Rural New Brunswick must stand up and be represented

I predict that the future of New Brunswick rests with its local communities. Two decades of globalization following two decades of ‘provincialization’ has left citizens disempowered and communities hamstrung. New pressures of all sorts – economic, social and ecological – are going to make life a lot more difficult in the coming decades. The only way we are going to deal with them is for all citizens to re-imagine our collective future and set about achieving it. This is best done at the local level where people live and work. For that to happen, local governance needs to be re-organized and communities given the power to chart their own course and the tools they need for the journey.

This government has set this in motion with its local governance reforms. The potential is there for a revitalization of our province from the bottom up. But if rural New Brunswick does not want to be dictated to by municipal interests (which are well represented in the news), they had better get on the local governance train. Either rural dwellers become engaged in shaping the future or it will be shaped for them and they may not like what they get.

True to his word, local government minister Bruce Fitch is not forcing amalgamations or new governance structures on anyone. But he is providing a great deal of incentive for rural areas currently without any local representation to take a good hard look at it. The regional service commissions recently announced will entrench some basic – and undemocratic – inequities between communities with and without local councils that will quickly become apparent once the commissions are up and running next year.

These regional service commissions are large, encompassing several municipalities and local service districts. They will be responsible for delivering (solid waste management, emergency services) and coordinating (policing, recreation) services throughout this region. Perhaps more significantly for rural areas, they will also carry out regional planning and local planning in unincorporated areas. What is important here is how decisions are going to be made. Who will sit on these commissions and how will they be appointed?

It should come as no surprise that the mayor of each municipality and incorporated Rural Community within the region will have seat on the board that will govern the commission. After that, things get messy. Unincorporated areas, the Local Service Districts (LSDs), will be allocated a certain number of seats based on some unspecified ratio of population and tax base – in other words, not every LSD will get a seat. Who gets them? The Chairs of the LSD advisory committees within each region will get together and nominate from among themselves people to fill unincorporated seats. Those nominees would then be appointed to the board by the Minister of Local Government to whom they would be directly accountable (they are not accountable to the people within unincorporated areas). Where there are not enough LSD committee chairs to fill the unincorporated seats, the Minister will simply fill them directly.

This structure is entirely undemocratic. First, people living in the many LSDs without advisory committees have no say in who sits at the table on their behalf. Second, far too much authority is vested in advisory committee chairs who are not elected by normal election rules as mayors are. In any case, their authority is limited to their own district, not the broad unincorporated area. Finally, having the minister appoint seats from Fredericton is simply feudal.

These are not insubstantial issues. Here in Charlotte County, as many people live in LSDs as in incorporated municipalities, and most LSDs have no advisory committees. Yet only municipalities will have democratically elected representatives on the board. This will create an imbalance, probably in numbers and most certainly in legitimacy, in board decision-making.

Three possible solutions come to mind. One would be to create a board seat for each LSD and require each one to form an advisory committee whose chair would take the seat. Another would be to assign all board seats based on population and for citizens in unincorporated areas to elect their representatives directly, overseen by Elections NB. The third would be for rural dwellers to take direct responsibility for their local affairs by incorporating Rural Communities with elected mayors who would then take their seats on the regional commission board in this capacity.

Like it or not, rural communities are going to have to step up to the plate and become more engaged in self-governance or let the municipalities and province dictate what happens in unincorporated areas. The time to step up is now. The train is leaving the station.

— Janice

Originally published February 8, 2012

Energy Policy Pipe Dreams

Pipe dream. Image credit: Flickr, Meilburgin

Canada — a nation in climate change denial endangers world.

Politics is politics, science is science — and never the twain shall meet, at least not in Stephen Harper’s Canada. Federal environment minister Peter Kent made that cleavage final Monday evening when he announced that Canada would remove itself as a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, the legally binding agreement to tackle global warming, which causes climate change.

In the 1960s scientists began to postulate that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations (due to fossil fuel combustion) in the upper atmosphere could actually change global climate patterns. By the early 1980s, the media were writing about it.

In 1988, the first international conference of scientists and policy makers convened in Toronto. By then, the trend was so alarming and the potential consequences so dire, that conference recommended a 20 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2000. It also established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), consisting of 1200 climate scientists from nearly every country, to provide scientific assessments and advice to world leaders. In 1992, those leaders — including Canada’s Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney — signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which pledged to “prevent dangerous climate change.”

