By 1968, rock and roll was over a decade old, and it had a big problem. The biggest stars in the business had been trapped in a party that they couldn't leave for 10 years.

In a kind of reverse meeting at the crossroads, they had the musical gifts, fame and fortune that they desired, but what they wanted most was what people in past generations would have had at their age: adulthood.

In J.M. Barry’s original 1904 play Peter Pan, Peter isn’t just playful or imaginative. He’s profoundly self-absorbed. He forgets people. He forgets promises. He can’t understand why other people have emotional needs. His adventures are endlessly exciting, but they never accumulate into wisdom or experience. Peter is both innocent and heartless. It’s not that he’s evil. It’s just that he never develops beyond the self-centeredness of childhood. The great tragedy of Peter Pan isn’t that he refuses to grow old. It’s that he cannot grow up and therefore can’t develop the capacity for meaningful responsibility, lasting relationships, or the kind of love that connects us to our family and our work.

In Halifax, we’re preparing for Last Waltz shows at the Devour Theatre and the Marquee Ballroom to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Band’s Last Waltz.

Much has been made about this enduring legacy of The Band. And rightfully so. They’ve been credited with gathering the roots of Americana music. They formed part of the foundation of the early days of country rock. Many commenters like to talk about how they mixed genres of rock, blues, country, and Southern music with a Canadian flair.

In this essay, I’m exploring a different way of looking at The Band, a different way of understanding what they were intentionally up to in those early days in the basement of that big pink house. The goal is to understand the lasting legacy of this band and this music, and the timely gift that it offers us today.

TIMELINE

In 1955, Bill Haley had a mainstream breakthrough with “Rock Around the Clock.” The song was pushed over the top by its appearance in the movie Blackboard Jungle with Sidney Poitier. It helped establish the association between rock and roll, teenagers and rebellion. Haley’s Comets topped the charts, and rock and roll became a national teenage sensation. By the end of 1956, it was a full-scale cultural explosion. Elvis appeared on national television, released “Heartbreak Hotel,” and became an international phenomenon.

Over the next four years, all the members of the band had become Hawks, touring and recording with Ronnie Hawkins. Levon Helm was just 17 when he joined in 1957. Robbie Robertson was just 16 when he joined Hawkins’ band in Toronto in 1959. Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and finally Garth Hudson joined by 1961.

They did three years in the hardscrabble world of rock and roll in that classic lineup. Then, with Levon as the leader, or ringleader, maybe you might say, they left Hawkins in 1964 and established themselves as Levon and the Hawks.

In ‘65 and ‘66, they backed Bob Dylan on his infamously controversial electric tour.

By 1967, rock and roll was 10 years old. The guys had passed through their teens on the road, but were trapped in a rock and roll Peter Pan world. The Odyssey really has nothing on this. They had seen more of the best and worst of life in those 10 years than most people ever will.

Through a meeting of the minds, with every one of them being a clear contributing character, the 10-year rock and roll ride took them to a new place that few people had ever been, and they had a brand-new plan about how to get back. Music from Big Pink was released in 1968, introducing them as The Band.

In the study of myth, writers like Joseph Campbell, in his book *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*, reveal the common goal of every journey, of every adventure. No matter what the original intention, no matter what the prize, no matter what the experience, the ultimate goal is the same and simple: to get back home.

Whole forests of trees can grow over 50 years. Even the ground can change. A lot of my thinking about The Band has come from Elliot Landy’s photography and a few interesting experiences, along with, of course, about 40 years of exploring the songs in more detail than is probably reasonable.

Elliot Landy’s photograph of the band with their families was a deliberate statement about being part of something larger, about gratitude, family, obligation, and home.

The story goes that it was the very first photo Elliot took of the band.

In 1968, they were preparing Music From Big Pink, and the band hired Elliot Landy to photograph them for the album. His first task wasn’t to photograph the musicians. It was to photograph their families.

Landy travelled to Canada, and some of the guys picked him up at the airport and drove him to a farm that belonged to Rick Danko’s family. The musicians had gathered their relatives for a large group portrait that they wanted to have on the album cover. Garth, Robbie, Rick, and Richard had their families there. Levon Helm’s parents couldn’t make the trip up from Arkansas, so their photograph was inserted into the corner of the finished image.

The photo is inside the album, and it’s titled “Next of Kin.” Elliot’s been really generous with his photographs and with his understanding of what the guys were up to in those days. He said they wanted to include a picture of their relatives in the album as a way of saying thank you for helping their our whole lives.

He contrasted the band’s attitude towards their families with the prevailing youth culture of the 1960s. At a time when a lot of young people were defining themselves in opposition to their parents and the older generation, the band were making a specific and public statement about not just their appreciation of the families, but their place in their families.

Looking at the photo, the guys aren’t standing out in front like rock stars. They’re just part of a larger complex clan of people. No one really has the spotlight. It’s the family, the household, the foundational building block of all society and all economies from time immemorial.

Being rock and roll stars, they weren’t declaring their independence from their parents. They were acknowledging their connection to them and a kind of debt that could never be repaid. They weren’t parading as stars or even self-made individuals. They were just part of households that made their lives possible.

To say this photo was different than normal rock and roll promotional imagery would be an understatement. While rock stars were cultivating celebrity, rebellion, and personal mystique, just as they do today, the band was introducing their parents. They’d finally gotten their own record deal, their own money, fame, and celebrity in their own right, and the first thing they wanted to do was thank their moms and dads. They weren’t dressed like old men to be funny. They were trying to express their adulthood, and the family photograph communicates these values as directly as it’s possible to do.

The conventional history describes the band’s influence as a return to roots, a rejection of psychedelia, and a kind of early expression of what eventually became Americana. That’s, for sure, all true to a degree, but this is what I see differently. They weren’t just turning back to an older form of music. They were using those touchstones and foundation stones to discover a way forward into adulthood. They wanted to dress like the old folks at home because, more than anything, they wanted to grow up. They wanted to be the old folks at home. For them, that front porch rocking chair was the most rock-and-roll idea of all.

The context is important. By the time they arrived at Big Pink, they had left home as teenagers and spent more than 10 years on the road, trapped in some ways in the perpetual youth and party of the early days of rock and roll, teenagers, and youth culture.

10 years is a long time to be at a party.

In a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Robbie Robertson described the influence of Louis Burnel’s films Nazarene and Veridina, particularly their exploration of the impossibility of sainthood. Maybe he was just talking a carnival barker’s big game, but he explained that he wanted the characters in the song to put their burdens on the traveller who narrated each verse. Once the traveller agrees to help, he becomes entangled in their affairs. Robertson is explicitly connecting the song’s famous chorus to the idea of assuming another person’s burden, taking responsibility for others.

When it was released in 1968, Music from Big Pink represented something pretty unusual. Rock and roll music in the mainstream was maybe 10 years old, and it was still strongly associated with youth, rebellion, sexuality, and self-expression. It was still the product of teenagers.

It’s hard to imagine now, but teenagers weren’t really invented until the 1950s. Of course, people have been turning 13 for as long as there have been people, but up until that point, you went from being a child to an adult.

It was only in that postwar boom that the teenager, as we now understand it, came to be, with leisure time and a unique lack of responsibility almost never seen before amongst any people in the world. The guys in the band were there. They had left home as surprisingly early teenagers and spent those 10 years on the road, goaded, of course, by Ronnie Hawkins, a much older man with a business to run. They performed for years as the Hawks and then subsequently as Bob Dylan’s controversial electric backing band on the front line, cutting edge, of rock and roll.

These musicians, as musicians often do, arrived at Big Pink looking and sounding like people who had already lived substantial lives. Four of them were still in their 20s. Garth Hudson was the oldest at 30, but they seemed a lot older than that. Being on the road and being in this endless youth, counterintuitively, has a way of really aging people.

The sound of the new band was famously disciplined, economical, and it was rooted in old folks’ music. They weren’t announcing a revolution. They were saying, “We’ve had it with teenage rock and roll, and we want to be adults.” In “The Weight,” musicianship is evidence of adulthood. Nobody’s showing off. Nobody’s trying to dominate the record. There’s no solo. There’s no “look at me.” There’s no pining love song.

They also demonstrate a kind of interest in thinking outside themselves and belonging to a larger group. The almost pathological, at least petulant, self-interest of teenage rock and roll culture is nowhere to be found. The lyric returns again and again and again to the theme of responsibility, but “The Weight” isn’t a straightforward celebration of responsibility. It recognizes obligation and burden in a very adult way, including dealing with people whose demands may be unreasonable.

The question isn’t just whether we should carry other people’s burdens. It’s about what our capacity for effort is: how much we can carry, what responsibilities we owe to other people, what duty of care, and whether the work of learning to be an adult is ever finished. Adulthood isn’t just a cheerful acquisition of responsibilities. It’s a willingness to accept responsibility that is difficult, unending, often thankless, and nevertheless necessary.

In an era when people were hyper-focused on freedom and feeling free, everything about the band made clear: freedom wasn’t freedom from responsibility. It was freedom to be responsible.

The band was intentionally adult, the first intentionally adult rock and roll band, on three levels:

The moral theme of “The Weight” is radical responsibility for others. The traveller gets drawn into the troubles of strangers, and the great burden of adulthood is that we’re no longer responsible just for ourselves. We become responsible to all kinds of people for all kinds of things: people who depend on us, and sometimes people we hardly know.

One attribute of adulthood that’s maybe more clear and more often discussed is their complete devotion to proficiency. They’re rock stars who took music lessons. They spent years working in the profession, and they learned the craft in clubs and on the road, in front of terrible audiences of all sorts. They were musicians, and exceptionally proficient ones. Yet they were always learning about how music works. In other words, their work was genuinely vocational and an end in itself, not a means to something else.

Maybe the most important thing about the band is that it distinguishes adulthood from the adolescent preoccupation with identity, individualism, and self. It moves away from personal recognition or gain and individual importance. It moves beyond the self to this notion of service: being part of something larger, working in service of the group, working in service of the music, and ultimately working in service of the audience, rather than taking something from them. It gives them something using the tools of their trade, the vocational tools of their trade.

Adulthood, in this sense, is the discovery that our importance is not established by who we say we are, but by what we are capable of doing for others. You become somebody and ultimately find purpose in life by making yourself useful to somebody at some time for something, and it all ties together.

It’s a trinity of themes. Responsibility without proficiency is just good intention. Proficiency without responsibility is potentially just vanity. Service without either is just wishful thinking, but put the three together, and you have the band’s coherent conception of adulthood.

We’ve spent decades describing the band in musical terms: country, blues, gospel, folk, rockability, roots music, inspiring Americana, but those descriptions explained only what the music sounded like. It never explained what the band actually represented, and there remains a kind of mystery about why this music has such enduring resonance.

Once we see that their great innovation wasn’t a musical genre at all, that it was the invention of a new kind of rock and roll identity, the adult, everything becomes clear.

Think about the landscape in 1968. The Beatles had become sophisticated. The Rolling Stones were still rebellious. The Who were famously singing about teenage alienation. Hendrix was searching for a new sonic language, and they were all struggling to keep the party going, to keep the rock and roll, teenage rebellion, pop star life going.

Then they saw the band emerge from the woods in Saugerties. They didn’t have extravagant solos, and the songs weren’t about young love or angsty teenage rebellion. Songs were about family, travellers, farmers, workers, soldiers, drifters, people with obligations and troubles.

When you look at Elliot Landy’s photos and see the band wearing these hats, you have to understand the context: up until the 1960s, all decent people wore hats. Adults wore hats, but by the 60s, young adults weren’t wearing hats, so they put on these hats: old fedoras and casual caps. They were putting on the clothes of adulthood, and they were cool. Maybe that’s the essential point.

Adult music existed. Of course, Sinatra was an adult. Country music was filled with adult concerns. Blues musicians had been singing about grown-up troubles for generations, and Dylan had introduced more complexity and literary ambition. The band didn’t invent maturity in popular music. They made being a grown-up a compelling rock and roll proposition, and it immediately spoke to the top performers in rock and roll. Maybe Eric Clapton’s the best example.

By 1968, Eric Clapton was one of the most famous guitarists alive. He was a superstar of rock and roll music, and then he heard Music From Big Pink. He literally went on a pilgrimage to visit the band in Woodstock with the intention of asking to join the band, literally to ask them permission to also be an adult in music. He said later that the experience was transformative.

He asked them if they wanted to jam, and they said, “Yeah, we don’t really do that.” They wrote and worked. They were tradesmen, vocational workers, and he felt he was shot down but also raised up. Clapton was enormously impressed, and it’s easy to see in Clapton’s career how that visit to Saugerties changed him and his music. He found his own way into intentionally adult rock and roll life, but he remained, as he often told folks in interviews, totally devoted to the band and what it offered.

I think music is a leading indicator. It gets at all kinds of things, way ahead of other areas of interest. The first generation of enormously successful rock and roll musicians had entered a profession almost entirely defined by youth. It was celebrated for rebellion, defiance, sexuality, excess, and freedom from adult obligations.

Time passed, and many of the most famous musicians were trapped playing teenage music for teenagers, but they weren’t teenagers. Their craft was developing. Musical tastes were expanding, their responsibilities were becoming more complicated, yet the business and mythology surrounding them continued to reward adolescence and adolescent behaviour. You could mature musically, like the Beatles and Dylan had shown, but could you become a mature rock and roll person without losing your standing as a rock star?

The band offered the answer. It showed the way. They looked like adults. They behaved musically like professionals. Their songs concerned adult things about work and travel, debts, losses, and responsibilities, and yet they were astonishingly cool.

How does this explain why we’re having these Last Waltz celebrations 50 years later?

Why is this music so enduring?

The answer is that, just as rock stars struggled in the 1960s with this notion of adulthood, today we’re all suffering through the same struggle. It’s not just teenagers. We’ve all been trapped in the spiral of youth culture. It’s marketed to us. It’s held up as the ideal of everything, and many of us at 30, 35, 40 are still living as children.

Ted Gioia’s breakthrough essay in The Atlantic explained how old music is killing new music, and the story of The Band at least partly explains why that is so.

Modern pop music, whatever you want to call it, is a looping, ruminating parody of itself. Songcraft, melody, and musical variety are often missing. With notable exceptions, mainstream modern country music seems sometimes more like lists of triggers than actual songs or stories, with the pickup truck, the blue jeans, and the drinking beer with your buddies.

But little of it aspires to any more than to just catch somebody’s ear, and maybe worse. The youth, danger, rebellion, and sex have been reduced to mostly just sex. What songcraft there is sometimes moves too far towards hyper-individualistic, self-centred, page-pulled-from-the-diary rumination. That’s as close to voyeurism, or a kind of light sex work, as it is to insight, shared understanding, or reflection on life and living.

But I think we all have a sense, when we listen to The Band’s music, that we can see another path where we can see music and cool people taking on adulthood and being cool about it.

Cool. “I spoke their word as if a wedding vow.”

Bob Dylan as a literary figure.

None of this was lost on Bob Dylan as a literary figure. He saw it all, and he continued to try to understand what was happening. Though I’ve written all these thousands of words, he boiled it down to four: “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” He came to this conclusion, this discovery, through Scripture, and it just shows how ancient this journey is.

In 1 Corinthians 13:11, the King James Version says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, and I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That’s the Apostle Paul writing about the passage from immaturity to maturity. Paul isn’t just advocating abandoning youthful behaviour. We should still all hang on to the curiosity, enthusiasm, and energy of youth, but the larger passage concerns love, responsibility, and the movement from incomplete understanding towards maturity.

In other words, growing up isn’t just about what we leave behind. It’s about how we find purpose in life when we become capable of giving to others.

Later in Ecclesiastes, the preacher doesn’t condemn youthful pleasure. He explicitly encourages young people to rejoice in their youth while remembering that their choices have consequences and to be aware of the transience of youth: childhood and youth are fleeting, and their pleasures cannot, by definition, provide a permanent foundation for a meaningful life.

The Hebrew word for vanity also carries a sense of breath or vapour, something that’s insubstantial and passing. When Ecclesiastes 11:10 says, “Therefore, remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh, for childhood and youth are vanity,” it makes the meaning of youth more clear. Enjoy being young, but don’t mistake youth for the purpose of life.

The Band didn’t reject the joy, energy, or excitement of youthful music. They rejected the idea that a musician had to remain an adolescent to continue making it. Youth is a wonderful place to visit, but a poor place to spend an entire lifetime, which is pretty much a description of Neverland.

In the song “King Harvest Has Surely Come,” we hear the story of a man that’s lost nearly everything. It’s a song of union politics and agricultural hardship. His farm is failing, his barn has burned, his horse is gone, and he’s ended up in poverty. Then a labour organizer arrives, offering him the possibility of a better life through collective action, but the man doesn’t see the union organizer as a simple saviour. He sees him as a political operator making big promises.

It’s not a protest song exactly. It’s a story about work, dignity, stewardship, responsibility, desperation, and belonging. It’s a kind of John Steinbeck musical, and all the man wants is to be part of something larger. He’s prepared to work. He’s prepared to pay the dues, but there’s an ambiguity in the song. He never learns if the union actually comes through. He’s heard a promise. He’s accepted a membership. He has a hope, but the story ends.

If The Weight is about accepting the burdens of other people, King Harvest is about discovering that sometimes we need other people to help us carry our own. You’re not going to hear anybody sing about anything more grown-up than that.

I’ll leave you with a recording of us playing the song at the Marquee Ballroom, in Halifax.

THE CODA

So here we are, trapped not just in a culture but in an economy of youth. We all feel something’s wrong. We’re all wondering about the purpose and meaning of it all.

Poor Ronnie Hawkins has come to symbolize the manipulative, goading business of capitalizing on youth culture while keeping youth trapped in a perpetual party that goes from bad to worse. He was both their introduction to that world and, in some respects, the person who prepared them to leave it. But there’s no doubt about it. He needed them and wanted them.

I think it’s important to notice entropy as well. Roughly defined, we took the idea from science, but the notion is that everything falls apart.

By 1976, almost another decade had passed, and the idea that gave birth to The Band had been fully explored. The sad part is, the story really echoes tragic Greek mythology. Arguably, none of the characters ultimately escaped and found their way back home as intended. Each took their own route, and it’s hard to say which path was most tragic.

It’s fascinating that this year the Odyssey has returned to our consciousness as a major motion picture at the 50th anniversary of The Last Waltz. Homer’s Odyssey is fundamentally about nostos, the ancient Greek idea of homecoming, and homecoming means more than returning to a particular place. It means finding your identity, your relationships, your obligations, your purpose and place in the world, and that’s certainly the story of The Band. In the Odyssey, Odysseus loses all the companions who set out with him on his journey home, and the homecoming, in whatever form it takes, belongs to him alone.

After the Last Waltz, Robertson found a home in Hollywood, the influential world of stars, money, and movies. Levon Helm returned to Woodstock, built a farm and a community. Garth Hudson, along with his wife Maude, lost himself in the sounds of keyboards and organs that were home to his restless musical mind. Rick Danko headed back home to southern Ontario to the people. He thought of his family, who he knew and loved, but was still captured in some ways by the joy of parties and entertaining people. Richard Manuel sadly never found home and was the first one to be lost in a traveller’s motel room in Florida.

Five young men set out to escape one world and find another, only to discover that they couldn’t quite escape themselves.

They had demonstrated radical responsibility in their music, but responsibility was proving difficult in their lives. They had achieved almost unimaginable proficiency, but proficiency couldn’t save them. They had made a virtue of subordinating the individual to the group, but the group itself was coming apart.

The point was never that adulthood made people immune to tragedy, temptation, vanity or disappointment. It was that adulthood offered a way of living in which we could take responsibility for something beyond ourselves, acquire the proficiency to do something worthwhile, and find purpose in being of service to others.

The Band found a way to express those ideas in rock and roll. They made music in which the old virtues sounded new, and the old responsibilities became something to aspire to.

They didn’t always manage to live by them.

Neither do we.

I don’t want to pick winners here, but I think that the Last Waltz (meaning the ultimate story of how things turned out for each of these five characters) is the lesson here for all of us. What I take away is this distinction between finding a home or being gifted something, and making a home.

I always lean into Levon Helm’s story without declaring it the winner in some moral competition. he’s the apostle that I most admire and with the qualities that I would most likely inculcate in myself. His barn became a place where other people could belong. It was a living expression of the responsibility, proficiency, and service that they set out to explore.

Finding your way home is not easy. That’s the Odyssey, and that’s the story of all of our unfinished business of becoming adults.

“You never be free if you can’t let go.” You might like to take a listen to Shovels and Rope’s, wonderful tribute to Garth Hudson and the band called The Last Hawk. Kind of really puts a bow on the whole thing.

None of this has been lost on rock and roll stars. In homage to Elliot Landy’s famous photograph, here’s Kiss with their parents.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I’ve been involved in the management of big projects throughout my working life, but I only recently found out about it.

In my teens, I started my first rock band. In my 20s, I worked in integrated logistics support for the Canadian Patrol Frigate Project, along with more bands and tours. In my 30s I helped create the world’s first fully refundable labour-based tax credit for the film and television industry that transformed the way movies and shows get made, and a Juno Award-winning travelling swing music band called the Johnny Favourite Swing Orchestra. In my 40s and 50s, I created and produced over $100 million worth of television series for History, Discovery, and National Geographic. Along the way, I planted gardens, built a cabin and an outhouse, restored an old Volkswagen bus, renovated and restored an historic house, had a family, and undertook dive expeditions in search of lost shipwrecks, and a thousand other things.

We’re all project planners and managers at some level. You’ve taken on projects that were big for you, and you’ve seen others in your family, in your community, corporations, and governments take on big projects. There’s a way to look at life and the world: all the affairs of people are just a series of big projects.

Even a nation, a government, an economy, and a change of almost any sort can be looked at as a project. Today, we’re at the very beginning of what is quickly becoming Canada’s new national project.

Every project starts with a story. It’s a story we tell ourselves about what the project will look like, what the benefits will be, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. The characters in that story all need to have their roles written, and the stage on which they will play their parts set.

In this sense, a project is just a story we tell ourselves about the future: our hopes, our dreams, our ideas and beliefs, the words we use, and the capacity for effort we can muster. That is what the future is made from.

Sure, there are problems along the way: unknowns, unexpected events, both small and catastrophic. But more often than not, once they’re in the rearview mirror, they just become part of the story of how the project got done.

In his book, How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg, maybe the greatest global rock star in project management today, creates a summary of his many datasets, essays, research papers, and collaborations about what really determines the fate of every project, from a home renovation to space exploration. Bent is the world’s leading expert on megaprojects: the inspiring big visions that define the future of our towns, cities, provinces, and nation.

He’s built a dataset of over 16,000 mega projects from around the world, and as Canada, its provinces, and cities set out on this new national project, we can learn a lot from this data.

First, the bad news: big projects are judged by a few things: the budget, the timeline, and the benefits. Unfortunately, most of us are only painfully too aware of their track record, but to bring the optimists alongside us in this conversation, I can lay out the long lottery odds that these projects face.

Here’s a summary from the world’s most comprehensive database of big projects.

As Canada begins our new national project, our cities, our provinces, our businesses, investors, and our government, our banks, and all of us as citizens have to come to terms with this track record: why things happen this way and what that 0.5% of projects get right, so that we can build a better nation.

How Big Things Get Dumb

“Do you remember the invasion of Newfoundland’s hydroponic cucumber?”, asks the Amazon blurb. How about New Brunswick’s ill-fated space-age sports car? In his book on failures and fiascos in economic development, Dan Soucoup follows the money trail up the political ladder to deliver the dirt on the most devastating failed business ventures, political scandals, and industry fiascos in Atlantic Canadian history. his book should be part of every child’s education in the Maritimes, and it should be on the desk of every decision maker.

The book exposes two centuries of debacles of regional, national, and international scope. Exposed is the downfall of many local industries including steel, coal mining, nuclear and hydro-power, oil, heavy-water, and even rum-running. From the tragic fall of Sydney Steel in Cape Breton, PEI’s flawed immigrant investor program, the controversial (and ongoing) Churchill Falls project in Newfoundland, New Brunswick’s doomed Chignecto Ship Railway, and plenty more. From the coal mines of Cape Breton to Yarmouth ferry, these stories make headlines and continue to baffle Atlantic Canadians today.

