I’m in a grouchy mood. Some of it is about things people are grouchy about.

Celine, Ben & Fruitcake

            Chickens will surround and peck to death one of their wounded or diseased. Why is it that so many of our species seem eager to emulate chickens?

            Currently Ben Affleck and Celine Dion seem to be favourite targets among celebrities.

            Affleck seems a rather minor character to attract so much public opprobrium.  He seems like a journeyman actor. I doubt many of the people who use him as a synonym for loser even know what it is about him that evokes their derision.

            Celine Dion has a wonderful voice. She did and does work very hard. She isn’t among my favourite singers. The spate of royal treatment she and her husband allowed or encouraged did irritate me a bit. There was something about a police escort from the airport to their island estate in Montreal.

            However, some people seem to feel she equals arctic weather as curses Canada has inflicted on the continent.

            Fruitcake gets the same treatment. Especially from American Thanksgiving to Christmas, pundits of all stripes seem compelled to talk about how no one likes or has any respect for fruitcake and no one eats it.

            Where does that come from?

            I like fruitcake. It isn’t something anyone should eat pounds of every year but a few slices at Christmas are just great.

Celebrity abuse

          What’s the difference between wallowing in news of the sick behaviour of Paris, Britney and Lindsay and taunting the village idiot?

            We fool these girls into thinking they are special. We fawn all over them, push them to the head of the line and ply them with temptations that will destroy them.

            We pimp them out like child prostitutes in the sex-tourism sleaze pits of Asia.

            Then we express shock and disgust when they behave as we have trained them.

            In fact, they have to behave in more and more shocking ways to maintain the public interest that is their stock in trade. Now a mere sex tape wouldn’t be enough. As the nymphets age, they will have to be caught doing kinkier things to keep their ratings, and appearance fees, up.

            It seems to me that the media have found it easier and cheaper to cater to the base instincts of the carnival crowd than to try to elevate our palates. The reading audience has bled away over recent decades and cost slashers rule the industry. Celebrity news has become a large section of the media menu.

            Brave new world!

No fly lists

          Flying continues to become less and less pleasant. Airlines and airports more and more restrictive and bossy.

            We hear more about incidents of air rage. The penalties are severe. Offend airline or airport crew and you could find yourself on a no-fly list.

            Given the dictatorial, inconsiderate behaviour of air industry personel, I think there should be a no-fly list for them.

            How would you feel about a no-fly list for airlines and airline staff?

            All passengers would be surveyed after each flight. Any airline or airline staff that didn’t meet a certain standard of customer service would go on the list and not be allowed to fly.

Lighter and brighter

          I was playing the martyr with my wife and her parents. I sighed that we poor men are simply putty in the hands of our wives.

            “Hmph!” snorted my mother-in-law. “You can’t even buy putty anymore. It’s all silicone now!”

            It took me a minute to recognize the double entendre. I don’t think she has yet. It was too quick to be deliberate.

                                                DAC

            This is a must-see movie about Edith Piaf. Anyone who has ever been touched by the music of “La Môme,” the little sparrow, Billie Holliday or any of the great soul and blues singers in history will appreciate the cost of their art as shown in this film.

            It surely isn’t pretty but it is powerful.  Marion Cotillard disappears into the role so that, when you see a picture of her, you wouldn’t recognize her. I don’t know where she went in her soul to find the torment in Piaf’s. I don’t think I want to know.

            It’s in French with subtitles when the characters speak French and in English when the characters speak English. I think you will forget that as you watch.

            So many explosive things happen in her brief 47 years that the movie has to race over the life and death of her son and takes no note of WW II.

            I’ve seen an excellent documentary on the life of Edith Piaf. That convinces me that this film encapsulates perfectly the woman she was.

            Seeing this film is like looking into the crucible where life and art are created.

            http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450188/

            Former Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, is under investigation regarding cash payments he took from Karlheinz Schreiber.

            Schreiber was a deal greaser for Airbus at the time Air Canada made a significant fleet commitment and Mulroney was in office.

