Two months after the Memorial Cup, Greater Moncton will host its second national championship.

The Canadian Women’s Amateur Golf Championship will be hosted at the Moncton Golf & Country Club. The event is more than a century old although most of the players are somewhat younger.

This Championship has spawned some world class players over the years, including Jocelyn Bourassa, Cathy Sherk, Dawn-Coe Jones and Lori Kane, all of them went on to play on the LPGA Tour. Sackville New Brunswick’s Lisa Meldrum won the event three times. Hall of Famer Marlene Streit won it eleven times. Gayle Borthwick, from Ontario was runner up four times and then went on to win the 1996 and 1999 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur championship.

This is a big deal for our community. 120 players have registered for the event. Forty of them are members of their respective provincial teams. A majority of the players are from Canada All ten provinces are represented. Many of the players are stars in their home provinces. Ten of them are members of Canada’s 2006 National Amateur Team. There will also be players from the United States, the UK, Argentina and France. The elite players will be traveling with coaches, caddies and family members.

All of the provincial teams and their entourages (an estimated 100 plus support people) will stay at the Delta Beausejour. Most of them will visit a restaurant or two in downtown Moncton while they’re in town. Some might even go shopping at Champlain Mall or head to Trinity Square for a shop-til-you-drop experience.

One lady who will not be here is perhaps the Grand Dame of Canadian golf, Ada Mackenzie, born in Toronto, October 31, 1891. She won five Canadian Ladies’ Opens and eight Canadian Senior Women’s Championships. She reached the semi-finals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1927 and 1932. Some might say that Mackenzie paved the way for women to earn a living from golf. She worked for the CIBC while playing the game but later opened her own branded clothing store, a venture that promoted her unique line of women’s golf and sportswear, long before Greg Norman or Tiger Woods.

Ada Mackenzie was a bit of a renegade. She held the view that women should be able to play golf on weekends, before noon. That was a problem in her day and still is in some golfing quarters. Perhaps her most important golf accomplishment was starting the Ladies Golf Club of Toronto in 1924. The course was designed by the renowned Stanley Thompson and only women were allowed to be members of the Club. I have played the course many times as an “associate member”. It’s beautiful and continues to thrive. Anne Murray plays across the street at the Thornhill Golf Club.

Stars of this year’s Canadian Amateur event include Erica Bennett, from Dieppe who recently won the Canadian University Championship. The last time Greater Moncton hosted this tournament, Lori Kane was a player and she went on to win a number of tournaments on the U.S. LPGA Tour. In 1969, Marlene Stewart-Streit was the winner at the Moncton Club and she went on to become the only Canadian ever to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Last year’s winner, Laura Matthews will be on hand. She won the 2005 Canadian Amateur in Squamish, B.C. with a two under par score of 290. Mary Ann Lapointe will also be here. She’s a four time winner of the Canadian Amateur, a five time Ontario Amateur winner and a six time Quebec Amateur winner. Last year, she won the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship. She played briefly as a professional in the 1980s and has frequently represented Canada in international competitions. She is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame.

Greater Moncton is a great venue for this Championship. There are a lot of golfers and a lot of golf fans in this region. Just look at the number of courses we have, fourteen of them within 45 minutes of downtown Moncton, five of them within 10 to 15 minutes of downtown. All of them can boast of the thousands of golf rounds played on their courses every year. There are probably 10,000 golfers in this area and another 10,000 within a two hour drive of Moncton. The course should be hopping next week.

Official practice rounds are scheduled for Monday, July 31st. The Championship is a four day event beginning Tuesday. After fifty four holes of play, the field will be cut to the low 48 players (by score) and ties. The winner will receive an exemption to play in the 2007 Canadian Women’s Open, a CLPGA event. The Moncton Golf & Country Club can be found in Riverview, just across the Petitcodiac River, a few metres from the new bridge.

As happened with the Memorial Cup, we should expect some national media attention for this event and that will be good for Greater Moncton. Expect some great golf and get out and support the players. Who knows, the next Michelle Wie, (16 year old golfing sensation from Hawaii who plays on the LPGA Tour and recently tried to qualify for the men’s U.S. Open) may be lurking in the pack.

Following the Women’s Canadian Amateur Championship, the Moncton Golf & Country Club will host a one day golf clinic for “”ladies only” on Friday, August 11th . Five professional golf instructors, headed by Anne Choulinard, Lorie Kane’s “swing coach” will be on site for the day. The Pros donate their time and proceeds from the day go to the Atlantic Chapter of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. I suspect it will be over-subscribed after next week’s Canadian Women’s Amateur Championship.

