It would be, without question, the most important federal announcement in more than a generation of Maritime industry. A few days before the news in October, it was all anybody along the Port of Halifax could talk about. Would the Irving-owned yards — the last major shipbuilding enterprise in the region — win the lion’s share of a $33-billion contract to supply the Royal Canadian Navy with state-of-the-art warships? Or would it, like so many other players in the high-stakes lottery of “regional industrial benefits”, go home a loser from a crooked game of baccarat? Rumour had it that even Las Vegas bookies were making odds.

People who knew anything about Irving and the men and women it hired to go “down to the sea in boats” knew, in their bones, that the commercial behemoth, born of humble origins a century ago, deserved the work. After all, it had built the current fleet of Canadian frigates, and two technologically advanced supply vessels at its old facilities in Saint John, New Brunswick, during the last half of the last century.

A group of senior Irving Shipbuilding employees pose for a photo in July 2011. This is a small sample of the more than 200 Irving Shipbuilding employees that worked on the Canadian Patrol Frigate (CPF) program when Irving Shipbuilding build 12 frigates under the program through the 1990s in St. John, New Brunswick.

But they also knew that life on the hardscrabble Atlantic seaboard was rarely fair, and that political considerations elsewhere often superseded sound business judgements here. And so, they girded themselves for the distinct possibility that the big money would go to either Seaspan Marine of Vancouver (where the Harper government was hoping to enhance its popularity), or Davie Shipyard across the river from Quebec City (where the Prime Minister’s Office was merely hoping to gain back ground lost to the NDP in the last general election).

As matters transpired, however, these gloomy prognostications did not. The news hit the sleet-sprayed coast like an Indian summer: $25 billion to Irving; $8 billion to Seaspan; and bupkis to Davie, which had narrowly missed both bankruptcy and tendering deadlines during the bidding process. Streets from Halifax to northern New Brunswick erupted as much with astonishment as elation.

“I stand here as proud a Nova Scotian as you could possibly be,” Premier Darrell Dexter told a crowd outside the Irving yards. “Today marks the beginning of a brighter future, a future that sees an entirely new generation of shipbuilders, a future that sees our sons and daughters be able to come home from the west.”

Indeed, the expected economic impact is staggering. The Conference Board of Canada estimates that the work to build 15 surface combat ships and between six and eight Arctic patrol ships over 30 years will boost the average annual value of goods and services in Nova Scotia by $661 million and maintain 8,400 jobs. During the peak years of 2020 and 2021, the number of workers employed will reach 11,500 and the province’s GDP will increase by nearly $1 billion.

In the end, the contract will likely generate economic value equal to Nova Scotia’s entire mining and offshore oil and gas sector and far greater than its tourism and hospitality industry. But more than this, declared an editorial in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, “There’s the psychological boost. Thousands of Nova Scotians … believed Irving had the financial and manufacturing strength to do the job and the edge over B.C. and Quebec rivals in warship experience. …But it was still a heart-pumping shock to have the selection committee confirm it. On the criteria all the bidders agreed to, the Irving bid was the best. It’s fantastic to win a transformational opportunity of this scale. And even better to win it fairly on merit.”

Shoe-horned into an older wing of the Dr. Georges L. Dumont University Hospital in uptown Moncton, one of the nation’s leading centers for medical inquiry and technology development is not much bigger than a high school chemistry lab. “On the other hand,” laughs its president and scientific director Rodney Ouellette, who holds out his hands as if to suggest that size isn’t everything, “you should have seen us when we started.”

In fact, despite its cramped and unprepossessing quarters, the Atlantic Cancer Research Institute (ACRI) is at the vanguard of some of the most innovative and important work in the areas of early detection and treatment of a disease that, in its various incarnations, claims nearly eight million lives a year worldwide. Over the past 12 months, it has taken a crucial step towards commercializing its research, having secured a U.S. patent on its molecular method for diagnosing prostate cancer. Now, it has begun the clinical evaluation phase to demonstrate how its process is more precise and reliable than standard diagnostic tools.

