New Brunswick notes from an accidental tourist

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New Brunswick is a province without a centre. At least that’s how it looks from a traveller’s perspective.

This weekend we did a whirlwind tour of half the province. We travelled up the coast to the Fundy National Park then up to Moncton and east to Sackville for a surprise visit with our daughter at Mount Allison. Then we did a second trip the next day, driving north to Glassville for a family reunion.

I could get into a travelogue here, describing all the highlights, you know, the scenic lookouts where wisps of clouds are rising off the ocean and drifting over the mountains or the rugged coastal towns hanging out over the water or the patchwork of groomed, green farmland stretching over the hills and off to the horizon. But there were interesting social patterns woven into the landscape also worth considering.

Rural New Brunswick seems to be rotting away, with the exception of big farm country. In the stretches between the cities old houses are falling down, old farm fields are turning back into bush. Along the coastal back-roads the tourist infrastructure is aging and falling apart. Vintage ’50s-era motels are boarded up, the signs for hippie-era arts and crafts shops are weathering into invisibility. The only viable businesses seem to be huddled around the major destinations like the Hopewell Rocks park.

Meanwhile, the suburban sprawl is expanding around the province’s three bigger cities, with housing developments sprouting up everywhere like proverbial mushroom patches.

And what of the smaller towns in between? It’s a mixed bag. Each seems to have its single major industry. Florenceville has McCains. Sackville has its university. So as goes the single industry so goes the town. New Brunswick is in mid-transition from a rural to an urban province.

Although there are similarities to other Maritime provinces, New Brunswick is unique. It doesn’t have a single major centre acting as a stabilizing gravitational force for the entire provincial culture. Where Newfoundland has St. John’s, Nova Scotia has Halifax and PEI has Charlottetown, New Brunswick has three, each with different economic and cultural functions.

Globally speaking, we live in a centralized reality. Governments and corporations rely on centralized systems of command and control, development and financing, production and marketing. Both Louis Robichaud and Frank McKenna, New Brunswick’s two most visionary premiers, understood this and worked to centralize the province’s social and economic structures into a more modern, urban framework. But due to the original urban-rural-ethnic design of the province, their efforts were only partially successful (if centralization is the key to success, and success is defined as urban materialism).

So how could one create a more modern, centralized New Brunswick? Well that’s the challenge facing every new provincial government. Given the structural diversity of the province the wisest and simplest answer would be, “I don’t know.”

One could simply anoint Saint John with principal city status and move the provincial capital there. The city has the biggest and best urban environment in the province and is a working international port. Fredericton would be a regional hub servicing the agricultural-education-technology sectors. Moncton would remain, well, Moncton, a franco-anglo transportation-retail-innovation centre. And that would be it. Saint John would be on its way to becoming a big city, and the province would have its gravitational centre.

Alternatively, the Maritime provinces could amalgamate, whereby Moncton would make the ideal capital city for the new province of Atlantica. Now that’s really reaching for it. I somehow doubt that Maritimers, and in particular Haligonians, would ever be willing to agree to that. At least not without some dramatic leadership and a compelling reason to do it.

Back to the local scene, sitting with the family in a shabby Chinese restaurant in Sackville I realized that the town’s main industry shaped its culture and economy. Students, the backbone of Sackville’s economy, don’t spend money on fancy restaurants. And that led my thinking back to the recent study on the state of the province’s educational system, which itself seems to be a decentralized mess with universities scattered everywhere in a province of just 750,000 people and a functional adult illiteracy rate of between 60 and 68 percent. Something seems broken here.

Could these abysmal literacy rates, Canada’s highest rates of obesity and classically high rates of sustained unemployment have something to do with a decentralized, rural-urban split, bilingual provincial structure stitched together—and keeping us trapped motionless in our cars—by the best four-lane highways in Atlantic Canada? Again, I don’t know. But nothing seems to come into focus in New Brunswick other than the two large and famous centralized family conglomerates: the Irvings and McCains. These two companies, as Connors Bros. did before them, seem to get the importance of the centralization concept a whole lot better than our governments do.

So how would I sum up our two-day experience of the province? Well, if it were a tourism slogan it would be: “Visit New Brunswick, the way life used to be,” or “There are so many New Brunswicks you won’t know which one you’ll like the best.”

