End of the line or new beginning?

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On Saturday some friends of ours took the train from St. Stephen to McAdam to see the restored train station—and loved it. Since I haven’t made the trip, I decided to check it out online.

The McAdam Railway Station is one of the three crown jewels of railway history in this area. The other two are Ministers Island and the Algonquin Hotel, and all three were built under the direction of the great railway czar, Sir William Van Horne. Today all three face an uncertain future.

By the time you read this we’ll have a new government in place. One of its first tasks is addressing the future of the provincially owned Algonquin Hotel—as the operating lease with Fairmont Hotels comes to an end in the next few months. The question is, will the Fairmont renew the lease? And does the province actually want them to?

As it stands the Province of New Brunswick takes a share of the profits of the hotel. But it absorbs the full impact of any losses. That translates into a risk-free deal for the Fairmont. It’s no surprise that the hotel—and the similarly managed golf course—have been losing money, with an accrued public loss of tens of millions of dollars. Faced with a growing provincial debt, there’s a real incentive to solve the Algonquin problem.

There’s another side to the problem. Since the province is the owner of the property, it’s the province’s responsibility to keep it up. That means constant renovating. Again, it’s no surprise to learn that this hasn’t been happening. Despite the efforts of hotel management, the hotel is tired. The last major renovations took place in the late 1980s with the addition of the new wing and conference facilities. Many of the 234 rooms are not air conditioned, and a large section is closed in the winter. Any business case would show that the hotel is currently unsustainable.

But there’s also a counter-intuitive logic behind this losing proposition. The hotel is the mainstay of the area’s tourism. There is no hotel of its size between Bangor and Saint John, and it directly and indirectly contributes millions of dollars a year to the local economy. The cash that the government “loses” in the Algonquin every year could be compared to the money it “loses” on other attractions in the province, such as the $1.3 million it spends on King’s Landing, or the $1.5 million it spends on the Acadian Village.

So, what should the next government do if the Fairmont doesn’t renew its lease? Should it simply look for a new tenant? It could. That’s the current model in the hotel industry. Most brand-name hotel chains no longer own their own properties. Developers do; the operators simply lease the properties.

If the government chooses that option, it would need to invest between $15 million to $25 million in updating the property. It would also have to commit to investing in regular upgrades, more than it’s done in the past. Given the province’s finances, this scenario may be unlikely.

The easy option is to put the hotel up for sale.

But is there a third option? I think so.

No one can make a good business case for an old railway hotel without having a large major attraction—such as a national park—located nearby to draw a big audience. There are numerous examples. Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel has Banff. The Stanley Hotel in Colorado has the Rocky Mountain National Park and Awhawnee Hotel in California has Yosemite. All three of these parks draw over a million people a year to their respective areas—providing a strong customer-base for the hotels.

So how would we create such an attraction here? Perhaps it’s a master plan to create the Fundy Bay National Marine Park & Railway. Its land-based headquarters would be set on Ministers Island, to be developed as a eco-sustainability interpretive site. The marine-rail park would be the end point of a new railway development relinking St. Andrews to Montreal, including the McAdam station and other points of interest. The goal would be attracting 500,000+ new visitors a year by road and rail to New Brunswick.

The set-piece of the new marine-rail park would be a freshly restored, “greened” and upscaled Algonquin Hotel. The number of hotel rooms should be nearly cut in half, to no more than 150 rooms. The “new” wing of the hotel could be redeveloped and sold as condo units. Another portion of the hotel could be turned into a private clinic for international medicine, such as plastic surgery, allowing patients to recover in the relative privacy of St. Andrews.

It’s a tall order. The total investment might go as high as $200 million. The 250 km. of NB rail alone would cost about $75 million. But we’re talking about a 100-year investment and planning for a post-fossil fuel world. The investment is a mere $2 million a year to create “the eco-adventure of a lifetime.”

The real work, of course, is not funding it or building it. It’s learning to think at on an entirely new scale. As Van Horne might have done when he was building the first 100-year railway.

Telling you what you want to hear, doing another

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CBC Radio reported this morning that most people are concerned about health care and the economy, yet very few people seem to be concerned about the effects of the massive provincial debt.