(L-R): The Atlantic Cancer Research Institute's Françoise Roy, executive director and Dr. Rodney Ouellette, president and scientific director. They and their team are leaders in prostate cancer research.

“Trying to understand tumor biology is a very worthy goal,” Ouellette says. “But, sometimes, there’s a gap between the discovery and application of something. So, we’ve been determined to understand the questions that are important to the people who are actually on the front lines. Essentially, what are the challenges they need to overcome to better deal with the patient population they see on an ongoing basis?”

And just so there is no misunderstanding about ACRI’s overarching objective, the organization’s executive director Françoise Roy flashes a knowing look at Ouellette and declares: “Our mission is to get from the lab to the bedside ASAP.”

It’s a startlingly confident statement of principle for an organization that began its institutional life on little more than a wink and a prayer. That was in 1998, when the young Ouellette — who had left his New Brunswick home to earn a medical degree and a PhD — returned with a dream to conduct biomedical research in a setting that nurtured the kind of hard science and practical breakthroughs common in places like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

The problem was there was nothing to come back to in Moncton. “At that time, the landscape, research-wise, in New Brunswick was pretty barren,” Ouellette says. “There really wasn’t very much going on. Universities typically chose other areas to spend their research dollars on. A lot of this was tied to natural resources. Also, though, we didn’t have
medical training programs which often serve as centres of gravity for health and medical research.”

There were other, more pragmatic, obstacles to hurdle. “In fact, the law in New Brunswick didn’t allow (public health dollars) to go to health care research,” Roy explains. “So, right from the get-go, there was no money to be had to finance this activity, as it was against the law. …So, the onus was on us to go out and find funding. Quite frankly, we had to be entrepreneurial. But the challenge allowed us to be a bit more nimble than we might otherwise have been.”

And more inventive. In the end, the solution was to establish the nascent institute as a not-for-profit operation, which gave it the independence it needed to qualify for broad funding programs. “We couldn’t have a finger pointed at us,” Ouellette says. “We couldn’t have anyone saying we were doing research on the back of patient care. Our structure gave us actual opportunities to grow within the health care system. Some doors that were initially closed to us probably opened.” Even so, the early days were hard going. Getting people to understand the research was one thing. Getting them to appreciate that advanced, practical science could actually flourish in this part of the Maritimes, and deserved to be taken seriously, was a little like convincing a politician that particle physics is a job-creation strategy. But Ouellette and his staff — one research technician and a student — persevered. Slowly, minds changed and opportunities came knocking.

“Initially, support from the community was crucial,” Roy says. “It remains crucial.” Indeed, says Ouellette: “It started with the community. The hospital foundation and some large corporations, like Assumption Life, National Bank and Dooley’s, came on board. And that provided us with the leveraging capability that we needed to help us build the infrastructure that, in turn, gave us the credibility to continue.” Arguably, ACRI’s biggest break arrived in the form of a large contribution from the Atlantic Innovation Fund, administered by the federally managed Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, early in the last decade. Since then, the Institute — which operates with an annual budget of about $3.5 million from government grants, donations and revenues derived from medical services it renders to other organizations — has raised a total of $30 million for research. Today, Ouellette is pleased to report, ACRI employs more than 40 of the best researchers and technicians in the world.

“That’s really what it is all about: attracting the best,” Ouellette says. “But to get them to come here, you have to provide them with the infrastructure and the opportunities. That’s what it takes to be a truly competitive research institute. A young researcher is not going to sacrifice his or her career to work in a place that doesn’t provide the tools, a competitive laboratory environment. So we have to keep fundraising and being entrepreneurial. In fact, we’ve often acted as a contract research organization for other colleagues.”

Adds Roy: “They are also attracting other scholars with their own national grants. So we’re a magnet and there’s a multiplier effect.”