That was 20 years ago. A whole new generation — the one that was to have been the first beneficiary of the 1992 agreement — has been born since then. The only thing we can say to them now is, we failed. Dangerous climate change will happen in their lifetime, the result of a gaping chasm between science and politics that opened up following that original commitment.

With each successive report, the IPCC revises its assessment of the severity of the problem and the speed with which it is progressing — always upward, never downward. Yet in inverse proportion to this evidence, each successive meeting of the parties to the Convention and its 1997 implementation agreement (the Kyoto Protocol) strays further and further from the 1992 imperative to prevent dangerous climate change.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Canada. Like Alice’s adventures falling down the rabbit hole, climate change politics has become increasingly surreal. Peter Kent and Stephen Harper are operating in an altered reality of their own making, one in which the forces of nature do not apply. Real things like people and the planet become very, very small. Unreal things like vested interests and power politics become very, very large, presiding menacingly over the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

The government’s political goal is to protect the unreal things and to shove the real things away from the table and out the door. The real things, represented at least marginally in the Kyoto Protocol, are in the past for Canada, says Canada’s environment minister. Previous Liberal governments which nodded in the direction of real things were incompetent. The Harper government is not so silly. It has willed itself to be above real things and therefore not bound by them. Scientific evidence of changing climate, not to mention people dying as a result (in other countries so far, and so they are especially not real), is both abstraction and distraction.

The Harper government prefers to operate in the theatre of the absurd, saying one thing but meaning the opposite, poking the world in the eye by announcing a new tar sands project from the Durban climate talks, negotiating in bad faith as a party to the Kyoto Protocol while fully intending to renounce it immediately on returning home.

I have no illusions about politics, especially Harper politics: take no prisoners, cede no ground, never let the facts (the omnibus crime bill) or the law (Kyoto, the Wheat Board Act) get in the way of an agenda.

What distresses me most is that the mainstream media and the public have given this government a free pass on this issue. CBC didn’t even have a reporter in Durban. For people who are supposed to care about this issue, we are recklessly complacent about this government’s delusional and unethical stance on climate change.

Are we also in denial about climate change, or have we given up on the future? Why do we allow this theatre of the absurd to continue?

Alas, we have been silent too long. Politics has already squandered the short lead time the world had to prevent dangerous warming. Scientists say that emissions would have to stabilize by 2015 and then start to decline if we are to prevent dangerous warming thresholds — tipping points — from being reached.

This is now impossible, given that in Durban, nations agreed to the unreal — to roll back the clock nearly 20 years and start again.

Time doesn’t run backwards. Earth is real. All we can do now is stand back and watch.

— Janice

Originally published Dateline: Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Denial, deferral and deflection are not moral choices

How many people read these headlines last Wednesday? “Time for climate change fix running out, IEA warns” (CBC News); “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns” (The Guardian); “IEA: Warming may be irreversible by 2017” (www.upi.com). Unless you tune into national, on-line and international news, you probably missed it. If you read the Globe and Mail, you would have had to turn to the Report on Business and a story with the rather underwhelming headline, “International Energy Agency calls for a price on carbon,” to learn that the most conservative energy institute in the world is “very worried” about the rapidly closing door for doing anything to avert disastrous climate change. By Thursday it was no longer news – the media had moved on.

Call me Cassandra, but it seems to me that this warning from the highly conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) is worthy of above-the-fold front page stories in every newspaper and the lead on every newscast in the world, not for just one day but everyday, until our governments respond accordingly.

What is it about climate change that it gets treated as just one story among many, interesting to those who are interested, irrelevant to those who aren’t? It isn’t because there isn’t enough convincing data. Scientists now are measuring real time changes in global mean temperatures and all manner of impacts associated with these changes. Extreme weather events – heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones – as well as droughts and floods, all of which threaten water supplies, food production, livelihoods, cities, entire regions – are becoming more intense, widespread, and prolonged. This isn’t a future problem any more, it is here.

The question is, can we keep it from getting worse? The IEA, whose data is described by The Guardian as “the gold standard in emissions and energy,” is worried. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook report, the agency explained the problem.