            Mulroney says he got $300,000 and was supposed to do something to help a Schreiber client develop a pasta business.

            Brian Mulroney is a lawyer and a former prime minister and a graduate of St. Thomas high school here in Miramichi.

            Perhaps the investigation will tell us more about what happened, what was supposed to happen and why.

            In the meantime, no one contests the fact that, on three separate occasions, Brian Mulroney accepted envelopes containing $100,000 in cash from Schreiber. One of these transfers took place in the U.S.

            What I am having trouble understanding is how a lawyer and federal politician could be so stupid as to accept $100,000 in cash, not once but three times.

            If I could understand how someone could be that stupid, which I cannot, I am faced still with the puzzle of what one does with $100,000 in cash. It may not have been the law at the time, as it is now, that if you turn up at a bank with more than $10,000 in cash, the bank has to inform the police. Even so, imagine the look on the teller’s face. Imagine the look on the depositor’s face as he tries to look as though he isn’t doing anything unusual.

            Imagine each party’s face when it happens a second time.

            Do you whistle a little tune, as you fill out the deposit slip. What tune is it?

            Now, let’s imagine the faces and elbows of the rest of the people in the cattle chute at the bank as the teller counts out $100,000 to verify the deposit slip.

            If I could understand how one slides that much cash into one’s account once and again and again, I have yet another move to ponder.

            Schreiber gave Mulroney one of the payments in the U.S.

            So, there you are at Canada customs and immigration with $100,000 in cash on your person. Surely, being a lawyer and a former prime minister, you have properly filled out your declaration which includes the fact that you are bringing more than $10,000 in cash into the country.

            Do buzzers, bells and lights go off in the customs shed? Do you get sent to a special line? Does someone snap on a latex glove?

            I shiver when I’m lined up at customs with a couple of hundred bucks worth of souvenirs and gifts. It wouldn’t matter what tune you whistle when you’re bringing $100,000 cash into the country, my lips would be too dry to perform.

            There is one thing Brian Mulroney would have going for him in such situations. His natural voice has such a strong tone of fake sincerity that it is unlikely it could sound much phonier in a face-to-face with a border guard.

            I voted for his representative once and believe his free trade and GST legislation have been important, positive, milestones for our country.

            Still, I never believed he meant what he was saying.

            Oddly enough, the one thing I might understand is why he didn’t declare the payments as income right away. I don’t know how lawyers usually deal with retainers as these payments have been called. I do know that many businesses don’t pay tax on what they call unearned income.

            In the newspaper business, for example, when you pay for a subscription, the newspaper does not pay tax on all of that money right away.    It calls some of it unearned income because it has not yet incurred the expenses that go with producing and delivering each of the papers you have bought.

            Mulroney may have decided the payments were an advance, in fact balanced off by a debt he owed to perform a service he had not yet done.

            That, of course, begs the question as to what service he did eventually perform that led him to move it from the advanced column to the completed column and declare it as earned income.

            I wonder if he sent the Canadian Revenue Agency an envelope of cash?

            Normally people pay lawyers retainers to reserve their services just in case they need them. Insurance companies pay top litigation lawyers retainers so you cannot hire that top notch lawyer to represent you against the insurance company. It is a form of protection money for the legal version of the gunslinger or mafia don.

            However, in this case, I doubt Schreiber was retaining Mulroney against the possibility he might pimp for a rival pasta maker.

            I think he expected a specific service to be performed. It cannot have been for a service that had been performed. If it were, Mulroney would have declared the income right away, right? Besides, there isn’t much of anything Mulroney could legally do for Schreiber while he was Prime Minister was there?

            If Mulroney is chlorine clean, Canadian taxpayers are still going to pay millions of dollars for an investigation.

            What are the chances we can get our money back from him on the grounds that he was incredibly stupid?

            Why not?

                                                                        DAC

Retailers defy law of gravity

            I’ve been very irritated by the cost of greeting cards for several years. Their price in Canada has been far higher than in the US and far higher than the currency difference for years. With the Canadian dollar at and above par, premiums in the range of 60% were outrageous.

