Yet another reason for reforming election laws
The current robo-call scandal isn’t a new threat to democracy. In fact, it could have been nipped in the bud if politicians had opted for changes when problems surfaced in the 2008 election, led by Conservative malfeasance in the B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. While there’s no going back to allow MPs to complete a re-do, Democracy Watch is calling on Elections Canada to reopen its investigation into the 2008 robo-call incidents. Moreover, the agency should be making public the details of all its investigations into irregularities, amounting to 2,284 complaints received by Elections Canada since 2004, says the Ottawa-based watchdog group.
“Elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and it is likely the robo-call scandal is the tip of the iceberg and that there are many situations which raise serious questions about whether the federal election law has been properly enforced since 2004,” says Tyler Sommers, coordinator of Democracy Watch. “Elections Canada must disclose the details of its rulings on 2,284 past complaints to assure Canadians that it enforces the law properly and effectively.”
Elections Canada is currently investigating the robo-call scandal in which voters in several dozen ridings received misleading phone calls, in some cases messages purporting to be from Elections Canada directing them to alternative polling stations in an apparent attempt to suppress voter turnout. There were annoying and ill-timed calls, also aimed at Liberal and NDP supporters, identified as coming from the party, but said to be harassing tactics to create ill will amongst supporters.
While Democracy Watch has faith in Elections Canada’s investigation – saying it’s too early to demand a full-blown public inquiry – it does want to see greater transparency to restore confidence in the agency and the electoral process as a whole. To start with, an election watchdog that’s working on behalf of the public should reveal all of the information it has collected on the public’s behalf.
That, says Sommers, doesn’t apply to current investigation into allegations of fraud, but there’s no reason not to release the findings of closed cases. The “ongoing investigation” excuse that Elections Canada keeps trotting out to Democracy Watch’s requests appear like so much stonewalling.
The agency’s reputation and integrity are at stake. More transparency is needed if Canadians are to trust there’s proper oversight in place. “Canadians need to be sure about what Elections Canada is doing to enforce the rules,” he notes. “We’re talking about the most fundamental aspect of our democracy: free and fair elections.”
Very strangely, Sommers adds, former Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley has opposed public disclosure of rulings on past complaints – more than 800 of the 2,284 complaints were made between 2004 and 2006 when he was in charge – but has called for full disclosure of exactly what happened and who did what in the robo-call scandal.
“If someone is not sent to jail as a result of the robo-call scandal, the system will have failed,” said Sommers. “And if Elections Canada does not disclose its rulings on past complaints, and all future complaints, Canadians will not be able to tell whether the system works fairly and properly in all cases.”
Compelling Elections Canada to be more transparent and, more broadly, making changes to some very undemocratic facets of our electoral process will require action from our politicians, not just all the talk, talk, talk coming out of Ottawa.
Opposition parties in particular are fond of making small issues – procedural matters, for instance, and turning them into big deals – playing politics. That’s not the case here. “The system is broken right now, and it needs to be fixed,” says Sommers, who maintains it’s not an overstatement to call this a fundamental threat to democracy.
Robo-calls themselves are not the issue – they serve a legitimate purpose in some cases – rather it’s the lack of transparency and accountability, he says. If they’re going to be used, there should be full disclosure as to who’s calling, on whose behalf and for what purpose. Compelling the parties to keep open records on all the calls would avoid a repeat of the situation now under investigation. Ideally, such rules would have been in place prior to last year’s election, following the irregularities in 2008.
“It seems clear from the 2008 robo-call scandal in a B.C. riding that Elections Canada has not been taking complaints as seriously as needed to properly enforce the law,” says Sommers. “If they’d changed the laws in 2008, there would be no Pierre Poutine.”
There’s no justification for Sansone fiasco
The justifications and excuses flying about in the wake of the Jessie Sansone affair is a perfect illustration of the bureaucratic mentality I recently discussed in a column about Parkinson’s Law. The 26-year-old Kitchener man was arrested last week after his daughter, 4, drew a picture of a man holding a gun: her daddy, who uses it “to shoot bad guys and monsters.” That precipitated a sequence of events worthy of the golden age of slapstick comedy, if what happened wasn’t the farthest thing from funny. A teacher going to a principal, who in turn involves the police and Family and Children’s Services. The father is arrested at the school when he arrives to pick up his three children. He’s strip-searched and interrogated. Possibly under duress, he agrees to let police search his home. There are, as one might guess, no guns. Well, there is a plastic toy gun, the kind found in millions of households.
Sansone was eventually released and given an apology. Only after going through the traumatic ordeal, however, was he told why he’d been arrested for possession of a firearm: the picture and explanation of a four year old.
Not surprisingly, he’s talking to a lawyer about compensation. Equally unsurprising is the response of all of the agencies involved: we’re just following policy. No one is admitting culpability or responsibility for what was clearly an overreaction of epic proportions. Everyone by now will have been advised by lawyers to maintain the party line: admit nothing, plead innocent.
For the rest of us watching from the outside, Sansone has clearly been wronged. He deserves compensation and, more importantly, we need to replace existing policies with a more common sense approach.
The little girl’s use of the word “monsters” should have been a clear giveaway that no one in the house was running around with a real gun or leaving firearms strewn about the house in reach of the children. The teacher could have easily followed this up by talking to the principal, who in turn could have contacted the parents for an explanation. No fuss necessary. No trampling of anyone’s rights.
