It’s not the brutal winters that lure humanity to the Great White North’s diverse rural and urban landscapes. It’s the absence of intellectual straight-jackets. We manifest the simple proposition that rational accommodation is the one enduring gift a true civilization bestows on its members.

Lately, though, this nation of 32-million souls has been losing its deft touch. Our emerging solitudes, displaying both American intensity and British stratification, are now almost too numerous to count: East versus West; rich versus poor; resource industries versus manufacturing ones; the over-educated versus the under-skilled, both unemployed.

Precisely when this happened is hard to know. But it is clear that our major media have, for some time, mongered intergenerational warfare to divide and conquer the watching, listening and (even ccasionally) reading public and, of course, the advertisers who follow them. A recent edition of Canada’s leading organ of preening self-regard sharpens the point.

“We are the gilded generation,” columnist and professional provocateur Margaret Wente writes about her fellow baby boomers in the Globe and Mail. “Things have always gone our way . . . Should we . . . feel guilty about this? I think so. We like to say we earned it, and I guess, in part, we did. But we also won the birth-year lottery. Perhaps we shouldn’t cling so stubbornly to our entitlements . . . Perhaps it’s time we pay it forward.”

It’s too late for that, declares her 20-something opponent Dakshana Bascaramurty in mock outrage. She’s a so-called “millennial” who “resents” the fact that she and the rest of her cohort “already have to start saving for our retirement, even as we pay for the mistakes of the older generation . . . For the most part, the boomers will keep enjoying what they’ve always enjoyed.” The conclusions from both sides of the debate – which occupied two full pages of prime editorial real estate – are no more fortifying than a face full of plastic glitter. But that is the point of the exercise, after all: To inflame, rather than inform, public opinion.

In fact, the Globe’s calculating masters don’t seek a solution; they want an argument. And, in this, they, and others like them in the Fourth Estate, have learned their lessons from political tutors who have, over the past 10 years, decided that Canada is no place for a reasonable conversation.

Premier of Ontario Dalton McGuinty screams blue murder over the deleterious effects of Alberta’s oil sands development on the Canadian dollar, whose value, he complains, is now too high to secure his province’s competitive edge in export markets. He doesn’t bother to mention that Ontario already receives tens-of-billions of dollars a year in industrial benefits from the western bitumen boom.

Alberta Premier Allison Redford responds in like, petulant fashion, claiming that the durable future of the Canadian economy lies in the land of the setting sun and implying, to the delight of her gritty, chippy electoral base, that this new natural order of things is as welcome as it is overdue.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cavalier of cabineteers continue their remorseless, relentless project to replace the very underpinnings of Confederation – to, in effect, set the provinces free to fight each other for the ever-dwindling attention and resources of the federal government – as they cut spending on programs Canadians need in favour of those they don’t.

How can procuring 65 new fighter jets in a time of relative peace or erecting new prisons in an age of falling crime rates compare in importance or relevance to improving access to health care? You may ask this, but don’t expect a thoughtful rejoinder. In Canada ver. 2.0, you are more apt to be reviled as a traitor, terrorist or worse, tree-hugger – such is the level to which public discourse has sunk.

In a society that is becoming increasingly tribal in its obsessions, it’s easy to overlook the fact that we no longer elect people who have our best, or even basic, interests at heart. And the only conversation they want us to carry on is the one that echoes in our small, divisive, intolerant minds.

They were expecting it like a bill come due, with an odd mixture of dread and resignation. So, when the Swiss-based Xstrata PLC announced in February 2010 that it would not close down Brunswick Mine No. 12 after all, the relief among the 900-strong workforce was palpable. “What it means,” said Euclide Hache, a spokesman for the United Steelworkers union which represented them, “is that some people are going to continue to work, and not going to have to leave their homes.”

Behind the good news, however, was the achingly obvious: This was not a new lease on life for the half-century-old lead-zinc colliery near Bathurst in northern New Brunswick; it was merely a reprieve, purchased by fortuitously high metal prices in global markets. That fact was certainly not lost on many business leaders in the province who declared that the future of the regional economy depended, as always, on its steady industrial diversification.