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com

A sister paper of the Times & Transcript has run two editorials recently advocating a major re-structuring of Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) program and calls on Prime Minister Harper to initiate the process.

The newspaper’s advocacy is based on the publication of a research project by an economics professor from the University of California, Peter Kuhn. Data used for Kuhn’s study is more than fifteen years old and deals with the years 1940 to 1991. Ironically, the research was funded by grants from the Canadian Studies, Faculty Research Program, delivered through the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Some might see Frank McKenna’s fingerprints on this project.

With all due respect to their editorialists, why should we care about the musings of another town’s newspaper?

I suggest we should care because Employment Insurance or (EI) as it is known today plays a significant role in the sustainability of our resource economy. By virtue of these editorials the program is under attack.

The Kuhn study offers a fifty year comparison of unemployment rates in the State of Maine and the Province of New Brunswick in relation to the value of unemployment insurance benefits. From his study, the Professor concludes that unemployment insurance benefits stimulate growth in unemployment. Kuhn postulates that when the value of insurance benefits increases, unemployment increases. He suggests that if unemployment insurance benefits could be reduced, more people would seek full time work and the economy would grow exponentially.

There is no consideration in the study for social and economic factors that influence the rise and fall of unemployment like literacy, education, language, plant closures, plant openings, business consolidations, business expansions, market demand, exchange rates, energy prices, etc.

In his introduction, Mr. Kuhn suggests that users of unemployment insurance do so voluntarily and with some purpose of lifestyle. To illustrate his point, he includes, among others the following quotation: “The point we were trying to make, Mr. Chairman, is that many people deliberately choose to have seasonal employment and don’t wish to work the rest of the year.” (Canadian Electrical Distributors Association)

Here’s the basis for Professor Kuhn’s conclusions. In 1940, Maine had a modest UI program while New Brunswick had none. By 1950, the two regions had similar UI programs. Prior to 1953, Maine had a higher rate of unemployment than New Brunswick. In the 1950s and 1970s, the Government of Canada increased the value of unemployment insurance benefits making them more generous in New Brunswick than in Maine. In the same period, New Brunswick’s unemployment rate was higher than Maine’s.

Kuhn suggests that increases in New Brunswick’s unemployment rate were directly related to increases in UI benefits. New Brunswick’s unemployment rate was consistently above 12 percent between 1982 and 1991 while Maine’s was consistently below 8 percent.

There is no mention in Kuhn’s Report or the two newspaper editorials that unemployment in New Brunswick today is about 8% while in Maine it’s about 4.4%. This near parallel downward movement suggests that unemployment rates more likely track the health of an economy than the value of insurance benefits.

That might explain why the newspaper editorials ignore the fact that data used for the Maine-New Brunswick comparison is more than fifteen years old and that subsequent changes in economic circumstance on both sides of the border might temper the professor’s conclusions. Witness the fact that unemployment rates in both Maine and New Brunswick appear to have dropped in tandem since 1991, even though Canada’s EI program has continued to deliver higher benefits to New Brunswick’s unemployed.

One of the editorials suggests that EI creates a “moral hazard” by making it easier for people to choose seasonal jobs and government subsidies than to look for full time work. It goes on to offer a three step program to remove the hazard:

• (i) make labour mobility more attractive and remove the barriers to inter-provincial mobility
• (ii) open our borders to temporary, low wage migrant workers from Latin America and the Caribbean so they can populate our seasonal work force and,
• (iii) reduce access to and/or benefits from Employment Insurance.

The paper calls on New Brunswickers to “lead the charge” for EI reform, using Kuhn’s Maine-New Brunswick comparison as the rationale. It wants EI to be an insurance against job interruption, not a subsidy for seasonal workers.

Nowhere in the editorials is there consideration for the possibility that economic circumstances might have changed in the last 15 years or that seasonal work subsidies may have some merit in a resource based economy. They simply conclude that EI reforms would increase full time employment in New Brunswick and create a stronger economy.

Umm…we cut employment insurance benefits, ship our seasonal workers to Alberta, open our borders to migrant workers and the net result will be increased year round employment. Simplistic at best!

In my view, it would make more sense to increase levels of literacy and education among seasonal workers so they could be more available for off-season work. Create the jobs that will employ them and they will stay in the Province and grow the economy.

I’m not suggesting there is no room for EI reform but significant reform should be phased in over a period of time. If we could grand-father everyone over the age of fifty under the current program and introduce reforms that would initially apply only to workers under fifty, we could buy time to educate and train many of the under-employed. In fifteen years we might have a revitalized employment insurances program that better meets the needs of workers, seasonal employers and the provincial economy.