            This weekend, in need of a birthday card, I was pleased to see that Sobeys is charging Canadians the US price.

            I was irritated and a little puzzled to see that Chapters is charging the Canadian price on its calendars. I guess they are gambling that Canadians will be overcome by the Christmas spirit and pay the premium. If enough of us don’t, we’ll be able to pick up calendars in January for half price or less.

            Some of the retail chains have been saying that they can’t do anything about the large premiums on items they acquire from US suppliers.

            That seems odd to me. For years we heard about how everything from cards and magazines to NHL hockey players had to be purchased in US dollars so we had to pay the high premiums.

            If so, shouldn’t the reverse of that also be true? If Canadian suppliers always had to pay for cards and magazines in US dollars shouldn’t it take far fewer Canadian dollars to pay those bills now?

            I seem to remember someone saying that what goes up must come down. Isn’t it interesting that that doesn’t apply to prices?

            It is similar with airline prices. When gasoline was up around and above the $1.25 per litre range, the airlines applied fuel surcharges to their ticket prices. I don’t remember them removing them when fuel prices subsided back near the $1.00 level. Oddly enough, as prices have risen again, they are applying fuel surcharges again.

            I suppose some of this has to do with the decline in the value of the US dollar. It isn’t that fuel is up so much as it is that the US dollar that buys it is down so much. However, shouldn’t the fact that you and I buy our tickets with big, fat, juicy Canadian  dollars mean that our costs should not rise?

            It is a good thing the people who calculate these prices don’t design teeter totters. One end would go up and down and the other end would just continue to ratchet up and up and up.

            Would we lose a lot of kids that way? I don’t think so. Kids are too smart to get on a ride like that.

            So, can we conclude that these large corporations are convinced we are more ignorant and naïve than nursery school children?

Great lines

            I love good lines. The art people create with words is as beautiful to me as the art people create with paint and music.

            In a restaurant on the weekend, our son’s girlfriend had arranged to be able to bring in a cake for Tyson’s birthday dinner. It was a work of art in cheesecake. The waitress admired it and Becca gave her a piece.

            Describing it, she said, “That is so light for cheesecake! You just keep eating it until it is too late!”

            I can relate to that.

            When we returned to their apartment, a group of their friends in the dark yelled “Surprise.”

            Tyson had never had a surprise party before and was quite overwhelmed.

            “I’ll bet you were glad to hear us yell ‘Surprise’ Tyson.” laughed his friend Kevin. “Did you think it was an intervention?”

            I can relate to that.

            It was quite a party. There was a gang of beautiful young people and guitars from the Miramichi, PEI, and Victoria County.

             I have a story that tells you about a local woman. Please bear with me while I tell you a bit about her first.

             A large crowd attended Donna Carol Fitzpatrick MacLean’s funeral, Monday, November 26, at St. Michael’s Basilica in Miramichi.

            Donna died last week following heart surgery.

            Donna was among the most joyful people I have ever had the pleasure to meet. She enjoyed her family. She enjoyed being a nurse. She enjoyed her music. She enjoyed her Liberal party politics. She enjoyed her church. She enjoyed her Irish heritage and culture. She always enjoyed her music. She even enjoyed being exasperated at some of the silly things powerful people do.

            It was a joy just to see her arrive at the Saturday morning farm market. She smiled and everyone smiled.

            She had a unique voice that was not only melodic but with a clean, clear, tone I can only describe as especially sweet. Her brother Tom, also musical, tells me she had perfect pitch and could harmonize with anyone.

            Father John Fraser chose the parable of the talents to exemplify Donna’s life. He compared her to the servant who invested his master’s money and earned a tenfold return.

            Friends and family were, at first, somewhat nonplussed at his choice. If there was one thing Donna was not about it was money.

            Father Fraser went on to explain that Donna, been born with the gift of music, had invested her talent in all the aspects of life listed above. He pointed out that she even died on the Saint day of Ste. Cecilia, the patron saint of song who, he said, claimed to “sing her songs for God.”

            He also joked that he had given instructions that all the servers for her funeral mass be Liberals.

