Canada's New Government (TM) at Work...

First, came the 5 government priorities, which managed to help propel Stephen Harper into 24 Sussex.

After that, John Baird was going to turn his government green.

Now, with a spring election safely behind them, Canada's 'new' government is focussing on the sort of issues Canadians really want action on - preventing an imminent flood of strippers from former Soviet Republics.

How is this even on Canadians' radar, outside of a depressing strip of dead-end strip-joints near the Toronto Airport? I'd like to see the polling on that...

You won't see this in the Moncton Times & Transcript

uh-oh.

The latest labour force data for New Brunswick has been released, and behind the rosy announcements there is a very troubling figure.

It appears that Metro Moncton, the dominant engine of employment growth for much of the last decade, has stalled a bit, or to be somewhat blunt, apparently fallen off a cliff.

According to the Labour Market Bulletin, Metro Moncton now has 6,000 fewer in its labour force than last year. It's participation rate dropped a whopping 6.4%.

Yikes. How can any NB urban area lose 6,000 from its labour force, and everybody miss it?

Did Bernard Lord suddenly take half of his old constituents with him when he started communiting to Montreal?

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Facebook comes to NB

Much like the rest of the internet world, New Brunswick has warmly embraced Facebook. This is a welcoming event, if only because it makes for more interesting digital reading than Charles Leblanc. Sadly, even online our parochialism still shines through (ex: how come SJ gets a network and not F'ton? M'ton? New River Beach? South Branch?)....

There are, however, some really interesting Facebook groups that make our tiny province look like a wonderful little laboratory for democratic exchange.

Some examples?
Saint John needs a 24 hour liquor store - 833 members
Fredericton Call Centre Employees - 100+ members
Port City Gossip - 80+ members
Saint John Singles - 2 members?
Dairy Queen Fredericton Employees - 180 members!?!
Fredericton Drivers Make Me Violent - 500+ members
Bring the Eagles to Moncton - 400+ members??
I lived in Moncton now I'm gone - 350+ members
I'm drunk in my facebook picture - NB chapter - 150+ members
Is the Saint John Telegraph Journal a tabloid? - 150+ members

of course, if group memberships were linked to elections, the guy who's going to get an image of Bruce Frisko's face tattooed on his body because 25,000 Maritimers told him to is likely going to be the next Premier of PEI in a couple of weeks...

It's a slam dunk (in my humble opinion)

In Points of Departure, Dalton Camp argued that one of the reasons why Pierre Trudeau was able to defeat poor old Joe Clark was because of the constant game of courtship between the mass media and PET.

Well, if this New Yorker article is any indication, Barack Obama will in all likelihood win the 2008 Democratic nomination. No other candidate in recent memory has produced such gushing media tributes this early - and no, the 2003 Howard Dean phenomenon doesn't count, since most news clippings were more about Dean supporters (or the Dean web community) than Howard Dean.

My prediction? Barry Hussein Obama will lead the Democratic ticket in 08. Hillary just can't sell the same amount of high-brow magazines.