Lisa Hrabluk

From the comments I’ve gotten here and through Facebook I’d say Canada’s telecos and cablecos have managed to unite all their customers in one large chorus of………..ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This in a country that once prided itself on excellent phone service. Sadly Bell, Aliant and Rogers can’t seem to get it together in the wireless world.

Interesting side note. Earlier this week I was sitting in on an MBA class at the University of New Brunswick Saint John campus (UNBSJ), which featured a discussion about the rise of NBTel as an innovative company in the 1990s only to be blasted into mediocrity when it was subsumed by that telecommunications deathstar that is Bell Canada around the turn of this century.

The class has a high percentage of international students and one South American student offered the opinion that he was disappointed and surprised when he arrived in Canada for school to discover that he had to sign a multi-year contract with Aliant for wireless phone service. In his country, the regulator won’t allow multi-year contracts.

His point was, with wireless phone technology changing every few months, phone users don’t want to be stuck with the same phone for two or three years – it would be obsolete a few times over before the contract was expired.

Tell me about it.

On my last trip to Toronto, I lost my cell phone while digging through a fabulous warehouse sale. Trust me, for the clothes I got and at 70 per cent off or more, I didn’t mind sacrificing the phone!

Anyway, I hadn’t had my plan long enough to qualify for an upgrade, but Michael did qualify for an upgrade. So off to mall we traipsed. Michael got his new phone – lovely touch screen – but it, of course, came with a three-year contract. I inherited his well-used flip phone, circa 2006.

Now I know why we call South America a developing region; it’s developing modern wireless service a hell of a lot faster than us!

Shawn Graham deserves a new title: fanboy-in-chief.

The provincial Throne Speech was delayed Tuesday afternoon because the Premier and an assortment of his self-titled brain trust were down in Moncton with 4,000 other people for a noon hour presentation by former US president Bill Clinton, hosted by former NB premier and Canadian Ambassador to the US Frank McKenna.

Moncton is about a 90-minute drive from Fredericton, the supposed seat of power, but as the premier and his cadre illustrated in their morning pilgrimege down the TransCanada, the real power in the province on Tuesday was sitting in a pair of overstuffed green club chairs, relaxin’ and regalin’ a crowd of 4,000 people in an old hockey arena on the outskirts of town.

Two political stars soaking up the adoration of their fans.

And why shouldn’t they? McKenna and Clinton are two highly charismatic and fascinating public figures.

People, including Graham, wanted to be there to listen to the insight and wit Clinton and his host brought to their interpretation of the major political and economic issues of day.

It was a level of rhetoric not normally heard in this province and it was a stark contrast to the speech delivered a few hours later in the Legislative Assembly.

Allow me to illustrate the contrasting, ah, speaking styles.

Here is Bill Clinton talking about fixing the economy on The View with Whoopi Goldberg. (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence)

Clinton on The View

Reasonable and engaged with the live studio audience whilst chatting with the ladies.

Here is the once-effusive Shawn Graham talking to reporters at the Throne Speech media conference:

Media conference

Getting……………..Very…………..Sleepy…………………

Sheesh.

Okay, I promised myself I’d keep the snark to a minimum but I’ve just got to get this off my chest and into cyberspace.

In our ongoing quest to lower our communications bill, Michael (that would be my husband Mike Hawkins, whose cooking talents are on display over at www.foodfunk.ca) figured out if we changed our Aliant business account into a residential account and then bundled that with our cell phones, we would save money.

Fabulous.

And then he called Aliant. A quite delightful person on the other end of the line then explained to him that in exchange for helping us – their valued customers – save some money, they would have to do the following:

1. Change our phone number.

Our old number that we have given out to God knows how many people over the past decade is registered for use as a business account. It would not be going with us in the move to residential services.

2. Not tell anyone that our number had changed.

Aliant business services and Aliant residential services do not talk to each other. They may smile occasionally as they pass each other in the hall, but these two branches of my communications provider do not and will not communicate with each other.