            The service was very emotional. Each hymn and piece of music was Donna. The meditation was the plaintive lament “Ashokan Farewell.”

            The incensing hymn was the famed Irish blessing that concludes “And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand.

            Jimmy Lawlor sang Donna’s defining song, “Down the River of Golden Dreams.” Donna and her father had always sung it together closing their radio program on CKMR in the early days of local radio.

            The Basilica choir was out in full force, determined to do Donna justice. Choir leader Joan Legere told me they made it to the end although the organist did, at one point, lose her ability to see her music through her tears .

            A large contingent of nurses joined the procession of mourners as Donna’s casket left the church. There were 40 names on the list of honourary pall bearers.

            You get the idea of how the community felt about Donna.

            I have a favourite Donna story.

            She was on staff at the Mount St. Joseph nursing home. She approached brother Tom, manager of the local Royal Canadian Air Force Association Wing club. She asked if he would press the various beer company representatives to donate a case or two of beer a month to the Mount.

            He did and, when they heard what she was up to, they all readily agreed.

            Donna created a weekly happy hour for the aged and handicapped patients. She would sing all the old songs and draft other local musicians to come in to perform. Those who could handle it got a paper cup of beer. As you can imagine, it was the highlight of the week for most of them. She treated them like adult citizens with a right to adult pleasures.

            If you think about who some of these people were and what they had done for us all, how else should they be treated?

            And that is how I will always remember Donna — joyfully bringing joy into the lives of patients who really needed some and really appreciated it.

                                                DAC

          Being young in 1960 was frightening, exciting and tumultuous.

          Among the exciting things happening was the election of a young war hero US president with a beautiful wife, great sense of humour and young children.

          John Fitzgerald Kennedy inspired not just young Americans but young people all over the world. He sailed. Family get togethers involved touch football. He was funny, sophisticated and had a radiant smile.

          He really did seem to signify a changing of the guard from the old, very serious leaders who had endured and won World War II with all its hardship and sacrifice.

          His inauguration address was poetic.

          “Let the word go forth,

          from this time and place,

          that the torch has been passed

          to a new generation of Americans.”

          The youth of the world responded to his “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

          And then, 34 years ago today, Lee Harvey Oswald shot him in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

          People hear a lot about boomer  privilege  as the pampered, post-war, majority.

          People don’t hear a lot about the anguish and disillusionment that went with it.

          For Americans, there was Vietnam. Many boomers fought and died there. Many others protested the war. That drove a wedge between the members of the generation that does not totally heal. Could that be the seed of the tragic polarization that exists between liberals and conservatives in the US today?

          Young military reservists shot young university students dead at Kent State.

          Innocence and optimism died with the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the charismatic black power leader. All of the boomers’ most exciting leaders were murdered.

          Life usually seems to dull the bright-eyed optimism and idealism of youth. The blessed, pampered baby boomers had their share of loss and disillusionment.

          On this anniversary of JFK’s assassination, let us wonder what long term effect his, and the subsequent, assassinations had on the current state of the world.

          Might US foreign policy and the state of the world be different and better?

          I believe it would be. I believe the leaders of that generation were, and are, underrated. JFK was the underdog for the nomination and the election. RFK was proving the cynics wrong on the day he died. Dr. King steadily gained momentum to the moment of his death.  Malcolm X’s idea of black power leading to a proportionate share of political, financial and social respect still needs a champion.

          They all made mistakes but they learned and grew.

          This is, indeed, a sad day.

                                      DAC 

           A new Ipsos-Reid survey shows that a full quarter of all Canadians have been diagnosed with, or feel they would be diagnosed as suffering from, serious stress. One medical commentator on CBC Newsworld called it lethal.

          Among the potential causes, he cited were the intense urbanization of Canada over the past several decades, changing family structures and the constant accessibility provided by cell phones and other devices.  He also said the public is beginning to view stress and other mental illness as less of a stigma.

          I wonder if we may also be sheltering our children from stress so much that they are not tempered to handle the adult world.

