A few choice bits that caught my eye over the last little while:
- Those of you who paid attention to New Brunswick politics last summer no doubt remember the debate/debacle over the government’s changes to French Immersion. If you didn’t, the only things you need to know are that the Liberal government introduced an new intensive French program for fifth graders (+10 for good thinking, considering the old Core French model was a total waste of time and the intensive French pilots were successes) and pushed the starting date for early immersion back to third grade (-1,000,000 for bad thinking, since kids learn languages best at an earlier age, not to mention the points lost for the issue’s bad political style). Last week, the government released test scores they said proved that their new program was a success. Unfortunately for the government, these results mean zip-on-a-stick. While nearly every fifth grader in the province took intensive French this year, none of them took the full program the province is rolling out (practically no French language exposure until fifth grade) and the province won’t be testing those students for another four years. What these results prove is that students who take four years of Core French followed by a year of intensive French are 29 times more likely to reach the province’s French comprehension benchmark than students who take five years of Core French alone. Whether results will continue to improve over the next many years remains to be seen and, to be honest, I still expect this issue to come up in the next provincial election.
- The New Democratic Party is still New, after all. Now, this is probably just the process wonk in me, but I’m slightly shaken about how it all fell out. The issue never officially came up for discussion because one-hour time frame for discussing such resolutions expired. This is mainly because much of the hour was used, not discussing the merits of the five resolutions scheduled before the name change, but arguing over piddlely points of order. This raises several important questions about the NDP, including these: why wasn’t more time set aside to discuss such resolutions (a solitary hour over a whole weekend seems rather pointless), was a small, vocal minority of the party really responsible for filibustering away any chance to discuss the issue, and why was the party spending so much time focusing on the style of the resolutions rather than the substance? With the exception of the Bloc, all the major federal parties (even the Greens) need to take some time to evaluate their identities, what they stand for, what’s important to them. The NDP just missed a golden chance for some very healthy and necessary self-evaluation.
- This story from Nova Scotia is why I bang my head against the wall when I hear people say (Progressive) Conservative governments are good fiscal managers. With possibly the exception of Bernard Lord’s New Brunswick government, I can’t think of a single Conservative government in my lifetime that has left the government’s books better than when they found it. There is a place for Conservatives in the running of a province or country, but let’s not colour them as economic messiahs when the evidence (Mulroney, Harris, and now Hamm and MacDonald) clearly suggests otherwise.
- Later this week, assuming other circumstances don’t get in the way, I’m going to be writing about why we won’t be having a provincial election in New Brunswick this fall. Later on, I’ll talk about federal election rumours. Also, sometime soon I’ll be moving my blog over to the Aquinian website at www.theaq.net. The site looks fantastic, and I’m proud to be part of the paper again this year. Till then, have a moment of Zen.
Advertisement