As the nice voice in the call centre told me when I called back to clarify some things, Aliant would not put an automated message on our number to inform people our number had changed because we were switching from business services to residential services. Instead our number has just disappeared – poof – into the telecommunications ether. Anyone calling us at our old number will be told: “The number you have reached is not in service. Please check the number and dial again.”

3. The change is immediate.

Well, at least Aliant delivers prompt service.

One small, final observation. I was connected to the residential services call centre to confirm the listing in the directory. Michael and I have different last names and I wanted it listed for both of us, so people could find either of us when they followed the above instruction and “checked the number.”

To add a second directory listing for the same phone number costs $1.49 or something to that effect – a month. Now, it’s a small fee – less than $20/year, but why do I have to pay a monthly fee to have my name and Michael’s listed in the directory? Is my name taking up that much space in Bell Canada’s digital archives? Am I eating up megabytes on www.canada411.com?

Considering the variety of living arrangements out there – married women who retain their family name, common law couples, blended families, gay and lesbian couples and platonic room mates – I’d expect a significant portion of Canadians with phone numbers have more than one last name using that number.

Why not waive the fee as a nice piece of customer service? Or at the very least, charge it once rather than add it to my monthly bill.

Not sure if the fault for all this lies with Aliant or with some antiquated CRTC regulation.

Either way, the Canadian communications dinosaur continues to lumber along…

Lots of stuff swirling around in my mind after a fantastic couple of days in St. Andrews at 21inc.’s Ideas Festival. Got home Friday afternoon and walked into a flurry of redecorating. We’ve been painting my home office – yea! – and so my office has temporarily been relocated to the kitchen table. Great for snack access, less so for thinking about stuff.

And of course, our office assistant has been deeply involved in this project, to mixed results.

We have been taxpayers for too long; it is time for us to become citizens again.

That was the lede in a column I wrote in February 2004 as I and John McLaughlin, president of the University of New Brunswick, went chasing after an idea; that to fix our broken public institutions – government, media and universities – we needed to empower the crowd.

Bottom up leadership rather than top down.

Our public institutions didn’t get it, but people did. They craved authenticity and failing to get it from their local governments, newspapers and radio and TV news, so went looking for it somewhere else.

It is a social and cultural movement and it is far more powerful and sustainable than anything happening right now in the political sphere.

Or at least that was true until last night.

Barack Obama is the new face from the crowd.

As Thomas Friedman wrote in his column today in the New York Times:

Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.

It is hardly surprising that people have used religious metaphors and imagery to describe him; faith and belief were the cornerstones of his campaign.

Faith in ourselves and belief in the greater good of our society.

Today I am envious that Americans have found what we in Canada are still searching for – a leader who can articulate the wisdom of the crowd.

Will we find leaders who inspire us, as Obama has inspired a generation of Americans?

Yes, I believe we can.

Newsweek has a great story about Michelle Obama’s impact on the presidential race and in particular the way she presents herself.

Usually, the lives of black women go largely unexamined. The prevailing theory seems to be that we’re all hot-tempered single mothers who can’t keep a man and, according to CNN’s “Black in America,” documentary, those of us who aren’t street-walking crack addicts are on the verge of dying from AIDS. As writer Rebecca Walker put it on her Facebook page: “CNN should call me next time they really want to show diversity and meet real black women that nobody seems to talk about.”

The win, when it comes, won’t be of biblical proportions.

The ideological sea that divides America isn’t going to part Tuesday night because, despite the fervency of his followers’ belief, Barack Obama is no saviour.

If we are to draw a Biblical analogy, he has more in common with John the Baptist, who wandered alone to prepare the path, and with St. Peter, the first apostle and upon whom a new church was built.

Barack Obama: part bricklayer, part prophesy-offering story-teller.

Ian Brown in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, wrote a lovely feature story about Obama’s appeal to people in Washington D.C. Near the end of the piece he interviews a 17-year-old named Tempestt Newton.

For her, Mr. Obama isn’t “The One;” he isn’t “That One,” as Mr. McCain called him during one debate; he is just one of what she hopes will be many.

