Private schools/public funding: the cost of choice

Education is not a consumer commodity. When we start talking about how we fund our education system as if it were, Alberta is in trouble.

Kent Hehr, Liberal MLA for Calgary Buffalo, seems to go out of his way to avoid talking about education as a commodity in his private members bill to stop all public funding for private schools. But some of the arguments surrounding the issue do look at education as something we can buy or trade, while also looking at students as factory products.

We need to avoid that, and instead look at funding models relating to how they touch the right of every child to an equal opportunity for the best general education possible, plus the rights of parents to decide what's best for their children – within the limits of the law.

The state need not dictate all the means, but the state must protect of the rights of children against parents, teachers, and administrators who do not reach society's standards in providing kids with the best chance they can get to succeed in life. For the vast majority, that is achieved through public funding of a public system.

First off, we need to acknowledge that despite the wide range of student abilities and the varying qualities of individual teachers and schools, Alberta is widely viewed as a top-quality place to send kids to school. We teach our students better than most other places in the world – if you believe the results of global standardized testing.

Alberta also has the highest tax-paid support for private schooling in Canada. The 25,000 students (about four per cent of the total school population) who attend Alberta's accredited private schools get 70 per cent of the per-pupil grant that public and Catholic school students get.

Only four other provinces give any public funding whatever to private schools (the Western provinces, plus Quebec), and they only provide 50 per cent of what a public system student would get. Ontario experimented with a tuition tax credit for private schooling, but dropped it in 2003.

Along with our charter schools and a widely-accepted home schooling option, Albertans have plenty of choice for providing an education for their children. We also have broad government support for private schools designed for children with disabilities. Plus, the outcomes of those choices are measured against broadly-accepted global standards.

Compared with the world, our system seems to be working for the vast majority of our children.

So why ask for as radical a change as the end to public funding for private schools?

Economic arguments should be ruled out; they are mostly too thin in the balance in any event. 

Parents of children in private schools pay full school taxes, but only get 70 per cent of the benefit. Tough. People with no children at all pay full education taxes. It's the price of civilization.

Parents of children in private schools "subsidize" the public system through both their tuition fees and the fact that public education would cost more if there were no private schools and every kid got full funding in a more universal public system. Both ways, that's also the price of choice.

Not all kids in private schools are rich and spoiled. A friend of mine taught for a time in an academy in Calgary, where Christmas gifts for teachers included expensive wines and NHL game tickets. In Grade 1. But the majority of private schools are religion- or language-based, not income-based. Again, it's the price of choice.

We should be more concerned with children from families who cannot afford any choices at all. And for children in families where parents don't seem to care much at all. How many private schools need breakfast programs, clothing exchanges, or in-school laundries? We have all of these in Red Deer public schools.

Our best investment is to raise the bottom, not to pad the top. Therefore, my vote is to allow support for parents' choices – and Alberta already does that in spades – and use whatever financial efficiencies we have to give more help to those who need help the most.

GST rebate won't cut it in Alberta

A sales tax in Alberta? Impossible! 

If there were an Alberta equivalent of the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, and if such a group contracted a pollster such as Leger to list the sources of Albertans' pride (like they did recently nationally), our repudiation of a sales tax would probably be near the top.

But if minds of a certain bent were to analyze Steve Lafleur's article in Monday's Advocate (Decentralize the federation) the case could be made we already have a sales tax in Alberta. It's called the GST. And we should be allowed to keep it here.

Lafleur is an analyst for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His thesis is that Canada would work a lot better – be more transparent, efficient and less corrupt – if the feds would simply transfer GST revenues to the provinces. With that, the federal government should cease all provincial transfers.

As well, he says the feds should divvy its fuel taxes among Canada's municipalities on a per capita basis, and likewise stop direct funding of municipal projects.

That way, he says, taxpayers would have a better idea of how their tax dollars flow, plus provinces and municipalities would be forced to be more efficient and honest stewards of their revenues.

But Lafleur's mind isn't quite bent enough to make this work for Alberta, or for Red Deer.

A fast crunching of the numbers shows Alberta would be worse off under the program suggested. The numbers for Red Deer need more study, but Lafleur's plan don't look very good here either.

The GST collects about $28.3 billion a year. That comes to about $823 per Canadian. Based on population, Alberta's share would be just under $3 billion a year. It could be more if the the feds remitted Alberta's portion of the GST collected, because Albertans have a higher average incomes and higher-than-average spending. To be fair, we should get it all, right?

Federal taxes on gas and diesel come to $5.3 billion a year. On a straight population basis, a math-challenged columnist finds Red Deer would get roughly $1.54 million a year from that. Does that match what the city currently gets for infrastructure, housing and (filtered through the province) social programs?

