It’s The Economy, Stupid

In the former Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was in charge of all propaganda - right down to editing articles that would be printed in the local paper.

You would think there is a lesson in there for the provincial government’s spin doctors. Last week, they announced with great fanfare that the ‘repatriation’ campaign to bring back New Brunswickers was working. As I reported before, Training and Employment Development Minister Margaret-Ann Blaney was practically giddy in last week’s press release. Here’s a quote:

“Two and a half years into the JOB Start Strategy, we continue to make [excellent progress] in recruiting, retaining and repatriating skilled New Brunswickers.” (my brackets)

Simultaneously, however; those loose cannons over at the Department of Finance had the audacity to update their population and demography chart.

The latest data shows that 2004-2005 exhibited the highest level of net out-migration from New Brunswick since the Lord government took office.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

There was a net out-migration of 1,650 people in 2004-2005 compared to 760 in 2003-2004 and 843 in 2002-2003.

Three questions:
1. How could the Department of Training and Employment Development define the worst migration numbers since they took office as ‘excellent progress’?
2. Doesn’t somebody at Finance actually share these numbers with TED?
3. Why aren’t we reading about this in the local paper?

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Last year, Canadian Business magazine ranked Moncton as the #1 place in Canada to do business. Less than a year later, the community has dropped to 13th place. How can that happen? What fundamentally changed in the past 9 months?

Not much. CB uses a very subjective model to determine ‘best place for business’.

Here’s another weird quote from the article:

Also, the magazine’s authors noted that the boom in the call centre industry appears to be over.”Existing ones are expanding and new ones are still coming”…but it is not as prolific as in past years,” said Pamela MacFarlane, research director with Colliers International (Atlantic) Inc in the report. “The current government is not pushing in the same way.”

Now, I am the first to hammer the government for lack of economic development effort but this particular comment is a bit out of place given that Asurion just announced a 300 person expansion, CenterBeam in Saint John is doubling in size and SNC-Lavalin just announced a major call centre in Campbellton.

We have to all be a little bit suspect of these ‘rankings’ anyway. I have the same concerns about the overused KPMG study that the Feds pay an egregious sum of money to have done every other year. The first year this study was done, St. John’s came out #1 among over 100 global cities for low costs. Then, I suspect the Quebec contingent got cranky because the next time the study was done they changed the ‘criteria’ and presto two Quebec communities came out on top.

It’s a bit unfortunate but true that most consultants will tell the client what they want to hear - and changing the ‘criteria’ on which the report is based is one way to do this in good conscience.

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I got a couple of calls regarding my comments about our mayoral choices and how we need to elect a Mayor that has a vision for the community, etc.

I am not talking about a specific mayor. I am talking generically about the emerging role of the mayor as a having a more strategic role - setting vision and implementing it.

That’s all.

No targets.

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Al over at the T&T will be happy to know that the Times & Transcript is not the only media outlet to misreport economic data. Check out this report from CTV:

Canada’s population growth second among G-8
CTV.ca News Staff

Canada had the second highest rate of population growth among the world’s most powerful nations between 1994 and 2004, according to Statistics Canada.

During the 10-year span, the Canadian population grew at a rate nearing one per cent, the second fastest among the Group of 8 countries, Statscan said in Wednesday’s report.
The United States ranked first among the G-8 countries over the same period with a rate of 1.1 per cent.

United Kingdom and France saw a growth of 0.34 per cent and 0.40 per cent respectively, while Japan, Germany and Italy recorded rates between 0.1 per cent and 0.2 per cent. Russia was the only G-8 country to see its population decline over the same period.

Now even a cub economic reporter would know that Canada’s population growth rate has been 1% per year. Didn’t the writer of this story stop and think that 1% over a decade doesn’t seem right?

Sheesh. They should hire that guy over at the Times.

