2013 starts with the individual

It's good to start the new year with an improvement in the weather, however slight. Somehow, it's easier to look forward to the turning of the calendar during a warming trend.



Especially when all this occurs during what we call the dead of winter.



Just think: wouldn't it have been nicer if New Year's coincided with the spring equinox? After all, since calendars are arbitrary constructs anyway, wouldn't it be better if we celebrated a new year that starts with the return of the sun, as opposed to two and a half more months of darkness and cold?


then again, who wants to worry about losing weight, getting fit or improving humanity when you can finally go outside without a parka?




But that's just me. Perhaps starting a new year in the middle of winter forces one to contemplate the near future in more personal terms. 



On the whole, 2013 is looking like it will be the kind of year when the positives are going to be personal, rather than economic or societal. With a world economy that can improve itself only modestly at best, and with a social fabric that's looking rather worn in western societies, maybe it is time people focussed on individual growth while we wait for the big picture to cycle round again.



Simply remaining civilized seems to be the major challenge here.



Learning about the insane shooting deaths in the U.S. over the Christmas season was agony. What sort of evil drives people to go into an elementary school and start shooting? Why would a person buy guns and ammunition for a clearly deranged neighbour, so he could set fire to his neighbourhood and kill the firemen who came to fight the fire?



Worse, why would someone in Alberta choose to use that as inspiration to threaten the same at a school in our province?



There is no good answer to any of that. All we can do is resolve to remain civil and rational in our own lives, while we keep watch over families and loved ones, without succumbing to nameless fears.



Maintaining ethics and integrity is another challenge for 2013.



There's not much we can do as individuals, while bureaucracies and people in power decide what to do as the chief of the Attawaspiskat First Nation starves herself on the doorstep of Parliament.



Elsewhere, violent revolutions have begun with similar acts (the Arab spring, for example).



But individual Canadians cannot hope to resolve injustices reaching generations back, which are as complex as the identity of the one, the culture of the many, and the machinery of government between.



What we can do is maintain justice in our own affairs, and insist on integrity from our leaders.



I believe that most people in Red Deer — if they had the power —would personally visit Chief Theresa Spence, and agree that a complete revision of our treaty relationship with First Nations is needed. She need not die to see that happen.



We would likely agree that the treaties signed so long ago were not fair, and were not kept. New strucutres need to be created, that maintain cultural dignity and right of self-governance for first nations, along with modern standards of democracy and individual responsibility.



Governments, bureaucracies and national representatives don't seem to act that way.



But while they learn how, we, on our own, can decide we will be civil to each other and pass along expectations that our leaders will do the same.



That would be a good start for 2013, don't you think?

High risks and a share of guilt

It's hard to read the reports relating to the inquiry into the murders that Robert Pickton committed on his farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C. over the course of many years, without feeling some measure of guilt.

Twenty poor and vulnerable women – prostitutes working Vancouver's seamy Downtown East Side – went missing over a period of more than a decade. For all anyone but serial killer Robert Pickton knows, that grisly toll could be even larger.

But, as the victims' families claimed and commissioner Wally Oppal confirmed, police consistently refused to take the disappearances seriously, and when they did investigate, their work was fraught with errors, bungled nearly from beginning to end.

"There was an institutional systemic bias against the women," Oppal told reporters after his report was released. "They were poor, they were aboriginal, they were drug addicted and they were not taken seriously."

But if the police work was uniformly shoddy, what's my measure of guilt in that?

Those of us who work or volunteer with agencies that serve the poor, the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill term where these women existed as a "high-risk lifestyle." (Full disclosure: my wife works for the Canadian Mental Health Association region in Red Deer; our daughters have worked summer jobs in the community CMHA serves in volunteer management, housing first services and with the local AIDS association. I'm a CMHA volunteer and fundraiser.)

We all know what "high-risk" means. There is generally no retirement age for sex trade workers, especially workers who have addiction problems. The vast majority either get out of the trade as quickly as they can, or they die in it.

So these women had already put themselves on a path to a severely shortened lifespan. What's my measure of guilt in that?

As I see it, Oppal's commission of inquiry, the police investigation which eventually grew massive, the hugely ornate and costly trial of Robert Pickton (taxpayers built him his own private high-security courtroom), the years of pleading by family members for some form of justice, these all came too late.

There is guilt enough to cover all corners here. But the part that concerns me is that these women came to the point where drug addiction and prostitution looked better to them than their lives did before they went onto the street.

Red Deer is lucky to receive the insights of people like Advocate  columnist Chris Salomons. Because of his articles, nobody should be able to claim they never knew how frequently broken family trust, neglect, abuse – and sometimes plainly stupid choices – lead people to take on high-risk lifestyles on the street.

