture.

As winter approaches, the zoo animals move south. Billions of cockroaches die in the unheated buildings. As the years pass, house roofs fall in, and trees root in living rooms. The glass drops off the skyscrapers, and birds breed on the desks. Grass grows over the cracked roads. Repeated hurricanes wipe all the buildings off the east coast. Cars rust and vanish. Concrete fails, and buildings collapse. Ships become reefs.

As the centuries pass, fish stocks are replenished in the ocean, forests cover the cities, birds fly freely in the clear skies, wolves return to Europe. Dams fail, and the Colorado River again reaches the ocean, while the fields it once irrigated revert to desert. The Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower fall. After 25,000 years – a geological eye-blink – the glaciers of a new Ice Age rumble down from the Arctic, grinding away all traces of human life, save for a few artifacts on the airless, eternal surface of the moon.

This has been a thought experiment, says the narrator, to see how the earth would do without us. Clearly, it would not miss us. But we cannot do without the earth.

Of all the startling images in this remarkable film, the ones that haunt me most are the nuclear power plants. Nuclear plants contain whole buildings full of spent fuel rods, which remain highly radioactive for centuries and are stored in swimming pools cooled by running water. This is nuclear garbage, and we have no idea what to do with it. We have dumped some in the oceans, and the nuclear industry has proposed various solutions, like dropping it into deep mines in stable rock formations, or fastening it into rockets and firing it into the sun. But most of it remains on-site.

The great irony is that we can't dispose of nuclear debris because nobody wants it nearby – and so millions live with it nearby, at the local power plant. It's safe enough until the water stops, as it does in Aftermath. Then the fuel turns the remaining water to steam. The storage buildings explode, creating a wave of nuclear disasters belching radioactive clouds and deadly rains.

The episode neatly shows exactly why nuclear power cannot be economic. Nuclear cost estimates never include the price of cleaning up the garbage, because nobody knows how to do that, or what it would cost. So the lifetime cost of nuclear power can never be known. What we do know is that nuclear power is not cheap because it's not safe – and we have no way to make it so.

In Aftermath, plants and animals die of radiation, but ultimately the earth shrugs this off, too. Within a year or two, the radioactivity is dissipated, and life starts to re-colonize the hot zones. Which reminds us – or ought to – that environmentalism is not about saving the planet. The earth doesn't need us. Environmentalism about saving our own habitat. It's about saving ourselves.

-- 30 --

Insulating Our Wallets

2008-10-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

October 19, 2008

Last summer, as the price of oil zinged up towards $150 a barrel, I was furious. Not with the speculators, who have since (predictably) had their come-uppance. Not with governments, which were no more dozy than usual. Not with the oil companies, which were simply being what they are. You can't blame a jackal for being a jackal.

No: I was furious with myself. I knew perfectly well that the price of oil was, sooner or later, going to the moon. (It is, too – don't be fooled by its present plunge to a mere $75 or so.) I remember the twin oil shocks of the 1970s, and – like the Danes, who took the hint and made themselves into world leaders in renewable energy – I had taken steps to ensure that another oil shock couldn't ambush me.

Then events had forced a drastic change on me, leaving me right in the bomb-sights of the oil jackals – and I hadn't adapted. Why do I ignore what I know?

Here's the story. In 1983, my family and I re-built an 1890s house on the waterfront in our Cape Breton village. We knew then that although oil prices had fallen from their peaks, the supply of oil was (and is) finite. If demand rises sharply and supplies decline, prices will soar. So we meticulously insulated the house, and arranged to heat it with wood.

We stuffed fiberglass batts in the walls, then added a vapour barrier and rigid foam insulation behind the gyproc. We lowered the 9-foot upstairs ceilings enough to allow R40 insulation in the roof. We replaced all 27 windows with new double-glazed ones. I built thick, heavily-insulated front and rear doors. We installed a heat-circulating fireplace and a combination wood/oil furnace, and a huge wood-storage area in the basement. When we were done, the house needed far less heat than it once did – and, if necessary, we could provide that heat by burning wood. (There's a link to a video tour of the house on my web site, www.silverdonaldcameron.ca.)

I lived 22 years in that house before health concerns and other issues induced me to move. And now that well-insulated, beautifully-upgraded house is for sale, while Marjorie and I find ourselves in a leaky 1937 house with 13 single-glazed windows, spotty insulation and a complete reliance on oil heat. When I got the oil company's $5500 estimate for the cost of next winter's fuel, I nearly fainted. I have actually bought houses for less money than than that.

Happily, the federal and provincial governments have an EcoEnergy grant program which provides up to $6500 in assistance for appropriate upgrades. We called up Clean Nova Scotia and got an energy-efficiency evaluation.
Our greatest heat loss was through the uninsulated walls. Next was air leakage, and third was the old windows. The wall insulation is eligible for a substantial grant and the air-sealing for a modest one, but the grant for window replacement – which is really expensive – is insignificant. The government program also provides a modest incentive for efficient wood-burning appliances.

So we won't do windows – but the wall insulation should cut the cost of heating by nearly half, and that saving combined with the grant will cover much of the cost. That's a no-brainer.

Air-sealing will include blocking off and insulating our “raccoon hotel,” a crawl-space gap big enough to admit the local wildlife as well as the bone-chilling winds. Another no-brainer, with or without grant support. Finally, an air-tight fireplace insert blocks the heat loss through the chimney, attracts a small grant, and gives us an alternative source of heat. Count me in.

OPEC, Alberta, eat your hearts out. Since we made these decisions, mind you, the oil price has halved – which means the payback time for these improvements will be twice as long. You know what? I don't care. The improvements are good for the planet – and when oil prices next take flight, I'll sleep comfortably.

Almost as comfortably as the new owner of our old house, whoever that lucky dog turns out to be.

-- 30 --

Canada's Political Kaleidoscope

2008-10-16T06:45:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2008

It's Saturday, and Election Day is Tuesday. The markets are making like ski jumpers, taking oil prices and the loonie down with stocks, and roiling the electorate as well. The election results are anyone's guess.

But beneath today's campaign, some long-term changes are afoot. For example, an insistent theme among the pundits has been the fragmentation of the left, and the advantage it gives to the united right led by Stephen Harper. The left, we're told, will inevitably unite, as the right did, undergoing the political equivalent of a corporate merger aimed at regaining market share.

I'm not so sure.

Three of the four parties to the left of the Harperites are built around a strong set of principles. New Democrats are dedicated social democrats, the Greens are channelling the planet, and the Bloc Quebecois wants a sovereign Quebec. Furthermore, the NDP and the Greens have gained significantly in this campaign, and the Bloc's support, though fluctuating, has remained substantial. Why would any of these parties throw in the towel?

That leaves the Liberals, innocent of principles, tacking to port or starboard in response to the shifting winds. In fairness, many Liberals would argue that a stable government for a country as large, fractious and varied as Canada must be a pragmatic coalition that eschews rigid principles. For the past century, that devout opportunism has been a winning strategy – but its day may be over.

The Liberals today find themselves led by an admirable Green-hearted man whose signature policy is a complicated tax measure that demands explication in a language still foreign to him, as the famous ATV interview clearly showed. Indeed, whenever he speaks, Dion infuriates the grumbling minority in English Canada who consider that the Quebec tail has been wagging the Canadian dog for decades. And the author of the Clarity Act is not even very popular in Quebec.

So, despite a brief blip of recent enthusiasm, the Liberals never gained much traction. The party has also been badly weakened by the Martin-Chretien wars, and by the out-migration of all its heavy hitters – Manley, Rock, Tobin, Copps, Graham, McKenna. Its surviving MPs are likely to be in a mutinous mood after the election. Without the discipline of power or the prospect of power, this is not a party with any great internal cohesion.

Now consider the results of recent polls, which show the Harper crowd at about 35%, the Liberals near 25%, the NDP around 20%, the Greens at 12% or so, and the Bloc somewhere under 10%. Do the math. If those percentages were reflected in seats, then any two of the first three would have enough support to challenge the Conservatives, and to ask the Governor-General for an opportunity to form a government. They could then do what Harper has done, namely to attract just enough support from a third party to survive the inevitable votes of confidence.

That won't happen soon. But the numbers underline the point that Canada is a centre-left country which is now being steered by a right-wing minority. That's an unstable situation. And the centre-left parties don't have to merge in order to rule. They only need to learn the tricks of coalitions and voting alliances, like politicians in other multi-party legislatures like those of Germany, Ireland, Italy, France and Israel.

The party which seems at risk is the Liberal Party. Its only real raison d'etre was to put a roof over an improbable alliance of interest groups, and that alliance has fallen apart. Its once-solid base in Quebec has vanished, as has its once-reliable strength among women and immigrants. Its weakness could easily accelerate into collapse.

For that matter, the Harper Conservatives remain an uneasy marriage of former Progressive Conservatives and Western true-believers held together largely by the unfamiliar experience of power. When the party loses power and Harper moves on – which will eventually happen – will the Conservative Party also unravel, as it did after Brian
Mulroney?

In terms of seats, the next Parliament may well resemble the last one. Beneath the surface, though, strong currents are running. Politically, this election looks like a watershed – the true end of the last century, and the real beginning of the new one.

-- 30 --

Two Women

2008-10-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

October 5, 2008

“When you're going door to door, it's amazing what people will tell you,” says Megan Leslie. “I was at this house the other day, and when the man recognized me, he said, 'I lost my job, I'm losing my house, I have to declare bankruptcy, and I don't know what to do.' And it really shook me how much trust this person had in me, to tell me that.

“You know, this is the privilege of being a candidate. People look to you to change things and make things better for them – even as a candidate.”

The man chose the right candidate to talk to. Personable and astute, Megan Leslie is a tireless anti-poverty advocate, deeply concerned with affordable housing and fair energy pricing. A dedicated environmentalist, she has a law degree and works with Dalhousie Legal Aid. Campaigning for the NDP nomination in Halifax against two strong and articulate competitors, she won by delivering a passionate speech to more than 600 party members.

Her opponents can only envy that enthusiasm. The Liberals quickly acclaimed a candidate just before the nomination deadline, while the Tories were forced to appoint a candidate not once, but twice. Meanwhile, Megan Leslie's campaign workers include both of her competitors, five MLAs whose ridings fall within the Halifax federal constituency, and her revered predecessor, Alexa McDonough.

That kind of firepower ought to carry Alexa's former seat decisively. Still, as Alexa firmly declares, the riding belongs not to the NDP, but to to the people of Halifax, and their support has to be earned anew every time.

I believe that good citizens should not only vote, but should actively support the candidates of their their choice. Since I'm voting in Halifax this time, I'll contribute both cash and effort to Megan's campaign, and hope to attend her victory party.

And though I can't vote in Central Nova, I'm also contributing to Elizabeth May's campaign.

A new web site, www.VoteEnvironment.ca, contends that environmentalists should vote strategically, supporting the environmentally-responsible candidate most likely to defeat the local Tory. In Halifax: Megan Leslie, NDP. In West Nova: Robert Thibault, Liberal. In Central Nova: Elizabeth May, the Green leader.

It's an appealing idea, but that's not what I'm up to. I just think that Elizabeth May is an extraordinary woman, one of the most powerful voices for environmental sanity that we've ever had, and I think that Canada would benefit from having her in Parliament.

I met Elizabeth in the 1970s, when we were both in the coalition of determined Cape Bretoners who successfully opposed the insecticide spraying in the island's forests. She was a shy young woman of 21 when the battle began. She emerged as an indefatigable, politicized environmentalist. In a later attempt to prevent Scott Paper from herbicide spraying, she and her family lost their home and 70 acres of land in a lawsuit – but the suit delayed the spraying long enough to prevent the use of 2,4,5-T. That's commitment.

After law school, Elizabeth served as an adviser to former Environment Minister Tom Macmillan. She was instrumental in creating several new national parks and was in negotiating the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer. She later worked for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and spent 17 years as Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada. She's written five books, and she has a basket of awards and honorary degrees.

In Canada, unlike Europe, the Greens have never been part of the political mainstream. Sweeping cultural currents are rapidly changing that - as is Elizabeth May's performance as leader. Since she took over, her party has steadily risen in the polls. In a 2006 Ontario by-election, Elizabeth captured second place, with 26% of the vote.

The strongest evidence of her stature is the uproar that arose when she was barred from the leadership debates. Agreed, the Greens have never elected a member – but by any other standard they are now a significant national party. The public roared, the establishment caved, and Elizabeth entered the debates.

These two women are like a waft of springtime. They're a powerful antidote to cynicism. A province which can generate such candidates should feel proud of itself – and prouder still if it sends them on to Ottawa.

-- 30 --

Facebook and Other Mysteries

2008-10-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

September 28, 2008

Tommy is bored. Cindy updated her profile. John “thinks this week rocks already.” Thelma went from “being single” to “in a relationship.” Edith bought Oscar for $486 on “Hotties for Sale.” Heinrich “bought a leather whip in Blood Lust.”

If this stream of odd snippets sounds familiar to you, you're probably one of the 100 million-plus people with accounts on Facebook. Such social-networking sites are the hottest thing on the Web right now. I'm on Facebook along with everyone else. But I really don't understand the phenomenon.

The social-networking sites out there include MySpace, of course, and Tumblr and sites like deli.cio.us, where you can share bookmarks, and Digg, which allows you to share and rank web content. LinkedIn is a networking site for professionals, and I'm there too, sharing my credentials, ready to network with peers and engage with potential clients.

I'm not on Yammer, though, or on its non-commercial ancestor Twitter, a site that allows its users to send and read little tiny messages called “tweets” no more than 140 characters all day long. Tweets are constant answers to the question, “What are you doing now?”

Well, um, I'm on the bus. I'm scratching myself privately. I'm going for coffee. I flatulated rowdily.

Twitter has more than 100 clones, all of them gushing constant twaddle. Come on, guys, who cares? Yeah, I may want to know what you're doing if we're both supposed to be at a meeting, and you're running late. But isn't that what the phone is for? What is the point of this torrent of narcissistic nonsense?

I don't know that there is any point, in the ordinary sense. I got onto Facebook because I asked a beloved teenage niece why people were urging me to join Facebook, and she went over to the computer and led me through the process. Because of that, I was able to follow her progress as she toured Europe with a friend, and she was able to broadcast her experiences, regularly, to friends all over the world.

Pretty cool. And that's a great benefit of Facebook. It gives me a peek into the world of my children and grandchildren and my 27 nieces and nephews, who are doing all kinds of interesting things all over the country. It provides a link to my friends and neighbours in Isle Madame when I'm not there.

Nevertheless, I'm wary. If knowledge is power, privacy is freedom. And so when I recently found myself in a breakout group at a conference of undergraduates led by a stubble-bearded social-networking oracle named Eli Singer, I had a few questions. Like, why do people want to tell the world that they were blind drunk or hopelessly stoned last night? Why would you post your photo albums, your videos, your opinions about art and politics and religion, your cell phone number, and even provide directions for guests to get to your house party?

An astute McGill undergraduate named Johnson Fung had some interesting observations. In earlier periods, he said, people found their identities in the relationships with family, community, church, profession and other social groups. In a fluid postmodern world, the importance of those groupings has faded, and the roots of identity have become mysterious. Facebook and its ilk allow people to forge and shape their identities as an act of will, with reference to a community of electronic peers.

Fascinating. But do people realize that they really can't remove themselves from Facebook or withdraw information they've posted on it? Once it's posted, Facebook owns it.

Eli Singer, a hoary old relic of 31, had some horror stories of his own. He reminded the group that most recruiters and employers today will routinely check out a potential employee's Facebook page, and silently reject stoners and party animals. A student remarked that elite graduate schools do the same thing. Eli recounted the tale of the Saugeen Stripper who, in a moment of lighthearted lunacy, peeled for the boys in a University of Western Ontario residence while the cameras were rolling. The footage became one of the most-watched videos in cyberspace, and though the girl had done nothing illegal, the publicity forced her to leave school.

“Control your information,” Eli counselled. “You have to manage the screens of your life, the way you present yourself online.” Remember, he said, Facebook forgets nothing. Google forgets nothing it keeps copies of every single email. Own your own domain. Blog on your own site. Turn your Facebook privacy settings up to the max. If you don't want something known, don't release it.

But in the cyberworld, there's really no escape. There's even a social networking site for the dead. Truly. Where did you think your Facebook information would go when you die? You're not going to heaven, you're going to Footnote.com. Electronic immortality. Who knew?

-- 30 --

The Politics of Culture Cuts

2008-10-02T16:32:00.001-07:00

September 21, 2008

“To be quite candid,” said the Danish professor, “we in the Scandinavian countries always considered your country as an uninteresting shadow of the United States. But now recently everyone wants to know about Canada, because we all want to know, where is this extraordinary writing coming from??

In 1988, I was speaking at schools and universities in Denmark and Sweden, sponsored by the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies. Canadian writers were suddenly emerging on the world stage -- Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro and many others. Everywhere I went, people wanted to know about Canada -- its cities, its ethnic complexity, its geography, all the realities that are reflected in its literature.

Culture is the face that Canada presents to the world. It is also an extraordinarily attractive industry. With a ball-point pen and a notebook, Alistair MacLeod composes stories that echo around the world. Celine Dion takes over Las Vegas, while Diana Krall conquers Paris. Alex Colville paints an image onto a scrap of canvas, and sells it to a German collector for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That's “value-added” and “export-oriented” beyond the dreams of Bombardier. In the information age, culture is the very content of the economy. In 2002, culture was a $40 billion industry in Canada. It was bigger than Mining and Oil and Gas ($35.4 billion) and nearly double the size of Agriculture and Forestry ($21 billion). Culture is huge. That's why American governments relentlessly promote their own cultural industries, running interference world-wide on behalf of American publishing, recording, film and broadcasting.

Culture is design, music, architecture, images, film, story. It is also quilting, folk sculpture, video games and festivals. It is what Cape Bretoners do in their kitchens. It's jazz on the waterfront, buskers on the Grand Parade, Shaun Majumder and Cathy Jones “goofin' around” on TV. Culture tells us what it means to be Nova Scotians, and Canadians, and sentient human beings. It creates no pollution, uses few materials, employs hordes of people, and travels almost free.

And the Harper government hates it.

Every 20 years or so, a new Conservative government guts Canada's cultural programs. The Harper crowd has chopped about $60 million since 2006, axing everything from the $2.5 million National Training Program in the Film and Video Sector to the tiny $300,000 Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, which supported the archiving of important film, television and musical recordings.

Why? Gary Schellenberger, the Tory MP who chaired the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, brays that arts support programs are fundamentally insulting to Canadian artists, indicating “that Canadian artists cannot compete globally” and that “Canadian talent is not as viable as American or European talent and that without government assistance, arts and culture in Canada could not survive.”

Horse pucky. Insert the words “aircraft” or “nuclear reactors” or “softwood lumber” in this passage, and see how it plays. Consider, for instance, Prom-Art, the $4.7-million program of the Department of Foreign Affairs which supported the foreign travel of artists promoting Canadian culture abroad. Yes, the Canadian cultural industry does need such programs -- just as the forest industry, the aerospace industry and the power industry need government support in selling their products abroad. Hello? Hello? Isn't that what government trade and industry departments were created for?

The programs under attack are largely industrial support programs -- training programs for cultural workers, research and development programs, seed money and venture capital programs. Stephen Harper says that the cuts are not anti-culture, but simply represent prudent financial management and then says that there's no point in “funding things that people actually don't want.”

Really? Who, exactly, was objecting to the industrial support programs he's been cutting? Some voters dislike the Canada Council, admittedly, but who dislikes Prom-Art? Who even knows about it? And if we're killing loser programs, when will Harper garrot Atomic Energy of Canada, which has sopped up $20 billion in public money building reactors that nobody will buy? Talk about “funding things that people actually don't want.”

The truth about the arts cuts is buried in a recent Globe and Mail story on the Conservatives' unprecedented use of data mining and micro-targetted marketing. One key to victory, the party believes, is appealing to “battlers,” blue-collar workers and low-paid white-collar workers who feel ignored by the country's elites, including government. The battlers really like tax reductions and cuts to government-supported programs -- particularly in the arts.

And that's why the latest cuts were made just as the government ramped up for an election. These cuts were designed to cause controversy, and to send a message to the “battlers.” They damage a major industry, and they shrink Canada's presence in the world. But they may give the Conservatives an electoral edge in a few ridings -- and that's the only thing that matters.

-- 30 --

Missing Ernestina

2008-10-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

September 14, 2008

The motorsailer Queen Charlotte was forced into New Bedford, Massachusetts by engine problems, but truly, the crew could hardly be sorry. New Bedford is a splendidly salty town -- the headquarters of the New England whaling fleet, the town where Herman Melville shipped out on the voyage that inspired his masterpiece Moby Dick, the place where a jocular whaling captain gave an abandoned oyster smack to Joshua Slocum, who rebuilt it here and then sailed it alone around the world.

New Bedford is also home to C.E. Beckman Co., the oldest family-owned business and the oldest chandler in America, now being managed by the seventh generation of Beckmans in the ultra-historic building it has occupied since 1790. Needing a new starter for Queen Charlotte's Perkins diesel, the crew repaired to Beckman's, where a droll marine-electric parts manager supplied a perfectly satisfactory General Motors starter for about 10% of what the Perkins distributor was quoting.

While the skipper installed the starter, the others explored New Bedford, starting with the city block occupied by Beckman's, a ramshackle treasure-house of antique and modern nautical gear. We passed the Seaman's Bethel, where Melville's whalers attended services, and then crossed the street to the Whaling Museum.

The museum includes the entire skeleton of a 45-ton sperm whale, and a full-sized replica of a whaling ship's fo'c'sl. Here are the ship models, and there are all the tools of the trade -- harpoons, flensing knives, tryworks. The Museum boasts a fabulous collection of scrimshaw -- intricate works of art created by sailors on bone, baleen and ivory, including knife and razor handles, picture frames, jewel boxes, spools and much more.

The most stunning exhibit is the largest ship model in the world -- a complete half-sized replica of a real whaling bark named the Lagoda, 89 feet long, built in 1915-16 for the owner's daughter, Emily Bourne, in memory of her father. The vessel is housed in a lofty exhibit hall also built by Ms. Bourne, and it is complete in every detail -- the catted anchors, the light whaleboats hanging in davits, the clouds of sail, the rope-driven steering gear and much else.

Whaling is New Bedford's heroic myth -- puny men pitting themselves against the monsters of the deep -- and its images and assumptions ring somewhat strangely in a world in which whales cling to survival, while human enterprise has become the most powerful force in the world. It seems odd, too, that so many of the leading figures in this furious world of blood, death and blubber should have been Quakers, who are identified in our day with peace and non-violence and who even then made New Bedford a haven for escaped slaves, a terminus of the Underground Railway.

The ship I really wanted to see in New Bedford had nothing to do with whaling -- and it wasn't in port, either. Built in 1894, the schooner Effie M. Morrissey was named for the sister of her skipper, Clayton Morrissey. Although the Morrisseys lived in Gloucester, they came from Lower East Pubnico, where Cap'n Clayt was born. He became famous as skipper of the Gloucester schooner Henry Ford, which in 1922 unsuccessfully challenged the Bluenose for the International Fishermen's Cup.

In 1926, after 32 years of fishing and freighting, the Effie M. Morrissey was sold to Captain Bob Bartlett, the Newfoundland master who had carried Admiral Robert E. Peary to the North Pole in 1909. Barlett refitted the ship for the Arctic ice, and skippered her on 20 voyages of northern exploration sponsored by organizations like the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution. She once reached within 600 miles of the Pole, and newsreels made the ship and her skipper world-famous.

During World War II, the Morrissey served as a supply vessel for US Arctic bases and for the Soviet port of Murmansk. After Bartlett's death in 1946, she was sold to the Cape Verde Islands, and re-named Ernestina. For the next 30 years, she sailed as a packet boat between Cape Verde and New England, maintaining a link originally established by the whalers, who frequently picked up crew in the Cape Verdes. She was the last sailing ship in regular service to carry immigrants to the United States.

In 1975, she was presented to the United States as a gift by the new Republic of Cape Verde. She now belongs to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts -- and when I was in New Bedford, she was in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, receiving a $4 million refit. I was sorry to miss her, but I was delighted to know that she'll be strong and hardy again, at the age of 114.

She is an international treasure, this stout-hearted wooden ship, born in the nineteenth century and still serving in the twenty-first. Going aboard her remains one of the greatest pleasures I've never had.

-- 30 --

Four columns at once

2008-09-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

This blog is a bloody nuisance, and never more so than when I'm on the road. I spent most of July in British Columbia, much of August helping to sail Queen Charlotte to Halifax, and the next time I checked, I had published four columns that hadn't been posted to the blog.

So I've just posted all four. Since nobody commented on their absence, it may be that nobody cares anyway!