Instead, we had the fiasco that unfolded. The Sansone family has undergone a trauma. The institutions involved all have black eyes. And the public is worse off, taking a hit in the wallet and in its freedoms. One thing we can count on is that this is going to cost us a lot of money. It already has if you measure the staff time and expenses racked up in the wrong that was done, from the school itself through the police process. Yet to come are legal bills – everyone will be lawyering up – and costly reviews of existing policies. Then there’s the issue of compensation. Costs could be reduced if the family is offered a settlement rather than dragging it out, but bureaucracies often don’t behave so rationally. Nor are they spending their own money: it’s the taxpayers that are on the hook.
It would be nice to think the costs would be extracted directly from those involved – payroll deductions, perhaps, or commensurate cuts to budgets – but that’s dreaming in colour. The money will come from taxpayers rather than holding anyone accountable.
More pressing, however, is making sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
In this instance, we have policies that clearly go against the public good: the unreasonable excesses that followed the child’s drawing can’t be defended on any grounds. Those involved had trotted out the “if it saves just one child” argument in defense of what happened, but that doesn’t cut it. That line of reasoning is insidious, glossing over a multitude of sins with what sounds like a rational argument. After all, who’s going to say a child shouldn’t be protected? Well, as Public Safety Minister Vic Toews’s recent arguments in favour of stripping away the rights and privacy of Canadians – siding with the government or with child pornographers – clearly indicates, there’s no stooping too low for those who would take liberties with our, well, liberty.
We can, hopefully, assume all of the officials and bureaucrats involved meant well, but you know what they say about the road to hell? Good intentions don’t excuse what happened. At a minimum, there was a lack of due diligence. It would be an understatement to say drastic measures were taken in the absence of credible evidence. And it wouldn’t be overstating things too much to say the child-safety card being played in defense of those measures should be countered by the words of Thomas Paine (1737-1809): “The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.” It’s no coincidence that some of the most memorable quotes about rights, freedom and democracy come from a time when they were in much shorter supply. Take, for instance, writer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s (1811-1884) reminder that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
Today, when we have far more liberties, at least on the surface, we have given up our vigilance. As a result, our freedoms are being eroded. I’m not talking about just the actions of a federal government that has been undermining democracy as its standard operating procedure – from proroguing Parliament and using closure to limit debate, from the G8/G20 fiasco to stealing away your privacy – but about a wider misuse of power by governments and bureaucracies. While what’s coming out of Ottawa these days is malicious, many of the problems stem from rather misguided notions, self-serving tendencies or outright incompetence, fueled by public apathy and the assumption that those “in charge” have both the public’s interests at heart and the ability to do what’s right. History, of course, tells us otherwise. Wising up the fact that things will get worse unless we make them get better – starting with a proper overhaul rather than butt-covering in the Sansone case, for instance – is the first step to protecting ourselves from creeping erosion of our rights.
As James Madison (1751-1836) notes, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
Keep tax issues in mind
Greece, once an idyllic dream vacation spot, has become synonymous with financial turmoil. It’s a convenient shorthand in the debate over government spending. And a bogeyman right up there with terrorists and online pornographers. We’ve seen more than a few comparisons as Ottawa tackles its deficits and, not surprisingly, in the aftermath of Don Drummonds report about Ontario’s finances. But let’s be clear: we’re not Greece. In fact, Greece isn’t Greece, at least not in the way it’s commonly portrayed. Yes, Greece is in a bad financial jam. Yes, much of the problem is self-inflicted. No, the Greeks weren’t (overly) profligate spenders. The problem, however, is a basic one: they spent more than they brought in. The spending wasn’t exorbitant, but tax revenues are so low that deficits were a given.
Officially, Greek tax rates are fairly high, even by European standards. But Greeks routinely find ways of avoiding taxes, enforcement is spotty and bribery is reported as rampant. Those Greeks in the top 20 per cent of earners pay virtually nothing in the way of taxes, the result of old deals extending back to the country’s days as a military junta and the widespread tax evasion in place today.
So even though Greece falls into the middle of the Eurozone pack when it comes to government spending, its tax collection rates rank near the bottom. And despite what we would view as generous social programs and retirement provisions, Greeks have one of the lower per capita incomes in Europe, about $21,100 in 2010 versus $27,600 in the original Eurozone countries – Germany, for instance, averages $29,400.
Greece’s below-average spending on social benefits is no recent trend: in the decade leading up to the 2008 fiscal crisis, Greece spent only $3530.47 per capita on social protection benefits, slightly less than Spain’s spending and about $700 more than Portugal’s, which has one of the lowest levels in all of the Eurozone. By contrast, Germany and France spent more than double the Greek level, while the original Eurozone 12 level averaged $6251.78.
So, in the wake of huge deficits created by the shortfall between revenues and expenditures, what’s the cure? Apparently, Greece’s faltering economy is to be helped by deep cuts to spending, support programs and employment. Seems counterintuitive, but there you have it.
We’re in nothing like that kind of trouble here, but we should be making comparisons – not for the alarmist reasons some keep pointing to, but because of what can happen if we ignore a rationale discussion about taxes here. (And, the perils of allowing politicians and bureaucrats to strip away public assets under the guise of a manmade crisis – see Klein, Naomi.)
