Seven years ago, as Opposition leader, Stephen Harper paid a stiff price for noting Atlantic Canada's "culture of dependence." In the 2004 general election, Liberal Leader Paul Martin took 17 seats in the Maritimes, Mr. Harper took five. Times do, however, change. New Brunswick Conservative MP Bernard Valcourt talked openly about his province's culture of dependence the other day – and not a single, solitary person appears to have taken more than symbolic offence.
As the minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Mr. Valcourt travels the Maritimes to check on economic conditions. "It bugs me," he told the Saint John-based Telegraph-Journal. "I go to Richibucto and I'm told by a company [Imperial Manufacturing Group]that they had to import 50 Romanians to work in a shop when I have hundreds and thousands of people living on EI benefits in the same town."
"Unfortunately, New Brunswick has one of the highest [EI]claimant rates in Canada," Mr. Valcourt said. "We have too many people who entered the labour market only to get EI benefits. It has become a way of life." This is essentially the definition of dependence: Work for 14 weeks, get EI for the rest of the year.
New Brunswick is gradually coming to terms with social welfare programs that serve more as hammocks than as safety net. Statistics Canada provides only a glimpse of this dependence – reporting, for example, that 34,300 people (as a monthly average) collect EI benefits at any one time in a province with a labour force of 350,000. But Moncton economic consultant David Campbell calculates that 100,000 New Brunswick workers collected EI benefits at one time or another during 2009 – at a cost of more than $900-million. Mr. Campbell thinks that the cost will exceed $1-billion in 2011.
The manufacturing company in Richibucto isn't the only New Brunswick company that hires Romanians, whose work ethic is (by way of contrast) remarkable. Ganong Bros. Ltd., the famous candy maker in St. Stephen, employs 35 Romanians on two-year contracts.
"We could not find suitable people locally," company president David Ganong told the Telegraph-Journal. "We have difficulty finding people who have the work ethic and the skill set required." He appreciates his Romanian crew. "[They have]a very solid work ethic, and a drive to get ahead. They have an interest in increased responsibility. Because they are interested in making more money, they are prepared to learn the skills required."
This isn't only a New Brunswick story. According to official Romanian statistics, Canada is now the No. 1 destination of Romanian migrant workers – taking 20 per cent of the 10,000 Romanians who officially declare their foreign work each year. But the Paris-based Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says the vast majority of Romanian migrant workers don't declare.
The OECD says the number of Romanian workers now working abroad exceeds three million (from a country with a population of 21.4 million) – 890,000 of them in Italy, 750,000 in Spain. The remarkable Romanian will-to-work makes the celebrated migrations of workers from the Maritimes to Alberta look insignificant. (Romania's own unemployment rate, incidentally, is lower than Canada's: 7.2 per cent.) In a perceptive speech the other day, Toronto-Dominion Bank chief executive officer Ed Clark described the economic conundrum of our times as the consequence "of promises that cannot be kept." This is a good way to understand what's happening around the world – the slow, awkward fading of ideology, the gradual return of old-fashioned moral discipline: Waste not, want not.
This takes us back to the billion-dollar boondoggle in New Brunswick, where 14 weeks of work buys a year's worth of government paycheques – year after year. You don't need to cut adrift the province's seasonal workers but you could try for promises that can be kept. What if seasonal workers had to work 20 weeks a year? Or 24? However the EI promises get juggled, the current formula is an affront to decency.
In the promise-breaking days ahead, the public sector will need to find ways to transfer promises to the private sector – which alone has the discipline and the decision-making experience to determine which promises can reasonably be kept, which promises cannot – and how these promises might be revised to require more honest labour, which, as every Victorian knew, hath sure reward – or, at any rate, once did.