To summarize, New Brunswick is the result of a failed political strategy of giving everybody a little bit of something—without ever having a grand vision and the discipline to focus on what we could all be, collectively.

Unless one plans to live in the 19th Century—which is another sustainability strategy—and if that’s the solution we’ve been abandoning that heritage as well. Either way it seems to be a pretty sad state of affairs.

But maybe you have some easy answers I've missed…

Walking on air and other dangerous pursuits

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Skype is pretty amazing. I called my sister and brother-in-law on the West Coast the other day and we had a long conversation—that lasted about three hours.

What kind of talk? Mostly the economy and politics, with some family thrown in for good measure. But we ended up talking about the importance of common belief.

We agreed that there seemed to be a widespread desire for more functioning community in our lives but there wasn’t a common foundation of belief in modern society—at least from a spiritual or moral perspective. Instead of community we’re connected to jobs and shopping and our individual pursuits—and long-distance relationships as a replacement for community, and perhaps at the expense of community.

So two things seem to be happening. First, more than ever we’ve become single units in a larger system. And second, the larger system is evermore complex and centralized as organizations merge and expand. Today we occupy more specialized positions in these complex structures than our parents did. Or we fall outside the system altogether.

And falling outside the system is what happens when complex systems break down or fail. Spain, for example, is deeply in debt and facing government austerity and belt-tightening to pay back its loans while it runs a staggering 50 percent unemployment rate for those under the age of 25. It’s no surprise, then, to see Spanish youth take to the streets in months long protests and ongoing clashes with police.

From a sociological point of view, it turns out that the idea of social structures and beliefs—the actual social “ground”—is fundamental to the success of societies. And this changes significantly from place to place. In one data set from a few decades ago we learned that countries with strongly integrated common beliefs had lower suicide rates: lower in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, and higher in Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

Translating this to Canada, we might then begin to understand why our aboriginal communities, which have had their traditional beliefs stripped away, are suffering from severe epidemics of suicide.

Here on the East Coast there are long strands of history woven into our communities over the past 300 years. The Acadian and Loyalist traditions are tightly integrated and can be seen in the succession of family names over the generations. That firm social ground makes it relatively easy for Maritimers to identify their places in society and to act out their roles. Everyone knows his or her place. But it also traps many of us in those roles.

Outsiders arriving here, while free from those grounding rules, are at a distinct disadvantage in many ways, as they don’t understand the underlying nuances of the society such as who controls the power and which families are the classic victims. And these are roles we learn early.

Sociology points out is that social structures trump moral systems. The shoe deforms the foot. We see this pretty clearly in Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971. Professor Zimbardo collected a group of normal students and randomly separated them into guards and prisoners and set up a prison compound on campus. The 14-day experiment had to be called off after 6 days. The guards had simply become too abusive and the prisoners too victimized to continue on. It was an eerie premonition of Abu Ghraib.

The conclusion of social researchers is simply this. Ordinary human beings are capable of the most inhuman behaviour given a sufficiently enabling social structure. We can see this from Nazi death camps and Stalinist gulags all the way to the current suppression of the Palestinians.

Apart from our social structures that can go horribly awry, all we have to stand on is our common moral ground—which, for the most part, no longer exists. Only a common moral ground can give us the courage to resist social pressures of social structures gone wrong. Which was why the Catholic Church was so important to the overthrow of the totalitarian communist regime in Poland, for example.

This leads to a myriad of thoughts. One of which is the fact that power corrupts. Another is the simple fact that more of us are serving the bureaucratically-controlled power at the top rather than our customers or our peers, with whom we’re competing—because that’s just how our system works.

And since our communities have been replaced by corporate central command and individual long distance personal communication, we’ve lost our local common ground—and the ability to resist the forces of power that may heading in the wrong direction.

Harper’s new bill C-51 and the future of Internet freedom is a good example. This new bill will mandate Internet companies to keep track on all of our activity. Not only will this make it more costly for small Internet providers, allowing larger providers to thrive, it will stifle free speech as the government will have full access to our correspondence.

