New Brunswick

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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On both Facebook and Twitter today I posted a link to this page: A List of Fallacious Arguments. I did so because in the New Brunswick power deal debate I’ve seen quite a few comments, posts and so on that are off track, in my opinion, or concern issues separate from the merits of the proposed deal.

For example, yesterday we saw discussion around the presence of former NB premier Frank McKenna and his role in bringing this deal about. On one hand, his name and input are presented as an example of why this deal should go through – it’s an appeal to authority. On the other hand, his name and input are presented as an example of why it should not go through – an appeal to authority in reverse.

The truth is that even if his involvement was large, and even if it was for the cynical reason of fleecing the public of more “consultant fees” (as some have suggested), it doesn’t affect the merits of the deal. It may mean we have to address the issue of government transparency, and it may mean we need to address the issue of integrity in how our government conducts itself. But the deal itself is good or bad on its own merits.

We keep seeing appeals to history with the subject of a previous deal between Newfoundland and Quebec and how this is why we shouldn’t back the deal. Again, however, while we may need to study this deal under a microscope to ensure we don’t make a bad deal (as we should with any deal), the deal itself is good or bad because it is either good or bad, not because of something that happened in the past.

We have seen both sides using false arguments to communicate their positions. It is easy to see why: it’s a complicated issue and it’s far easier to simplify and appeal to emotions than to detail arguments for or against.

The result, however, could be disastrous. We may sign a deal that throws away our future or we may turn it down when it could have ensured our future. Either way, we won’t know until it’s too late that we didn’t think it through, we allowed ourselves to be swayed by arguments that were false but, at the time, told us what we wanted to hear.

Other links:

• Logical Fallacies or Fallacies in Argumentation

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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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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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Yesterday I did a road trip down the highway and a bit to the right (west) along the Fundy coast to St. Andrews, New Brunswick. (Or, as some like to say, St. Andrews By-The-Sea … “It’s Life, Only Better.”)

Yes, it’s very beautiful there and the weather yesterday was about as good as you could ask for.

I went with Michael-ann, a friend and the sister of Liz, owner of the Urban Deli in Saint John. If you’ve been in to the deli, you’ve probably met Michael-ann. We didn’t have any agenda in St. Andrews. We just went to eat and wander around and see whatever we might see. Very relaxed.

For what it’s worth, I placed a passel of pictures up on Flickr.

One picture I didn’t get, though I wish I had, was of the stands along the highway selling blueberries. Michael-ann had wondered as we went down whether they were in season yet or not. I don’t know much about these things, but given the number of cars and people clustered around the stands, I would guess the answer is yes.

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A few days ago I posted You are what you post. While I had something completely different in mind, that same headline is even more relevant to today with the Telegraph-Journal, the primary newspaper in Saint John, New Brunswick. Today they printed and posted an apology to Canada’s Prime Minister and two of it’s reporters for a story, “… that was inaccurate and should not have been published.”

The apology included the reporters because what they submitted, “… did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote.”

With the traditional news business in its current state of chaos as it tries to figure out how to survive with the huge shifts that are occurring due to economics and the Internet, this is the worst time possible for something like this when so much of the debate regarding the value of traditional news rests on credibility.

What the apology does not state, and what must be made clear, is how did something like this get into the story? If it was not part of what the reporters submitted, who added it? And what will the consequences for this be?

As much as the PM is owed an apology, as well as the reporters and many others (not the least of which is the family of the late Govenor General Roméo LeBlanc), journalists and the public should be provided with an explanation of how it occurred and what will follow from it. In a digital world, New Brunswick is not off the beaten track and this is not something that affects a small few. It affects journalism and, today, even its survival.

Credibility is not something news can afford to not have, even in New Brunswick.

Update:

As the CBC updates the story (Wafergate leads paper to apologize to PM, reporters) it just gets more interesting and troubling. “This is another in an embarrassing string of events for the Telegraph-Journal.”

See also:

Craig Silverman: New Brunswick newspaper apologizes to Canadian Prime Minister over made up accusation

Update #2:

From the Globe and Mail posted at 1:30pm ET titled Newspaper apologizes to Harper :

A secretary for Jamie Irving, publisher of the newspaper, referred questions about the apology to Kevin Publicover, acting general manager for the company that owns the Telegraph-Journal, Moncton-based Brunswick News.

Mr. Publicover said the company would not make any further comment on the apology.

“Our position is that the statement in the newspaper today is self-explanatory and that we have no further comment on it,” he said in an interview.

Sorry. But that’s not acceptable. It may be self-explanatory as far as stating there was a screw-up. It does not say how it happened, who is responsible or what the consequences will be, if any.

And one last update (a biggie):

From CBC: Publisher, editor out over wafer story

I guess there were consequences.

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I’ve been tearing my hair out with frustration because of a Facebook problem. It’s one that, as I think about it, indicates what I think is a big flaw in their system – one compounded by their indifferent support.

I’ve set up a pretty barebones web site for a small business in Saint John, New Brunswick – the Urban Deli. I tried to keep it pretty simple for several reasons: 1) I think simple works best, especially if you’re small, 2) I’m not a site designer, I just do the simple, Wordpress stuff, and 3) as important as a site may be, I thought effectiveness lay in setting up social media.

I set them up with Twitter (@urbandeli) and also on Facebook. Twitter is fine but the Facebook account – good grief.

The problem began with making a change to my own personal account. I’m transitioning from one email account to another and made a change in that personal Facebook account to the new primary email. But … that was also the email I had used for the Urban Deli’s in the set up. When I was setting them up I had used it as a temporary one until it was determined what address they wanted associated with it.

I suppose it was my fault for not realizing that Facebook uses email addresses as usernames — as the “account.”

