I have been reading the news from Saint John and it’s hard not to comment on the brilliant, visionary moves of Premier Shawn Graham and his fantastic team of experts. For years, we lived under the impression that Saint John is a city with unrealized potential. Mr. Graham managed to prove us wrong in just under six months with a barrage of reports. So far, as part of his (oh so ironically named) sustainability agenda, Mr. Graham proposed to build two more nuclear reactors next to the one that is not working properly, championed construction of another oil refinery next to the largest one in Canada, backed construction of an LNG terminal and then, as the icing on this fine industrial cake, proposed to close down a university so that he can use all of the higher education resources on trades necessary to build and operate this massive pollution machine. To actually come up with this stuff in 21s century is a lunacy.

I understand that if you contract a bunch of businessmen to come up with a plan for you to implement, you are going to end up with idiotic proposals like the ones that have been coming out over the past six months or so. What Mr. Graham and his business buddies don’t seem to understand is that they do need the rest of us to agree to it, too. The latest move to abolish UNBSJ is beyond stupid and it more than anything reflects the goals of the business elite in Saint John. The universities have long been complacent about the influence of business and corporate interests on the direction of their programs and the defining of what exactly is the role of a university. That complacency was going to bite them back sooner or later. In Saint John, we now came to a threshold where the idea of a university as the place of knowledge, doubt, reason and imagination is facing down corporate interests that need worker bees, not the doubters.

I have a few questions I want to ask Mr. Graham. I photographed you for your election campaign and I want to know what did you do with the guy who actually seemed to care about the province and education in particular? I would also like to know what are the MLAs for if we had to hire, on taxpayers' dime, a bunch of rich business people to tell us how to go forward? Naive me, I thought that the parliament was the place that set the direction for the executive branch and enacted laws to protect the common good.

I hear that some people in Saint John are protesting on the streets. Good for them. Something tells me that it may not be enough. You know, sometime it feels like it WOULD be fun to bring out torches, tar and feathers and do it the old fashioned way. But, this is 21st century after all.

Croatian word of the day: revolucija: revolution