To avoid irreversible and catastrophic climate change, we have to limit global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial global mean temperature (we’re halfway there already). Greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming are produced by existing energy-intensive infrastructure – power plants, refineries, factories, highways, pipelines, buildings. Infrastructure is expensive to build and lasts for many decades. When the IEA ran the numbers to 2035 based on the two degree increase limit, it found that 80 percent of the allowable emissions are already being produced by existing infrastructure. Within five years (by 2017), the additional fossil fuel-intensive infrastructure now planned will add the remaining 20 percent, leaving no room for new energy demands which will surely come. In short, unless governments act now to divert investment from fossil fuel to efficiency and renewables infrastructure, by 2017 we will have “locked in” our greenhouse gas emissions for the next several decades, making meaningful emission reductions unlikely.

Despite this obvious need to act now, the IEA report says, “There are few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is underway…Global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010, pushing CO2 emissions to a new high. Subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption of fossil fuels jumped to over $400 billion.” Given this, the IEA projects that we are in line for a 3.5 degree temperature increase, even if the world’s governments implement their current tepid commitments to greenhouse gas reductions. If they fail, we are on track for a 6 degree increase, the consequences of which are unimaginable.

Here in New Brunswick, we are awash in fossil fuel infrastructure. The refinery is our single largest economic engine (we dodged a bullet when a second refinery fell through). The massive Atlantic Gateway highway locks us into trucks when we need to move to trains. We have recently built an LNG terminal and two natural gas pipelines. And on what is the government now pinning its economic hopes? New natural gas production, this time in the form of hydrofracking.

The IEA’s take-home message is that decisions the Alward government makes today matters. The deeper we dig that fossil fuel hole, the harder and more expensive the climb out of it will be. But that is just money. Any new investment of capital, private or public, that increases our fossil fuel dependency is a betrayal of the Earth and all that dwell within it, present and future. Denial, deferral and deflection are not moral choices, especially for governments that hold the policy levers to make the necessary changes.

What do the occupiers really want? Part 2

 In last week’s column, I tried to shed some light on the contemporary source of the discontent that is driving the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Everywhere movement.  The movement is not a 2011 phenomenon, or a relic of the 2008 near-collapse of the global financial system. It is an inevitable response to the social and ecological conditions that have been exacerbated by the shift in the 1980s from the so-called welfare state organized around the idea of a common good achieved through public policy, to the neo-liberal state organized around the idea that the ‘invisible hand’ of a free market economy, unfettered by national borders and social obligations, would deliver a better life for all.

After two decades of this experiment, the edifice of free market ideology is crumbling, creating an intolerable situation for many, particularly young adults who are facing high unemployment, and a future shaped by mortgage-sized student debt, and increasingly unstable climatic and ecological conditions. People are saying, enough.

This is not an unexpected development. In his 1944 classic, The Great Transformation, economic historian Karl Polanyi explained the social and political unrest of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as the predictable reaction of people to the impacts on people and communities of the shift from a regulated market economy embedded in and directed by society to a ‘disembedded’ unregulated market. A market economy can only exist in a market society, according to Polanyi. The organizing principle for such a society is that “no arrangement or behaviour should be allowed to exist” that might impede the functioning of the market mechanism. According to liberal economics, if the “free” market is to work its magic, then society must subordinate itself to its demands.

This means that central elements of personal and community life must become commodified and  measured solely in terms of economic value. Land becomes real estate. Nature becomes raw material. Work becomes labour. Time becomes money. Money, simply a common medium for exchange, becomes a commodity itself.  Polanyi calls these “false commodities” because they were not created as goods and services for trade in the market economy. They are inherent to the experience of being human within a larger community of life. When value is reduced to only economic terms, humanity is impoverished, along with the natural community within which people live.

Left to its own devices, Polanyi writes, the unregulated market would inflict intolerable social dislocation, destroying individual lives, whole communities, and nature itself. Society, however, possesses a protective intuition, inevitably giving rise to a “double movement” which counteracts the market logic and blunts the impact of “this self-destructive mechanism” on the fictitious commodities of land (the environment), labour (people) and money (people’s purchasing power). This double movement, according to Polanyi, is not ideologically driven or homogenous in its make-up. Nor need it be progressive; it can also be reactionary and subject to capture by despots. Its coherence is simply the collective reaction against the dehumanizing and ecologically destructive nature of an economy that has become disembedded from and therefore no longer in the service of society.