Where politics are involved, there are plenty of reasons to be upset about paying taxes: governments of all stripes waste considerable amounts of our money. Incompetence, patronage, graft and outright theft still exist. From RIM Park to eHealth and the G8/G20 fiasco, there are no shortages of examples at all levels of government. In looking at those kinds of expenditures, paying your taxes becomes hard to stomach.
That said, the bulk of the tax money collected by governments goes into providing us with services. From water pipes and roads to health care and education, these are things we opt to pay for collectively. That’s not the kind of thing we hear from politicians.
The reality is we need to pay taxes. Even the most extreme libertarians see some kind of state function, typically for policing, the legal system and national defence – all of which require taxation.
Taxes allow us to pool our resources so that we can afford to have things that would be impossible if we had to pay as individuals. If only those families with kids currently in school paid for the education system, for instance, the costs would be prohibitive. Multiply that by a host of government services, and it’s clear that we’re better off acting collectively.
Too often, however, “tax” is used as a dirty word in political debates. Each of us feels overburdened by taxes, and there’s some merit in that. Each of us can find examples of programs and services we’d rather not fund, making it easy to gripe about wasted tax money. Truth is, we’re generally much better off for what our tax dollars buy us.
That’s not to say things can’t be improved. As this week’s revelations about the Harper government show, plenty of our money is genuinely wasted and funnelled into the wrong pockets. And politicians must be disabused of the notion that taxpayers are a bottomless well. That’s especially true given the huge infrastructure deficit.
Hundreds of billions will be needed to repair and replace crumbling water systems, bridges, electrical grids and a host of other hard services we take for granted. That means more of our tax dollars will have to be directed that way at a time when an aging population will be demanding ever-more health-care and related services. Tough decisions are coming (as the Drummond report makes clear), the kind we’ll have to keep in mind while reviewing both spending and tax policy. We’re going to need more, not less money. Some programs will have to go. New spending plans may have to be scrapped. And, most importantly, tax giveaways and the shifting of the tax burden to individuals, largely in the middle class, will have to stop.
We’ve got some solutions on the table, and a look at what not to do in the form of Greece. What’s missing is the political will to dole out the cure and the public appetite for the medicine.
Government attacking your privacy
If at first you don’t succeed in taking away the privacy rights of Canadians, try, try again. And, in typical style, the government is doing it in the most disingenuous of ways. With Bill C-30, what it calls The Protecting Children From Internet Predators Act, the Conservatives hope to strip away our basic civil liberties, hitting us with a huge – but as yet undisclosed – bill in the process. The government that railed against the long gun registry and the long form census on the grounds of privacy sees no hypocrisy in an act that will make those two items pale in comparison both in terms of cost and moving us farther down the road to a police state. Hyperbole? I’m afraid not.
The so-called lawful access legislation tabled by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews would give police the right to demand personal information – your name, phone number, IP addresses, surfing habits and the like – from Internet service providers without a warrant. It would also force ISPs to install expensive hardware and software to provide real-time surveillance of all their customers, turning that information over to police on a whim.
In essence, we’re all guilty until proven innocent. Well, make that we’re all guilty, as once the surveillance measures are in place, there’s no going back – the monitoring will continue. But we’re supposed to be just fine with that because, according to Toews, we either support the bill or we support child pornographers. Those are the only options.
“As technology evolves, many criminal activities, such as the distribution of child pornography, become much easier,” he said in the House of Commons. “We are proposing to bring measures to bring our laws into the 21st century and to provide police with the lawful tools that they need.
“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
Hyperbole? I’m afraid so. But not surprising given how Karl Rove’s tactics were imported by this government.
The Harper government’s attempts at relieving Canadians of their rights have been roundly condemned by a range of experts, including the federal privacy commissioner and all her provincial counterparts. In Ontario, Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian has launched a concerted push against the legislation, countering the claims the changes are minor.
“Let’s get this straight: It’s not phone-book information! We must dispel the myths relating to the new powers that would enable warrantless access to much more information than an individual’s address and phone number,” she writes in an online attack of such legislation
“In total, 11 fields of identifying information could be collected about an individual in the proposed ‘lawful access’ scheme. In my view, there’s little that should be considered ‘lawful” about this.
Legislation proposed by the Conservatives threatens our freedoms and our democracy, she asserts.
“The proposed legislation lacks proper judicial oversight, and is deficient in transparency and openness; these elements are vital in a free and democratic society. Properly supervised, surveillance powers can be invaluable to law enforcement. However, it is equally true that where individuals are subject to unwarranted suspicions, or evidence is poorly handled, or erroneous conclusions are hastily drawn, the consequences for innocent individuals can be devastating.”
There will, of course, be the expected “if you’ve got nothing to hide” counterargument from supporters of such invasive measures. That argument doesn’t hold up: everybody has the right to privacy unless there are compelling grounds to cross that line. And that line of thought leads to an awfully slippery slope, one George Orwell would recognize: why not video monitoring inside your home, if you’ve got nothing to hide?
If the moral and legal grounds aren’t enough to make you contact your MP to express your outrage, there are some practical reasons to do so.
First, as we’ve seen from other databases of information, if someone is collecting it – government or business – sooner or later it will be accidently released or hacked. The same portals that allow police, unsupervised, to snoop and spy on your online data will most certainly be accessed by others. Just think about all of your online activities – every email and messages, surfing history and web searches – posted on the equivalent of WikiLeaks for all to see.