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If you read my blog, you know I am sometimes critical of the Times & Transcript for its bias in reporting political issues as well of its lack of balanced reporting on economic issues. I further maintain that a newspaper has the right to write trash if readers have an alternative but that somebody needs to provide the community with a good, unbiased and comprehensive look at the news. So in one newspaper markets, I think that the newspaper has a duty to try and play this balanced role.

While many of you disagree with that premise, that’s ok, we can agree to disagree. But if you read the ‘We Say’ in the Times & Transcript today you will have to agree with me on the bias. Only a complete partisan would say that commentary is an unbaised and balanced look at a very important issue facing New Brunswick - that being Federal/Provincial relations.

The We Say calles the Prime Minister ‘disingenuous and hypocritical’. It continues “His government and some of its MPs have been toying with the province, playing petty political games and standing in the way of perfectly acceptable and legitimate goals rather than acting as the benevolent uncle that it purports to be.” Further, it states “And the dirty trick the prime minister and his government played with the province in the Point Lepreau refurbishment negotiations was so far beyond the pale and in such bad faith it is a wonder there is any trust at all in Ottawa.”

Now, I am not presenting just one side - this is the commentary (embellished with more examples). I don’t claim to be overly connected to politics in New Brunswick but I have talked with a number of people in both the provincial and federal governments and the truth is that there is blame to go around. After watching the arrogant posture taken by the province on several files, I am inclined to side with the Feds on this one.

The Premier purposely and thoughtfully embarrassed the Prime Minister during the last election campaign. Everyone knows it. It was national news.

The Premier and his ministers have a duty to play the diplomatist role when it comes to the Feds. That is tradition. That is history. These guys have taken an adversarial and even arrogant stance against the Feds since day one. Who cares if they are in different parties? The Premier and his ministers have an obligation to the residents of New Brunswick to ensure that relations with the Feds are as good as they can be - and listen up We Say - it’s not the other way around. The Liberals or Conservatives or NDP could form a national government without even one seat from New Brunswick. We are becoming more and more trivial in terms of our voting power. There are suburbs of Toronto that elect more MPs than New Brunswick.

It’s our job, the province, to engage the Feds in a healthy and beneficial relationship.

But that’s just my opinion. And We Say has theirs. But when the editor of the one-newspaper town that is Moncton acts like the Premier’s personal propagandist is not in anyone’s best interest. Certainly not the province’s.

On this issue, We Say should at the very least be challenging both sides to reach a compromise and try and work together.

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It’s amazing to me how quick governments are to say they can’t do anything about the price of gas. As reported this weekend in the local newspaper:

Fuel tax accounts for 40 per cent of the price of fuel and the province charges 14.5 cents per litre.Since 2001, the provincial fuel tax has increased by 35 per cent.

Now, consider the fact that the average New Brunswick spends between $1,500 and $2,000/year on fuel and you will pretty quickly see that the tax on gas is a major drain on your disposable income and that government have a whole lot they can do about the ‘price of gas’.

Cripes, we all yelled and screamed when our auto insurance rates went up by an average of 25%. Gas taxes are up more than that and we don’t care?

Hmmm.

The provincial government should make at least a good will gesture and freeze its ‘take’ on gas prices back to about the 90 cents a litre level. They were able to live on that last year, why not this year?

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According to the Times & Transcript today:

The provincial government has nearly doubled its repatriation goal by attracting 550 former New Brunswickers to return to work in New Brunswick.

Once again, the government is playing on people’s lack of knowledge and counting on the media for lack of comparative research.

Using numbers posted on the New Brunswick government web site, we have had a net out-migration (more people moving out than in) for 13 straight years - that’s right, Lord and McKenna. Almost 15,000 more people moving out than moving in during that time.

So they say that they have attracted 550 former NBers to move in - what about the other 14,500 that moved out?

The T&T quotes Margaret-Ann Blaney, training and employment development minister as saying:

“We’re really pleased with the numbers on all fronts, I think they’ve very encouraging.”

If the media had any sense or any desire to provide NBers with the real picture they would have said, Thank you Madame Minister for that 550 statistics but how can you be ‘pleased’ and encouraged by 13 straight years of out-migration? How come your $10 million hasn’t led to a net in-migration of people?

