Canada

Since moving to New Brunswick (NB) about three years ago, the proposed NB Power/Hydro-Quebec deal is the first time I’ve seen some genuine public interest in what this province is about and where it is going. In that sense, regardless of the deal’s merits or whether it goes through or not, it has been a good thing. For good or ill, we’re actually hearing a lot of voices.

Another good though troubling aspect of the debate is that as it goes on we are seeing other issues being discussed. These are related issues as many of them have an impact on what will or won’t happen, and some are arguably more important than the ostensible debate itself.

First on my list of these, and the one I think may be of even greater importance, is political integrity and how we perceive politics and politicians. Put bluntly, it ain’t good.

Often we put the issue in partisan terms but the reality is that it is non-partisan. Regardless of what party is in power and regardless of whether it is provincial or federal, there is a sense of deception to everything coming from our governments. Further, there is a sense of deception to anything coming from the parties.

We can (and many have) questioned the integrity of the current New Brunswick government of Shawn Graham and the provincial Liberals, but recently we were also questioning that of the federal government of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. And the federal opposition, the Liberals. And the NB Conservatives.

Before the wider public had even heard of a NB/Quebec deal on NB Power, we were seeing federal money being handed out with great big cheques dressed up to look as if they were from the federal Conservatives even though the money was from the Government of Canada (which is us).

If you are like me, you receive with some frequency black and white flyers telling us (depending on who they are coming from) how awful Michael Ignatieff and his Liberals are or how awful Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are. Given how they are written and presented, it is hard to view them realistically as anything but political electioneering that we pay for because they are again paid for by Government of Canada money.

With the New Brunswick Liberals, they had as part of their election platform that NB Power would remain a public company. This could be said to be still true with the proposed deal, except the “public” in public company is Quebec.

In many of these issues, there is a sense of deception. Prior to the proposed NB Power deal, when I was asking various people about those black and white flyers to see how they viewed them, I was struck by how cynical attitudes were. In a sense, people were blasé. They expected politicians to be deceitful. They expected dishonesty.

When we speak of low voter turnouts at elections and of public indifference, I believe this expectation of deceit is the primary reason. But even more worrisome to me was a suspicion that many had moved beyond indifference to contempt – for politics and for government. If this perception is accurate, how can a country remain coherent as a nation?

The current environment is unacceptable to me. Parties change positions with the wind, meaning as polls and surveys come in with ever more data so what is said can be fashioned to tell us what we want to hear. There are few statements coming from governments or from parties that don’t feel as if they’ve been laundered through the many spin filters. Seldom do we hear anyone say, bluntly and truthfully, “We were wrong.” In a case where a party or government is wrong, we see exercises in triage and soft shoe routines to avoid stating what is often obvious. When we hear something true, it comes to us in the most obfuscated form as linguistic games are played to make one thing sound like another.

We may have a voice in elections but from what I see, that isn’t enough. We have to have a voice in the parties themselves and how they are run. It seems clear their primary focus is the party and not the province or country. This is a problem in every province and at the federal level. And we are part of the problem too since we seem to be complacent as long as we hear what we want to hear, regardless of whether it’s true or what we need.

It is time to restore integrity in politics. And it’s time for all of us to demand it. And it’s time for all of us to wake up to realities such as sometimes the other guy is right and we’re wrong and hearing what we want to hear isn’t always true or good or right.

We have to demand better of our politicians and their parties and we have to demand more of ourselves.

(I actually wrote this about two weeks ago but kept it in draft form. I read it again today and decided – yes, publish it despite the pompous, pontificating tone. )

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In New Brunswick, there are several battles going on: the one between the power deal with Quebec and the H1N1 vaccine for top news story. Then there’s the one within that power deal between the those for and those against. There are a lot of kneejerk responses to the power deal, some of which are discouraging for the cultural and societal biases that inform them.