The effect, it seems, is working to great advantage.

Scientists at the Institute and Sackville, N.B.-based Soricimed Biopharma Inc. are currently studying how the molecular target of the toxin from the lowly shrew can be used to develop a screening test for breast, prostate and ovarian cancers. The procedure could identify patients who would most likely benefit from treatment based on a compound derived from the toxin.

Meanwhile ACRI researchers Dr. Stephen Lewis and Dr. Gilles Robichaud have obtained grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The former will continue his work on apprehending the way a particular protein in the human body controls the production of other cancer-promoting or suppressing proteins. His research may provide vital insight into the underlying mechanisms that cause the growth of the disease, itself. For his part, Robichaud will investigate the processes that transform healthy cells into cancerous ones. The research should improve understanding of breast cancer
biology and, in turn, lead to more effective diagnostic tools and therapies.

Not to be left out, Ouellette, himself, along with ACRI staff Michelle Davey and others, have received a grant from Colon Cancer Canada and the Colorectal Cancer Screening Initiative to fund research designed to assist scientists in their efforts to demonstrate that intact cells shed from the colon can be isolated and ultimately used to develop an accurate, non-invasive test for early detection of the disease.

To support these initiatives and others, ACRI recently acquired a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer — which it installed in the chemistry department of Mount Allison University — to enable researchers to more fully investigate the subtle factors that underlie and contribute to the disease progressing.

And then, of course, there’s the groundbreaking molecular methodology for diagnosing prostate cancer, which ACRI developed in collaboration with the National Research Council’s Fredericton-based Institute for Information Technology. “Essentially, we found that we could identify a certain group of genes that would change in the same way when the cell is cancerous, and would change in the opposite way when the cell is normal,”

Ouellette says. “So instead of looking at 25,000 genes, we can deploy a microarray to whittle that number down to find a very small number of genes that we could develop in a kit to screen patients,”

If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is. But the real-world potential of this and, indeed, all of ACRI’s notquite-ready-for-prime-time innovations is tantalizingly close. And if any of these processes, technologies and applications reach the market, they will almost certainly save billions of dollars for health care systems and millions of lives around the world.

This promise, alone, is worth the occasional struggles ACRI has endured over the years. “Actually, things are getting better for research here,” he says. “Over the past four or five years, New Brunswick (the government) has decided that innovation and research and development will be part of the province’s economic fabric. And we get CVs on a regular basis. Our doors should be open.”

Now, if only Dr. Ouellette can find a place to put them all.

To find the man who once employed more than 100 people to animate TV shows for networks around the world, you enter a side door of a slouching pill-box house in what passes for a downtown in the northern New Brunswick city of Miramichi. You climb a sagging staircase two flights until you reach a desk where a receptionist should sit, but doesn’t, before you venture down an aisle past rows of unoccupied tables arranged like work stations in a Third World garment factory. And then you spy him, standing in a far corner, squinting into a computer screen. He sports a ratty cap atop a serious case of bed-head, and you think he, like his office, has seen better days.

But Gene Fowler is smiling. He is happy. Finally.

“You know, during the worst of it, the local newspaper did eight stories on me,” he laughs. “They just tore the shit out of me. It got to the point where I couldn’t even go out to the pub with my wife without people staring and whispering behind their hands. …In this town! My town! People had elevated me to CEO status and gave me lots of glass and brass. And I was probably the most miserable I have ever been.”

Though Gene Fowler probably couldn't have imagined it at the time, the loss of FatKat and its attendant stress was a good thing. He was hospitalized for 10 days with heart trouble; he reports that everything appears to be fine now.

We’re sitting, now, in a part of the studio where artists might once have congregated to commiserate about brutal deadlines or intractable clients. Before the end. Before the whole thing came crashing down in an avalanche of debt and recrimination in the spring of 2009. The couch on which Fowler reclines embraces him like an old friend as he speaks softly and candidly about the final days of FatKat Animation, the company that had been his singular preoccupation for 10 long years.