The last thing we need to do is shrink our work force and supplement it with low skill, low wage migrant workers.

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com

• 
  It’s interesting how our provincial government has taken ownership and responsibility first for the cost of electricity and now for the price of gasoline.
  
  In the first instance and contrary to recommendations from the Public Utility Board, they capped electricity price increases at 8% and then offered consumers an 8% tax cut to offset the increase. The tax cut will come in the form of a rebate, a huge make work project for the bureaucracy who will have to receive and process rebate applications, verify the legitimacy of receipts and issue payment cheques.
  
  Consumers will still pay the 8% increase in electricity prices. They will also have to save their receipts and twice a year apply for the rebate if they want their money back.
  
  For consumers with an average electricity bill of $300 a month that will mean forking over an extra $24 a month for six months to pay the tax. If we assume 30 days for processing, the first rebate cheques will come seven months after the price increase goes into effect. That’s not good news for people on fixed incomes. In effect, they are being asked to fund the government’s tax loss for seven months of the year.
  
  In the second instance, the Government decided to “regulate” the price of gasoline.
  
  I put the word regulate in quotations because they don’t have the tools to regulate gasoline prices. All they can do is put a price cap on gasoline and hope they guess right in terms of the cost.
  
  What makes the regulatory regime a joke are the factors of cost that go into the price of a litre of gasoline. If they really wanted to control prices they would do so with the tax system but that would cost them money.
  
  The first consideration in the price of gasoline is the price of oil. New Brunswick has none so we import it from the Middle East.

The Government’s formula for pricing gasoline is subjected to a market test in New York. Platt’s New York Harbour price for refined gasoline products is being used as the baseline for New Brunswick’s price cap.

• Movements in the price of oil and value of the Canadian dollar play a role in the pricing formula.
• Average daily prices for gasoline in the previous two weeks and projections for the next two weeks are also factors in price-setting.
• When all factors are considered, we have a base price.

For discussion purposes, let’s say that base price is 68¢ a litre.

1. Add 10¢ a litre for the Federal Excise Tax and then add the Provincial Gasoline and Fuel Tax of 14.5¢ a litre.
2. Using the provincial government’s formula, wholesalers can add 6¢ more for margin (that’s the difference between their cost of refined gasoline products and the wholesale price to retailers).
3. Margin pays for the wholesaler’s operating expenses and profit. The wholesaler can add another 2¢ a litre for delivery costs and then the government moves back in to tack on the 14% HST. That’s another 14.07¢ a litre.
4. Retailers need to make money so they are allowed to add another 5¢ a litre.

Now here’s the problem. All the above adds up to $1.19.57¢ a litre.

Last week, the Government’s posted cap price for the week was $1.12.4 a litre plus 2¢ a litre for delivery. The only player in the chain who has no control over cost is the retailer.

Using my example above, there is nothing left for the retailer and that’s what all the fuss has been about this week. That’s why retailers closed their doors. Even with the increased price cap this week, up to $1.16.5 a litre, including delivery costs and assuming no increase in the base price there would only be 3¢ a litre left for the retailer.

For some that may be enough but for others it is not.

So why would a government go to such great lengths to create such headaches for itself?

One can only guess that some political motivation caused them to jump blindfolded into this regulatory mess. Maybe it was pressure created by a bunch of government friendly lawyers who wanted to re-write the Acts that govern price capping and tax rebating.

And what about the tax rebates?

Assuming they make good sense, wouldn’t it be logical that NB Power be asked to remove the tax at source so that people wouldn’t have to collect receipts and fill out rebate applications?

Wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient and a lot less expensive for NB Power to remove the tax from their bills before it was ever collected?

Wouldn’t the burden for people on fixed incomes be lessened by removal of the tax at source?

There can only be one logical reason for this rebate program. It’s either a temporary program or it’s a misguided attempt to create government jobs.

Based on the evidence, it’s hard to believe in retrospect that such an interventionist government was not responsible for the Colsen Cove Orimulsion fiasco as it once claimed. It’s hard to fathom how a bunch of political folks could promote free markets and lower taxes on the one hand and cap fuel prices on the other. It’s also short-sighted.

A more progressive move would be to let prices rise. Maybe a carbon tax could be added to reduce demand for gasoline and eliminate some of that greenhouse gas in the environment.

More disturbing is the financial burden being created by the government’s interventionist policies. With the capping of electricity prices, NB Power will lose an estimated $36 million a year.

The tax rebate will cost the government more than $100 million a year in lost revenue and who knows what cost for processing the rebates.