And a few minutes later commentators discussed Canadian household debt, ranking us second highest among the G8 countries, right behind the U.S. The conclusion? That 7% of Canadian households are "living on the brink," especially if interest rates go up slightly.

In an unrelated CBC story, access to mental health care in New Brunswick was a big issue. No wonder. When the economy goes south, stress levels rise. We suffer financially—and emotionally.

If I were the next leader of the province what would I do? First, I’d admit that we’re in tough shape. Second, rather than making promises, I’d set priorities and find real "how to" solutions. And the first priority is getting New Brunswickers to collaborate on a new vision.

That vision would focus on two main fundamentals—natural resources and human resources. New Brunswick is facing the decline of both. We also have a small, widely dispersed population, with three main cities and numerous small towns making it a difficult province to service.

Our population is aging. Health care, drug plans and affordable seniors’ housing will take up more of the provincial budget. And with more options out of province our youth continue to leave.

Simply put, we need to relocalize, re-energize, reskill and retool. Here are a few ideas.

1. Reduce unessential government spending. Reduce strict bilingualism, start to hire best people for the job in each language, not necessarily bilingual. Put a fork in ‘pork barrel’ regional projects and end handouts to the biggest corporations. Trim government staff by 5%. Refocus the government on the essentials: creating opportunities for the next generation.

2. Form an alliance with Quebec on francophone youth culture and economic development.

3. Create an Atlantic energy consortium. Build a DC tie-line to Churchill Falls, Labrador. Create a combined off-shore wind–in-stream tidal array up the length of the Bay of Fundy to generate 2000 megawatts of electricity. Retire Colson Cove and Point Lepreau power plants as soon as possible. Introduce competition in the natural gas sector.

4. Provide innovation subsidies to small manufacturers, small agri/aquacultural operations, "green" tech and knowledge-based businesses. Create a "New Brunswick supplier program" for all government contracts adding a 10% surtax on out-of-province suppliers.

5. Rebuild the entire residential housing inventory to 21st Century energy efficiency standards. This could require a $20 billion investment over 10 years—or $2 billion a year, refunded by a 5% sales tax on the sale of all residential real estate and on all building materials, and a 2% tax on home heating energy consumption. Full payback could be achieved in 40 years. A government corporation will be set up oversee the retrofitting.

6. Offer free post-secondary education to all permanent New Brunswick residents—with the proviso that graduates remain in the province for three years after graduating and sign a binding contract to pay 5% of their salaries to a provincial education fund for five years. Centralize post-secondary administration. Create an entrepreneurial youth development program in partnership with the province’s business sector. Develop early multi-functional learning: start arts and trades, increase focus on basics: language and grammar, math and conceptual problem solving.

7. Increase public–private sector partnerships. Take an ownership position in new private technology–manufacturing startups. Introduce significant locally-grown, locally-produced purchase mandates for large out-of-province food retailers—including a 500-kilometer diet component.

8. Stop building new 4-lane highways. Introduce high quality subsidized inter-city commuter bus service with wi-fi internet service, etc., mandate car-pooling and add a gas-guzzler tax on vehicles and investigate new transportation options. Build a new Atlantic Canada fast-freight, roll-on-roll-off rail network with the Maritimes, Quebec and Maine, and develop a new transportation services marketing corporation.

9. Financially assist the health of the province’s three main cities to increase urban–pedestrian livability, and reduce suburban–commuter development through increased taxation. Plan and begin building a fund to construct an inter-city commuter rail service.

10. Provide a provincial drug plan and free dental care for all New Brunswick residents. Create an employer-employee contribution component.

11. Find federal assistance to create a 15-year partial moratorium on the fishery. Establish protection for old growth forests to cover at least 20% of the province’s landmass...

and so on... In short, we need fewer promises and less political combativeness—and more collaboration and healthy competition across all sectors. It’s time to get tough on ourselves. If the dream is to reduce poverty and build a youth-driven middle class, we need to create an environment that gives our young people more options. Business as usual is not an option.