“When the recession hit in 2008, that’s when the phone stopped ringing,” he says. “And there was mismanagement of the production in-house. It was a big operation. Towards the end, we were handling $8-million contracts. Then, a distributor pulled out and left us with a massive gap in financing. We hobbled over the finish line and then I had no choice but to close the company.”

In fact, he went bankrupt, personally owing more than $2 million to creditors. “FatKat was never profitable,” he says. “Not one year. …Okay, I think we made maybe five grand in 2004. The problem was that everyone was on salary. We became slaves to the salary. I became a slave to the workers. …And all the while, people were saying, ‘Oh, you are the best. You are doing amazing.’ And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell? No I’m not. I’m just trying to stay alive.’”

Still, he shows no sign of bitterness or self-pity. He talks like a man who’s been forged by fire, somehow ennobled by his misadventures. Maybe it’s simply that he’s managed to stay out of trouble since shuttering FatKat and laying off dozens of employees, or that he’s fully embraced what HR gurus like to call “an appropriate work-life balance.” More likely, though, his sanguinity is a consequence of his newest entrepreneurial love interest: A little outfit he calls Loogaroo.

“I’ve taken all the lessons I learned at FatKat and applied them here,” he explains. “This is a very small creative shop. Now, work comes to me. I don’t really have to chase it. We’re not restricted to big clients and their MBAs telling us what we can and can’t do. We do what we want to do.”

As it was, November’s Speech from the Throne concluded with all the spiciness of a bowl of porridge: “Over the course of this session, ministers will provide more details regarding the initiatives and legislation contained in this Speech from the Throne. Your government will also provide details on other programs and policies of importance to all New Brunswickers.”

Indeed, the tract reminded its audience, “Your government began its first steps towards changing the culture of government. To achieve this goal together, the people of New Brunswick have been engaged in historic levels of consultations under the banner Government Renewal.”

Yawn!

“The results of these efforts will include a legislative and budgetary agenda to be considered by this Assembly that will lay the foundation for rebuilding New Brunswick. To be sustainable, however, this new foundation must be built upon the bedrock of trust and collaboration. Only then can our province get back on the road to prosperity while addressing New Brunswickers’ priorities, including investing in jobs; supporting healthy families and an enhanced quality of life; and continuous Government Renewal.”

These declarations were worse than meaningless; they were patently misleading.

Building a sustainable economy in Canada’s second-smallest province does not depend on “a bedrock of trust and collaboration” (though it would be nice if it did). In fact, New Brunswick’s longterm prospects for prosperity rest on the shoulders of public office holders who, having consulted with the people, still choose to face and seriously discuss tough, even deeply unpopular, options.

The debt stands at $10 billion. The annual deficit hovers at $550 million.

What’s the fix?

Is it, for example, to hike all tax rates? Should the provincial government, instead, erect toll stations on highways, cut the provincial public sector by at least 50 per cent, or consolidate (read: close) public schools and hospitals?

Should Cabinet curtail grants, loans and guarantees to businesses (mostly small) that don’t regularly create jobs, stop subsidizing rural governance, toss social development programs into the rubbish bin?

Should Premier David Alward’s team do all of these things? Some? None?

And, if the answer is none of the above, then what are the clear, articulated, credible, plans in store to keep the lions of Wall Street’s bond markets from pressing a button and turning New Brunswick into yet another basket case of the developed world?

You won’t find them in the Throne Speech, because, according to conventional wisdom, this is not the place for them. The 6,000-word address is the exclusive reservation of government writers and their prosaic absurdities: “Our economy is adjusting to international forces, our population is shifting, and our expectations are increasing with new standards and technology. As a province, we are learning to live within this new reality.”

But this is precisely the point: No, we’re not.