What's my measure of guilt in that? It's that I know this evil situation exists. It's that many, many people know this situation exists and that we're a bit too comfortable allowing it to continue. Until it touches us personally.

Commissioner Wally Oppal challenged all his readers to "imagine how you would feel, put yourself in the shoes of the missing and murdered women and think how you would feel if you were dismissed, considered unworthy of attention by the majority of the people in your city."

The burden is that we can't pretend the mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, or the addicted are invisible. Or that many of the forces that put them there can be identified and help for them can be found. Once you know, you cannot refuse to act, or else that burden turns to your share of guilt.

Apocalypse Now, version MCCXVIII

Are you prepared for Doomsday? After all the Christmas preparation done in our house recently, if civilization as we know it ended Friday (as some fear it will), I figure we've got enough food and drink banked that we could climb out of the wreckage next spring somewhat overweight – probably with a hangover.

I cribbed this picture off the Internet;
sue me – if you survive.

Sadly though, we will have missed a long-standing family Christmas tradition of going as a group to see the latest Tolkein movie. Good thing we kept the books.

Personally, I'm somewhat disappointed with the lack of hysteria whipped up for this latest version of the end of all things. I blame the media. Definitely not keeping the pace.

I kind of enjoyed the madness around Y2K, not least because it provided employment for a family member, who got a lot of programming work for companies worried that they might not be able to bill their customers in the new millennium. But also because "obsolete" computers became really cheap. It was such a good deal, I've been working on obsolete equipment ever since.

In preparation for what might become my final column, I searched online for a complete tally of end-of-the-world predictions. The list proved so long as defy mockery. I mean, what could the ancient Mayans know that the early Romans, Isaac Newton and many others, clear up to the Bible Study Movement, several (still operating) Christian churches, multimillionaire evangelical preachers, Charles Manson, and the Amazing Criswell did not know?

The Large Hadron Collider did not turn Earth into a singularity, so even humanity's hubris in tinkering with the laws of physics failed us here. But there's still a statistical chance that an asteroid is out there, with your name on it.

History strongly indicates that people in general just need something to fear. Something big. Something far outside of our puny powers to control.

So what could we fear in Red Deer? 

Well, the Dickson Dam could suddenly and catastrophically fail, sending a lake's worth of water rushing downstream, backing up severely at the narrow Canyon area, and flooding the city. I happen to live on the floodplain, and benefit from the centuries of intermittent flooding that have built my garden topsoil to a fertile depth beyond three meters. It could happen again, I guess.

But that's too unlikely. We need something more plausible.

I know: a cabal of extreme conservatives will take over city council at the next municipal election, and cancel all capital projects that involve debt for 14 years. This has happened here before.

Infrastructure will slowly decay as frozen tax rates do not allow for adequate upkeep, much less growth in the next boom cycle. The streets will be in gridlock, unable to handle the rise in population.

And me, on my obsolete bike, will be smiling.

Teen bullies a problem; adult bullies are worse

The tragic death of Amanda Todd, tormented into suicide by online bullying, galvanized Canada into confronting the dark world faced by many of our country's young people. It's sad that a final, desperate cry for help like this is needed to bring widespread attention to the way that people treat each other.

Peterborough's Miss January,
in a photo from the Toronto Star.
Granny got run over by
a smear campaign.

In today's digital world, casual and anonymous hatred passes for conversation. Violent and extreme language, delivered instantly for all to see, passes for entertainment. 

It's reflective of the invention of the printing press; it's first widespread uses were not to disseminate the Bible, as we are often told, but to wage the vicious propaganda war that came with the Protestant Reformation.

It took many years, and a lot of legal reforms for a widely literate society to understand the power of the written word and to accept that freedom of expression carries responsibility and has limits. Perhaps that's what's missing in the Lord-of-the-Flies universe of online media.

But it isn't just youth with too little guidance and too much cell phone power who make up Canada's bullying population. Our own city council and staff are quite aware that adults will use the cloak of anonymity to spew violent and hateful language, which would bring them to shame, if not arrest, if they said the same things in public, or signed a printed document with the same words.

In Peterborough, Ont., a group of 11 women, including a 98-year-old lifetime church member, became targets of both public and anonymous bullying, for their attempt to raise some money for a duplex purchase by a local non-profit for homeless people.

What made them targets? They posed for a hockey-based calendar on sale for $20. The OHL's Peterborough Petes, and hockey legend Eddie Shack were backers.

The photos are the usual tasteful-but-slightly-bare fare that has adorned community fundraiser calendars around the world, since the 2003 movie Calendar Girls made these projects popular.

But since 2003, society seems to have grown a bit less accepting and much more spiteful. These women were attacked in public, online, and even from church pulpits as purveyors of pornography, elder abuse and the objectification of women.

Their neighbours felt entitled to engage what is described as a "vitriolic" smear campaign. 