          Even so, I can certainly believe that being a single mom or dad commuting to work an hour or more away from your children and being accessible to all your stressors 24 hours per day could certainly make you a tad edgy.

          My son just bought his first home because the people upstairs in his apartment building were shift workers and complained about his surround sound. He does not blame them but he does want to live his life too.

          And, yes, I fully realize how fortunate he is to have the option to buy a home. That is my point.

          The shift workers upstairs might well be complaining about that single mom’s kids. What is she to do? Besides Prozac, I mean.

          City planners, economists, energy conservationists and even architects are now making more and more noise about the need to kill the suburbs and increase the population density of cities. Realtors hired surrogates to line up for three days for a chance to get listings on condos in an 80-story luxury retail, hotel and residence building going up at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, now Toronto’s main intersection.

          Either I am nuts or the conventional wisdom is.

          Everything these experts are lobbying for seems insane to me.

          Remember that massive power outage in Toronto three summers ago? Have you imagined what it was like for people who lived on the upper floors of tall buildings? How were they to survive without elevators, refrigeration, air conditioning or showers?

          Do we not understand that humans are not meant to live in beehives or anthills? I guess if we can do it to chickens, we will do it to ourselves.

          Some years ago, there were studies to see what happened when scientists increased in rat community population densities. Violence, gang rape and cannibalism were among the deviant behaviour that resulted. Normally communal rats gradually began to engage in violence escalating to gang rape, murder and cannibalism. When communities are not designed to meet the needs of creatures, society goes completely to hell. It seems we all need some private space and time.

          I also believe there is ample evidence to indicate we need fresh air and a certain amount of sunlight. How is that possible in the concrete canyons of the hive?

          For many folks I know, a couple of hours combing the shore at Kougibouguac are a better stress reliever than sedatives or psychiatrists.

          Observing routines of nature like sunsets, turning tides, birds courting and working, and trees turning their leaves up in anticipation of rain, also, I believe, contribute to inner peace.

          The most horrifying Star Trek aliens I remember were the Borg. They overwhelmed and assimilated any species they encountered and melded the power of each mind into one. They referred to themselves as “The Hive.” As they advanced, they proclaimed, “We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

          Our politicians, bureaucrats, utilities, service providers, architects and now even ecologists have apparently been assimilated.

          Is resistance futile?

                                                DAC

              RCMP Tazered a Polish passenger in the Vancouver airport and he died. A video tape the RCMP originally tried to suppress seems to reveal that there was no reason to use that level of force.

          An autopsy did not reveal what caused Robert Dziekanski’s death. It may well be that it was not the shock.

            Beyond the question of over-reaction by the police is one of what transpired during the 10 hours prior to the police intervention.

            The man, who did not speak English, and was to meet his mother, received no help whatsoever from anyone in the airport. His mother had told him to wait by the baggage carousel. She forgot, or did not know, she would not be allowed into that area. In smaller airports like Moncton, families routinely meet and greet at the carousels.

            No one helped the mother find her son and, in fact, she was eventually told he was not there.

            There was a time when I would have found the callous neglect and discourtesy extended to the Polish passenger,  not only shocking and disgusting, but hard to believe. A Pacific Western passenger agent once offered my family his own apartment as a place to rest and freshen up during an Air Canada strike. You read that right: Pacific Western agent – Air Canada strike.

            Sadly, now, I don’t find it at all hard to believe .

            Airports themselves were never very co-operative. They operated like all monopolies treating their clients like recalcitrant detainees. They herded us like cattle and exploited us like mountain country border guards.

            As security has become more and more an issue at airports, the level of disdain for customers has become more and more pervasive.

            A case in point is the total lack of concern for passengers who turn up at security with an item that isn’t allowed on flights. In my case, I once forgot the little Swiss Army knife, scissor, nail file, tweezer, toothpick, multi-tool I carry always. The knife blade is one and one quarter inches long. An assassin could do as much damage with a sharpened pencil. The tools cost almost $30 now.

            Security was just going to take it. Fortunately, because it was Moncton, I had time to scurry out to the parking lot and put it in my car.