What we are learning to do is shut our droopy eyes to the reality of our fiscal circumstance, which is, simply: We can’t afford ourselves. And, apart from Newfoundland and Labrador, neither can this region’s other provinces. (Nova Scotia’s outstanding debt stands at $13 billion; Prince Edward Island, which boasts a population less than Sudbury’s, reels under nearly $2 billion in long-term obligations.)

Private enterprises live and die by the relative worth of their balance sheets. Unless they are big enough or lucky enough to score a government bail-out (which is a different, though not entirely unrelated, problem), their debts drive them to the brink of bankruptcy, and frequently over.

If you imagine that the unthinkable can’t happen to a modern industrial state, consider wayward Greece, whose profligacies are wreaking havoc across the Eurozone, where even mighty Germany has had well-publicized trouble raising capital to finance its spending commitments.

Had I lived in Fort Lauderdale, my soft-hearted gesture might have seemed merely unnecessary. But I didn’t live in Fort Lauderdale. I lived in Moncton. I still do, and over the years of record-breaking accumulations, I have come to believe that the decision I made then actually betrays congenital mushiness in the organ located somewhere north of my big mouth.

Until last Sunday.

That’s when I met a man by the name of Weh-Ming Cho, who lives with his wife  in a nicely appointed bungalow in one of the Hub City’s prettier neighbourhoods. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

About a week ago, after the season’s first, real blast of winter, he posted a squib on the online classified advertising site Kijiji, seeking offers for his snowblower. But it wasn’t just any squib. It was a comedic rant worthy of the late George Carlin writing at his raucously best. It read, in part: “This isn’t some entry level snow blower that is just gonna move the snow two feet away.”

This is an 11 HP Briggs and Stratton machine of snow doom that will cut a 29-inch path of pure ecstasy. And it’s only four years old. I dare you to find a harder working four-year-old. My niece is five and she gets tired and cranky after just a few minutes of shoveling. This guy just goes and goes and goes.”

You know what else? I greased it every year to help keep the water off it and the body in as good a shape as possible. It’s greasier than me when I was 13, and that’s saying something. You know how many speeds it has? Six forward and two reverse. It goes from leisurely slow up to light speed. Seriously, I’ve never gone further than five because it terrifies me.”

Weh-Ming, who now prefers to hire others to move his snow around, explains he was just having some fun. But within hours, something that could only make sense in this Internet-addicted, glued-to-the-blinking-screen age of ours happened. Weh-Ming and his haughty Briggs were getting famous. Everywhere.

Views of the ad jumped from 100 to 1,000, then to 10,000, 50,000, 100,000. By Sunday night, the counter at the bottom of the screed registered more than 300,000 hits. Emails poured in from Europe, New Zealand, the United States. Facebook was on fire. The twitterverse was. . .well, all atwitter, and the mainstream media were muscling for interviews. Who was this guy, and how did he get so funny?

Weh-Ming, who is actually an office worker in real life, graciously complied, chortling merrily for CBC hosts on the regional and national networks. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post gave the ad two thumbs up for hilarity.

I came late to the party, catching wind of the fine fellow’s adventures only after hearing him talk in a radio item late last week. But after checking out his prose online, I recognized a man who had clearly missed his calling. And I began to cogitate.

All my recent efforts to secure a snow-removal contract had come to nothing and I was not looking forward to another winter of sinew-stretching shoveling. My only question was: Why was he selling? He had an answer for that, too.

“I’ll tell you why,” his ad obliged. “Because I heard it was time for you to man up and harness some mighty teeth and claws and chew your way to freedom.”

That was good enough for me, so I sent him an email: “I will buy your snowblower for the listed price, plus the cost of having it shipped over to our place in Moncton. As a professional writer, I think we writer guys ought to stick together on matters of snow jobs!”

He agreed, and the deal was done.

Do I need a snowblower? Yes.

Do I have anywhere to stow it? No.

But when it comes to supporting great scribbling, I believe in putting my money where my big mouth is.

