The embedding worked but I suggest you use the  480x385 size instead.

It's a little wider than the column, but more visible

 what happened to his NOSE man?

Hi Geo - I recognized the legislature and in the background and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery across the street.  And of course you are right about who's in the driver's seat in this province and has been for fifty years. 

New Brunswickers are wimps. They accept the utter crap they read in their controlled news. They vote Liberal or Conservative knowing both are owned. They're getting ripped off for a hugely expensive hockey arena - which will benefit only the billionaire owner of the hockety team. Meanwhile basic needs are ignored.

They have allowed the Irvings to effectively take control of the public schools - and do real damage to them as well as sucking out education money for themselves.

And nobody will openly talk about it. It's not just a village mentality that pervades the province. It's fear.

This province is damn close to the world of Orwell.

I have a blog site on NB politics, and on the quality of news service down here. For the first ime in my long experience of writing, I had not had any comments sent in. Nobody in this province is going to post his name on anything controversial.

However, I have been reported too the government, the department of education, probably the Irvings, and have had a phone call from an MLA.

New Brunswickers do not discuss anything serious. They're scared. So they mutter. And they report for Brownie point.

My blog was on standardized testing, how far right wing think tanks are using this to get control of public education, to get their hands on its budget, and to privatize it as much as possible. The local far right think tank is Atlantic Institute of Market Studies - which has the contract of several million dollars for these utterly useless "tests".

The local MLA is a fairly recent ex-MLA who is now chairman of the Moncton region school board. I had earlier asked him to present what I had to say in an e mail to the whole board. He never answered. So I started the blog. Then I got a friendly call from him.

The Atlantic Institute is effectively controlled by the Irving family, which also controls everything else, including the Liberal and Conservative parties of NB. And almost all the news media - so what they want always gets very favourable coverage. (In fact, several members of the school board are employees or business associates of the Irvings.)

I'm quite sure several reports were sent, including some to the Irvings. They don't tolerate disagreement. This isn't a province. It's a fiefdom.

I can never get the blog URL right. But you can google it at "Graeme Decarie Moncton Times"  It should be on the first page that comes up.

graeme

Hi Witch,

Thanks for the suggestion. I think my preference is for the smaller, crisper image; which fits inside the margins. This is more to my liking for symmetry.

Beshpin - okayt. The ex MLA is still very active in the NB Liberal Party, and possibly a candidate again in the fall election. Meanwhile, he is chairman of what is called a District Education Council, really an elected school board - one of that type of election in which few vote, and nbody knows what the issues are. Nor can they ever find out because most of the news media in  New Brunswick are owned and tightly controlled by the Irving family.

As a still active politician, he is still a loyal servant to the Irvings and other corporate heads. (Otherwise, he wouldn't be even considered as a decent coffee chum for either Liberals or Conservatives. The control is very tight, almost impossible for an outsider to understand.)

Corporate leaders, especially the Irving interests are strong supporters of the regional far right, neo-cons Atlantic Institute for Marketing Studies. Under the pretence of making schools accountable, they have pushed for an education system based on competition - and with a large and growing role for private business - for private profit.

Accordingly, they " advised" the government of their desire for standardized testing of students at regular intervals - administered at a cost of several million dollars a year by AIMS. These are taken as tests of the schools' and individual tjeachers' abilities. Then all the schools in the province are publicly ranked for quality on the theory that competition will make the students and teachers better learners and teachers..

This is all nonsense. And the AIMS "research" team, as in most right wing think tanks, is selected for it its preference for private business in all areas of life, and its desire to privatize the public schools.

Those tests have no validity at all as tests of schools or teachers. And I have never even heard of a serious educator who thinks they do anything but damage. As a part of their programme, they sent all parents a questionnaire about their children and school. It was not only unintelligible to most parents, but how many could possibly know whether the teacher is working hard? Or what the teacher's motives are? It was also amateurish. For example, "Is your teacher working hard to raise education standards?" That's not only a question most parents could not answer because they have no such information and, in any case, exactly what do working hard and raising standards mean? For that matter, how many parents even know what a teaching standard is or should be?  - it also makes no sense. If the teacher is working hard but not to raise standards, is the answer yes or no? If the teacher is not working hard but is raising standards - is the answer yes or no? That's the quality of testing churned out by AIMS for several million a year of our education budget.

I wrote a short article about this (which later appeared in longer form in my blog). I argued that some goup in the system must tell the Irvings they cannot have our children for their private profit. I asked him to circulate the note to the DEC. He never replied - though he did get it.

After my blog was reported to him, he called me with a very friendly tone, and assured me I would be invited to speak at a public meeting of the board in September.

There's a catch. There's no way most of the New Brunswick news media will report what I say. Almost all are owned by the Irvings. And the few exceptions are owned by people of the same breed.