Since “we’ve” given the Conservatives a majority government, we might believe that we have no choice but to give in and let this travesty occur. But we do have choice. Do we become cowering victims in this brave new world? Or do we stand up and fight back?

It’s a choice between walking on air—or finding common moral ground.

(Feel free to e-mail Stephen Harper anytime at pm@pm.gc.ca)

Why the environmental movement is dead

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President Obama delivered his jobs speech last week. It was good. And from a business point of view, there was a collective sigh of relief in the media: there was no mention of the “Green Economy” anywhere—not that it helped the stock market, which tanked after his speech.

Way back in 2009 creating green jobs was at the heart of Obama’s economic recovery plan. So what happened? Well, I guess political and economic “reality” just got in the way. Since ’09 the global economy has stalled and the working classes have been hit hard by unemployment. So it’s come down to survival time—both politically for Obama with an election coming up next year, and for voters, who would rather have jobs and food on the table than taking tax money to fund airy-fairy green projects that might or might not amount to anything “useful.”

But this environmental ambivalence thing isn’t new. Environmental journalism got going in the early 1960s with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the famous exposé on DDT that ramped up the back-to-the-land movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s—the Whole Earth Catalogue generation—which faded away as quietly as silent spring itself. So again, what happened?

In the simplest terms the hippies just grew up and got real jobs. They left the communal farms, got mortgages had kids and raised their families. They morphed into the Me generation of the 1980s and evolved into the Starbucks generation of the 1990s. And yeah, most of them kept their eco-friendly orientation. But they also exploded into a supernova of occupations—from non-profit workers to commercial artists to researchers to tax consultants—with tastes that grew evermore refined, moving upmarket from rusty pickups to the shiniest sheet metal they could afford.

Throughout the process, the successful ones went from comfortable to fabulously wealthy. Today the top ten percent of the U.S. population (and it must be somewhat similar here in Canada) owns 80 percent of the population’s total wealth.

And the politics says it all. The political agenda has turned decidedly conservative. In real terms, that translates into a voting population that seeks to protect and grow its personal assets with as little interference from government as possible. This has led, as we all know, to some predictable results: the deregulation of business, demise of labour unions, massive lowering of taxes on wealth, reduction in government-funded social services and environmental protection and so on. Life, it seems, has become an endless game of “chasing the cash.” And that’s just the domestic scene.

Internationally it’s the same. The Amero-Anglo-Euro agenda has been aimed squarely at the control of strategic resources (read: energy, natural resources, human “capital” and food production). This power axis has been continuously involved in a geopolitical—and real—resource wars for the past 50 years, ever since the prospect of declining oil and gas reserves was first noted by geologists. International concern for the environment? Nadda. Whatever’s been done has been merely window dressing, with the exception of the banning of CFCs, yeah, those nasty refrigerants that were eating a hole through Earth’s ozone layer.

Here in Canada we’re managing to put oil and jobs ahead of the environment in a massive way with our tar sands oil mining venture—one of the dirtiest mega-projects in the world. Meanwhile, our good old underemployed Altantic Canadians make their pilgrimages to Fort McMurray for the fattest paycheques of their lives, and who could blame them, really, what with the fishery in total collapse? (And I’m pretty sure there is some kind of cruel irony in that, too.)

And now that our economy is stalling, like our neighbour’s to the south, our focus will be even less on the environment—and more on business development—as we move ahead.

Want proof? One need only to look at the recent Conservative government’s move to lay off 700 workers—fully 11 percent of the entire staff at Environment Canada—while granting corporations a generous $6 billion annual tax cut in an effort to create jobs, which has yet to materialize. Of course the CEOs of our biggest corporations aren’t complaining about any of this.

And don’t look to science or academia for too much help on the environmental front. Research today is a race toward corporate funding, so only those things that promise to “pay off” get funded. How about mind control research? There’s a market for that in the security sector. Let’s do that!

I haven’t even mentioned the lack of public outrage about the catastrophic Fukushima meltdown and radiation “leaks” (deluge would be more like it) or the inherent dangers of nuclear power on all living things on the planet. Or why ocean life here in Passamaquoddy Bay is full of flame retardants and worse.