SDC

Queen Charlotte's Progress

2008-09-07T06:05:00.000-07:00

September 7, 2008 (HH0835)

In the pearly light of an August morning, Queen Charlotte putters across the calm waters of Point Judith Pond, her Perkins diesel rumbling below the wheelhouse. Queen Charlotte is a husky 34-foot Fisher motorsailer skippered by John Pratt and crewed by his daughter Liz, his son Ben, and me. Bound from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Halifax, we have spent the night in this idyllic waterway which meanders four miles into the low Rhode Island landscape.

As we turn behind two wooded islets, a family of swans scatters before us. The young ones take off, and soon the mother follows, her broad wings heaving her heavy white body into the air.

“I wonder what swan tastes like,” says the skipper pensively.

“What?”

“I'm sure someone, somewhere, has eaten swan. I wonder what it tastes like.”

The idea cracks me up – not the idea of eating swan, but the idea of viewing the world through one's stomach. John is a foodie, whose mind never strays far from contemplation of the next meal.

Queen Charlotte slips between the villages of Galilee and Jerusalem, which flank the pond's narrow entrance, their wharves crowded with steel draggers. We emerge into the Point Judith Harbor of Refuge, an artificial lagoon formed by a V-shaped structure of enormous rock breakwaters, built in 1914 for the coasting trade.

Outside the breakwaters, Queen Charlotte rolls heavily in a sloppy sea with very little wind. Dodging some fishing boats, we raise the mizzen and roll out the jib to ease the motion. The boat lopes northeast towards Buzzard's Bay, the coastline lost in the mist. Two hours pass. Three hours.

And then the engine stops.

The only thing that normally stops a diesel is lack of fuel. The fuel filter is probably plugged. While the boat rolls erratically, John replaces the filter. That leaves the fuel lines full of air, which we have to force out by pumping fuel in. John tries three different pumps. But no air bubbles appear.

“Is it possible that there's no fuel in the tank?” I ask. John grabs a stick and taps the tank. Boing! The tank is empty.

All right. A gentle breeze has come up. Up go the mainsail and the inner jib, and Queen Charlotte sails into the mouth of Buzzards Bay, the light wind giving her a surprising five knots.

“I filled the tank last fall before I laid her up,” says John, puzzled. “Ninety gallons. We've run about 20 hours, and she uses a gallon an hour. So there should be about 70 gallons in the tank. It must have been stolen while she was laid up in Bridgeport.”

He calls TowBoatUS. Their nearest base is in New Bedford, Massachusetts, about 10 miles away. To minimize the cost of towing, the towboat skipper suggests that we sail to the harbour approaches, and then he'll bring us in.

Fine. The wind is blowing straight up the bay, giving us an easy reach to New Bedford. The sun is warm, the sky clear. We have the demountable tiller fitted in the cockpit, so we can steer from outside, watching the sails. It's a glorious afternoon.

“Should we be concerned about those black clouds over there?” says Ben, pointing to a greasy roll of smutch on the horizon.

“Nah,” I reply. “I don't think it's coming our way, and if it does, it'll probably blow straight over.”

Whoops. Dead wrong. The light breeze dies, the black roll advances, and when it reaches us the wind hits like a wall. Queen Charlotte's 14-ton mass heels far over. As John and Ben quickly furl the genoa, the boat straightens up and starts to sail. The sea is already carved and fretted. The anemometer shows the wind at 20 knots, gusting to 25 – and it's coming straight from New Bedford.

Motorsailers aren't designed for windward sailing. They normally sail downwind, and motor upwind. But we have no choice. Hunkered down with her lee decks awash, spray flying over her, Queen Charlotte settles into a long, slow slog to windward. Tacking back and forth through the eye of the wind, she doggedly nibbles up the remaining miles to New Bedford.

At dusk, as we approach the harbour mouth, the wind slackens. With her running lights on, the towboat emerges from what looks like a solid wall blocking the entrance – a hurricane barrier, the first one I've ever seen. The towboat skipper passes us a hefty line and pulls us through the gate to a mooring. He hands over 10 gallons of diesel, and John pours it in the tank.

“We'll try the engine in the morning,” he says. “Right now I want some rum, and some food.”

I wonder what he wants to eat. Swan under glass, I suspect.

-- 30 --

The Liberation of Halifax

2008-09-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

August 31, 2008

“The Mayor of Halifax has very little actual power,” explained the Mayor of Halifax. “But he can use his office to bring people together, he can speak out on issues that matter, and he can lead by example.”

The year was 1968, exactly 40 years ago. The Mayor's name was Allan O'Brien, and my profile of him was my first national magazine article, in the long-vanished Star Weekly. I quote O'Brien from memory, but I know the substance is correct, because I subsequently came to know him quite well. He was a splendid representative of Halifax, a deep-rooted Nova Scotian with a global vision and a powerful view of his city's role in the world. He was a national vice-president of the NDP, a dedicated advocate for social justice and a vigorous opponent of the Vietnam war. Was it appropriate for the Mayor of Halifax to speak out on such matters?

“We're all very concerned about our own local issues, as we should be,” he said. “But I don't regard that as an excuse for ignoring the plight of our neighbours – anywhere in the world.”

O'Brien sprang to mind recently when I read a speech by Brian Flemming to the fledgling organization called Citizens for Halifax (www.citizensforhalifax.ca). I don't believe that the old City of Halifax was ever again led by a politician of O'Brien's stature – and Flemming's analysis of municipal politics today suggests that its clumsy successor never will be either.

As Flemming makes clear, Halifax Regional Municipality – let's be blunt – is a disaster. I liked John Savage and I honour his memory, but his amalgamation of numerous smaller municipal units to form HRM and CBRM was a breathtakingly dumb idea. As Flemming notes, Nova Scotia politics is dominated by rural Nova Scotia, which is deeply suspicious of the capital. By including all of Halifax County in HRM, Savage ensured that the same dysfunction now exists within HRM itself – and compounded the problems by instituting an unwieldy 23-member council of which only four members are from the genuinely urban peninsula of Halifax, and none are elected at large.

The result is a city council in which the city has no voice. Decisions about pivotal urban issues are taken by rural councillors obsessed, says Flemming, with “potholes in Ecum Secum or Hubbards.” Among the great achievements of this camel of a council is the passage, after endless hours of debate, of an unenforceable cat-control by-law to set alongside the unenforceable dog-control by-law.

This is scandalous. Small though it is, Halifax is a world city. Its history is about cataclysmic conflicts, the clash of empires, international trade, culture and communication. Halifax is leafy and hard-edged, salty and intimate, bustling with students and artists and movers and shakers, small enough to be convenient, large enough to provide a genuine urban lifestyle. Its leadership needs to combine local pride with global vision, treasuring the city's heritage while embracing its future as a model of sustainability and innovation.

Instead, it's obsessed with cat control.

Flemming offers no prescriptions for structural changes in HRM, but it's obvious that we need somehow to separate the truly urban districts ringing Halifax Harbour from the outer reaches of what was once Halifax County. HRM is a shotgun marriage that serves neither population well. In the meantime, Flemming has some useful suggestions to make about one of the major issues affecting the city, namely transportation.

Flemming chaired the Canada Transportation Act Review Panel of 2001, and he contends that core of the transportation system is still the road network. He suggests numerous useful improvements in road transportation – a tiered, closed-in highway along the railway cutting into the South End, a third Halifax Harbour crossing (possibly a tunnel), a bridge across the Northwest Arm, possibly the relocation of the two container piers to the Shearwater lands in Dartmouth.

His most important suggestion is the creation of an HRM Transportation Authority to plan and co-ordinate transportation in the municipality. The Authority would be governed by an independent board of directors, including representatives from such heavy users of the roads as truckers and commuters. Flemming would also give the Authority the power to support viable alternatives to roads, including fast ferries from Bedford and Purcell's Cove, light commuter rail service to Bedford and Sackville, bike paths and busses.

Such an Authority would benefit every part of HRM. The province would have to create it, but it's hard to imagine why any provincial politician would oppose it. Even more important, it might be a first step in liberating the capital from the paralysis that now grips it, a vivid example of the foresight and vision that a great little city so desperately needs.

Citizens for Halifax, this would be a great place to start.

-- 30 --

The Book of Negroes

2008-09-07T05:54:00.000-07:00

August 24, 2008

Maybe there's something else out there as vile as racism, but I can't think what it would be. I have just read Lawrence Hill's magnificent, heartbreaking novel The Book of Negroes, and I am filled with horror, wonder and fury.

Horror at Hill's crackling account of the unspeakable violence of being abducted and enslaved. Wonder that people can go through the hellfire of slavery and emerge with their minds intact and their hearts still warm. And fury at the persistence of racism, whose heat still scorches us all.

The Book of Negroes is the story of Aminata Diallo, a girl of 11 captured by slavers who murder her parents. After walking three months to the coast, Aminata is bundled onto a reeking slave ship and sold to a South Carolina plantation, then to a Charleston businessman. Escaping while visiting New York, she emigrates to Nova Scotia as a Black Loyalist, emigrates again to Sierra Leone, and ends her life in London as a living witness for abolitionists working to end the slave trade.

But that bare outline does not begin to describe the violence that Aminata endures. She is beaten and raped. Her husband repeatedly finds her and is torn from her. Both her children are ripped away. Equally painful is the cultural and psychological violence that she and her fellow-slaves suffer. Africans from dozens of different nations are tumbled together -- Igbo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Fulani, Mende and many others – so that they are all isolated, unable even to speak to one another. It's as though someone had captured Finns, Scots, Basques and Greeks, and lumped them all together as “Europas.”

Nor are the Africans permitted to generate a new identity. They are forbidden to learn, teach, read or write. They develop two languages:Gullah, which they speak among themselves, and a form of English to use with the “buckra,” the white people.

This robbery of culture and identity is not accidental, argues an unnamed writer on a website called AfricanDNA.com:

“Slave owners wanted our ancestors to think of themselves as nameless objects of property, plain and simple, like a chicken or a cow,” s/he writes. “I am convinced that this still impacts our people today, crippling our ability to know ourselves by connecting with our family's past.... We have internalized generations of doubt and fears about who we are as a people and what we can accomplish, just as White racists wanted us to do. And we continue to pay a terrible price for this.”

Yes, exactly. Many of Aminata's companions go mad, or kill themselves. No wonder that the effects of this horrific experience linger on. Afro-American slavery dates from the same period as the Highland Clearances, the deportation of the Acadians and the decimation of the Mi'kmaq. If the rest of us still feel the sufferings of our ancestors, how can we fail to weep at the anguish of the Africans?

But we do fail, to our enduring shame. Stories of racism bubble up in this newspaper almost on a daily basis: slurs in Digby, teenage battles in Cole Harbour, constant harassment for the offence known to black people as “DWB” – Driving While Black.

So it is no surprise that Aminata's experience during eight years in Birchtown, Nova Scotia is one of exclusion, poverty, broken promises and lethal violence. And it is no surprise that she chooses to emigrate again to the new free colony on the Sierra Leone River – the very river where she was branded with a red-hot iron and thrust aboard a stinking slave ship 40-odd years before.

The Book of Negroes is hard, vivid and unsentimental, and Aminata is not a soft character. Though she is capable of great love, she is also tart and clear-sighted, shrewd and cunning. Her salvation is her adaptability, her skill as a midwife and her love for languages, which repeatedly allows her to eavesdrop on people who think she cannot understand them.

As a child, she learns a bit of reading from her father, whose copy of the Qu'ran is the village's only book. Although she is a girl, she yearns to be a djeli – a village storyteller, a recorder, a magician who conjures with language. And she knows that in the end, her words are the tools to give meaning to her life of loss and pain.

“I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion,” she writes. “I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.” Someday, “one of these people will find my story and pass it along. And then, I believe, I will have lived for a reason.”

-- 30 --

The Planes and the Trains

2008-09-07T05:51:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2008

Soaring over Manitoba in a Westjet plane, I'm reading a Globe and Mail report on Westjet's corporate performance. The company's second-quarter profit jumped 162% to $30.2 million, and the company is about to launch a series of ads taunting Air Canada, though the ads won't mention the rival airline.

Westjet allows two checked bags for free, and makes no charge for booking through its call centre; Air Canada charges $25 for each. Westjet's charges are lower for all manner of things, says the Globe, “from overweight luggage to transporting pets.”

All true. Our dog MacTavish is in the belly of this plane, and he's a deal-clincher. Air Canada won't carry pets at all, nor will it carry unaccompanied children. So, given a choice, our family will never again fly Air Canada.

We also find Westjet's people refreshingly good-humoured and accommodating, just as their TV ads promise. For example, during our three-hour stopover in Toronto, can we take MacTavish out to stretch his legs, drink and relieve himself?

You bet, says the Westjet agent. It'll take about 30 minutes to fetch him, and you have to return him an hour and a quarter before the flight, but that still gives you lots of time. Wait right over there. I'll call the baggage handlers.

The last time we tried this on the dour bureaucracy of Air Canada, the response was No, Absolutely not. Go away. Don't bother us. We're busy – we're running an airline here.

Hello, Air Canada? You've made it very clear that you don't want our business – and we got the message. We're gone. And you're losing money, while Westjet turns a profit. Can you connect the dots?

Still, Westjet is merely the best version of a fundamentally nasty experience, and an environmentally-reprehensible one as well. Airliners, says George Monbiot, produce emissions per person-mile which roughly parallel those from car travel – but the number of miles a passenger flies is enormous. On one family visit to Vancouver, Marjorie and I probably covered as many miles as we would in an entire year of driving in Nova Scotia.

In Europe, by contrast, high-speed electric trains are beating the airlines hands-down on trips of 1000 km or less. This development is directly due to shrewd investments by the French government, which poured money into Trains à Grande Vitesse – electric trains which can travel at 320 km/h, and routinely average 280 km/hr. The next generation will be faster; prototypes have hit 575 km/hr.

Trains race from the heart of London to the heart of Paris, via the Channel tunnel, in just over two hours. The TGV network runs all over France, and has revitalized the relationship between Paris and the provincial cities. The system now reaches London and Brussels, and will soon reach Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Similar trains operate in South Korea, Japan and Spain, and are planned for Argentina, Italy and Morocco.

Imagine such a service here, in a country once laced with railways. At 280 km/hr, a TGV train could take you from Halifax to Charlottetown or Fredericton in about an hour, to Quebec City or Boston in under four hours, to Montreal in under five. Downtown to downtown. No long waits at security, no humping your baggage on and off buses or limousines, no trouble with your ears. Leave Halifax at 8:00, arrive in Charlottetown by 9:00, do a day's work and be home for a late supper.

Even to Montreal, a TGV train would challenge the airlines. A flier spends at least an hour getting to and from the airports, another hour or more getting through security and waiting for the flight, and ninety minutes on the flight itself. Three and a half hours minimum, and most of it spent waiting, being herded or undergoing indignities. Personally, I'd rather spend five hours watching movies, reading a book or working at my laptop.

But a TGV is one thing in France, with a large population and short distances. In Canada, could a TGV compete with intercity air travel?

It might. Air travel is affordable while fossil fuel remains cheap and available – and $140 a barrel is still cheap. When oil is $400 a barrel, how affordable is the plane? Electricity for the TGV can be generated from fossil fuels, yes – but also from wind, sun, running water, the waves, the tides. And while oil prices are rising, the cost of renewable energy is falling.

With a Maritime TGV network, one big airport could serve the whole region. How much would that save? And if the airlines had to bear the true cost of their massive emissions – and sooner or later, they will – their ticket prices would, um, soar.

Someday, this country will wake up and hear the train whistle. Meanwhile, book me on Westjet.

-- 30 --

The Power to Change

2008-08-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

VANCOUVER:
Last month, a splice failed in a major power cable in downtown Vancouver. The resulting explosion and fire also knocked out the utility's backup cable, which quickly clicked off the lights for 4400 customers, including several office towers. One of the affected towers houses the Vancouver Sun newsroom, which has an Uninterruptible Power Source for just such occasions. But the UPS had only enough juice for a few hours – and the power was off for three full days.

The Sun managed to rent generators, setting them up on the street and snaking cables up to its offices, and it kept publishing throughout the blackout. Other businesses didn't fare so well. Restaurants had to throw out masses of food. Retailers locked their doors. Professional offices closed down. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business reckoned that about 4800 small businesses were affected, and their collective loss ran to about $36 million. Stand by for a blizzard of insurance claims and lawsuits.

Now look, this happened in British Columbia, which has dammed innumerable mountain valleys to create massive hydroelectric plants, and profited for decades from exporting hydro power. If any province should be a poster-child for renewable energy, even surplus renewable energy, BC is it. Yet Vancouver Sun business writer Scott Simpson reported that BC Hydro's “entire system, from the dams that capture water to generate power, to the wires distributing electricity to people's homes, is maxed out.”

In fact, Simpson reported, the situation is so dire that BC Hydro has applied for permission to pay its largest industrial users to shut down their operations at peak usage periods during the winter, because it won't otherwise have enough power to serve its residential customers. It's already doing this on Vancouver Island. This is – forgive me – a shocking situation in a province which always promoted itself to industry on the basis of almost limitless energy supplies, and low power rates. Whoops.

So what does all this have to do with Nova Scotia? Well, despite the creakiness of the BC electrical system, “the reliability of service,” says Simpson, “is comparable to other North American jurisdictions, according to internationally established performance measures.” Which surely means that other power systems are equally stressed and comparably vulnerable to sudden serious failures. And, since all the grids are linked, the prospect of another big blackout, like the one that hit northeastern North America in 2003, are pretty good.

BC Hydro says that the problem is years of under-investment in infrastructure, and proposes to fix the problem by adding more generating capacity, upgrading transmission lines and so forth. It wants to increase rates by 15% and spend $3.4 billion on infrastructure by 2010 – which it admits is only a start.

To me, this sounds like an advance straight into the past, when rising demand for power was taken as a given, and squandering power was a way of life. But those days are gone. And there's an alternative. The quickest, cheapest way to solve a problem like this is to reduce demand by changing the pricing of electricity.

Power companies have always priced electricity in a thoroughly perverse way. Power rates start out high, and go down as consumption increases. But the costs of generating power run precisely the opposite way. Power companies run their cheapest generators all the time, and only bring in their more expensive generators when demand increases. In other words, power companies put their lowest prices on their most expensive power. Worse, the price structure encourages customers to waste electricity.

The immediate alternative is common sense, which in this case is called “marginal-cost pricing.” Marginal-cost pricing means that your basic allotment of electricity comes at a very reasonable cost – but power rates rise steeply as consumption increases, and more steeply still in peak hours of demand.

Proper pricing induces customers to conserve energy – and to produce their own energy wherever possible. Companies start generating their own power from their own waste heat, and charging the forklift's batteries overnight. Households buy solar hot water heaters, heat pumps and mini wind turbines. People turn off lights and run their washers and dryers just before bedtime.

In short, marginal-cost pricing rewards conservation, self-reliance and innovation, and punishes wastefulness. Overall, it reduces demand for power – and thus reduces the need for large expenditures on increasingly-costly generating systems. And the tools needed for its implementation are not power turbines, but pens and brains.

BC Hydro is said to have plans for marginal-cost pricing and conservation. It should – like all utilities – hurry those changes along. Otherwise we can expect more events like the big 2003 blackout, which shut off power to 10 million people for a day, or the 1998 blackout in Auckland, New Zealand, which lasted for five weeks. What Vancouver experienced in July should be a warning to all of us.

-- 30 --

Tumult in the Cannabis Trade

2008-08-03T06:41:00.000-07:00

VANCOUVER:
Who would have thought that cavalier lending practices in the US Sunbelt would damage the second-largest industry in British Columbia?

No, I'm not talking about forestry and lumber. I'm talking about dope. BC Business magazine reckons that marijuana production is BC's second largest industry, contributing $7.5 billion dollars and 250,000 jobs to the province's GDP – less than construction, but more than forestry. Most of the product is exported to the United States. The RCMP estimates that marijuana is being grown in about 20,000 BC homes, not to mention sizable farms in the Interior and large-scale commercial operations in former warehouses and industrial buildings. One academic study concluded that if marijuana in BC were legalized, the province would see $5 billion in additional legal business activity, and could collect $2 billion in taxes.

The ranks of BC marijuana producers have also broadened remarkably. Cannabis cultivation is no longer the exclusive preserve of organized crime, though organized crime certainly continues to thrive in the fetid netherworld of prohibition. Today, however, marijuana production has become a sideline for thousands of otherwise law-abiding middle class citizens.

As a recent BBC report put it, “Much of the revenue derived from BC Bud, as the cannabis crop is known, goes on paying college fees, perhaps buying a second car or making that holiday to the Caribbean just a little bit more affordable.” As a result, “the trade is so large that the police in BC are faced with an impossible task.”

Indeed they are, and the job is getting harder. The RCMP drug section in Greater Vancouver once employed more than 100 officials, but it's now down to 60. The number of tips they receive about grow-ops has also fallen, from 615 in September 2003 to 207 in December 2007.

Does that mean that the number of grow-ops have fallen? Probably it has, says Marc Emery, a leading cannabis advocate and leader of the BC Marijuana Party. For one thing, the rising Canadian dollar has hurt the competitiveness of BC Bud, just as it has hurt film-makers, the forest industries and furniture manufacturers.

In addition, the downturn in the US economy has induced many Americans to try their hands at growing their own pot. Marijuana plantations have been turning up in the National Forests, while laid-off workers and homeowners facing foreclosure have been converting their basements and spare rooms into grow-ops. Even a tiny operation using only a couple of high-intensity lights can earn $20,000 a year for the owner – in cash, and tax-free.

“It certainly is enough to tide people over, no problem,” says Emery, “And two lights are not going to get you into trouble either.”

So there you have it. Predatory and foolhardy lending practices in the US lead to a wave of foreclosures. Wary consumers stop buying. Workers get laid off. Desperate for cash, the victims of the downturn try their hand at illicit agriculture. At the same time, the rising loonie makes BC Bud less competitive, so Canadian growers find their markets contracting.

What's so striking about this story is that it really is not a story about crime and the law. It's a business story, and almost all accounts of the situation treat it that way. In theory this whole industry is illegal, but in practice it's so big that the police can't even begin to control it. Any serious attempt to enforce the law would require an army of policemen, and gobble up so much public money that governments would almost have to abandon such other concerns as health care and education.

So the business is completely unregulated, and the only controls on it are the controls imposed by the markets themselves. As with any business, unfavourable market conditions do affect the industry. Adverse exchange rates and increased competition drive prices down and eliminate marginal producers.

Nevertheless, the market is huge and hungry. It reaches into every social class and every age group, though a recent study from the University of Alberta apparently revealed that marijuana is particularly popular among educated, middle-class Canadians. Do they wish to break the law? Probably not. But do they think this law deserves to be obeyed? Obviously not.

In short, the law has essentially made itself irrelevant. If anything, the law benefits the business. To a large extent, the industry is profitable precisely because it is illegal. All entrepreneurs take risks, but if the risks include jail time, only the boldest entrepreneurs will enter the business – and they'll demand a premium for the extra risk.

The net result of our irrational policies is that we enrich the criminals, criminalize ordinary citizens, and control illegal drugs far less effectively than we control alcohol and tobacco. If those are the effects we want, these policies are perfect.

-- 30 --

The Economics of Unhappiness

2008-08-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

July 27, 2008

What is the purpose of the economy?

Most of us would say, I suspect, that the economy exists to make people comfortable and happy. If so, then it's logical to believe that the more the economy grows, the happier people will be. That's why government and industry are always promising greater and faster economic growth.

But what if economic growth doesn't promote happiness? What if economic growth – beyond a certain level – creates unhappiness? Is “more” always better?

That's the question behind Bill McKibben's recent book Deep Economy. An outstanding environmental thinker and writer, McKibben is the author of the landmark book The End of Nature. His new book leads McKibben in some fascinating directions.

Our obsession with economic growth, says McKibben, makes sense for poor people – but not for wealthy ones. For a poor person, “more” means better food, better housing, better clothing, comfort in the winter, access to art and music and learning.

Because this is true for poor people, and was true for most of our ancestors, we assume that it's also true for us. But it's not. Research from a new field called “behavioural economics” shows that once your basic needs are nicely met, greater wealth does not bring greater happiness.

The religion of economic growth, says McKibben, is facing three great challenges. First, economic growth is now producing “more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress.” The US economy has grown enormously in the past 30 years, but the median wage has not grown at all. The bottom 90% -- that's right, 90% -- of US taxpayers actually earned slightly less in 2005 than they did in 1979. All the additional wealth has been captured by the top 10% of taxpayers.

Second, it's become increasingly clear that we're running out of energy, and bumping against the limits of the world's capacity to absorb our wastes. Economic growth may (or, more likely, may not) be giving us a few more dollars of income – but it is also giving us foul air, toxic food, empty oceans and ravaged landscapes. None of that breeds happiness.

Third, says McKibben, we have increasing evidence that happiness is not just a subjective feeling, but a measurable state of mind – happiness shows up as specific kinds of activity in the brain – and the main things that create happiness are not economic in nature. The best predictors of happiness are thing like being healthy, being married, being engaged in one's community. Nothing to do with wealth at all.