So what goes wrong with big projects?

It turns out a few of the same mistakes are made over and over again.

First off, big projects are often undertaken with an optimism bias, but after a certain point, optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous. Planners underestimate costs, schedules, and difficulties while just overestimating the benefits of the project. Sometimes these things are innocent. Most of the time psychology, politics, and profit underlie the bias to the point where there’s actual strategic misrepresentation, and promoters deliberately understate the costs and exaggerate the benefits to secure the approvals and funding that benefit them.

Along with optimism comes a rush into execution. Production begins before sufficient planning and testing happens. Along with the pitching of any big project comes a uniqueness bias where every project is treated as special, so proponents, promoters, and planners often ignore the lessons of experience. Human brains resist complexity. We look for simple patterns. We look for binaries. Complexity and interdependence are seldom considered to the degree they should be, considering the complexity of the world in which we live.

Another problem is time. The longer a project takes, the more exposed it is to all kinds of problems: inflation, political changes, market shifts, and unexpected events of all sorts. Then there’s the sunk cost fallacy. Once leaders publicly commit to a project, they become reluctant to ever reconsider it, even when the evidence suggests they should. In simple terms, the sunk cost fallacy teaches us that we shouldn’t hang on to our mistakes, even if they cost a lot of money and we spent a long time making them.

Finally, when any or all of those things go wrong, there is the problem of responsibility.

Admiral H.G. Rickover, USN, is my hero of project management. He’s known as the father of the nuclear navy. To put it simply, he was the person responsible for transforming the power of the atomic bomb into an engine that powered the first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus.

On a secret submerged journey in 1958 from Hawaii, under the Arctic ice and under the North Pole, into Portland, England, to announce the arrival of the atomic age.

Anyone who’s seen a big building go up or followed along with some government project (perhaps the new highway construction) might have an idea of how long a project like that would take. Few among us would guess that it could be accomplished in the 5 years it took Rickover to get it done.

Hyman G. Rickover defined responsibility as an indivisible, personal burden that cannot be delegated away or escaped through blame. Rickover noted that individuals, rather than abstract organizations or systems, are ultimately responsible for achieving results. True accountability and the drive to do a job right come from personal attitude, hands-on experience, and common sense rather than corporate management theories.

“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”

― Hyman G. Rickover

Anyone reading this is well aware of this final problem. The very notion of responsibility is almost entirely absent from our modern world, government and business.

How Big Things Get Done

At a development meeting with Sky TV, NBC Universal, and Discovery Channels, almost 10 years ago, I pitched an idea for a new kind of science and engineering documentary TV series. The show would be called “If We Built It Today,” and that was pretty much the pitch: no deck, no slides, no presentation, no tape, just the title and my presentation as a creative, confident person — a producer who could get projects like this done.

In fact, I was pitching a project about big projects, and there, on comfortable couches, overlooking the Croisette in Cannes, they all said yes. I spent the next 5 years travelling the world, exploring the biggest, most complex, and most famous megaprojects in history. I needed to understand everything that could be learned about how they get done, but that wasn’t the show. The show was: how do we go about it? How long would it take? How much would it cost? What would the dangers and benefits be… if we built it today?

From the Great Wall of China to the Great Pyramids, I got to talk to the greatest project management experts in history about how the world’s greatest megaprojects could be recreated today.

But unknown to the broadcasters and commissioning editors that bought that series, it wasn’t a whimsical, optimistic opportunity. I had actually spent a full 7 years developing this idea on paper, doing the research, working out each of the shows, how we would do it, and what the main factors would be in reimagining history’s projects for the modern age: Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Washington, D.C., even Atlantis. I found a way to think through and tell a story about how we would use modern materials, technology, and ideas to build the greatest mega projects of history.

So, rather than making the 100th or 1,000th story imagining how the Great Pyramids were built, I travelled to Egypt and assembled a team to look around at the project, the available resources, and how we might go about it today. I spoke to some of the world’s most ambitious property developers and builders and really got into a budget, finance plan, schedule, and an understanding of, for practical purposes, what the Great Pyramid actually was.

Francis Ferris, one of the most interesting of Canada’s Lebanese diaspora large-scale property developers, signed on to the project, and the way he saw it was fascinating to me. “It’s not a building, John Wesley,” he said. “It’s just a very well-organized pile of blocks.” With that sentence, he unlocked for me the true secret of megaprojects and my own understanding of how big things get done.

For our series, we looked to the nearby port of Alexandria. There, enough modern shipping containers travel through each year to build five great pyramids, and the port had all the machinery, manpower, know-how, and management to easily organize the pile of blocks that Francis helped imagine. Through the magic of CGI and project management software, we were easily able to game out how we could approach the construction of the Great Pyramid if we built it today.

But the much deeper lesson is in the blocks themselves. The reason I had never considered myself a big project manager is because, in my mind, I had never undertaken a big project. I’d never made a TV series. I just made an episode of one. I never made an episode. I just shot a scene. I never shot a scene. I just organized a team to shoot a day of interviews, but each of those elements added up.

I’ve now produced and delivered, on time and on budget, with benefits exceeding what was promised, over 500 programs for global broadcast. Though the topics of the shows varies from ocean adventures, history, mystery, science and engineering, and wildlife, all I was doing was looking at it the way Francis looked at the Great Pyramid: just shaping each block the same and putting it together one by one until the project was done.

Many Small Things

The essential lesson for cities, provinces, and for the new Canadian national project is clear: a big future can be made from many small things. The essential lesson is that large ambitions don't necessarily require large, bespoke projects. Modularity, repetition, experimentation, and learning can achieve enormous scale while reducing the risks of any individual undertaking.

We know this. Everyone knows this. It’s fundamental to our thinking: the way farmers have varied their crops since time immemorial, the heuristics in our language itself that tell us not to put all our eggs in one basket, and the basic financial advice that every person is given when investing: to diversify their portfolios.

Still, somehow, we default, over and over again, to megaprojects that are gigantic, all-or-nothing, bespoke, one-of-a-kind things, not at all unique because we do them over and over again, but unique in the sense that they’re not being compared to ample data that shows that they will go over budget over time and not deliver the promised benefits.

How did we get here? In my industry, the hubris of Hollywood has the answer.

As the motion picture industry matured, it developed a seasonality where new pictures would come out for the Christmas holidays or for auspicious anniversaries. Winter romances and countless movies about spring, but nothing held the imagination of the industry and the audience more so than the summer blockbuster.

By the 1970s, the summer blockbuster became so important to the studios and systems of Hollywood that it overshadowed the industry. Everything was riding on it. Reputations, awards, and finances all depended on a studio reaching the top of the box office with a summer blockbuster. Jaws helped establish the modern summer blockbuster in 1975, and Star Wars reinforced the model in 1977.

Blockbuster mentality worked in the entertainment industry when the project was big enough to absorb everything else, to capture all the light, all the attention, all the media, and all the audience, and all the awards. The blockbuster was mesmerizing, not just to the audience, but to the creators. They made careers, they saved studios, and they made fortunes.

In an attention economy, the blockbuster began to seem like the only way to go. Through all the entertainment industries (film, TV, music, art, sports and video gaming, the blockbuster, the mega project, the big bet-everything swing started to seem like normal business. Psychology, politics, and profit swirled together to the point where the notion of not putting all your eggs in one basket started to seem like the folksy, naive accent of another age.

Even as the entertainment industries began to collapse in on themselves, the blockbuster mentality, the megaproject mentality, continued. The industry is mystified. The audience is growing, the demand for the product is growing, the rate of consumption is growing voraciously, and the consumer’s willingness to pay is increasing. Yet somehow, the industries are failing.

New technology comes along to make production faster, cheaper, and better-looking products, and yet still, the industry is in despair, and everyone can see it. Even just this week, Netflix, following along with all the other big entertainment companies, has laid off over a thousand workers and fired their creative management team. Well, just across town, the new deal to combine Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount into an even bigger megacorp has reached final approvals.

The blockbuster brain, the megaproject mentality, is the distraction of the age, but the reasons are timeless: psychology, politics, and profit.

I’m writing this all out as if I have some special insight from the front line, but I know in my heart nothing I’ve written here will surprise anyone. Every citizen, every consumer knows all this, and they’re telling it to the market all day, in every way. Still, the blockbuster boom continues, but we can’t build a nation that way. We have to return to the fundamental building blocks, and just like each of the stones in the Great Pyramid, we have to fit them to their greater purpose.

The citizen, famously, is at the heart of liberalism and our democracy. Maybe more important is the household. Today we look at households as consumers, but only because the economics of the age don’t count what counts. But any one of us can tell you that it’s the household that’s the fundamental building block, the fundamental productive unit of any society.

When we build, we need to build big by doing many small things and repeating them with craft, precision, enthusiasm, and beauty. the key is not thinking small, reducing ambition or scale. The key is repeatability. Doing similar things repeatedly builds skills. Anyone who has ever practised anything understands this. In science, things designed this way are called fractals. Fractals are almost magical building blocks of nature, and more common than we can imagine, where big things, when looked at closely, are made from increasingly smaller versions of the same thing.

The secret to successfully building big things is to build them out of small, repeatable things. The most reliable way to accomplish enormous ambitions is to make the work modular, standardized, and repeatable, and capable of improvement through experience.

The central metaphor of Bent’s book is Lego. The key to building at world-transforming scale is to understand what our Lego is, and the proof of how important this is is easily observed in the dataset.

Big, bespoke, enormous undertakings like nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, and Olympic Games are the worst-performing projects. No amount of economy of scale or any other business school jargon can make up for how bad these projects perform in the long run. Where we can standardize, where we can build, test, improve, and repeat, repetition creates experience. Experience produces learning, and learning improves quality while reducing costs, schedules, and risk. Experimentation becomes possible without putting all our eggs in one basket.

The next table shows cost overruns for twenty-five project types covering sixteen thousand–plus projects. Overrun is measured as (a) mean cost overrun, (b) percentage of projects in the uppertail (defined as ≥ 50 percent), and (c) mean overrun in the tail. Overrun is measured in real terms.

For us who are being asked to choose what kind of projects we support, their findings are crucial because there are certain projects that have that Lego character. There are certain projects that will be over budget, over time, and poor performers, underdelivering benefits almost every time. As a nation, as a province, as a city, we have to look for projects that can be constructed in repeatable, productive units where we can not only learn, but we can become experts, craftspeople, artists. It’s modularity that makes enormous ambitions achievable.

That’s not saying that everything has to be bland and the same. Sears and Roebuck, over a century ago, began selling homes from their catalogue. Across North America, as many as 100,000 were built. Now, a century later, they’re among some of the most unique, valuable, and cherished homes for families ever built.

My conclusion is that we should stop thinking about economic development as the business of attracting and financing big projects. We have a century of failures to draw on, to remind us that this doesn’t work.

What we should be thinking about is developing small, repeatable capacity that can produce big outcomes for government. That means getting out of the “pick a winner” business, getting out of the business of writing big checks to this company or that, to backing this particular mine or this particular idea, and building systems of support that are automatic and available to all.

The opportunity cost of concentrating public money in a few large projects is not merely that those projects might fail. It’s that hundreds of alternative enterprises never get the opportunity to demonstrate what they could accomplish. There’s a survivorship bias in pick-a-winner systems, where the projects that get the big government grants, the companies that win the competitions and receive the government largesse, also get all the attention. What’s not counted is the alternative uses for that capital and the ever-growing negative feedback loop of what is, by definition, the greater number of ideas and interests that are left without support, without capital, without attention, and without interest

The success of Keynesian economics in the Progressive Era and beyond is proof positive that government has a role to play in building a great economy, but it must be done in a way that understands how big things get done. The secret of doing big things is not learning how to do big things. It’s learning how to do small things, or, more importantly for government, letting small things happen so that they can be done well.

Automatic systems in government include things like tax credits, success incentives, and rewards for making small things happen. Counterintuitively, maybe one of the crucial roles of government in the 21st century will be to ensure that things don’t get too big. We must return to government oversight such that monopoly, oligopoly, concentration of capital, too much wealth, too big of corporations, too big of draws on our natural resources, and in small places, that too big of characters don’t dominate the world of ideas and imagining.

We also have wonderful datasets. We know what works and what doesn’t. We know what kinds of projects will come in on time and on budget. We know what kinds of projects overdeliver and underdeliver benefits, and most importantly, we have the datasets we need to estimate and understand these costs.

There is nothing new under the sun. Everything we imagine to do in our city, in our province, in our country has a comparable set of efforts which we can use to estimate and understand how long it will take, how much it will cost, and what the true benefits will be.

Our task as citizens is to look beyond the psychology, to look beyond the politics, to look beyond the profiteers, and imagine the future as it will actually be.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I knew an old woman, way down the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. She was a Scottish war bride. She and her husband, after the war’s end, bought the house for a couple thousand dollars. It was one of a series of saltbox houses that some man had built as a kind of rural development project. Her husband had long passed away, and she lived there, paying property tax on an assessment that, by the time I met her, was around $100,000.

Not long after, a young family who moved down to The Shore from Halifax to pursue the good life and start a business bought one of the other saltbox houses (same house, built at the same time), and they paid about $300,000 for it. Their tax bill, from the jump, was three times that of the old lady next door. Same rural area, same lack of services, same house built at the same time, and they paid three times as much. It made starting their business and supporting their family much more difficult in a period of life when a couple thousand dollars a year makes a big difference.

From Ecum Secum to Hubbard’s and all points in between, everyone knows a story like this and lands on one side of the ledger or the other. That’s the impact for regular people of the current property tax system.

The difference may have little to do with the services they receive, the real value of the property, or their ability to pay. There’s only one real difference. One family has lived there for years. The other has just bought.

The newcomers may have stretched themselves to the limit to move to Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore ( part of Halifax Regional Municipality ) and buy a home. They have paid market price, taken on the big mortgage and now face a tax bill that their established neighbours have been protected from. The family with less equity pays more tax.

That is a weird welcome to homeownership.

Halifax’s own introduction to tax reform begins with a statement of the greater purpose and how it evolved into a problem.

”Since the 1880s municipalities in Nova Scotia have collected property tax as a percentage of the value of a home. The original idea was that those with more valuable property had a greater ability to pay. Today things have changed. Current research indicates there is little link between income and property values.”

Nova Scotia’s capped assessment system began with an understandable purpose: protecting people from sudden tax increases as the value of their homes rose. But over time, that protection has created a widening distance between neighbours. Long ownership can bring a substantial tax advantage, regardless of whether the owner needs it.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary rise in home prices has delivered a windfall to many people who bought years ago. The cap did not create that wealth. It does, however, allow some of its beneficiaries to contribute less toward municipal costs than they would under a common market-based system. Other taxpayers, often, newcomers, young families, and people just starting out, the kind of people we need to build our future, carry the difference, often during the most expensive chapter in their lives.

Nobody has done anything wrong by accepting the tax bill they were sent. But a city needs to think about the people arriving on the property ladder as well as the people already higher up. Our children will have to establish themselves somewhere. We should care about the terms on which they can establish themselves here.

The basic repair is well understood. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has compared the ways governments assess property and protect taxpayers. Its work favours accurate, regular assessments, that closely reflect market prices for all, and sensible tax rates, backed by relief for people who need it. We do not have to invent a new branch of economics, build a new bureaucracy or burden people who’ve built the neighbourhoods and communities we love.

It’s difficult to have this conversation without using a lot of math and even more complex percentages, but I’m determined to try that here, even though my stock and trade is numbers and percentages.

The municipal budget determines how much must be collected. It’s the amount they need to run the city for the year. They set a rate expressed as a percentage of the assessment value of your home. The assessment multiplied by the rate percentage determines your share of the bill. If property values rise, and the total amount the city needs stays the same, the tax rate can come down. Moving to market assessments should not hand City Hall a windfall.

The important point here is that the amount you pay is not just the rate or the assessment. It’s a function of the two together. A very low assessment and a high rate, or a very high assessment and a low rate, can still produce the same total amount of money to support the municipal budget. Therefore, we shouldn’t get too hung up on the assessment by itself, but rather on how it’s calculated and how the calculation impacts individual homeowners, even if the total collected is the same under any number of various schemes.

Getting agreement on property tax reform is hard, because correcting an unequal arrangement changes people’s bills.

Some longtime owners could comfortably pay more. Others live on pensions or wages that have scarcely kept pace with ordinary expenses. Some have considerable wealth in their houses but very little in the bank. Their home may have become valuable without becoming any less necessary to them. And sometimes none of this takes into account other practical concerns like family life expenses or much-needed home maintenance and repair costs.

An assessment notice does not know anything about the income and financial situation of the person opening the envelope.

I do not want anyone forced to sell a family home because we finally decided to repair the tax system. Nor do I want the repair to require an annual pilgrimage to City Hall, bank statements in hand, to persuade someone that you deserve help. That is an unpleasant burden for the homeowner and another administrative department for a municipality that already has a bigger bureaucracy than I think we should have.

So I looked at approaches in Canada, the United States and around the world. There are ways to postpone payment, programs that consider income, and mechanisms that soften sudden increases. The idea that most interested me came from Denmark.

After years of frozen property taxes and rising values, Denmark restored the connection between property taxation and property values in its 2024 reform. It lowered rates and protected qualifying existing owners against increases caused by the change through a fixed tax discount.

That fixed discount is the part worth borrowing to help finally fix Halifax’s property tax calculation problem.

For Halifax, the province and municipality could agree on a move to market assessments, with rates calculated to preserve the intended total revenue after allowing for the credits. An existing owner facing a higher bill because of the reform would receive a credit for the difference in the year of the change.

If that difference were $2,000, the annual credit would be $2,000. It would remain $2,000 if the house rose in value. It would remain $2,000 as inflation gradually reduced its purchasing power. The ordinary bill could change, but the credit would stay fixed.

The homeowner would not have to prove poverty or borrow the difference. It would be an acknowledgement that people made long-term decisions under rules the government gave them.

In the version I favour, that protection would continue while the owner or a surviving spouse remained in the home. An ordinary sale would end it. Transfers would need clear rules so that protection for a spouse did not become an inherited tax privilege continuing indefinitely. The next buyer would enter the ordinary market-assessment system.

Our current cap also generally resets after a sale, but the purchaser can then become capped again. Under this proposal, we would stop starting that clock over. There would be no assessment caps going forward when somebody bought a home. Everyone would be treated fairly by having the same market rate assessment and the same rate.

There is a cost to fairness. We can’t expect a quick-fix, easy-way solution to a problem we’ve spent a long time making. If existing owners are fully protected and the city collects the same total, we cannot also promise an immediate tax cut to everyone else. Relief would emerge as credits expired and rates were adjusted. Anyone selling this as an instant saving for every household is selling something the arithmetic cannot deliver.

Using StatsCan data on housing turnover, we could estimate that there’s about a 5% annual turnover in the 150,000 or so owned households in Halifax. That means that about a third would turn over in 10 years, over 50% in 20, and maybe 80% would turn over within 30 years, substantially completing the reform project.

It’s a generational repair. It’s a soft landing. Much of the transition would occur within the first 20 years, and there would be some holdouts where people might stay in their homes for another 40. That’s the reason to begin now. Had we started this 20 years ago, at the first consideration of property tax reform, we’d be halfway there already, and we wouldn’t be having the struggle today.

But the direction would change immediately. The advantage already accumulated would become a fixed, visible amount. We would stop allowing it to grow through the cap, and every ordinary sale would bring us closer to common treatment.

This would still take work. Denmark’s wider reform suffered expensive administrative difficulties, and we should learn from those too. The attraction of the fixed credit is its limited demand for new personal information. Nova Scotia already records market assessments, capped assessments and ownership changes. We should ask whether those records can do the job before creating another office to investigate people’s circumstances.

The system would remain imperfect during the transition. Some neighbours would still pay different amounts. Losing a credit could still discourage a move. A fixed credit would not protect anyone against every future tax increase. Existing hardship protections would still matter.

I think those are acceptable compromises for a reform that protects people from the immediate shock while establishing an eventual end to the inequity.

We’ve spent a generation living with this problem. I’m old enough to remember endless days of Gloria and the other councillors, along with Bruce Fisher, the old Halifax CFO, who was given responsibility for property tax reform. Then all our political leaders were talking about this endlessly in the community and on the radio back in 2007.

The ideas given back then, starting with a review in 2004, were finally rejected in January 2010. Six years of work. Ended almost 17 years ago

The project, though needed, became so fraught they ended up giving up on it. Had we begun a lasting transition twenty years ago, the ordinary buying and selling of homes would have done a great deal of the work by now. Time was available to us. We let it pass. And the intervening time of tremendously increasing property values has both complexified the problem and made the stakes a lot higher

That is more reason to begin now. A gradual solution needs years to work, and every year of delay postpones the fairer system we all agree we want.

This reform will not make anybody richer tomorrow, but it shouldn’t make anyone poorer either. And we want to make sure that it doesn’t give City Hall a growth windfall at a time when we would prefer to bring the size of government more into proportion with the economics of our community.

We can give households a clearer basis for planning, protect established residents from an abrupt change and begin removing an arbitrary disadvantage facing future buyers. Those are useful economic gains for a city that needs people to put down roots.

The neighbours in those two houses out along the eastern shore should be able to support that bargain. One can remain at home without being punished for trusting the old rules. The other can see that those rules finally have an expiry, and they won’t be expected to carry more than their fair share of the load as they work to imagine and build a more prosperous future for us all.

We owe the next generation a city they can join on fair terms. It starts with offering them the greatest gift we possibly can: an opportunity to imagine a future filled with opportunity, promise, and prosperity. And that’s a promise that we can build into their tax bill.

Sources

Background reading for the essay

Property Valuation Services Corporation
Capped Assessment Program eligibility and calculation

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Property Tax Relief for Homeowners research summary

OECD Economic Surveys Denmark 2026
Housing taxation reform and implementation difficulties, Box 4.1

Danish Tax Agency
Fixed owner discounts and provisions for spouses, in Danish

British Columbia
Property tax deferment and automatic renewal

Minnesota Department of Revenue
Income-based and tax-increase homeowner refunds

Irish Revenue
Multi-year income-threshold deferrals

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

TL;DR : Skip to the end for a short list of six ways to tell if somebody’s bullshitting you about Mark Carney’s book Value(s).

I understand why people look at Mark Carney’s resume and Rolodex and get nervous.

After a generation of neoliberalism and the 2008 financial crisis, we’ve all earned the right to be suspicious of arrangements in which governments and giant financial institutions tell us everybody will benefit… eventually; the old trickle-down trick that is the hallmark of modern neoliberal economics.

For sure, don’t trust the resume. Read the book. Judge by actions, not words, but if you haven’t read the book and you’re just trying to work out what other people are saying about it or what they say it says, maybe this can help.

Let’s look at what’s actually going on.

All right, so all I have to do in this essay is:

1. read the book

2. understand what it means, the context, and where it’s coming from

3. do the online Google research to cross-reference it with all the criticism, mean things, and quotes that have been attributed to it and Mark Carney

4. pull out the fair criticisms and understandable concerns about Mark Carney

5. explain it all.

Shouldn’t take long. Kidding. It took a really long time, and the only thing I can promise about this long essay is that it’s shorter than the book.

Carney really did work at Goldman Sachs. He really did work with Brookfield. He really has attended the most elite gatherings in economics and world affairs. He really has been the head of two central banks, the people who set monetary policy and sit at the centre of the financial system. And he really does know the heads of pension funds, sovereign funds, banks and gigantic asset managers.

And then there’s the book.

If you haven’t read this book, congratulations for having a life, getting things done, and probably focusing on things that matter that you can have an actual impact on.

In March 2021, Mark Carney released a book called “Values: Building a Better World for All.” Though, if you’re following along on social media, you’d think it might have been called “Secret Plan for World Domination.” It’s 600 plus pages with introduction, notes, references, and indexes and lays out an argument for radical, foundational change required if we’re going to build an economy and society based not on what the market values, but on our own values.