Without resources for a full study, I'd say if all Red Deer got per year in total federal grants was one-and-a-half million, there's your next election issue right there.

Currently, federal cash transfers to Alberta are about $3.8 billion, just a bit over $1000 per person. So Alberta would have to collect between $800 million to a billion a year to make up the difference.

The other provinces already do that and more, with their provincial sales taxes.

Hmmm. Is this where Lafleur was going with his thesis? Bent minds want to know.

Small change can move mountains

I very seldom wish I had a Facebook account – no, check that, I've never wished I had a Facebook account. And the recent announcement by Target Canada urging Canadians to use their Facebook page to make charitable donations isn't enough to change my mind.

But if you happen to be a Facebook client, you may wish to spend a little time to spend a little piece of Target's $1 million which they will donate according to choices you make from a list of selected charities on their page, or wall or whatever they call it in Facebook.

Apparently, Target's department of external relations spent months researching the right mix of partner charities to receive this million bucks. 

I surmise the charities had to be national in scope, but with enough local chapters that customers can designate donations to a place close to where they live. They also needed to cover areas with a broad level of public acceptance, but unique enough that the Target brand will stand out as a supporter. (For instance, an effort like Run for the Cure already has a great deal of national corporate backing.)

When you think about it, these choices aren't as easy as it sounds. And if you're investing in goodwill prior to perhaps 135 store openings in cities across Canada, a million dollars is a lot less than it sounds. So you've got to target your choices.

At any rate, after much deliberation and the consumption of sandwiches at meetings, Target aimed at the arts, education and literacy, and programs that benefit people on low incomes. For Target, I'll allow these are good choices, but I wouldn't be impressed (or get a Facebook account) until they upped the ante to $5 million at least.

ArtsSmarts, ArtStarts, First Book Canada, Pathways to Education, Food Banks Canada and a number of YMCAs made the list, and starting Tuesday, you can designate $100 a day to a local chapter of one of these on as many days as you wish, until Dec. 9 (or until the money runs out, which would be my bet).

You'll notice that not many of these have a chapter in Red Deer, although Target will open a store here. But  a benefit to any of the charities on their list is a benefit to us, in the big picture.

However, if you want to donate money that you'll never miss, in ways that could have real local impact, there are other options.

Load your pocket with a bit of the small change you keep in a dish on your bedside table, when you go out to shop for groceries. Red Deer Co-op, for instance, has change collection jars at their checkouts, listing a number of valuable local charities as beneficiaries. Other stores will have theirs as well.

Consider: there must be 50,000 grocery purchases made every day in Red Deer. If we could achieve just a nickel average donation for each of these, that comes to about $75,000 per month going to local charities, without the need for a costly fundraising campaign or an army of volunteers to make it work. 

Do you think that level of money might make a difference in the quality of life for a lot of people in our city? Just ask the charities involved.

And here's this: nobody would miss having the money.

The Salvation Army will soon be starting their annual Christmas Kettle campaign. Even if you're the kind of shopper who uses a plastic card for everything, keep some change in your pockets. Promise yourself that you will not pass a volunteer with a kettle, without adding even a little to it.

Everyone loves a generous corporate donor, but collectively, many people doing incredibly small acts of caring is how mountains get moved.

Small change, big impact. Just pick the right target.

The thin line between money and power

When a ruling party has been in power longer than the majority of its citizens have been alive, the line gets blurred between the proper roles of government, its partisan supporters, its party machinery and the bureaucracy that manages its services.

Nobody came out of the recent Alberta PC convention to make headlines saying the province needs to brings political fundraising laws into line with public expectations of fairness and openness. And why should they? These laws are mandated by government, not party policy.

But in Alberta, it's fair to ask: what's the difference?

The Wildrose opposition is making hay over recent revelations from CBC news, that premier Allison Redford's sister Lynn (who happens to be vice president of special projects for Alberta Health Services) inappropriately expensed up to $3,500 in donations to the PC party.

Good for them for doing so, but the behaviour of Alberta's political culture speaks to an awful lot more than $3,500 in cash, plus a few hours of political organizing on the company's (taxpayers') time. 

That occurred back in 2008, when political fundraising in Alberta was all but going down in ethical flames. All sorts of government-funded agencies were using tax grant money to "give back" to the party that had ruled the province for most people's living memory.

Colleges, universities, hospitals, school boards, municipalities – even the ATB – have since been found to have "erroneously" expensed partisan donations made by their officials.

Recent headlines of questionable donations by the family and businesses of Edmonton billionaire Daryl Katz are likewise only part of the picture.