The thing about the proposed deal to sell NB Power to Hydro-Quebec is that the more you look at it and the more you try to educate yourself to make a thoughtful decision on it, the more muddled it gets. Simplistically, it eliminates a lot of New Brunswick’s debt. It also freezes residential rates for five years. And that all sounds good, except that after five years all bets are off. Kinda. After five years, rates will only increase to keep pace with inflation … as long as needs don’t grow. If we grow the way we need to in order to prosper, or at least to maintain the status quo, we would likely need to add more generation, costs New Brunswick would pick up (not Hydro-Quebec, as I understand it).

A lot of concern has been raised about the aspect of selling off key assets. It concerns me too. Hydro-Quebec is agreeing to this deal for a reason: it wants those assets. They provide the company with greater access to the U.S. energy market that most people assume will have a great need for energy from this side of the border (for their north eastern states). In order to manage it’s debt, New Brunswick is trading off those assets.

On the surface it appears to me that New Brunswick is opting for short term gain at the expense of the long term.

But the more I think about it, I wonder if that isn’t the only thing to do? I’ve been in New Brunswick for almost three years now and my gut perception is that politically there is no long term vision for this province. There is even less public will to actually tackle tomorrow. If those NB Power assets are retained by New Brunswick, they will likely remain assets with potential, potential never realized. So why not sell them off to someone who will actually use them to reach that potential?

Sold or retained, what this province needs more than anything is a genuine vision for the future. What will it look like? How do we get there? The “cross your fingers and hope everything stays the same” approach won’t work.

From what I’ve seen, the majority of people are against the deal between NB Power and Hydro-Quebec. Fine. But what is the alternative? How do we manage our debt? What kind of future do we want? How do we achieve it collectively? What are we going to do with these assets?

One of my other worries about this deal is the idea of one public company being bought by another public company. If a public company is intended to serve its public, whose public gets served? Or at least, whose public gets served first? It strikes me as a situation where the old cliche applies: you can’t serve two masters.

Yet another problem I see has to do with where the revenue goes. I’m not interested in simply selling NB Power and eliminating a good deal of debt. I want an investment — a piece of Hydro-Quebec. I want to know that a portion of their revenue flows back to me, as it would if I were a shareholder. From what I’ve seen (and I may have this wrong) we don’t even get to tax them in New Brunswick. There is no long term benefit to selling NB Power to Hydro-Quebec unless there is assurance that a portion of revenue flows into New Brunswick. There is a reason Hydro-Quebec wants access to that U.S. market. It would be as if a deal was signed and all the revenue from the Alberta oil sands went to B.C. instead of the government of Alberta.

And that’s my bit of muddled thinking on this power deal. I’m still not sure if it’s good or bad but I do know that the more I learn about it, the more concerned I am with it. But perhaps the largest issue at hand is the ongoing one of New Brunswick being very good at knowing what it doesn’t want to do but not having a clue or any inclination regarding what it does want to do.

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On the weekend I was going through some very old files. I bought a floppy drive for 3.5″ discs about two years ago with the intention of locating and moving files I considered important to my other hard drive, or burn them to a CD or DVD. Well, two years later I finally opened up the box with the floppy drive and went through some of my discs. (And believe me, it took a while going through the house and searching for where I had put them.)

The first thing that struck me was just how many of them there were. The second thing was just how much writing I had done over the years. They contained files from a number of different jobs I’ve had (as a writer) as well as a lot of personal writing such as fiction and poetry.

Good grief! I wrote a lot!

I was mainly interested in the fiction and poetry material. Or maybe I should say I was sidetracked by it.

Three things characterized the material: 1) the quantity, 2) how dreadful most of it was, 3) how good a very small amount of it was.

I think I knew even at the time that most of it was rubbish. But it was interesting to see what mistakes I was making (primarily three) and how, over time, I eventually began to eliminate those mistakes. In other words, there was progression in the quality. That has always been one of the aspects of writing I like most: seeing it improve.