The book was aimed at a global audience of business leaders, policy thinkers and public servants, especially people working where private business meets public policy. It was not a voter’s handbook. Carney was not even an elected politician when it was written, though this is the kind of book people write when public service is on their mind.

So no shame if you didn’t read it.

But now he’s prime minister. Now, the book is part of a story that we’re all interested in. It’s a story about the future of Canada, the wealth of nations, and the part each one of us is going to play in that future.

Now it matters.

On Amazon today, it’s number one in international economics books. It’s number one in international financial books, but, like a lot of economics books, from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to Thomas Piketty’s Capital, it’s a book that we know about through its interpretation, its analysis, and the impact it’s had on others’ thinking.

The book has certainly spilled over into a general audience. It’s number 360 in books today, which is amazing given the millions and millions of books available on Amazon. I don’t think this will go to Mr. Carney’s head or to his bank account. To put that in perspective, it’s about 300 places behind Franklin’s Halloween and about 350 places behind Mary’s Comfort Classics: Food to Fill Your Plate.

Mark Carney’s training and vocation are in economics. I think it takes a certain kind of mental defect to be interested in economics. It’s not science or math enough for calculation, but it’s not social study enough to really help anybody with their day-to-day lives. People who get caught up in it, I think, are kind of dreamers and imaginers, creative enough to just try to make something out of whatever materials and resources are close at hand, and tedious enough to really care about the details of things. At least that’s my experience. Over a lifetime, I’ve been reading these books, from Wealth of Nations to Capital in the 21st Century, and, as soon as I could get my hands on it in the spring of 2021, I read this damn book too.

I have a useful toolbox for this work. I studied international finance and accounting, with graduate degrees from the London School of Economics, HEC Paris and NYU Stern. And for the past 25 years, as a documentary producer, writer and showrunner, I’ve made more than 500 programs for broadcasters including National Geographic, History and Discovery, trying to turn complicated factual material into stories people can actually follow.

So reading, interrogating and explaining a book like this is pretty close to my day job.

What I can’t do in this essay is tell you what’s in the centre of a man’s soul. I can’t reach into the dark, secret places in another human’s mind and tell you about their deeper motivations and their moral character. What I can do pretty easily is tell you what this book actually says and how it connects to what Mark Carney’s current policy efforts are, the economic program he is laying out nationally for Canada, and his discussions about how the nations of the world can work together.

And that’s the first point. When you hear people talking about Mark Carney, this book, and Canada’s economic policy in purely moral terms and revealed secret motivations, and drawing conclusions about what he thinks based on their worst imagining of economics and global finance, you know they haven’t read the book. Or they’re giving you a line of talk without reference to its truth or falsity, but for some other purpose. That, as we all know, is the definition of bullshit.

During the last election, I accidentally found myself writing as a kind of mythbuster about the things that were being said about the candidates.

But the problem didn’t end with the election. When Mark Carney became prime minister, it ramped up, and then, when Mark Carney started to matter, to Canada, to Donald Trump, and to the people actually working on how the world works, the whole thing exploded.

The interesting thing here is you don’t need foreign government interference. You don’t even need nefarious intent. (Though there may have been a little bit of all that). You just need worried and restless minds. You need sour and bitter folks, and you just need the giant game of telephone that is our modern digital age. Here’s a single example among thousands.

In April 2025, social-media posts circulated an image claiming to quote passages from Carney’s Value(s) saying Western society was “morally rotten,” “corrupted by capitalism,” and that climate action would require “rigid controls of personal freedom,” “less flying, less meat,” and a “world of severely constrained choice.”

AFP checked both a recent physical edition and the electronic text. To be sure, after reading, I used the search function on my Kindle edition of the book and I can confirm that none of the passages or key terms exist in the book. Those passages condemning capitalism and Western society are not in the book. Most of the language came instead from a hostile 2021 review by Peter Foster. His interpretation of Carney’s argument had been stripped of its attribution and recirculated as though Carney himself had written it.

“Mark Carney is insane!” reads the text inside an April 8, 2025 X photo shared by Tamara Lich, an organizer of the Ottawa Trucker Convoy who is currently serving house arrest, curfew conditions and 100 hours of community service for her role in the controversial 2022 protests. She is appealing her conviction. She recently failed in her efforts to vary her sentence, which she wanted to change so that she could freely travel for her new job with Rebel News

The rest of the text in the image is purportedly a quote from Carney’s 2021 book, “Value(s): Building a Better World for All,“ including supposed calls for “rigid controls of personal freedom” and a “world of severely constrained choice.”

A variation of the image was shared by former Canadian hockey player Theo Fleury, who has previously spread misinformation, while similar posts claiming the quote came from Carney’s book appeared across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Threads.

If you do search for these phrases, it leads to a review of the book in the National Post by Peter Foster. To be as fair as possible to Peter, it was intended to reflect his opinion on Carney’s book, or at least its association with the worst fever dream understanding of the Justin Trudeau government .

Peter’s most recent book is called “How Dare You!” It’s a collection of his National Post columns and it’s a kind of intellectual takedown of current left-of-centre views. That’s his stock and trade. He writes politically incorrect columns for the National Post about what he calls: junk science, environmental alarmism, unsustainable sustainability, corporate irresponsibility, uncivil society, censorship, cancel culture, the war on Canadian resources, and the false promise of green energy.

His targets are the people you would expect: David Suzuki, Justin Trudeau, Naomi Klein, Barack Obama, and the Pope, and now includes Mark Carney.

I wrote to Peter asking him, in hindsight (given the facts now available and the way things are playing out with Mr. Carney’s economic plan), if he still stood by the early National Post opinion piece about him and his book. I asked him how he felt about the way it kind of got co-opted by some of the more outraged folks. If I hear back from him, I will put it out as a note to this essay.

UPDATE:

So, what is this book really about?

The surprise about what Values actually says is that Carney sticks with that one-word theme across the whole 600 pages. He’s talking about counting what counts. He’s saying the market does what it does fabulously, but price and values, meaning the things we really value, are not the same thing. The market is the car. Our idea about where we want to go should be the driver. And that destination, and why we might all want to go there, has to be clearly explained to the passengers.

He is not alone in this thinking. Robert Kennedy spelled it out clearly in his University of Kansas election speech about GDP’s failings nearly 60 years ago, and what people are calling feminist economists, like Jane Gleeson-White, Katrine Marçal, Kate Raworth, and older thinkers like Henry Hazlitt, are spelling it out in books that are written for a general audience. I’ve referenced and linked them below because you may love to read these books.

Most importantly, though, the book echoes a middle path argument first put forward by economist John Maynard Keynes a century ago during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and the economic ideas that got us through the Second World War and created the modern global economic world that prevailed up until the neoliberal era and the crises of the 1970s. But it’s not an economics of nostalgia. When a critic accused Keynes of changing his position on a particular economic theory, Keynes is famously noted as saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” The quote may be apocryphal, but the philosophy is unmistakably Keynesian and Carney.

As one of my favourite thinkers, Admiral H.G. Rickover, USN, put it,

“Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you learn nothing. Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.”

It comes from a March 16, 1954 address at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, where Rickover was laying out principles for managing large, technically complex projects.

The key word is “humbly,” with humility. That’s the title of the full concluding section of Carney’s book. They’re not just saying, “Look at the data.” They’re saying you have to submit your theory, your status, your prior beliefs, and even your preferred outcome to evidence-based thinking and reality. You follow where the facts take you.

And in that way, the book gives you a very clear way to check Carney’s work. Given the facts at hand, is the economic policy following logically? Not the easy way, not the politically correct way, not the expedient way, but the way that follows from the facts at hand with a long view about what must be done to create value. Is the plan changing as the facts change?

Then Carney sets up the problem from the highest-level view. The way he says it, we’ve moved from market economy to market society, and we’re letting the markets price everything and define what matters, when in fact none of us really care about those things. He’s not abandoning the car. He’s reminding us that we’re the driver, and we have to have some sense, well-articulated to all the passengers, about where we’re going and why.

Four economics books that everyone can read and three YouTube clips that everyone should watch to understand where Mark Carney is coming from :

Canada’s current problem is not a great depression and the lack of demand that John Maynard Keynes faced in 1930. It’s not 1930s-style mass unemployment and collapsed spending.

Canada’s current problem is:

• weak productivity growth

• inadequate investment

• too little capital flowing into productive Canadian investment; chronically weak business investment and capital formation per worker.

• infrastructure that is far beyond its best-before date, suffering from deferred repairs and maintenance

• tremendous difficulties in moving large projects forward

• over 10 years of going in the wrong direction, solving for the wrong problem with the wrong diagnosis

• a deteriorating geopolitical environment

Mark Carney became governor of the Bank of Canada in 2008. It wasn’t an ordinary year. He took the job just as the global financial system started to come apart.

From the top down, the system looks fabulously efficient. Everybody’s making rational decisions. Profits are everywhere. Assets are appreciating. There’s financial market innovation, but under the surface, there’s an incredible amount of risk piling up that nobody was accounting for. There was a short-termism (”grab the money and run”) attitude that was wrecking the system from the inside. Worse, even as the aggregate numbers looked strong, inequality had risen sharply over the preceding decades, and people were starting to feel it.

Companies were closing down offices, eliminating positions, centralizing operations. Governments were deferring infrastructure investment. Everywhere, people could see much-needed repairs and maintenance being neglected. Big decisions about environmental costs were being pushed off to the future. Everywhere, from government to industry to households, debt was being used not to finance valuable assets and spread their costs out over their productive life, but to finance short-term spending that hid and distracted from the problems of the age and supply chains. In an overly globalized economy, we’re being stretched beyond reason. GDP and productivity per person were going down, and the price of houses was going up, even as their value, meaning their ability to deliver houseness, remained unchanged.

Carney, the economist hired to use the levers at the central bank to settle the situation, got down to work, by all accounts and based on what happened next, he made the correct moves, but something else was going on in Canada. A different kind of diagnosis was manifesting itself.

The idea washed over decision makers that Canada’s problem was that it was getting old, and old people cost a lot of money and didn’t contribute to society. ( all of which I’ve argued is wrong ) Therefore, the solution was growth, grow, grow, grow: grow the population, and everything else would look after itself. The new immigrants would create wealth and industry. They would pay massive amounts of taxes. They would do the jobs that we didn’t want to do, and they would enable us to live the life of leisure that we imagined we deserved.

Here in Nova Scotia, that manifested itself as a thing called the Ivany Report, which the government of Nova Scotia took on as its bible and pursued for 10 years before the city government and finally the provincial government began to push it aside because it didn’t do any of those promised things. Growth did not cover its own expenses. In fact, growth put further strain on already overexerted systems, institutions, and infrastructure.

As a sidebar from my personal perspective, Ivany and his report got quietly pushed to the side. It was never analyzed. It was never admitted what was wrong, and most importantly for me, it was never admitted that the whole project is grossly immoral. The notion that we should attract the world’s best and brightest to look after us without a care for what we’re taking from their home nations is what I would describe as reverse colonialism. We will look back on it in the fullness of time with more disdain than we’ve ever looked at the colonial era.

This is the true context in which to look at Carney’s book. In 2021, rising above the chaos of COVID, Carney was asking the professional managerial class (academics, economists, writers, bankers, finance people, and government) to look farther to the future and begin to count what counts.

To do that, Carney laid out seven values that we could use to talk about what an economy looks like when it thinks in the long game: beyond the next deal, beyond the next quarter, beyond the next election, beyond the next paycheck. That’s the book. It’s not radical. It’s a return to the pre-neoliberal economics of the Keynesian era that brought us the progressive movement in Canada, the New Deal in the U.S., and the global economic system that took us from the ruins of the post-war world into the greatest, longest, and most sustained period of human flourishing, increase, broad economic success, and improvement that the world has ever known. We call it the baby boom, but it was so much more.

In Carney’s book, he explores the seven values at length.

• Dynamism just means that an economy should encourage creativity, in the sense that Rickover defined it.

  
  "The deepest joy in life is to be creative. To find an undeveloped situation, to see the possibilities, to decide upon a course of action, and then devote the whole of one's resources to carrying it out, even if it means battling against the stream of contemporary opinion, is a satisfaction in comparison with which superficial pleasures are trivial. But to create, you must care."
  
  Adm. H. G. Rickover, USN

• Resilience means an economy should be able to absorb complexity. To riff off Barack Obama, progress doesn’t happen in a straight line. It careens from pillar to post. The economy needs to follow along that path without losing the most vulnerable along the way.”

• Sustainability is broader than the modern environmental meaning, but it includes it. Decisions should be made with a long and wide view of their effects across generations.. It just means decisions should be made with a long and wide view of things. This is Harry Hazlett’s economics in one lesson. The biggest mistake in economics has always been to not consider the impact of decisions in the long run, across the broadest horizon, and consider the most people involved.

• Fairness is the same thing that any five-year-old in the schoolyard would understand. Things need to be seen to be fair. Markets and the whole economies need to be seen to be fair because their legitimacy depends on people believing in the rules and the system, and the idea that the game is not rigged against them.

• Responsibility could be a whole book on its own. It’s the notion that individuals, businesses, and institutions should be personally accountable for the consequences of their actions, and as Admiral Rickover points out, it’s responsibility that is in greatest decline today.

  
  Carney’s idea of responsibility is much larger than legal liability or simply being blamed when something goes wrong. To him, responsibility is the act of accepting an obligation to engage with life. It means refusing to hide behind inevitability, dogma, bureaucracy, job descriptions, or the comforting idea that someone else is really in charge. In Carney’s moral vocabulary, that distinction matters enormously.

• Solidarity is another way to describe the citizen’s obligation. Democracy is an intellectual machine, and it does not work at all without the sustained sense of community and shared purpose among citizens. Citizens are not consumers of democracy. They are the foundation stones. The citizen is an officeholder of the highest degree, with tremendous responsibilities, and without their active and enthusiastic participation, democracy and the compromises it requires do not work.

• Humility, as we’ve discussed, in Carney’s sense in the conclusion to the book , is about recognizing the limits of our knowledge and our power, and being open to correcting our mistakes and changing our minds. It’s very much like Wendell Berry’s notion of stewardship over the land, and the idea that we should act again, not as consumers but as custodians of a common good larger and longer than ourselves.

And here’s humility in a nutshell. There are plenty of fair criticisms of Carney, and it is more than fair to criticize him if his conclusions and policies fail to follow from the facts at hand. His promise is that he will go where the facts take him, and that’s how he should be judged. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to read the book to get there, but you do have to understand that he’s playing a long, practical, and pragmatic game that balances a middle ground and a middle way as Keynes did before him.

6 ways to tell

if somebody’s bullshitting you

about Mark Carney and his book

You don’t have to read 600 pages of Mark Carney’s Value(s) to tell whether somebody else is giving you a fair account of it.

There are some pretty obvious tells.

1. If they tell you Carney’s argument is that capitalism and markets are bad, they’ve missed the central idea of the book. Carney thinks markets are extraordinarily powerful. His argument is that markets are tools, not moral beings. They can establish prices. They cannot decide what a society should value.

2. If they tell you the book is basically a plan to make bankers, asset managers and Carney’s rich friends richer, they have the direction of the argument almost exactly backwards. Carney is interested in how the enormous pools of capital already controlled by banks, pension funds, corporations and investment managers can be made to serve longer-term productive and social purposes. You can certainly argue that this creates opportunities for regulatory capture, sweetheart deals or private profit at public expense. Those are legitimate criticisms. But they are criticisms of the mechanism Carney proposes, not descriptions of his stated objective.

3. If they start quoting Carney saying Western society is “morally rotten,” calling for “rigid controls of personal freedom,” or promising “less flying, less meat” and “more poverty,” stop them right there. Those words are not in Value(s). They came largely from Peter Foster’s hostile review of the book and were subsequently circulated online as though Foster’s description had been written by Carney himself. AFP went back to the physical and electronic editions and checked. I did too.

4. If they tell you it’s essentially a climate-change manifesto, they haven’t understood its architecture. Climate is important to Carney because it is one of his great examples of the problem he is trying to describe: people receiving benefits today while passing costs and risks to somebody else tomorrow. But he makes the same argument about finance, infrastructure, business behaviour, institutional resilience and government.

5. If they describe his seven values as a collection of fashionable political virtues, they probably haven’t followed the argument very far. Dynamism, resilience, sustainability, fairness, responsibility, solidarity and humility are his attempt to describe the characteristics of an economic system that can create wealth without consuming the institutions, trust and future capacity on which that wealth depends.

6. If they say the book is a blueprint for some secret global government, New World Order or supranational financial regime, ask them to show you the page. Carney is unquestionably an internationalist, and a very cosmopolitan fellow . He believes nations should cooperate, markets should cross borders and international institutions matter. That is quite different from arguing that nations, democratic governments or citizens should surrender control to a secret financial elite.

And there’s one more tell that may be the most important.

If somebody cannot explain the difference between market value and values, they haven’t understood the book.

That is the whole of the matter.

Market value, price, tells us what somebody is prepared to pay.

Values are the things that we care about, the things that matter, the things that count.

• Our comfort in our own skin

• Our hope for our future and the rising generation

• Our responsibilities as citizens

• Our connection with family, friends, and the community

• A sense of excitement about the opportunity and promise of the future

• For practical purposes, the notion that at least some of the time our money worries will let us be, and we don’t suffer through the middle of things with a recurring case of acedia.

It’s about counting what counts in our households, to Canada, and towards the idea of being a prosperous nation in a peaceful world.

Carney’s argument is that a functioning economy needs both markets and values. Markets are the machinery, like a car. Values are the ideas that the driver and passengers have about where they’re going and why. Carney’s idea, like Keynes before him, is that there’s a middle ground: the driver and the car work together to create more, better, and faster than would otherwise be possible, and that difference is the margin of prosperity.

You are perfectly entitled to disagree with him.

You might think he has too much confidence in governments and experts. You might think of him as a technocrat. You might worry that governments directing investment inevitably means governments picking winners. You might think his climate prescriptions are wrong. you might think the practical means to his ends are just too much to bear for the civil service, for the environment, for our culture, for our various identity groups, or just for your personal point of view. You might think the relationship he wants between big government and big finance is simply too cozy.

You might even think, somewhere in your heart, that you would be better off, richer, more respected, and have more fun if we just burned the whole thing down and you were some sort of lieutenant in a post-apocalyptic militia or a character in your favourite racing car video game.

Those are arguments that people could make. Maybe they’re telling you their alternate vision for the future, or maybe they’re just bullshitting you, trying to impress you or make themselves believe they’re smart.

Let them go for it.

But if someone tells you Mark Carney wrote that capitalism has made Western society morally rotten and now intends to restrict your meat consumption as part of a plan to enrich BlackRock and impose a global social-credit system, you don’t have to spend a week reading Value(s) to join the argument.

You already know something useful.

They aren’t arguing with Mark Carney’s book.

They’re arguing with something somebody told them was in it.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Are you suffering from the eighth deadly sin?

Everyone has heard of the seven deadly sins, but before they were set out that way, before they were even called the seven deadly sins, there was an eighth evil thought called acedia (a-SEE-d-a).

In early monasteries, monks would get up, do their morning chores and prayers, and arrange their affairs. By noon, they faced the long day ahead of them that looked very much like every other day before and every other day after. They would have a sinking feeling that they called the Noonday Demon: acedia, the low in the middle of things.

Starting things at the beginning has novelty, and completion has reward, but sticking with things in the middle asks for fidelity to the task without novelty or reward.

Today, some among us, as individuals, as part of a household, as part of our work or vocation, as citizens in our community, our province, and even our country as a nation, have been suffering, individually and collectively, from acedia.

Acedia is weariness, aversion and resentment toward the good that is actually available to you. It makes the opportunities and obligations of the day feel burdensome rather than meaningful. You begin to wonder why anything matters, imagine that life would be better somewhere else or as someone else, and become tempted to abandon things that matter because, temporarily, you can no longer perceive their meaning.

It is a moral and spiritual category, not a medical diagnosis. Depression, burnout, grief, ADHD and exhaustion can resemble it, but they belong to different categories and should not be treated as moral failures. Acedia describes a recurring human experience: the loss of desire for the good that is already within reach.

The early monks called it “the noonday demon.” It characteristically arrives in the middle. After the excitement of beginning, before the satisfaction of completion. The day seems endless, the work pointless, elsewhere attractive.

Today, it’s more about the contemporary feeling that prosperity, obligation, citizenship, family and even opportunity can come to feel like impositions.

Saint Thomas Aquinas' definition of acedia is a kind of sadness about the good that's all around us. That opportunity itself can become irritating precisely because it also asks something of us. It's often expressed in everyday language: We don't “get to write a report”; we have to write a report. We don't “get to wash the dishes”; we have to wash the dishes. We don't “get to meet our friends”; we have to go and meet our friends.

The interesting thing about our medicalized language is that it also always implies medicalized solutions, but what were the traditional moral solutions for moral dangers?

For me, the answer comes from Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century Christian monk, theologian and remarkably acute observer of human psychology, born around AD 345 in Pontus, in what is now Turkey. He eventually withdrew to the Egyptian desert and lived among the people we now call the Desert Fathers. He died in 399.

Evagrius wasn’t drawing up a catalogue of forbidden behaviour like we imagine the seven deadly sins today. He was studying thoughts. He called them logismoi: recurring patterns of thought that arrive in the mind and, if entertained, can eventually impact your behaviour. He identified eight major ones: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

Generations later, this tradition was distilled down into the seven deadly sins. Along the way, acedia got folded into sloth, but for us in the modern world, I think a very important concept may have been lost.

For Evagrius and the desert tradition, the great prescription was essentially to stay in the cell. Acedia tells you that the problem is the work, the place, the people, the routine. Therefore, go somewhere else. The monk’s discipline was not to obey that thought merely because it felt persuasive. Continue the prayers. Continue the work. Eat. Rest. Attend to the person in front of you. Think outside yourself. Don’t redesign your life at noon.

That gives us a great, modern set of remedies:

- Fidelity. Keep doing the worthwhile thing when its meaning isn’t presently visible.

- Attention. Look closely at what is actually in front of you rather than fantasizing about the elsewhere.

- Gratitude. Deliberately recover the gift concealed inside the obligation. I have to make dinner becomes there are people here to feed.

- Service. Do something concretely useful for somebody else. Acedia turns attention inward. Service reverses the direction.

- Community. Don’t make your private disenchantment the sole judge of reality. Other people can remind you why something matters when you’ve temporarily forgotten.

- Perseverance. Delay irreversible decisions made during temporary collapses of meaning.

There was also an easily actionable idea in the tradition called antirrhēsis, roughly “talking back” or contradiction. Evagrius compiled scriptural responses to troublesome thoughts. You might call it answering the thought rather than automatically believing it.

Acedia says, This is pointless.

The response isn’t necessarily, No, everything is wonderful.

It’s: Maybe. But I’m not going to make that judgment from where I’m standing today. I’ll finish what I’m doing.

And now I’m heading to my work and off to finish what I’m doing today - setting up the basement at the Jubilee House (our own little musical monastery) for 2 months of rehearsals for our Last Waltz 50th Anniversary shows in Nova Scotia.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Let’s Make A Faustian Bargain

TL;DR: Carney’s argument in his speech at the European Parliament is that freedom is never a finished inheritance. Canada and Europe now have to become stronger without making a Faustian bargain that leaves them less free.

I liked Mr. Carney’s speech because my experience in life has led me to believe that the real nature of freedom is not freedom from responsibility; it is freedom to be responsible.

____________

I’m not here to sell anybody on Mark Carney or his vision of the Global North or a new world order for the ages. I love learning. I love when things are put in perspective geopolitically and through history. That’s why these speeches of his are of interest to me, and why I look forward to each one; to study them critically and learn.

I like to take each line, each statement, and trace it back to the prime source material. Verify the facts, of course, and go deeper into where each idea is coming from. But maybe the most rewarding work is to name-check every reference.