Not a pleasant thought, is it. But maybe you’re one of those people with nothing to hide.
Or maybe you’d simply like to think of the impact on your wallet. The technology needed to allow for widespread surveillance of you, your friends, family and neighbours, as well as the rest of us across the country, is going to cost money. Lots of it. The government will likely have to give ISPs cash to offset the costs. The ISPs themselves will have to spend more. In both cases, the cost will be passed along to you, either as taxpayer or as customer.
Dr. Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in online issues who strongly opposes the government plans, says the price tag is a major consideration in the debate.
“Cost is a big question mark on lawful access, though costs will ultimately be borne by the public. According to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, many telecom and Internet providers have been primarily focused on the costs associated with installing surveillance equipment and with processing law enforcement requests. The government may provide financial assistance to smaller Internet providers to help address their costs or provide an implementation delay. Some smaller providers have indicated they may be forced to close if they bear the costs alone. Providers will likely also be able to charge fees for complying with law enforcement requests,” he writes on his popular blog (michaelgeist.ca), one of many spots to get up to speed on the legislation’s impact.
In that vein, and to help prod MPs, there’s also www.StopSpying.ca and www.realprivacy.ca. Being informed is the first step to countering the activities of those intent on removing your freedoms.
No sustainable future in a McMurray economy
Blame it on corporate greed. Or maybe on out-of-touch unions. Either way, 450 workers at the Electro-Motive Diesel plant in London have joined the growing ranks of the unemployed. In isolation, what happened there is a shame. Looked at in perspective, it’s a microcosm of what’s plaguing our economy. The company, owned by U.S. giant Caterpillar through its subsidiary Progress Rail Services, says it needed wage concessions of 50 per cent to keep the plant going. Shortly after locking out the workers, it announced plans to shutter the building, moving production to its new facility in Indiana, which just happens to have adopted right-to-work (i.e. anti-union) legislation.
Reaction to the news essentially falls into two camps: one says the company’s only goal was to drive down costs despite making huge profits last year, the other says unions got greedy, opting for no jobs instead of those paying half of the $35 an hour previously paid to workers.
Leaving aside arguments that the owners never had any intention of continuing to run the operation long-term after acquiring EMD in August 2010, the real issues at play are free trade and globalization. Caterpillar argues it can produce the locomotives at the U.S. plant for less than half the $35 an hour it pays to workers in London. Though the parent company made record profits last year ($4.9 billion), there’s more money to be made by slashing costs. Nothing new there: shareholder returns – and large management bonuses – are the priority.
Having gained concessions from Indiana, the company can simply ramp up production at the new facility and ship product north as needed. With facilities in Mexico, China and India, low wages are clearly an issue for EMD.
The closure is the latest in a long line of hits taken by Ontario’s manufacturing sector, which was already suffering from the high value of the dollar and, especially, free trade agreements that had hollowed out industry here even before the Wall Street-created financial collapse. While some facets of the economy improved last year, for instance, manufacturing wound up 2011 with a string of job losses, including in the plastics and rubber, computer and electronics sectors.
In fact, across the country employment in factories fell to its lowest level since Statistics Canada began collecting data in 1976.
Summing up the manufacturing sector, Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, paints a bleak picture. “Productivity gains are a positive story, but the sadder story is that Canada has been pricing itself out of manufacturing as resource industries’ success drives up our currency. The world is beating down our door for our resources at a greater rate than for our manufactured goods.
“Unfortunately, the combination of sluggish growth beyond our borders and a still-elevated Canadian dollar doesn’t give much promise to manufacturing as a source of employment growth.”
As new Census data released this week by StatsCan show, there’s a correlation between the declining in manufacturing in Ontario and growth out west, where the resource-extraction industry is booming. Similar gains, though less notable, have been seen on the East Coast where oil and gas are in play.
With the decline of value-added manufacturing, we are in danger of regressing to our age-old role of hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Well, that and the purveyors of service jobs, as that is where much of what passes for employment growth has been. Low-paying, part-time jobs with few if any benefits are increasingly the norm.
Manufacturers in this country have shed some 300,000 jobs in the past decade or so. Everything from higher labour costs to red tape and a strong loonie have been blamed for the crisis. It’s cheaper to make goods in China or Mexico, so that’s where those intent on short-term gains go to do business.
The workers displaced by plant closures – offshore transplants or recession-invoked bankruptcy, it doesn’t matter – find themselves looking for work in a tough environment. Those lucky enough to find another job typically take a pay cut, reducing buying power and ultimately contributing to the overall economic malaise. Another Statistics Canada study shows that those Canadians thrown out of work by closures and mass layoffs who find other jobs suffer an average decline of 25 per cent in earnings, implying a loss of about $10,000 a year for a typical manufacturing worker.
As a result of the recession, even the growth in poorly-paid service jobs has been unable to keep up with manufacturing losses, at time driving up the overall unemployment rate. The remedy? More of the same failed policies that are in part responsible for the mess we’re in: trade agreements, corporate tax cuts and a focus on resource exports, as evidenced by the likes of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters.
That focus may help sell unprocessed bitumen from the tar sands in Alberta – shipped off to be processed elsewhere, and sold back to us a finished products – but it’s not a sustainable arrangement, especially as Alberta holds on to little in the way of royalties, a common problem with resource extraction across the country.