Polanyi was describing the economic, social and political history of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, but he could well have been describing what we have seen over the past two decades. Following the defeat by popular movements of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment which would have loosed capital from any national restraints, the shut-down of the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in 1999 was the most vivid evidence of a double movement against the 1980s re-emergence of the economic liberalization agenda. The police state tactics subsequent to Seattle and the 9/11 terrorist attacks have obfuscated the messages of G-8 and G-20 protests, but southern social movements such as the World Social Forum (formed to counter the powerful World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland) have been making progress, as recounted by Judy Rebick in her book, Transforming Power.

Today, as the excesses of late capitalism are visited on the middle classes as well as the poor, the mass demonstrations in Europe and the Occupy Wall Street/Everywhere movement are the latest manifestations of the double movement. Resistance is intensifying to an economic system which is organized only to perpetuate itself, has politics in its thrall, and around which society is organized. From this perspective, the aims of the Occupy movement are simple to grasp. They want an ecologically sustainable economy in the control and service of a just society, and a politics that empowers people to redesign the economy to these ends.

To characterize these aims as ‘demands,’ however, is a mistake. Such characterization assumes the occupiers to be supplicants to the existing power structures. The occupiers do not see themselves in this way. They are challenging the power of capital and its politics because they know their aims will never be realized until that power is decamped.

— Janice

Originally published October 26, 2011

What do the occupiers really want? Part 1

The Occupy Wall Street movement is spreading – solidarity rallies were held in 951 cities in 80 countries over the weekend, including in Saint John, Moncton and Fredericton.  By occupying a particular piece of ground, participants are staking a claim, so to speak, on the political discourse of our time with the clear intent of changing it.

This discourse – a way of describing the world and how it ought to be which then shapes attitudes, norms and ultimately public policy – has been dominated by economic elites and their intellectual backers since the 1980s. It was then that the neo-liberal idea that the capitalist free market, unfettered by government regulation, national borders, and social obligations to share the wealth, and fuelled by greed (“greed is good” declared neo-liberal guru Milton Friedman) would maximize economic growth and thereby deliver a better life for all, finally gained a firm grip on the politics and policies of industrialized democracies.

Since then the idea of government responsibility to protect the public interest and the norm of achieving social equity through wealth redistribution have been seriously eroded. While the breakdown of economic stability in the US has produced understandable backlash, both reactionary (the Tea Party movement) and progressive (the occupiers), Finance Minister Jim Flaherty can’t understand what Canadians have to complain about. After all, our banks didn’t fail in 2008 and we were spared the shameful spectacle of trillions of dollars of debt-financed bail-outs flowing into the hands of the worst abusers of the public trust since the 1920s.

In the U.S. and Europe, ordinary working people through their taxes are propping up a morally and financially bankrupt finance system which over the past three decades has made obscene profits and paid equally obscene salaries and bonuses to its architects by speculating on money, including the interest paid on consumer debt and mortgages by those same ordinary people who were lured into debt by crooked lenders and the allure of a particular lifestyle perpetuated by a pervasive consumer culture. This culture is not a product of human nature, as some might wish to portray, but the construction of an economy that requires ever-increasing household consumption to support the ever-increasing production of goods and services needed to fuel the economic growth machine, which virtually everyone now takes as the sine qua non of civilization.

That Canada has been spared this grossest exploitation by finance capital is more a function of  timing rather than good governance. The constraints on the financial sector that were put in place before the agenda of deregulation took hold in the 1980s were largely maintained throughout the Liberal era of Chretien and Martin, even while other neo-liberal policies were implemented (free trade, deregulation of industry, privatization of public assets, shrinking of social programs).  The minority Harper government inherited a good dose of luck that banking restrictions were still in place when the 2008 financial collapse occurred. Had we had a Harper government earlier, we might not have been so lucky.