That’s it. This sentence coalesced my thoughts about this fascinating U.S. election campaign. I want to see Obama win because I do believe he represents change, but not just a change of policy or even of style.

Obama gives me hope that there are others like him, who want to reach beyond the divisions we have in our communities, whether they are class, race, gender or ideology, and begin to build consensus among citizens.

I hope that an Obama presidency attracts people to public office who up until now have stayed away.

However, for that to happen, political parties must be willing to cede ground to other voices in their party, who may not be the first choice of the flacks and hacks.

The federal Liberal party doesn’t seem to understand that – yet. Neither Michael Ignatieff or Bob Rae are true Grits in the mould of great Liberal leaders. Both have been on the national stage for two years and have failed to ignite any sort of following outside of Liberal party ranks and I doubt either ever will. Perhaps they can reengage the base and maybe, in Canada, that will be enough to win.

Hardly an audacious strategy.

Thanks to all my lovely friends across the country who have emailed with their thoughts and suggestions on accessing information online – and for the freelance writing tips.

Here are a few sites I like to visit:

Activate – a weekly compendium of international news, put together by the people behind Flavorpill in NYC.

Bookninja – a fabulous blog out of St. John’s NL that covers all things literary and bookish. One of the most-read literary blogs in North America – proof that some great things are percolating on the fringe.

Everywhere – an online travel magazine with great user-generated content.

Unlimited – an Alberta-based magazine that is a mash-up of business and lifestyle. I picked it up at Indigo a couple of months ago and liked it. Hope it survives.

For those who are torn between online news and the look of a newspaper, with its column inches neatly defined, check out PressDisplay. It gives you access to just about every major and regional paper in the world, allowing you to read stories as they appear in the paper. I can almost smell the ink.

Last June I did a CBC Radio commentary about cancelling my cable and my newspaper subscription. The decision was an easy one, made moments after opening the $100-plus cable bill that forced us to receive a bunch of channels we didn’t want in order to get the ones we did. As soon as the hockey playoffs were over (how very Canadian, I know), we pulled the plug. Being on a bit of a roll, I cancelled my subscription to the Telegraph-Journal, my local paper and the source of my income for eight years.

As I said in the CBC commentary:

My own version of spring cleaning: out with the old media and in with the new.
I don’t need yesterday’s news on my doorstep, when I already read it yesterday on my desktop.

That’s me the consumer talking, but I’m also a writer, so I’m torn as to how any of us are supposed to earn a living in this digital age. All those unpaid bloggers over at Huffington Post can’t be the future, can they?

We are in the midst of a massive migration.
Not of people, but of content.
Information is on the move – away from traditional providers like newspapers, cable companies, music labels, movie theatres and yes, even radio stations, and onto the web, where it can find a much larger audience.
Finding profits, that’s a little more difficult.
In these early days of the digital information age, it is easier to earn a reputation than to earn a living online.

Now it is November and we’re still cable and local paper-free. Michael’s order GameCenter from nhl.com, I’m watching Mad Men off a live stream on ctv.ca and I’m reading way too many American election blogs – mainly because they are always a day or two ahead of conventional media.

Seriously, have my fellow journalists forgotten how to tell a freakin’ story? They’re between a blogger and the campaign plane – watching both so intensely they’re lost all hope of originality. Blah.

Barack Obama told a new story; journalists need to follow his lead. I can’t believe the future of journalism is gawker.com; that’s part of it, but I believe, more than ever, people want context. They want their world explained to them in a homespun kind of way. Rather than political and corporate spin.

I’m still here and I’m still watching, listening and reading.
I, and others like me, still crave the content.
The question is, who’s going to provide it.
I read an interesting study recently that offered a dash of common sense with its analysis: there is only so much information each of us can absorb each day and that going online doesn’t mean we’re getting more information – we’re just getting it from more sources.
That should offers a glimmer of hope for traditional media and entertainment companies – but only for those brave enough to let go of that old business model that has them choose the content and the delivery system for me.
The online world doesn’t work that way.
Old Marshall McLuhan was right – the medium is the message.
All the Internet did was change the delivery.
And that’s changed everything.