Gasoline regulation may drive retailers out of business. Enforcement of regulations will add cost for the government. Worse, it will have no significant affect on the cost of gasoline because that cost is largely controlled outside of Canada.

W.E. (Bill) Belliveau is a Shediac resident and Moncton business consultant. He can be contacted at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com

I have this television image of Stephen Harper standing before the White House media alongside George W. Bush, bathing in the President’s blandishments, even as the media wanted to talk about North Korea.

I couldn’t help but recall his infamous speech delivered to a June 1997 Montreal meeting of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing U.S. think tank when he said.....

You're (the United States) the second greatest nation on earth.....Your country, and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world.....Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it. Canadians make no connection between the fact that they are a Northern European welfare state and the fact that we have very low economic growth, a standard of living substantially lower than yours, a massive brain drain of young professionals to your country, and double the unemployment rate of the United States”.

Mr. Harper must have been so pleased with himself standing beside the President of a country he clearly idolizes. This is our Prime Minister, the man who is ploughing ahead with his softwood lumber agreement in spite of some very serious objections from the BC forest industry.

The agreement would allow the United States to keep about $1 billion of the $5 billion in penalties collected by the U.S. on Canadian softwood since 2002 and limit shipments of softwood lumber to that country if lumber prices begin to fall south of the border. The agreement is intended to last for seven years but the U.S. has insisted that a clause be added that would allow either side to opt out after 23 months.
There’s more. The agreement will place Canadian lumber and lumber harvesting practices under the scrutinizing eye of American bureaucrats but the same will not be true for American companies. Further, we are agreeing to waive $1 billion in wrongly collected import tariffs even as courts and international trade tribunals have ruled they were illegally collected by the Americans.

In so doing, we are tacitly acknowledging that the Americans must have been right in collecting the duties and that this agreement is simply a negotiated settlement of penalties that rightfully were collected by the Americans.

It seems to me that in the first instance we would be agreeing to cede some portion of our national sovereignty to the United States and in the second we would be admitting to a wrong for which we are not guilty.

On this side of the country, some would disagree with me.

The President of the Maritime Lumber Bureau has expressed concern about British Columbia’s resistance to the Agreement. The Maritime group is only concerned about “protecting the Maritimes’ historic status as free and fair traders, recognition by the Canadian Government of the Lumber Bureau’s ‘certificate of origin’ program and maximizing the amount of duties returned to the Region”.

From the Bureau’s point of view, these conditions have been met in the Agreement.

Its members seem content with a negotiated settlement that effectively acknowledges guilt where none exists because in their view, settlement is better than non-settlement and settlement will bring stability to their industry. Better to pay a blackmail price for peace than to stand on the principle of free and fair trade.

They may be alone in this view because reservations about the Agreement are also being expressed in Ontario and Quebec.

There is no question that Canadians want this issue resolved.

It’s been a festering sore for nearly twenty five years. For Stephen Harper to say that it’s a done deal just because he was meeting with the President of the United States earlier this week and to say there will be no further negotiations and no further debate on the matter is ridiculous to the extreme.

It’s important to note that neither the provinces nor the Canadian lumber industry have the power to prevent the signing of an international agreement between the United States and Canada.

However, the Canadian lumber industry can block implementation of the deal by refusing to agree to drop existing legal actions against the United States and/or by refusing to sign up for a duty refund program that would return 80% of the fines (the $4 billion) shippers paid to the U.S. government.

As I understand it, resistance to the Agreement in Western Canada is driven primarily by those who oppose the 23 month termination clause. They had been led to believe that the price for a seven year peace was the $1 billion holdback of illegally collected duties (according to various trade rulings).

In reality this deal will only buy them a twenty three month peace. To compound matters, much of the industry is strapped for cash and will be vulnerable to the political arm-twisting that will inevitably come from the Agreement’s authors who want to please their Washington idols.

In my view, this is a defining moment for Canada.

If we agree to the deal that sits on Mr. Harper’s table, we acknowledge that we can be bought by the Americans. We acknowledge that our forest management practices are illegal under American trade law and by so doing submit to the jurisdiction of American law and acknowledge that our sovereignty is for sale when the price is right.

With all due respect to the Maritime Lumber industry and the many people who earn their living in this industry, the Softwood Lumber deal, negotiated by former Liberal Trade Minister David Emerson who is now Minister of Trade for Stephen Harper, is wrong for Canada.

It’s wrong because it surrenders some part of our sovereignty and it’s wrong because we are agreeing to pay or leave behind a blackmail fee of $1 billion.

Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com

I had a chance recently to ask one of the federal Liberal leadership candidates how he would resolve the rural urban divide in Canada.

