Because of Air Canada’s new “lean and mean” schedule, it’s no longer possible to leave Boston late in the day to fly to Charlottetown — the last flight out is at 2:20 p.m.

As a result, I’m leaving Dublin this morning at 9:00 a.m. for a day of seemingly endless travelling, including a very special 2-hour layover in the Halifax airport.

Next time I fly I’m going to see if Prince Edward Air’s new Charlottetown to Halifax service can link up with Delta’s Halifax to Boston service; if it prices out about the same, the mere fact of being able to avoid Trudeau (nee Dorval) Airport in Montreal would be worth the additional complications.

Back on the Island tonight at 7:30 p.m. Can’t wait.

Have you ever talked to anyone who’s worked in a call centre? They universally describe their call centre jobs a ones with low pay, high stress, and few prospects. And the latest news about call centre layoffs in Bloomfield, and Montague demonstrates just how secure these jobs are.

Industry types call call centre work “intense.” Take a quote from this story for example:

“Call centres have a high turnover rate, due to the intense nature of the work. The search for employment and rewarding work keeps many working in call centres always looking for new opportunities,” says site administrator Luc Theriault.

And PEI’s wage rate is euphemistically called “competitive,” as in this snip from this HRDC publication:

The provincial government continues to support the development of the call centre industry in P.E.I. This, coupled with a wage rate in P.E.I. which is very competitive, could attract new business and provide a favourable economic climate for existing companies to expand.

And yet call centre jobs are promoted as “IT jobs” and the naive public is led to believe that answering the phone for Reader’s Digest is somehow akin to writing code to guide the Space Shuttle home to earth.

And our tax dollars are given away — $292,000 to Souris, $70,000 in Charlottetown, $1 million in Charlottetown, $490,000 in Wellington, for example — to lure new call centres to the Island.

While some might say that it’s elitist to look askance at any new jobs on Prince Edward Island, surely to continue to invest in these transitory jobs is foolish: let’s invest in high-value, sustainable IT jobs rather than throwing our money away to build more digital sweat shops.

The CBC introduces its first RSS feed. It’s an RSS feed about the CBC, mind you — top story at this moment is “Speaking Points for Robert Rabinovitch at the World Electronic Media Forum, Geneva, Switzerland.” — but it’s a start.

Although I can’t begin to explain (or even understand) the myriad ways in which delegates to the Democratic Convention (who ultimately select their nominee to run for President) are choosen, it is interesting to note that according to this page at CNN, Dean’s delegate count, even after Iowa and New Hampshire, is still the highest, with 133 delegates to Kerry’s 94. Watch that page.

My colleague Sherin and I, along with Sherin’s friend Susan, drove up to Manchester tonight to try and participate in some of the Primary Night fun. We headed for the so-called “Center of New Hampshire,” which is not, despite its name, in the centre of New Hampshire, but is rather the large Holiday Inn convention centre in Manchester where the media is concentrated, and where John Kerry held his Primary Night rally.

We arrived just after 7:00 p.m. (the last polls close at 8:00 p.m.), and wandered around drinking it all in. Media were everywhere — BBC, ABC, Comcast, and CSPAN had studios well in evidence, and there were vast curtained off areas behind which who knows what media deeds were being done.

Eventually we found our way to the Kerry rally, and because of our early arrival I was able to partake of the free vegetables and dip on offer (the only free food of my entire Primary experience). Inside the main ballroom Kerry supporters milled about looking happy and content, and an ever-growing collection of TV crews — I counted 50 tripods by the time we left — pointed at the stage from the back of the room. In the corner a large-screen TV projected the local TV station’s coverage, which resulted in odd parallaxes where a reporter doing a stand-up from the media area would, in turn, be projected on the TV screen in the corner. 3D house of TV horrors.

Next we wandered over to the on-location studios of 96.9 FM Talk, a Boston-area talk-only radio station. Starting at 8:00 p.m., the station’s signature hosts Jay Severin, Margery Eagan and Jim Braude held a special primary-night broadcast. We ambled in and sat down and watched a couple of acts (they are all very talented talk-radio personalities, and it was interesting to see them work as a team). During a break Sherin and Susan went up to the broadcast table and snagged a T-shirt signed by Jay.