And what were the three main mistakes I was making? First, there was too much telling and little showing, at least in the early stories. Second, there was a great deal of over-writing which could also be rephrased as pretentious writing. Thirdly, and related to the second, much of it tried too hard to be cute or clever.

But that was the negative side of things. From the positive perspective, a good deal of it was damn funny! I could also see I write fiction best when I begin with an absurdity. For some reason, that triggers my creativity. For instance, I had a very, very short story called The Itinerant Town. It was about a town that every day was in a different part of Canada. It was, as you can imagine, very difficult to find.

It was a fascinating exercise and, in some sense, gratifying because while I saw how utterly awful most of the material was, I saw the few that were pretty good. And even many of the bad stories and poems in those files have some good ideas at their core. It reminded me of Horace (I think it was Horace) who wrote somewhere that you should take what you write and bury it for a number of years. Then, when you finally go back and look at it, you’ll truly know if it was any good. In other words, it’s difficult to judge truly in the moment. Time gives you a more objective perspective.

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I really am tired of the repetitive and now long-redundant either/or debate around traditional and social media. Apart from being well worn, it risks obfuscating other issues. A good example of what gets lost lies in the Michael Valpy essay, Is this the end of social cohesion? and David Eaves’ response, Dear Valpy: social media isn’t killing democracy, it’s making it stronger.

We can probably blame Mr. Valpy because he brings up the subject of newspapers and social media and certainly makes some valid points (such as quoting Carleton’s Christopher Waddell’s speculation about seeking out confirmation online rather than challenges).

The problem, however, is that if you accept the argument that newspapers provided some social cohesion and, through challenges and debate, unifying ideas (something Mr. Eaves flatly rejects), surely we can take it further. If we were all made to own and read and study Bibles, and all made to belong to and attend Christian churches and their services, regardless of whether we were Christian or not, surely we’d have the cultural coherence and common touchstones that they had in Elizabethan England. Now that was coherent and that was a world with things in common, including shared values.

The problem is that in a democratic society that can hardly be considered democratic.

We’re told, however, that social media is. It has the potential to save the day. But who exactly is social media democratic for? The homeless? Personally, I’m not aware of any homeless people online, but maybe my social circle is limited.

Canada’s aboriginal people, those living in far off, rural areas with no Internet access? Or the ones living in poverty – do they have access? Do they even have computers? (I recently approached Canada’s food banks with the idea of using social media as a way to facilitate what they did, to reach more potential donors and volunteers etc. They liked the idea but had some huge obstacles: their disparate nature and the fact that many food banks don’t have Internet access and/or don’t have computers. The real world gave me a wake up call.)

Yes, I’ve written about this before.

Here’s the thing about social media: you need a computer or some handheld device. And you need access. And even if you do have the wherewithal for those things, you need to know how to use them and have a facility for doing so. It may be hard to believe, but some people don’t. Just as some people couldn’t balance a bank account to save their lives and some people couldn’t sing on key no matter how many lessons they took.

Social media comes with predicates. It makes assumptions about who you are and what you have. You meet those, you get to use it. Otherwise, you’re outta luck pal.

So let’s be careful when we speak of the democratizing nature of social media.

Our beautiful mosaic

But getting back to Michael Valpy’s essay … Mr. Eaves says Mr. Valpy enters the conversation three years late and that is true if the conversation is this endless traditional/social media thing. But the science fiction author Samuel R. Delany was writing about this back in the 1970s and 80s. However, he wasn’t writing about social media because what is at the heart of Valpy’s essay is not tools but people and society and our ability to find and talk to each other. Social media is a tool and nothing more.

What Delany was writing about was social fragmentation and the “What if …?” that follows when you follow it through to its extremes. In one of his novels (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I believe) the risk is cultural fugue, a kind of social catatonia. The economist Herbert Simon has said, “A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” Delany’s novel seems to suggest, “A wealth of choice leads to an inability to choose.” Fugue.