So when I made the change of address in my personal account I received an auto email from Facebook to Urban Deli that read:

Someone else has registered and verified the email address <email address>, which was previously tied to your Facebook account. Because they were able to confirm this email, <email address> has been removed from your account. You can no longer use this email address to log in, and we will not be sending notifications for your account to that address.

You can still log in using <email address>. (Your same old account password will work with this email.) We will be sending notification emails for your Facebook account to <email address>. You can change these settings at http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php

Please contact us at info@facebook.com if you have any questions.

Thanks!

The Facebook Team

Am I misreading this or do the first and second paragraphs contradict one another? “You can no longer use this email address to log in…” followed by, “You can still log in … Your same old account password will work with this email.” As for that second quoted sentence about still being able to log in and the old password working –it doesn’t. So I can’t adjust settings, I can’t do anything.

It appears, then, that if you have someone’s email address, the one they associate with their Facebook account, you can just shut down their access any time you please. Is this an accurate assessment?

I have no idea because, the second problem with Facebook is that they ignore all attempts to contact them. It’s been about a month, I’ve sent a number of emails to a number of their “contact” addresses, and have received nothing except one email that said they would forward my email to the correct area. Otherwise, they have been completely silent.

I’ve even tried their “reset password” at login, thinking I might have it wrong (I’ve also tried myriad variations of the password). They are supposed to send an email with a link but I’ve no idea where they send it since I receive no emails from them.

Do I just ignore the problem and set up a new account for the Urban Deli? That may be what I’ll have to do but they already have a large number of “fans” for the account we can’t access and it would be confusing for anyone seeing two accounts for the same thing. It’s a poor solution though in the end maybe the only one.

It may well be that all of this is due to something obvious that I have missed and is easily corrected. But if that’s the case, why does no one seem to know what it is? When I talk to people about Facebook pretty much everyone is in the dark about how it works. And Facebook continues to say nothing.

What a schmozzle!

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I’m a creature of habit. Anyone who knows me knows this, to their great exasperation. But every now and then, to keep people on their toes, I change my habits.

As people who know me also know, I like beer and the beer I’ve been drinking for ages is Stella Artois. Don’t ask me why. Back when I tried it, it clicked. And I’ve been drinking it ever since. However …

For some time now, I’ve been thinking I should change, not because I had lost my Stella fixation but because another aspect of my personality – let’s call it the joiner – has been trying to persuade me to go another route. That route is “local.”

Like many people, I like the idea of local – local food, local news, local … beer.

Here in New Brunswick, we have Moosehead out of Saint John. And we have Pump House, out of Moncton. And from Fredericton (where I live), we have Picaroons. Unfortunately, my Stella focus has held me back. But now that has changed.

I was at the Urban Deli in Saint John on Saturday – they’re a restaurant opening on Monday and are owned by a good friend of mine, Liz. One of her goals with her restaurant is to be as local as possible. Part of that has been to go with the local breweries: Moosehead, Pump House and Picaroons. So when I was down at the deli for a “preview evening” prior to their opening on Monday, I went with a local beer: Pump House Cadian.

Today I went to liquor store and bought more. Yes, I liked it! I’m drinking it right now.

Is my Stella on the ropes? Possibly, possibly …

I am not a connoisseur of beer. If you’ll pardon the boorishness of it, I like what I like. I wouldn’t know an ale from a lager from a stout. (Well, actually, I do know a stout. But ales and lager? I dunno.) But I do know I like this Cadian from Pumphouse. They describe it as, “A golden coloured ale lending itself to the wonderful malty aromas layered with just a kiss of spicy hops for a clean, smooth finish …” You can read a bit more here.

Now, I’ve tried Moosehead. Here in New Brunswick they’re fairly ubiquitous. But while I’ve tried some of the Moosehead brews, and generally like them, none has swayed me yet.

As for my local brewery, I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t tried Picaroons yet but it now rests at the top of my list of things to do. I’ll probably start with either their Best Bitter or Blonde Ale. As a general rule, I like beer that tastes like beer (whatever that means). Once again, that’s the boor in me speaking. As with coffee, I like things to stay true to themselves and not add additional flavours to jazz them up (like lime).

Yes, I know that brewing techniques and ingredients affect what the final brew tastes like.

(If this reads as if it ends aburptly, that is because I was interrupted as I was writing it. For what it’s worth, I wrote this yesterday afternoon but didn’t post it till this morning. So, no I’m not drinking beer at 9:00 in the morning. Morning equals coffee in my world.)

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I’m increasingly annoyed with the litany of reasons I hear when an idea is proposed for why it won’t work, can’t be done, will never get off the ground in New Brunswick. There’s an obstacle to everything, or so it would seem if you listen to the relentless nay-sayers.

So, call it a rant of sorts, I decided to start a list of all those reasons, if only to get the frustration out of my system. Some overlap, some are variations of the same thing, but here is the list of reasons for why nothing can be done in New Brunswick. Feel free to add your own in the comments:

• the government
• the opposition
• the universities
• the Irvings
• province too small
• too many moose
• cities too small
• population too small
• fiddlehead season too short
• province too rural
• roads really bad
• cabal of corporations prefer status quo
• snow
• always someone, someplace else that’s better
• bilingualism
• mosquitos
• western Canada
• Ontario
• Quebec
• young people gone
• dog poop
• population too old
• low literacy
• wrong skill sets
• too French
• too English
• too Liberal
• too Conservative

Those are the ones that come to mind immediately. But I’m sure there must be more. The point is: Have an idea? Someone is sure to jump up and tell you why it won’t work in New Brunswick (but, they’ll add, it will fly like gangbusters somewhere else).

I’ve an idea for a new list: why anything can be done in New Brunswick.

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