The issue is Alberta's democratic deficit. 

People here have freedom to run for office and vote as they choose. But the rules governing how parties are financed, the way party leaders are chosen, and how elections are fought are skewed heavily toward those with power to grant favours and those with money to secure them.

Alberta is the only province in Canada with no spending limits on elections. Alberta allows the second-highest tax credit limit for political donations of all the provinces. There is no prohibition on corporate or union funding of political parties – and as we have seen, the donation limits seem more like guidelines than rules.

Only in Alberta is the position of chief electoral officer (the top policeman on watch against corrupt electoral practices) appointed by a partisan agent of the party in power.

Lorne Gibson held that position once. He fought for tighter limits on party fundraising and more transparency in how the money is spent. He was fired in 2009 by then-premier Ed Stelmach.

That was the low point. That was not too long after the premier sought to recoup his leadership campaign costs by selling face time in conjunction with a fundraising dinner. These dinners and breakfasts – the lifeblood of all parties – were attended by people on payrolls either fully or partly filled by tax dollars, and nobody will ever know how many expensive meals ended up with receipts given, which were expensed back at the government-funded office.

It was unethical, illegal – and far too often unquestioned.

And now we hear the premier's sister – with her six-figure government salary – felt entitled to political activism, with us paying the expenses.

It must be pointed out that Lynn Redford was a senior exec at the Calgary Health Region at the time her expense claims were routinely approved. When the regions were dissolved and melted into the current AHS, its new CEO Stephen Duckett put a sharp line on what government employees could do politically while on the clock.

He's history now, too, spending his severance in his native Australia.

Wildrose is not calling for a total revamp of the laws surrounding election fundraising – just a public investigation into alleged Tory wrongdoing.

We must remember they actually outpolled the Tories in that regard, raising $2.4 million in the last election, against $1.8 million for the Progressive Conservatives. That campaign was supposed to be a Wildrose upset.

Maybe that speaks to our political culture as well. In Alberta, who can tell?

Ralph Klein's legacy: Alberta today

Former premier Ralph Klein deserved his day of honour Tuesday. It is a shame his physical illness prevented him from participating in the ceremonies awarding him both an Order of Canada, and a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

"King Ralph" as we knew him,
was ever the "People's King."

Ralph loved nothing more than the adulation he received over his many years of public service, and I'm certain that had he been able to be at the event to participate fully, he would have taken it all in with a big, satisfied smile.

As it was, it was a kindness on the part of the federal government to move the ceremonies to Calgary, so that Colleen Klein could accept these honours on his behalf, without needing to be parted from her husband for an extended trip.

We've had two premiers in the long Tory dynasty since Klein stepped down, but his fiscal legacy and his contributions to our political culture continue to endure. In the same breath, the changes to Alberta that occurred under his long watch have made many of his policies and style of government quite unelectable today.

Klein was the man for his times, but times have changed. In fact Klein worked very hard to usher in those changes.

I'm not sure he recognized that while in office, and I'm pretty certain his core advisers didn't either. But the PC party under premier Alison Redford sure ain't Ralph's "Henry and Martha" Tories.

Voters today have much more culturally diverse names, and they come from parts of the world that likely wouldn't recognize a Ralph Klein, much less choose him to lead such a technologically advanced and dynamic place that Alberta is today.

Not recognizing the face of 21st Century Alberta is also the failing of the Alberta Wildrose Party, which is trying to assume the populist mantle that Klein wore.

Klein's greatest achievement was to re-establish the Alberta brand of economic progress and national political influence that was being eroded in the hard years immediately following Peter Lougheed. Klein put the swagger back in our step.

He did it by putting himself in front of the parade to regain control of our finances. He did it through austerity measures that are being forced way too late on other governments around the world now, two decades later. Whether Klein was prescient in that, or just plain lucky, it pays to be first.

There is a cost to that kind of prudence, which we are paying today after many years of postponed investment in infrastructure repairs and building. 

There is also a cost to Klein's imprudence in not aggressively building Alberta's savings account. It's almost heartbreaking to think about the billions that would be coming into our treasury today, if Klein would have chosen to simply pay down our mortgage in the orderly manner he first mandated, instead of plundering that account, so he could brag about being debt free in time for our provincial Centennial.

And therein lies the mistake of the Wildrose Party. Opposition leader Danielle Smith points to the $10 billion Alberta gets in energy revenue every year, and wonders how the government can't balance the books with that kind of windfall.

So do I. But had we built our savings through the 20 boom years under Klein, had we not not adopted Stockwell Day's idiotic flat income tax, had we not been too proud to think about even a one-per-cent provincial sales tax dedicated to infrastructure spending, we'd be making $10 billion a year today in interest payments from the Heritage Fund – probably even more.