After the anticipation and the enthusiastic ovations, but before Donald Trump’s social media blasts and the world press glowing reporting, Mark Carney stood in front of the leaders of 27 nations and laid out an astonishing trifecta of concern, complexity, and cool confidence.

In his speech to the European Parliament on September 17, Carney spoke in German to quote from Goethe’s Faust, Part II.

“Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der täglich sie erobern muß.”

Now, I’ll admit, I’m not up on my Faust. So I had to do a lot of work to get this. And it is SO much more layered and complicated than I ever imagined. But, with AI as the new Google search, and a lucky find on my bookshelf of a stash from Ethics classes at Dal and a couple of left-behind books from King’s College ex-girlfriends, I think I’ve pieced it together.

You may think Donald Trump says some wild strange stuff, makes odd references, and reveals surprising things. This week, he has nothing on Mark Carney.

Many people have a sense from pop culture that a Faustian bargain means getting the thing that you most desire by surrendering the things you most value. Traditionally, Faust bargains with the devil, but in Goethe’s version, the arrangement is more complicated than the familiar “sell your soul to the devil.” Faust bets that the devil will never be able to give him a moment so completely satisfying that he would wish to never leave it. Carney’s quote is from that same man at the end of that lifelong experiment.

The line comes from the very end of the book. A fairly literal rendering is:

“Only he deserves freedom, as he deserves life, who must conquer them anew every day.”

Carney’s office rendered it more smoothly as, “Freedom and life must be earned every single day.” The German verb erobern is appartently much stronger than “earn.” It means something closer to conquer, win, seize, gain by struggle.

Most importantly, though, it’s where this quote comes in the story that really matters.

Faust is now an old man. He has spent his whole life pursuing knowledge, pleasure, power, achievement and experience. Nothing has satisfied him. At the end, he becomes obsessed with an enormous public-works project. Reclaiming land from the sea so that millions of people can live upon it.

He imagines a society constantly threatened by the ocean but constantly defending itself. Children, adults and old people working together on fertile land. Then comes his final revelation:

“Only he deserves freedom and life

Who must conquer them every day.”

And immediately after that:

“I would see such a throng,

stand on free ground with a free people.”

That is essentially Faust’s final conception of a worthwhile human life. Freedom isn’t a possession. It is an activity. You don’t acquire it and put it in the bank. Every generation has to maintain it, build it, defend it and sometimes recover it. It can’t be handed down. In fact, it can’t be given or passed on at all.

I like this a lot. I take it to mean freedom is not freedom from responsibility. It’s freedom to be responsible. 

But, plot twist. Faust is blind. He hears digging and believes workers are completing his great project. They are actually digging his grave. And his supposedly enlightened development project has itself involved coercion and terrible moral compromise. So Goethe/Carney isn’t simply handing us a slogan suitable for a government poster. The line sits inside a much more ambiguous meditation on progress, power, human striving and the price we pay for grand schemes.

That brings us to Carney.

In his September 17 speech to the European Parliament, Carney built almost the entire opening around Goethe. He began with the Ettersberg ridge outside Weimar, where Goethe walked. The famous Goethe Oak later stood inside the Buchenwald concentration camp. Carney therefore puts Goethe’s European humanism and Buchenwald’s European catastrophe literally on the same piece of ground.

Then he quotes Faust and continues:

“Every day. Not once in 1945, or 1956, or 1989. Every day, including this one.”

1945 means the defeat of Nazism and liberation of Europe. 1989 means the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. His 1956 reference is almost certainly the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet rule (a bit of history we know he’s into). These are moments when Europeans had to fight, literally or politically, for freedom rather than merely proclaim it.

And this is the key to understanding the speech. Carney isn’t really talking about Goethe. He’s constructing an argument about the postwar order.

His argument goes roughly like this:

Freedom was not permanently secured in 1945.

Democracy was not permanently secured in 1989.

The institutions built afterward are not self-maintaining.

Economic openness itself can become a vulnerability when trade, capital, technology or supply chains are used coercively.

Therefore democratic countries have to rebuild their capacity to act independently and defend their choices.

That leads directly into his case for much closer Canada-European cooperation in defence, energy, critical minerals, AI, finance and trade. He explicitly describes this as sovereignty, meaning “our ability to live as we wish,” and later circles straight back to “the freedoms we must fight for, every day.”

So the Goethe line is actually the philosophical hinge of the speech.

And there is another clever layer. Carney is speaking to Europeans in German, quoting perhaps the canonical German writer, in Strasbourg, about a German tree, Buchenwald, Vimy, the Second World War, European integration and the fall of the Wall.

Later he invokes another Goethe idea, Wahlverwandtschaften, “elective affinities,” to argue that Canada and Europe are joined not simply by geography or treaties but by affinities they consciously choose. I can’t help but think this should be setting off some political correctness alarms.

Then he turns the whole thing into the oak/forest metaphor. One tree can fall in a storm. A forest, with intertwined roots, is resilient. Canada and Europe should therefore become something like a geopolitical forest.

That is a remarkably constructed speech.

And I think the really interesting sentence is not actually Carney’s translation, “Freedom and life must be earned every single day.” It is Goethe’s much harder formulation:

Freedom has to be won again every day.

That is a substantially different political philosophy. It says freedom is not the natural resting state of civilization. It is something people continually do.

Carney’s subject is essentially: How do we obtain prosperity, technological progress, openness and security without discovering afterward that the price was our freedom to choose?

That is a very Faustian question.

And it changes how we read his opening. Goethe isn’t merely there, as an affectation of such speeches, because Carney wanted an impressive German quotation for a European audience. Faust is arguably the underlying parable of the speech: beware of confusing what gives you power with what keeps you free.

Ronald Reagan’s famous formulation of this same line is almost the American vernacular version of Goethe’s idea:

“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

Reagan repeated this line, and this line was repeated in American politics ever since. Mr. Carney would be well aware of that too. And that Benjamin Franklin said basically the same thing at the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

So, what is this fight? What is it that has to be fought for and defended constantly? What are the details of this freedom in this political sense we talk about it?

What has to be continuously reproduced is the behaviour that makes the system work. Citizens accept election results. Governments accept restraints on their power. Opponents remain legitimate opponents rather than enemies. Courts retain authority. People tolerate speech they dislike. Power changes hands without violence. Citizens participate rather than merely consume politics.

It’s ultimately about our belief in and stewardship of the system, this vast intellectual machine that we talk about as freedom, liberty, democracy, and republicanism. You inherit a free society the way you inherit a farm or a vintage car. You inherit responsibility for it.

How do you build the power, prosperity and security you need without surrendering the freedom you were trying to protect in the first place?

That may be the bargain facing Canada and Europe now. Not whether we can get everything we want. We can’t. It is deciding what we are willing to give up so that we don’t accidentally give up the one thing we were trying to keep.

But there’s hope. One key aspect of this deal that’s already floated to the top is that young Canadians would have better access to Europe’s schools and universities. Maybe that, more than anything else, will keep this on people’s minds and give our rising generation what they need to understand and conquer their own day.

Faust is a German legend based on an historical character, Johann Georg Faust. The story has been told in many variations for many audiences, and it’s probably true that the story is much older even than that, because it echoes older Greek legends. It straddles the worlds of politics, philosophy, magic, alchemy, and religion as much as any story.

It’s one of these subjects where the Wikipedia page really does give a great understanding of the story and its impact on popular culture through the ages. For those who aren’t quite ready to dive into classic literature, let me tell you in advance: it’s heavy going.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Tonight, I’m remembering walking on warm evenings through the crowds on El-Moez Street, in Islamic Cairo. It runs through the old walled city and becomes wonderfully lively in the evening. Families strolling, kids hanging around, young people playing music, cafés, little shops and stalls open late, all against medieval buildings lit up at night.

It’s hard to explain how sweet places like this are in the evening without any alcohol or drugs, just people being people. Young and old together, but separate in their little groups and all together in each other’s company. One thing that always stuck out with me is how many of the kids with their guitars and little crowds of friends around loved singing Ed Sheeran songs.

If Sheeran is correct that he has studied the matter and formed a serious moral judgment, does the possession of that judgment, combined with extraordinary influence, permit him to retreat into personal peace?

In a word, I would say the answer is…

No.

In 700 words, I’d say it like this:

know, speak, act.

Take a walk with me, on El-Moez Street, and let’s talk.

I would argue that each of us has an affirmative moral duty to engage with the world. Our conscience should never release us from concern for the problems of the day. Intelligence on its own is insufficient because many among us may understand something yet lack the courage to act. Finding purpose in life requires putting concern for what is right ahead of personal safety.

Public figures in particular do not have the right to prefer their own personal peace to the happiness of mankind, and their place and duty are to be in the front line of struggling people, not in the unperturbed rank of those who keep themselves aloof from life.

For the creative person, the duty is even stronger because creation requires caring, and when you care, you must be willing to speak out and act.

In fact, it is a duty of citizenship.

Citizenship is an office of the highest degree, and it carries many responsibilities. A healthy state requires courage from its citizens, and that courage consists of frankly identifying problems and challenging abuses of power. It’s not only possible, but it is, in fact, the duty of everyone to state precisely what knowledge and conscience compel them to say.

Know, speak, and act.

This is not to simply say everyone must have a public opinion on every controversy. In fact, the responsibility is much more demanding than that. First, you have to make great efforts to know the facts. You need candour, skepticism, respect for unpleasant evidence, doubt, and rigorous logic. Only then are you obliged to say what knowledge and conscience compel you to say.

The only circumstance that would leave room for you to be absent from the struggle is if you don’t know enough, if you don’t have studied and tested certainty, if you haven’t struggled through enough doubt to understand the opposing views deeply, or if you don’t believe that your intervention would contribute anything useful. But if you’ve studied it, and you’ve reached a firm moral conclusion, and possess a powerful public voice, then you do not have the right to prefer your own personal peace to speaking out.

The obligation is not to have an opinion. It is not to repeat the fashionable opinion. It is not to speak because a mob demands speech.

It is almost exactly the opposite.

The obligation is to inform yourself to the limit of your ability and follow wherever the facts take you.

Know. Speak. Act.

There’s only really one great enemy among us, and it’s the spectator. The spectator does passive things and chooses passivity so his accustomed life will remain undisturbed, and hopes tomorrow will somehow take care of itself. He’s the kind of person who delegates his worries about the world to officialdom and assumes that those in authority will somehow be the ones to know and act for him. The opposite of moral action isn’t necessarily evil action. It can simply be spectatorship.

Historically, this disconnected man, unconcerned with what his actions mean for the next rising generation, is the enemy. To struggle against these enemies and against apathy and mediocrity is the only path to find purpose in life.

It takes a certain amount of courage in the private citizen. A certain amount of courage in the private citizen is necessary to the good conduct of the state. Without it, men who have power through riches, intrigue, or office will administer the state and will ultimately do so to their private advantage. When this courage concerns questions involving the welfare or survival of the nation and its prosperous place in a peaceful world, it is singularly unseemly to remain evasive.

If music and song is to have its proper place in the further development of society, it must be increasingly dissatisfied with things the way they are.

Learn the facts, think hard, listen to your conscience, then have the courage to say what it tells you, especially when saying it costs you something.

One thing you have to say about Ed Sheeran: he is nothing if not consistent. Here’s one of his popular songs from 2017. It’s called “What Do I Know,” and it literally lays out the case for his current position. I give him equal time here to try to convince you that his position is morally correct. but the problem you may find is, in spite of the explicitly specific lyrics, the result that I take away is an incoherent and internally inconsistent worldview. Ed Sheeran believes somehow that he both should not be involved in politics, religion, or other people’s business, while acknowledging that his position absolutely gives him (or creatives in his position) the power to make a difference that could change the whole world with just a couple of instruments (or, in his case, I suppose, a looper pedal)

Sing it, Ed

Lyrics

Ain’t got a soapbox I can stand upon
But God gave me a stage, a guitar and a song
My daddy told me, “son, don’t you get involved in
Politics, religions or other people’s quotes”

I’ll paint the picture, let me set the scene
I know when I have children they will know what it means
And I pass on these things my family’s given to me
Just love and understanding, positivity

We could change this whole world with a piano
Add a bass, some guitar, grab a beat and away we go
I’m just a boy with a one-man show
No university, no degree, but lord knows
Everybody’s talking ‘bout exponential growth
And the stock market crashing in their portfolios
While I’ll be sitting here with a song that I wrote
Saying, love could change the world in a moment
But what do I know?
Love can change the world in a moment
But what do I know?
Love can change the world in a moment

The revolution’s coming, it’s a minute away
I saw people marching in the streets today
You know we are made up of love and hate
But both of them are balanced on a razor blade

I’ll paint the picture, let me set the scene
I know, I’m all for people following their dreams
Just re-remember life is more than fittin’ in your jeans
It’s love and understanding, positivity

We could change this whole world with a piano
Add a bass, some guitar, grab a beat and away we go
I’m just a boy with a one-man show
No university, no degree, but lord knows
Everybody’s talking ‘bout exponential growth
And the stock market crashing in their portfolios
While I’ll be sitting here with a song I wrote
Saying, love could change the world in a moment
But what do I know?
Love can change the world in a moment
But what do I know?
Love can change the world in a moment

I’ll paint the picture, let me set the scene
You know, the future’s in the hands of you and me
So let’s all get together, we can all be free
Spread love and understanding, positivity

We could change this whole world with a piano
Add a bass, some guitar, grab a beat and away we go
I’m just a boy with a one-man show
No university, no degree, but lord knows
Everybody’s talking ‘bout exponential growth
And the stock market crashing in their portfolios
While I’ll be sitting here with a song I wrote
Saying, love could change the world in a moment
But what do I know?
Love can change the world in a moment
But what do I know?
Love can change the world in a moment

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Edward Christopher Sheeran / Foy Best Vance / John McDaid

What Do I Know? lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Spirit Music Group

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

What a week coming up, man!

Prime Minister Mark Carney is hosting the Canadian Investment Summit in Toronto on September 14 and 15, bringing together governments, global investors and some of the biggest pools of capital on Earth. Carney’s theory is that some of the world’s most well-endowed sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and investment companies are underrepresented in Canada, and his goal is to bring in $1 trillion of new investment to Canada over the next 5 years.

Who Has Seen the Wind?

By Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

In 1947, after the war and before many people in Canada could imagine the unbelievable sustained increase in human flourishing that would come to the world over the next half century, Canadian writer W.O. Mitchell turned this whimsical poem around into a nihilistic series of vignettes (not even really a story) about life and its prospects in Canada: people die, you never find God, and crops always fail.

Mitchell wasn’t a fool. What right-minded person, as winter came to the prairies in 1947 and the men slowly began to return from the war to the fields (after a great war, a global depression, a Second World War, an atomic bomb, and the world’s cities left burning in ruins), would have expected what happened next?

Who would imagine peace as anything more than the brief summer season between the wars? Who would have expected the greatest, most sustained period of increase in human flourishing? Who would have expected the astonishing rise in the rates of healthcare and education, and the fall of infant mortality? Who would have expected the environmental movement, the peace movement, the summer of love?

Who would have expected that a rising generation filled with opportunity and promise would get their hopes up so high that almost no amount of wealth, material gain, or progress would satisfy our appetites for more and better? Who would have expected that we would be here in the first quarter of a new century, with steadfast expectations that we can eliminate war, disease, starvation, and want of almost any kind?

Who would imagine that the environmental movement would come so far that there are few among us who don’t see in their own work some responsibility to care for the planet and all the living things in it?

And who would imagine that the wind that once powered global trade and rattled the nerves of old people would be returned to again as the source of unlimited, clean, renewable energy for a new Canada, inspired by a new national project.

I believe we’re at a similar turning point in history now. That’s a challenge to our creativity, our capacity for understanding, and to our imaginations, from which the future is actually built.

Christina Rossetti’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?” is a tiny 1872 nursery poem. Its central idea is not “nothingness” or even melancholy in Mitchell’s classic Canadian sense from those bleak prairie days of 1940s Canada. It is that invisible things can be known by their effects. You cannot see the wind, but you can see the leaves tremble and the trees bow. Hope, opportunity, promise, a charitable disposition. Expectations. You can’t see these things, but they are as real as the wind off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Tim Houston is going to have so much fun next week. No province or Premier is better suited to shine in Toronto than he is. It's going to be amazing.

The upcoming Canadian Investment Summit is potentially the most valuable two days he will spend as our Premier this year.

It's a sales trip, but he doesn't have to sell Nova Scotia.

The world understands Nova Scotia. Anyone who looks at the map can see that Nova Scotia is a trade gateway. It's an energy gateway. It's a supply chain gateway, and it's a resource gateway. It's Canada's gateway to the world.

Nova Scotia’s had some amazing premiers from astonishingly varied backgrounds. We’ve had lawyers, of course, doctors, and ministers of national defence. We’ve even had a fiddler, but I would argue the moment is right economically to have an accountant, somebody who knows their way around an investment deck and a business plan.

Houston has, in pocket, wonderful investable propositions. He has projects with cash flows.

He has things investors can put serious capital into in Nova Scotia:

• Wind West and its transmission infrastructure

• Offshore energy

• Critical mineral development

• Port industrial infrastructure

• Michelin is an astonishing case study in what you can offer global manufacturing.

• And our case for investment in productivity improvement, given our current investment per worker, is frontier-level, exciting.

Those are all really understandable propositions.

Wind West is the flagship, and it's the easiest project to place in Carney's nation-building project. Nova Scotia has the highest potential ROI with the least institutional/government risk of any renewable energy project in the world right now, with a captured renewable energy market in Canada. The U.S. is probably completely shut out, so no real competition. We can be supplying a quarter of Canadian electrical requirements over the next 30 years. Oil and natural gas projects are defined in barrels. Nova Scotia has access to unlimited barrels of wind. That's not potential. That's a real bank, and what we're doing better than anyone is de-risking.

That's why Nova Scotia's size is a competitive advantage. Putting a billion or five billion into this province, you're not dealing with layers of bureaucracy or department heads at this investment summit; you’re not meeting with would-be business people. With these investments, you're dealing with the Premier: direct access, political alignment, genuine administrative value.

Our size enables us to bespoke de-risk these projects. And we’re not just pitching ideas. Nova Scotia has done the work. We're going into the room with asks: the transmission piece, the infrastructure fund. Equity positions. We can bring everyone to the table: the regulator, the utility, the port, project proponents. We're tight, we're focused, and we're ready to manufacture transactions.

We're not talking about ‘becoming’ an energy superpower. We are an energy gateway with:

• large undeveloped energy resource

• proximity to markets

• great ports

• established offshore supply chain

• de-risked regulatory timelines

• a government prepared to make the projects happen

We can offer global investors investment-grade, low-risk, long-term, high-return projects with the numbers and the calendar ready. We're ready to go. We can show them the rock-solid 30-year ROI. Show them we're prepared to seriously crowd in with the private equity investment in a meaningful way, on their side of the table, as a real project partner, invested in de-risking projects and getting them moving on timelines larger states or governments couldn't dream of.

It's going to be awesome.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

NOTE TO READERS: I’m really struggling with Substack’s new AI detection tool. I think there’s something about my writing that is setting it off, but I feel ridiculous going down the path of doing a whole lot of work to figure out why the way I write seems like AI to this particular tool. But nor do I want to shut it off and prevent people from seeing what it says. I just want to be clear, and I think it’s obvious from this essay, when you read it, that it’s mine, and I wrote it; it’s about my ideas, my experiences, and I’m sharing it here with you.

Today is my birthday. I’m heading into my 65th year.

It’s often the case that when you think you should think of something, it’s a symbol that comes to mind before any complete thought. In Freemasonry, we love the symbol of the beehive. It represents industry, effort, and organized cooperation.

The hive works because individuals contribute to something larger than themselves. Many individual actions combine to make a coherent whole, and each individual's labour generates a surplus to help the building grow and survive. Productive usefulness to the group is the buzz.

That’s why I called the substack the Bee.

But throughout this summer, there’s been another symbol that’s hung over me and the life of our household every day, and it’s constantly on my mind. It’s a huge, bald-faced hornet’s nest that has been built over Beech Street at the corner of Jubilee. It’s an incredible feat of nature, and if you get a chance in the neighbourhood to come by and see it, I highly recommend it. You can’t help but be awed at its scale and design, and if you’re there at some points through the day, you can see the astonishing activity taking place.

The beehive and the wasp nests are almost perfect symbolic opposites. The Masonic beehive is a symbol of constructive order: everyone working together, doing useful labour, producing something durable, sustaining the community, creating the surplus honey that can be shared. It's a miniature civilisation that we can see and share the world with, and our lives are better for it. Sweet nectar.

In many ways, to the casual observer at least, the bald-faced wasp nest is a very similar structure, but for us, the emotional charge is reversed. It has the same architecture, physical and social. The individuals cooperate. The colony builds an astonishing structure that's actually made of paper that they create from scratching the top layer of bark off wood and chewing it. There's a similar division of labour, collective defence, communication, and it's extraordinarily efficient. The nest is highly ordered, but the symbolism feels very different.

The bald-faced hornet does not see itself as the villain in our story.

The Rise and Fall of a Hornet Empire

Hornet nests begin with one individual, a single queen that hatched the year before. She winters in some protected space that she’s found, such as leaves behind some loose tree bark or even in the attic of your house.

When spring comes, she sets out to find the perfect spot to build her colony. The nests are aerial and often up high in tree canopies, but under the eaves of a building or some other protected location works too. Once she’s found her spot, she finds some rotten wood, chews it up, and mixes it with her saliva to create the paper for the nest construction.

The initial proto-nest in early spring is just a little ball with a tube extending down, where she and her offspring will enter and leave from. She lays her eggs in the little cells, and then her young assume the duties of nest building, food collection, feeding, and guarding the nest. By the end of summer, the nest can contain over 300 offspring. It normally takes on a kind of football shape.

Baldfaced hornets are not actually hornets at all. They’re yellowjackets, which is a type of wasp. Their main mission is to defend their nest, but since the nests are up high and away, we mostly don’t have many encounters with them unless that nest ends up being in the rafters at our back door. They guard their territory and fight with competing nests. Their defence is to swarm. Like bees, they are pollinators. In the fall, the queen births the next generation of queens, and the cycle begins again.

They leave their nest, find an overwintering spot, and wait for spring, but the colony itself, all the life that existed in that nest, dies at the first hard frost. Birds will tear it apart over the winter. Storms will blow it around, and no wasps will return to that spot.

The wasp colony is defensive. The organizing principle is to protect the nest. The structure exists partly by excluding outsiders, and the closer you get, the more dangerous the system becomes. The wasp nest is temporary. It's established in the spring and abandoned by the time winter comes. See the life cycle below.

Our wasp nest has reached a magnificent peak this week, but within a few weeks, the old workers will die, the old queen dies, the whole paper palace will fall, and only newly made queens will carry the possibility of another colony next year. For me, this has a strong memento mori quality. This furious civilisation at the height of its monstrous glory, and it's already doomed.

The nest looks ominous too. It's beautiful, but genuinely threatening. I only tangled with it once this year, pulling some Virginia creeper off the house. I reached down, and I genuinely thought I put a spike in my arm. When I pulled it back out of the bush, I couldn't believe that there was nothing. Well, almost nothing. But it friggin' hurt as if I had driven a nail into my arm. The pain and discomfort lasted for more than a few days.

The wasp nest, the hornet's nest, is a good emblem of conflict, politics, and communities or groups that are organized around defence, keeping other people out. The Masonic beehive is about working together, building something, and being useful. From my perspective of being stung, the wasp nest says, "We've built something here that's ours, not yours. Stay away." But maybe it's about being around for 65 years. I can see all this a little differently. The wasps are not evil. They're not angry. They're doing what their system tells them to do. The individual wasp doesn't have evil intent or even a theory of the world. The wasp is not my enemy, and if it hurts me, that's certainly my problem, but it's not the hornet's intention.

This summer, I returned to a book I haven’t been in since a graduate ethics class at Dalhousie in 1987: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.