UPDATE: Kudos to Junk-Away Moncton for dropping their cargo, speed-washing their ride and getting their asses in gear just in time to be CTV-filmed taking the fame monster to her new home on the other side of town.

Under the new plan, the utility – a provincial Crown corporation – will be re-integrated, as its separate operating divisions are merged into a single entity. This will effectively end a failed, seven-year experiment with “energy competition” in which generation, distribution and transmission operators were required to bid (if only putatively) on the open market for business. The move will also scrap the New Brunswick System Operator, which had regulated transmission access for all energy players, either real or potential.

According to the blueprint, “The competitive market has not developed in New Brunswick as anticipated, and given what has occurred in British Columbia, Ontario and elsewhere where competitive electricity markets have also failed to thrive, there is little likelihood that it will happen.”

At the same time, however, the utility will be required to buy renewable power from large industrial producers in the province at a premium well above market rates and then sell it back to them significantly discounted – something the official opposition and several commercial organizations characterize as a thinly veiled business subsidy and, therefore, the antithesis of competition.

But perhaps stranger still is the utter absence of any mention of the Mactaquac dam along the St. John River. The structure, which was built in the mid-1960s, is facing replacement, rebuilding or decommissioning at a cost of at least $2 billion. Energy Minister Craig Leonard says the omission is deliberate as the dam’s fate falls just outside of the blueprint’s ten-year timeline.

Still, any soundly managed business incorporates known quantities into its planning process regardless of when these factors are expected to affect the bottom line.

Under the circumstances, how trustworthy is the energy plan’s forecast that, thanks to competitive commercial practices, NB Power’s net debt will drop by $600 million to $4.1 billion by 2021?

Is NB Power becoming more businesslike, or is all this just more evidence of business as usual?

It was, at the time, a revelation – a seemingly inexhaustible supply of comparatively clean, inexpensive energy that ushered in a new industrial revolution, a new era of prosperity and innovation, a new age of economic development unimagined by previous generations. “It” was oil, and, with some chagrin over the past 100 years, the world has come to recognize both its quantitative and qualitative limitations.

Replacing this finite, environmentally harmful and variably costly resource with one that actually lives up to the billing, “endless, pristine and cheap”, is a task that’s proving to be as challenging as any a government can face. Markets, infrastructure, global supply chains, and consumer demand for oil are entrenched, even as, most energy experts agree, the planet is running out of accessible (meaning, cost-effective) reserves of the stuff. Meanwhile, the technologies available to commercialize alternatives other than hydro – particularly wind, tidal, biomass, or energy extracted from dead plants, and solar – remain dear and, in some cases, underdeveloped.

That, at least, seemed to be the New Brunswick Energy Commission’s fatalistic conclusion in its final report this past spring. In characterizing its months-long effort to chart a meaningful course for provincial policy, it stipulated, “Flexibility and transition define the approach of this energy plan. These two words were used during our meetings to describe the approaches we should follow to ‘transition’ to the future and establish our future system with ‘flexibility’ to take advantage of our location and changing energy market conditions.”

Still, if “slow and steady” is the pace this and, indeed, the other Atlantic provinces are selecting for themselves, they are certainly not standing still. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador each maintain comprehensive plans for the development and deployment of renewable energies over the next few years. If some appear farther down the path than others, it’s understandable in a world that still measures its intrinsic power more by the barrels it recovers than by the watts it generates.

Nova Scotia

The K.C. Irving Chair of Sustainable Development at the University of Moncton is decidedly generous with his opinions. And decidedly unapologetic. “All things being equal,” Yves Gagnon says, “Nova Scotia is a leader in terms of development and integration of renewable energy.”