Look out the window. We see the Alberta that we all built under Ralph Klein. For the good parts (and there are many) we need to be grateful. For the lessons learned – that's our responsibility going forward.

America needs Europe's dismal medicine

There's a reason we call economics the dismal science. We can't say it's an austere study, because "austerity" has a different meaning these days (aristocrats used to be austere; now it's the unemployed). So dismal it will have to be, and progressively more dismal as the globe marches toward America's fiscal cliff.

Or not. While Canadians were watching CFL playoff games on Sunday, Europe was saving itself from destruction – or at least giving it a significant delay. As midnight tolled through European time zones (and Edmonton Eskimos fans ended another disappointing season), new agreements were announced in Frankfurt that many believe will save the European union, save its currency, and be a lesson for American leaders hoping to find a parachute at their cliff's edge.

The Greek parliament also passed a budget that will raise taxes and cut spending, reducing its deficit by 13.5 billion Euros. Greece's "austerity" budget means the country can avoid default on 4.1 billion in debt that matures next week. 

Europe's central bank now has the power to buy pretty well unlimited amounts of bonds issued by its troubled economies, vastly reducing their costs of borrowing. Europe's Sunday agreements open what appears to be a year-long window of opportunity to work on its financial problems and avoid a costly breakup.

In other words, Europe will do what U.S. president Barak Obama wants to do, if Congress will just come along. 

Europe is raising taxes and cutting spending – exactly what U.S. financial institutions want it to. American money market funds poured themselves back into Euro bonds for the third straight month, a 16 per cent rise since September. For all I know, some of that money comes from my RSP.

But in America, raising taxes and cutting spending are considered bad medicine; that's the fiscal cliff everyone's talking about. They reduce the ability of rich people to spend freely, withhold government services from the poor and middle class, while driving up unemployment and driving investment down.

But in dismal economics, what medicine is ever good? 

Unemployment in Greece is 25 per cent, and Europe has a whole new social class: the NEET. A NEET is a person aged 15-29 who is Not in Education, Employment or Training. There are 14 million of them in Europe now. This is expected to get worse before it gets better.

But that's the point. As of this week, Europe expects to get better. America doesn't.

President Obama wants America to take its medicine. There will have to be tax hikes, sacred spending cows (the military?) will have to be bled. 

Why should an economy that has run short by a trillion dollars a year for 11 straight years not take the same medicine needed in Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Britain? The mixture needs to reflect the patient's needs, but the basic ingredients are the same.

The science is dismal, but it seems that worse-before-better still means that someday, you will will arrive at better.

Advice you give to yourself

Maclean's  came out this week with their annual ranking of Canadian universities. It must be a big seller, because it seems to me that they come out twice a year.

This time out, they ran a side feature asking some prominent Canadians for advice they would give to their own 18-year-old selves, now that they have the benefit of hindsight. Sort of a quick essay assignment, the kind that appeals to writers, news personalities and politicians (who formed the majority of respondents to this feature).

Our family has had at least one member – and some years, three – continuously in post-secondary for the last 15 years. I must have have imparted some wisdom somewhere along the line to our children, though looking back I can't remember what it might have been. Probably  something along the lines of "don't tell me when you've been partying too hard." You know, the important stuff.

Of my own university experience, the only advice I recall getting was from my dad who told me not to use bad language in my editorials in the student newspaper. Above that, we were on our own.

So after reading what the prominent Canadians had to say to themselves in Maclean's, I thought surely I would be qualified to advise myself for a reverse time capsule that could be sent to an 18-year-old me leaving the farm for the lights of Edmonton.

If the technology existed to send such a message, I surely hope I'd have the sense to read it and take it to heart. But I doubt it. Back then, I was having a lot of fun making friends, exploring ideas, and faking my way through those classes I thought I "needed" but didn't enjoy.

First off, I'd tell myself to drop linguistics, and go for the science-class-for-arts-students program designed for those of us who needed two science options to complete an Arts degree. Students called it "Jolly Rockets." Personal note: we have nothing to learn from linguistics.

Also, there must have been a more worthwhile French option than 18th Century French literature. Voltaire was a pretty neat guy, but he didn't help my French much. A history course, particularly a course in the history of political thought, plus an introductory course in philosophy and critical thought would serve you better, my young friend.

Then I'd give the big one (and this copies advice you'd read in the Maclean's article): pay attention, stupid, and keep up! You only get one chance at this kind of learning, and the experience is really, really expensive!