To use a Canadian cliché, if we are a cultural mosaic what are we a mosaic of? Cultures or gated communities of the mind and spirit? Mr. Eaves doesn’t like the quote by Carleton’s Christopher Waddell about us seeking reinforcement rather than challenge online but I suspect Waddell is correct. But I think that is a human tendency the Internet facilitates rather than being a consequence of it being the Internet bogeyman. And it may be we tend to do this the more fragmented our world becomes.

Whatever the truth is, there is a problem and reducing it to a traditional versus social media argument misdirects attention. It misses the real world.

We think we know Canada and Canadians but what we know is the parameters of our own lives: friends, work, family. To everything else, we are tourists. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” applies. We don’t know the rest of the country, we don’t even know the rest of our own provinces. (How many people in Vancouver have ever been to, much less lived in, Fort St. John? How many of us have lived in Smiths Falls? How many in Toronto have lived in Elliot Lake? Who has been to and lived in Bathurst, New Brunswick?)

Social media can facilitate this but only if we are listening. Waddell’s question (“Do we?”) is one worth asking along with, “Who are we listening to?” Despite all the online voices, we have to constantly ask, “Who am I not hearing from?”

You can be sure someone’s voice isn’t there.

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It’s all over the place now so it hardly needs repeating but I have to say something – maybe because I lived in Alberta for 20 years. Using an old school approach to marketing, one of smoke and mirrors, Alberta has turned itself into a joke – one that’s gone viral. Why? A tourism campaign that uses images not of Alberta, but of, “… Beadnell Bay near Bamburgh, Northumberland, where the North Sea rolls in from Lindisfarne.” From an article in The Guardian:

“We think it’s quite funny – a landlocked province in Canada presenting an image of itself as an island,” said Sheelagh Caygill of Northumberland Tourism, which is now fondly hoping to piggy-back on the international campaign. News of the gaffe is spreading like wildfire on the internet with tags such as: “Come to Alberta – no, wait, it’s Britain.”

For those unaware, that’s the UK, a considerable distance from Canada.

Should not one of the cardinal rules of a tourism ad be that the images be of the place being promoted?

Apparently not. Also from The Guardian:

Tom Olsen, head of media relations for Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper, said: “There’s no attempt to mislead here. The picture used just fitted the mood and tone of what we were trying to do.”

So now we’re trying to make something bad even worse by trying to tell people that it’s okay to be deceptive if it fits the mood. But of course, that’s Canada’s Prime Minister’s Office. It’s Alberta that is responsible. Their response?

His take (Tom Olsen’s) that the British children were “a symbol of the future” was echoed by Olga Guthrie of Alberta’s public affairs bureau, who is managing the campaign. She said: “This represents Albertans’ concern for the future of the world. There’s no attempt to make people think that the place pictured is Alberta.”

In other words, something clearly stupid will not be admitted to. If it actually is a, “… concern for the future of the world,” then the message must be, “… and the future ain’t in Alberta.”

I’m sorry, but the whole thing is embarrassingly stupid and it’s being made worse by not owning up to it. Every rule of marketing and PR in this technological world is being broken and apparently with no awareness or concern at all.

The story link above, a version of a story that  has been kicking around for a few days, is from The Guardian (the UK). I got the link from a guy in Manitoba via Twitter, where I’ve seen it repeatedly for the last few days from people across the country, from around the world. I first heard of it on Facebook – how many people on that?

Yes, it’s viral.

It’s another example of, a) not understanding or respecting people, b) not understanding current technology and how it affects communication and, c) relying on old school marketing and PR techniques that not only don’t work, they harm what they’re meant to promote.

In trying to make itself look better, Alberta has made itself look worse. And the irony? There aren’t many places in the world as beautiful as Alberta. Unfortunately, its politicians and marketers don’t seem to believe that.