By the end of the second act of the radio show, it was clear that Kerry had won the night, and so we headed back to the Kerry rally in the ballroom, which by this time was jam-packed with people. One interesting aspect of all of the events I attended is that there is very strict screening at the door — not for guns, drugs, or alcohol, but rather for hidden signs that might be used to deflect or distract TV coverage from the candidate.

The place was so packed that we lasted only 10 minutes before we had to escape for air.

A little more wandering — including a surprise encounter with Margery Eagan in the hall — and we headed back off into the New Hampshire night.

Over the lunch hour today, I drove up from Dublin to Keene to the house of Nat Stout, who is a colleague here at Yankee, and active in the Dean campaign. Nat’s house was home to a “get out the vote” effort for Dean, and there were a gaggle of young Dean supporters from across America there on the phone, and coming and going to and from polling locations and strategic “visibility” locations where they could hold large Dean signs.

I spent about an hour at Nat’s, watching the action, sharing some pizza, and learning about what Nat called “the nitty gritty.” At 1:00 p.m., I taped a piece, by cell phone, with Matt Rainnie for CBC Prince Edward Island’s Main Street on my Primary experiences. And on the way back to Dublin, I swung by the polling location nearest to Nat’s house and took some pictures:

The Prince Edward Island deficit, CBC reports, was $83.3 million last year.

This is roughly $850 for each registered elector, and about $1,000 for each employed person.

As at the last budget, PEI’s debt was $1.16 billion. That’s about $11,000 per elector, and about $14,000 per employed person.

Our budget for this year requires about $90 million to pay interest on the debt.

It strikes me that I’ve never heard anyone in Prince Edward Island, politician or no, suggest any mechanism by which we’re going to pay this money back to the people we owe it to. It’s like a giant unspoken impossibility. That will go on forever.

Wesley Clark — he’s just “Wes” to you and me now that he’s a politician — appeared at a rally at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, New Hampshire this afternoon and I was there with bells on.

I have discovered the secret to successful primary rally attendance: arrive 45 minutes early. If you arrive 45 minutes early, you will (a) get a good parking space, and (b) get a good seat. If you don’t arrive early, you will (a) have to park 3 miles away, on the side of a road, and walk in sub-zero temperatures to the hall and (b) will probably not get in, as the fire inspector will have already closed the hall.

I arrived 45 minutes early, and, posing as a resident of New Hampshire, was shown to a good seat in the “special seats we’ve received for residents” section, 6 or 7 rows back from the dais.

This was the most barnburner of a rally I’ve attended here so far — tremendous rah-rah-rah, stomp-stomp-stomp and military-style marching chants. As one person said to an organizer on the way out “you guys have a great advance team!”

The “very special guests” supporting Clark included actors Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, former New York Mayor David Dinkins, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Gov. Jim Hodges (SC), Congressman Mike Ross (D-AR), and Mayor Michael Coleman of Columbus, Ohio.

Plenty of pictures here, including many of Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen!

Ross spoke first, followed by Coleman, who then introduced Danson and Steenburgen. Steenburgen was there, she explained, because her mother and Clark’s used to work in the same bank in Little Rock. Danson, presumably, was there because he’s married to Steenburgen.

After brief, well-spoken and witty remarks from Dinkins and Rangel, there was a confusing and tear-jerking-attempting speech by Gail Kruzel, whose husband, a colleague of Clark’s, was killed in the Balkans. Clark gave her his wedding ring at his funeral. Touching, and more than a little awkward.

Clark then bounded to the stage, and spoke for 45 minutes on a variety of issues, concentrating on “leadership” in its various incarnations. Lots of rah-ra-rah. Lots of “George Bush is in for a lickin’.” Some talk of issues, with few specifics. A few token questions at the end. More stomping. And then the end.

The audience was decidely different from Dean on Friday (Birkenstocks and Apple Cider) and Kerry on Saturday (Firemen and Organized Labor): Clark appears to attract the “khaki-wearing vice-principal” demographic, along with its related “khaki-wearing math teacher” strain. There were also plenty of balding geeky types, and good dose of “looking for leaderhip intellectual suburbanites”.

It was weird sitting besides otherwise rational people, having substantive policy discussions, and then only minutes later, to have them break out into paroxysms of “We Want Clark,” waving their signs, and bouncing their balloons.

I’m taking tomorrow off to do some real work; up to Manchester on Tuesday night for the results.