These are not teens, taunting each other with misspelled non-gramatical insults in text messages. These are grown people who consider themselves good citizens, and who do not see their incivility as any crime whatsoever. 

For them, bullying is totally acceptable behaviour – when they wish to engage in it.

So why should Canada get upset that young people bully each other, when upstanding adults feel entirely free to attack people they don't like, freely, anonymously, viciously and at will?

Check Question Period in the House of Commons. Read – if you can still find them – the social media exchanges and advertising in the last U.S. elections. Phillip Melancthon, Martin Luther's collaborator and propagandist, called the Pope the Antichrist (and worse), but he had nothing on the people thumbing their 140-character anonymous slurs in today's social media.

In the small town of Hanna, long before the adult world knew of Amanda Todd's private suffering, local RCMP approached town council about proposing a bullying bylaw. Just as the legal world took a long time to catch up to moveable type technology, the Criminal Code offers police too little means to deal with harassment effectively.

So mayor Mark Nikota and council passed a bylaw calling for fines up to $1,000 for bullying. You can even get a $100 ticket for being a bystander, if you do not speak up when you see bullies at work.

The local school board, under provincial law that supersedes local bylaws, is onside to extend the bylaw's intent.

After what happened when Red Deer's bike lane pilot project was installed this summer, maybe our city council should consider something similar. Adult ratepayers can be pretty spiteful, when they think they can get away with it.

Fiscal cliff looks more like a chimera

Raise taxes, cut spending. In all the world, that's the prescription the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the greater powers of the European Union have for all countries whose out-of-control debt is threatening the global economy.

That's the medicine prescribed for Greece, Spain and Portugal. And when the leader of Italy's unelected technocrat government, Mario Monti, decided to step down over the weekend, his country's stock index took an immediate hit.

Monti was specifically placed in office to raise taxes and cut spending in 2011, when Italy was poised on the verge of a Greece-like economic meltdown. As directed, he raised taxes and cut spending, and despite the pain inflicted on the Italian middle class, he's widely seen as the county's saviour.

So, if raising taxes and cutting spending is called good (if bitter) medicine in all the world, why is it called a fiscal cliff in the United States? Why is prudent government something to be feared in what is still the world's largest and most influential economy?

Here in Red Deer, why should we be afraid that America might go over that cliff? Because they won't buy as much of our oil and gas? That doesn't seem likely. Because they won't buy our manufactured goods? We already buy far more of these things from the U.S. than they buy from us, so a drop in these exports should hardly be called a fiscal cliff in Canada.

I make no claims to understanding that disconnect. In fact, I wish somebody could make a clear explanation as to why raising taxes and cutting spending in America is bad, where everywhere else on the planet it's the basis of qualifying for economic bailouts.

The reasoning can't be completely blamed on America's high debt-to-GDP rating. According to IMF figures, it's 103 per cent. That rate for Greece is 161 per cent. Italy, where the tax-and-cut turnaround has begun, is at 123 per cent. Spain (a troubled economy, by most reports) has a debt-to-GDP ratio of only 68 per cent, which is far less than strong-economy Canada's 85 per cent. France, at 86 per cent, is said to be in the danger zone, while Britain, at 82 per cent is said to be close to some serious trouble.

No strong trend indicators there.

Pundits are telling us that if America puts a surtax on high incomes, and cuts program spending (primarily in the military, but also in health care reforms), the result will be like taking everyone's spending allowance away. The rich won't buy stuff (as if), the middle class will have less (what else is new?) and the poor will have less of a safety net (America? Safety net?).

And there will be another recession.

I suppose the pundits do know what they're saying, but nobody has explained the alternative. Debts have to be paid, governments can't run from reality . . . or they must eventually run over a cliff.

Better sooner than later, I say. Until we get better information, it seems to me that America faces a chimera, not a fiscal cliff. We should worry more that president Barak Obama, Congress and the Senate patch together some sort of delay tactic, rather than face their problems head on.

America should not be above taking its medicine. Neither should Canada, when we need it.

Value of citizenship: not measured on TV

If I read the news report correctly, TV production company Force Four would put something like $400 in a bank account for me, if Red Deer were to be chosen as its venue to shoot their reality show Axe the Tax.

That represents eight weeks of my municipal taxes, more or less. The company would then film me, paying as I went about my socialist life, over a course of eight weeks. 

A small fee for the use of the streets to ride my bike to work (or to drive when the weather is really bad), or to do my shopping. A little more every time I took a shower or flushed the loo. A point here and there whenever I went to the library, a bit more on top of the entry fee for my morning swim.

The cost of a stroll on our trail network? So little, that if I saw the change on the street, I probably wouldn't stoop to pick it up (and I'm a notorious cheapskate).