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It has been snowing all day. Wet and heavy. Disagreeable snow shovelling. A reminder from the gods that they want us to listen to Christmas music, whether we like it or not. You could moan and groan about it, send irritable letters to a paper’s editor, rave in blog posts or the comment areas of other blogs, or as Molly Bloom chooses to do, enjoy the arrival of season (and the banishing of the late fall’s gray gloom):

(By the way, this image is from last year. But today looks much like it.)

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In the Globe and Mail, Margaret Atwood responds to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent comments on the arts in Canada in which, in part, he claims to speak for the average person. Titled, To be creative is, in fact, Canadian, Atwood makes a number of observations. But I especially liked this paragraph:

I suggest that considering the huge amount of energy we spend on creative activity, to be creative is “ordinary.” It is an age-long and normal human characteristic: All children are born creative. It’s the lack of any appreciation of these activities that is not ordinary. Mr. Harper has demonstrated that he has no knowledge of, or respect for, the capacities and interests of “ordinary people.” He’s the “niche interest.” Not us.

I agree, though I think a lot people aren’t aware of how creative they are because they have a wrong-headed notion that creativity is restricted to “artists.” With what people do with personal fashion and home renos, I’m not sure what people think that is if not creative.

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Yesterday the current Canadian election turned to support of the arts, or the lack thereof. Parties on all sides took their positions, ridiculed their opponents position and, as you might imagine, it all devolved into the usual pointless rants.

I find discussions of the subject of government support of the arts largely pointless because they have all the appearance of two people trying to carry on a discussion in two very different languages.

On the pro side, many of the arguments come across as airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky, sentimental nonsense. People on the negative side, particularly those described as “ordinary Canadians,” can’t see the point of putting money into something they just don’t get, particularly when there is still debt to be paid and jobs to be created. As for identity, there is a kind of, “I know who I am; I don’t need an artist to tell me,” kind of attitude.

And artists are maddened by what appears to be an intransigent, Philistine mind set on the opposite side of the fence from them.

Here’s the thing: the value of the arts is rarely touched on because artists are wildly inept at communicating the value to non-artists. It’s as if they were trying to define a French word by explaining it in French to someone who doesn’t speak French. Both people will eventually become exasperated. Often, the non-artist is practical, tactile oriented person who finds it next to impossible to see the worth in something that is spoken of in a way that makes it appear to be insubstantial and amorphous.

I think, however, there might be a better chance of communicating the value of the arts if, rather than speaking in terms of uplifted spirits and cultural identity and so on, we spoke in terms of brand. Because, in fact, the arts and culture are a country’s brand. They aren’t the only elements affecting it, but they are key when it comes to how citizens and, from an economic perspective, the rest of the world perceives a nation.

Generally speaking, when you don’t support your brand, you damage it. At the very least, you abandon it to the vagaries of the world – and someone else may end up defining your brand.

Support of the arts should be thought of in terms of investment. And you should look for an R.O.I., a return on that investment. However, return doesn’t have to be thought of in terms of money. Surely there are indicators that help us judge whether an investment in the arts has had a positive impact and is generating a return. For example, are more movies being made in Canada and are they bringing jobs to the country?

It may not be the way the average artist wants to think of the arts, but when trying to communicate the value of those arts to non-artists, the language of business is at least something many of them understand.

I think it’s more than warranted to review programs that support the arts and see if they are having a positive effect, and to monitor the arts to see what areas are strong and which ones are weak, and direct funding appropriately. Of course, it’s difficult to judge the success of an investment in the arts over the short term. Generally, results come across in the long term.

And let’s not forget the argument that Daniel Pink makes in his book, “A Whole New Mind,” that the future for those of us in the West will depend largely on our creativity.

Me? I’d support the arts. I might want to review what I’m supporting and question how success is measured, but I would support them because I want my country to have a strong brand. It would also help make some hedges on the future to ensure we have pay cheques.

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