The simple premise is this. If we create a healthier environment we’ll create a healthier long-term economy. We need to envision New Brunswick as the best place to live and work on the continent. That’s the real challenge for the next crew we send to Fredericton. Let’s wish them all the very best.

Recommended reading for politicians this week: Lester Brown’s "Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."

Politics: where soul meets the real world

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Do we have the political resources we need?

This occurred to me as I listened to provincial PC leader David Alward answer questions on a CBC Radio call-in show this morning. He kept using the words, “I believe,” to preface what he and his party planned to do if elected.

Soul and belief have a long history. What is soul? To paraphrase philosopher Thomas Moore, the soul is a kind of interior workspace in which we work out issues between our internal nature (or spiritual being) and the physical world. In Jungian terms, soul might be seen as a waiting room between the conscious and the unconscious mind.

Our souls, putting aside any specific religious notions of the word, crave something more than mere survival. Our souls are aspirational. Our souls want to shape the world into something more than the sum of its parts. Everything we do, from the making art to the creation great societies is soul work.

But soul work also has a dark side. Politics, more than any other endeavour brings out that darkness. The rise of fascism in Germany 75 years ago is one of the most dramatic examples. While surfing the YouTube a few nights ago, Sharon came across an old war documentary made by Alfred Hitchcock. His crew had recorded the Nazi death camps as the American Army arrived. The movie is beyond disturbing. Our horrific capacity for inhumanity is right there in stark black and white.

Local activist Larry Lack, never one to shy away from the dark side, called in to the radio show this morning. He challenged David Alward to shut down the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant, citing the huge ongoing expense of developing a technology that was far from being “green.” At first Alward ignored the question and promoted the project as a necessary and worthwhile government investment. Lack probed deeper, and Alward simply acknowledging that their opinions differed.

Nuclear power, in a most visible way, demonstrates the conflicted soul of ingenuity. The nuclear promise is cheap electrical power. The dark price of that power is radioactive nuclear waste that can’t be safely stored anywhere on the planet, and will remain a threat to living organisms for tens of thousands of years. And I needn’t stress the very real prospect of turning nuclear waste into nuclear weapons.

Back to the radio show, most of the callers dealt with more immediate concerns. Access to doctors and drug plans for seniors were hot topics. Alward did his best not to weld himself to any specific promises while trying to satisfy the voters.

The trouble with that is neither the voters nor the politicians want to look at the real issues. What are those issues? The issues, as always, are physical resources and human energy. New Brunswick is relatively resource poor. Its forests and fisheries are depleted. It doesn’t have sources of abundant cheap energy, such as Churchill Falls in Labrador. And it doesn’t have any large local reserves of fossil fuel. But on the positive side, it does have 800,000 tonnes of potash reserves to help support its agriculture industry. Instead 95% of its potash is planned for export. So the question is, with limited resources, how can our politicians give the voters everything they want? The simple answer is, of course, they can’t. They have to get creative.

The easiest way for a politician to be creative is to shield the voter from the truth. It becomes politics as usual—“the art of the possible.” But real creativity requires more soul searching.

For example, on the energy front, the province could form a coalition between the Atlantic provinces to collectively develop greener sources of energy. One of these projects could easily be the construction of a new DC tie line across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the aforementioned Churchill Falls. The falls has the potential to produce far more cheap power than we can use, and the government of Newfoundland would like nothing better than to have customers other than just Quebec for its hydro power.

Making the most of human energy depends on aspiration. As individuals, we gravitate toward our dreams. So what is the New Brunswick dream? For many of us, unfortunately, the dream is merely to survive. And that may not be good enough.

In the next radio program, the CBC crew went to Saskatoon to report on the economic boom underway there. Saskatoon has become an aspirational place. Fortunes are being made there in oil, potash and hi-tech. Car dealerships are selling $100,000+ vehicles. The arts community is thriving. Newcomers are arriving daily from the rest of Canada. The city has grown 10%, from 200,000 to 220,000 in the last three years. Saskatoon has the resources the world wants.

My concern would be, what will they do when their frontier runs out of resources? That’s a prospect we New Brunswickers already face. But do we have the courage to do the soul work to create a better future for ourselves? Not if we listen our current political leaders.