In fact, increasing wealth correlates strongly with increasing misery. Every year, the National Opinion Research Council polls Americans and asks whether they are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy. In 1946, the US was the happiest developed country on earth. Forty years later, it was tenth among 23 nations. The number who say they are “very happy” has slipped steadily since the 1950s. And the same is true in other developed countries such as Japan and the UK. As incomes increase and possessions accumulate, rates of alcoholism, suicide and depression also rise. One report, says McKibben, showed that the *average* American child in 2000 showed higher levels of anxiety than children under psychiatric care in the 1950s.

In short, says McKibben, today's Americans have much more stuff – and much less happiness.

Why? And what's the solution?

First, let's recognize that in developed countries, economic growth is not a solution; it's a problem. Things are already far too big, far too wasteful, and we're no longer in touch with our own lives.

Take food, for instance. It makes no sense to ship food products an average of 1500 miles to our tables, when it's perfectly possible to grow more nutritious, less toxic and better-tasting food close to home. That's the way we produced food in the past, and as energy costs soar, it's probably the way we'll produce it in the future. There will be huge opportunities for agriculture in places like Nova Scotia.

Or take housing. We have ever-larger homes with ever-smaller families in them, in locations that are viable only if gasoline is cheap. Or take electricity, which we produce in big dirty plants and then transmit for thousands of miles, suffering heavy losses along the way. Or take entertainment. Maritimers still know how to produce their own entertainment, but most other regions have forgotten.

The future, McKibben argues, will feature localized economies, short supply lines, more intelligent use of resources, more co-operation, less individualism and much less growth.

We might choose to make such changes because we perceive that our current lifestyles are really wrecking the world. Or we might be forced to make such changes because the rising price of resources, notably energy, simply prevents us from continuing on our unsustainable course.

McKibben's argument is much simpler. Our obsession with individual wealth is making us miserable. Why wouldn't we simply choose to be happier?

-- 30 --

The Private Life of Plants

2008-07-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

If human beings have learned anything about nature during my lifetime, it is that we know almost nothing about nature. And the more we learn, the more we realize how little we know.

Consider the nature of plants. Aristotle divided the living world into two kingdoms: plants, which don't move, and animals, which do. Most of us probably still think that way. Pushed a little harder, we would probably say that many animals are conscious. They think, feel, understand, communicate and interact. Plants don't.

But nothing in nature is as simple as our mental models of nature. Some microscopic organisms are not clearly animal or plant; they have characteristics of both. And plants interact in much more sophisticated ways that we ever imagined.

A decade ago, for instance, I was fascinated by the research of Dr. Suzanne Simard, then a biologist with the provincial Ministry of Forests in Kamloops, BC, and now a professor at the University of BC. Dr. Simard was researching the interactions between trees and the various species of fungi which sheathe the tree’s roots and – like a set of roots upon the roots – send out tiny threads to forage in the soil for nutrients. The fungi convey these nutrients to the tree. The tree in turn reaches up into the sunlight to capture carbon from the air through photosynthesis – and it conveys carbon to the fungi in the form of sugars.

This is a classical symbiotic relationship. The fungi and the tree depend on each other. Simard and her colleagues, however, showed that there was another whole level to these interactions, in that the fungi connect the trees not only to the earth, but also to other trees. Furthermore, the fungi can transfer carbon from one tree to another. Seedlings blocked from sunlight by the forest canopy are nurtured by their elders – and even by trees of different species.

Among the trees which overshadow young Douglas fir, for instance, are fast-growing paper birches, whose roots can be connected with the roots of the fir by as many as 10 different species of fungi. By “feeding” different radioactive carbon isotopes to different trees, and then noting where the isotopes wound up, Simard’s group was able to show that the birch was actually providing carbon through the fungi to the fir.

Simard’s research changes the whole definition of a forest. Above the surface, the trees look like isolated individuals — but almost half their biomass is underground, where they interact to form what one biologist calls “a superorganism.” Or, one could say, a social organization. That's what a forest really is. (And that's why a “managed forest” of identical trees is not a forest at all.)

More recently, researchers at McMaster University have demonstrated that a humble beach weed called the Great Lakes sea rocket is able to tell whether another sea rocket is related to it – and to react accordingly. If a neighbouring sea rocket is not related, the plant aggressively puts out roots, grabbing nutrients in a highly competitive way. If the other sea rocket is kin, however, the first one restrains itself.

No plant has ever been known to do this. But the discovery is consistent with a whole range of new discoveries about plant interactions. Some plants can determine whether nearby plants are potential competitors by detecting the wavelengths of sunlight that the other plant absorbs or reflects. And plants send electrical signals around within their bodies, just as your nervous system does, though nobody yet knows what information is being transmitted, or why.

We now know that a parasitic plant called “dodder” locates a potential host by sniffing the air. Unlike almost all other plants, dodder can't grow its own roots or draw sustenance from photosynthesis. Instead, it grows on and into other plants. But how does it find those particular plants?

Scientists set up time-lapse movies to see how dodder seedlings located their victims. As they watched, the seedlings sent out tiny sprouts, which circled around sampling the air like a dog. When they detected traces of certain airborne chemicals, they recognized their victims, and grew immediately and rapidly in that direction. One member of the study team described the process, as seen in the time-lapse film, as “like a little worm moving towards this other plant.”

These findings are tremendously controversial, because they show that plant behaviour is far more complex and sentient than anyone had imagined. Furthermore, since plants don't have obvious organs for thought or perception, it must be the case that these functions can be accomplished in some other way. The dodder, for example, “smells” without a nose, which seems to imply a whole alternative physiology of sensation and perception.

Fascinating. Wondrous. The more we learn about nature, the more we realize how little we know.

-- 30 --

The Geography of Hope

2008-07-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

“Environmentalism has become a sort of mythology of death – passionate, lyrical, righteous and hopeless,” says Chris Turner. It has “failed as a common language of hope or a ritual of rebirth. It has failed as myth.”

Eloquent – and painfully accurate. Fear and hopelessness are useless emotions – emotions which make people numb and passive, preventing them from taking useful action. As Turner notes, would all those people in Washington have been inspired if Martin Luther King had stood before them and declared, “I have a nightmare today?”

So Turner set out to find what he calls “the archipelago of hope,” the places and initiatives in the world where people are fully aware of the environmental crisis – but are attacking the problems with imagination, exuberance and optimism. The result is a stimulating new book, The Geography of Hope (Random House Canada, $34.95).

Turner takes as his mantra Kenneth Boulding's observation, “Anything that exists is possible.” He sets out to see not only what might be, or could be, but what is. Is there, for instance, a really prosperous city where people normally travel on first-class public transit, where car ownership is restricted and heavily taxed, where the remaining cars are often powered by hydrogen fuel cells? Well, yes, that would be Singapore. And if Singaporeans can do it, so can others.

Are there houses which are entirely sustainable, generating their own heat and electricity, processing their own wastes, growing some of their own food? Yes, in Germany, Thailand and New Mexico. In Manchester a commercial tower entirely clad in photo-voltaic cells generates enough energy for 61 British homes. It exists, so it's possible.

Is there a first-world community powered entirely by renewable energy? Yep – that's the island of Samsø, in Denmark. The OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s made the Danes realize that they were reliant on oil imports for 94% of their energy. So Denmark began taxing emissions and consumption – doing the sort of thing that Stephane Dion is now proposing for Canada – and invested heavily in the renewable energy industry. Denmark is now the planet's highest per capita producer of wind energy, and it exports wind turbines to the world.

I n 1997, the Danish government invited the country's 78 inhabited islands to compete to become Denmark's showcase “Renewable Energy Island.” Samsø won. At the time, it was deriving 92% of its electricity and 85% of its heat from fossil fuels. Eight years later, it was obtaining all of its heat and more than 100% of its electricity from solar panels and wind generators, exporting its surplus green power to other parts of Denmark. Its heating costs were down by 20%, and its CO2 emissions had been reduced by 140%.

Even more remarkable, says Turner, was the deliberate, thoughtful process which persuaded conservative Danish farmers and villagers to sign up for leading-edge green technology. The proponents did it by buying a fruit press and lots of beer, and going out to the villages to press apples into juice and share a few beers, and talk about working together on a beneficial project that would save everyone money. It was, says Turner, a classic “viral marketing” campaign.

Does that sound familiar? That's Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins, holding study sessions and kitchen meetings all over eastern Nova Scotia, slowly building a whole co-operative economy. That's the citizens of Halifax, spending a year talking about what to do with their own garbage and coming up with a composting and recycling program that leads the world – a story that appears in Turner's book.

Turner tackles some important themes along the way – recycling, for example, which almost always “down-cycles” materials, making them progressively less sophisticated and useful. A variant is Extended Producer Responsibility, the scheme favoured in Europe which makes the manufacturer responsible for the entire life-cycle of a product. But neither of these solutions, says Turner, really tackles the fundamental problem, which is a whole system of lousy industrial design.

Better design also exists, and Turner finds it – Interface Carpet's sustainable factory in Georgia, the long-established eco-spiritual community in Findhorn, Scotland, a Colorado shopping mall converted into a real town centre, bio-gas digesters and micro-hydro sites in rural Thailand. And the point is that you know it's possible because it exists – the technology, the knowledge, the examples, everything.

What really interests Turner are the social processes that can transform our vision and behaviour and thus bring the new, sustainable world into being. Those processes require optimism, excitement, commitment. They're rooted in community, in the happiness of doing good things in company with others. They're rooted in hope.

“We gotta start thinking of ourselves as what we are, which is the future,” says one green ad guru. The future is cool, hip, smart and exciting. It's fun. Show it to people, and they'll want to live there – and that's how you change the world.

-- 30 --

Allan J's Ancient Error

2008-07-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

I have a bone to pick with Allan J. MacEachen.

It grieves me to say this, since “Allan J” – as he is universally known in his native Cape Breton – is a towering figure, and a much-loved one, with a record of public service stretching back into the mists of history. There are people now in retirement who were not born when Allan J. was first elected to the House of Commons in 1953. He was re-elected to the House eight times and retired as a Senator in 1996.

During his 43 years in Parliament, Allan J was Minister of Labour, of National Health and Welfare, of Manpower and Immigration, of External Affairs, and of Finance. He was Leader of the Opposition in the House and in the Senate, and Government House Leader three times. He ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1968, and lost to Pierre Trudeau, who later appointed him Deputy Prime Minister.

None of this begins to capture MacEachen – his erudition, his charm, his capacity for political legerdemain. Think of him as Cape Breton's own Highland chieftain, complete with kilt, sporran and deadly little sgian dubh in his stocking top. During his years in public life, he moved through his riding just like a clan chief, smiling and inscrutable, dispensing favours, absorbing information, reassuring the troops. He greeted everyone by name, knew their families, their tastes, their fears, their occupations and preoccupations. I was among his constituents, and I owe him a favour or two myself.

Allan J is the only politician in my experience who generated his very own cliché; writers repeatedly referred to him as “the wily Cape Bretoner.” And wily indeed he was. It was MacEachen who engineered the surprise defeat of Joe Clark's government in 1979, and the immediate return of Pierre Trudeau from retirement. When the roof was about to fall in on the Liberals in 1984, MacEachen slipped upstairs to the Senate. After Brian Mulroney's landslide victory, MacEachen led the Liberal majority in the Senate, who were the only real opposition to the Mulroney juggernaut.

The new Government Leader in the Senate happened to be Lowell Murray, also a Cape Bretoner. The two faced some major issues – the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords and the imposition of the GST, for instance – and mighty was the clamour of their conflict. The venerable chamber rang with the clanging of claymores, the air was filled with smoke and Gaelic imprecations. The battle over the Constitution of Canada was being fought out by two Cape Bretoners, with the rest of the country as spectators. Wonderful.

But I still have my bone to pick. In 1981, as Minister of Finance, MacEachen introduced a budget full of sweeping changes to the taxation system, closing numerous loopholes and tax shelters. One of the provisions he abolished, however, was not a loophole, but a fundamental mechanism for fairness in the tax system. The provision was income averaging, and we've never been able to get it back.

Income averaging? Suppose you earn $30,000 a year for four years, and then you have a bumper year and earn $150,000. Under today's tax system, you're taxed in the fifth year at the top tax rate, as though you earned $150,000 every year. Under income averaging, you'd tot up your five-year earnings, which come to $270,000, and then you'd divide that by five. The result is $54,000, and your tax would be recalculated as though you had earned $54,000 a year for five years. You'd still pay tax on everything you earned – but at a rate which reflected reality.

The cultural community cares passionately about income averaging, because wild swings in income are common in the arts, where almost everyone is a self-employed freelancer. A novelist works in poverty for years – and then her book is sold to the movies. A painter struggles in obscurity, and then lands a major commission. The taxman swoops down and carries off far more than his fair share. And so, ever since 1981, the cultural community has been asking in vain for a return of income averaging.

But income averaging benefitted any taxpayer with an irregular income – farmers, fishermen, commission salesmen, and many others. Indeed, the problem can afflict almost anyone. Suppose you sign up for your employer's share-purchase program. Over the years, you accumulate a nice chunk of company stock. When you sell it, you probably have a big capital gain – and though the gain didn't occur in one year, it will be taxed as though it did.

The loss of income averaging harms thousands who know nothing about it. And every spring, when I wrestle with my taxes, I think, “Allan J, Allan J, you did so many things so well. How did you blow it on this one?” Twenty-seven years later, I still don't have an answer.

-- 30--

Caper Gas: Back to the Future

2008-07-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

When I moved to D'Escousse, Isle Madame, in 1971, the island had at least eight gas stations, all representing major oil companies – Gulf, Shell, Esso, Irving. They were full-service businesses, selling gas, oil, tires, batteries, accessories, lube jobs, minor repairs and tune-ups. Some of them also did bodywork and paint jobs. Two were new car dealerships: Clarence Martell sold Chevs, and his cousin Leo sold Fords.

Five of those eight stations have run out of gas. One stands abandoned, another has been levelled, and three have been converted to other uses: a fiberglass boat factory, a heritage centre and an auto-repair shop. Of the three surviving stations, two are essentially unchanged, but one has morphed into a little retail node which includes a convenience store, fast food services, a propane depot and a car wash.

These changes echo a nation-wide movement away from traditional service stations and towards self-serve gas bars, often coupled with convenience stores. Between Halifax and D'Escousse, gravel lots mark the sites of vanished service stations in Heatherton, Salt Springs, Marshy Hope, Sutherland's River and elsewhere.

The vanished stations may be no terrible loss on the TransCanada Highway, but it's another story on the back roads and secondary highways. There's hardly a place left to buy a chocolate bar, let alone a tank of fuel, in the 80 km between St. Peters and Sydney.

Yet though rural communities may not offer economies of scale, they do still represent a market. Years ago, when the major oil companies shut down their local heating-fuel businesses, a wide-awake entrepreneur named Greg Boucher established Greg's Fuels and built a thriving home-heating operation in the niche vacated by Big Oil. He expanded into the gasoline business, and when major companies like Esso abruptly severed their long-standing relationships with outlets like Poirier's Garage in D'Escousse, Greg's Fuels – head office, Arichat, NS – was ready to fill the gap.

Boucher ultimately built a chain of service stations reaching into New Brunswick, just as Wilson's Fuel expanded elsewhere. (The former Petro-Canada station in West Arichat is now a Wilson's convenience store/gas bar.) But then along came Emera, the energy company that grew out of Nova Scotia Power. Emera bought Greg's Fuels, and promptly closed down the head office and many of the stations.

The Poiriers in D'Escousse eventually found their competitors were selling fuel for less than they themselves were paying for it. They stopped selling fuel, and within a couple of years they closed the station and retired. That left us with an 8-km drive to the nearest gas pumps.

But the oil business – and the Acadians – are irrepressible. After Emera bought Greg's Fuels, Greg's customers migrated en masse to a new distributor in Arichat, Boudreau's Fuels, established in 1995. Boudreau's Fuels is owned by four Boudreaus, two cousins and their wives – Brian and Lisa, Lloyd and Viola. In the beginning, the two men drove the company's two trucks. Now, with seven trucks and 10 employees, Boudreau's is the dominant fuel supplier in the area. And rightly so. I've done business with them for a decade, and they're a pleasure to deal with.

And their whole business is built on their perception that though rural communities may not offer economies of scale, they do still represent a market. Which brings us to Caper Gas.

Caper Gas is the Boudreaus' new venture – a business aimed squarely at rural consumers abandoned by Big Oil, a business which actually returns gasoline retailing to its roots. In the beginning, after all, gas was sold from a hand-cranked gas pump out in front of a general store. Service stations came later. But why shouldn't a general store sell gas again? As a standalone business, gasoline retailing may not be very rewarding – but as a community service, as part of a broader business, and as a generator of traffic to a store, it may make a great deal of sense.

The Boudreaus commissioned a smart corporate orange and green logo derived from the Cape Breton flag, and adopted the Cape Breton phrase “drive 'er” as their motto. They developed a micro-station format, with a fat above-ground tank and a single pump for regular gas. They found partners in small Cape Breton general stores like G.H. Smith and Son in Orangedale, the Fleur de Lis Store in Rockdale, Ehler's Convenience in Whycocomagh, and – of course – Shamrock Store in D'Escousse, run by my friends Pearl and Raymond LeBlanc. Four outlets now, two coming soon, more in development.

And when Wilson's recently chose to build up a great fund of consumer ill-will by peevishly and publicly allowing rural gas pumps to run dry, the phone was ringing furiously in Arichat. Would Caper Gas be coming to other Cape Breton locations?

Soon, soon! Drive 'er, chers Boudreaus!

-- 30 --

Guns along the Northwest Passage

2008-06-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

“Thanks to global warming, the Arctic icecap is rapidly melting, opening up access to massive natural resources and creating shipping shortcuts that could save billions of dollars a year. But there are currently no clear rules governing this economically and strategically vital region. Unless Washington leads the way towards a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.”

That's the summary of a recent paper in Foreign Affairs, published by the US Council on Foreign Relations. Written by retired US Coast Guard officer Scott Borgerson, it was sent to me by an American friend who wanted my opinion. That summary made me blink.

Borgerson argues that global warming means that the fabled Northwest Passage will soon be ice-free in summer and, with icebreakers, navigable year-round. The melt will continue even if we stop greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow. Furthermore, the Arctic is rich in resources. The Russian offshore alone may contain oil reserves twice as large as Saudi Arabia's.

Five nations border the Arctic – Russia, the US, Norway, Denmark and Canada. There is no established agreement about where Arctic boundaries lie, as witness our contretemps with Denmark over tiny Hans Island. Do we really care about that minute pile of rock? No – but we do care about the adjacent seabed resources.

No legal framework determines who owns such resources, because they were always thought inaccessible. But now the rush is on. Russia has claimed 460,000 square miles of Arctic waters, has taken to flying strategic bombers over the Arctic, and recently planted a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole.

And are the waters of the Arctic archipelago, including the Northwest Passage, international waters open to the shipping of all nations – or territorial waterways belonging to Canada? Canadians assume that Canada owns all that territory, including considerable parts of the ocean – but the US and the European Union disagree. The point is not academic. A navigable Northwest Passage would cut 2000 nautical miles off a voyage from Seattle to Rotterdam and would shave about $3.5 million from its cost. And hundreds of ice-class ships are coming into service.

Borgerson aims to wake up the US, which has never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and thus cannot formally assert its Arctic rights. Worse, says Borgerson, although the US navy is larger than the world's next 17 navies combined, it has only one usable icebreaker. Russia has 18. Canada plans to build up to eight new icebreakers, and is installing a satellite surveillance system. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, the US is in trouble.

Overall, says Borgerson, “the combination of new shipping routes, trillions of dollars in possible oil and gas resources, and a poorly defined picture of state ownership makes a toxic brew.” The US should ratify UNCLOS, build icebreakers and strike a deal with Canada to create an Arctic seaway management commission comparable to the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. And it should lead the way to peace by convening a conference of Arctic nations to create “an overarching treaty that guarantees an orderly and collective approach to extracting the region's wealth.”

It all sounds good – but that's not how the US normally behaves. The notion that the US is needed to keep the peace between Canada and Denmark is deeply amusing, though the Russians are no joke. When it comes to national security and oil-supply issues, however, the US is generally the problem, not the solution. If the US wants unimpeded access to the Northwest Passage, it will declare that it is bringing peace and democracy to the Inuit, and it will send the navy, not the negotiators.

Borgerson's argument is a good one – but he's got the wrong country. Canada has the most to lose in the Arctic, and – as in the Cold War – it is sandwiched between the world's most formidable military powers. It would be folly for Canada – or Norway, or Denmark – to take up arms in the Arctic. Instead, Canada should combine with the Scandinavians to initiate a comprehensive Arctic treaty conference, inviting the Russians and the Americans to participate.

Canada could offer to internationalize the Northwest Passage and manage it collectively – in return for a declaration that the Arctic archipelago itself is Canadian. We should also note that nature may not consent to be managed, that the consequences of the Arctic melt are unpredictable, and that the Arctic nations should insist that any new cache of fossil fuels be rationed, not squandered. Our reckless use of fossil fuels got us into this mess. If the new resources will only get us in deeper, their rapid exploitation should be resisted.

The Arctic could be our last chance, as a species, to act with intelligence. Canada can play a key role. It's a rare opportunity. Let's seize it.

-- 30 --

Champion MacTavish!

2008-06-17T04:15:00.000-07:00

"I hate it when this happens,” said Darren McKinnon. “I mean, it's wonderful, and we're all very happy – but in some ways this is the worst thing that can happen. Owners think it's normal, and they expect it to happen again – and then they get upset and disappointed when it doesn't.”

It was Saturday, February 9, at the Halifax Kennel Club Show at Exhibition Park. Talisker Sea Dog MacTavish – our 21-month-old Shetland Sheepdog – had just cantered through the show ring hauling in ribbons. To be a champion, a dog needs 10 points, and MacTavish – in his first day at his first real dog show – had won four points, a dazzling start to a puppy's show career.

And Darren, who has been showing dogs for most of his 40-odd years, was cautioning us not to think this was normal. We shouldn't expect MacTavish to do it again.

So the next day, MacTavish did it again. In his first two appearances in the show ring, he accumulated eight points. Just two more points, and he'd be a champion. But the next time out – in a cavernous, bitterly-cold arena in Truro, at the end of March – he won no points at all. When we took him last weekend to the South Shore Kennel Club's annual show in Lunenburg, we were still seeking the elusive two points,

Dog shows are a perfect example of order within chaos. The Lunenburg rink was clogged with dogs, and dog voices filled the air – baying, woofing, howling, yipping. Shows may have 150 breeds or more – some in their kennels, some walking or standing with their owners or handlers, some in the ring. Sleek Salukis, big blocky Bouviers, peppy Papillons, terrible terrific terriers, bandy-legged bulldogs and bonny bad-ass beagles.

Primped and powdered and perfumed, clusters of dogs journey to the judging rings and strut their stuff, scampering in circles with their handlers. They stand on tables while the judges poke and prod and peer into their ears and other orifices, appraise their bearings, bones and briskets, contemplate their coats and assess their testicles.

Then the judges hand out ribbons and rosettes. Everyone applauds. The dogs go offstage, and a new crowd enters the ring.

This is “conformation” competition. The judges are determining how closely the dog conforms to a published “breed standard,” which describes the ideal example of that breed. The Shetland Sheepdog, or “Sheltie,” should stand between 13 and 16 inches at the shoulder, should have a long, heavy double coat, should have a black nose, a flat head and a well-rounded muzzle. The ears should be small and three-fourths erect, with the tips breaking forward. A Sheltie may be reserved, but not fearful; self-confident, but not aggressive. And much more.

Each of these points is, literally, a judgment call, and the dog which wins with one judge (in Halifax, say) may fall flat with another judge (in Truro.) So what about Lunenburg?

MacTavish comes from the Talisker kennel in Middle Sackville, owned by Sharon Ayers, and in the show ring he's normally handled by Emily DeLong, Sharon's associate. I don't know how to show a dog, and neither does Marjorie. Last weekend, however, Sharon was in New York and Ontario, showing her great champion, Lily – who has now been rated “Best in Show” no fewer than 23 times, tying the Canadian record for Shelties.

On Saturday, with Sharon absent, Emily and MacTavish were both on edge, and they were skunked again. Worse, all of us realized that MacTavish's heart really was not in the game, though he gallantly did what was asked of him, as he always does.

Driving home, with MacTavish lying exhausted on the back seat, Marjorie said what we all had been feeling. Was there any point in making our beloved dog suffer in the show ring, if that really wasn't what he liked? Let's just not do this any more. We didn't buy him to show. I love his quick, bright mind, and I'd much rather do obedience with him anyway.

We had promised to take him back to the show the next day. But after that, his show career would be over.

On Sunday, however, MacTavish was himself again – sassy and alert, ready to take on the world, infecting Emily with his buoyancy. He was up against some beautiful Shelties, but when judge Jack Ireland – a distinguished man, and clearly a perceptive one – pointed his finger at the Best of Winners, he was pointing at MacTavish.

Two points. Champion!

“There, he's done it,” said another Sheltie fancier, as Emily led MacTavish off for his official championship photograph. “Now he can go do what he really likes – which is sailing, isn't it?”