Even without bank profligacy, since the 1980s the gap between rich and poor in Canada has steadily grown and is now approaching 1930s levels. According to the Globe and Mail (Monday’s paper), from a high of over 17 percent in the late 1930s, the top one percent of income earners’ share of total national income reached its lowest point at less than eight percent in 1980, the result of post-war redistribution policies such as progressive taxation, unemployment insurance, old age and public pensions, medicare, and social assistance, as well as unionized workforces. Since then the one percent’s share steadily rose to 14 percent by 2005. It is likely higher now, due to ongoing tax cuts which leaves more money in high income pockets while starving public services of badly needed funds. Over the same time, demands on food banks and homeless shelters have exploded, student debt has reached crushing levels, the middle class is shrinking and in crisis, consumer debt in Canada is at critical levels, public infrastructure is falling apart, communities are being disrupted by the last grabs for increasingly scarce resources, and global climate is being knocked off kilter.

As commentator Dave Mitchell wrote on rabble.ca, “Capitalism is in the process of cannibalizing itself by devouring public infrastructure, personal livelihoods and the planet. Faith that the system can save us from itself is falling rapidly.” This is what is driving the Occupy movement. Mitchell says, “The enigmatic ‘one demand’ of Occupy Wall Street was always only that, to occupy Wall Street. Shut it down.  No more business as usual. No more profit from human suffering and ecological destruction…no more sacrificing sound public policy to the growth imperative.”

What are the implications of this demand? Fodder for another column.

— Janice

Originally published October 19, 2011

What a civil, respectful government would do about fracking

The Alward government has responded to shale gas protests with the promise of a fall season of “information sessions” designed to make sure the public has the information about shale gas hydro-fracking the government wants us to have. Once we are supplied with government-approved information, then surely the opposition will melt away and SWN Resources can return in the spring to an uneventful season of seismic exploration. Or so the government hopes.

The chances of that happening are slim. People have been doing their own research. There are lots of reports on-line, both scientific and in the media, that contradict claims that this industry can or will be carried out responsibly here. The only thing this government can bring to the table will be promises that the regulations governing the industry in New Brunswick will be better than those in other areas, thereby minimizing the risk to water supplies, landowners and communities. They cannot eliminate the risk, nor prevent accidents, even with new regulations.

Regulations are only as tight as the companies are willing to accept. If they cannot deliver expected profit margins to shareholders, they won’t hang around. In a global regulatory marketplace, the government’s game is to attract mining, oil and gas companies with promises of high profits and low costs. New Brunswick has the dubious distinction, according to industry analysts, of having some of the “most favourable conditions” for industry investors.

Translation? Low tax and royalty regimes, lucrative exploration rights, comparatively low environmental and bond requirements, cooperative politicians and bureaucrats who will expedite the company’s operations and run interference with the public as necessary. Remember last year when Sackville town council voted to ban hydrofracking within town boundaries? A gas company executive phoned the Department of Natural Resources to fix the problem – the Province can override any such local decision. Without going into details, Sackville reversed its decision after meeting with DNR, not because councillors changed their minds about the risk of fracking to the town water supply, but because it could go bad for them if they didn’t cooperate with the company, which was to continue exploring just outside town boundaries.

Then there is Penobsquis. If there is any doubt that the government is willing to hang people out to dry in order to protect big business, this disaster should disabuse that notion.  Potash Corp. has never admitted responsibility for the loss of dozens of wells in the vicinity of their mine, even while providing trucked-in water for awhile. Eventually the company had enough of that, so the Province used taxpayer’s money to install a new water system and forced the victims to pay for the service. Now, after losing their water, their houses are being damaged and farms ruined as the land collapses beneath their feet. Residents are now before the Mining Commissioner fighting for compensation, a stressful and expensive undertaking which may well end badly, as many judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings do for those up against deep pockets and corporate lawyers.

With this experience, why should New Brunswickers trust this government to protect their water, land and communities?  Launching an information road show is not going to change this. Parties to the controversy can draw very different conclusions from the same set of essential material facts.

It all boils down to this simple statement: There are real risks associated with shale gas development even with strict regulatory controls. The government believes the risk to be small, and is willing to subject people to those risks in return for royalty payments.  The people who would be affected believe the risks are too high and are unwilling to assume them. While some people would accept some level of financial compensation for damages, others would not.