Real aspiration for this province seems to be in stunningly short supply.

New Brunswick provincial election snooze alert

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You might think operative word in this week’s title is “snooze.” But you should take another look. This election is a little different—at least here in the southwest corner of the province.

The first sign is the appearance of four parties on the slate: the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, Green Party and People’s Alliance of New Brunswick. Each of these parties should offer us a different set of options—if we get past our own personal habit of treating politics like religion, you know, the “I was born a (blank) and I’ll die that way” sort of thing.

That kind of belief is, of course, branding and it’s the type of blind loyalty that companies like Coke and McDonalds spend billions of dollars to insert under our thick skulls. Our major political parties invest heavily in their brands and you can see it in their signs: the red and white “Canadian flag” Liberals, and the red, white and blue “true-blue patriotic” Conservatives, and so on. And don’t think that these cheesy efforts to control your emotional mind won’t work—they work extremely well. For more about this, google Edward Bernays who pretty much invented the idea of modern propaganda and also happened—not so coincidentially—to be Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Or for a lighter touch listen to Terry O’Reilly’s ‘Age of Persuasion’ show on CBC Radio.

Back to this election, the CBC News website informs us that “Charlotte-Campobello is shaping up to be one of the best four-party races and is considered to be one of the handful of ridings that could see one of the non-traditional parties winning a seat.”

Before looking at these non-traditionals, let’s review the two traditional parties. First, the Progressive Conservatives. As you know, MLA Tony Huntjens is not rerunning. In a heated contest, Curtis Mallock from Campobello won over St. Andrews’ Mayor John Craig who’s gone over to the new People’s Alliance to stay in the hunt. According to his PC bio, Mallock is a long time Conservative, a political organizer, a volunteer firefighter, a community worker and a fisherman. Mallock is as traditional as his party, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The PC party platform is pretty straight ahead too. They’ll bash the Liberals as hard as they can for the collapsed sale of NB Power to Quebec. And the new PC leader, David Alward, will save us all.

Facing off against Mallock on the Liberal side is Annabelle Juneau. She grew up in a business family and has worked as a real estate agent, Border Services employee, and a tourism business operator before retiring in 2009. She’s also an active community volunteer and “supports an environmentally clean and safe” Charlotte-Campobello. Like Mallock, Juneau is what I would term a ‘safe’ candidate. The incumbent Liberals are offering us more goodies, because they can. Shawn Graham promises to protect existing jobs and create new ones. He’s big on economic development. He wants more doctors for the province, wants to support the farmers, will put $10 million into a new college in Miramichi, and so on. Their slogan? “The Future Matters.” Well, duh.

And now for the upstarts, John Craig and the new People’s Alliance first. Craig’s bio tells us that he’s been Mayor of St. Andrews for the past 9 years, works in a retail grocery store, has been a volunteer firefighter, town councillor, public safety chairman and is a good family man. What is omitted is his role as a strong opponent of LNG development in Passamaquoddy Bay, which would endear him to most of us living around the bay. His main limitation is that he’s been politically St. Andrews-centric. His party is basically a conservative populist entity focused on lowering taxes, cutting government spending and giving the ordinary Jane and Joe a voice in Fredericton. Their communications, led by long time activist Art MacKay, also includes some notions about the use of nuclear waste for power (a good thing, they think) and regional economic development (a good thing, I think).

Not least is Janice Harvey and her Green Party. Unlike the other three, Harvey does not seem to be running a big marketing campaign. That might be too bad, because she stands, in my opinion, heads and shoulders above the other three candidates. Harvey delivers experience and sophisticated level of understanding to the job, and would bring real national connections to this riding. She is a provincially recognized political commentator, an excellent policy analyst and someone who stays in touch with the front lines working for organizations like the Fundy North Fishermen’s Association. As for her party, of which she is the New Brunswick leader, the name “Green” says it all.

So, fellow voters, we have some real choices. We can put on the blinders and vote the way our parents did on election day. Or we can try something different. For me it’s no contest. We can either find the courage to send our best people off to do the job—or keep snoozing along with business as usual, New Brunswick style.