            Airport administrations make no provision whatsoever to keep such a thing for you until you return or to buy a bubble package and mail it to yourself. Solutions that simple should have been put in place years ago. Airports either just don’t give a damn or enjoy mistreating their customers. One wonders what becomes of the items confiscated.

            I travel extensively. In Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Russia and especially downtown New York City, when I’ve needed help, I’ve been offered it promptly.

            Now, thanks to Vancouver airport staff and the RCMP, Canada is a video star on You Tube as a definitive example of how to be mean and cruel and dangerous to visitors.

            We all share the shame.

            Now, what do we intend to do about it?

            We must ensure that airport administrations get a crash course in manners and customer appreciation. Let’s each demand they start behaving like service providers and care givers rather than military prison guards.

                                                            DAC

             New Brunswick is pretending to revise its gambling policies to protect addicts. It will reduce the number of one-arm bandits. Governments, of course, don’t like to call them one-arm bandits or slot machines.

            Everyone knows those things are what the sleazy underworld casino operators use to bleed their prey. Most of us think casinos are about black jack and roulette. I recently learned that 90% of casino revenue comes from the slots.

            But no, no, governments don’t operate slots. They operate video lottery terminals. Sounds like entertainment, doesn’t it?

            What is actually happening is that government is engaged in its permanent occupation of trying to pluck the goose to produce, as someone said, the maximum amount of feathers with the minimum amount of squawking.

            Racinos, a way to pretend governments support horse racing, are one avenue. Horse racing is dying as fewer people know one end of a horse from the other. By appearing to come to the aid of racing, lottery corporations open the door to the casino idea. The next step will be to show that the horse part is a big drain and phase it out.

            It’s all directed to generate the maximum of revenue for government whether there is any net profit in it or not. Watching the addicts pour money into the slots and hearing the sad lies they tell themselves is sickening.

            Government says it wants its slot clients to gamble responsibly. At the same time, its machines have the very flashing lights and bells deliberately designed by the international gambling industry to addict players.

            If they really wanted people to limit their playing, they could easily do it by silencing and darkening the machines. They could also shut down the machines for an hour every four to give addicts a chance to get a grip.

            Nope, there is no evidence whatsoever governments really want to loosen the machines’ grip on addicts.

            The other clear sign provincial governments are greedily addicted to gambling revenue is that they have systematically drained what used to be community fund raising tools.

            Before government lotteries, every service club raised money with raffles. Community halls, Catholic churches and service clubs ran bingos.

            Lottery tickets and the slots have drained most of that money out of the communities and into provincial coffers.

            There are few raffles and bingos are much less profitable than they were.

            The process isn’t even subject to freedom of information access. Each Atlantic finance minister will always say he has no problem opening up Atlantic Lottery but his province is just one of four owners. How convenient.

            I believe gambling has to be legal. It will exist so it is only a question of whether it will be publicly owned and regulated or underground.

            It would be nice if public ownership were less sleazy than underworld ownership.

            As I’ve pointed out, the games could easily be made less addictive.

            The provinces could make themselves disinterested regulators by turning over ownership of the Atlantic Lottery Corporation to the municipalities.

            The provinces could still receive a cut for health care and social services to addicts.

            Slots should probably be in separate, dedicated locations to avoid messing up the normal development of business as they have. First they encouraged a flood of new convenience stores by ruling slots had to be in places that sold groceries. Then they put gangs of the convenience stores out of business by moving the slots to bars.

            That led to the paradox of service stations with bars and slots. There should be signs at the exit doors from the bar-slot rooms that say “Don’t Drive!” and signs at the entrances that say “Don’t Drink!”

            Mind you gambling addicts don’t drink much anyway so we have all these bars scrambling to stay in business.

            Still, isn’t there something paradoxical about a credit card statement that has a charge for gasoline next to a charge for booze from the same place at the same time?

            Maybe they could put the slots in the liquor stores and agencies.

            They could also auction off the liquor agency licenses to end the obvious and sleazy patronage gifts of agencies to friends of the party in power. The liquor corporation is supposed to belong to us, not the political party.