His response indicated that he heard my question as regionally-specific and offered the usual recipe for curing the economic ills of Atlantic Canada like greater application of science and technology, education, improved transportation, adding value to our exports, more research and innovation, commercial exploitation of our universities, new investment, increased trade, etc.

There was even mention of AIMS (a Halifax based think tank) and the “Atlantica” trade corridor.

Not once was there mention of the differences that divide rural Canada from urban Canada.

To some, the question may sound academic but the reality is quite different. Young people are leaving our small towns and villages by the droves and heading to the cities, leaving behind an older, smaller population and a declining tax base.

To make matters worse, governments are consolidating and centralizing public services in larger centres. Businesses are doing likewise and gravitating to major centres where skilled labour and supporting services are easily accessible.

Rural communities are focused on their natural resources and the industrial spin offs that come with processing and manufacturing. The rural work force tends to be under-educated, lower income and often seasonal in nature. Few workers in our rural communities have transferable job skills. New job opportunities are limited, distance limits access to outside opportunities and the lower cost of living in a rural community often makes it impossible for mature families to transition to more expensive urban centres.

When young people leave a rural community, they are usually the brightest and best. Those who stay behind are less able to fend for themselves.

As the local tax base gets smaller, municipal governments are less able to deliver essential services. Hospitals close, banks close, schools move to larger centres or consolidate in remote locations. The only businesses that continue to thrive are the grocery stores and the telephone companies.

Urban communities are clearly much bigger and much richer than rural communities.

They offer tremendous opportunities for the young and the well educated. There is more to choose from when it comes to sports and recreation, more entertainment, more cultural activities, more theatre, more night life, more of everything. They offer better medical services, institutions of higher learning and thrilling sporting events. They also have their problems, decaying infrastructure, overcrowded housing developments, higher crime rates and tired public transit systems.

It would be easy to dismiss the rural – urban divide as phenomena with no particular application to this region. The reality is that the share of population living in Atlantic Canada’s rural areas is much higher than in other parts of the Country. It ranges from 42% in Newfoundland and Labrador to 55% in Prince Edward Island. That compares to a Canada-wide average of only 20%. There is tension in this balance as urban centres like Moncton grow and shrinking rural communities in northern New Brunswick lose services as a result of out-migration and declines in traditional resource based employment.

Rural Canada has thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people who are ill-equipped to produce economic outputs in a knowledge-based economy. Vast numbers of our people, particularly in rural communities are functionally illiterate and worse in today’s world, computer illiterate.

They remain unconnected to the Internet. Older and less educated workers find it particularly difficult to retrain for new jobs.

Does it make sense to force them into training programs and push them out of rural communities? I don’t think so.

So what is the answer? How do we bridge the rural – urban divide?

Clearly increased literacy and more education will be part of the answer but education will be a double edged sword in the short term because it will push even more young people out of rural communities to search for challenge and opportunity.

Moving low wage jobs into a community won’t benefit people with higher educations because they will be overqualified for the jobs and won’t be rewarded with enough to keep them in the community. Low wage jobs will only benefit the grocers.

Unless we find ways to link our rural communities to the mainframe of business and opportunity, people will continue to leave their rural communities and won’t come back except in retirement.

In southern Ontario, some rural communities like Alliston have been revitalized by major auto-makers who move in with high paying jobs for skilled workers and trained managers. These workers live in rural communities. Many of them commute seventy or eighty kilometers a day to preserve their rural homesteads and breathe new life into their communities.

Canada is a vast country that was built on a largely rural foundation. To do away with our rural communities in favour of large, more efficient urban centres would be a tragic mistake.

In practical terms we have to maintain our rural communities if we want to eat. We need farmers and fishermen to put food on our tables. We need wood cutters and tree-planters to harvest and replenish our forests. We need mill workers to process our lumber and more.

Education will be critical in making rural businesses more competitive. Science, technology and new investment will make them more productive.

We have listened to our provincial politicians whining for weeks about “equalization” the transfer of federal dollars to the provinces. Sadly, the whine is based on traditional formulas of federal/provincial program financing.

Wouldn’t it be nice if some of them could step back for a moment and look at the problems that are really important to people. Equalization is not about money to lower tax rates, it’s about people and how they will come to grips with the 21st century.

Atlantic Insight is a published Blog inventory of opinion articles published weekly in New Brunswick's print media as written by W.E. (Bill) Belliveau, who is a resident of Shediac, New Brunswick, and small business owner, operating his Moncton-based marketing consultancy, Bell Strategic. He can be reached by e-mail at bill.bellstrategic@nb.aibn.com