Sticking with a moribund political status quo is not just a local-provincial problem, it's an international problem. Voters everywhere are suffering from a disconnect between their intentions at the ballot box and the actions of their political parties.

We need people who have the courage to find real solutions to mounting global resource problems, and we need those people right now.

If our major party politicians can't—or won't—deliver these solutions, we need to start electing people who can.

What we see is not what we are

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Only 4% of the universe is matter as we know it. The other 96% is made up of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” about which not a heck of a lot is known other than it’s invisible. I won’t bore you with the astrophysics; it’s all pretty complicated.

Suffice to say that what we see is not all there is. We see only a small portion of light, for example. The visible spectrum runs from infrared to ultraviolet. We don’t even know exactly what light is, so scientists have come up with a combination of particles and waves in “packets” to explain the phenomenon, and in doing so invented quantum physics. Quantum physics is all about determining probabilities, and it’s based on the observation that particles can apparently wink in and out of existence.

Okay, so why should you care? Well simply put, everything we do is the direct result of light, so it’s a rather important to our survival. Every time you fill up your tank with gasoline, you’re using up sunlight that’s been stored underground for millions of years. Right up to 150 years ago, all work was done using sunlight in real time. The sun provided light for photosynthesis, which allowed the grass to grow to feed the horses that plowed the fields to grow the food that our forebears harvested and ate. As we use up finite reserves of fossil fuel, our grandchildren will have to figure out how to collect more energy from the sun.

There is still lots of fossil fuel left, of course. We’ve only used half the supply, so we have some time to figure it out. And there are still new oil discoveries, like the recent find near Greenland, which some experts are predicting will supply us with 90 billion barrels of oil. That seems like a lot. How much? Well, the world currently uses 30 billion barrels a year, so that’ll give us another three whole years.

Of course there are options. But making use of new options will require major changes in our thinking. We might have to abandon highways and personal vehicles. We may need to “desktop” energy generation on our rooftops and load it back into the grid. We may have to start thinking about integrating processes such as energy storage and metallurgy (which Dr. Dan Sadoway at MIT is working on). We may have to rethink our entire infrastructure—physical and social—if we want to maintain some semblance of our current standard of living.

Options are the keys. Jared Diamond talks about this in Guns, Germs and Steel. His basic premise is that the most successful societies were and are those with the most resources, a sufficient population density, the ability to grow lots of food, enough leisure time to be creative, and proximity to other, similarly endowed societies with whom they could trade and compete.

At the end of the book he summarizes the two other determinants for healthy, long-term societies: fragmentation and unity. He compares the histories of China and Europe. China, which led the world in technology for more than a 1000 years has always enjoyed a geographic predisposition toward unity. It was a single, large land-mass with few geographic barriers. As such it was relatively easy to maintain as an empire. Europe, on the other hand, was smaller with more geographic barriers. This created a more fragmented set of social systems, and a lot more competition. China fell behind Europe due to its unity. About 500 years ago, China’s small ruling class decided to isolate the empire from the rest of the world, allowing its technology to stagnate. At the same time Europe provided adventurers such as Columbus with lots of options for financing their exploration. This abundance of fragmented options gave individuals the resources they needed to find a wealth of riches in new frontiers.

The last 500 years has been a giant leap forward in technology. Diamond’s theory of fragmentation and unity resonates with innovative business leaders, too. The new business model is based on small, competitive, highly communicative units working within a larger context—think about small “experience design” units at Apple computer competing with Microsoft and Google. The entire business model has evolved over the last 30 years. It’s a new micro-macro creative model.

Theories of evolution have changed too. Dr. Mark Pagel in England thinks that species evolve in response to rare environmental events—such as shifts in climate. He and others, including geneticists, are beginning to view evolution as a series of leaps.

Creativity works the same way. Being creative is not a steady state process. Inspiration and passion come in fits and starts, as does the creative work. And it requires specific ingredients: social openness and curiosity, competition, resources and options and more.

All this makes me question whether our little corner of the world has enough of these key options on which to build a vibrant knowledge-based economy. As much as I’d like to say we do, my recent experience tells me I’m not so sure. How many options do we really have?

Maybe, like dark matter, there's more going on than we can see.