Newspaper work was fascinating, and was the basis for a whole lot of well-rounded learning, but a little less interviewing and a little more study would not have hurt at all. In the mid 1970s, stagflation and high unemployment ruled our economy, but I never doubted that I could walk into any newsroom and produce immediately. After all I'd already been doing it for years while a full-time (cough, cough) student.

And by all means, buy that 1965 Vauxhall Epic for $150, drive it through a January snowstorm to Red Deer, and land that job. Even though the pay was less than my honorarium at The Gateway, the employer had a lower circulation and press run than the university publication, and received less per line for advertising.

Coming here, and dragging my girlfriend with me to marry her, were the smartest moves I made in those years.

What advice would you give now, to your 18-year-old self? Send a short note to greg.neiman.blog@gmail.com, and I'll compile responses into a column. I'll try to negotiate some swag from the Advocate as a reward. After all, not all advice should be free.

Don't buy a bridge from misleading pollsters

There's more to the story than was reported in the Advocate Monday in a column by Matthew Johnston, president and CEO of Enquirica Research. The article Sending our money east is an accurate reporting of the company's poll based on the questions they asked, but I am skeptical of the poll's accuracy in its reporting of opinions of Albertans who are more fully informed

In short, both the poll and article attempt to convince us our federal government is taking Albertans' hard-earned incomes to build a bridge in Ontario that competes directly with a privately-owned bridge business. In Alberta, them's fightin' words.

But the premise is not quite true. 

This artist’s rendering provided by the Gov. Rick Snyder’s office
(via the Detroit News) shows the New International Trade Crossing
bridge and its location in southwest Detroit. 

The Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor Ont. and Detroit, Mich., was built in 1927 – with taxpayer money, of course. Many years later, when we all woke up to the fact that private enterprise can do everything better (including ownership of the world's busiest international trade nexus), the bridge came into the ownership of Matty Moroun.

That bridge carries a quarter of all Canada-U.S. trade. Not just trade in goods, but trade, period; $120 billion worth last year. It's a constant stream of heavy trucks paying tolls to Moroun, going both ways.

The builders of the bridge in the 1920s could not have envisioned the changes to occur on either end of the project. The route has no easy access to customs offices, and its approach runs through 16 traffic lights, straight through downtown Windsor.

In Red Deer, we don't even like the noise of our own transit buses. How would you like hundreds of diesel trucks an hour, 24/7, through our downtown?

Johnston's article points to a downturn in traffic on the bridge in past years, in tandem with a downturn in the auto industry. Coincidence? Try in tandem with traffic congestion at both ends on this aging chokepoint. By the way, long-term plans aim to ban heavy truck traffic through Detroit's downtown zone by 2020. (Wonder which citizen ratepayers group got that one going?)

Both Canada and the province of Ontario, plus the states of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, along with their major manufacturers and associated unions, back a proposal for a six-lane bridge 3.2 km west, away from the cities' downtown cores, direct freeway-to-freeway, with dedicated lanes for pre-screened traffic and quick access to customs offices.

Detroit's broke. So is Michigan. But cross-border trade is still expected to rise, despite the current U.S. economic downturn. Almost a quarter million jobs rely on this trade in Michigan alone, never mind the other states and in Canada.

The current bridge infrastructure cannot handle the traffic, and its current owner has proven, well, hard to work with.

So prime minister Stephen Harper told Michigan governor Rick Snyder, that we'll put up $550 million to build a new bridge, plus $1.5 billion for connecting roadwork on the Canadian side, if Michigan will waive the "buy American" rules and allow both Canadian and American labour and materials for the project. We're talking up to 15,000 construction jobs, plus opportunities to sell a whole lot of steelwork.

The government of Canada would collect tolls on the bridge to recover the  investment (putting us in direct competition with Moroun), and for all we can foresee, in due time a future clone of Harper will probably deed the bridge to a Canadian billionaire, to run it "better."

Hwy 63 to Ft. McMurray, which desperately needs a fast-tracked upgrade, is not connected to this bridge, despite what Johnston and the wording of his polling questions might have you believe.

The Huffington Post put up a poll of its own on Proposition Six, which is a question on Tuesday's presidential election ballot in Michigan. It proposes that no bridge or tunnel between the state and Canada should be considered without direct voter approval.

You can't participate in the Huffington Post poll until you first give an opinion, and then read the arguments for and against the proposed bridge project, and then vote again.

Canada's side (against the proposition) was argued by ambassador Gary Doer, the pro side being argued by Mickey Blashfield, director of the group called The People Should Decide.

When informed of the arguments, polling opposition to Proposition Six grew from 75 per cent to 82 per cent. Now, which poll do you trust more?