In the rush to blame the workers for EMD’s decision to shut the plant – there’s been a fair bit of CAW-bashing in the blogosphere – it’s important to remember the lack of sustainability before simply recommending the unemployed move to Fort McMurray.
Danger of running afoul of Parkinson’s Law
Those in search of Parkinson’s Law in action need look no further than Woolwich Township, where Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s classic dictum is clearly in evidence. What is Parkinson’s Law? Even if you don’t know the term, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the sentiment behind it: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. First postulated in 1955 and expanded into the 1958 book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, the theory came from the writer’s experience with the British civil service. With mathematical precision – and a large dollop of humour – he dissected the actions of bureaucrats, discovering that bureaucracies expand over time, whether they’re needed or, in most cases, not.
In a notable example, he showed that the British Colonial Office continued to grow even as the empire shrunk precipitously. In fact, the department had its largest-ever staff after it was folded into the Foreign Office because there were no longer any colonies to administer.
Two forces are at work in explaining the growth of needless bureaucracies and the costs thereof: “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” (the Law of Multiplication of Subordinates) and “Officials make work for each other” (the Law of Multiplication of Work). He notes in particular that the total of those employed inside a bureaucracy rose by five to seven per cent per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”
Managers wish to appear busy, so they increase their workload by creating paper and rules, filling out evaluations and forms, and filing them. Then they hire more assistants, who in turn require more managerial time for supervision. Moreover, many bureaucratic budgets rely on the “use it or lose it” principle, meaning the current year’s expenditures determine the following year’s budget. This provides a deep incentive to spend (even waste) as much money as possible to guarantee an ever-increasing budget. Parkinson’s views remain consistent with those of conflict theorists, who hold that bureaucratic growth serves only the managers, who in turn use their increasing power to control the workers.
All of this usually adds up to little in the way of productive outcomes, either in government or the private sector (Parkinson’s Law applies to all bureaucracies, but examples are most egregious in the public sector because there’s no offsetting pressure from competitors, shareholders and the like).
What we end up with, then, is much ado about nothing – the size of the bureaucracy and the amount of paperwork don’t necessarily bear any resemblance to the actual work done.
“Granted that work (and especially paper work) is thus elastic in its demands on time, it is manifest that there need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned,” Parkinson argues in his original essay.
“Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson’s Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear.”
What Parkinson outlines is prevalent at all levels of government, growing worse from local to federal.
While Woolwich has largely avoided the worst of the law’s impacts – there has, however, been an entrenched deference to bureaucrats on the part of council members, but that’s just part of the problem – we’re starting to see more of it here.
First off, the size of the staff has been creeping upwards, most notably with the opening of the WMC. Some of the jobs have proven unnecessary, even on the frontlines, though changes have been slow. The situation is much worse at the middle-management level. Then there’s the issue of paperwork, as Parkinson sagely warned of: we’ve seen a lot more consultants and host of over-bureaucratized report writing even for what were once simple functions, from tenders to ersatz attempts at business development projects.
Worse still, as the current budget talks have shown, the township is prone to the Law of Triviality, another Parkinson revelation whereby “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”
By that he means just what we’re seeing today: some long discussions of minor budget items, leading at time to easy cutting around the edges, but little regard for the bigger items, which are glossed over quickly.
Woolwich council is not as profligate as the provincial and federal governments. It also has another advantage when it comes to reducing its size: it has no deficits to contend with, which means its cuts will translate into immediate tax savings rather than going to pay down the results of past spending decisions.
As Parkinson and other scholars following up his work have noted, there’s an inherent resistance to downsizing within bureaucracies. When cuts do come, they typically involve frontline staff, not management and other entrenched bureaucrats. Those affected tend to get lower pay while doing the actual work that is of value to the public. In that light, cuts don’t save as much money as they could, hurt services to the people paying the freight and maintain management layers that provide little if any value.
Tip public sector wages in favour of taxpayers
Premier Dalton McGuinty is being more than a little disingenuous when he calls for a public sector wage freeze without making it mandatory. We’ve been hearing the same message for two years, to little avail.
That’s not to say the goal isn’t worthwhile: wages typically make up 50 to 60 per cent of the tax dollars spent by governments, so that’s where the cuts have to be made to get spending back under control. That’s especially true if the goal is to maintain programs and avoid large tax increases, in which case something’s gotta give. That something is the civil service salaries.
The restraint advocated by both the federal and provincial governments finds a receptive audience: most of us have no problem seeing government workers as overpaid and underworked. Fair or not, that’s the perception. Layoffs and wage freezes (if not outright cuts) are an easy sell to the public. Public service compensation now outstrips the private sector by some 30 per cent when wages, benefits and pensions are factored in, and it’s now time to begin reversing that trend.
Public sector unions, seeing the writing on the wall, are quick to argue that private sector compensations should rise rather than rolling back what’s paid to government workers. A nice idea, but one detached from current economic reality, and an issue government has no direct control over, unlike their own budgets.
To be fair, governments do have to stop corporate tax cuts, increasing rates by a few percentage points. There’s no point in cutting wages only to pass the money on to large corporations that have been hording revenue rather than using it productively in the economy.
The other union tactic, painting a dire picture of service cuts, also has little credence. Indiscriminate layoffs could theoretically see needed frontline workers let go, but that’s an unlikely scenario. There are ways of judiciously reducing the size of the civil service with minimal impacts. Lowering wages would free up money to tackle deficits and to funnel money where it’s needed.