These represent not different ‘facts’ but different ethical stances based on how the parties perceive the risk and their willingness to impose or accept it. In such a situation, the government has only one honourable, civil and respectful course of action. Let those who could be affected decide for themselves whether or not to accept the risk. Some are calling for a provincial referendum. A cheaper and easier approach would be to give each community the power to hold its own vote on whether or not to allow shale gas development within its water and air sheds. If the people say no, the government would have to respect that decision and the company would have to move on. To withhold that decision from those potentially affected is to perpetuate the disrespectful, high-handed politics that New Brunswickers rejected in the last election.

— Janice

Originally published September 7, 2011

The government is destroying poultry supply management

How ironic that at a time when citizens are more and more concerned about local food security and the protection of family farms, the Alward government is prepared to let the supply management system for chicken fall prey to predatory corporate monopolization.  The Nadeau Poultry – Groupe Westco dispute is complex and poorly communicated. As a result, most people don’t really understand what is going on or the significance of it.  This appears to be the government’s problem as well, judging from the comments by Agriculture Minister Mike Olscamp in yesterday’s paper.  He is quoted as saying, “From the very beginning, this issue has been between two companies that have been at odds for the past several years…We once again ask these companies to resolve the dispute. We have offered mediation services in the past, and that offer still stands.”

With all due respect, this is a ludicrous statement. Chicken producer Groupe Westco with its Quebec processing partner Olymel, is trying to eliminate the processing company Nadeau Poultry and establish a vertically integrated poultry monopoly in this province. On what possible grounds, then, might the two mediate a solution?

More problematic is the minister’s apparent denial that the poultry market is regulated under the federal law and therefore requires enforcement. Under this national system, a fixed quota of chickens can be produced for the provincial market. Originally, in New Brunswick that quota was distributed among existing chicken farmers and capped at 10 percent per farmer, and ownership of quota was restricted to New Brunswick producers.  Under the same system, it was determined that all chickens would be processed a single large processor, Nadeau Poultry (owned by Maple Lodge Farms of Ontario and independent of producers).

The purpose of such a managed market is to ensure a healthy poultry industry in each province, with market and price stability to farmers and processors and a secure supply of chicken at a fair price to consumers. To achieve this, provincial governments are expected to put in place and enforce basic supply management rules. Our government has failed to do so. As a result, Groupe Westco/Olymel is well on the way to constructing an American-style vertically integrated (“from egg to table,” as they put it) corporate monopoly within the shell of a supply management system intended to prevent that very thing.

Here’s my read on how they did this. First, Groupe Westco set about buying up chicken quota in defiance of the 10 percent cap, eventually achieving 51 percent direct ownership and control of another 29 percent through partnerships, a total of 80 percent. In anybody’s books this qualifies as a virtual monopoly. Rather than stop this consolidation of quota, in 2005 the Chicken Farmers of New Brunswick (which administers the rules of the system), at the behest of Groupe Westco, eliminated both the quota cap and the New Brunswick residency requirement, the only province to do so. The provincial government did nothing.

With its control of 80 percent of the quota as leverage, Groupe Westco/Olymel, offered to purchase the processor Nadeau Poultry at a fraction of its assessed value. When Nadeau refused the offer, Groupe Westco began shipping its New Brunswick-grown chickens to Olymel in Quebec for processing, crippling Nadeau and throwing 165 people in St. Francois out of work. Now Groupe Westco/Olymel has announced it will build its own processing plant in neighbouring Clair. Whether or not this happens, Nadeau could well be bankrupt this time next year, and ripe for picking up at fire sale prices.

These are well-worn tactics in the cutthroat game of predatory monopoly capitalism. If all goes as planned, at the end of the day Groupe Westco/Olymel will have achieved its goal to create a vertically integrated poultry monopoly and in doing do, begin the unravelling of poultry supply management in eastern Canada.

There is more to this story, of course. But the important thing to remember is that unlike every other province, successive New Brunswick governments have failed to fulfill its obligation to protect our segment of this national poultry supply management system. In such an integrated system, when one link in the chain is weakened, the whole system is compromised.

Several years ago when agriculture was on the table at World Trade Organization negotiations, I wrote a column in defence of Canada’s agricultural supply management systems. I was very surprised to receive a phone call from the agriculture minister of the day, David Alward. He thanked me for the column and assured me of his personal commitment as minister to stand up for supply management in federal-provincial talks. I appreciated his call and was reassured by it. Where does David Alward stand today?

— Janice

Originally published September 14, 2011