Want the real reason the environmental movement is dead? As social critic Naomi Klein pointed out last week, Victoria (Posh Spice-girl) Beckham recently snapped up 100 Hermes Birkin bags for the low, low price of $2 million. Now, how can quoting Albert Einstein that “nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet” offset behaviour like that?

The easiest answer seems to be “human nature;” our nature against the rest of nature, as always.

Forget about all that. Who are you?

Trying to figure out how the world works can’t be done, and yet we’re all hardwired to try from the get-go. And maybe that’s why we keep listening to experts for answers instead of turning to our personal experience.

This caught my attention twice last week. The first was a discussion with some friends in the US.

I’d sent a bit of research to my friends that seemed to provide a clear view of the global economy. The research conflicted with their worldview only in the fact that it gave a broader perspective. But instead of reviewing it, they were more interested in who authored it. And the entire discussion got tossed out the window.

But the source of the information happened to be quite credible. It’s just that he was neither a famous nor leading expert—making his views easier to dismiss. And what annoyed me was how much the quality of the message seemed to be influenced by the stature of the source.

The second example was a call I got about last week’s column. The caller was a former local businessperson who wanted to discuss the future of the region, and wondered if I was interested in meeting. So we did. And he had a lot of ideas and some great advice for both me and for the local economy. He also set up a few meetings with his old acquaintances here. But I got the sense that his reputation was of more interest to everyone than the actual solutions, and that his reputation would influence the outcomes of his discussions far more than his actual ideas. And I think he was also aware of this.

So what’s more important, I wondered, the message or the messenger?

From a purely rational point of view, information is information and facts are facts. The quality of the data should stand on its own. But from a human perspective everything is relative, especially when facts degenerate into opinion—as in the climate change debate. The facts tell us that our climate is changing. We learn this from internationally respected scientists. But many of our equally influential business people dispute whether these changes are caused by human activity, suggesting that these changes are just natural cycles. Who are we to believe?

The ongoing nuclear hazard from Fukushima is good example. The Canadian government has done little to no monitoring—to the public’s knowledge—of the amount of radioactive fallout in the rainfall dropping on Canada. But one ordinary guy bought himself a handheld Geiger counter and is travelling, on his own nickel, across the country from west to east testing rainfall, and his findings are a bit frightening to say the least. But again, who is he, anyway? And where are the experts on this?

On another newsfeed I read that a suspiciously high number of Atlantic lottery jackpots being won by retailers and insiders. Common sense would say there’s something wrong. The Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) tells us that there’s no reason for concern, even though the rate of insider wins has skyrocketed by almost 300 percent in the last year, and lottery retailers have been winning jackpots of over $10,000 at a rate three times a month over the past four years.

Fortunately, mathematician Maureen Tingley at the University of New Brunswick thinks that the data is “wacky” and has called for more information. But who is Tingley, anyway? I don’t know who she is, nor did the news report tell us. So I checked her out. She’s the director of UNB’s Applied Statistics Centre. I think we’d be more inclined to trust Ms. Tingley than the ALC public relations department, wouldn’t you?

We need experts because we have a difficult time trusting our own common sense. The problems just seem too big. We’ve even handed our own personal problems over to the experts: the educators, the psychologists, the TV self-improvement gurus. And the more highly-credentialed the sources, the more inclined we are to believe them.

So how do we know when to choose between our common sense and the expert’s view?

It all comes down to two things: motivation and specialization. Motivation has to do with what’s behind the big picture, such as who’s selling what? Who has the most to gain or lose? The key to common sense lies in understanding the motivation behind any big decision. For example, why might large corporations debunk climate change and oppose climate change legislation? Why might the U.S. invade oil-rich Iraq but not impoverished Ethiopia? When it comes to general trends, you’ll hear a lot from the experts—but you might want to listen to your own common sense.

When it comes to specifics we’re much better off trusting experts. Dentistry or knee surgery is never a pleasant do-it-yourself venture any more than data-mining ALC’s win ratios would be. We need experts to help us solve very specific problems.

So here’s a clue. When someone asks (or hints at) “who are you?” you might want to think about their motivation for asking. And then address whether the situation calls for specific knowledge or just plain old common sense. And if it’s the latter, you owe it to yourself to trust your instincts.

Because in the end it isn’t who you are, it’s what you do.