Champion Talisker Sea Dog MacTavish! With an emphasis on the “sea dog,” if you please.

The Republic of Childhood

2008-06-10T05:26:00.000-07:00

“What's our waitress' name?” I asked.

“Mary Jane,” said Marjorie.

“What's your name? Mary Jane,” I chanted. “Where d'you live? Down the lane. What d'you eat? Pigs' feet. What d'you drink? Black ink -- “

“What?” cried Marjorie, flummoxed.

“What's your number? Cucumber.” I laughed. “You don't want to know how far back in the previous century I last said that rhyme.”

“What is it?”

“I don't know. A children's rhyme.” I thought for a moment. “I think it's a skipping rhyme.” I started it again, emphasizing the rhythm.. “What's your NAME? Mary JANE. Where d'you LIVE? Down the LANE. Yeah. Do kids still have skipping rhymes, I wonder? ”

“I never see girls skipping,” Marjorie said. “I don't see kids playing hopscotch, either.”

“Right. Or conkers, with big old chestnuts. Or marbles. Almost the only game we played when I was a kid that still seems to be played is street hockey. There's a whole kids' culture that's almost completely lost.”

Years ago, my friend Lloyd Bourinot asked me, “What ever happened to peggy?” I assumed he was talking about a woman – but in fact he was talking about a childrens' game, played by batting a short piece of broomstick with another longer piece. The short piece, sharpened at both ends to make it fly better, was the “peggy” or “piggy.” In Isle Madame, almost everyone my age remembered the game very fondly – but it had disappeared completely, except for the occasional sentimental match played when some of its middle-aged aficionados got together at reunions.

I wrote a radio drama called “What Ever Happened to Peggy?” The play was about the game – and also about a woman named Peggy. It later became “Peggy,” a Gemini-nominated half-hour TV drama. While I was writing the radio play, I asked my friend George Jordan to mention the game on-air during CBC Radio's rolling-home show, and ask whether anyone else had ever heard of it.

George's phone rang off the wall. People knew the game as peacock, kippy, and tiddly. Listeners reported having played it as far away as Toronto, Saskatchewan and Scotland. In New England it was known as "one-a-cat." One listener reported that such a game was also played in Pakistan.

Everyone thought this game was local, but it had been played all over the world – and there's something miraculous about that. How did a game like that travel around the globe? Evidently there was – perhaps there still is – a kind of international republic of childhood, with its own rules, its own forms of heroism, its own folkways, its own recreations.

Or maybe it's just that there are only so many simple toys – a bat, a ball, a swing, a teeter-totter – and that, given the same toys, kids the world over will invent the same games.

So what did happen to peggy? And to Red Rover, and British Bulldog, and Kick the Can, and Anti-Anti-I-Over, and even Hide-and-Seek?

Part of what happened, surely, was television. In a year, we are told, the average child spends 900 hours in school and nearly 1,023 hours in front of a TV. That's close to three hours a day, seven days a week. A kid who watches that much TV – and spends additional hours at a computer – hardly has time for anything else.

I also blame the corporatization and commodification of play, and of sports in general. In my day, sonny, kids who wanted to play hockey found a frozen pond, established a makeshift goal with a couple of rocks, laced up their leather skates and played. It was a rare kid who had any more equipment than a pair of gloves, some primitive shin-pads, and maybe a Maple Leafs sweater.

Today, childrens' hockey is a scale-model imitation of the NHL – indoor rinks, organized leagues, complete suits of equipment, even hockey cards showing mean-looking 12-year-olds in full regalia. All this organization certainly has benefits – we would have loved the equipment, and the opportunity to play during thawing weather – but the game is firmly in the hands of adults, and its participants are a corporate market. It's no longer part of the independent republic of childhood.

Finally, and most sadly, I suspect we're over-protecting our children. We may complain that they watch too much television – but if we were honest, might we admit that we'd rather have them at home in front of the box than out chasing around the neighbourhood, trespassing on the neighbours' property, climbing trees, playing with fire and batting pointed sticks at one another?

The kids didn't get rid of the republic of childhood, and replace it with this elaborately-regulated playpen. Adults did. Will the new, safe arrangement yield outward-looking, risk-taking, self-confident kids? I doubt it. And that's an enormous loss.

-- 30 --

Beyond Brain-Dead Accounting

2008-06-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

My submission to the Voluntary Planning hearings on natural resource policy came down to just 10 words.

Go beyond brain-dead accounting. Use the Genuine Progress Index.

Nova Scotia Voluntary Planning is holding consultations on a long-term natural resources strategy for the province, looking particularly at forests, minerals, parks and biodiversity. Clearly, something big is afoot. Meetings have already been held in Pugwash, Parrsboro, Blockhouse, Port Hawkesbury, Middleton, Tusket, Dartmouth, Inverness, Saulnierville, Middle Musquodoboit, St. Ann's, Debert, New Minas, Shelburne, Cheticamp, Windsor, and St. Peters.

Further meetings will be held in Sherbrooke, Sheet Harbour, Weymouth, Membertou, Yarmouth, Halifax, Liverpool, Stellarton, and Antigonish. There will be three meetings in French. It's also possible to submit written comments. Details are at http://vp.gov.ns.ca/projects/resources

These consultations may shape the government's natural resources strategy for years to come. But alarmed conservationists reported that the early meetings were packed with industry representatives demanding that the province reduce the number of protected areas, support clear-cutting and herbicide spraying, relax its regulations on mining and, specifically, abolish the moratorium on uranium exploration and mining.

Ye gods. But if nobody else is heard, those voices will control the discussion. So I trotted off to St. Peters with my ten-word recommendation.

Go beyond brain-dead accounting, I said. Use the Genuine Progress Index.

Every economic activity has costs as well as benefits. Brain-dead accounting overlooks the most important costs, and overstates the benefits. For example, it sees a forest only as potential pulp and lumber. The only costs are the cost of labour and equipment to cut it down. The benefits are employment and profit.

But a living forest is a natural community which confers all kinds of other benefits. It inhales greenhouse gasses like CO2, and exhales oxygen. It provides habitat for life forms which enrich the soil and pollinate our crops. A forest absorbs rainwater, filters it, and regulates its release into the streams. It prevents soil erosion, attracts visitors, provides us with recreational activities like hunting, fishing and hiking.

To the forest industry -- indeed, to the industrial economy generally -- such benefits literally count for nothing.

A natural forest also produces more and better wood than a clearcut one. Windhorse Farm, in Lunenburg County, has been logged selectively and sustainably since 1840. No pesticides, no clearcuts. Its rich, mature Acadian forest has produced more lumber than would have been produced by clear-cutting and re-growing and the site contains as much standing timber today as in 1840.

GPI studies have also found that forestry jobs per unit of wood cut have steadily declined with the growth of industrial forestry. Sustainable forestry produces far more jobs than clear-cutting.

The 170-year experiment at Windhorse Farms simply ends the debate on clear-cutting, which really amounts to mining and destroying the forest, just as we mined and destroyed the cod fishery. If clear-cutting destroys the other benefits of a forest, and doesn't even produce as much wood as selective logging, it simply can't be permitted.

Uranium mining and nuclear power are even worse. Uranium mine tailings are viciously toxic, and they persist for generations. Nuclear power plants are so dangerous that they can't get liability insurance at any price -- so they are insured by government. That's you and me, buddy. Wastes from nuclear plants have to be securely stored for centuries, perhaps millennia. Nobody knows how to do that, and the costs, though real, are simply incalculable -- so they aren't calculated. They're ignored.

That's brain-dead accounting, the kind of accounting that goes into calculations of the Gross Domestic Product. It's the normal basis for economic decision-making, and it's hideously wrong. If we had kept the ecological books properly in the first place, we wouldn't be facing environmental catastrophe today.

The essence of the Genuine Progress Index, by contrast, is "full-cost accounting," which recognizes the value of such natural capital as standing forests, healthy populations, productive soils and waterways -- and the cost of destroying such assets. Over the past decade, GPI Atlantic (www.gpiatlantic.org) has been publishing realistic accounts for Nova Scotia, using our province as a test-bed for techniques to be applied globally.

The GPI is a fabulous gift to Nova Scotia. Nobody else has it. It covers almost every sphere of human activity, and it's almost complete. It should be the foundation of any discussion of natural resource strategies in this province.

We can choose to ignore the GPI and the environmental crisis, fouling the earth with toxins and consuming the natural wealth that belongs to our descendants. But the St. Peters crowd, which included several forest workers, was largely on the GPI wavelength. It wanted to develop sustainable lifestyles, and agreed that a top priority should be the restoration of our depleted forests.

The death of brain-dead economics and the birth of genuine progress. It's a vision as beautiful as sunrise.

-- 30 --

The Federation of the World

2008-05-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

When commentators and reporters describe people like me as “anti-globalization,” I get annoyed.

“Globalization” in its true sense is not a set of policies or institutional initiatives. It is simply a fact. How can one oppose the movement of the air, sushi, the circulation of the oceans, the Internet, the migration of birds, the world-wide circulation of ideas? The world has become very small, and each of us is connected to all of it.

What I do oppose – what millions like me oppose – is a global conspiracy of institutions which give priority to money over human beings. I oppose a “harmonization” of trade rules and regulations which means that commerce trumps working conditions, health-care and the environment. I oppose a system which empowers unelected officials, meeting in secret and accountable to no one, to determine the conditions under which you and I will live our lives.

But I am entirely in favour of bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, if that is what their people want.(Did anyone think to ask them?) I am even more in favour of bringing democracy to the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8, and the people of North America.

One of the great oddities of economic globalization – which really amounts to economic and social homogenization – is that so many of its enthusiasts have little concept of the rich complexity and variety of the world as it is. “Globalization” seems to be driven by people as ignorant as George W. Bush, who had travelled outside the United States only once before he became president.

And I am struck by the fact that the “anti-globalization” forces are so often led by people who really do know the larger world – people who have travelled widely, and have often lived abroad as teachers, journalists, health-care workers and students.

The barons of industry and their servants in government have created global organizations to serve their interests. The rest of us don't have such resources. So we create small organizations to fight on a local scale – issue by issue, event by event, town by town. Paul Hawken recently estimated that the world's people have created nearly two million organizations actively engaged with environmental and social justice issues. But we don't have a commanding voice on the world stage.

That may be about to change. Last year, an international coalition of civil society organizations and prominent individuals launched a campaign to establish a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. The UN General Assembly provides a forum only for the national governments of the world. The UNPA, by contrast, would be a place where the world's people could be directly represented. It would begin – like the European parliament – as a consultative body made up of parliamentarians from around the world. It could evolve – again, like the European parliament – into a directly-elected World Parliament with gradually-increasing powers and authority.

Among the Canadians calling for a UN Parliamentary Assembly are Lloyd Axworthy, Flora MacDonald, Romeo Dallaire, Elizabeth May, Lois Wilson, Warren Allmand, Allan Blakeney and Douglas Roche. You could hardly find a more distinguished group of internationally-minded Canadians – two foreign ministers and a solicitor-general, our most revered soldier, a former president of the World Council of Churches, an ambassador for disarmament, the leader of the Greens.

The appeal has been endorsed by the Liberal International, the Socialist International and the Global Greens. It's been signed by parliamentarians from 113 countries, by 108 civil society organizations, and by a growing number of eminent individuals like Boutros Boutros-Ghali. You can see the list – and sign up yourself – at www.unpacampaign.org.

The idea is gaining some traction. Last July, our own House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development called on Canada's Parliament to “give favourable consideration to the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly,” noting that Canada could be the first nation to endorse the proposal.

It's time. We all breathe the same altered air, sail the same rising seas, drink the water that falls from the moving clouds. Emissions from Nova Scotian smokestacks and tailpipes compromise the polar bear's habitat, cause emphysema in Moscow and drown the island nations of the Pacific. We need political connections to match our natural connections.

In 1835, in a prophetic poem called “Locksley Hall,” Lord Tennyson foresaw commercial air travel, and aerial battles between the “airy navies” of the nations raining down a “ghastly dew” of bombs. All of that has come to pass. But Tennyson also imagined a day when
...the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

The federation of the world – Tennyson's dream – has not come to pass. But if we are to survive, it must. A parliamentary assembly of the peoples of the world would be a huge step forward.

-- 30 --

Greening a Government

2008-05-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

“Here's a statistic that shocked me,” says Environment Minister Mark Parent. “I was at a meeting in Brazil, and I learned that Brazil has about 4000 kilometers of coastline. Nova Scotia has about 10,000 kilometers – 12,000 if you include the Bras d'Or Lakes. We have three times as much coastline as Brazil.”

That startled me, too. I knew that our intricate filigree of a coastline was pretty extensive, but 12,000 km. is huge – three times the distance between the east and west coasts of Canada.

I wanted to talk with the Minister about protecting that gorgeous, complex coastline, which may be vulnerable precisely because there is so much of it. We don't think to guard something so abundant, any more than we think about declaring spruce trees an endangered species.

But there is a danger, all the same. The Maritimes have almost the only remaining large stretches of wild coast in eastern North America, and development is steadily nibbling away at it.

Mark Parent is the minister responsible for protecting and extending Nova Scotia's wilderness areas. The government has announced its intention to have 12% of the province's land mass under protection by 2015. That objective is enshrined in the ambitious Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, known to its friends as “EGSPA.”

The government seems to be quite serious about this. Last summer, the province created the Blandford Nature Reserve in Lunenburg County, and also acquired 10,000 hectares of high-value forest land in southwest Nova Scotia from Bowater Mersey Paper. Last fall, it established the 1350-ha. Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area adjacent to the Bayers Lake Industrial Park in Halifax. That swath of land is three times the size of Vancouver's Stanley Park and more than 20 times as large as our own Point Pleasant Park. It contains 18 lakes, more than 50 wetlands, old-growth pine forests, mainland moose and 150 species of birds.

This is a stunning gift to the future – and the province recently nominated an area ten times larger for protection. The 14,000 ha. Ship Harbour Long Lake tract behind the Eastern Shore is one of the last large roadless areas on the Nova Scotia mainland, with river corridors, old-growth forests, plenty of wildlife and more than 50 lakes. Public consultations are going on now – to participate, visit http://www.gov.ns.ca/nse/protectedareas/ – but the tract is expected to be protected by the autumn.

One problem with land conservation in Nova Scotia, the Minister notes, is that we have so little Crown land. Assembling land for protection thus requires much patient negotiation and accommodation with private landowners. About 70% of our land mass is privately owned. On the coast, that figure rises to 95%.

So what about shorelines? Seventy percent of Nova Scotia's population lives along the shore, in 360 coastal communities, and 14% of the province's jobs rely on coastal activity. Nobody in the province lives more than 65 km. from the sea. All Nova Scotians, essentially, are people of the coast.

Mark Parent agrees. Nova Scotia, he says, “is defined by its coastline.” But aside from snippets of shoreline within protected areas, he has no mandate to deal with shorelines. The government's proposed coastal management plan is being developed under the leadership of the Department of Fisheries.

Say that again? Fisheries departments are generally focussed on enhancing the fishery, not on preserving the environment. Similarly, as I found when I was researching the Zenn car, the Department of Transportation assesses electric vehicles on the basis of highway safety. Nothing requires that they consider environmental benefits.

“I know,” nods the Minister. “I get a lot of stuff coming to me that belongs to other ministries like Transportation – bike paths, speed limits and so on. My department will participate in the coastal management plan, but what we really need is a culture shift so that all departments appreciate the environmental aspects of their activities.

“It's actually a horizontal challenge in a vertical structure. Government departments stand beside each other like silos – but environmental issues are global, they don't respect departmental boundaries or any other boundaries. The environment cuts across everything. You can't care for the economy without caring for the environment.”

This is the “huge challenge and opportunity” that prompted the Premier to propose EGSPA and other innovations like the Green Deputies, a forum of deputy ministers who meet regularly to discuss environmental questions across departmental lines.

So the Department of Environment must not only manage its own programs, but also influence the entire agenda of the government -- ?

The Minister smiles. He is actually two ministers in one – a minister of the Crown, and also a minister of the Baptist church..

“Yes,” he says. “Our role is to be the leaven that leaventh the lump.”

-- 30 --

Silver Donald Cameron's books, including The Living Beach, are available at www.capebretonbooks.com

Zenn and the Art of Green Driving

2008-05-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

Rick Mercer is bombing around the streets of St. Jerome, Quebec in a jaunty little hatchback, making driving sounds: Rrrrmmm! Brrrrr....! He finds it unsettling, eerie, to drive a car that doesn't make any noise at all, that operates in silence. As his passenger, Ian Clifford, remarks, driving down the street on a summer day with the windows open, you can listen to the birds singing.

This is the Zenn car. “Zenn” stands for Zero Emissions, No Noise. It's an electric car – clean, quiet, compact, cheap. The wave of the future. A real weapon against global warming.

“Remind me again, what did John Baird say the first time he took this for a test spin, the Environment Minister?” asks Mercer. Clifford laughs and shakes his head.

“John hasn't been in one.”

“Ah, hasn't been in one!” cries Mercer. “And the Minister of Transport?”

“Ditto,” says Clifford.

You can watch this revealing dialogue on YouTube. As The Economist recently noted, Canada is a world leader in manufacturing electric cars – and Canadian governments seem intent on throwing our lead away.

The Zenn is a Low Speed Vehicle (LSV) built in St. Jerome for a Toronto-based company headed by Ian Clifford – a graduate, incidentally, of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. An LSV is designed to operate on roads with speed limits of 50km/h. It can carry two passengers and a week's worth of groceries – in Mercer's case, 20 cases of beer and one box of cereal. It travels up to 80 km on a “tank” of electricity, which costs 32 cents. When it's “empty,” you plug it into the wall and let it recharge, just like a cell phone. A full recharge takes about four hours.

You won't be the terror of the freeways in this little bucket, but that's not what it's for. It's an urban vehicle, and it could make a remarkable impact on urban congestion and air quality. You could drive it all day on city errands and never run out of power. Plug it in at night and it's fully-charged in the morning. It costs about a penny a mile to operate – about one-tenth of the cost of a normal car. In the US, where they are approved for use in 44 states, Zenns sell for about $16,000.

So why can't I buy one?

Transport Canada is doubtful about the safety of LSVs, arguing that they would come off badly in a collision with a dump truck or a Hummer. Perhaps – but so would a motor scooter or a bicycle, both of which operate now on Canadian roads. In the US, where 45,000 LSVs are already operating, these micro-cars have had a zero death rate.

Rationally, it would be far better to ban the Hummer than the Zenn. After all, urban air pollution, mainly from vehicles, kills at least 5900 Canadians every year. The figure comes from Environment Canada – John Baird's department. But those slow, terrible, gasping deaths leave no gore on the asphalt – so somehow they don't count.

One could argue – people do – that in a province with electricity as dirty as Nova Scotia's, an electric car simply pushes the pollution farther upstream. The car doesn't pollute, but the power plant does. That's true, but the Zenn is still a vast improvement. One expert calculates that the average vehicle emits 0.23 kg of CO2 per kilometer. A Hummer emits almost twice as much (0.4) and a Prius less than half (0.1). Even in Nova Scotia, the net emission from a Zenn would be .07 – 30% less than a Prius.

Transport Canada wants LSVs restricted to “controlled areas” like golf clubs, campuses, parks and military bases. Happily, that decision isn't entirely up to them, because the provinces decide for themselves which vehicles can use provincial roads. One province, British Columbia, has already approved LSVs. Manitoba intends to. Nova Scotia could follow suit.

Will it? And if so, when?

Mike Balsom, an engineer with the Department of Transportation, says that the Zenn is one of several creative and surprising “emerging vehicles” – the TRX, the Dynasty Electric Car, the CanAm Spyder and others. The government is just developing a system for evaluating such novelties, which challenge the existing definition of a motor vehicle. And yes, the intense public interest in the Zenn “will force all jurisdictions to address the emergence of new vehicle technologies.” Including Nova Scotia.

So when will we see the Zenn in Halifax? Mike Balsom smiles. He is an engineer, not a prophet. Even if the car were approved tomorrow, the process would still take eight to 12 months. The earliest we could hope for would be early 2009.

Okay. I'll settle for that. But let's get cracking. The future is here already.

-- 30--

Anticipating Iolanthe

2008-05-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

I could not have been much more than ten when my father took me by the hand and led me into the wicked, winsome world of Gilbert and Sullivan – a world I still find magical beyond the dreams of Disney.

A high school not far from our home had developed the tradition of producing one of the Savoy Operas every spring. The Mikado, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance. Every spring my father would take me to encounter the likes of Dick Deadeye, Little Buttercup, the Lord High Executioner and the Lord High Everything Else, and I loved every bit of it – the rippling music, the cockeyed, surreal plots, the sparkling wit of the dialogue. We didn't see Iolanthe, which will be presented in Halifax next weekend. I can't wait.

Gilbert and Sullivan's characters may have been my introduction to irony, with their ridiculous bursts of bravado and sentimentality delivered without a flicker of self-awareness. And for a boy already in love with language, nothing could be more delicious than the wild, brain-twisting, mouth-warping “patter songs” which are among the operettas' signature pieces. Sing this, very fast:

You get a good spadesman to plant a small tradesman (first take off his boots with a boot-tree),
And his legs will take root, and his fingers will shoot, and they'll blossom and bud like a fruit-tree –
From the greengrocer tree you get grapes and green pea, cauliflower, pineapple, and cranberries,
While the pastrycook plant cherry brandy will grant, apple puffs, and three corners, and Banburys –

And of course all of this goofiness and artifice and drollery is constantly puncturing the pretensions of the rich, the pompous, the snobbish and the stupid – who, in these operettas, are often the same person.

The rapier humour retains its timeliness. One of my favourite Gilbert and Sullivan characters is Sir Joseph Porter, a lad who rose through the ranks of the legal profession until “I grew so rich that I was sent/By pocket borough into Parliament.” A pocket borough was a form of Parliamentary rot – a tiny constituency so dominated by a single landowner, usually a lord, that he could simply appoint the MP.

Once “elected,” Sir Joseph boasts,

I always voted at my party's call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

It would be a rare MP or MLA, I suspect, who could read that couplet without at least a small wince. But party solidarity has its rewards:

I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

Parse that out. After “winning” a safe seat, I slavishly followed the party line, and I was rewarded with a plummy appointment for which I was, umm, indifferently qualified. That probably describes half of Canada's judges, most of its senators, and an inconceivable number of Commissioners and Inspectors and Chairmen of This and That.

Before their partnership began, William Schwenck Gilbert was a well established wit, poet and playwright. Arthur Sullivan was a brilliant young composer of concerti, oratorios, and symphonies -- not to mention “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” one of the hymns I grew up with. The two had worked together once, in 1871, before producer Richard D'Oyly Carte asked them in 1874 for a short comic opera to fill out a program at his theatre.

The result was Trial By Jury, and it was a hit. The first of their 14 operettas, it turns on a young woman's suit for breach of promise of marriage. The defendant contends that because he is so worthless, she shouldn't get much by way of damages. The plaintiff argues that because she loves the defendant ardently, she should get a generous settlement. The judge solves the problem by marrying the plaintiff himself. This is light-footed Victorian theatre of the absurd.

The law and the peerage were favourite targets for Gilbert and Sullivan – and they are targets again in Iolanthe (1882), a story about true lovers, one the child of a fairy, kept apart by secret origins and legal lunacy. Through a mix of comic invention and word-play, it all works out in the end. Gilbert's genius, says one of his critics, “is to fuse opposites with an imperceptible sleight of hand, to blend the surreal with the real, and the caricature with the natural.”

I haven't seen Iolanthe yet – but I'll see it on Friday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in a production by the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Nova Scotia. I wish I could invite my father.

-- 30 --

The Pirates, Then and Always

2008-04-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

Laws are made, says the old maxim, by those who have the power to enforce them.

The first laws, says Captain Charles Johnson, were probably made by a caveman who attacked the caveman on the other side of the river, “took everything he had, and made the rule that the river belonged to him and his family, of course. So there came government, and anybody from the other side of the river who did the same thing was a criminal committing an act of piracy.”

Johnson wonders who was the greatest pirate of the Renaissance. Was it Philip of Spain, who looted the Americas? Or Elizabeth I of England, “who sent out fleets to loot the looters? Or Drake, the greatest looter of them all?”

Captain Johnson is the central figure in Pirate's Passage, the deliciously subversive book by South Shore writer William Gilkerson which won the 2006 Governor-General's Award for Children's Literature. Spectacularly-successful thieves, Johnson says, become monarchs, emperors and governments. Less successful thieves become criminals. If they're sailors, they're called pirates. The definitions come from codes of law and the history books, which are written by the winners.

If I had been told all this when I was a boy, it would have saved me a lot of later confusion. But I don't know many children's books as forthright and provocative as Pirate's Passage.

The novel begins when Captain Johnson's little yawl surfs into the village of Grey Rocks in a November storm in 1952. He stays the winter at the Admiral Anson Inn, where he befriends Jim, the 12-year-old son of the widowed innkeeper. Are there echoes of Treasure Island here? Oh, yes.