The central metaphor or allegory in the book is the story of the lamb and the eagle. eagles are great predators who swoop down and kill lambs. Nietzsche imagines what the lamb thinks of the eagle, how it perceives its strength, its abilities, its mission, as the embodiment of pure evil. Lambs are famously gentle, harmless, non-predatory. They must be good, and the eagle represents everything the opposite of that. But the eagle, on the other hand, sees the lamb as much-needed food. The eagle bears no ill will towards the lamb. And the eagle doesn’t see itself as evil.

When we think of life and the relationships among living things, so many relationships work this way, but we all, mostly individually and together, perceive ourselves as the lamb. It’s literally been the central symbol of all Christian-based philosophy and thinking for going on to a couple thousand years.

In the moral philosophy of the lamb, we see the things that threaten us as our enemy, as evil.

In our neighbourhood, the hornet's nest creates an obvious moral atmosphere. It's threatening, and we talked about knocking it down, spraying it, or hiring some sort of extermination company to come because these creatures sting and they can hurt badly. It's a large grey fortress hanging over our ordinary street, with hundreds of armed soldiers inside, ready to attack if we cross some invisible boundary.

From the neighbourhood's perspective, it's dangerous, aggressive, and hostile, but the hornets aren't up there thinking they have a quarrel with the neighbourhood. They aren't malicious, they aren't bullies, and they don't resent us. They're not trying to take over the street. They're just hornets, and I think that the thing that helped us understand that the most is the astonishing short life of their empire: one summer, spring to fall, then it's over. We're the gods of this street. We live here forever. From the hornet's perspective, that perspective makes it easy to take a more benevolent view of our bald-faced hornets.

the Masonic beehive is different because we see ourselves in it. We see industry, cooperation, charity, useful labour, social order. We admire the virtues of the bee and the product of its labour. We interpret the bee from a human moral point of view. They're like us. They support us.

The wasp nest, the bald-faced hornet's nest, displays many of exactly the same qualities: the astonishing building abilities, the sacrifice for the colony, the collective defence, and the relentless purpose. The symbolic hornet's nest carries a different tone. The wasp is wicked because it stings us. The bee intersects with our human interests. Honey pollination has a thousands-of-year-old connection with our productivity. The wasp just has its weapon. One is an emblem of civilization, and the other is a menace.

We make the same mistake as the lamb. This idea threatens something I value, so it's bad, but nature has no obligation to echo our morality. This giant hornet's nest has hung over us all summer and challenged our capacity for understanding. It asks us, even though the threat is real, to open ourselves up to the possibility that it has a place in our world as much as anything. It's beautiful, it's industrious, it's dangerous, but the thing that's made it possible to understand and live with is how temporary it is.

And so here I am, in my 65th year, wondering if I’m the lamb or the eagle, the bee or the hornet.

Through my work and life experience over the years, I’ve really gotten to face one important difference: the difference between fear and danger.

Fear isn’t a real thing. It’s a feeling that I have inside myself. It’s an old, ancient feeling meant to protect us and keep us out of trouble. It’s closely related to the more modern feeling of worry that, for many of us, never lets us be. Danger is a real thing. It exists out there in the world. It can be measured, quantified, and assigned probabilities.

Much of my work in the field requires me to really sort out the difference between fear and danger, but there’s a larger difference to be navigated. Danger and evil aren’t the same thing.

Danger is about what something can do to you. Evil is about what that means morally. Danger is still the real thing in the world: the cliff, the deep ocean, the shark, the hornet's nest, but none of those things require hatred, intention, malice, or even awareness. It's just the possibility of harm.

Evil is more like fear. It's a judgement, a moral judgement. It's us attributing us to a dangerous thing: giving it agency, intention, cruelty, indifference, responsibility. The hornet can hurt us. That makes it dangerous, but it doesn't make it evil. When we think of things as evil and make decisions from that perspective, it tells us more about ourselves. Evil is a judgement. Danger is a fact.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Look, if the smartest people in history and the public could have been this wrong about this many things, it’s kind of humbling.

That’s what’s at the heart of the scientific method.

The ability to bend to the facts, to learn from mistakes, and change our minds when new information comes to light.

Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you learn nothing. Don't push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.

Adm. H G Rickover USN

We’ve all been there. There’s some sort of disagreement, fussing and fighting. There’s a conflict, and someone says, “I’m entitled to my opinion,” or “That’s your opinion.” “It’s just a difference of opinion.”

The funny part of all this is that some of the most savage arguments and controversies of the age are where there’s no good supporting evidence either way. So the division happens based on, and stoked by, our entitlement to our opinions.

In 2012, Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes wrote an amazing essay summarizing his research. It was titled “No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion.” What he believed was that you’re only entitled to what you can argue for.

There are certain phrases, boiled down to a few words, that tend to be discussion-enders, or at least the end of constructive discussions. “I’m entitled to my opinion” is often claimed not so much as a defence of freedom of conscience, but as a way of sheltering a belief from criticism, and the differences can be subtle. “I think the Atlantic is the better ocean” and “I think the Atlantic is the bigger ocean” are two very different claims.

This new argument trick did not just come around with Facebook. The word “opinion” comes through Old French from a Latin word that means conjecture, belief, judgement, or just simply what one thinks. The English word has been around since the early 1300s, but it was about a sense of judgement made where the evidence does not produce certainty.

The ancient Greeks had already developed a distinction between doxa, usually meaning opinion or belief, and episteme, meaning knowledge. Plato repeatedly asked about the meaning of knowledge and what separates knowledge from just believing something, even if the belief happens to be true. It seemed important to make the difference.

Aristotle took the view that opinion, especially that held by knowledgeable people, was a good starting point for inquiry. His dialectic method subjected these opinion things to cross-examination. Some survived, others were discarded, but it’s interesting that over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle already had a more sophisticated Facebook policy: your opinion gets you into the conversation, but it doesn’t get you out of the argument.

In John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he separated knowledge from probability and opinion. Again, he leaned on opinion being the acceptance of a proposition that was short of being certain. This means we hold the proposition, but we really don’t know with certainty if it’s true. He just argued that a rational person should examine the evidence for and against any proposition and admit it to be some probability of being correct.

In 1644, John Milton is quoted as saying, “Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” He believed that a society genuinely interested in learning will produce lots of arguing, lots of writing, and lots of opinions, and that disagreement is not noise but is part of the machinery for creating knowledge.

From a historic perspective, opinion isn’t the problem. The problem is immunizing opinion against correction. By the time John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty, a great 19th-century defence of disagreement, things had pretty much settled. Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” His formulation was that if you can’t state and answer the opposing case, you don’t have particularly good grounds for preferring your own position. A truly rational position, in that case, would be just a suspension of judgement, and that’s a pretty hostile reading of the modern “I’m entitled to my opinion.”

You are constitutionally entitled to your opinion. And it is a basic human right.

Let’s get this straight: you are, as a constitutional matter, absolutely entitled to your opinion. Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter protects freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The UN Human Rights Committee’s interpretation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says that the right to hold opinion admits no exception or restriction and explicitly includes the freedom to change one’s opinion whenever one chooses.

BUT… none of this is as glorious as it may seem. "I'm entitled to my opinion" means something fairly modest. It means that you cannot compel me to believe what you believe in a free society. I'm allowed to hold wrong, foolish, eccentric, poorly informed, and even contradictory beliefs. There's no tribunal of correct thoughts.

What happens in practice, though, is that this comes up at the end of an argument when someone's opinion has been challenged, and it kind of is a magical incantation. "I'm entitled to my opinion" starts to mean: "I'm entitled to my opinion. Therefore, you can't criticize it. You can't ask me to justify it. You can't point out that my facts are wrong, and you can't regard my judgement differently just because I hold this opinion."

Here's the thing: sure, you're entitled to your opinion. You're just not entitled to have it treated as equally informed, equally plausible, and equally respectable as every other opinion. You absolutely have the right to form your own opinion, but you have no corresponding right to have other people agree with you.

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

Saying "I'm entitled to my opinion" closes the door of argument just at the exact point when the conversation might finally be interesting, because the next questions might be:

Why do you think that?

What evidence would change your mind?

How confident are you that you're right?

That's the kind of conversation that gets somewhere.

Wanna make a bet ?

Here’s the list of books that I pulled off my shelf when I was thinking about this essay.

- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

- The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef

- Think Again by Adam Grant

- How to Think by Alan Jacobs

- How to Change Minds: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney

- How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan ( this one is actually about the modern renaissance in the use of psychedelics to open your mind, change your mind, and solve some of the problems of the mind)

The first one was this book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke. She was a professional poker player, and her idea is pretty simple: life is like poker, and so you should stop judging your ideas and your decisions only by their outcomes and think in terms of bets. How confident are you? 50/50, 80%, 95%. Thinking in Bets turns belief into probability. I think it really helps loosen our grip on our beliefs and enables us to update them intentionally as people challenge us, or we find new facts or information, or if the situation changes. It also changes the way you think about things based on just the simple coin flip of whether they succeeded or failed

Can we tell facts from opinions?

A group of researchers at the Pew Research Centre set out to determine if the public could distinguish between facts and opinion in the news. They studied a group of over 5,000 adults. They presented each with five factual statements and five opinion statements. Only 26% could correctly identify all five factual statements.

In this study, a factual statement was defined by its capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence. Note that it’s not required that the factual statement be true. A factual statement can be true or false regardless of whether it’s accurate or inaccurate. So, the study group could choose this classification even if they thought it was wrong, if the statement could be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

An opinion statement is a claim based on values and beliefs and could not definitively be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

It turned out the main factor indicating how and why people got answers wrong was identity group. People were heavily influenced by which side of an argument they were on. For example, members of a political party were far more likely to label opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side. Ultimately, it’s not just about whether we think a statement is true. We can also be influenced by what kind of statement we think it is, based on the group to which we perceive ourselves to belong

Life is not fact-checked

Love, taste, loyalty, commitment, belonging. Most of what we really care about in the big picture and in the regular day can’t be fact-checked

I think sometimes we get too wound up about claiming to hold facts and being rational and logical, when actually that’s a smaller part of our thinking and our lives than you would imagine. We’re not as often as we imagine discussing whether a claim is true. We’re talking about our identity, our loyalty, our faith, our tastes, our interests, our commitments, our attachments. Those are all legitimate things, and an enormous part of our lives operates that way. Love, loyalty, aesthetic judgement, religious belief, belonging to a place, and even most of our moral intuitions don’t lend themselves to laboratory experiments, but we probably should be able to identify and name them honestly.

What are the ways we believe?

Here’s a taxonomy to help clean up how we think about the things we think.

(A note to readers on AI: I’ve been following along with the AI scans now available on Substack. This next section and the other places in this essay where there is a list, a hierarchy, or bullet points attracts the ire of the AI scan. I personally like writing this way, just like I like: em dashes, triplets, and long sentences. I don’t want to take any of them out just because it triggers the percentages on the AI scan.

All I can say is this is not AI-written or AI-assisted, but I think the machine sees it in the style that AI writes. I don’t know. I apologize for that. I guess it’ll be interesting to see where all this AI business goes.)

- A fact is a claim about reality that can be, at least in principle, scientifically tested or checked against evidence, can be looked up, and multiple sources can be identified. We can check facts.

Here’s Alex’s list of things that are often presented as facts but are verifiably untrue. And Alex has done the verifying.

- A belief is just something that you hold to be true. It might be well founded, and it might be badly founded. It’s yours. It could be shared with a group, or it could be contrary to everybody. You can have beliefs that put you right in the dead centre of the public point of view, or you can believe something that almost nobody would agree with you on.

- An opinion is a judgement or a preference, an interpretation, some sort of evaluation, where reasonable people can differ, even after agreeing on the facts. One way it differs from facts and belief is that it should inspire a reasonable person to hold it with less certainty.

- A conviction is a belief held with unusual certainty, often because it connects to values or identity, or forms part of a creed or even religion.

- A faith commitment is something you do not claim is a fact. it is held beyond the question of certainty and beyond the prying questions of investigation Or even discussion. It’s not open to empirical proof. Your faith commitment is a foundation stone that you should be able to identify because much of your worldview is built on it. It’s easy to imagine this is part of Christian or religious dogma, but be assured, amongst our first principles, we hold more articles of faith than most would imagine.

Articles of faith are sometimes hard to imagine or admit because they’re so big.

We assume, as an article of faith, that the external world really exists. We imagine that other people have minds and are sentient in the same way we are. We rest on a belief our memories are broadly an accurate remembrance of the past. We assume that tomorrow will be similar enough to yesterday that induction works. Many of us believe we have free will.

We say all human beings possess equal moral worth. We say every life is sacred, but the certainty of these statements doesn’t come from any sort of test or proof. The same is true of fairness. We insist that all cases should be treated alike, that promises should be kept, that any cruelty or violence requires justification, and that innocent people shouldn’t be hurt, but this is not physics. These are articles of faith and premises that form the foundation stones of our civilisation: things that we believe we must behave as if they are true, as if they are facts.

Politics is loaded with articles of faith. Democracy rests at least in part on faith that ordinary citizens deserve some say in governing themselves and have the capacity to be responsible for that office. Western liberal societies, at least, have the conviction that freedom of speech is valuable, even when people use it badly, and none of these things can be simply proved.

Economics has its articles of faith. Money is an obvious one. We’ve gotten so used to seeing $20 bills that we believe money is a real thing, even as cryptocurrency reminds us that it’s really just an agreement of beliefs, shared beliefs, and even gold itself derived its value from shared belief, not from an actual fact. Property rights and contracts, credit and corporations - they’re all institutionalized acts of shared collective belief.

But it’s in our personal life where maybe faith plays the biggest role — kind of the centre of it all. We live in the romantic era, where we share the belief and behave as though love is a real thing and it’s worthwhile despite its risks.

When asked about my beliefs, I tend to trot out this notion that history tends towards progress, that we live in the best times ever so far, and that things are getting better all the time. I believe that people are basically good and that the world is a good place to be. I’m taught again and again by the internet that not everyone shares those beliefs, and try as I might to support them, I have to face the fact that I’m holding them as an article of faith. The article of faith isn’t just a belief without reasons. It’s a belief that is intentionally and consciously held beyond reasons.

How to lose an argument and win the day

Arguing is a learned skill with its own rules, standard moves, errors, and tricks. It doesn’t matter whether you’re arguing with yourself, with your family, with other people or teams, or if you’re arguing with the world. Argument still works the same. I think that’s why this business about opinion is important.

The very first thing to know about argument is: what kind of argument are you in? Oftentimes, the simplest way to find out is just to ask. It’s always surprising to me if, asked, “Are there any facts, changed conditions, or new information that could change your mind?” many people will simply answer no. It would be easy to imagine that you can then win the argument, but that’s not what happens. What happens is they just reveal to you what kind of argument you’re in. It’s not a rational or logical argument. It is ultimately opinions, and these kinds of arguments happen all the time, and we don’t get the least bit wound up about them.

If I said, “My favourite colour is orange,” you would presuppose that there are no conditions under which I would change my mind. You wouldn’t argue with me about it. You might tell me your favourite colour, but then we wouldn’t argue about it. We wouldn’t fuss or fight. We know these are just our opinions, and we could go along happily with you liking blue and me liking orange, and neither thinking the less of the other. I’m not going home telling my wife that you’ve been irrational all day about what the best colour is.

It’s only when the stakes get raised because our beliefs and opinions connect with our identity or the groups to which we belong, the politics or problems of the day, or sex, power, money, control, that things can get more complicated. The important thing is simply that we not lose track of where we are and to not lose the thread of the argument.

I could listen to Dan Cohen explain how arguments work every week and be better for it. I’ve been watching this video on YouTube since it was first posted

My grandmother had a little saying for everything. She sat somewhere between Dale Carnegie and the front pew of the church for a really long time, and she liked to say, “We fight to win, we argue to win over.”

Everyone has the right to look at the world and have an opinion about what they see.

So where does this all leave us? We have the constitutional right to our opinions, but we don’t have the corresponding constitutional right that everyone should agree with us.

Strong opinions, loosely held

What are opinions for? I think, to sum it up, opinions are like the opening stakes, the ante, if I have that metaphor correct, to get into the game of any argument. If you’re sincerely arguing, discussing, or conversing about anything with anybody, you should be prepared to lose those stakes. Each of us should be prepared for the notion that new information might become available, that facts might change, and that opinions held with something less than perfect certainty may need to be given up in the course of an argument or any encounter with the real world as it actually is.

It’s not that we shouldn’t have strong opinions, and it’s not that we should keep our opinions to ourselves, and it’s not about claiming we have the right to those opinions. We clearly do. It’s about making sure we understand what, among all the things we believe, are opinions, and making sure we’ve opened ourselves up enough so that those opinions are answerable to the world.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This week, I’m starting into rehearsals and creating art for the Last Waltz 50th anniversary coming up in November. I haven’t been able to think through and research an essay this week, but there are definitely pieces of news and life on my mind:

1. Arcadia launched its first YouTube channel in August. We’re calling it Humans Plus, and eventually it will capture all aspects of Arcadia’s work, from our natural history work, our documentaries, our science, engineering, and machines series, and our history and mystery work. We started by focusing on some of our history and mystery content. For now, it’s just clips, but the plan is to create new narratives that explain how we got access to these people and places and ideas over the last 20 years. Even now, looking at some of the clips and images, they seem like just impossible adventures, but we did it. This YouTube channel is going to be about how we did it, what it meant, and what we learned. I’m also excited that the YouTube channel got monetized within a few weeks, so it may become a significant part of Arcadia’s business in the coming years.

   

2. This weekend past was the annual open house at Hope for Wildlife. It’s another huge success, and it’s more and more clear to me that my 15 years supporting Hope and her work has become central to who I am, what my company is, and what I want to do with the next 15 years.

   I noticed that a little clip from the show posted on Love Nature has passed 13 million views, and I think it really captures the central promise of Hope for Wildlife, which is now on the air worldwide in over 40 countries and on in America on CBS on Saturday mornings. I still think we’re just getting started.
   

   

   
   

3. Volkswagen lays off 50,000 people and says pretty plainly that the business model that’s worked for them since the war is no longer working.

4. In France, the government has levied a fee on fast fashion. It’s paid by importing manufacturers at the border, and it charges up to about $14 per clothing item on clothing that’s obviously underwritten somehow and is not a sustainable, repairable garment.

5. The municipal government in Halifax reports that transit ridership is down as prices to get on the bus go up, and the people’s experience riding the bus, by every measure (on-time, safety, and cleanliness), is disappointing.

6. Something’s going on on late-night TV, which I love. NBC has put Seth Meyers’ Late Night with Seth Meyers on a 7-week hiatus. It’s far beyond a normal summer vacation, and the show won’t be back till September 21st.

   In a turn of events that reveals some difference of opinion, at the very least, Seth Meyers is not on vacation. He’s doing a pretend version of his show with one of his head producer-writers on a Zoom call and putting it up on YouTube. It’s being picked up on the NBC YouTube channel. It’s long and cartoonishly low in production values compared to what apparently is the $1 million-a-week style for the studio show, but it’s still doing more than, say, 50% of the viewership that The Million Dollar Show does.

   Does this prove that NBC doesn’t need Seth Meyers, or does it prove that Seth Meyers doesn’t need NBC? I’m not sure.

7. There’s a picture of Gloria Steinem, who passed away this week, with Shirley Chisholm, along with Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan in 1972 at the launch of the National Women’s Caucus. I would argue that Steinem’s conflicted relationship with Ms Chisholm is the defining feature of her life, her work, and that era of the feminist movement (when Ms Chisholm ran to be a presidential candidate and the feminist movement hesitated to support her)

   

8. Over on Facebook, which is the only social media platform I remain on, I’m facing some hard facts. Of the 6,000 or so people who follow along with my social media, the active and engaged crowd is overwhelmingly 65-year-old-plus women, but the people who actually write are overwhelmingly men who are mad at the government. It’s increasingly hard to see the point of continuing beyond the original Facebook premise of sharing pictures with my family and friends.

9. And speaking of social media, it was a crazy day for Donald Trump commentary, even by Donald Trump commentary standards. He was just saying some crazy stuff that cost the stock market a couple of points and probably billions of dollars. I keep thinking that there’s a brain behind the gun, if not simply just a strategy of personal greed, but you got to ask yourself: what if there’s not

10. new reports show that Canada is a significant destination, transit point, and laundering venue for criminal money. The 2025 Government of Canada’s National Risk Assessment basically paints Canada as the world’s most nerf destination for money laundering, not because of lax tax haven rules or an unusual amount of criminal activity, but just simply because we’re so reluctant to call out money laundering
    
    The important distinction is that Canada is not primarily known as a classic secrecy haven like the Cayman Islands. The attraction is that dirty money can be made to look extremely ordinary here. Buy a house. Lend money through a private mortgage. Move funds through a corporation or trust. Buy cars or securities. Run money through a legitimate business. Use a lawyer’s trust account. Mix proceeds into trade transactions. FINTRAC specifically identifies real estate, securities, automotive businesses, legal services, banks, money-service businesses, corporations and trusts among the channels that get exploited.

11. I’m pretty excited about the rollout of the new ChatGPT Astra model. The promise is deeper integration with your computer and data and internet, such that the model moves from being something that can just write clean copy for you to one that can actually do work for you.

12. The main point where AI touches my life, where AI touches my work, is an app called Wispr Flow. It’s an AI-augmented dictation tool. I’ve been using dictation to text on the computer for years, since it was first implemented in Word, but it’s always been just a very rough first draft.

    Wispr Flow is a dictation tool which does editing and correcting as you go, takes out the ums and ahs, makes corrections if you make a mistake and say, “Tuesday,” no, I meant “Thursday,” and does all the structuring of grammar, sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, lists, and so on. It has really improved my workflow, which is oftentimes all about just producing written text, scripts, outlines, treatments, synopses, and so on. It’s been a game changer for me.

13. For those old enough to understand the reference, I’m really enjoying following the restoration of Relics Jet Boat after its recent rediscovery on Vancouver Island

14. Yes, but how is this all going to play in Atlanta?

    Atlanta Black Star was created to publish empowering narratives for all people of African descent. It’s a great publication with a unique and astonishingly plain and clear point of view. It’s fascinating to look at their YouTube channel and juxtapose their editorial view on Mark Carney and Canada with the cast of characters they’re compelled to report on daily.

15. Is it beauty? I have a tin pot theory that, through the whole of human history, beauty is the most efficient, most well understood, and greatest long-term, sustainable store of human wealth, but for the past 100 years, we’ve rejected beauty.

    It happened in the art world first, with a joke about a urinal. As art, it spread to other arts, and then jumped to architecture, engineering, design, and then to government itself, aided by an infection in the universities.

    We’ve struggled terribly to name the problem in our ecology, in our economy, and in our efforts to keep what’s been good about society in the past, even while we’ve succeeded in material terms beyond most of history’s imagining. I’m just increasingly suspicious that it’s beauty.

16. I loved watching this recent video explaining how folks are affording those $80,000-plus trucks that are lording over our local roads

17. I like my music loose, and it doesn’t come much looser than Weezer’s astonishing reading of the plot to Madam Butterfly in their song “El Scorcho.”

    But I have seen it even looser still, with this astonishing Weezer all-girl cover band called Sheezer taking on “El Scorcho” on this suburban Toronto wine night

Charity begins at home

The Principle of Charity is a rule in philosophy, logic, and critical thinking that requires you to treat another person’s argument in its strongest, most rational possible form.

Human beings make a lot of noise. We talk and write a lot. We say the wrong thing. We use the wrong word. We misspeak, as an indiscretion so often that it can appear as a pattern, even in the absence of pattern language. We become irritated. We make jokes that land wrong with the wrong crowd. We use an old word instead of the newly preferred one. We occasionally say something ungenerous about somebody we actually love. If every stray idea that we’re trying on for size is treated as a deposition under oath about the speaker’s innermost character, ordinary human society becomes almost impossible.

Charity, meaning taking a charitable view of others, requires us to listen beyond the noise, to hearts, and to hope for the best in people.

We all should get to say the wrong thing and use the wrong word sometimes, and it’s an act of charity to believe in the better parts of people’s nature. Move on beyond those things. Make a slight correction if absolutely necessary, and then let it pass.