As long as our government ministers continue to be ‘pleased’ and encouraged by 13 straight years of out-migration, the third worst job creation record in the country, the second worst employment rate and the third worst unemployment rate in North America, we will see nothing getting done. Period.

Click here for the province’s own table on this.

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Closer to The Heart

And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones to start
To mould a new reality
Closer to the heart

You can be the captain
I will draw the chart
Sailing into destiny
Closer to the heart

Closer To The Heart by Rush (1977)

I heard this song on the radio yesterday and I thought this would be a great slogan for a political campaign. In an era where the majority of us don’t trust politicians, where marketing/spin dominates, where every word coming out of a politician’s mouth has been vetted and checked against the polls - a politican that could get close to the people and make politics about the betterment of things.

New Brunswick is declining. Across the board. We are more dependant on taxpayer dollars from other provinces than we were ten years ago. We have the first sustained population decline since Confederation. On just about every economic indicator we are well behind the national average and slipping further. And to add insult to injury, PEI and Nova Scotia have beat us in almost every economic category in the last few years.

And the anecdotal stories that I hear reinforce this decline. Most of Northern NB is reeling. Saint John continues to struggle. Fredericton, well, Fredericton is Fredericton. Moncton is doing well by Atlantic Canadian standards (it is still growing far slower than cities in the fast growing regions of Canada).

And the government continues to micromanage and pick away at the issues as if that was bold and aggressive action to tackle the provinces. $8 million over three years on R&D. Wow. One new rural call centre. Wow. We are focused on e-Learning in New Brunswick (the e-Learning industry has collapsed in the past five years). eNB will bring the benefits of the Internet to all New Brunswickers (we have dropped from 7th to last place among the provinces for households connected to the Internet in the past five years).

So with this as the backdrop, I proffer Rush’s intro lyrics:

And the men who hold high places
Must be the ones to start
To mould a new reality
Closer to the heart

Make it personal. Dying communities is personal. Communities dependant on welfare - is personal. Declining industries like the forestry, fishing and mining - this scares people - they worry about the future of their towns.

Stop friggin’ around and give these people some reason to hope (outside the optimism of Moncton and the airheadedness of Fredericton).

Bring it closer to the heart. And the people will vote for you, I guarantee it. People are ready, I think, for a hard dose of reality. If a politican said that Northern New Brunswick was dying. People would agree. Saying that the ‘Prosperity Plan’ is working doesn’t do much for the many areas of this province that are not very ‘prosperous’.

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Sometimes I think that governments go out of their way to try and confuse people. Case in point, the pie charts the New Brunswick government have been using widely to show people where the money comes to pay for government services.

Now, the folks up at ‘Communications New Brunswick’ know full well the rules of charting. If ‘other’ is the largest component of a pie chart, you have a serious problem. There must be a better way to show the data than that.

Are they trying to say that you can’t group any revenue buckets in that 28.4% to more than 2.5% (the smallest category). When I see this chart, I think they are purposely throwing a bunch of revenue sources in that 28.4% to try and hide something (maybe that’s just my skeptical nature). I think they are trying to hide the fact that there are more federal funds in the 28.4% and they don’t want NBers to realize just how dependant we are on the tax dollars generated in other provinces.

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In today’s We Say segment of the Times & Transcript, they once again called for the abolishment of the CBC. If this happened, we would be relegated to getting local news from either the T&T or the 60 second blast of news provided by the rock ‘n’ roll stations.

The T&T already has a monopoly on the English language local written news. Now they want a monopoly on all the news.

I propose a different scenario. I think the CBC should branch out into newspapers. I think they should write a daily newspaper that competes directly with the T&T. This daily would provide meaningful economic and social news. It wouldn’t be afraid to raise the tough issues. It wouldn’t try and push a single minded agenda like our friends at the T&T.

Wouldn’t that set Al Hogan’s britches ‘a burnin’.

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