Jim is writing a school essay about pirates. Captain Johnson offers to help – and not only with schoolwork. The historic inn is in decline, and the village dictator, who heads a local clan named Moehner (pronounced “meaner”), is manipulating police, firemen and health inspectors, squeezing Jim's mother to sell. Captain Johnson applies his strategic intelligence to thwarting the Moehners.

Meanwhile, Jim gets an astonishing view of piracy. In 1724, a Captain Charles Johnson published an authoritative General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates – and the Captain Johnson of 1952 eerily echoes his namesake. He sometimes implies that he is becoming younger again, raising the tantalizing possibility that he may indeed be the same man, having found some means to wax and wane in age.

The captain has a remarkable capacity to inject Jim straight into the scenes he describes. Again and again, Jim finds himself reasoning like a pirate and planning like a pirate – and inhabiting the subsequent action so vividly that he actually seems to live it. The experience, Jim says, “rattled my notions of reality,” as it is clearly meant to do.

Indeed, the point of these intense conversations is the captain's insistence that Jim discard conventional thinking, and learn to see the world clearly and accurately. Once, for instance, Jim comments that the merchant sailor's condition in the 18th century seems unfair, and should be changed.

“Changed?” the captain retorts. “What's to change? The way of the world? Don't overtax your brains with how things should be; you're going to need all the brain power you've got just trying to figure out how things actually are.”

According to Johnson, “the Brotherhood” of freebooters created the world's first true democracy at a time when most Europeans were utter pawns of absolute monarchs. The captain quotes with approval Captain Samuel Bellamy's denunciation of those who live within the laws established by the wealthy as “ a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls.” The wealthy, he says, “vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?"

Good question. And if you think piracy and slavery are behind us, says the captain, think again. Starting with the Moehners and ending with a crew of armed thugs in a motorboat off Boston, Jim meets all manner of contemporary pirates. In the end, says the captain, there's no such thing as “the pirates.” There's just “them as lives in the seams and spaces between the rules...in governments, churches, academies, businesses, tennis clubs, and pub society – pirates ready to come out and ransack from the spaces between the spaces.”

The pirates are among us, and our best defenses are speed, courage and surprise. Pirate's Passage a glorious romp and a vivid historical tale – and a foundation text in the political philosophy of survival. No doubt we have met our pirates already. Perhaps we are pirates ourselves, forsooth, in our moments of courage and freedom.

-- 30 --

Paul Watson and the Armada of Death

2008-04-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

Let me get this straight. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, aided by the RCMP, boarded and seized the Dutch-registered protest vessel Farley Mowat in order to prevent injury to sealers -- just a couple of weeks after DFO drowned four sealers itself in a terrifying display of incompetence.

And the European master and mate of the vessel have been jailed and charged with offences under a set of "marine mammal protection regulations" that were created specifically to stifle dissent by preventing protesters from approaching seals who are in the process of being slaughtered.

And all this hits the headlines just as the European Union debates whether to ban seal products from the EU completely. A triumph of Canadian diplomacy.

And the Minister, Loyola Hearn, contributes to the calm and rational discussion of the seal hunt by sneering at the internationally-venerated Farley Mowat, who had the effrontery to putup bail money for the jailed officers. Hearn also excoriates Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd Conservation society as "a bunch ofmoney-sucking manipulators."

If money-sucking manipulation is now a crime under the Fisheries Act, perhaps we should send a few fisheries officers to call on The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney. Whether or not Mulroney's skulking encounters with Karlheinz Schreiber were otherwise illegal, there's not much doubt that they represented "money-sucking manipulation" on an Olympic scale.

But that's not true of Paul Watson. Say what you will about Paul Watson -- and you can say, with some justice, that he's intransigent, uncompromising, hyperbolic, pugnacious, rash and intemperate -- you cannot ascribe cynicism to a man who has spent his whole life charging whaling ships with rubber rafts, getting himself tear-gassed and beaten and jailed, and confronting armed and angry sealers and whalers far out on the cold and lonely sea.

But Hearn, who has spent his entire working life in classrooms and legislatures, says Watson is "gutless." Stunning.

Paul Watson is not a cuddly figure. He doesn't mind risks, and he is not intimidated by the authorities. If they don't give him a permit, he goes to the ice without one and takes the consequences. If he has to go to jail, he goes. If the authorities bar him from the ice, he organizes a shipload of others. If they harass his Canadian ship, he registers it in the Netherlands. If they tell him he can't enter Canadian waters, he stays 13 miles offshore and lets the hunt come to him.

He is utterly devoted to what he's doing. And his passionate commitment reduces DFO and its successive ministers to gibbering, frothing incoherence.

The truth is that two worlds are colliding every spring at the seal hunt. Loyola Hearn represents the fading world-view which holds that human beings somehow rank above all other beings, holding dominion over the living whole and exploiting it without restraint. Watson, a vegan, represents the leading edge of a new world of people who recognize themselves as part of nature, responsible for their stewardship of the natural world, and no more precious than any other species on the planet.

Watson was speaking for that new world when he said that the deaths of the four sealers was a tragedy -- but the deaths of 270,000 seals was an even greater tragedy. The striking outcome of that remark -- as I saw it on a CBC News poll -- was not that many people were outraged by it, but that perhaps two-thirds of the callers agreed with him.

When I first met Watson, I'm quite sure that the proportion would have been reversed -- that a single human life would have been considered far more valuable than the lives of any number of animals. That was in 1976, on the ice at the Front, north of Newfoundland. I was reporting on the seal hunt. Watson was there with Greenpeace, of which he was a founding member.

That year, the Front was covered by all the major American TV networks, the wire services, and influential papers like the Boston Globe. The gory images that flashed around the world were a disaster for the sealing industry and the Canadian government. Ever since then, DFO has worked implacably to prevent detailed coverage of the slaughter, and it has largely succeeded. Except for Paul Watson.

In those days we hadn't begun to grasp the damage that human beings had already done to the oceans. We didn't know about the fury of destruction that has eliminated 90% of the world's large predatory fishes. We hadn't watched while DFO "managed" the Atlantic cod and the Pacific salmon into commercial extinction.

But Watson understood in his viscera that we were confronting an armada of death supported by pliant and amoral authority. With growing support, he has fought them ever since -- and, with his fellow green warriors -- he has changed the world.

-- 30 --

UnTV - An Audience of One

2008-04-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

“Okay,” says Candy Palmater, “we've got a video clip for you. Take a look at this.”

She waves her hand towards the side of the cavernous, funky interior of the Marquess Club. A video screen abruptly comes alive, showing Candy dressed up as a sportscaster, interviewing a feckless wimp in a suit. Candy wants to know why white people are so sensitive to odd things, like being sports mascots and having teams named for them.

“What's wrong with the name 'Whiteskins?'” she demands, as the screen cuts to a really nasty-looking cartoon of a muscular white dude with yellow hair.

“Look,” whines the white guy, “how would you native people feel if it happened to you? Supposing there were teams called the Redskins, or the Braves? Or a car named something silly like 'Cherokee?' How would you feel?”

“Oh, come on,” laughs Candy. “Nobody would ever do anything as silly as that.”

This is a pilot taping of The Candy Show, a potential half-hour series for the Aboriginal Peoples' Television Network. Candy herself is a reformed lawyer, a Mi'kmaq lesbian comedian backed by a hot band called the Nasty Habits. Her guests include a much-tattooed belly dancer named Monique, the celebrated Mi'kmaq drumming group Eastern Eagle, modern blues singer Charlie A'Court, and the powerful R&B vocalist Asia.

The Candy Show also includes a video clip from a new film directed by another of Candy's guests, Juanita Peters. Hannah's Story is a profile of a Winnipeg girl so appalled by homelessness and hunger that – at the age of five -- she took on poverty as a personal challenge. She founded an organization called the Ladybug Foundation, which has raised more than a million dollars for anti-poverty work. Hannah has become an internationally-recognized advocate for social justice. And she still isn't old enough to vote.

Fundamentally this is a TV variety show of the type pioneered by the likes of Ed Sullivan. In Sullivan's day, though, there was one vast undifferentiated audience, addressed by just two TV networks, whose signals reached us through enormous metal aerials on our rooftops. Even cable was only a distant possibility. Network TV was run by middle-aged white men in suits, and its programs all had to be acceptable to every narrow-minded dimwit in its mass audience.

The proliferation of cable channels shattered that mass audience into 500 pieces, with individual channels dedicated to golf, sex, mystery, history, you name it. Look around inside this black-painted, post-industrial space on Gottingen Street in Halifax, and you see an audience of minorities – black, white, Asian, aboriginal, young, old, men, women, gay, straight – brought together entirely by taste and attitude.
The space within which The Candy Show has grown up simply didn't exist until the fragmentation of the mass audience. TV has become a mosaic of specialized outlets – like Aboriginal Peoples TV – which serve many small audiences. And it's on the verge of another sweeping transformation.

The Candy Show is produced by Pink Dog Productions, which consists of two former CBC producers, Dawn Harwood-Jones and Roberta Hancock, and a young techie named Steven Morrison. The trio also run a broadcasting enterprise called untv.ca – and I believe that untv.ca is the future of broadcasting, the ultimate fragmentation and reconstruction of the audience.

Untv.ca bills itself as “Canada's first Internet television station, producing original content for an on-demand audience.” It will broadcast The Candy Show the Internet – not as a single half-hour show, but as several short segments.

“Untv.ca is a new form of broadcasting,” says Dawn Harwood-Jones, the CEO. “But there's a new audience out there. lot of people under 30 don't even a TV. They watch everything on their computers. And they don't want long-form shows, they prefer short segments.”

On the Internet, that's easy. The Internet imposes no length constraints at all. A show can run seven minutes or seven hours, and it can run without commercials, too, if it can find an alternative source of revenue.

What untv.ca really demonstrates is that the audience has shrunk yet again. Now the audience is just one person, with a mouse. Internet television is personal television, to be watched whenever and wherever you want.

And yet, paradoxically, Internet audiences can be huge – immensely larger than cable audiences. In many parts of Canada, for instance, cable companies don't carry Aboriginal Peoples TV, so its programs simply aren't available. Nor are they available to viewers outside the country, though they might be of great interest to the Maori or the Mayans.

On the Internet, however, the programs of untv.ca are always available, anywhere on the globe. And though only a tiny percentage of any population may groove on The Candy Show, tiny percentage of six billion people represents an enormous audience.

Altogether vast. But just one at a time.

-- 30 --

Greening Our Minds

2008-04-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

“All of what we produce is going to be waste,” says Claude Ouimet. He waves his hand around the brand-new seminar room, studded with audio-visual devices. “This beautiful room, all this equipment, it's all going to be waste. It's just a matter of time.”

Claude Ouimet is head of InterfaceFLOR Canada and Latin America, a subsidiary of Interface Carpets of Atlanta, Georgia, a company already familiar to readers of this column. Inspired by its visionary founder, Ray Anderson, Interface aims to be not only the world's first zero-impact corporation, but also the world's first restorative corporation – an organization which actively improves the environment.

Claude Ouimet has thought a great deal about the future and the environment. He fears that his legacy to his children – our legacy to our children – is “a first class ticket.... on the Titanic.” And what he has just said is a stunning, transformative thought.

“All of what we produce is going to be waste.”

It is, too. I never thought of it this way, but viewed from the perspective of Gaia, the “economy” that we treasure so much is just a vast apparatus for the production of garbage.

Nor does the transformation from goods to garbage take very long. Claude Ouimet was speaking at EcoPrise 2008, a conference on business and the environment organized by Dalhousie University's Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship and its Eco-Efficiency Centre. The Eco-Efficiency Centre's director, Ray Côté, handed me a graph produced by The Natural Step showing that of the raw materials and energy that go into US manufacturing, only 7% is transformed into products. The other 93% becomes waste – slag heaps, emissions, heat, by-products. And of the 7% that reaches the market, 80% is discarded after a single use. Think of packaging, motor oil, tissue paper, garbage bags.

The result: 99% of the raw materials and energy that we took from the earth to make industrial products has become waste within six weeks of sale. Ninety-nine percent!

Nature, by contrast, wastes nothing. Nature is cyclical, fluid and creative. One organism's wastes are another's nutrients. The fallen tree shelters the mouse and feeds the fungus. Substances and energies interweave, separate and re-join, looping together like the circles that represent the Olympic Games. Life forms are created, abandoned and re-created in the most intricate of dances, powered always by the sun.

Industrial societies, by contrast, are linear and reductive – and we're only beginning to understand the implications of those qualities. For instance, Nova Scotians are rightly proud of the fact that we've reduced the amount of solid waste going to our landfills by more than 50% -- but in truth that's only a baby step. We need to choke the waste stream at its source, resisting lavish packaging and planned obsolescence, refusing to buy what we don't need, re-learning to value quality and durability, ridding ourselves of “disposable” products that actually linger for centuries.

In short, we have to green our minds, change the way we view the world, and accept responsibility for our life decisions. More and more, our lives need to mimic natural cycles. If everything we produce is going to be waste, we have to ensure that it's useful waste, waste that nourishes life.

These are great challenges – with great opportunities. We're lucky to live at a time when all human activity is up for re-examination and re-invention – and not just by vanguard corporations like Interface, but by ordinary people and small local businesses. The dangers are great, but the opportunities are glorious.

One participant at Ecoprise 2008 was Robert Taylor, the whiskered, plain-spoken president of Taylor Lumber Company of Middle Musquodoboit. Taylor Lumber began in 1945 as a small local sawmill and horse logging operation, and now includes a major sawmill, a planer mill, a chipper, and a building supply store in Musquodoboit Harbour.

Taylor's problem was the mountains of chips and sawdust created by its mills. The solution was to use those wastes to fuel an electrical generator. The generator powers the mills and provides electricity to the local community. Its heat dries wood in the kilns, and its ashes replace lime on the fields of nearby farmers.

Taylor is now looking for a good use for the hot water from the generating plant. He contemplates using it to heat greenhouses, or possibly to warm up ponds for aquaculture, growing species like Arctic char.

The company also practices sustainable forestry, planting enough trees to replace what it cuts. Since the trees provide the mill's energy as well as its raw materials, the operation begins to take the elegant shape of a sustainable natural cycle.

“All of what we produce is going to be waste.” A sobering thought – but it's also a splendid opportunity to free our minds, liberate our imaginations, and discover a new, green world.

-- 30 --

The Discipline of the Market

2008-04-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

If you owe the bank $1000 and can't pay, says the old maxim, you have a problem – but if you owe the bank a million dollars and can't pay, the bank has a problem.

No doubt. But if the bank owes billions of dollars and can't pay, then the taxpayer, the consumer, the small investor and the householder all have a problem. That's the latest message from Wall Street – that the Masters of the Universe can take idiotic risks, and if they lose, the little guys should bail them out.

My degree is in English literature, so naturally I don't understand finance and economics. But I do hold certain financial truths to be self-evident. I agree with J.P. Morgan who, when asked what the stock market would do, replied, “It will fluctuate.” Indeed it will, and sooner or later, all soaring markets will tumble. When gleeful investors tell you, “This time it's different,” head for the exits. Remember when the NASDAQ stood at 5000 points? Since the technology stocks crashed, it's never reached half that height again.

We're seeing a similar crash in US housing.

Fundamentally, houses are not investments; they're places to live. The amount that people can pay for housing is limited by their family incomes. For generations, the rule of thumb was that a down payment should be 25% of the value of the house, and that a family should not spend much more than 25% of its income on housing. Prudent lenders charged higher interest rates to families which strained these criteria.

No more. In recent years, US institutions have been lending 100% of the cost of a house – in some cases, 105% or 110% – to borrowers whose credit histories and incomes were ridiculously insufficient. New buyers rushed into the market, pumping air into the bubble. Initially, they got a very low interest rate, and often paid only the interest on the mortgage. By renewal time – so went the theory – the value of their houses would have risen, and buyers could raise cash by re-financing.

And if house prices fell? They wouldn't. “This time it's different.”

Ah, yes.

Loans like that – loans that the borrowers can carry only by defying gravity – are the financial equivalent of goose guano. But the Masters of the Universe had another wrinkle. Roll a bunch of these “sub-prime” mortgages together, and call them a bond. A few of the assembled mortgages might go sour, but the whole bundle surely wouldn't, so the bond was a perfectly safe investment. The boys in the bond-rating houses would give it a good rating, and all kinds of institutional investors would buy them – universities, pension funds, municipal governments in Finland.

But the bonds were simply gift-wrapped globs of guano, based on a game of musical chairs. When the music stopped, house prices plunged. Homeowners found themselves with $300,000 loans on $250,000 houses. Worse, mortgage payments increased sharply once the incentive periods had passed. People couldn't manage the new payments – and why would they try? Much simpler just to walk away from the house.

Wall Street's fifth-largest investment bank, Bear Stearns, was hugely successful at peddling mortgage-backed bonds, which drove its share price to $170 in 2007. Alas, gift-wrapped guano is still guano, and when the music stopped, you couldn't give those bonds away. To stave off a bankruptcy which might have started a whole cascade of bank collapses, the US government, through the Federal Reserve, advanced funds to JPMorgan Chase & Co to buy Bear Stearns – for $2 a share, later increased to $10.

This is “the discipline of the market” which sends right-wing ideologues into rhapsodies. The omniscient Market God impassively allocates rewards and penalties in accordance with the courage, perception and skill of the players. If some poor slob in Cleveland gets bounced out of his house, that just shows he lacked those sterling qualities. Tough guano.

Today, tens of thousands of US houses stand vacant and abandoned. A search for condominiums under $50,000 in Fort Myers, Florida – a very pleasant place – turns up 91 properties. Two bedrooms, one bath, $34,900, a price that would be competitive in Reserve Mines. Nationwide, whole streets are in foreclosure, placed there by the implacable discipline of the market.

But when a contagion reaches financial institutions, the Market God is rudely shoved aside, and government bails out the bankers. This is the social safety net of the rich. When the discipline of the market threatens Wall Street, hard-nosed free-enterprisers suddenly discover the merits of socialized banking.

People with degrees in necromancy and prestidigitation – who are far more qualified than I to comment on the markets – contend that the Federal Reserve was right to shovel cash into the financial system. Maybe so. But after this episode, could we please be spared any further guano about the discipline of the market?

-- 30 --

Last Sunday was Easter Sunday -- and since the Sunday Herald doesn't publish on Easter Sunday, I did not write a column.

In My Hat

2008-03-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

“I don't know if I mentioned that I love this hat,” I said, for possibly the twentieth time.

“Do you?” said Marjorie, her voice ringing with innocence and irony. “I hadn't noticed.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “I love this hat.”

I didn't wear hats until about 20 years ago, when a dermatologist dabbed liquid nitrogen on the bridge of my nose to remove a pre-cancerous lesion.

“That's sun damage,” he said. “Over the years you'll probably develop a few more. Don't let the sun do any more damage to your face. Wear a hat.”

The threat of cancer quickly gets one's attention. I went hat-hunting, and soon discovered the Tilley hat, which Alex Tilley boasts is “the greatest adventure hat in the world.” I agree. I bought a white one, a blue one and a brown one, and I wore them all summer long, year after year. Eventually I gave the much-faded blue one to a friend who had done me huge favours. The brown one is still serving nobly. The white one has logged something over 10,000 miles at sea, and is about worn out. It's guaranteed for life. Alex Tilley will send me a new one if I send him the old one. Fat friggin' chance.

A Tilley hat won't do in a Canadian winter, but I found nothing else I really liked. Toques are scratchy, and they don't shade my face. A standard-issue baseball cap is no warmer than a Tilley. I have a huge Russian fur hat for really bitter weather. It makes me look like a fur-flavoured ice cream cone. I only wear it when survival trumps appearance.

My best all-purpose winter hats are what Marjorie derisively calls “goober hats” – insulated caps with flaps that can be turned down over my ears. I have a trim little black one that I wear often, and a bulkier dark blue one that I wear rarely, and a black one with a long, long bill and a chin strap that I hardly wear at all.

They're good warm hats, and Red Green would love them, but they don't accord with a suit and tie. They leave me sartorially-challenged at a symphony concert or a speaking engagement or a business meeting. But what else is there?

And then, one January day, my friend Ron Robichaud hove in view sporting a splendidly stylish full-brimmed hat made of heavy dark tweed, almost like a cloth fedora. Something about its cut and proportions gave the hat an indefinable air of insouciance and panache. Wearing that hat, Ron was hard-pressed not to swagger.

“Ron,” I said. “That hat. Marvellous. Where did you get it?”

“This?”said Ron, with an exceedingly smug smile. “It's a Tilley Winter Hat.”

A Tilley Winter Hat? I was instantly aflame with envy.

Marjorie was chortling. I never covet clothes. I'd sooner visit a dentist than a haberdasher. When she comes home from a retail raid bearing garments for me, I am downright churlish.

“Look at this lovely sweater I found for you!” she cries.

“I've already got a sweater,” I object.

“I got it at half price. Look at the colour. Isn't it beautiful?”

“Mmmph.”

But now I was researching feverishly, and Marjorie was amused. The Tilley web site showed several dealers in Halifax. I went to The Binnacle. (Haberdasheries are one thing. Chandleries are quite another.) Late in the season, the hats were on sale. They came in chocolate brown and charcoal. I particularly liked the brown one, but the shop had no hats my size in either colour.

I phoned all around the city, looking for a 7 3/8” hat. No luck. Even Colwell Brothers had no Winter Hats left at all. Then I noticed a dealer named Atlantic Workwear in the Burnside industrial park – not a very likely source for insouciance and style, but I was desperate.

Jackpot. Having found that Tilley hats and orange safety vests did not make a coherent fashion statement, Atlantic Workwear were selling all their Tilleys at half-price. I scuttled over to Burnside and bought the only brown winter hat in my size – and a new khaki summer hat as well.

I enjoy the hat every time I wear it. Driving along, I'll turn to Marjorie and say, “Did you know I just love this hat?”

“Really?” she replies. “I hadn't noticed.”

So the other day I was playing one of my very favourite albums on the car stereo, Isaac Stern's Vivaldi Gala, with a star-studded cast of players – Perlman, Oistrakh, Rampal and the like. The music was rippling and glittering like sunlight on a mountain stream, and I was grooving.

“You know,” I said, “this music is just exquisite. What a pleasure to listen to it.”

“And in your hat...” said Marjorie, with a sly, sidelong smile. “Can life get any better?”

-- 30 --

Kabul on the Rideau

2008-03-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I received a warm and graceful fan letter from a Baptist minister in a small Nova Scotian town. He had just finished my most recent book, Sailing Away from Winter, and he had enjoyed it very much. He was puzzled, though, that I had included dismissive remarks “about evangelicals and their Bibles” without any explanation. Many evangelicals are very fine people, he noted, and he hoped I had not been soured by a chance encounter with a distasteful one.

Hmm. I did lob the occasional drollery at ardent and simplistic Christians, including a comment that I hadn't found a wide diversity among cruisers. I expected -- but didn't find -- “nature freaks camp-cruising in dinghies, young families poking south in dowdy old ketches, sleek stockbrokers in fast motor-yachts, drifting hobos in grotty ex-fishboats, students in cramped sloops, evangelists navigating by faith and laden with Bibles.”

Pretty innocuous. I assured the minister that I too know plenty of Christian fundamentalists who live generous and productive lives. But I also noted that evangelicals, by definition, evangelize, trying to convert others to their opinions. If that fails, they're often quite willing to impose their values unilaterally.

And, I confess, I am intolerant about intolerance. I don't care much for folks who believe they have The Truth and who don't respect my right to disagree -- and that applies equally whether the dogmatic proselytizer is a Marxist, a Catholic, a free-market fanatic, a tobacco totalitarian, a Wahabi Muslim, an environmental fanatic or a Holy Roller. I am not warm and fuzzy about people who want to dictate the way that my conscience and I will get along in this world.

Which brings us to the stunning example of Charles McVety, Stephen Harper, and Canadian film policy.

Canadian dramatic films generally require government funding, because films are ferociously expensive to make, and Canada's small domestic market does not generate enough revenue to repay those costs. To have our own films, telling our own stories, we invest collectively in new film projects through public agencies like Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board, various provincial film offices and the CBC.

The process of financing a Canadian film is fiendishly complicated, involving broadcast licenses with TV networks, co-production arrangements with producers abroad, theatrical distribution deals, and much more. As a Halifax producer once told me, his job is “not about making the film. It's about making the deal.”

The final ingredient in the deal – which comes in when all the other pieces are in place – is provincial and federal investment. Without that public support, we simply wouldn't have a film industry of any importance, and we wouldn't enjoy shows like DeGrassi, Bowling for Columbine, Little Mosque on the Prairie and Away from Her.

And that's why the Canadian film industry is up in arms about proposed amendments to the Income Tax Act. The revisions provide for regulations allowing federal bureaucrats to withdraw funding for a film all by themselves, even after the funding has been committed by agencies like Telefilm. The funds may be withdrawn if the bureaucrats think that the project contains too-explicit sexual material, denigrates an identifiable group, portrays “excessive” violence without “an educational value” or is otherwise “contrary to public public policy.” Naturally, there's no appeal.