Making cuts and wage freezes work requires the public to think about service levels and what they’re getting for their money: wage increases and program spending that have routinely outstripped inflation has left us paying much more while getting little or nothing more in return. For example, look at this week’s debate in Kitchener over firefighting services. The city expects to pay $29.3 million for the fire department this year, 55 per cent more than the $18.9 million budget 10 years ago, but residents are no safer today than they were a decade ago. The same can be said about a host of other services, municipal, provincial and federal.
In short, we have government, but not a commensurate increase in service.
Between 2004 and 2011, the number of employees in the public sector grew by 20 per cent, to 3.6 million from three million.
The total number of employees in the sector is more than 20 per cent of the national workforce of 17.2 million, according to figures from Statistics Canada.
Salary figures indicate a growing gap between civil service wages and the average earnings of private-sector employees. The discrepancy is likely to increase, as average industry wages will remain stagnant or decline dramatically in some industries as layoffs take hold. Even though the recession is officially over, unemployment remains high and private-sector wages depressed.
Yet, as we’ve seen in this area, government employees continued to receive multi-year deals worth, on average, three to four per cent a year. With no bottom line – politicians seem to have few qualms about dipping deeper on their repeated trips to the well – governments simply pass the increases along to a public forced to pay taxes, a far cry from the situation faced in the private sector.
Few would begrudge civil servants a decent wage, but when those supported by public money are making more than those paying the freight, friction is bound to follow. It’s with that reality in mind that elected officials have to counter years of excess, waste and concessions. McGuinty calls for freezes, but does not make them binding. If history is any indicator, voluntary restraint will not work. Measures will not be carried out uniformly across provincial government lines, let alone translate into similar restraint at the municipal level. All the efforts will be hampered by arbitrators who’ve typically undermined the public interest.
This is not simply a tirade against government workers. We want services, so we need people to provide them. Those people should be paid a decent living wage. The trick will be to decide what services we really need – hint, fewer than we’re spending money on right now – and what constitutes “decent.” As the annual sunshine list and other revelations of public sector wages reveal, however, we’re a long way past most people’s concept of appropriate compensation. The 30 per cent overage is a good benchmark against which to measure rollbacks.
Fairness is important, certainly, but the priority is fairness to the average taxpaying resident – all other interests take a back seat.
New “downloading” — paying for useless rules
Call it a form of taxation without representation: a long list of legislation that essentially downloads costs to municipalities without giving them a say in any of the decisions. And, to add insult to injury, most of the requirements provide no benefit to residents while lifting evermore dollars from their wallets. From useless paperwork demanded by the Office of the Fire Marshal to overzealous water-monitoring regulations and from accessibility requirements with few benefits to all of the downside of gravel pits, Queen’s Park has long burdened municipalities with the real-world impacts of their own bureaucratic make-work schemes.
It may be futile, but Woolwich officials hope to counter that trend by making direct pitches to the provincial ministers and senior staffers at next month’s Rural Ontario Municipal Association/Ontario Good Roads Association conference.
Tackling just some of those grievances, a list of which was approved by township councillors this week, is the priority of chief administrative officer David Brenneman, who’s seen plenty of red tape in two decades of municipal service.
A clear example of the problem can be seen in what happened following the Walkerton fiasco. Instead of treating what happened as an isolated incident, compounded by Harris government cuts to inspectors, the province instituted sweeping new measures, including excessive amounts of water testing, that collectively added millions of dollars to municipal spending. There were plenty of new rules and procedures, but not one dime to help local governments pay for them. The result: not one iota of improvement, but plenty of added expenses.
That’s no isolated incident, he says.
“Was that (Walkerton) an overreaction to a very specific circumstance? I think you’d find that most municipalities were doing just fine … with their inspection programs.
“In cases like Walkerton, in the end the legislation becomes very reactionary.”
Brenneman notes such kneejerk reactions lead to heavy-handed changes, blanket rules that force every municipality to comply whether or not there was a problem. Poor emergency response in one town, to a flood or tornado, for instance, has led to new emergency management protocols for everyone. In almost every case, they’re not needed, but municipalities are forced to spend the money anyway.
“Often, it’s a reactionary fix,” he argues, calling the resultant costs for implementing and enforcing the rule changes “a de facto form of downloading.”
He likens the provincial approach to a manager having a problem with one employee’s conduct dealing with it by sending out a thou-shall-not directive to every employee – all the others know what the problem is, and resent being lumped in with the troublemaker. Instead, the matter should be handled directly with the employee in question.
Just as such actions by a manager have consequences in the office, the province’s decisions have repercussions across the board. Even good ideas that are fine in theory – some are, many aren’t – lose credibility and effectiveness when they’re handed down willy-nilly without thought to what comes afterward in terms of implementation, compliance and enforcement.
“There are a couple of things to consider right off the bat. One, we need more funding. And two, there needs to be more dialogue before this kind of legislation is enacted.”
To date, however, municipalities get neither. In essence, they’re forced to tax without representation.
The same is true of the steps needed to comply with the Ontarians with Disabilities Act (ODA), for instance, which forces a range of measures and costs on municipalities even where it makes no sense at all. This goes beyond elevators, ramps and sidewalk cuts in new construction, but extends to such things as providing alternative document formats despite zero demand in Woolwich. Still, everyone will be forced to pay for it.
