[BRIEF NOTE] Two solitudes, yet again

A non-trivial amount of noise has been made in English Canada about the disappearance of the iconic theme song The Hockey Theme from the CBC's NHL-licensed Hockey Night in Canada program and its transfer to the private CTV television network. What has gotten much less attention in English Canada, as Peter Cheney wrote in Wednesday's The Globe and Mail ("Iconic song to return to French Canada"), is that Francophone viewers will get to hear The Hockey Theme when they're watching official NHL-licensed French-language hockey broadcasts for the first time in four years.

Dominique Perazzino's barbershop on Montreal's Rue Masson is a shrine to the sport of hockey, Quebec-style: the floor is painted like a rink, the talk is about the latest game, and the walls are lined with portraits of the Montreal Canadiens pantheon - Jean Beliveau, Saku Koivu and, of course, "Rocket" Richard.

Yesterday, Mr. Perazzino got some of the best news he's heard since Mr. Koivu's cancer went into remission: The Hockey Night in Canada theme song will play again on French-language hockey telecasts.

"We welcome it back," he said, taking a break between haircuts. "We all grew up with it, and it's in our hearts."

The return of the song to the airwaves of French Canada is the latest wrinkle in a long, twisted battle that has transferred the theme music from the CBC, which has used it on Hockey Night in Canada since 1968, to the rival CTV network. The deal, which closed on Monday, means that the tune is now available to Montreal-based RDS, a CTV affiliate some call "the French TSN."

For the past four years, the theme has been off the air for French-language hockey broadcasts. CBC had the rights to use the music, but RDS had the NHL broadcasting licence. Bottom line: anglophone viewers heard the famous "dunt-da-DUNT-da-dunt" chords every Saturday night, and francophone viewers didn't.

In the view of many, the loss of the song to French Canada created two hockey solitudes - and its return is hailed as a small victory for the forces of national unity. "We all need to be on the same page," says Mario Brisebois, a sports media reporter for Le Journal de Montréal. "Hockey without that song is like Christmas without Bing Crosby."

Gerry Frappier, president and general manager of RDS, says adding the music to his company's hockey coverage will "complete the experience" for French-speaking fans. "This song is a piece of history," he said. "It's the sound of hockey. People grew up hearing it, and it reaches deep into their experience. Putting it on our show will be magic."

[BRIEF NOTE] An Albertan disadvantage

From the Calgary Herald:

Alberta found itself in the world's crosshairs Wednesday over its economic and environmental policies after the OECD advised the province to sock away more of its energy wealth and slash its carbon footprint.

But the new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was panned in part by Alberta Finance Minister Iris Evans, who said it would be irresponsible for the province to save its oil and gas riches if it meant ignoring pressing infrastructure needs.

The OECD's biennial report card on the Canadian economy said inflation and a soaring loonie could be corralled if Alberta and Ottawa established a savings fund -- similar to Norway's $400-billion account -- to collect the windfall from soaring oil prices and then invest those funds in foreign currencies.

The savings fund would cushion against a fall in energy prices or the future depletion of the resources, and help prevent so-called Dutch disease -- the hollowing out of the country's manufacturing sector -- particularly in Central Canada.

The report was especially critical of the Alberta government's lack of overall spending restraint and absence of rules for payments into and spending withdrawals from its $16.4-billion Heritage Fund.

"Fiscal policy in Alberta should be more prudent," the report said, noting other countries have "shown much more restraint and foresight in managing their resource revenues to mitigate boom and bust cycles."

I wrote back in January about Norway's prudence in establishing a well-regulated sovereign wealth fund that holds nearly twenty-five times as much money as Alberta's Heritage Fund. As beneficial to Alberta's future as this switch might be, as outlined in Mark Anielski's 2002 op-ed in the Edmonton Journal, the Albertan government has chosen to make this objective difficult to achieve by charging some of the lowest royalties in the world on oil production in Alberta, even--as a recent panel argued--failing to collect on some of the royalties. This royalty policy, in turn, is part of an effort to attract international oil companies to Alberta's tar sands as a consequence of the choice of the small- and large-c Conservative government not to create a provincial oil company under local control--a 2007 proposal to increase royalties was met with hostility from the companies in question, with hints on their part of possible disinvestment. Similarly, establishing a strictly regulated fund that provincial governments couldn't raid at will, as in Norway, is a non-starter in an Alberta where successive governments have chosen to use the oil to subsidize consumption in the short term and government operations in a province that chose not to have a provincial sales tax. For all these reasons, then, and despite a long history of criticism in Alberta of Albertan policy in this regard, the Norway model doesn't seem likely to be imitated, regardless the consequences of this choice for Alberta and all of Canada.

[BRIEF NOTE] Conservation

rollobay23
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The spit of land in the middle of the picture--land, only in low tide, actually--once hosted a dense population of mussels, well-suited for the relatively warm, sheltered, and nutrient-rich waters of Rollo Bay. At one point in the mid-1990s, a group of people found the spit and, in the space of the month, destroyed the mussel population.

Experiences like that make me think that high fuel prices, already cause for fishers' protests in Spain and Ireland and Tasmania and Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, might be a good thing for the fish and crustaceans and other edible marine life out there.