And film producers won't learn the mandarins' opinions until they complete the film and file their tax return – and are denied the tax credit they were promised. At that point, the producers will presumably have to repay any government investment. Since few will be able to do that, many will face bankruptcy.

Sane producers will not put themselves in that position. Instead, they simply won't make controversial, edgy films. Which – one darkly wonders – may be exactly what the Harperites have in mind. Paranoid? Enter Charles McVety, an evangelist, the head of the Canadian Family Action Coalition. McVety claims he's largely responsible for convincing the Tory ministers, notably Stockwell Day, to implement this loopy idea.

“It's fitting with conservative values, and I think that's why Canadians voted for a Conservative government,” says McVety.

Well, no. Canadians voted to rid themselves of the Liberals, but, as the polls show, they remain wary of the Conservatives. And with good reason.

Today's Conservative party is mainly yesterday's Reform and Canadian Alliance parties, which were filled with zeal to re-make Canada on evangelical principles. Stephen Harper would never have been elected had he not managed to keep his nutbars in their wrappers. But now and again a Charles McVety gets loose, reminding us all that a nation which pleases the core Tory supporters will not really please anyone else.

As a Globe and Mail letter-writer observed, at least this episode tells us what to do about our troops in Afghanistan. We should bring them home. The Taliban are already here.

-- 30 --

What Nova Scotians Know

2008-03-02T03:54:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest intellectual skills is the ability to ask good questions – which is a prerequisite for discovering good answers. Nobody asks better questions than GPIAtlantic.

The Faithful Reader already knows my admiration for this little research organization from St. Margaret's Bay, which has done so much to help us think more intelligently about the world and the frantic social flux we live in. GPI, you'll recall, stands for “Genuine Progress Index,” as opposed to “Gross Domestic Product,” which has become our conventional – but unsatisfactory -- indicator of progress.

The GDP is only about money. Increased sales of cars and cannelloni make the GDP go up, yes – but so do crime, disease and disasters. When Hurricane Juan strikes, the GDP counts all the costs of clean-up as economic growth, and thus as “progress. The GPI, by contrast, counts things which are destructive and harmful as negatives and deducts them from our overall well-being. Sounds like common sense? Yes, exactly.

In the past decade, GPIAtlantic has issued more than 80 reports about Nova Scotian society on topics as diverse as the social costs of obesity and tobacco use, the unrecognized cash value of volunteerism and unpaid housework, the destructive irrationality of our treatment of forests and fisheries. Each report is a piece of the Genuine Progress Index of Nova Scotia. When the index is complete, we will have an unique description of Nova Scotia's quality of life, and a solid set of benchmarks against which to measure future progress or decline.

GPIAtlantic's most recent report, just issued, is entitled How Educated Are Nova Scotians? Education Indicators for the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index. Predictably, the study reviewed such data as test scores, literacy, student debt and research financing. It came up with some interesting findings – for example, that the increasing reliance of schools on fund-raising is slowly creating a two-tiered educational system, where schools in wealthy neighbourhoods are much better equipped than schools in poorer districts.

The study reported that Nova Scotian university students graduate with a very heavy debt load, and that they work longer hours during the academic term than they ever have. It also revealed, rather shockingly, that although Nova Scotians today have more schooling than ever before, they are no more literate than they were a generation ago.

The usual report on education would have ended there, basing its findings on the assumption that “education” means “what the educational system does.” Instead, the GPI report turned the process on its head, asking not, “What do students learn?” but “What do Nova Scotians know – no matter where or how they learned it?”

So the GPIAtlantic study considered modes of learning which lie beyond the formal educational system. “Life-long learning” is the intellectual progress that continues throughout the individual’s lifetime. Life-wide learning is the education that takes place in informal settings like the home, the workplace, and the community, and through advertising and the media.

The end result of life-long and life-wide learning is a wide range of “literacies.” The GPIAtlantic team therefore attempted to assess Nova Scotians' command not only of languages and numbers, but also their understanding of science, ecology, health, nutrition, civics, arts, culture, statistics, indigenous knowledge, and the media. We don't have much data on the general level of public understanding, but GPI executive director Ronald Colman notes that high levels of literacy in these matters should be revealed in wise collective choices and intelligent public policies.

Alas, the report found little evidence that Nova Scotians are particularly literate in most of these areas, and in some – civics and politics, for example – younger people are actually less literate than their parents and grandparents, although they have much more schooling.

As is so often the case, the research was badly hampered by a lack of information.

“We don't know how literate our people are on all those dimensions, and we don't know whether their literacy levels in these and other knowledge areas are improving or not,” said Dr. Colman. So GPIAtlantic Statistics Canada to begin administering a Canadian Knowledge Survey, which would provide an evolving picture of population knowledge and wisdom – clearly an essential step.

For me, however, the report's greatest contribution is its deep insight into the purposes of education. Learning starts with data, but it soon progresses to information and then to knowledge – and its final destination is wisdom. Understanding – otherwise known as literacy – is the factor that connects all four levels.

Without a broad spectrum of literacies, there is no possibility of attaining wisdom. And without wisdom, there is no possibility of creating a truly humane society and a sustainable way of life. In its deepest and broadest sense, that's really what education is all about – and by reminding Nova Scotians of that fact, a report like How Educated are Nova Scotians does us a signal public service.

-- 30 --

In Praise of Taxes

2008-02-24T07:22:00.000-08:00

The message came over the Internet, and it began in an amusing and informative way.

“A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,” it said, “but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.

“A billion seconds ago it was 1959. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.”

But, notes Our Correspondent, in bold red type, “A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.” That would be the US government, I assume, although there is a later reference to both Washington and Ottawa. And then the message goes on to note that Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu is asking Congress for $250 billion to rebuild New Orleans – which works out to $516,528 for every person, or $1,329,787 for each home, or $2,066,012 for a family of four.

I would have some trouble with that, too – though probably not for the same reasons as our anonymous author. Sea level is rising, the Mississippi delta is sinking, and Katrina was only the first catastrophe. What the good Senator is trying to do, really, is hold back the sea with money. It would be smarter to rebuild somewhere else.

But that's not the conclusion in the message. Our Correspondent works himself – herself? itself? -- into a full-court lather about reckless government spending and rampant taxation. First comes a poem:

Tax his land,
Tax his wage,
Tax his bed in which he lays.
Tax his tractor,
Tax his mule,
Teach him taxes is the rule....

And then an endless list of taxes – income taxes, tobacco and liquor taxes, dog and vehicle licenses, unemployment insurance premiums, and so on for roughly a page.

“Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago,” cries Our Correspondent, “and our nations were the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids. AND NOW WE ARE THE MOST IN DEBT OF ANY COUNTRY ON EARTH!!!”

Hold on, now. “We” are not. Despite the ambitions of the corporate elite, Canada and the US are still two separate countries. Only one has been ruled by for the past eight years by ideologically-motivated tax-cutting spendthrifts – financial idiots, in short – and it wasn't Canada.

And – though I don't enjoy paying taxes any more than anyone else – I complain about the ludicrous complexity of our tax system, not about the fact that we have to pay taxes.

Income tax, for instance, ought to be fairly straightforward – but the Income Tax Act now runs to 2,226 pages, mainly because it's full of tax breaks for various interest groups. It doesn't have to be. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently published a report on tax reform proposing a simple, revenue-neutral set of reforms. Write down your income. Subtract a few standard deductions which apply to everyone – basic but generous deductions for yourself, your dependents, your RRSP – and then pay 15% tax if the remaining amount is less than $80,000, and 25% if it's more.

Done. And you don't need 2,000 pages of text to describe it.

But the larger point is that tax-denouncers like Our Correspondent assume that one's income is fundamentally one's own, and that taxes are inherently a form of theft. That's codswallop. The economy, within which your success occurs, is a social framework Your earnings involve employers, producers, customers, suppliers, and the orderly marketplace which government provides. Your success also relies on the whole infrastructure of modern life – highways to move people and materials, an educational system to provide literate workers, health care facilities to help them stay productive, police to protect the whole enterprise. You couldn't succeed without the services that taxes buy.

So yes, we didn't have most of those taxes 100 years ago, but we also didn't have today's wealth, today's levels of literacy and education, today's capacity to travel, today's support system for the unfortunate. Perhaps most important, we didn't have today's life expectancy. Admittedly, it's expensive to keep old people alive – but the older you get, the more worthwhile that expense seems to be.

And of course Our Correspondent overlooks the fact that many taxes are essentially transfers from the taxpayer to the private sector. Why is health care so expensive? Talk to the manufacturers of medical equipment and to the pharmaceutical companies. Why is defense so expensive? Talk to your friendly defense contractors, like GM and Boeing.

Taxes are just a form of expenditure which buys us the essential components of a modern, civilized society – the very framework within which wealth is created. The economy, I'm told, has grown sevenfold since 1950. Have taxes harmed that economic growth? Hardly. Taxes have made it possible.

-- 30 --

The Fourth Maritime Province

2008-02-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

In 1993, I published a book called Sniffing the Coast, the story of a memorable 600-mile cruise from Cape Breton to PEI, New Brunswick and the Magdalen Islands.

Sailing our engineless sailboat Silversark, my late wife Lulu and I met the shades of K.C. Irving, La Sagouine and Anne of Green Gables, hung out with Grand Prix hydroplane racers, and learned more than you'd believe about potatoes. We foregathered with poets, sand sculptors, silver fox farmers. I declared, quite confidently, that a bridge to PEI would never be built.

And we discovered a new province. Here's the story, as recounted in the book:

Around 1653, the government of France created a Province de la Grande Baie de St. Laurent, notes Mark Haines, a devoted amateur historian in Guysborough County. The new province took in all the Gulf coast from the Isthmus of Chignecto, between today's Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to Canso, Nova Scotia. It was a properly constituted jurisdiction; its governor was Nicolas Denys.

Just a year later, in 1654, the British captured Acadia; in 1670 they gave to back to the French; in 1690 and 1710 they recaptured it; and in 1713, under the Treaty of Utrecht, they forced the French to give up, forever, “all Nova Scotia or Acadie with its ancient boundaries.”

But what were the ancient boundaries of Acadia? Nobody knew, and an international commission was appointed to decide. The commission inaugurated a venerable Canadian tradition. It abducted and absorbed the issue as completely and permanently as a black hole absorbs light: it sat for 60 years and never reached a conclusion.

In the meantime, Acadia – including a great stretch of the adjoining continental land mass – became Nova Scotia. The continental territory was split off in 1784 and became New Brunswick, and both colonies became part of Canada in 1867. In all these transactions, the terrain covered by Denys's Province de la Grande Baie de St. Laurent was assumed to be part of Acadia-- but Mark Haines can find no record that the province was ever extinguished or legally conveyed to the British. So the coast down which we sailed may still be a French colonial province.

I am eager to get a speeding ticket in New Glasgow or Antigonish. I will fight it on the grounds that the court has no jurisdiction, since the alleged offence did not take place in Canada, and Canadian laws do not apply in the Province de la Grande Baie de St. Laurent.

Readers and reviewers said all manner of nice things about Sniffing the Coast. When the hardcover's run was finished, however, the publishers declared that an affordable paperback would require a print run of several thousand copies – and they weren't sure they could sell thousands. So the book went out of print.

At roughly the same time, my friend Charlie Doucet and I produced a VHS videotape called Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes: A Sailing Tour with Silver Donald Cameron. Sailors and tourists loved the video, but we never found an efficient way to distribute it. We got caught up with other projects, and then VHS itself became almost as obsolete as the eight-track. So the video also vanished.

Fifteen years later, information technology came to our rescue. Unlike a videotape, a video on DVD can be duplicated easily and marketed on the Web or transmitted electronically as a download. So can a book. And book production has been transformed by a technology called print-on-demand, which allows publishers to produce books in tiny print runs – five books, fifty books – and still keep prices affordable.

So Sniffing the Coast has just been re-issued by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, a literary press operated by a medical doctor named George Vanderburgh in Shelburne, Ontario (www.batteredbox.com) Meanwhile, Charlie has digitized the Bras d'Or Lakes video, and we've re-packaged it as a DVD.

Neither product, however, is available in traditional stores. Both are available on the Web at Ron Caplan's site, www.capebretonbooks.com . I'll also be selling them at events like the Halifax International Boat Show, where I'll be showing the DVD and reading from Sniffing the Coast next Saturday.

All of which illuminates the fate of fine independent book stores like The Book Room, now closing after serving Haligonians faithfully for 170 years. These wonderful stores were created to serve a local market – but that market has almost gone away. Book buyers shop globally, lured by big boxes like Chapters and on-line vendors like Amazon, which can afford to carry almost everything and ship it anywhere. And though niche publishing and bookselling survives, it too is global, selling special-interest books to narrow world-wide markets.

There may be three people in New Zealand who will want our DVD. They'll find us, and we'll sell it to them. How truly odd is that?

-- 30 --

The Man I Want to Be

2008-02-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

I drove up to the D'Escousse credit union to deposit a cheque, and found Willard Fougere's car backed up to the door with its trunk open. Willard was filling the trunk with money – bags and boxes of coins.

“Willard,” I said, “I knew you were filthy rich, but I had no idea you had to load up your car when you came to make a withdrawal.”

“Oh, yes,” said Willard, his broad face opening up with a smile. “The weekend's coming, I don't want to run short.”

“From now on,” I said, “I'm calling you 'Moneybags.'”

The mundane truth was that the credit union, where Willard's wife Naomi worked, had gradually accumulated an enormous number of pennies, nickels and dimes. Willard and Naomi were taking the coins to Halifax to exchange for more usable forms of money. But I called Willard “Moneybags” all the rest of his life, and the two of us always had a chuckle out of it.

When I moved to Isle Madame in 1971, Willard and Naomi were still operating the little red general store hanging out over the water in the neighbouring village of Poulamon. In those days shopping centres were few and far away, so village stores were sturdy and essential little businesses. The individual villages of North Isle Madame still preserved some distinctness, an echo of the days when each had things like a government wharf, a post office, a general store, a one-room school. Even in 1971, the Northside had at least four stores. It only has one today.

Willard's service was remarkable. He did deliveries, so house-bound people could shop by phone, and Willard would deliver the order right to their kitchens. He was a gregarious man, and he would stop and visit for a moment. He always knew what was going on, as storekeepers tend to do. Travelling through the villages on the north side of Isle Madame, Willard was a key component in the network of interest and concern that carries information in rural communities.

“I always saw Willard as a pillar in the community,” says Father John J. MacDonald, who knew him for more than 50 years. “He was a very welcoming person, and he easily related to all kinds of different personalities. He served in the merchant navy during World War II. That's why there was a flag on his obituary. He was quite close to Allan J. MacEachen, did you know that?”

I didn't, though I did know that Willard was an ardent Liberal – a hereditary affliction which is distressingly common on Isle Madame. Moneybags, Moneybags, I would think, shaking my head, how regrettable. But his Liberal sympathies were an integral part of who he was.

He and Naomi bought the store in 1957, three years after their marriage. He was 39 when they married, and she was 21, a beautiful young woman from River Bourgeois, on the opposite side of Lennox Passage. Almost 55 years later, he was still handsome, and she is still beautiful.

“I never saw him cross or cranky,” Naomi told me. “I've never seen him out of sorts. He was the same with me as he was with you or anybody else. He was always cheerful, always smiling.”

They sold the store in 1974, so I knew Willard mostly in his three decades of retirement. No man ever found more happiness in retirement than he did. He turned his attention to community affairs, becoming a diligent and generous volunteer in all the local organizations. His special love was the Lennox Passage Yacht Club, of which he eventually became an honorary lifetime member. The club's membership consisted mainly of people half his age, but he worked and played alongside them with a spirit that simply erased the age difference. He was one of those people who never really become old, even though their bodies eventually give out.

He had a little red truck, and a succession of fierce little white dogs, and he would cruise the island's roads on his various errands, smiling cheerily, with the dog sitting beside him like a co-pilot. He lived every day with zest and gratitude. When I found myself cruising the island in a little red truck, with a dog beside me, I told Willard I was training to become him, because he was what I wanted to be when I grew up. He thought it was a joke. It wasn't.

Willard Fougere died on January 28. He was 93 years old, a living treasure in his own corner of the world. “We've lost our lovely man,” said Naomi when I called her. And it's true, all that remains is our memory of his laughter and his smile.

But that's a sparkling legacy. And I will not stop striving to be like Willard when I grow up.

Chocolate Wars

2008-02-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

My initiation into the world of protest movements took place in 1947, when I was 10 years old. For a middle-class kid in postwar Canada, strikes and demonstrations were someone else's news. But when the candy manufacturers jacked up the price of a chocolate bar from five cents to eight cents, I joined with other kids by picking up a placard and going on strike.

I remember it vividly – a couple of dozen kids waving signs in front of the confectionery stores in the shopping district (there were no malls) just a few blocks from our school. DOWN WITH EIGHT-CENT CHOCOLATE BARS! BRING BACK THE NICKEL BAR!

At the time, I thought this was a local battle – but in fact it was a strike by all the children of Canada. It began in Ladysmith, BC, and rapidly spread across the country. Mobs of kids marched down Bloor Street in Toronto. Ottawa kids demonstrated on Parliament Hill. Adults were sympathetic; the end of wartime wage and price controls had resulted in a tide of rising prices, but nobody had expressed the general resentment until the kids tackled the candy companies.

The boycott worked, too. Chocolate bar sales plunged by 80%.

And then the tide changed. Ludicrous as it seems, right-wing outlets like the Toronto Telegram denounced the movement as a communist-inspired threat to national security. The Mounties muttered darkly that the boycott had been cooked up in Moscow. Reds under the bed. Principals, parents and priests fell in line. The strike soon faded away.

I think I remember that prices did go down, but only briefly. After things cooled off, the companies quietly raised the price again, and this time it stuck.

What astonishes me, as I revisit the 1947 boycott in Carol Off's fine book, Bitter Chocolate, is the way the protest prefigures so many themes in the world I would grow up to live in. Inflation, for instance, which had been unknown during the depression and the war. And the attempt by all the elites – the police, the press, the educators, the politicians, the churches, you name it – to discredit protest by ignoring the grievances and blaming Reds, furriners and “outside agitators.” the system used the same technique against labour, against the peace movement, against women's organizations, against students.

But the most powerful weapon of all was time. A government, a university or a wealthy company can always outwait its opponents.

My childhood experience of unfairness apparently typifies the chocolate trade throughout history. Bitter Chocolate (Random House, $34.95) is sub-titled “Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet.” In it, Carol Off makes the case that chocolate is the blood diamond of the candy-box, rooted in conquest, corruption, slavery, child labour and hypocrisy. Her story begins with Cortez , who conquered Montezuma's Aztecs, learned the value of the cocoa bean, and promptly enslaved the Aztecs. Cocoa plantations in Central America and the Caribbean were subsequently manned by slaves transported from Africa.

The story seemed different in the 19th century, when British chocolate manufacturing was dominated by earnest Quakers. Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree were benevolent capitalists who, Off says, “managed what was near at hand with impeccable regard for human dignity.” They built model communities around their model factories, and often supported progressive measures like a minimum wage and family allowances.

But their cocoa came from a couple of Portuguese-owned islands in the Gulf of Guinea, which were, a century ago, the world's leading source of cocoa. And the cocoa was produced by a vicious system of forced labour – as it is to this day, notably in the backwoods of Cote d'Ivoire.

Cote d'Ivoire was once a prosperous place, an “African miracle” based on cocoa. Then cocoa prices dived, and the economy was savaged by the “assistance” of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With newly-impoverished Ivorian farmers desperate for labour, smugglers began trucking children from nearby Mali and Burkina Faso. By 2000, the US state department estimated that 15,000 Malian children were working in the cocoa plantations. “Many are under 12 years of age, sold into indentured servitude for $140 and work 12-hour days for $135 to $189 per year.”

The only hopeful note is the emergence of new “fair trade” companies like Green & Blacks, who established a mutually-respectful cocoa business with the Mayans of Belize, and marketed a premium chocolate bar called Maya Gold. So far, so good – but in 2005, Cadbury Schweppes bought control of Green & Blacks. What next? Will the fair trade movement transform the multinational? Or will the chocolate barons eviscerate the standards of fair trade?

That's the industry we were taking on as school children in 1947. No wonder we lost. But what a good foe to have chosen!

-- 30 --

The Plague of Bottled Water

2008-01-28T07:41:00.000-08:00

A hundred and sixty-five miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, Sable Island was once a graveyard of shipping. Today it is, among other things, a unique environmental monitoring platform, where universities and government agencies measure weather, the magnetic field of the earth, and the quality and composition of the air and water. Among the pollutants the researchers encounter are pesticides banned since the 1960s but still circulating in the air, contaminants used only in China – and thousands of plastic water bottles.

Plastic water bottles?

Yep. If you want to do something for the environment, and also prove you are not a gullible mutton-head, then stop drinking bottled water – now.

In 1976, the average American drank less than two gallons of bottled water a year. Today, that figure is 30 gallons, and sales are growing at more than 10% a year – faster than any other beverage. Bottled-water companies spend hundreds of millions a year on advertising – and Americans now spend $15 billion a year on bottled water. No doubt the figures would be comparable in Canada.

But bottled water is a scam, a triumph of brilliant marketing and knavish politics. The bottled-water industry routinely implies that the water from your taps, supplied by a municipal water authority, is not clean enough to drink. It further implies that bottled water is drawn from pristine natural sources, and is naturally cleaner and purer than tap water.

In fact, about 40% of bottled water actually is tap water. The biggest-selling brands are Aquafina, which is owned by Pepsi, and Dasani, which is owned by Coke. As Pepsi was forced to admit last summer, both brands are just filtered tap water -- with an outrageous mark-up.

In Tucson, reports the Arizona Daily Star, Aquafina costs $1.39 per half-litre bottle. The contents come from the Tucson municipal water system, which provides 6.4 gallons for a penny. The Aquafina consumer is paying roughly 7000 times more for the same water.

Furthermore, many bottled-water companies are actually less rigorous in testing for purity and quality than are the municipal systems. One process used to enhance tap water is ozonation, which has a byproduct called bromate, a suspected carcinogen. In 2004, when Coca Cola launched Dasani in the United Kingdom, the company was embarrassed to discover that about half a million bottles were contaminated with excess bromate.

In other words, the quality of the water was better before it was “purified.” The company withdrew the tainted water – and also withdrew from the UK bottled-water market.

The environmental impact of the bottled-water rip-off is stunning. The US produces 29 billion water bottles every year, using the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil. The bottles are designed for one-time use, and shouldn't be re-used, because contaminants from the low-grade plastic may leach into the contents. Environmental groups estimate that only about 14% of the bottles are recycled. More than 80% of them end up in landfills, or in places like the beaches of Sable Island.

Once bottled, the product is shipped enormous distances to market, nearly 25% of it travelling far enough to cross a national border before being sold. The Pacific Institute estimates that the energy used for pumping, processing, transportation, and refrigeration represents another 50 million-plus barrels of oil equivalent—enough to run 3 million cars for a year.

The political implications are equally obnoxious. Private water promotion is a steady drumbeat of insinuation that public water supplies are inferior and dangerous, and that private supplies are safe and secure. Just like public schools versus private ones, or public transport versus private cars, or public health care versus private health care.

Happily, municipalities are taking offence. Last June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors noted that their 1100 cities spend $43 billion a year to provide clean drinking water to citizens – and yet city officials often purchased bottled water for city employees. Led by San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis, the group called for an impartial investigation into the environmental effects of bottled water. San Francisco subsequently ordered a complete ban on bottled-water purchases from public funds, as did the state of Illinois. Los Angeles has had such a ban for a decade.

“There's a sucker born every minute,” said circus magnate P. T. Barnum. And what the suckers are sucking on today are beautifully-labelled plastic bottles of water, adorned by blue mountain peaks with white glacier caps.

When gasoline prices rise much above a dollar a litre, consumers vigorously object – but they cheerfully pay three or four times that much for tap water in designer bottles. Barnum would have loved it.

-- 30 --

A Green and Floating House

2008-01-23T12:02:00.000-08:00

Our little ketch Magnus motored into the marina at Southport, North Carolina, at the end of a long day coming north on the IntraCoastal Waterway. The wind was gusty, the current was strong, and the docking process was tricky.

With Magnus tied up, I hopped out to help Sunshine, a beautiful Valiant 40 cutter which had followed us all the way from the pontoon bridge near South Carolina's Calabash River. Joe and Lynne, Sunshine's crew, brought the big boat in smoothly and tidily, like the accomplished cruisers they were.

“Will you want power?” asked the dockmaster. Joe laughed.

“We haven't been plugged into shore power for six months,” he said. “I don't think we'll need it tonight.”

Joe later told me that Sunshine had achieved what Magnus only dreamed about: an electrical regime in which solar panels and a wind generator provided almost all the energy for the boat's carefully-designed electrical system. Joe and Lynne had all the normal conveniences – computer, lights, heat, refrigeration, stereo, TV – and all those devices were powered by renewable sources.