“Without an appropriate level of funding from the province for the implementation of these standards, costs are directly supported by the local taxpayer,” Brenneman says in a report discussed at council this week.
Then there’s the issue of gravel pits, a topic with which the township has become intimately acquainted, and one that he hopes to speak about when meeting with provincial representatives next month.
The process is lengthy and costly, with the concerns of municipalities often swept aside by the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ontario Municipal Board. The municipality does all the work, but gets little for its efforts aside from a great deal of political grief, as we’ve seen in debates here.
To make matters worse, municipalities receive only a pittance in revenues from gravel operations. The cost-benefit analysis alone is reason enough to deny all applications. Aside from the process itself, gravel pits bring increased truck traffic that put residents at risk, create more wear-and-tear on the roads, bring environmental problems such as dust and noise, and threaten to despoil prime agricultural land and the accompanying vistas.
To offset the immediate costs, he suggests higher revenues for municipalities. In Woolwich’s case, aggregate extraction brings in about $37,000 a year in revenues. He contrasts that with the fact a single battle at the OMB could ring up $250,000 in legal costs.
Once a pit is approved, municipalities have little recourse in the event of problems. The industry is supposed to be self-regulating, but that system isn’t working. The Ministry of Natural Resources, which can make unilateral decisions about specific sites, typically sides with the operators, not the public it’s supposed to serve.
“The residents of Woolwich do not trust the system,” he notes.
What’s true of the aggregate process applies equally to the range of legislation without regard to what’s best for municipal residents and their pocketbooks. It will be difficult, however, to overcome a system where bureaucrats look to justify their positions by coming up with policy changes, regardless of whether or not changes are needed or make any sense at all.
“I understand why it happens,” said Brenneman.
But how optimistic is he that next month’s meetings will bear fruit?
“We can’t just sit back on the sidelines and not try,” he argues. “It’s always a tough hill to climb. Part of the municipal role is to be an advocate to the senior governments.”
The effort will be aided if other municipalities bring the same message to Queen’s Park, eventually swaying the government. But that’s not going to happen in short order.
A case of Harper’s short-term thinking
Lost in the current debate over pipelines from the Alberta tar sands are the big-picture issues. Yes, the government appears to be taking a decidedly undemocratic position, yes there are economic advantages and downsides, yes there are environmental concerns. But none of these can be looked at in isolation, nor from this overarching consideration: who benefits and at what cost?
Both the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines come with a hefty price tag, political baggage and a long list of environmental caveats. Proponents point to the economic benefits: investment, jobs and profits from building the pipelines and carrying away Alberta bitumen to foreign markets.
Opponents cite the environmental peril of running a pipeline through pristine B.C. wilderness en route to the coast. Construction alone will be damaging, as will the increased tanker traffic. A spill could wreak havoc. There are also concerns about developing the tar sands in general, both for its impact on the local environment and its contribution to the larger matter of climate change.
There’s money and environmental health at stake. So, who benefits if we roll the dice?
Clearly, those pushing hardest for the project have the most to gain: the oil industry, its lobbyists and government supporters. They’ll reap the profits. Those who work in the industry, provide supplies or benefit from direct spinoffs also have pretty good motivation to back a new pipeline.
At some level, of course, we all benefit. We live in an energy-based world, dependent on oil in particular. Every time we heat or cool our homes, drive our cars or use any form of transit, make use of technology or enjoy something to eat we’re buying into that status quo.
That (not so) little moral piece aside, however, projects such as the Northern Gateway pipeline (the Keystone project being on hold south of the border) provide benefits to some while the risks are more widely dispersed. Pragmatically, will the project pay more than the potential costs to society as a whole? And, will those profits be short-lived, with the downside stretching well into the future?
Those are prime considerations in debating royalties paid for natural resources, not only oil and gas but a host of others, from potash to nickel. If we look at the Norwegian model – the country has been setting aside most of its huge oil revenues into a fund for future generations – then we’re certainly falling down on the job here. Non-renewable resources are by and large a short-term windfall for both the companies involved in extracting them and the provincial governments who collect royalties for taking from the public trust.
“We’re not getting good value for our natural resources,” says Erin Weir, an economist with the United Steel Workers who’s made a study of the royalty issue. “Norway is an outstanding example of managing natural resources.”
Norway collects high royalties. It also puts all but four per cent of its earnings into the Government Pension Fund, the largest pension fund in the world, valued at $525 billion at the end of 2010. None of the money can be touched for decades, until the oil runs out, and the fund invests outside the country in order to avoid making the economy dependent on oil profits and to ease inflationary pressures. (Whether that investment should be in purely speculative form – the troubling financial markets – or in the form of direct investment and asset-buying – see, for instance, China’s bid to buy up technology and resources, including Canada’s – is another discussion.)
It’s a great example of long-term thinking in the public interest, says Weir, noting there’s little of that in this country, as even the heritage funds in Alberta and Saskatchewan, which do set aside money for the future, pale in comparison.
Higher royalties, combined with a Norwegian outlook, would do wonders not only for Alberta, which generates the largest revenues due to oil and gas reserves, but also in every province where resources are extracted.
“We should be charging higher royalty rates and then there might be a bigger public benefit from those projects,” he says of the pipeline debate.