He bases this conclusion on recent policy – to which he contributed – including the province’s 2010 Renewable Energy Plan, which attempts to plot a course to good jobs, stable electricity prices and a cleaner environment by edging away from carbon-based sources of power and towards greener, more local founts. The plan actually commits Nova Scotia to reducing its dependence on imported coal, petroleumcoke and fuel oil – which accounts for about 85 per cent of its electricity portfolio – and expanding its use of renewables to 25 per cent of the mix by 2015. It hopes to vastly improve this performance by 2020.

The Annapolis Tidal Power Plant came online in 1984. It has a capacity of 20 megawatts and a daily output of roughly 80-100 megawatt hours, depending on the tides. Photo by: Communications Nova Scotia / Len Wagg

“To achieve what it wants by that year – 40 per cent renewable energy – Nova Scotia will need to diversify its supply of indigenous renewable energy sources,” Gagnon says. “It can do this by tapping into its abundant wind, biomass and tidal resources – all of which are economically viable, or should be with respect to tidal in the medium term. On a smaller scale, solar power can also contribute to achieve this goal.”

Well, yes and no. Currently, the province possesses only about 280 megawatts of wind-energy capacity, representing about 14 per cent of the province’s electricity requirements during winter peaks. Meanwhile, the condition of tidal and biomass industries is largely precommercial. And solar merits only the briefest mention in the energy plan: “Today, solar is used more economically for air and water heating rather than electricity generation. Its role may expand as the cost of solar technology changes in the future.”

For the former, we can properly blame the largely self-regulated, international financial system and its slathering pursuit of short-term gain. Kiting the prices of essentially worthless mortgage-backed securities whilst skimming hefty profits from their brokered sales was a perfectly legal fraud until the money ran out.

But for this new calamity – not yet fully realized, only just unfolding – we must censure an entirely different culprit: governments who, given the crucial role they played in pulling the world back from the brink three years ago, ought to know better, but evidently, inexplicably, do not.

We speak of debt – mountains of it, oceans of it; so high and so deep, it can be measured only through fanciful journeys to the limits of the imagination. How many billions of dollar bills, piled one atop another, would build a bridge from the Banks of Fundy National Park to the outer rings of Saturn? Hint: We’ve borrowed more for less promising terrestrial pursuits.

Debt incurred by paying for two absurdly costly, and utterly unnecessary, wars has driven a partisan spike into the American political system. As the nation’s bond rating – a measure of its credit worthiness – slips, right-wing hawks in Congress threaten to shut down government until Barack Obama repudiates his plan to raise marginal tax rates on the wealthy as one means to fill the black hole previous right-wing administrations actually dug.

Meanwhile, debt manufactured by forcing the marriage of productive and unproductive countries (Germany’s shotgun hitching to Greece) has compromised, perhaps fatally, the European monetary system and shredded its capacity to support legitimate development. As the largest economic zone on Earth lurches from one sovereign calamity to another, it threatens to topple upon itself, also crushing comparatively healthy jurisdictions half-aworld away.

Even Canada, which the rest of the developed planet now perceives as a rare oasis of sanity, is not immune to moments of fiscal imbecility. Indeed, the government of Stephen Harper is so serious about putting citizens back to work, it’s fishing into its shallow pockets to pay a major consulting firm $90,000 a day for one year to tell it how to stop spending money. The deal with Deloitte Inc. was necessary, explained Finance Minister Jim Flaherty in a refreshing moment of candour, because, though the federal government already pays its civil-service accountants, administrators and economists $100 million a year in wages and benefits, “it isn’t good, quite frankly, for a government to just look at itself.”

In this context, 20 million bucks for a bunch of private-sector suits, who possess, at least on paper, virtually identical educational backgrounds and skills as their Treasury Board and Department of Finance counterparts, is a bargain at twice the price. For, surely, the first piece of winsome advice these efficiency experts will proffer is: “Dump the numbskulls whose jobs you’re getting us to do.”

Still, for sheer cock-eyed lunacy, nothing beats the C.D. Howe Institute’s recent conclusion that “Ottawa, Ontario and New Brunswick set the standard for transparency and comprehensiveness in helping readers understand the relationship of results to budget plans… The key figures are easy to find, comparisons of results to budgets are clearly presented using the same accounting, and the relevant auditors expressed no major reservations.”