Now, nearly two years later, I sit in my house and think about the impending energy crunches, and the whole issue of sustainable living. It occurs to me that cruising sailors are among the few people who wouldn't be greatly inconvenienced by a sudden shortage of fossil fuels.

Cruisers deal with energy in two ways. First, they minimize demand. They don't leave things running. When they're done watching TV, they turn the set off. They turn on the lights only when they need to see. They don't use electricity to make heat. Their stoves are fuelled by alcohol, propane or kerosene, and they don't use devices like electric hair dryers.

Second, they maximize storage. Most long-term cruising boats have three or four husky batteries, or even more. The batteries are often divided into separate banks – one battery dedicated to starting the engine, for instance, and four more to provide “house” power. When the sun is blazing down on the solar panels, or the trade winds are briskly spinning the rotors of the wind generators, or the ship's passage through the water is whirling the vanes of an underwater generator, the batteries are storing the bountiful energy away for later use, when the winds aren't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

Our boat didn't have renewable energy sources, but it did have a hefty bank of batteries, big enough to supply all our needs for at least two days without recharging. We recharged them from the engine's alternator, from a small gas generator, or by plugging in at a dock.

We did have three neat little fan-driven air vents with built-in solar cells and batteries, which ran all day and all night on sunlight. We didn't operate a car; when we needed land transportation, we took a taxi or rented a car for a day or two. We carried 50 gallons of water, and it took us the best part of a week to consume it. And we didn't spread any sewage. We had a composting toilet called an Air Head (www.airheadtoilet.com ) which produced a pailful of compost every couple of months.

We didn't have air conditioning, though we did have a little furnace that burned perhaps a litre of diesel a week in regular use. We had a diesel engine in the mother ship, and a gasoline-powered outboard on the dinghy. But we also had sails and oars, and we used them.

We weren't eco-heroes. Our boat, its sails, its ropes, its instruments and cooking utensils were all made of non-renewable resources, and a lot of energy was used in creating all that stuff. And we were in a warm climate. Still, our consumption of resources was far smaller than it is today, when we're heating a full-sized house, flushing out sewage, buying coal-derived electricity and driving a car in the middle of a Canadian winter. Those are the things that make Nova Scotians some of the world's greediest consumers, with an ecological footprint which represents the productivity of 8.1 hectares per person, when the earth can sustainably provide only 1.8.

On the boat, our footprint must have been a small fraction of what it is now – and we lived very well afloat. We ate our favourite foods, drank decent wine, enjoyed music and literature, had an active social life. We didn't feel deprived. In fact, we felt wealthy.

When people quail at the idea that we'll have to reduce our footprints dramatically to preserve the planet in any human-friendly form, I think about life on the boat. We can easily reduce our footprints without going back to living in caves. It doesn't require an unbearable shift in our lifestyles. It does require a substantial shift in our minds.

-- 30 --

The Return of the Dirigibles

2008-01-13T17:19:00.000-08:00

On March 4, 1957, the US Navy blimp Snow Bird took its departure from South Weymouth, Massachusetts. Travelling at 35 knots, burning seven gallons of fuel an hour, it crossed the ocean to Europe, then travelled south to Africa.

Over Morocco, six days out, Commander Jack Hunt asked his technical officer, John Fitzpatrick, whether the airship could make it back across the Atlantic. Fitzpatrick did his calculations and said Yes. The Snow Bird flew to the Lesser Antilles and continued up the island chains of the Caribbean to Florida. It was heading up the US east coast when it was ordered to land at Key West.

The Snow Bird had visited four continents, using less fuel than an airliner uses just taxiing from the terminal to the runway. It had coped with heavy winds, snow, ice, tropical storms, thick fog and scorching sun. When it landed, the ship had covered 9448 miles and remained continuously aloft for 11 days – the longest unrefuelled flight ever made, both in terms of time and distance.

I think the Snow Bird represents the future of air travel. Like the electric car, it's an historic technology with a new and urgent relevance.

George Monbiot, the British pundit and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, recently pointed out that if we are truly going to hold the rise in global temperatures below the crucial threshold of 2º, we will actually have to decarbonize the entire world economy. He thinks we can do it.

“By switching the whole economy over to the use of electricity,” he writes, “and by deploying the latest thinking on regional supergrids, grid balancing and energy storage, you could run almost the entire energy system on renewable power. The major exception is flying.” We cannot expect “battery-powered jetliners.”

No, but we can still fly. Remember Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the developer of the huge rigid airships which became known as zeppelins. In 1909 the Count began passenger air services within Germany. Between the two world wars, his company pioneered international air travel with great success, running a scheduled service from Lakehurst, New Jersey to Friedrichshafen, Germany.

The zeppelins reached Europe in two and a half days, at 75 miles an hour. They floated along in almost complete silence, at altitudes low enough for passengers to watch animals, houses and ships. In nine years of service, one airship – the Graf Zeppelin – 17,000 hours in the air, carried 13,000 passengers, and flew more than a million miles, including a circumnavigation of the world with stops only in Tokyo and New Jersey.

The zeppelins were almost immune to interruption by the weather. They boasted lounges, dining rooms and staterooms. The Hindenburg a grand piano. They were so stable that a milk bottle balanced upside down in Germany once arrived undisturbed in New Jersey.

The zeppelins had only one fatal accident, but that event killed the whole industry. On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg fire while mooring at Lakehurst. The hydrogen inside her skin burned the ship to white ashes in 34 seconds. Thirty-six people died, including 13 passengers, the only passengers ever to die in an airship. Sixty-seven people survived, but reporters and cameramen turned the flaming Hindenburginto an iconic image of disaster. No zeppelin ever carried passengers again.

Ironically, the Hindenburgwas designed not for hydrogen, but for helium – which actually snuffs fires rather than feeding them. The only country that had helium, however, was the United States. During World War I, the German zeppelins had terrorized the English, lurking in the clouds and bombing market towns. Not surprisingly, the US refused to sell helium to Nazi Germany.

And thus the airships died, at the height of their success.

I learned their story largely from John McPhee's wonderful 1973 book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, an account of an attempt to create a hybrid airship using aerodynamics as well as helium to achieve lift. That project faded away, but the larger story continues. Several companies are producing and developing airships, and with today's materials, they can be far larger and far lighter. A model built by a high-school teacher in Utah (www.hyperblimp.com) is so light and transparent that it looks like a ghost cigar in the sky.

Airships represent transportation without airports, roads, railroads, tunnels, bridges, harbours. They are road-less trucks and buses that can operate anywhere – in the Third World, in the Arctic, over seas and swamps and deserts. Small airships are already used for communications, surveillance, rescue, photography and eco-tours. Big ones could carry commuters, bulk freight, saw-logs, prefabricated houses and bridges. They could be warehouses in the sky, platforms for enormous arrays of solar collectors. Powered by sunlight, they would represent something approaching sustainable air travel.

Bye-bye Boeing? Okay. But that doesn't mean we can't fly.

-- 30 --

The Truly New Cars

2008-01-07T02:03:00.000-08:00

If our family's 16-year-old Subaru resigned from duty today, I would go shopping for a gasoline/electric hybrid. There are plenty of models available today, mainly from Toyota, Honda, GM and Ford.

But I'd really like the old Subie to hang on long enough for me to replace it with a next-generation vehicle: a Tesla, say , or a Honda FCX Clarity or maybe a Chevrolet Volt. Or a tiny, all-electric Subaru R1e. These vehicles may not be familiar, but cars like them are coming soon to a carport near you – and, from an environmental viewpoint, the sooner the better.

The Tesla (www.teslamotors.com ) is a gorgeous roadster fuelled entirely by electricity. It goes from zero to 100 KPH in less than four seconds and gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon. Designed as a high-end sports car that's really fun to drive, it's named for Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the electric induction motor and of alternating-current power transmission. You can buy a Tesla now – this year's production is sold, but you can order a 2009 – provided that you live in the lower 48 US states, and are willing to pony up $98,000 for the base model.

Hmm. Maybe not a Tesla. What about the attractive Honda FCX Clarity sedan? () This one uses a fuel cell to transform hydrogen into electricity, which drives the car. The only emission is clean water, which drips out the tailpipe. Honda claims the car is ready for production, but it is currently being leased on a trial basis to a handful of households in Southern California – the only place in North America where hydrogen refuelling is fairly readily available. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced plans to create a “hydrogen highway” with hundreds of hydrogen stations spread across the state.

The availability of hydrogen will also govern the appeal of BMW's Hydrogen 7, a modified stock sedan which Jay Leno recently took for a 10-day test drive. () Unlike a hybrid or a fuel-cell car, the Hydrogen 7 has a normal internal combustion engine which burns hydrogen instead of gasoline. It drives just like a regular BMW 7, and its only emission is also water.

The Chevy Volt () is completely different. A sporty two-door, the Volt uses lithium-ion batteries to propel it up to 65 km a day. Almost 80% of Canadian commuters travel less than that distance daily, and the batteries can be recharged simply by plugging the car into a household outlet overnight. For longer trips, a small generator kicks in – and the generator can be powered by gasoline, biodiesel, ethanol, or even hydrogen fuel cells.

The Volt is a “concept vehicle,” not likely to appear in the showroom any time soon. But General Motors, its manufacturer, already has gasoline/electric hybrid versions of several models, and will soon be testing a fleet of 100 fuel-cell SUVs. Alas, those will only be available in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. So we won't be getting one of those, either.

And now Popular Mechanics reports on a new generation of diesel vehicles in Europe, where more than half of all passenger cars are diesel-powered. Volkswagen's Polo – only available in Europe, alas – can get up to 75 miles per gallon while producing even fewer emissions than Toyota's celebrated hybrid Prius. The secret of such performance is new low-sulphur diesel fuel, combined with advanced exhaust-scrubbing systems.

All the major carmakers say they'll be producing new clean-diesel vehicles within a couple of years, but most of them are likely to be light trucks and big cars, not fuel-misers like the Polo. One exception will be Volkswagen's diesel Jetta, a car I look forward to seeing.

I like diesels not only because they're simple, economical and efficient, but also because they can readily be modified to run on a variety of fuels, including some truly sustainable ones. Indeed, Rudolf Diesel originally designed his engine to run on vegetable oil. The Constant Reader may remember my friend Jamil Shariff, who drove from Montreal to Vancouver in a diesel Volkswagen fuelled by McDonald's french fry oil.

All of which substantiates Jay Leno's remark that the environmental problem is not so much the car as the fuel. An electric car running on batteries charged by the wind – or by a diesel generator burning methane derived from sewage – is something approaching a sustainable car.

And, as Tesla's marketing materials note, electricity is “the universal currency of energy,” which can be generated “from coal, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear sources — or a combination of all of them.”

It's hard to believe that the next generation of automobiles could be fast, quiet, economical and clean. But wouldn't that be lovely?

-- 30 --

O Canada! Our home, da-dum, da-dum...

2008-01-02T10:33:00.001-08:00

I recently received a much-forwarded email exhorting me to SPEAK UP about a proposal that O Canada be sung in Hindi. One Bruce Allan had apparently spoken out against the proposal and got himself in deep doo-doo. The author of the message was in a patriotic froth.

"Enough is enough,”s/he wrote. "No where or at no other time in our nation's history, did they sing it in Italian, Japanese, Polish, Irish (Celtic), German, Portuguese, Greek, or any other language because of immigration. It was written in English, adapted into co-founding French, and should be sung word for word the way it was written. The news broadcasts even gave the translation -- not even close.”

Goodness me.

I flashed up Google. I believe, rather quaintly in this day of instant electronic outrage, that it's a good idea to know what you're talking about before you sound off. So who had made the proposal, and in what circumstances? Who was Bruce Allan (or Allen) and how had he drawn his line in the sand?

Bruce Allan proved to be an impresario who has been hired to produce the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. He does regular commentaries on a private radio station. In September, he did one on immigrants.

Said Allan: "It seems more and more that we are being pilloried by special interest groups that just want to make special rules for themselves. This is easy to solve: these are the rules, there's the door. If you don't like the rules, hit it. We don't need you here. You have another place to go: it's called home. See ya."

That provoked a storm of outrage from recent immigrants and from the politically-correct. MP Raymond Chan complained to the CRTC. Allan subsequently claimed that his comments were pro-immigrant. If so, that was easy to miss.

But nothing in Allan's comments involved the singing of O Canada in Hindi, one of India's 20 official languages. I found no such proposal anywhere, though I did find a touching 2006 story about a newly-composed anthem in praise of Canada by Pakistani-Canadian composer Sohail Rana -- with lyrics apparently in Urdu.

The spectral Hindi version of O Canada is an odd episode -- but the story of O Canada was always odd. It was first written in French, not English, for a "Congrès national des Canadiens-Français" in 1880. The Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, Hon. Théodore Robitaille, commissioned Judge Adolphe-Basile Routhier to write a hymn, which the well-known composer Calixa Lavallée would set to music.

That 1880 version of O Canada is still the only French version. No English version existed until 1906, when Dr. Thomas Bedford Richardson of Toronto translated Routhier's poem:

O Canada! Our fathers' land of old
Thy brow is crown'd with leaves of red and gold.
Beneath the shade of the Holy Cross
Thy children own their birth...

Two years later, Collier's Magazine ran a contest, won by one Mercy E. Powell McCulloch. Her version began:

O Canada! in praise of thee we sing;
From echoing hills our anthems proudly ring...

There were many other versions. Growing up in BC in the 1940s, I first learned a version composed by a Vancouver bank manager named Ewing Buchan:

O Canada, our heritage, our love
Thy worth we praise all other lands above...

All this time, O Canada was just a patriotic song, not an official national anthem. It was customarily sung -- in one version or another -- at the beginning of an event, followed by God Save The King at the end. Mackenzie King thought that was quite good enough. So did Louis St. Laurent.

Finally, in 1980, Parliament proclaimed O Canada our official national anthem. The English words chosen were a revision of the version written in 1908 by Montreal judge Robert Stanley Weir. In Parliament's version, "From far and wide" replaced one of the three repetitions of "We stand on guard." Senator Vivienne Poy later introduced legislation to revise the revision, changing "in all thy sons command” to "in all of us command.”The measure never passed, but lots of people sing it that way anyway.

If there are numerous English versions and a French one already, why shouldn't there be others? Maybe the Hindi version would begin, "O Canada, great Shiva's cold domain..”The natives could sing, "O Canada! Our truly native land!”The Gaelic version might start, "O Canada! Macdonald's whisky dream...”

The true Canadian tradition about O Canada is confusion. The wording still hasn't settled down, so most of us sing the first line or two and mumble the rest. And if the people beside us are equally proud of this wonderful, goofy country, but want to mumble in Turkish or Tagalog instead, why not? Just smile and keep singing. Civility and good humour are among the great Canadian virtues.
-- 30 --

Nova Scotia: Up in Smoke

2007-12-24T12:07:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school, the amusements of the lunch hour included the sight of the teachers roaring around the back alleys in their Vauxhalls and Austins, trying to catch students smoking near the school. Imagine! Grown men and women wasting their time on such foolishness! Hypocritical, too, because the school's staff room contained an absolute fog of tobacco smoke.

We couldn't have imagined seeing RCMP cruisers skidding through the streets chasing smokers. But who could have imagined the events of this silly season in Nova Scotia?

Who could have imagined that the Bridgewater council would over-ride the objections of the mayor and direct its legal eagles to draft a bylaw banning the vile weed in any public place in the town streets, parks, sidewalks, you name it? We haven't seen such a demented anti-smoking initiative since a now-forgotten Nova Scotia health minister proposed banning candy cigarettes. That idea propelled my friend Lloyd Bourinot into song:

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette!
Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette!
While we haul our dope ashore
The cops are at the corner store,
Protecting us from candy cigarettes!

Bridgewater's sappy initiative was preceded by a silly by-law in Wolfville, which the silly legislature hastened to extend to the whole silly province. Starting next month, it will be illegal in Nova Scotia to smoke in your own car when there's someone under 19 aboard.

Okay, it's not a great idea to smoke with children in the car although my father did it with me, and I did it with my own children, in that not-so-distant era when smoking was normal adult behaviour. But to pass a law against it? Holy smokes, we can't stop the children themselves from lighting up, despite heroic efforts. Now, presumably, a 17-year-old smoker can be arrested for driving his car in Nova Scotia on the grounds that he's damaging himself, though he might thumb his nose at the cops if he were walking. Still oh, happy day! he wouldn't get away with smoking while sauntering in Bridgewater.

If we can't smoke in our bars, our cars, our streets, how far are we from the day when we'll be forbidden to smoke in our own houses if there are children present or invalids, or other potential victims? Will we see the Mounties creeping through suburban gardens in the freezing nights, peeping through the curtains to catch parents sneaking a fag? Gotcha, Papa! Cuff 'im, boys.

I quit smoking six years ago, but I was tempted to go down to Bridgewater and light up with the protesters on the LaHave bridges, which belong to the province and will be the only legal places to smoke in Bridgewater if this antic by-law passes. I don't want to smoke again, but I'd far rather be a smoker than a passive ally of the tobacco totalitarians. These zealots give a bad name to good health.

Honourable members and councillors, listen. Tobacco is a vicious addiction worse than heroin, according to people who have experienced both. Anyone who could easily quit has already quit by now. And tobacco use is legal. If we haven't stopped people from smoking marijuana or crack on the streets, how will we going to stop them from smoking tobacco?

And if our police are sufficiently at loose ends to go haring off after smokers, then why can't we can't keep the Halifax Commons safe? Why do people think we need the Guardian Angels here? Why do we still have 36 unsolved local murders on the books?

What's really disgusting about this type of prissy, moralistic legislation is that it's politically cheap and easy -- like the recent pronouncements of the Surgeon-General of the United States, attacking chubby old Santa Claus as a bad role model for obese North American children. Fatso should watch his diet and get more exercise.

Wow. That shows the same kind of courage it takes to pick on some 85-year-old South Shore grandmother who can't quit smoking and doesn't want to. But what about Nova Scotia Power, whose smoke constitutes the sixth-largest source of air pollution in Canada?

Honourable members and councillors, tackle those guys. Tackle Irving, Bowater, McCain, whose mills and diesel trucks pump out more pollutants than all the smokers in Canada. Nettle the drivers in your town by passing an anti-idling bylaw. Design a workable system of public transport. Pass a motion calling on the Harperites to stop embarrassing our country on climate change. Commit your town, your business, your province to meet the Kyoto targets even if the feds won't.

These are all things you could actually do, but you'd need genuine courage. Go do them and when you've proven that you're more than sanctimonious busybodies, then come back and talk to me about tobacco.

-- 30 --

The End of the American Century

2007-12-16T11:12:00.000-08:00

“I'm glad I have a property in Canada,” said my American neighbour, “because I know I have a place to go when the brown hits the blades in the States.”

Wait a minute. This is not some pinko dope-smokin' hipoid radical kid. This is a prosperous middle-aged businessman, an armed forces veteran, whose general political orientation is probably Republican.

And yes, I heard such talk 40 years ago, when the US was in flames: inner cities burning, campus riots, an endless slaughter in Vietnam. Today, with a dishonorable war slowly being lost in Iraq and a lunatic presidency spoiling to start another one in Iran, you might expect the same symptoms. But they aren't there.

True, many patriotic Americans are deeply sad and angry. Read the passionate anti-war speech by Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, for example, at http://www.slcgov.com/mayor/. But the Democrats are both complicit and cowardly, and the streets and campuses are not ripping out the country's entrails as they once did. So what is my friend worried about? What does he mean?

“I'm not sure what I mean,” he replies. “But the United States has not discharged its responsibilities well either domestically or internationally, and my intuition tells me that we'll be called to account for that. I don't know whether it will be a lot more al-Quaeda attacks or what it may be. But I'm glad to have a place to go with my family.”

Well.

Soon after that, I read John Risley's investment advice in Atlantic Business. Risley, you'll recall, started out selling lobsters from the back of an old pickup truck. His Clearwater Fine Foods group is now the dominant player in what's left of the Atlantic Canadian fishery. Risley is a very wealthy investor.

Risley's first investment preference is Canada, with its natural resources, strong dollar, robust economy and orderly markets. But one should also diversify into foreign investments. He suggests looking first at London, which is “in the process of replacing New York as the world's financial capital. Why is that? Because the global financial powerhouses can move talent from around the world to their London offices. The paranoia resident within the US immigration policy prevents that from happening in New York.”

Richard Florida makes the same point on a broader scale. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argues that the driving force in today's knowledge economy is human creativity, which flourishes in places that are tolerant, diverse, culturally and intellectually rich, hospitable to innovation.

Thus the US economy has been propelled by its ability to “energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world.” Almost a third of the new businesses in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were created by immigrants from China or India. Enterprises founded by immigrants include Intel, Sun Microsystems and Google.

But, says Florida, Bush's Washington “has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views.” Think about stem cells and global warming. Washington has also “inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, 'You don't belong here.'”

So the brilliant young immigrants who once competed for entry to Harvard and Berkeley are applying to Cambridge and Copenhagen – and Toronto. Foreign students in the US “complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security.” Scientists report that they can't hold international conferences in the US because foreign scientists can't get visas. Even distinguished American scholars are emigrating.

These huge trends reflect millions upon millions of individual choices. A Cape Breton couple decides to fly to Nassau via Toronto rather than New York in order to take some food to their hosts and avoid the hassles and delays at the US border. A Brazilian family chooses not to vacation near the Grand Canyon. An small Italian company expands in Germany, not the US.

So there's less demand for the US dollar, and it falls. Did the Canadian dollar strengthen? Yes, slightly – but this year the U.S. dollar has declined against 15 of the 16 most-actively traded currencies.

When George W. Bush took office, his neo-conservative buddies were touting a “New American Century” of world domination. American power seemed limitless. That was an illusion, of course, as unlimited power always is. But Bush behaved as though it were a reality. On his watch, the US has lost much of its power, economic, political, military and intellectual, along with its global good-will.

An increasingly-hostile world is learning to get along without the United States. The “New American Century” is ending. It didn't even last ten years.

-- 30 --

The Troubles of Mahone Bay

2007-12-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most famous image of Maritime tranquillity is the three graceful churches of Mahone Bay side-by-side along the shore, their images reflected back from the still water.

Alas, Mahone Bay is anything but tranquil these days. Last May, the Town Council accepted a developer's proposal to buy 14 "surplus" acres from the Town for $90,000 to build a substantial housing complex. The decision created a storm of opposition.

The proposed development would include 96 seniors' apartments and 30 "assisted living" apartments, 36 other apartments, 36 semi-detached homes, and 32 single family dwellings. The homes are intended to be small and affordable -- about 1000 square feet in size, priced from $130,000 to $150,000. The 220 new units would house about 300 residents.

That's a lot of new housing for a town of about 900 -- and the village already has subdivisions with lots available. Worse, say opponents of the scheme, the land in contention is not "surplus." It includes most of the former Mahone Bay Academy grounds, excluding the old school itself, which is now a non-profit community arts, culture and recreational facility.

The remaining acreage has always been used as if it were a park. It includes a first-rate soccer field as well as a lovely stretch of woodland seamed with pathways where people cycle, do cross-country skiing, watch birds and walk their dogs. The new housing would reduce the amenities of the neighbourhood, create a need for new recreational facilities elsewhere, and substantially alter the character of the town.

And the character of the town -- its serenity, its historic architecture, its easy pace -- is Mahone Bay's greatest asset.

The plan's supporters retort that there's a difference between being serene and being comatose. Like other small coastal towns that once bustled with small factories, foundries, sail lofts and boatyards, Mahone Bay has been gutted economically by the sweeping changes of the last half-century. The tax base is shrinking, the population is aging. The village needs stimulation.

And say the project's supporters the new development will provide much-needed accommodation for all those seniors as well as affordable new housing for the young families who are the key to the town's future. At one meeting, a veteran firefighter explained his support for the plan in terms of the difficulty in finding young volunteers to join the fire department. New homes mean new families and new volunteers.

Well, maybe. But the problems of Mahone Bay are the problems of rural Nova Scotia generally, and indeed of rural Canada. As we lose the old labour-intensive resource economy of farming, forestry, fishing and mining, villages wither. Simply providing affordable housing won't reverse that trend. Mahone Bay, luckier than most, is close enough to Halifax to serve as a bedroom community. But that's not what the village wants.

The deeper issue in Mahone Bay is the process. Citizens are enraged that the council made such a crucial decision without consultation. Indeed, the council was meeting in-camera when it
accepted developer Bob Youden's proposal. It also agreed to refund him the purchase price of the land as an investment, and to provide him with certain tax concessions.

It later ratified these decisions in a public meeting. Then, when the decisions proved controversial, the council refused to reconsider them or to delay their implementation.

On October 9, town resident Penny Carver presented the council with a petition containing more than 250 names. (As of this week, the petition had 359 names.) Its final paragraph said, "We call on you not to commit to this development before all the people of the Town have had a chance to fully assess and debate its implications, both good and bad, and to consider alternatives."