Sunday Sermon

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean —

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

+ Mary Oliver

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

There he was, with his red wing boots up on his homemade desk, looking out at the land, with the dog and the books and paper, and this fold-away cot so he could stay up all night if he wanted. Then half a century passes, and he’s 90 and still searching for the words that he hoped to find out the window that summer afternoon. That’s how life goes by.

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

Though inevitable. I was very moved to read of the passing of Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer, poet, economist, and writer.

To say he left a big impression on me would be a laughable understatement, because I wear his influence on my sleeve, along with Alden Nowlan, Admiral H.G. Rickover, and the whole cast of characters from my youth.

Wendell Berry first came to my attention when I saw the cover of a book that just asked a simple question: “What are people for?” Inside the book, Mr. Berry answered the question in both the most simple and straightforward way and with the cleverness I’ve come to appreciate. Of course, it’s well known that he looked at this through the lens of what’s come to be known as traditional Christian values: people’s purpose is to be stewards of the earth, husbands and wives of our farms, and useful caretakers of each other. Though that could all be taken quite literally in Berry’s writing, it’s also metaphorical.

It would be easy to imagine this Kentucky farmer as an individualist, the rugged man on the land. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Berry saw the basic building block of society as the household, meaning the farm, the family, or whatever shape it takes. In Berry’s thinking, the question was not “Can I take care of myself?” It was “Can I be counted on to be useful to others?”

People are for good work, good relationships, and the care of a particular place. I think it’s this business of a particular place that made Wendell Berry interesting to a much broader audience. It wasn’t about saving the planet or a cause or being induced to save this, protect that, be friends of this.” It was about a particular place, one that you belonged to and, in some sense, then belonged to you. It had real and practical limits that made the philosophy infinitely actionable on a daily basis. It always put me in mind of the Scottish notion of “clan,” meaning “of the place”. On one level, it seemed modest, but once looked at from a broader perspective, it’s more like the meaning of love.

It’s here that he turns his question, “What are people for?” around. Households are useful to the land, to the individuals within, and to the community without. The husbandry and wifeery are needed. Just as the blossoming and dying leaves of life make the forest, it’s our living and dying that shapes the world we live in.

What Berry really wanted to ask is not what people are for, but how did we get so mixed up to imagine that people work in service of government, corporations, banks, militaries, cars, computers, and highway systems, and to remind us that it is all those things that only have worth and purpose to the extent that they work in service of us.

Love very often appears not as a feeling but as competent attention followed by useful action.

In the household, a man has to be handy. Everyone makes themselves useful. The question isn’t “What are you entitled to?” or even “What do you want?” The question is, “What needs doing, and how can you help?”

Berry has a way of speaking to environmentalists, conservatives, anti-corporate types, farmers, Christians, young and old. but he doesn’t really fit in any of these categories. He he is always plumbing the depths of first principles, with the question: What is worth conserving and caring for, and what are all these institutions actually for?

I think Wendell Berry’s considered complaint over a lifetime was that we removed too many things from the household. We’ve removed too much production, too much responsibility, too much considered independence, too much opportunity to gather, and in doing so, we’ve removed too much meaning that gave the householders a sense of purpose.

But we can all be grateful that all this wisdom wasn’t just imparted while leaning on a fence in the back 40. Wendell Berry had the wherewithal to take pencil and paper and write it all down in his own way, and then famously filter it through his wife and her old Royal typewriter. The result of their collective effort, I’m positive, will withstand the test of time, along with the greatest literature of all history.

Below, I’ve collected a few pictures of my favourite Wendell Berry books.

In Berry’s image, handy is a much higher accolade than it might be in normal use. This is not just Grandpa putting a penny in a burned-out fuse. This is agency with some pretty key abilities:

1. To improvise

2. To play the long game

3. To make decisions as if the world is watching.
   

Farming and stewardship of the land is a lot like, famously, metaphorical carpentry. You have to be able to see the problem. You have to be able to see when something needs doing, and then you have to have the confidence to understand the situation and the resources at hand and improvise with what’s available. Admiral Rickover would describe this as pretty close to the very definition of creativity.

Wendell Berry once told a story about a farmer who needed to build a wall to separate a growing field from a livestock field, and he also needed to remove the rocks from the growing field. There are a lot of ways you could go about that, and commercially it could take a lot of money. With his family, he picked up the rocks from the field and built a wall with them, solving two problems at once without involving tractors, transportation, training, or any kind of outward expenditure. The economics of industry were within the household and centred on the place to which they belong.

For me in my life that capacity travels. Building a cabin and producing a television series look like unrelated activities, but at a certain level they’re the same act: Here is the situation. Here are the materials, people, money and constraints. What can we make from them? Creativity and handiness are pretty close synonyms So is writing music. So is producing. So, in a quieter way, is maintaining a household.

Amanda makes the Berry connection stronger and explicit. She chose me because I could fix stuff. It’s really just about as simple as that. Being handy isn’t a collection of skills. It’s a disposition toward the world. The virtue isn’t solitary ruggedness. My usefulness becomes valuable because I am useful to someone and for something. A husband who can solve problems, a father who can make things happen, a neighbour who turns up, a producer who can get a show made, a friend who knows what to do when something goes sideways. Competence acquires meaning through relationship.

That’s as simply as I can put what I got from Wendell Berry.

The Wendell Berry books that meant the most to me.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I’m very proud of Canada this past few weeks and our new National project.

I have a tinpot theory that unintended consequences are the rule, not the exception.

And I’m of the mind that a lot of good is gonna come from this trade and tariff debacle.

Special shout out to Prime Minister Carney, and all the premiers, including our own Tim Houston, who have redoubled their support for his leadership efforts.

Whatever Mr. Trump thinks is happening, this is as they say on South Park, a great day for Canada and therefore a great day for the world, and probably in the fullness of time it’s good for America too.

I can’t help but think that the governor of California speaks for many Americans.

The most recent national poll puts Mark Carney’s approval rating at 60% in Canada. In a world skeptical of politics and politicians, that’s an astonishingly high number.

Donald Trump’s approval rating is stuck at a career low of 33%.

The Republican Party has revoked CBC/Radio-Canada’s media accreditation for the party’s upcoming midterm convention.

Chuck Thompson, the head of public affairs at CBC, confirmed on Monday that the Republican National Committee (RNC) would no longer provide accreditation for CBC/Radio-Canada journalists to cover the convention in Dallas, Texas, on Sept. 9 and 10.

As the news gets more confusing, it’s worth reminding ourselves:

Tariff is another word for tax.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods

They are paid ultimately by the citizens and business consumers of the country, but unlike income taxes, sales taxes, or property taxes, import taxes aren’t traditionally used to finance some improvement, wealth redistribution, or other good purpose. They’re just used to make imported goods more expensive, and it’s often unclear where the money raised goes.

The idea is that tariffs (taxes on imported goods) will make locally produced goods and local production relatively more attractive.

In practise, complexity of markets, pricing incentives, product quality and differentiation, and preferences make this an economic theory, more so than a plan.

The tariff is paid by the importer on goods that cross the border, and the importer might be any kind of organization, from a distributor to a final consumer, and I think, based on your laugh, you know, that the costs are often and eventually, but not always or immediately, passed on to the consumer.

The word doing the heavy lifting there is “border.” A tariff, obviously, is a very old-timey, old-fashioned concept like a duty, and it is all about a thing, a physical thing, crossing a border.

For general interest, the tariff is the rate, and the duty is the amount. A 50% tariff on goods valued at $100 would result in a duty of $50.

In the old days, before the income tax, government had a problem. How do you collect money to finance the costs of government from people who are hard to account for, don’t really keep any records, and have no system, really, for collecting the taxes?

The easiest answer was tariffs and duties because most trade happened at the wharf. That’s why, even in Nova Scotia today, we still have wharfs that we call the government wharf, because that was where trade happened, and that’s where taxes were assessed, levied, and collected before the income tax and the modern system of bureaucracy, records, and banking came into play. Today, governments still build and pay for wharves, but they’re not the centre of government commerce that they once were.

It’s getting difficult to understand what the anti-Carney, anti-Canadian government criticism is supposed to be here.

Canada’s position on the trade talks was explained in Government of Canada statements released essentially in real time, on August 21 and 22 and beyond. They set out what Canada offered, what the Americans were asking for, and why Canada ultimately walked away.

These aren’t obscure documents. They were carried widely in the media, they’re easily discoverable online, and, by the standards of government communications, they’re remarkably plain-spoken.

Yet more than a week later, social media is still jammed with demands that the government “come clean” about what really happened in the negotiations, and claims that the information is being hidden or simply not available, even as we hear it over and over and over in the media.

There just isn’t much mystery here. Obviously, the actual negotiating texts and every private exchange were not published. Nor would anyone reasonably expect them to be. But the broad offers, demands, sticking points and reason for walking away were made public almost immediately.

For a negotiation at this level, that seems like more than expected disclosure.

Would it be unreasonable to wonder whether some of this goes beyond the usual partisan political talk, trolls and bots, and may at least partly reflect purposeful amplification by foreign influencers?

When a contrarian, self-sealing claim keeps circulating loudly after the basic facts are publicly available and easily checked, it seems like a reasonable question to ask.

I’ve linked some examples below, but I encourage you to just search the government press releases as you see fit for yourself.

https://www.canada.ca/.../appearance.../negotiations.html

https://www.pm.gc.ca/.../statement-prime-minister-carney...

https://www.pm.gc.ca/.../prime-minister-carney-delivers...

There’s one area of this tariff story where I really have a horse in the race. In the early 1990s, I was tasked by the government of Nova Scotia to define a system to replace a mixed-up bag of grants and competitions with something that would attract a meaningful film and television industry to Nova Scotia. What we ended up designing and implementing was the first industrial, labour-based, fully refundable corporate film tax credit in the world. It worked because, at that time, we perceived that cultural industries would not be caught up in tariffs and trade politics, and it worked.

It was so successful that it didn’t go unnoticed. Within a year, I was consulting the government of Canada on setting up a federal version of the film tax credit, which still operates today as an exact duplicate of the original Nova Scotian system. It wasn’t long before provinces, states, and countries all over the world saw what we were up to.

We created a system where we were basically buying investment dollars for 30 cents, creating good creative jobs and understanding the value of owned IP 30 years before that became a mainstream media concept. How many dollars would you buy for 30 cents each? The answer is all you could get your hands on, and we got our hands on a lot. We increased the amount of film and television production we did in Nova Scotia by an order of magnitude, and then within 10 years, another order of magnitude.

In those early days, the wind was at our back. Digital cable television had risen to popularity, and with it, new channels like Discovery, History, Food, Home and Garden, and eventually National Geographic. When those television brand franchises wanted to come to Canada, they were more than welcome, but with an understanding that they couldn’t just pour American content into Canada. They needed to commit some portion of the money they made in Canada to Canadian production, Canadian stories, and they did. It was truly a golden age for Canadian television and stories.

Eventually, by the turn of the century, Canada actually became the world leader in my little corner of the television industry. We now call it factual television, which includes everything from documentaries to reality shows to the kind of lifestyle, home improvement, true crime, history, and engineering programmes that people love the world over.

Buoyed by this success that defined our entertainment and the era, it wasn’t surprising then when the next generation of television came along; we had a plan. The streaming platforms came to dominate TV in the post-COVID era, and it seems sensible that Canada would offer the same deal. Sure! We love to see these streamers in Canada, but to be fair, could they also spend some amount, maybe 5% of the money they make in Canada, on Canadian production? Nothing could have been more fair, but the world had changed, and America had become less fair, led by a leader who seems to have no innate human sense of fairness.

Today, one of the stumbling blocks of our unnecessary trade negotiations is about digital trade, which is infinitely more complicated than border-crossing physical trade. Most people didn’t believe that even Donald Trump would open the Pandora’s box of digital trade taxation in the modern world, and yet he’s done it.

You can read more about that below

RELATED:

Donald Trump set up a full-on, straight-up confrontation with the Prime Minister of Canada.

Mr Carney reported that one of his objections to the trade negotiation was a demand that bilingual labelling, streaming, and entertainment in multiple languages be removed.

Donald Trump responded today by saying he loves French Canadians and would never ask anyone to stop speaking French.

Now, that’s all fine, and we can see that he did not respondtothequedtion, that he was obfuscating and not answering the argument at all. He still purposefully laid it out in this “Who you going to believe?” style.

I would argue that he’s probably going to lose that match.

Mark Carney, whatever you think about him, has spent a career where the careful crafting of statements under scrutiny is his stock and trade, and he does that work with incredible finesse. Whereas Donald Trump, well, the kindest thing to say is he’s playing a different game.

It’ll be pretty interesting to see, in the coming days, weeks, and months in America, who’s perceived as the more believable character. If that’s the place where Donald Trump wants to make his stand and fight, I really don’t see how he wins.

Calling these “tariffs on Canadian autos” really obscures what’s happening and what the purpose is.

I think most people know that there are no Canadian cars. There are no Canadian car designers or manufacturers at scale presently. There are at least three meaningfully large factories where American auto manufacturers ship most of the parts and pieces of cars north across the border, where they’re assembled and shipped back to America for sale.

A Chevrolet Silverado made in Oshawa is an American-brand truck built in Canada. A Chrysler Pacifica built in Windsor is a Stellantis product. Toyota builds RAV4s in Ontario. Honda builds Civics and CR-Vs there. Lexus builds NXs and RXs.

A little Google research shows that only about 10% of these cars stay in or are sold in Canada, and that might represent only about 5% of the 2 million-plus cars sold annually in Canada. Of course, that doesn’t account for any of the used car market.

I think it’s important that Canada not rise to the bait and view this nationally in a world of multinational corporations. What Trump is really saying is that if you want to sell cars in America, you got to make them in America.

It’s not really about Canada. Canada’s stock did not go up or down today. The big five automakers’ stock went down.

Trump is putting a tax wall through the middle of the North American automobile factory and telling companies to move whichever parts of their factory are north of the wall to the south. Like it or not, that is a coherent strategy. It flies in the face of 60 years of industrial practise since the Auto Pact. It could be ruinously expensive. It’s inefficient at best, but it’s not wrong on its surface. It’s not even immoral.

But it’s not nice either; it’s part of an isolationist vision, an overall rejection of free trade and a globalized world.

The important thing here is that we, as Canadians, don’t get to a place where we take this beyond its economic impact. It’s business. It’s tough, hardball business, but it’s business, and it creates tremendous opportunities.

I don’t want to see one transportation industry job lost here in Canada.

Counterintuitively, in the fullness of time, this could see many more and much better jobs for building transportation here in Canada. We can build our own cars and trucks, our own vehicles of all sorts, for our own country, our own roads, our own climate, and our own ideas about what transportation should be.

I can assure you that I think it would look a lot different than the cartoonish American vision that we’ve accepted for the last 60 years.

We might never have come around to this on our own, but with this unexpected and unintentional help from Mr. Trump, I can imagine a day where we design, finance, build, and repair our own Canadian cars that represent our vision and our needs and our creative ideas about how getting around should work.

And the best part is, economically and stylistically, I think the rest of the world, including America, might be very interested in the kind of vehicles we would wish to build.

The most incredible Canadian car that you’ve never heard of

I’m trying to avoid saying cars above because I think that unnecessarily limits the transportation devices that we could have and could be used in the future. From Halifax’s famous Volvo plant to Vancouver’s shamefully under-known Intermecanica manufacturing and all points in between, we could be making mobility vehicles of all sorts here in Canada for the future.

All we have to do is just let go of America and America’s 1950s vision of the automobile and 2000s vision of the pretend pickup truck. Intermechanica is especially fascinating if I had the opportunity to have an automobile for just the sheer joy of driving an automobile. An Intermecanica 356 Speedster would be my first choice every time, and I felt this way since I visited the factory with Clive Cussler back in 2000.

The saddest part of that visit was sitting with the owner as he recounted years and years of struggle to try to get the government of Canada and Transport Canada to loosen its grip enough to let him be a car manufacturer and sell cars in Canada. Ultimately, it was a mug’s game. It was impossible, but his cars were so popular globally that, after all his years in business, cars that he had sold to the world were, by that time, 15 years old. Paradoxically, they could then be imported back to Canada and be sold, registered, and driven in Canada once they were 15 years old and sold as, again, strangely, actual vintage cars.

The point of Admiral Rickover’s quote is that he believed rigid rules hold back talented people, and, in my view, provinces and countries too. Instead of encouraging smart, thoughtful choices, rules force everyone to sink to a basic standard. They kill critical thinking because when people follow blind rules imposed by unthinking, uncritical bureaucracies driven by politics, fear, and risk management, they stop thinking for themselves.

Rickover’s idea was that, to really be creative and to make positive change, we need active questioning minds rather than blind obedience. As the father of the nuclear navy, Rickover valued personal accountability, high competence, incredible realized capacity for effort, and deep understanding over bureaucratic paperwork or red tape.

As Canada is forced to begin again with new partnerships, new ideas, and new goals in mind, now more than ever, we need to open ourselves up to the idea that rules, government, and bureaucracy, like everything else in the world, suffer from diminishing marginal returns. There are no infinite goods, and even being careful can itself cause suffering and cost more than it’s worth.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

We have more ways to communicate than ever, but fewer places to talk seriously about the things underneath everything else. First principles. What is freedom for? How important is the sanctity of human life? What are people for? What responsibilities do we have to one another? How should we live and behave with people who we believe are wrong? What duty of care do we owe them? Where can we have these conversations in the modern world?

This is an essay on first principles, tolerance, charity, disagreement and the lost art of serious conversation. I am inspired to believe a free society depends on our ability to question our first principles, to tolerate people we think are wrong and have said the wrong thing, and to find places where we can be together and discuss difficult ideas.

The beaver, named Felix, became LSE’s mascot because it symbolises exactly what the School values: industry, cooperation, creativity and community. It started as a simple emblem in 1922, but it’s now one of the most recognisable and loved parts of LSE culture.

The motto is taken from a longer line in Virgil’s Georgics:

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. “Happy is he who knows the cause of things.”

And to know the cause of things requires getting in there under the hood and looking at the nature of things and our beliefs, our first principles.

Note that the beaver’s name comes from the first word in Virgil’s quote. It means happy, fortunate, lucky, blessed, prosperous, or fruitful. So Felix is not just “happy” in the modern cheerful sense. It carries the richer idea of being favoured by fortune, flourishing, successful, or blessed by circumstance

What is something that you believe that most people would disagree with you about?

It’s a great conversation starter because it gets at the heart of things. It’s impossible to answer by just being pleasant and agreeable. It’s deeply revealing, but most importantly, it comes quickly to first principles, the things that we believe, from which everything else flows.

I’ll offer this: I believe that the world is mostly a safe place, and people are mostly good. I believe that things are the best they’ve ever been for humanity and are getting better all the time. My evidence is our recorded flow of human history.

I say this knowing that, if social media is to be believed, there are a lot of people out there who think the opposite.

One of the funny things that I hear these days is the idea that, “Oh, I don’t like that person because I don’t agree with them,” or “I can’t talk to that person because they don’t agree with me on this or that.” There’s a softer version of it, too, that goes, “I really like what you write, but I don’t agree with everything you say,” as if that isn’t self-evident. Of course, it’s obvious that this kind of thinking is divisive and is an impediment to change and progress.

The higher the stakes get, the worse this line of talk becomes. “Don’t agree with some policy or decision about one of our political representatives” leads almost immediately to “They must be morally flawed, and their motivation must be corrupt,” leading quickly to “They don’t agree with me, so they’re the worst person in the world.”

What happens here is that we take policies, strategies, tactics, and plans and think of them as first principles. If we don’t like the current government’s budget, we jump from there to: this government hates Nova Scotia or Canada, or hates working people, or wants to keep poor people down, or is oppressive, or whatever. We don’t often stop to think or have a place to talk about some simple first principles, like: can we agree that we all love our friends, home, family, and country? If possible, wouldn’t we all want things to be nice, peaceful, safe, and prosperous?

This essay is about first principles and, maybe more importantly, the places and conditions under which we can talk about them.

This essay contains strong opinions loosely held.

To doubt one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don't defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don't be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.

Adm. H G Rickover USN

Where does an ordinary person now go to have that argument?

We’ve got the media in all its forms. We’ve got books. We’ve got Substack here. We’ve got government. We’ve got music and the arts. We’ve got social media. We’ve got politics. We have the law and our constitution, but where do we go to talk about the really big things? Where do we go to talk about first principles?

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve been reading about Canada becoming a leader in medically assisted death, with Quebec’s rate of medically assisted deaths approaching 10% of all deaths. I’m feeling that the demand for that might be higher than the supply, given the rules, culture, and availability around it.

Obviously, for many Canadians, it’s good to be alive, but it’s not that good. This new system really rubs against one of our crucial first principles, which is about the sanctity and primacy of human life.

First principles aren’t everyday arguments about carbon taxes or Donald Trump renaming a lake or municipal zoning or whatever somebody said wrong on social media.

First principles are our basic building blocks of ideas, things that seem to be self-evident or self-justified. Some of them are captured in our constitution, but so many more are just out there underpinning everything we do.

There would have been a time when first principles were much discussed in the church, in the universities, in popular culture of books, and even in the media of newspapers in their heyday. It seems interesting that we were more openly taking our time and talking about first principles 200 years ago than we are now, given all our opportunities to communicate.

But maybe there’s nothing to talk about anymore. Maybe everything’s settled, but I don’t think that’s the case. As is often said about democracy, it always has to be discussed, it always has to be justified, and it always has to be fought for, or it disappears. It’s the same with the other first principles, and we lose something by not talking about them.

I think I first thought about this when I saw Wendell Berry’s book titled simply “What Are People For?” It came to me at a time when Nova Scotia had just started talking about growth, growth, growth, and the importance of immigration and why we need to have more people. That was always just taken as a given, as a first principle. We never stopped to talk about what people are for, meaning not just in numbers, but how they should be treated, how they should be thought of, and what we can ask of them.

Up until very recently, Canada’s immigration policy openly promoted the idea that they were taking the very best and brightest of the world’s citizens and actively encouraging them to come to Canada. We wanted to take for ourselves the people with the most capacity for knowledge, the most capacity for effort, the people with the most potential. We wanted them to leave their home countries and come to Canada. I see two problems with that:

Who are we to lure away another country’s best and brightest? Surely they’re needed there, and taking them away is a kind of reverse colonialism. It must have some role to play in why the rich countries remain rich and the poor countries remain poor.

We never talk about why we want them to come here. A reasonable observation would be: we want them to come and look after us. We want them to come and create wealth for us, and, as politely as I can say it, we want them to come and serve us to do the jobs that we no longer want to do.

How does that square with our first principles?

I suppose that’s just one example, but there’s other questions too. And the problem seems to me where there were once family gatherings and open universities and institutions and organizations of all sort and the church, and a government working from nearly a blank slate, now we have Twitter, or X, and Instagram. and LinkedIn. How bracketed the discussion is in those media, is surprising when you stop to think about it.

Magazines, periodicals, and journals once captured a lot of this discussion, and books, of course, but whatever the rise and fall of the digital world, it doesn’t seem to be captured anymore, even here in Substack.

When I sat down with a blank page this morning, I knew for a fact that if I had written about Carney and Trump and my thoughts on the trade wars, and put my voice to the rally, a lot of people would read and share and comment. That’s fine, but what does that really do beyond just that? What do I have to offer or contribute to that discussion? If I tried to crack into my ruminations about first principles, it suffered two main risks:

People would take immediate offence or think I’m weird.

Nobody would read it because it’s difficult going.

It’s work that’s never done, and it’s never as simple as just picking a side, making a judgement, assuming somebody’s moral or motivational worth, and moving on. It’s tough stuff, and it always will be.

And yet here I am, along with you, doing it the hard way.

I’m going to just wrap up here with a list of first-principles questions, not to say that they’re always on our minds, but just that, for whatever reason, or mental defect, my conscience never truly releases me from thinking about this stuff.

What is freedom for?

