A couple of years ago the CBC sent a young reporter to out Stanley to interview folks about the proposed Sisson tungsten/molybdenum mine. I was bracing for the worst when she started her reportage but it turned out that most…
Continue ReadingCalling all you zombies
At some point during the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I don’t remember exactly, Viggo goes into a dark and dreary forest and finds an army of cranky undead and enlists them to fight against the armies of Mordor. As…
Continue ReadingWill the NB economy keep on truckin’?
Those of you who have followed this blog for a while will know that I believe good economic development strategy is based on a strong understanding of your economy, its assets and attributes and on determining what is an…
Continue ReadingWhere do good ideas come from?
Walking around London and Paris these last few days I keep bumping into some of the biggest thinkers of the past 400 years or so. We walked around Bloomsbury and I was reminded of Keynes and his Bloomsbury group. We…
Continue ReadingNew Brunswick’s Rodney Dangerfield problem
The 1980s comedian/actor Rodney Dangerfield used to say he “gets no respect”. Sometimes I feel that way about New Brunswick. When you eat at a restaurant in New York you order “Nova Scotia salmon” even though Nova Scotia doesn’t actually…
Continue ReadingGuaranteed minimum income: Permanent underclass or innovative way to share prosperity?
Niall Ferguson is one of the more interesting historians out there today. He is a prolific writer and out there in a very public way espousing history as a tool to influence current public policy. In the past few years…
Continue ReadingWhy the bond rating agencies’ opinions matter
To clear things up DBRS did not downgrade the bond rating. It confirmed New Brunswick at A (high) and R-1 (middle) but it changed the trend from stable to negative. This matters because in the fairly arcane world of bond…
Continue ReadingAttracting and retaining international students. Two thumbs up!
Liberally applying Bryan Adams’ lyrics inappropriately, I have been writing about the importance of international students ’til my fingers bled. I was glad to hear the feds are now taking this seriously in Atlantic Canada. There is so much to like…
Continue ReadingThe myth of the full time worker
If most of us were asked to describe what ‘work’ looks like I suspect we would talk about getting up in the morning, going off to work – maybe fighting rush hour traffic, putting in eight hours and then going home. The…
Continue ReadingIt’s time to end the EI fiction
There’s a story on the CBC website this morning about the plight of workers on EI that work seasonally at Kings Landing. It’s unfair, they say, because they get fewer weeks of EI than their counterparts in the Village historique…
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