Indeed, theirs was only the latest expression of a familiar refrain in economic development circles (typically in the southern cities), which insisted that the good, old days of natural resources — mining, forestry, the fishery — in New Brunswick were all but over. It was time to move on, to chart a course with the new, more durable tools of prosperity, to embrace the promise of “knowledge-loving” enterprise.

Now, two years later, as Brunswick Mine continues to await its inevitable shuttering, industry observers do not wholly repudiate the received wisdom, (economic variegation is still a key driver of long-term growth everywhere on the planet). But they do wonder if New Brunswickers truly appreciate the potential of the remaining wealth that lies buried beneath their feet.

“This province has long been blessed with a diverse and rich mineral endowment,” says David Plante, manager of the New Brunswick Mining Association. “Of the 22 major mineral commodities produced in Canada, we actually produce 18. In 2010, the value of mineral production in this province was $1.15 billion. That was off our record peak of $1.54 billion in 2007. But it still represents the greatest value per square kilometer of mineral production of any jurisdiction in Canada.”

This tends to explain why Plante and others prefer to see the impending closure of Brunswick Mine as merely the end of one particular era in a series of epochs that stretch in both directions along the temporal continuum. “The province’s mining history begins with the first coal extraction 350 years ago on the Grand Lake region,” he says. “Where we are is at the end of what I call the modern age, which began in the early 1950s with Brunswick Mine. Where we go, what the future holds for us in this province, is really quite interesting.”

And potentially lucrative.

In a recent blog post for the Globe and Mail, Moncton-based economist and consultant, David Campbell, wrote: “The Canadian economy has undergone a fairly profound shift over the past 10 years. The biggest change has been a shift in our goods-producing economy from value-added manufacturing to non-renewable resources development. As a share of total exports, fabricated metal manufacturing exports are down by 28 per cent. Meanwhile, oil and gas exports are up from only $104 out of every $1,000 worth of exports in 2001 to nearly double that figure over the first nine months of 2011. Mining sector exports as a share of total exports have increased 273 per cent and now represent the third most-important export sector.”

In an interview, Campbell expanded his point. “Natural resources have become so critical to the economy that if we decided to shut down the oil sands, it would have a massive ripple effect across the country. As for some people in New Brunswick who like to complain about Alberta, I would point out that we are up to our eyeballs in (oil sands wealth) through transfer payments and through direct jobs created . . . The question for me is whether places like New Brunswick are going to get on that bandwagon and develop their natural resources in a fair, equitable and environmentally sensitive way.”

Economic guru Donald Savoie doesn’t mean to parrot an episode of reality TV’s “Till Debt Do Us Part,” whose annoying host invariably lands like a cop on the doorstep of prof ligate marrieds to tell them to turn off the music because the party’s over.

It’s just that for three years, the Université de Moncton’s Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance has been struggling to persuade Joe and Jane Maritimer that the wretched condition of public finances is every bit as real and urgent as their own (which are, according to the Conference Board of Canada, historically compromised by runaway consumer spending). “Put it this way,” he says. “Your house is mortgaged, you have no cash, so you buy your groceries with your credit card . . . That’s where some of our governments are right now. And it can’t last.”

The problem is that people rarely make such connections until they’re denied some of their privileges of citizenship. Then, suddenly, affordable health care and state-funded education — indeed, all the things we think our taxes purchase for us in perpetuity — become as ardently missed as a repossessed plasma TV or a seized leather sectional. Just ask the hapless, rioting people of Greece, whose government — its debt grown so large that bond markets have, on occasion, refused to f loat even its quotidian expenses — has savagely curtailed pensions and tax breaks.

Of course, Atlantic Canada is not Hellas. Not yet, at any rate.

“We can continue to go blindly down the road and keep spending, keep raising our debt levels and keep thinking all will be well,” says Savoie, who is writing a book on the subject. “The fact is, though, all will not be well. Increasingly, we are looking at a bad case scenario. Financial markets will be the iron curtain that comes down. When they start telling us what we can and can’t afford, then we’re in real trouble . . . It would be like having an outsider show up at your house to give you an allowance.”

Exactly how bad is it? The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC) paints a grim picture. Nova Scotia’s longterm debt now stands at nearly $14 billion. Newfoundland and Labrador’s is $7.8 billion. Prince Edward Island’s is $1.9 billion. New Brunswick’s is clocking in at $10.2 billion. This gives the region of some 2.4-million souls a combined fiscal burden of $33.6 billion, one of the deepest per capita holes of any jurisdiction or region, with a comparable population, in North America.