            Why do you suppose we never see any of this kind of discussion among politicians?

            Could it be that they are blinded by their addiction to our money?

            Is there a 12-step program for that?

                                                DAC

             Politicians and bureaucrats like to promote the idea of speaking with one voice. When you say it fast, and don’t think about it, it makes great sense. Let’s stay on message and not confuse potential visitors with a fog of different messages.

              It has been especially popular in the field of tourism. Is there anyone who doesn’t know that “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”?

            Unfortunately, when you do think about it, it has all the flaws of communism or dictatorship.

            Even for a very focused product such as Las Vegas offers, it is dangerous. The idea that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas must make every spouse whose partner goes to a convention or trade show wonder just what stayed there. And it did inspire Jay Leno to muse that clamydia may happen in Las Vegas but it certainly doesn’t stay there.

            For products with a variety of types of attractions to offer, it is even more dangerous.

            Prince Edward Island has beaches, Anne of Green Gables, amusement parks, golf, seafood, music and plain, old fashioned peace and quiet.

             A few years ago, PEI decided to bet the farm on golf courses. The province invested heavily in top notch courses with the expectation that people would flock to PEI for golf the way they flock to Vegas for gambling and sex. The province promoted its courses by sponsoring skins tournaments featuring senior golf legends like Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus.

            The province wound up with great courses but without enough of a base of local membership to support them. They were, and are, very dependent on tourists to survive.

            They’re not surviving.

            In New Brunswick, the Department of Tourism applied the favoured bureaucratic “I’m here to help you” technique to take control of the tourism message.

            They awarded the contract for the official, glossy, tourism guide to Hawk Communications and gave tourist service and facility operators a 50% subsidy to advertise in that guide. They even use local tourist association executive and provincial tourism department staff to promote, even sell, advertising in the guide.

            That guide, of course, is delivered to all the provincial visitor information centres at government expense. At one time, they were blocking other tourism information products from even being displayed in visitor information centres much less delivered to them free.

            The government thus takes total control of the message delivered to tourists. No private publisher can compete with that deal.

            So what’s the problem? Shouldn’t the government encourage the tourism industry as it does other industries?

            Maybe so, but it should not take control of the industry’s marketing.

            For one thing, governments can’t perform any business function well. The tourism guide is such a hodgepodge of design-dominated content that you can’t tell ads from editorial. That makes it hard when you are looking for anything.

            For another thing, it guarantees that the editorial product is going to be fluffy propaganda. It will never contain any, juice, wit, criticism or any real opinion.

            Neither is it a good or proper idea for a government to be, in effect, practicing censorship and competing, very unfairly, with private business.

            Finally, if we learn anything from dictatorships and totalitarian communist governments it is that speaking with one voice is the road to destruction.

            As a young man, I was afraid of communism. The idea of being a programmed, controlled, member of a hive made me ill. I was afraid that communism might win because the state could pick a direction and make everything focus on that as they did to put Sputnik into space or to amass piles of Olympic medals.

            A magazine publisher, who had been a salesman, where I worked at Southam Business Publications Ltd. told me communism would never work. He pointed out that, when everyone is going in the same direction, the odds are high it is the wrong direction.

            In a free society, where government cannot control people, they all go in their own directions and one or more of them are bound to be right.

            Tourists aren’t all interested in the same voice any more than you and I are all interested in the same jobs, hobbies, music, foods, beverages, pets or politics. Many of the top tourist destinations attract people by simply being themselves. Louisiana and France and New Zealand invite you to come and do what they do. I believe that the Maritimes does best when it concentrates on being itself.

            “The Picture Province” was, and could be again, a great slogan and marketing focus for New Brunswick. It includes everything from an Acadian festival to a lobster feed to a harness race to a day at the beach, “The Picture Province” represents whatever is in the tourist’s mind’s eye.

            I read an article about Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina.” The writer said Tolstoy was brilliant to describe her simply as having green eyes and being the most brilliant woman in the world. That left the image of her to each reader’s imagination. She would look different to each of us.

            Beware of one voice.

                                                            DAC