What do we owe one another?

When does compassion become harmful?

What makes authority legitimate?

What is a good life?

What should never be bought or sold?

Is equality intrinsically good?

What is society allowed to demand from an individual?

When is suffering worth enduring?

What obligations do the living have to the dead and the unborn?

Those are first-principles questions.

Two hundred years ago they were asked, naturally, in sermons, taverns, reading societies, lodges, universities, political clubs, dinner tables and public lectures. Today, we have a lot more communication more communication, while having surprisingly few socially accepted places for that kind of conversation.

First principle of the day :

People should get to say the wrong thing and use the wrong word, repeat stupid stuff they’ve picked up along the way, and say dumb things without distracting you too much from what you know is in the good and gentle hearts of almost all people.

Tolerance does not require agreement.
We can permit things we believe to be false, foolish or objectionable.

In Freemasonry, this would come under the heading of charity, using the more traditional definition of charity (not the modern sense where A induces B to give money to C), but that we should take a charitable view of things in hopes that the world would take a charitable view of us.

The principle is not:

“Your belief is as good as mine.”

It is closer to:

“I think you are wrong, perhaps profoundly wrong, and I nevertheless recognize limits on my authority to stop you.”

That is a remarkably sophisticated idea.

Why is it a first principle?

Because a pluralistic society becomes almost impossible without it.

Tolerance or charity begins with a serious and pragmatic statement of fact:

We are going to continue disagreeing with each other about important things.

The political question therefore changes from, “How do we get everyone to believe the right thing?” to:

“How can people who believe incompatible things live together without coercing one another?”

That turn is one of the great achievements of Western political thought.

Toleration contains an implicit theory of human fallibility.

I think I’m right.

But I may be wrong.

Where this leaves us is the importance of learning how to argue well and how and where we do that. It is another mystery because, traditionally, it would be in the same spaces we learned to discuss first principles.

To finish where I started, by quoting Admiral Rickover, I’ll share two things he considered crucial goals of any education. You’ll hear these ideas echoed through everything I write and talk about, and this is where I get the ideas :

To understand, appreciate, and learn to live with the fellow

inhabitants of our planet. Every child must learn about the races and people of

the world and the rich variety of the world’s cultures. He must know something of

the history of men and nations. He must learn that there are many people in the

world who differ from him profoundly in habits, ideas, and ways of life. He must

perceive these differences not as occasions for uneasiness or hostility but as

challenges to his capacity for understanding.

To learn some kind of critical or intellectual method. I regard this

as the most important of all. We have all learned that we live in an age of an

information explosion. But we are also in the middle of a misinformation

explosion. With the proliferation of mass communications media, we are

surrounded by hawkers, pitchman, hard and soft sells, persuaders hidden and

overt. Bombarded daily with millions of words by print and electronic media, we

all have to have some kind of critical method by means of which to decide whom

and what to believe, and to what degree.

How is this propaganda evaluated? It cannot always be analyzed by

scientific method, since propagandistic statements are rarely capable of proof;

but it can be approached with a scientific attitude. Some kind of discipline in the

orientations of science is necessary to inculcate a critical attitude towards words,

our own as well as those of others, so that our lives may be governed by

skepticism an respect for fact that characterize the rational mind.

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In the BEE, I’ve been talking a lot about amalgamation, economics, government, and geopolitics.

But if we are truly going to stop and start again in Nova Scotia, with new goals in mind about progress, purpose, prosperity, and productivity, I think we really have to start from a sense of place.

Nova Scotia is special in one obvious way. It is deeply connected to Canada, but it is almost an island. It has about a million people. From a seagoing perspective, it kind of floats somewhere between London and New York, and for such a small place it contains a similarly vast variety of mind and manners, of astonishing depth and breadth. It has everything the world would want in miniature. Halifax is like looking at London through the wrong end of the telescope.

Sometimes when people go into therapy, they’re asked, “Do you remember a time before you had the problem?”

If you ask that question of Nova Scotia, the answer goes back past modern memory.

But we can still see the evidence.

We can see it in some of our town centres and Main Streets. In rows of incredible houses. In farm fields, forts, churches, wharves, rail lines, and astonishingly productive harbours.

Whatever the shortcomings of the past, and whatever the faults and foibles of those who have gone before us, there was a time when Nova Scotia was more productive, more prosperous, and filled with a larger sense of promise.

And that time had a real sense of place.

We can still hear it in our music and culture, and in all sorts of echoes around us in the woods and waters.

So maybe we should do what the BEE intended to do in the first place.

Stop here.

And take a different way of looking at this.

Not HRM. Not municipal units. Not this or that level of government or bureaucracy. Not amalgamation or de-amalgamation.

Let’s just take an accounting of our places here in Nova Scotia.

This morning, I started wondering how many towns, villages, and communities there really are in Nova Scotia. Not just incorporated towns. Not census units. Not places on the managerial or tourism maps. The actual places people know.

How many would you expect a place this size, with this history and geography, to have?

Old and new. Cities and towns. Villages and crossroads that have somehow become real communities.

I came up with about 160.

And I rounded it off to that because next year is the 160th anniversary of Nova Scotia joining Confederation with Canada.

That seems appropriate.

Maybe not since the war has the notion of a national project, a sense of purpose, meaning, and place, felt more important. So it seems worth talking about.

We see more wildlife than you’d expect on the peninsula of all different kinds. This big buck passed through our yard on Jubilee Road with some friends just after midnight a couple nights ago. The idea is that place in Nova Scotia doesn’t just mean one thing. We can be urban and still have thriving wildlife. You can find the most cosmopolitan of company on a gravel country road, world-class rock climbing along a little lake shore. Epic surfing in a little cove. Like our music, our places don’t know any boundaries other than our own imagination and capacity for effort

I came up with a list of 160 places, organized into what I’ll call natural communities of communities.

I’ve tried to disregard political boundaries and go back to the way we actually talk about where we live.

Cape Breton.

The South Shore.

The Eastern Shore.

The Annapolis Valley.

The Northumberland region.

The Capital Region.

Places with fuzzy boundaries, perhaps, but meanings that are quite clear.

There’s an old joke that nobody lives in New York City.

If you seriously ask people where they live, they’ll tell you Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx or hundreds of other places. We may never have lived in New York, but many of those names are familiar to us because the people who do live there so proudly in their way have a shared sense of place.

Maybe that is part of what makes New York great. There is this open, layered sense of place.

I think the same thing is true in Nova Scotia.

Someone may technically live in Halifax Regional Municipality, but they live in Dartmouth. Or Bedford. Or Beaver Bank. Or the Prestons. Or Musquodoboit Harbour.

There is no town line around Musquodoboit Harbour. There may be no sign telling you its population. Administratively, it is part of something much larger.

And yet nobody is confused about where Musquodoboit Harbour is.

People who live there know they live there.

Other people know the place too.

You don’t have to live somewhere to feel connected to it.

Maybe you used to live there.

Maybe your people are from there.

Maybe your grandparents had a house there.

Maybe you played hockey at the rink there when you were twelve.

Maybe you had a first date in Port Williams.

Maybe you have always thought Canning was the picture of a perfect little Nova Scotia town.

Maybe Chester exists only in your imagination as somewhere beautiful.

Maybe even Ecum Secum represents the end of the Earth in your family.

Places have populations.

But they also have constituencies of affection.

A town of 800 people may have thousands more who care what happens to it.

So this project starts with nothing more complicated than naming the places.

Before we start reforming governments, calling for de-amalgamation or more municipalities , financing programs or cutting programmes, drawing boundaries, or telling every community what industry it ought to specialize in, maybe we should just remind ourselves what already is.

Nova Scotia as a community of communities.

A constellation of places.

Some are prosperous. Some busted. Some growing. Some in decline. Some old. Some surprisingly new. Most of them are painfully still trying to figure out what they are.

But all of them are part of the place.

Here is my first list of 160.

I expect people will disagree with it. I know very well that people can find fault with anything, and I’m open to hearing about it because the truth is, there are corners of Nova Scotia I don’t know as much about as I would like to.

Tell me what I missed.

Tell me what doesn’t belong and what I got wrong.

Tell me where one region ends and another begins.

But mostly, I’d love to know which of these places you feel some connection with, and why.

When I look back on this list after lunch today, I was tempted to do a kind of personal list of which places I thought I knew and understood, and which places only kind of existed in other people’s stories and in my imagination. I could talk pretty confidently about Waverley, but Gysbrough only exists as a place my father dreamed of owning a farm someday, and so on through the whole chapter.

Connection is more than just where you live or where you work.

Maybe grew up there.

Maybe your people are from there.

Maybe you had a first date there.

Maybe you played a hockey game there.

Maybe you passed through a hundred times.

Maybe you just think the place is beautiful and it holds some place in your imagination.

Whatever the case, let’s stop for a moment and talk about the places of Nova Scotia.

Before we decide where we are going, it is surely important to remember where, exactly, we are.

It’s only then we can work out the mix of purpose, progress, prosperity, and productivity that could give us a shared imagining of where we go from here.

160 Places of Nova Scotia

Capital Region . 20

1. Halifax

2. Dartmouth

3. Bedford

4. Lower Sackville

5. Middle Sackville

6. Beaver Bank

7. Fall River

8. Waverley

9. Enfield

10. Elmsdale

11. Lantz

12. Mount Uniacke

13. Tantallon

14. Timberlea

15. Spryfield

16. Herring Cove

17. Eastern Passage

18. Cole Harbour

19. The Prestons

20. Hammonds Plains

Annapolis Valley . 16

21. Wolfville

22. Port Williams

23. Canning

24. Kentville

25. New Minas

26. Coldbrook

27. Centreville

28. Berwick

29. Aylesford

30. Kingston

31. Greenwood

32. Middleton

33. Lawrencetown

34. Bridgetown

35. Annapolis Royal

36. Gaspereau

South Shore . 17

37. Hubbards

38. Chester

39. Chester Basin

40. Mahone Bay

41. Lunenburg

42. Bridgewater

43. Riverport

44. LaHave

45. Petite Rivière

46. New Germany

47. Liverpool

48. Port Medway

49. Port Mouton

50. Shelburne

51. Lockeport

52. Barrington Passage

53. Clark’s Harbour

Eastern Shore . 13

54. Lawrencetown

55. East Chezzetcook

56. Grand Desert

57. Porters Lake

58. Musquodoboit Harbour

59. Head of Jeddore

60. Jeddore Oyster Pond

61. Ship Harbour

62. Tangier

63. Sheet Harbour

64. Ecum Secum

65. Sherbrooke

66. Canso

Northumberland Region . 22

67. Pugwash

68. Wallace

69. Malagash

70. Tatamagouche

71. Brule

72. River John

73. Toney River

74. Caribou

75. Merigomish

76. Arisaig

77. Malignant Cove

78. Bayfield

79. Pictou

80. New Glasgow

81. Stellarton

82. Westville

83. Trenton

84. Thorburn

85. Antigonish

86. Pomquet

87. St. Andrews

88. Heatherton

Fundy Shore . 11

89. Windsor

90. Falmouth

91. Hantsport

92. Maitland

93. Noel

94. Walton

95. Parrsboro

96. Port Greville

97. Advocate Harbour

98. Five Islands

99. Digby

Southwest Nova Scotia . 11

100. Yarmouth

101. Tusket

102. Wedgeport

103. Pubnico

104. Church Point

105. Saulnierville

106. Meteghan

107. Weymouth

108. Belliveau Cove

109. Comeauville

110. Freeport

Central Hub . 10

111. Truro

112. Bible Hill

113. Stewiacke

114. Shubenacadie

115. Brookfield

116. Debert

117. Great Village

118. Economy

119. Bass River

120. Londonderry

The Borders . 8

121. Amherst

122. Springhill

123. Oxford

124. River Hebert

125. Joggins

126. Maccan

127. Tidnish

128. Wentworth

The Strait . 8

129. Guysborough

130. Mulgrave

131. Port Hawkesbury

132. Point Tupper

133. Auld’s Cove

134. Port Hastings

135. Havre Boucher

136. Monastery

Cape Breton . 24

137. Sydney

138. North Sydney

139. Sydney Mines

140. Glace Bay

141. New Waterford

142. Dominion

143. Louisbourg

144. Membertou

145. Eskasoni

146. Baddeck

147. Whycocomagh

148. Iona

149. St. Peter’s

150. Arichat

151. D’Escousse

152. Port Hood

153. Mabou

154. Inverness

155. Chéticamp

156. Margaree Harbour

157. Pleasant Bay

158. Ingonish

159. Neil’s Harbour

160. Dingwall

The Bee exists to struggle to find a different way of looking at things than the ones we’re often given. I don’t see this as being contrarian, disagreeable, or judgmental. I just think, especially for local issues, the frame seems to be too often provided for us, and then it becomes difficult to find different ways of talking and thinking about the issues and problems of the day. That’s what the Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

We aren't very good at honouring maintenance. I’m kind of worried, reading the news and social media, that we’re all about tearing things down, especially anything that’s connected to the past, to hierarchy, to tradition, to beauty, or wealth. Not in the GDP sense, but in the unaccounted sense of households and happiness. but maybe even worse than intentional destruction is mediocrity, and its most insipid manifestation is the deferral of repair and maintenance.

What have you maintained this summer that, in return, has given you the gift of meaning, purpose, and a sense of the good life?

A marriage survives another ordinary year.

A roof doesn’t leak.

A healthy person stays healthy.

A main street remains pleasant.

A forest isn’t cut.

A friendship maintained for forty years.

Nothing “happened.”

Yet enormous value was preserved.

Something was maintained.

This summer seems to me to be all about maintenance. I've been working on maintaining old motorcycles, maintaining Olive, our Volkswagen bus, and a hundred other things seen and unseen around my life.

Maybe it's a product of living long enough to appreciate when things last. That their continued existence depends on thousands of later acts.

Civilization is mostly maintenance.

Marriage is maintenance.

Parenthood is maintenance.

A town is maintenance.

A business is maintenance.

Democracy is maintenance.

Friendship is maintenance.

Culture is accumulated maintenance.

Meaning itself is just a product of accumulated things we've committed to maintain.

Maintenance is economically invisible because its greatest output is that nothing happens. Yet when it's deferred, the imputed interest and devastating costs can be astronomical.

If our dominant account of freedom says that flourishing consists in continually choosing the arrangement that is maintenance-free or disposable, our lives, institutions and even meaning itself becomes extraordinarily fragile.

And worse, in pursuit of ease, the good life actually eludes us.

Maybe sometimes the burden of maintenance itself is where dignity, competence and meaning are being generated.

As James Allen wrote in his 100-year-old but seasonally popular book, "As a Man Thinketh",

“Of all miserable men, the shirker is the most miserable.”

The Bee exists to do what too much of today’s media doesn’t: step back, look harder, and tell the truth of a story from fresh angles. It’s not about outrage or easy narratives—it’s about making sense of the world by asking better questions and refusing to accept the stale frames that dominate politics, culture, and economics. Whether the subject is local music venues, municipal planning, or national identity, the goal is the same: to uncover what really matters and to show how it connects to our lives here and now. Finding new ways to look at issues isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s essential. Old ways of thinking created the messes we’re in. If we want better futures—for music, for communities, for Canada—we need sharper tools, braver conversations, and perspectives that cut through noise to the signal. That’s what The Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Tonight I’m wondering what is happening in the Nova Scotia Liberal leadership race. It’s Thursday after supper. Maybe by tomorrow night all will be revealed, and we’ll be off to the races to select a new provincial Liberal leader.

The deadline for applications has now closed. Two people appear to have applied: Richmond County deputy warden Amanda Mombourquette, who has been approved, and Becky Druhan, who has not. At least not yet.

Druhan left Tim Houston’s cabinet and caucus last fall. She sat briefly as an Independent, joined the Liberals in May, and said from the beginning that she intended to seek the leadership. Now the deadline has passed. The CBC and other media outlets announced her as one of two candidates…

Well, sort of.

Ms. Druhan says she has not officially announced because the party is still vetting her application.

That may be perfectly routine. Maybe, though she openly said in May, when she left the PCs, that she was going to run, she might have filed near the deadline, and the rules allow the party 48 hours to verify signatures, donors, fees and eligibility. they also allow the candidate another 48 hours after that to correct any deficiency in the application. By Friday afternoon, they may approve her, and I may amend this post to say: Oh. There you go.

UPDATE: well, there you go! As of this morning, www.togetherwithBecky.ca has announced that the MLA is officially running for the leadership of the Liberal Party, and a news release has been put up officially announcing her entering the race!

I don’t know either of the candidates directly and can’t discern their record, but this is the first step in the next chapter of the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia. I sure hope it brings interest, ideas, and innovation to the party. We need them now more than ever.

But it is still worth noticing.

The Liberal caucus, meaning Derek and Ian, and the Liberal Party organization, meaning Margaret Miller, are not quite the same thing. The caucus welcomed Druhan warmly. They made her caucus chair, gave her major critic responsibilities, and presented her arrival as evidence that the party was rebuilding.

The party organization, however, is the body now deciding whether she may run to lead it.

That leaves at least some room for intrigue. The caucus may see an experienced MLA with cabinet credentials and a ready-made seat. The party establishment may see someone who was a Progressive Conservative less than a year ago, who arrived with an apparent plan to take over, and whose departure from Tim Houston’s government has never been fully explained.

And the one vetted and approved candidate has the support of everyone from ultimate Backroom Insider’s insider Richie Mann to the former Premier himself, Stephen McNeil.

Maybe this is nothing more than responsible vetting. Perhaps it is exactly what a serious party should do.

Still, it all seems politically awkward. The Nova Scotia Liberals stand at the precipice of an historic moment. They were nearly erased in the last election. They badly need energy, attention, members, money, and some sign of renewal.

and Nova Scotia needs competent, serious, enthusiastic, and interesting opposition and political party alternatives. It’s crucial to democracy and good government.

This ought to be their moment.

We need a new Angus L. McDonald.

Instead, for at least a day or two, it has become a question mark.

Yeah, we named a bridge after him, and that is symbolically awesome. More than that, he was a leader that Nova Scotia could absolutely, truly be proud of at a time when all the parties seemed to have reputations and leaders that people could be proud of and support with informed joy and optimism for the future.

God knows, at the end of the Second World War, after the Great War, the Great Depression, and then a second war, there would have been a lot less reason for hope than there is today. Yet people still got out and got behind him. That gave him and others like Mr. Stanfield the mandate and the power to believe in Nova Scotia and to imagine a better future for us. And in spite of the cross lights that flash around us today and our uniquely pessimistic view of things, things did get better. We are immeasurably better off than we were 50 or a hundred years ago.

Liberal for Life… almost

I’ll share that I’m an unreliable narrator of this story. I’ve been a lifelong Liberal supporter, as was my mother and my grandmother. In fact, the happiest I’ve ever seen my grandmother was her walking across the Stellerton rink, arm-in-arm with Jean Chrétien, surely among the greatest political figures and fighters in living memory.

And, like most Canadians, and hundreds of millions around the world today, I feel truly and richly blessed to have Mr. Carney as our Prime Minister and as a true world leader in these difficult times.

I’m also an unabashed and enthusiastic supporter of my Pictou County cousin Sean Fraser, who’s commitment to service has been tested again and again, and it just keeps offering more.

My early career work that I’m most proud of, the work of designing the Nova Scotia film tax credit, the first labour-based industrial film tax credit in the world, would not have been possible without the support of then Premier Dr. John Savage. He supported me every step of the way as I fought through the details of the truly disruptively innovative idea that the Nova Scotia Department of Finance bureaucracy hated then as much as it hates it now.

But I saw the very, very best of politics and democracy in the 2007 Liberal leadership race where Kenzie McKinnon, Stephen McNeil and Diana Whalen contested for the party leadership through a provincial tour of discussions, debates and open houses. It was rural region politics at its very best. Diana Whalen’s straight shooting technocrat of the best kind. Kenzie McKinnon, an erudite and intelligent Halifax lawyer, and Stephen McNeil, a bearded, tall, lanky, rural working man with a big old-fashioned family.

The public discussions they held around the province through 2007 were phenomenal, exciting, informative and educational for everyone. If you were there, you can remember the excitement in the rooms, and the crowds just got bigger and bigger and bigger until the final vote was so enthusiastically supported that the event had to be moved to the Dartmouth Sportsplex to hold everybody who wanted to be there in witness and say that they were members of the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia.

It was an exciting time, but a different political time as well. 20 years ago, a lot of the older folks in the party wondered how a man with a beard could ever be the Premier of Nova Scotia. On the voting day, when Stephen McNeil showed up smirking and awkwardly clean-shaven, there were roars from the crowds, and he deserved the win that he got. It was a physical, and I’m sure for him difficult, manifestation of his commitment to the party and to Nova Scotia. It also built the bank account, not just in cash terms but in support terms, in every district in the province that carried the Liberal Party through to some great wins.

After the election, I was so happy to be invited by Stephen McNeil to what was promised to be an ongoing series of open morning discussions with politically interested folks from around the region, with ideas and enthusiasm for building a better Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, within a couple of months, those meetings were cancelled. I lost contact with the party and never heard much more from them until the news came that they cancelled, seemingly arbitrarily, the film tax credit that Dr. Savage and his Liberal party hired me to set up.

At the time, I thought it was all a big misunderstanding, so I thought I’d just go and explain it to them, as I had explained it a million times before. How the system was a tool for buying money, and it was a system where you could buy dollars for 30 cents. Ask yourself: how many dollars would you buy for 30 cents? The answer seems obvious enough: all that you could get your hands on, especially if those dollars also created good, high-paying creative jobs.

But something had changed inside the party. Stephen McNeil wouldn’t return my calls. The nightly news was filled with Liberal caucus leaders austerely repeating the same lines that I had fought against from the functionaries in the Department of Finance. I kept on trying. I grew up in Waverley. I know what it is to get treated harshly, but I don’t think I’ve ever been treated as dismissively as I was by Ian Rankin and Margaret Miller when I met with each of them and tried to talk to them about what was happening with the film tax credit.

In the end, the seemingly arbitrary decision, which had really been forced on them by the Department of Finance movers and shakers because they had always hated it, was unsustainable. To save face, they came up with a kind of fast food, empty calories version of the thing, which got the productions made and kept the producers and industry happy. It took a programme that was nutritious and good for Nova Scotia labour and made it into a programme that helped the Hilton Hotel Corporation’s bottom line more than Halifax’s.

Unknown to me at the time, unknown to most people, they also quietly gutted the Nova Scotia equity tax credit. They changed it to something eerily called the Innovation Equity Tax Credit, and they specifically exclude it from investments in the film and television industry, in digital media, and maybe, in hindsight, most astonishingly, the home building industry. Ten years later, that one mistake seems astonishing and might be considered the biggest blunder a political party has made in modern Nova Scotia history, and that’s saying something. But wait, there’s one more.

Nova Scotia Bill 148: the biggest, baddest bill of them all is now an actual bill

Stephen McNeil became embittered in office — as people do — and no one faced the wrath of that bitterness more than organised public labour. His distaste for collective bargaining seemed to know no bounds, and he passed a law limiting increases in wages for public sector workers. At the time, it was a popular thing to try with governments across the nation, but it also had proved to be legally suspect and morally against most of the principles of good government. He did it. He pushed it through, and now, ten years later, it turns out he was as wrong as anyone has ever been. It was illegal. The Supreme Court has ruled.

Now we, all of us, are going to face the biggest bill Nova Scotia has ever gotten, and we have nobody to blame but the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia.

Whoever becomes the next leader of the party will go into an election not looking to the future, but having to explain a past blunder of obscene proportion. They will have to explain how they plan to pay out a debt that is modestly going to come in the hundreds of millions and, if not handled very carefully, could reach into the billions.

But for the third time in this essay, I’ll write: We need the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia. Our democratic, political, and social future depends on strong parties that people are as proud to support as my grandmother was proud to support Angus L.