Just as troubling are the provinces’ rolling, annual deficits, caused in no small part by their debt servicing obligations. Nova Scotia’s is currently $365 million; Prince Edward Island’s is $73.4 million; and New Brunswick’s is topping $550 million. Revised estimates from Newfoundland and Labrador’s Department of Finance suggest the province will post a surplus by the end of the fiscal 2011-12 (as much as $59 million), before falling back into the red (by $495 million) the following year.

Still, the situation is not uniformly bleak in all corners of the region. Newfoundland and Labrador will continue to benefit from its massive oil and gas resources, which will bolster the province’s finances for years to come. Nova Scotia, meanwhile, will benefit from a $25-billion Royal Canadian Navy shipbuilding contract, which is expected to increase provincial GDP by $661 million a year and employ as many as 11,000 skilled workers over the next three decades.

Atlantic Canada’s real problem children are P.E.I. and New Brunswick. Especially New Brunswick.

“I would have to rank public debt as the most serious issue that province faces,” says APEC president Elizabeth Beale. “Its debt and deficit position (have) been growing over the past few years in part because of the decisions governments have taken. At the same time, the slowdown in the U.S. economy endangers New Brunswick most of all because it is, among all provinces in the region, linked to American manufacturing and related export markets.”

A December 31 story in London’s Daily Mail predicts that the formerly “great” Britain, the home of blood pudding, warm ale, druidical henges, and so much consumer debt that corner grocers can’t install pin-card readers fast enough, will become an economic powerhouse by 2050.

Indeed, the UK will be “the biggest economy in Europe with one of the wealthiest populations in the world . . . It will jump from being the sixth wealthiest country in the world to third, based on national income per head. Only people in the United States and Canada will be more prosperous.”

Or so claims Goldman Sachs, about which U.S. Senator Carl Levin once raged: “They were self-interested promoters of risky schemes. They bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got the credit rating agencies to label them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold and profiting at the expense of their clients.”

Yeah, those guys.

Still, we need not look this far afield to observe the insidious effects on the average Joe and Jane of corporate disingenuousness, though, perhaps, not on the breathtaking scale of Goldman Sachs.

The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council reports that over the past decade industrial players in this region, which complain about a pervasive shortage of skills, have created nearly four times as many low-wage jobs as higher-end ones, even as they have earned sometimes record profits.

“In the private sector, the creation of 14,300 high-wage jobs in construction over the decade was not sufficient to offset the loss of 28,500 positions in manufacturing,” the think tank declares in one of its recent epistles. “The net creation of 11,000 new jobs in high-wage industries between 2001-2010 came from an expansion of the public sector, which added 13,000 jobs in public administration and education.”

And it gets worse.

“Looking forward, public administration and education will not be a major source of high-wage job creation in the Atlantic region . . . as federal and provincial governments focus on deficit-reduction, and school enrollments are projected to decline,” APEC writes. “Meanwhile, in the private sector, flat housing markets and major project activity will limit high-wage job growth in construction and professional services over the next few years, except in Newfoundland and Labrador.”

Even there, though, where $40-billion in major energy programs are gearing up to provide historic boons to the once-benighted eastern tip of Canada, the gulf between the corporate sector’s tight-fisted accumulation of capital and its responsibility for building and maintaining a competitive workforce is growing.

“Employers across the province are having trouble hiring tradespeople for new projects and other positions,” a Globe and Mail piece asserted in December. “Thousands of people continue to leave home to find employment elsewhere – notably in Alberta’s oil fields – as Newfoundland suffers a 13.2-per-cent jobless rate.” It’s a circumstance about which Premier Kathy Dunderdale can only observe glumly, “We know it’s a problem.”

You bet it is.

If we are determined to avoid becoming a region of clerks, waiters and other ignoble varieties of counter help, industry must start investing in the people who protect its long-term productivity and profits. This means parting with some of the cash it’s been hoarding since the downfall of global financial markets and establishing training programs for the workers it needs to remain relevant, innovative and fully engaged in the global marketplace.

People don’t serve the economy. They are the economy.

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?