These findings must have come as happy, if wholly unexpected, news to New Brunswick Finance Minister Blaine Higgs, who recently likened his task of acquiring accurate, monthly financial reports from his government’s various departments to getting blood from a stone. “The information isn’t available,” he said publicly. “It’s as simple as that. I haven’t said I’m giving up on it. I’ve just said I haven’t gotten it yet. I don’t intend to give up on any of this.”

First avarice, then stupidity. Now we know what they mean when they call it a “double-dip” recession.

I, myself, could not resist the temptation to jab away. After all, anything would be better, including and in no particular order:  “New Brunswick: What’s not to love (about ten months of winter)?” and “New Brunswick is a state of mind (if you’re nuts)” and my personal favorite “I lost my car keys and all I got was this lousy province.”

Still, Graham was adamant, insisting at a public event, “Our brand is first and foremost about people. Throughout the brand’s development, that’s something New Brunswickers told us was important to them. . .This brand for our province, our government and its residents lets us tell a powerful story about what it means to live and work in New Brunswick.”

Maybe he was right after all, if profligacy and waste in high office defines “what it means to live and work in New Brunswick”.

Testimony before the province’s Public Accounts committee last week suggested that the total cost to develop the slogan (which the Tory government unceremoniously dumped earlier this year) may have exceeded $1 million, roughly four times the original $230,000 budget.

Quoted by Brunswick News, Tim Porter, deputy minister of Communications New Brunswick, explained the overrun to committee this way: “In the previous government, the decision was made to go outside and use private-sector companies to do the research, to do the development and there is a cost associated with that. . .It was a noble idea, but when it came down to convincing New Brunswickers, it was a tougher concept to grasp.”

Given the province’s $850-million annual deficit and $10-billion long-term debt, it’s safe bet New Brunswickers will soon clamor for another, more relevant slogan for their land of happy spendthrifts. Something they can certainly grasp. Something along the lines of: “New Brunswick: Where money’s no object (because we don’t have any).”

But a Moncton-based gaming studio is betting that the couple’s famously televised tribulations will continue to titillate fans in the virtual world. According to George Donovan, CEO of Gogii Games – which collaborates with game-makers across Canada and Europe – work is nearly complete on Shannon Tweed: Attack of the Groupies. And, apparently, its namesake couldn’t be more delighted.

“It’s been a lot of fun learning about this industry,” she said earlier this week in a statement. “It’s taking off so fast now. Gene and I are really excited to get the final product out so our fans can enjoy it.”

Added Donovan: “Meeting Shannon was one of those random moments in life. She is so vibrant and after listening to her speak, I knew her story tied into the type of game that we wanted to build.”

Tweed’s story is, in fact, the stuff of entertainment legend.

Born in St. John’s in 1957, she was raised on a mink ranch in the community of Whitbourne. She moved with her family to Saskatoon. Later, she posed for Playboy, became Playmate of the Month and then Playmate of the Year for 1982, before launching a successful career in film and television.

In 1983, she met Simmons and the two have been together ever since (they married earlier this month), though her companion’s predilection for pretty girls has provided the dramatic arc of their story and an essential fan-baiting mechanism in their hit reality show Gene Simmons: Family Jewels.

Attack of the Groupies features Tweed’s gaming alter ego fighting off a horde of rampaging lovelies who are “desperately trying to gain access to her life and love.” According to a Gogii news release, the game “is a tongue in cheek look at what really happens backstage. Featuring stereotypical groupies inspired by Tweed’s stories, the game allows players to unlock exclusive, rarely seen content of the life of the starlet.”

Rarely seen content? Is that even possible when it comes to one of the world’s most over-exposed couples? One thing’s for sure: All’s fair in love and war. Especially when there’s money to be made.