"It's about fair process," Penny Carver told the council. "It's not just about a number count of those for or against development; it's about ensuring there is dialogue about how and where development takes place."

Yes and in fact, the matter doesn't seem that difficult. The town needs seniors' housing, and a very attractive seniors' complex could be built on the edge of the school property, overlooking the soccer field and leaving most of the woodland untouched. The homes vacated by the seniors would then be available for younger families.

But the council responded to the petition by reaffirming its earlier declaration that the lands were surplus and when Mayor Joe Feeney proposed to defuse future controversies by instituting a "mayor's round-table" as a mechanism for future citizen involvement, the motion died for want of a seconder.

Such huffy defiance seems politically loony, and makes one wonder what else may be motivating the councillors. Meanwhile, by creating deep divisions within the community, the controversy may wind up driving people away from one of Nova Scotia's most charming and beautiful communities. That's precisely the opposite of what "development" is supposed to do.

-- 30 --

Blessed are the Peacebuilders

2007-12-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

The decline of Canada's commitment to peacekeeping, says Carolyn McAskie, is “the greatest disappointment of my life.” Peacekeeping is a treasured Canadian tradition; it was practically invented by Lester Pearson, and for two generations this country was among the world's most dedicated peacekeepers.

Today, says McAskie, we're not even a player. Our peacekeeping is a memory. We rank 56th in the world in our contribution to peacekeeping.

Carolyn McAskie knows. She spent 30 years with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency. In 1999 she joined the United Nations, becoming Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and also heading the UN peacekeeping mission in Burundi. Sixteen months ago she was appointed Assistant Secretary-General for peacebuilding support, attached to the UN's new Peacebuilding Commission. She was recently in Halifax to deliver the Lloyd Shaw Lecture on Public Affairs at Dalhousie University and to participate in a symposium on peacebuilding.

Peacebuilding? Whuzzat?

In 1961, as a young peace activist, I did fundraising for the Canadian Peace Research Institute created by physicist Dr. Norman Alcock. Huge amounts were being spent on war research, euphemistically called “defence research.” Alcock – who died last March, at 88, bless him – argued that we should also be studying ways to prevent war and resolve conflicts peacefully. In 1961, that idea was novel, shocking and suspect, but dozens of academic programs cover that field today.

The research shows that achieving peace involves at least three major phases. “Peacemaking” means bringing an end to a violent conflict. “Peacekeeping” is the maintenance of the ceasefire and the prevention of fresh violence – for example, by soldiers patrolling the ceasefire line.

And “peacebuilding” -- the new concept -- is the long-term process of creating an environment which ensures that the inevitable conflicts in a society, or between nations, are worked out within a non-violent framework. Carolyn McAskie's new UN agency is currently working in Burundi and Sierra Leone. Each has a recent history of violent conflict, and either could slide back into violence. The peacebuilder's role is to ensure that doesn't happen, ever.

Canada will be joining the Peacebuilding Commission next July – but the decay of our peacekeeping capacity, says McAskie, means that we're in danger of arriving without the ability to do anything useful for those two beleaguered African nations.

What has happened to us?

Traditionally, she says, Canada recognized itself as a “middle power” which couldn't rely for its security on force. A great power might believe that security lay in military strength, and might believe it could win a war if necessary. A middle power could never win a war, though it could certainly lose one. For a middle power, peace is the only security.

For Canada, then, peacekeeping was not mushy-headed do-goodism, but hard-headed realism. Peacekeeping in Suez was not simple altruism. It was a practical exercise in defence of Canada, which would have been instantly vaporized if the conflict had escalated into a nuclear duel between the US and the USSR.

Peacekeeping also suited our character. McAskie cites a quip from The Economist that Canada is the only social democratic country which never elected a social democratic government. Like western Europeans, we believed in a mixed economy, a strong social safety net, and an individual willingness to support state initiatives with taxes. We believed that in a rich country, nobody should be homeless or hungry. We had seen that in the Depression, and we did not ever want to see it again. There were no food banks in the Canada I grew up in.

And we were proud to be among the world's leading peacemongers.

Individual Canadians, says Carolyn McAskie, still care about peace and social justice – but our government and other institutions have lost sight of our traditions. Since the 1990s, we have been absorbed with internal matters – western alienation, Quebec separatism, the deficit. We said we couldn't afford peacekeeping and a decent level of foreign aid. We told the world we'd be back, but we never came back.

Instead we joined the NATO effort in Afghanistan, which tries to combine peacemaking, conquest, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. But that's impossible. You can't do it all simultaneously – and certainly not with a foreign army.

“The process was founded on a great mistake,” says Carolyn McAskie. “The Taliban was never at the table. You may think the Taliban is completely evil, but the Taliban has to be at the table. If you want to get out of hell, you have to talk to the devil.”

A disquieting thought, but a deeply Canadian one. The only solution is peace, and the only route to peace is negotiation with the other side. You don't have to like the other side, but you do have to deal with them.

Waging peace, a small country can make a large difference. We've done it before. We should do it again.

-- 30 --

A Farm in Eleuthera

2007-11-25T08:15:00.000-08:00

Tall, lean Calder MacInnis is bent double, sitting on a wheel well in the back of a Mitsubishi Pajero 4x4 which is jouncing along an overgrown bush track on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. I sit on a sack of fertilizer, facing Calder, bouncing up and down, hitting my head, jarring my teeth. The Mitsubishi’s windows are closed to prevent vines and branches from slapping us in the face. It is stifling inside the vehicle, and both of us are streaming with sweat.

Calder and his brother run a surveying business in West Bay, Cape Breton. Among his friends is John Pratt — “Johnny Grape” — who owns the vineyard in nearby Marble Mountain. John sits in the passenger seat. He owns a rental property in Harbour Island, near Eleuthera. Calder and I, and our wives, are guests of the Pratts. We are in the Bahamas to have fun.

“Uff!” grunts Calder, as the Japanese jeeplet drops into a particularly deep pothole in the limestone bedrock.

“When I discovered this road — ” says Austin Mullin, the driver, a young Irishman from County Donegal.

“Road? What road?” I inquire innocently. And everyone laughs.

We are actually are having fun. We are visiting Austin’s farm.

Austin has taught school in Dunmore Town, on Harbour Island, for a decade. His wife Gail, also a teacher, is a native of Harbour Island. They have three gorgeous children. Austin cares passionately about education, is devoted to his students and seems to be a much-loved teacher. When we went out on the streets with him one evening to follow a noisy band practicing for the Christmas festival called Junkanoo, local kids greeted him with transparent affection, joking with him, teasing him, holding his hand.

Because Gail Mullin was born and raised on Harbour Island, she is entitled to a share of the “commonage” on Eleuthera — an area which Harbour Island people own in common. Individuals can use it, but cannot sell it. They can build houses there, for instance, and bequeath them to their children.

Or they can establish farms — and that is what Austin is doing. Most days he works on his farm after school. The farm includes a gleaming white beach beside the turquoise sea. So Austin normally travels the easy way — by motorboat, not by Mitsubishi. But today he needs the 4x4.

Farming in Eleuthera is not like farming in Manitoba or the Annapolis Valley. It’s more like farming in Peggy’s Cove, or on the Funk Islands. There is no soil. You can’t grow carrots, corn or lettuce. Sea grape thrives there, along with palmetto, Australian pine and other tough, unusable plants. These invasive plants can be cleared off, but they quickly spring back.

To keep them down, Austin maintains a flock of sheep and goats, which will eat almost anything. The animals, however, are easy prey for feral “potcake” dogs — and now for raccoons, which some lunatic recently introduced to Eleuthera. To protect the farm animals, Austin relies on high chain-link fences set in concrete.

To make concrete, Austin must bring large quantities of washed sand over his alleged road. He carries the sand in a rough-and-ready box trailer behind his Pajero. The sand, however, is so heavy that it recently broke the trailer’s tongue.

And that’s why we all came to Eleuthera — to help Austin unload the sand, jury-rig the tongue and tow the trailer to a welding shop for repairs. We bagged the sand, sandwiched the tongue between two-inch planks, and delivered the trailer. Now Austin is taking us to the farm, which is a long way off the main road.

The farm looks more like a hippie’s homestead than a regular farm. There’s a dug well in a hollow, a pump, and a big plastic tank up on a hill which provides water for the animals. The only building is a tool shed. The ground is hilly and rough, composed mainly of lumpy white rock.

Here and there, small depressions contain little pockets of soil. In those depressions, Austin has planted fruit trees, each one carefully fenced with plywood, wire and steel rod. As John Pratt remarks, Austin is “farming in the pot-holes.”

The farm has one great advantage: a warm, temperate climate, ideal for bananas, mangoes and citrus. But these, too, require a lot of hard work. Sour orange trees root well here, for instance, but nobody wants sour oranges. So Austin cuts off the branches and grafts other citrus species — lemons, limes, sweet oranges, grapefruit — onto the sour orange rootstock. Eventually, only the trunk of the tree will be sour orange.

And eventually the farm will produce cash crops. Eventually, Austin and Gail will live here. Eventually, their children can also build houses nearby.

“It’s a lot of work,” says Austin. “But when I ask if it’s worthwhile, I just look at my family. They make it all worthwhile.”

— 30 —

Mysteries of the Heart

2007-11-23T16:16:00.000-08:00

Halifax Sunday Herald column, November 18, 2007

Jean Chretien was playing golf with a cardiologist when he complained that he had a bit of discomfort in his chest.

“You'd better come and see me,” said the cardiologist. But Chretien finished the golf game, attended a cocktail party, and didn't go to the Montreal Heart Institute till the next morning, when his chest pain had become severe.

No wonder. All his coronary arteries were partially blocked, and he was poised for a massive heart attack. But Dr. Michael Pellerin did a quadruple by-pass, and Chretien should make a full recovery.

Chretien's story illustrates both what's right and what's wrong with our handling of heart problems. If patients get expert help within the “golden hour,” the brief interval at the beginning of a heart attack before the heart muscle begins to die, then our doctors can perform miracles, as they did with Chretien.

If patients don't get help fast, however – and only about 10% do – their hearts can be severely or fatally damaged. But most people – like Chretien – don't want to believe that they're having a heart attack. They don't want to cause a big fuss and scare their families over what may be a bout of indigestion. We would, literally, rather die than look foolish.

Believe me, I know. When my chest felt strange one July evening in 2006, I didn't call 911. I waited till the morning, and then – second dumb decision – I didn't call an ambulance. I got Marjorie to drive me to the hospital.

“Suppose you'd really been stricken in the car,” the ER doctor scolded me. “What's your wife going to do? Stop and administer CPR? Keep going to the hospital? Panic? What if she's stuck in traffic? She doesn't have a siren, or oxygen. She can't radio ahead. Next time, call 911 and get an ambulance.”

The average time between the onset of symptoms and calling 911, says a Mayo clinic cardiologist, is 111 minutes. That hasn't changed in 10 years. And at least 50% of patients, like me, don't call an ambulance. Some head for the hospital on foot.

The astonishing truth is that we know enough about the prevention and treatment of heart attacks that we could almost eliminate them. But heart disease remains a major killer. Why? First, victims wait too long to get help. Second, half of all heart patients eventually stop taking their drugs. Patients simply don't accept that they will need medication for the rest of their lives – particularly aspirin, which reduces the clotting that causes heart attacks and strokes.

It's easy to understand. You improve your diet, start exercising, get yourself in shape. You look good, and you feel good. So you don't need the drugs any more, right?

Wrong. Indeed, dead wrong.

I don't want to sound too sanctimonious. I'm faithful about my pills, and I'm careful with my diet. And I amble along the shore for about a kilometer a day – which is not enough, but is better than I used to do.

That said, the failures are not altogether the fault of the patients. Doctors don't always communicate well – so patients often don't understand that aspirin and Lipitor are forever. And then there's the little matter of knowing that you're having a heart episode.

In a heart attack, you don't clutch your chest and fall over. Instead, you feel pressure, heaviness, shortness of breath, perhaps an ache. Sometimes the sensation spreads to the arms, neck or back. In women, especially, it often spreads to the jaw – a fact that few women know. People may break out in a sweat, or experience sudden feelings of great anxiety, or have blue lips or hands or feet. Diabetics often have “silent heart attacks” with no symptoms at all except a sudden sense of complete exhaustion.

The symptoms of a heart attack are so varied and diffuse that they're hard to identify, even for the victim. So it's just too glib to say, “get medical help immediately.” If I knew I was having a heart attack, I'd call 911 in a trice. But how would I know?

Here is a place where medical research could make a huge advance fairly easily. What we need at least as much as another drug is a reliable test to confirm that a heart attack is taking place.

In my own case, I didn't think I was having a heart attack. Then I thought I was. Now, ironically, the cardiologists aren't so sure. I have no heart symptoms. I definitely have blockages in my heart arteries, but recent tests show the heart functioning very well. Maybe I had a muscle spasm, or indigestion.

But if even the cardiologists can't tell, how can the patient possibly know?

I'm not quitting the pills or the diet, and I'll try to do better about exercise. Next time I suspect a heart attack, I'll take no chances. But it really would be better to know.

-- 30 --

Dance of the Icebreakers

2007-11-23T16:08:00.000-08:00

Halifax Sunday Herald column, November 11, 2007

Samuel Johnson was wrong. The last refuge of scoundrels is not patriotism, but “budget constraints.” When governments want to do something, they can always find the money. When they don't want to act – or when they want to do something indefensible -- they cite budget constraints.

Last month, for example, Fisheries New Minister Loyola Hearn announced that “Canada's New Government” -- which is getting a bit long in the tooth now – was making “an investment of $12.2 million for the restoration of three buildings located on the Canadian Coast Guard base in Quebec City.” The objective is to “enhance the area's architectural landscape” in time for the 400^th anniversary of the city's founding.

Fine. Quebec deserves it. But Canada's New Government can't then claim that it doesn't have $6 million to repair and renew the decrepit Coast Guard base in Dartmouth, and that it therefore must close the base and move the Coast Guard's two largest icebreakers to Newfoundland.

Canada's New Government is awash in cash. Just like Canada's Old Government, it's running a massive surplus – maybe a record $20 billion. But if funds were tight? Well, the Coast Guard isn't in the business of enhancing the streetscapes of the nation. It's in the business of search-and-rescue, coastal patrol, ice-breaking and similar difficult and essential marine pursuits. Its most important assets are not buildings but ships and the facilities that support the ships and the men and women who sail them.

If you had to choose, that's where you'd spend your money. But we don't have to choose. So what's going on with those icebreakers?

Go back to 1995, when Canada's Old Government – claiming budget constraints – merged its two non-military fleets by moving the Coast Guard from the Department of Transport to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which had a fleet of scientific research and fisheries enforcement vessels. Where the two fleets had contiguous bases, the facilities would be merged. So the Dartmouth Coast Guard operations would move to the Bedford Institute of Oceanography.

Great on paper – but the BIO had no wharves adequate for the big icebreakers Terry Fox and Louis St. Laurent. Very well: new wharves would be built. Whoops: that would cost $6.4 million – almost exactly the same cost as upgrading the original Coast Guard base. All right, perhaps the Terry Fox could dock at a leased Navy facility, with the Louis St. Laurent being moved to Sydney or Mulgrave. Maybe.

Meanwhile, the merger of the two fleets didn't go particularly well. For mariners, particularly fishermen, the Coast Guard represents safety and security. They're the guys who pluck you off your burning or sinking vessel. DFO, however, represents law enforcement. They're the guys who charge you if you break their regulations. Two different functions, two different cultures. Morale in the Coast Guard plummetted.

And then, last April, Loyola Hearn dropped a bomb. The two big icebreakers would move from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland “to avoid significant additional infrastructure costs which would be required if they stayed in the Maritimes Region.” In Newfoundland, “the infrastructure is already in place.”

Bosh. Louis St. Laurent goes to Argentia, a port where the Coast Guard has no presence and which affords almost no facilities for a ship this size. The only appropriate berth is a deteriorated naval dock which is barred to heavy trucks and cranes. St. John's is 85 miles away -- $125 by taxi -- so bringing in crews and supplies will be costly and time-consuming.

And St. John's? The Fox visited there this fall, riding relatively high after using up much of her fuel on an Arctic voyage. The harbour pilot refused to take her alongside the shallow Coast Guard wharves unless she was further lightened. Unless the wharf is dredged, the ship will have to lie elsewhere. She may have to lie elsewhere anyway, since the Coast Guard base isn't big enough for the existing fleet plus the Fox.

And does anyone care about the disruption of the lives of 150 families associated with the two ships, or the loss to Halifax of about $15 million a year?

This reeking proposal produced a storm of objections from Coast Guard retirees, opposition MPs and MLAs, citizens, and even serving Coast Guard officers like Stewart Klebert, skipper of the Louis St. Laurent – though little from the muted mayor of Halifax and the muzzled premier of Nova Scotia. All hands agreed that the cheapest and simplest option would be to repair the Dartmouth base and keep the ships where they are.

So what's motivating Loyola Hearn? Survival. With Danny Williams on the war-path, no federal Conservative seat in Newfoundland is safe. The Tories hold three Newfoundland ridings, and this proposal would put icebreakers in two of them.

Canada's New Government? Phooey. The faces look different, but the smell is the same.

-- 30 --

Workers of the World, Where Are You?

2007-11-23T16:03:00.000-08:00

Halifax Sunday Herald column, November 4, 2007

“The thing to do,” says Jim McNiven, “is to let the States do the screening for us. Tell them, when they find illegal immigrants working in factories or warehouses, don't ship them south to Mexico. Ship them north to us. We need them.”

What?

Big Jim McNiven is only half joking. That would be Dr. McNiven to you, sonny, the august personage who was once the provincial deputy minister of development, and later the dean of the Dalhousie management school. He's standing before a crowd of 200 at an Assembly of Leaders convened at St. Mary's University by Novaknowledge, the advocacy group which speaks for Nova Scotia's knowledge economy.

Big Jim is talking about Nova Scotia's looming economic crisis – too many jobs, not enough workers.

What?

Look at the numbers, says McNiven. Nova Scotia will run out of workers completely in about eight years. Our economic policies and structures, rooted in the last century, are all upside down. They assume we have a surplus of workers and a shortage of jobs. But those days have vanished.

This dramatic change results from a low birth rate during the past generation. To sustain a population, you need 2.1 births per fertile woman. Nova Scotia's rate is 1.39. The Canadian rate is 1.5. The developed countries all have low rates. European nations range from 1.0 to 1.9. Many countries offer hefty baby bonuses. Russia is proposing “procreation holidays.” The assembled leaders chuckle audibly.

“I gather,” smiles McNiven, “that there's some enthusiasm here for that idea.”

The brutal fact is that Nova Scotia will need 52,000 more workers by 2026. But our population is dropping by 500 people a year, partly from out-migration and partly from attrition. The local kids who will be entering the workforce by 2026 have already been born. We know there aren't enough of them. We have labour shortages already in rural areas and small towns – and those shortages will only get worse as the competition for labour in the cities intensifies.

“We could drain off all our rural workers into the cities and turn rural Nova Scotia into a national park, and it still wouldn't be enough,” says McNiven.

And with too few workers, the economy declines, which has serious implications for government revenues and services, entrepreneurial opportunities and general quality of life.

Big Jim puts up another slide. There are only three ways to make up the shortfall. One is to increase the participation rate – the proportion of the population that's actually in the work force. We can make better use of now-marginalized groups like the disabled, for instance. We can encourage more women to work. We can discourage older workers from retiring. Never mind Freedom 55, says McNiven. Think Freedom 75.

The second approach is increased immigration, but that's not a complete solution. To get 52,000 new workers, we'd have to attract well over 100,000 new citizens, but most immigrants actually go to “TMV” – Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

“I'm half serious about the illegal immigrants in the US,” says McNiven. “Those people are so intent on getting work that they walk 80 miles in the Arizona desert after crossing the border. They're highly motivated, they have work experience, and they speak some English. They're just the kind of folks we want. The Americans haven't caught on yet that they need them too. We should take them off their hands.”

The third solution is productivity – getting more output from each participant in the work force. It sounds awful, like Scrooge squeezing Bob Cratchit, but in fact we see it all the time. When I got my first computer, for example, I couldn't believe how much more work I got done. That's productivity, and it came directly from a capital investment.

“Productivity” really means making much better use of our people. Pay employees well, and give them the best possible tools. Automate what can be automated. Provide decent benefits for part-time workers. Expand day care. In general, recognize that the key to prosperity in this strange new world is the effectiveness of working people.

McNiven makes other unorthodox suggestions. Lower the school age to three or four, freeing up young mothers for the work force. Abolish the school-leaving age and provide flexible high school and college education on the Internet. Double the payroll tax, to encourage businesses to get more production from their existing workers rather than hiring additional ones.

Big Jim would also increase the inheritance tax dramatically, which will encourage parents to give their savings to their children early. The kids will spend it quickly and foolishly, and so both parents and kids will have to keep working.

“These suggestions are somewhat frivolous, and may not be the way to go,” McNiven concludes, “but doing nothing is not the way to go either.”

The assembled leaders nod. It's a remarkable moment. We've just seen a man plant a topic squarely on the public agenda. And I'd bet we'll hear a lot more about it, on the road to 2026.

-- 30 --

Silver Donald Cameron received an honorary D.Litt. degree from Cape Breton University yesterday.

Where have all the apples gone?

2007-10-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

“That looks like an apple tree,” I said to Marjorie. “But how come it doesn't have any apples?”

Feral apple trees abound in Isle Madame – dotted through the woods, standing gnarled in deserted fields, adorning the edges of roads. They include several different varieties – probably heritage strains, since they apparently descend from orchards planted by French settlers in the 18^th century. In October, they should be groaning with apples. But this one, growing beside a long-abandoned road, bore not a single fruit.

Later that day, I drove the five miles from the bridge at Lennox Passage to my house in D'Escousse. Apple trees grow along that road as closely as school children waiting to cheer a parade – so many, in fact, that I would like to see the dull name “Route 320” replaced by Route des Pommiers/Apple Tree Road.

But I saw no pommes on Route des Pommiers either.

By now I was curious, and rather alarmed. What about my own fruit trees, the ones that grow around my boat shed, and carpet the ground with little sour apples at this time of year? Local deer-hunters generally phone me in the fall to ask if they can have the apples to set out as deer-bait. But nobody had called this year.

No wonder. Five trees, and between them they had barely produced enough apples to make a pie.

My buddy Edwin DeWolf, who built the shed, drove up beside me.

“No apples this year,” I said.

“No apples anywhere,” said Edwin. “No bees, that's why.”

Ye gods.

That evening I saw Farley and Claire Mowat, who last month donated 200 stunning seaside acres to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust. This splendid gift includes 35 years' worth of the Mowats' careful records and observations on the site and in the area.

“We saw almost no fruits of any kind this year,” said Farley. “No plums, no cherries, nothing. And it affected all kinds of things. It was a cold, wet, late spring, and we had so few insects this year that the insectivore species of birds didn't reproduce. The tree swallows and the barn swallows live on flying insects. They made nests, but they didn't lay eggs and they didn't stay around. I've never seen them behave that way before.”

Was it truly just a cold, late spring – or something more alarming? Bees, I remembered, have been dying off in record numbers right across the United States and Europe, and nobody knew why.

Honey bees are not native to North America, and indigeous North American plants didn't need them for pollination – but the species which do need them are the ones in the supermarket, the products of industrial agriculture: apples, almonds, cherries, tomatoes, zucchinis, cantaloupes. Theories about the cause of their decline ranged from new pesticides, mites and genetically modified crops to climate change, fungi and even radiation from cell phones.

Whatever the reason, the US problem was serious. Every third bite we eat, says one expert, “is dependent on a honeybee.” In the US, the crops pollinated by honey bees are valued at something like $15 billion. The California almond crop alone is worth $1.5 billion.

With money like that at stake, agribusiness doesn't leave pollination to nature. Bees have been bred to work both earlier and later in the season – and they migrate to where they're needed. Huge semi-trailers packed with hundreds of millions of bees rumble through US agricultural districts, renting the bees' services to farmers.

These bees make money, not honey. (Believe it or not, American honey is being undercut by cheaper honey from China.) Industrial bees don't eat nectar, either. Their food arrives in tanker trucks full of protein supplements, sucrose and corn syrup. It costs $12,000 per load.

“I don't think the situation in the States is related,” said Farley. “We had extreme conditions this year, including the most rain we've seen in 35 years, nearly 40 inches. We also had a lot of fog, and flying insects can't handle fog.” A biologist from the Nova Scotia Museum later confirmed a “patchy” die-off of bees in some districts of the province.

“It isn't just the bees,” said Farley. “We had minimal populations of butterflies and moths too, and they came late. It may be several years until insect populations recover, since there aren't many insects left to breed.”

And what about the swallows?

“They would have gone to where there was more food,” Farley said. “It might be just a few miles inland, out of the fog – but remember, these birds migrate 10,000 or 15,000 miles, so it would be nothing for them to fly a couple of thousand miles to find food.”

The apples of Isle Madame have survived 250 years so far, so I guess they'll be back. But it's a very strange autumn without them.

-- 30 --