Here’s the story of the biggest political mistake in modern Nova Scotia history

The Bee exists to do what too much of today’s media doesn’t: step back, look harder, and tell the truth of a story from fresh angles. It’s not about outrage or easy narratives—it’s about making sense of the world by asking better questions and refusing to accept the stale frames that dominate politics, culture, and economics. Whether the subject is local music venues, municipal planning, or national identity, the goal is the same: to uncover what really matters and to show how it connects to our lives here and now. Finding new ways to look at issues isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s essential. Old ways of thinking created the messes we’re in. If we want better futures—for music, for communities, for Canada—we need sharper tools, braver conversations, and perspectives that cut through noise to the signal. That’s what The Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

The good life is a life of modest pleasure, friendship, freedom from fear, and peace of mind.

Watching Adam over the years, I’ve come to think he belongs to a philosophy that doesn’t have a name.

So I’m going to give it one.

Enoughism.

I can’t tell you that I know Adam Baldwin any better than anyone in the audience. He’s an open person, and he shares a lot of himself through his music and his songs. I have had occasion to spend some time with him, in the good times and in the hard times too, and it’s always joyful. I feel a certain kinship with Adam.

We both grew up along those lakes, outside the city that kind of separate things. You cross over them at the Inn On The Lake if you’re coming from or going to the airport. But they run across the whole of the province, and they’re kind of a dividing line culturally. In between the country, rural, urban, and suburban, but none of those things. It’s kind of a netherworld that hangs in between, and it makes for an interesting life for kids. We both grabbed onto the same threads in the Narnian wardrobe of it all: electric guitar, motorcycles, a little bit of curiosity and adventure… and run it all through a real life Dunning-Kruger effect pedal.

I feel like Adam also suffers from the same affliction as I did growing up in that in-between world: kind of longing to be with the other people, to connect with them, to communicate, to share. That’s the mindset that takes you beyond just playing the guitar or owning a motorcycle and really wanting to perform, to be on a stage in a band, because there’s no other way I know of to connect and be with more people on a regular basis.

I know he loves it because I really came to spend time with him at an incredible point in his life. Most young men, I think, spend their 20s pretty much inside their own minds, and then, sometimes, something beautiful, something amazing happens: a wonderful woman and a baby. It’s a kind of ancient magic, of course, but now, with all our knowledge and our technology and our medicine, it’s more rare. I just don’t think there’s anything else in the world that can bring a young man into bloom like that. It happened at a pivotal point in his life, and I watched him as he started to think outside himself more and more. I watched him as he got actively informed and interested in family, in Nova Scotia, in politics, in improving himself, and in being the kind of person that anyone would imagine a good father would be. It was so impressive to watch him do that.

I love his music, and his charm is a match for any man, but it’s his capacity for effort, to grow and continue to grow, that really makes him a match for the world.

I’ve been lucky enough to be around successful musicians all my life. When I was a little kid in Waverley, the big kids had a band called April Wine. It’s hard to explain how much I admired and was inspired by Jimmy and Myles and the guys. Though I was really just a barefoot kid at the canteen, they sure left a big impression on me. On more than one occasion, still in adult life, it’s Jim Henman I would most like to talk to most with a family problem, concern, or decision.

As I got older, I was lucky enough to have a little band of my own. That put me in the orbit of the guys in The Tragically Hip and Blue Rodeo and Skydiggers and Barenaked Ladies, Billy Bragg, and dozens of others, musicians of a certain type. And Adam came along a musical generation later. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest to see him fall in with the same folks. In some ways, whatever people’s imagining of rock and roll is, this is the most NERF crowd of boys you’re ever going to meet. We all shared that kind of longing to be with the other people, to connect and communicate, that Adam was born into in Nova Scotia. The best of those musicians practise a religion, a creed, a philosophy that I would describe as Enoughism.

I think Adam Baldwin is a case study in living the good life through the practice of Enoughism.

I’ll say it defines the good life as a life of modest pleasure, friendship, freedom from fear, and peace of mind. Once you notice it, though, you can spot it in lots of your favourite musicians, from the Beatles to Tom Petty to Noah Kahan. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and The Band obviously. It’s definitely a denomination of the secret society of music.

Maybe the whole “enoughest” philosophy comes from the music itself: that stripped-down rock and roll, the smell of the tube amplifiers, the honest and open songs. Modern pop music that pulls pages from diaries may seem open and vulnerable, but it’s a pose. Adam’s music is more writerly. It’s more painterly, with pictures of characters and places and sometimes sickening situations that let us live lifetimes through music.

It differs from Epicureanism, the philosophy founded by the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus. It is often understood as: eat, drink, indulge, and enjoy luxury. That is closer to the modern meaning of “epicurean,” as in someone who loves fine food. The now-popular Stoicism is different too, in an interesting way. Stoicism asks, “How can I remain strong and virtuous regardless of what happens?” The Enoughist asks, “How can I arrange my life so that fewer needless disturbances happen in the first place?”

For sure, it’s about pleasure. But its central idea is not wild pleasure. It is enoughness.

I see Adam as more of a rock n roll Wendell Berry than a Buddhist about all this. Buddhism tends to see craving, attachment and the unstable nature of things as the root of suffering. Its answer is detachment, disciplined awareness, compassion, and eventually liberation from the cycle of craving itself.

Adam’s Enoughism does not ask you to withdraw from ordinary earthly goods. It asks you to distinguish the goods that truly satisfy from the desires that agitate and enslave us. Friendship, shelter, food, conversation, bodily ease, freedom from fear. These are not illusions to transcend. They are the substance of a good human life.

That may explain why Wendell Berry feels closer to Adam in my mind.

Berry is profoundly attached. To land. To marriage. To neighbours. To work. To memory. To a particular place and its obligations. His answer to suffering is not chiefly to release one’s hold on the world, but to belong to it properly.

A Berry-like Enoughist might say:

The problem is not that we love the world too much. It is that we often love it badly, abstractly, greedily, and without fidelity.

That is quite different from the version of Buddhism commonly encountered in Halifax cultural circles, where the emphasis can seem to be on non-attachment, inward calm, personal consciousness and watching one’s thoughts pass away. Berry is less interested in observing the river than in asking who poisoned it, who owns the banks, whether the farm upstream can survive, and what duties fall upon the people who live there.

Look, I’m just making all this up, but what I’m trying to share is that Adam holds this creed that I’ve seen in the best of the best rock musicians I’ve known from April Wine on. I know he loves his family, his home, playing music for the folks, and riding on a motorcycle to any happy place where people gather. And I think there’s value in stopping here for a minute and noticing it all and how it works, because I think it is right at the top dead centre of the good life

It’s easy to imagine the rock-and-roll lifestyle as hedonistic or out of control, but in my experience, there’s another path, there’s another way to do it. The cool thing about Adam is that he rides that road consciously, intentionally, and with pride. I think there’s a test for deciding what to do. I used to think of it as a kind of simple family test: Would my mum be okay with me doing this? Does it seem right to do this when my wife and family are waiting for me at home? Or, “What if everyone did this?” But there’s a deeper way to define the test, and in more than one conversation Adam really laid this out for me as a pretty clear choosing rule: Will this pleasure make my life more peaceful, or will it create a new appetite, dependency, cost, or anxiety?

A defining feature or trait that comes out of this ethos or philosophy is easiness. I’ve seen it again and again in the best musicians, but in none more so than Adam. It can come across as humble or self-effacing, sometimes to a fault.

I remember when we were kids, Chris Murphy and I were travelling in music, and we were starting to get requests for autographs and such. Chris would admonish the people asking for his autograph and say, “You don’t need my autograph. I should get your autograph. You’re just as good as anybody...” And he would embarrass and be embarrassed. After a point, I just said, “Look, man, they just want your autograph. It’s the easier thing,” and he kind of fell into it. But of course, I think he still dutifully acts embarrassed while he’s doing it.

Adam has that idea too. I know thousands put him up on a pedestal for his art and his music, but he prostrates himself before his audience. He’s a rock star, always on bended knee and always working in service of his audience, knowing that he has this humble set of tools, and time-limited opportunity with which to entertain them. He takes that vocation so seriously. These are humbling times for rock musicians. Like all the best, he is grateful and appreciative, and it shows.

I just wanted to write this to say that, after a dozen or so years, I’m grateful and appreciative of Adam too, and wish him the very best on his birthday. Rather than a present, my birthday wish for him is that he goes the whole summer and needs for nothing. That’s enough I’m sure.

Hey, that reminds me… I’m hungry… for some Flying Burrito Brothers… Glasgow style.

The Bee exists to do what too much of today’s media doesn’t: step back, look harder, and tell the truth of a story from fresh angles. It’s not about outrage or easy narratives—it’s about making sense of the world by asking better questions and refusing to accept the stale frames that dominate politics, culture, and economics. Whether the subject is local music venues, municipal planning, or national identity, the goal is the same: to uncover what really matters and to show how it connects to our lives here and now. Finding new ways to look at issues isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s essential. Old ways of thinking created the messes we’re in. If we want better futures—for music, for communities, for Canada—we need sharper tools, braver conversations, and perspectives that cut through noise to the signal. That’s what The Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Yes, you have one councillor.

But you also have fifteen un-councillors.

They are not bad people. They simply do not share your intimate knowledge of your street, your neighbourhood, your lake, your road, your village, or your local problem. They represent other places, other priorities, and other constituents.

Then there is the nearly 5,000-person municipal government behind them.

That government is not designed to make your neighbourhood more distinctive. It is designed to fit your neighbourhood into a regional system of policies, procedures, standards, forms, and processes.

Your councillor may understand what makes your community unusual.

The rest of the machine is built to make it less unusual.

Whether you live in Sheet Harbour, Hubbards, Meaghers Grant, or the Hydrostone, you have, more or less, one councillor.

You may spend months talking to that councillor. You may explain the history of your community, its hopes and habits, the peculiar shape of its streets, and the thousand fiddly problems that make one neighbourhood different from another.

Your councillor may listen carefully. They may understand completely. They may even agree with you.

Then the issue goes to council, and all that local knowledge becomes one vote.

Your community’s representative is one councillor among sixteen. On any deeply local question, that councillor must persuade fifteen other councillors, and perhaps the mayor, who represent other places, face other pressures, and have reasons, good and bad, not to care very much about the peculiar problem on your street.

That is the first part of the equation.

Behind council stands a large municipal bureaucracy with an institutional preference for consistency. It does not want sixteen answers to sixteen different local problems. It wants a policy, a procedure, a standard, a form, and a solution that can be applied everywhere.

That is the second part.

This instinct can make sense at higher levels of government.

The federal government can decide which side of the road Canadians drive on. The province can decide where beer may be sold. In those cases, uniformity is often the point.

Local government is different.

The difference is right there in the title.

Its work is local.

Local government deals with the small, irregular, intensely particular things that shape daily life. A dangerous intersection. A troublesome ditch. A beloved view. A corner store. A forest path. A lake. A bus stop. A neighbourhood tradition. A stretch of highway that works one way in February and another way in July.

These matters resist standardization because the places themselves are not standard.

Meaghers Grant is not Hubbards. Hubbards is not Sheet Harbour. Sheet Harbour is not the Hydrostone. They differ in geography, history, economy, density, culture, transportation, infrastructure, and way of life.

Yet Halifax has built an immense big-box municipal government and asked it to govern all of these places through substantially the same machinery.

The municipality stretches from the dense urban streets of Halifax to rural communities, forests, lakes, farms, fishing villages, and long reaches of coastline. Places separated by hundreds of kilometres, and by almost every meaningful feature of daily life, are pushed through one set of policies, procedures, systems, and political institutions.

READ ABOUT “HOW WE GOT AMALGAMATED” HERE.

Some systems cannot be repaired by finding better people to operate them. Their governing assumptions must be reconsidered.

This is not merely a problem of leadership.

It is a problem of arithmetic and design.

You can blame your councillor. You can wish for a better mayor. You can demand that the provincial government intervene, or demand that it stay out.

But no sufficiently gifted politician can make the wrong structure consistently produce the right result.

The present system was created during the great North American enthusiasm for municipal amalgamation in the 1990s. It promised efficiency, coordination, reduced duplication, and lower costs.

What it produced was distance.

Local knowledge was diluted. Responsibility became harder to locate. Communities gained access to a larger government but lost meaningful authority over smaller things.

The equation is simple:

One local councillor
plus fifteen councillors from other places
plus one region-wide mayor
plus a large central bureaucracy
does not equal local government.

It equals regional administration.

That is why people feel helpless.

They feel it on their street. They feel it in their neighbourhood. They feel it in Sheet Harbour, Hubbards, Meaghers Grant, and Halifax. They can speak, organize, attend meetings, write letters, and make their case. But they sense that the machinery was not designed to recognize distinctions.

It was designed to eliminate them.

Every local question is gradually translated into a regional policy question. Every exception becomes a threat to consistency. Every unusual circumstance becomes an administrative inconvenience. Every community is told, sooner or later, that allowing it to do something differently would create a precedent.

But difference is not a defect in local government.

Difference is the reason local government exists.

The big-box solution did not work.

That is the problem.

How can we save local politics from regional administration?

One thing I’ve noticed lately is how much of our concerns about AI and the framing of those concerns could more rightly be applied to the failed systems and big-box institutions that make up our government.

People in Sheet Harbour, Hubbards, Meaghers Grant, and the Hydrostone still possess political concerns, attachments, knowledge, and ambitions. But those things are passed upward into a structure that translates them into process and procedures. The local political life of the community becomes an administrative file.

You have one councillor, but even that councillor does not quite possess the power to practise local politics. They operate inside a regional administrative constitution that has already decided what kind of questions may be asked, at what scale, and through which procedures.

The fifteen un-councillors are not merely fifteen people who do not care about your neighbourhood. They are part of a structure that turns place into abstraction. Your particular road, lake, village, woodlot, or neighbourhood becomes a specimen in a regional category:

• a transportation issue

• a service standard

• a land-use designation

• a maintenance request

• a precedent risk

• a budget line

The lived place disappears into its administrative description.

In Marxist and critical-theory language, a fetish is not merely an object someone is obsessed with. It is something created by human beings that comes to appear independent, natural, and more powerful than its creators.

HRM itself can be understood as a political fetish.

People created amalgamation. People drew the boundary. People designed the council. People constructed the bureaucracy and wrote the procedures. Yet the resulting system is now spoken of as though it were a natural fact:

“This is one municipality.”

“We need consistency across the region.”

“We cannot make an exception.”

“That would create a precedent.”

“The policy must apply equally everywhere.”

The machine created by people begins issuing commands back to them. A paper boundary from 1996 becomes more politically real than the communities, watersheds, roads, forests, villages, and neighbourhoods that preceded it.

What do we do?

Rip It Up and Start Again: Sex, Laws & Rock ’n Roll

Rebellion is not merely opposition, complaint, or destruction. It can be the act through which people begin forming a better political order. You reject an arrangement because you are trying to recover the capacity to make another one.

Applied to Halifax:

The argument against amalgamation should not be, “Leave us alone.” “Down with amalgamation.” “Fire the council.”

It should be, “Let us govern locally.”

I think the answer, here at the beginning, is just saying those four words.

Say it to yourself.

Say it to your neighbour.

Say it to your councillor.

Say it to any level of government person you come in contact with.

It’s a long game, but it starts with those four words.

The cosmopolitan case for strong local government

Why localism is not parochialism, provincialism or a fear of the world

I have lived and worked with a deeply cosmopolitan outlook. My education, business, travel, and creative life have brought me into contact with people, institutions, and ideas from many different countries and cultures. I am comfortable in large cities, international rooms, and complex systems.

But that experience has not made me less interested in the local. It has made me more interested in it.

The more of the world I have seen, the more clearly I understand that strong places are built from the ground up. Real diversity comes from communities with enough confidence and authority to remain distinct, not from large systems that make everywhere operate the same way.

Cosmopolitanism does not require sameness. It requires confidence that different places can govern themselves while cooperating with others.

Powerful local government lets communities remain distinct without becoming isolated. It protects variety, deepens responsibility, and gives people real power over the places they know best. A healthy region should be a federation of strong communities, not one large system flattening them into administrative uniformity.

Halifax can’t see the forest for the trees

Only about four per cent of Halifax Regional Municipality lies within its continuous urbanized area.

The other 96 per cent is something else: forest, lake, river, wetland, field, farm, barrens, beach, village, road, woodlot, and scattered settlement.

Not all of it is wilderness. Not all of it should be. But almost all of the municipality is physically something other than city.

Halifax is not a city with a large rural fringe.

It is a vast rural, forested, and watery municipality with a city occupying about four per cent of its land.

That is not scenery around Halifax.

That is Halifax.

The forests, lakes, rivers, barrens, wetlands, coves, farms, and coastal communities are not empty spaces awaiting an urban purpose. They are the physical reality of most of the municipality. They shape where people live, how they travel, what they do for work, how they spend their weekends, and what they imagine the good life to be.

For many people in Halifax County, the good life does not begin with a condo, a bike lane, or a faster commute downtown.

It begins with an environment.

A view. A sense of quiet and peace. A lake within walking distance. A place to fish. A trail used by generations. A walk to the store. A small road under a canopy of trees. Room for a garden, a workshop, a boat, a few chickens, or a pile of firewood. A street, village, or community means something different than a municipality, and it needs a different kind of government. It needs a local government. The freedom to know the land around your home and to shape a life along with your neighbours that belongs to that particular place.

This is part of the identity of Halifax County and Nova Scotia itself. We live in and among the forest. We swim in its lakes, follow its rivers, heat our homes with its wood, hunt and hike through it, and build communities within it.

Yet the municipality continues to understand itself primarily as a city.

Even its forest policy is called an Urban Forest Management Plan. Its focus is naturally drawn toward street trees, urban canopy, parkland, development standards, and neighbourhood planting. These are useful things, but they reveal the governing point of view.

The forest is understood as an amenity of the city.

The city is not understood as one human settlement within a much larger forest ecosystem.

The problem is not simply that Halifax needs a larger environmental department or a few more studies.

The problem is that the municipality has never fully developed the institutional imagination required to govern a forest, watershed, and coastal region.

A city government asks how to protect trees during development.

A forest municipality asks where settlement belongs within a living landscape.

A city government asks how much parkland a subdivision requires.

A forest municipality asks how people, roads, homes, lakes, wildlife, forestry, recreation, and local enterprise can inhabit the same land over generations.

A city government sees rural land as the space beyond the serviced boundary.

A forest municipality sees the urban core as one unusually dense settlement inside a much larger natural and human system.

This change in perspective would alter almost everything.

It would change planning. It would change taxation. It would change road maintenance, fire protection, watershed management, recreation, forestry policy, community development, and the way Halifax understands economic opportunity outside the urban core.

It might even change the language.

We would stop describing forests and lakes as “green space”, as though they were decorative gaps between the important parts.

We would stop treating rural communities as distant service problems.

We would stop assuming that every part of the municipality is travelling, however slowly, toward some more urban form.

Halifax is not a city with a forest.

It is a forest with a city in it.

Until the government can see that, it will continue to miss the municipality for the map and the forest for the trees.

RELATED:

The Bee exists to do what too much of today’s media doesn’t: step back, look harder, and tell the truth of a story from fresh angles. It’s not about outrage or easy narratives—it’s about making sense of the world by asking better questions and refusing to accept the stale frames that dominate politics, culture, and economics. Whether the subject is local music venues, municipal planning, or national identity, the goal is the same: to uncover what really matters and to show how it connects to our lives here and now. Finding new ways to look at issues isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s essential. Old ways of thinking created the messes we’re in. If we want better futures—for music, for communities, for Canada—we need sharper tools, braver conversations, and perspectives that cut through noise to the signal. That’s what The Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Can we have an effective left in Nova Scotia without a strong industrial base?

Watching the new left fight and fret about the progressive conservative plan to rebuild some sort of smoke-stack-less industrial base in Nova Scotia is a difficult do.

A left-wing party can win seats without a strong industrial base. It can assemble a coalition of public-sector workers, white collar unions, renters, students, professionals, social-service organizations and people who depend on government programs.

But that coalition will struggle to create a durable social democracy. It can argue about distributing income. It cannot easily generate the income that must be distributed. It can argue about saving the environment, but it cannot imagine where the capital will come from to prevent its slow decline.

That is the bind Nova Scotia’s left now faces.

The historic Nova Scotian left did not arise principally from university departments, publicly pensioned seniors, or non-profit organizations surviving on government grants. It arose from mines, steel mills, railways, docks, shipyards, fishing communities and producer co-operatives. When we sang “There’s power in a union,” it was literally true. Unions organised the nation’s fundamental source of productive power — labour. During the Cape Breton coal struggles of the 1920s, the United Mine Workers represented roughly 12,000 Nova Scotia miners. Those struggles helped establish labour rights later copied elsewhere in Canada.

Without that productive foundation, the left tends to become a party of public administration rather than political economy.

Its principal constituents are employed by the state, funded by the state, regulated by the state or seeking additional services from the state. Its natural answer to nearly every problem becomes another program, office, subsidy, consultation or regulatory protection.

Some of those things are necessary. But the politics becomes one-sided. It is very good at discussing who should receive wealth and increasingly uncomfortable discussing who will create it.

The province can appear prosperous because Halifax is growing, property values are rising, governments are spending and federal money is arriving. But much of that activity circulates money already earned or transferred. It does not necessarily create a larger export-earning base.

A left built on that economy becomes fiscally dependent on continued population growth, federal transfers, rising property values and taxes on consumption or even ownership. It may be compassionate, but it is not economically sovereign.

Nova Scotia can have a vocal left without a strong industrial base. It can have a humane left. It might occasionally elect a left government. But it cannot have a confident, durable and transformative left unless it develops a productive economy beneath it.

And in this contradiction, Nova Scotia’s New Left, the left far outside the bounds of the traditional and the existing NDP, must, as they protest and posture and pontificate, face a great compromise to take Nova Scotia back to its future.

The left cannot live forever by redistributing the proceeds of somebody else’s economy. Its historic task was never merely to divide wealth more fairly. It was to organize productive labour so that ordinary people helped create the wealth, shared in it and possessed some power over what happened next.

A People’s History of “There Is Power in a Union”

Songs do not always respect the borders drawn around them.

In 1862, George F. Root wrote The Battle Cry of Freedom as a rallying song for the Union Army. Its chorus declared “The Union forever,” meaning the United States. Confederate songwriters promptly took the melody and supplied their own words. Before recorded music, a good tune was common machinery.

In 1899, Lewis Edgar Jones wrote the gospel hymn There Is Power in the Blood, heard here in its later country-church form from the Hee Haw Gospel Quartet. Fourteen years later, Joe Hill borrowed its melody and question-and-answer structure. He replaced salvation through Christ’s blood with freedom through workers standing together. A hymn people already knew became an Industrial Workers of the World recruiting song. Hill was executed in Utah in 1915. His song was sung at his funeral.

Billy Bragg completed the braid in 1986. After singing in support of Britain’s defeated miners, he wrote a new There Is Power in a Union. He took Joe Hill’s title, but set it to Root’s Civil War melody, playing off the phrase “there is power in a union”.

Across a century, the music moved from church, to battlefield, to picket line. The idea remained: power becomes real when people bind themselves to a common purpose.

But the union song contained a harder fact. Miners, steelworkers, dockers and railway workers did not merely believe they had power. Their hands rested on the productive machinery of society. Organised together, they could stop it. They were part of a labour workforce that productively, increasingly productively, produced the trade goods of the nation

That is the missing verse in much modern left politics. Solidarity can survive without industry. Power has a harder time.

The Bee exists to do what too much of today’s media doesn’t: step back, look harder, and tell the truth of a story from fresh angles. It’s not about outrage or easy narratives—it’s about making sense of the world by asking better questions and refusing to accept the stale frames that dominate politics, culture, and economics. Whether the subject is local music venues, municipal planning, or national identity, the goal is the same: to uncover what really matters and to show how it connects to our lives here and now. Finding new ways to look at issues isn’t just a stylistic choice; it’s essential. Old ways of thinking created the messes we’re in. If we want better futures—for music, for communities, for Canada—we need sharper tools, braver conversations, and perspectives that cut through noise to the signal. That’s what The Bee is for.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now