That’s especially true during a time of high commodity prices: profits grow, but the public doesn’t share in the good times. In fact, Alberta has been pushing royalty rates lower, unlike what it did during the boom times of the 1970s when its Heritage Fund was growing in leaps and bounds.
Through the Eighties, there was downward pressure on royalties in Alberta. There have been some spikes, but most recently the trend is down yet again. From collecting total royalties of $12.26 billion in 2006-07, the take fell to $6.1 billion in 2009-10.
“The industry has a very strong interest in keeping royalties low,” says Weir, noting the oil, gas and mining industries have been very successful in playing one jurisdiction off of another, threatening to go elsewhere if royalties are increased.
“There’s a belief that provinces have to give the resources away in order to get them developed.”
While that has been the case with manufacturing – leading to the gutting of Ontario’s economy – it’s a far less compelling argument with natural resources, which have to be extracted where they’re found. Of course, there are other locations in the world, but as supplies dwindle – be it for oil and gas, or a host of other resources – the “we’ll go elsewhere” argument holds less water.
Even today, Weir notes, there are a variety of factors at play in choosing where to develop resources, including the size and quality of the reserves, accessibility, infrastructure, a skilled workforce and political stability.
“Canada stacks up very well in those other factors,” he says in urging governments to resist the divide-and-conquer strategy.
The tactic is at play within the country, as resources fall within the provincial sphere: there’s no national standard.
“I would like to see a bit more inter-provincial cooperation to get higher returns.”
That remains unlikely, however, as lobbyists are relentless and the industry spends large sums of money to influence politicians. There is no corresponding effort on the other side on behalf of the public interest, he notes.
“I’m hopeful that people can learn more about the issue, get engaged and push for better returns on their natural resources. The resources belong to the public.”
They call it democracy, but that’s still a stretch
Was 2011 the year of democracy? Or, at least, when we gave lip service to democracy?
As Gwynne Dyer notes in his year-end summary, the planet was full of democracy-related news, most notably the Arab Spring. Public action in the likes of Egypt, Libya and Syria (still unfolding) put shame to the those of us here who can’t even be bothered to vote, nor to even take note of the erosion of our rights and freedoms.
In the latter context, we did see the Occupy movement gain some traction, only to break on the battlements of public apathy and entrenched corporate interests. While casting some light on the inequities of the system, the movement’s failure to breakthrough echoes the string of letdowns that followed the financial collapse of 2008, as politicians of all stripes sold out the public interest to corporations lobbying against regulation and accountability.
We got platitudes – lip service – but no action.
What did stick from the Occupy experience are the 1% and 99% labels. Not just catchy, they are appropriate as they show the growing economic inequities in our society: a handful of people got richer even as the majority of us took a hit. That’s a problem in itself, but the real story lies in the fact that those who have profited are responsible for the poor economy, having lobbied for the deregulation, trade and fiscal policies that created the mess.We remember the slogans, but how many of us really got the message?
As it does every year, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives brought the situation into stark relief this week – and garnered the usually short-lived media attention – with its report on the compensation of Canada’s top 100 CEOs. By noon on Tuesday, that select group had already pocketed $44,366 – what it takes the average wage earner an entire year to make.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ (CCPA) annual look at CEO compensation reveals Canada’s Elite 100 CEOs – subbed the 0.01$ – pocketed an average $8.38 million in 2010, 27 per cent more than the average $6.6 million they took in 2009.
In contrast, after taking inflation into account, the average worker’s weekly earnings are lower now than they were during the worst of the 2008-09 recession.
“The average of Canada’s CEO Elite 100 make 189 times more than Canadians earning the average wage,” says the report’s author, economist Hugh Mackenzie.
“If you think that’s normal, it’s not. In 1998, the highest paid 100 Canadian CEOs earned 105 times more than the average wage, itself likely more than double the figure for a decade earlier.”
The report finds that those CEOs among the country’s richest 0.01 per cent, a privileged group of 2,460 tax filers whose minimum income was $1.85 million in 2007. Their incomes soar above the average income of $404,500 (2007) required to enter the richest 1 per cent club. The lowest paid of Canada’s CEO Elite 100 pocketed $3.9 million in 2010, though few of us would shed any tears over that.
“The conclusion from these data is inescapable,” says Mackenzie. “Soaring executive pay plays a significant role in driving the growth in income inequality in Canada. “The gap between Canada’s CEO Elite 100 and the rest of us is growing at a fast and steady pace, with no signs of letting up.”
These people are certainly the elite, as the title of the report suggests. Still, there’s something to be said to fall into that 1% category that is the mainstay of the Occupy movement. If you’ve made it into Canada’s richest 1% club, you’re among the 246,000 who made a minimum of $169,300 and an average income of $404,500 (as of 2007, the most recent year for which data are available.).
What about the remaining 99% of us? Well, we’ve not been so lucky, says the report.
Between September 2010 and September 2011, average weekly earnings in Canada rose by only 1.1 per cent. After taking inflation into account, weekly earnings are now lower than they were during the worst of Canada’s 2008-09 recession, resulting in a dangerous mix: Canadians are feeling the squeeze of shrinking disposable incomes, a rising cost of living, and record-high household debt.
Clearly, the very modest efforts made to correct such inequities did not make the problems vanish when the calendar flipped over. Much more effort is needed if we’re going to reverse a decades-long slide. Note, however, that politicians don’t have that kind of change among their resolutions.