For the right to call police and complain about a neighbourhood drug house, I would pay just about anything. I already know what happens in some towns in the U.S. when people don't pay their voluntary fire protection fees. Their house burns to the ground, while the firemen hose down the buildings owned by the socialists next door, to keep the capitalist fire from spreading.

In all, it might be interesting for other people to find out if I get $200 a month value for the right to live in Red Deer. But for myself, I already know. (It's why I haven't left town).

As far as value for services goes at any level of government in Canada, municipal taxes are pretty well the best deal you can get anywhere.

That must be why Penhold mayor Dennis Cooper is so sanguine about a proposal that his town be chosen for this social experiment-cum-TV entertainment project. If he wasn't as convinced as I am that municipal government is simply the most efficient means of delivering collective services in a democracy, then the stress of his job just wouldn't be worth the pay.

I wonder what portion would be taken from every Penhold resident's "bank account" for a town meeting at the Penhold Multiplex. In fact, I wonder if Force Four paid anything at all to use the centre for their meeting Tuesday. Do they think multiplexes grow on trees?

That, of course, is the shortcoming of an eight-week experiment of this type. Most of the benefits of living in Red Deer that I mentioned at the beginning of this article involve long-term infrastructure investments.

People were outraged, yes, outraged, at the cost, the waste, the wanton profligacy of building Red Deer's Collicutt Centre. Today, it's a source of community pride – and too small at that.

That's the easiest, most obvious of examples. What I don't see inside my $200 a month is the dedication, education and expertise of the staff who make my city work, even if the snow does get too deep on some city streets. 

Engineers, planners, clerks, bylaw officers, parks personnel, transit workers, librarians and more, these people are where the best value is achieved for my taxes. Yet these are the very people that tax complainers devalue and disparage whenever the cost of running a municipality gets discussed. 

The total dollar values are indeed high, but think about how great a deal this all works out to, for $200 a month (in my case). Even that ultimate evil – bike lanes – cost each household less this year than a ticket to Life of Pi, with popcorn and a soft drink. What's the value of safe passage to work, even if it's only used when the weather is better than it is today?

The shortcoming of this experiment is that it cannot take a full measure of the value we get for our taxes. If some people don't use certain services (and therefore don't pay) during this experiment, should these services therefore not exist, or be priced out of reach of the people who need them?

There is a value beyond mere taxes in a community where people take care of their neighbours. TV shows don't measure that. So count me out of any experiments like Axe the Tax.  You can keep the change.

Gravy trains and public suspicions

There's a balance, an ongoing conversation between people who report the news, and those who read and receive it. When I started in this business about 40 years ago, exchanges on issues occurred at the speed of Canada Post and the interval of publication.

In some ways, it still does. I appreciate the long-term rejoinders in monthly publications like The Walrus or weekly newsmagazines. Even the more rapid give-and-take that occurs in your local daily gives some time for thought, while histories that develop in conversations – all duly recorded – can be illuminating.

But in this electronic age, instant reactions to events as they are revealed become part of the events themselves. Even when the story is years old.

Just ask the Alberta premier. When old political skeletons are revealed, their new life is not in the revelation, but in how people react. There is no evidence of direct plotting by Alison Redford to do unethical party fundraising, or to unethically direct lucrative contracts to firms with whom she has personal ties. But news that unethical donations have been made in the past, or that personal ties exist, gives stories about these things a decidedly hot glow. 

Or consider the mayors of certain Quebec cities, where years-old revelations of shady payments for construction contracts are coming to light. The story is one thing, the instant online reactions are a story unto themselves.

The reaction to the news in fact becomes bigger than the news itself, because the conversations affect the ways many people over a wide area make decisions. These decisions have consequences, far beyond the outcomes of the original events.

Here's a good recent example. An investigation by CBC reporters discovered that two years ago, CN Rail formed a "mystery train" that shuttled back and forth between Sarnia and Port Huron, Mich. The train, loaded with about $25 million worth of biodiesel, went back and forth across the border (a trip of about three km) numerous times, clearing customs both ways, without ever being unloaded. The shipping bill paid to CN was about $2.6 million.

The practice seemed common enough for CN administrators to feel confident sending emails ordering staff to ensure these trips went fast and smooth. Move the train, do the paperwork, move the train back, repeat as quickly as possible.

The American companies listed as customers were HeroBX and Northern Biodiesel. CBC says CN records show the Canadian company that arranged the deal is Bioversal Trading Inc. Bioversal is being investigated by the Canada Border Services Agency on allegations it made false statements to avoid shipping duties in Romania and Italy.

That's pretty well all we really know about this.

But the replies to the story say a whole lot more. People – whose identities are not revealed – claim (in the online discussion that follows the CBC story on its web site) that they have worked in the transportation industry. Shady stuff like this happens all the time, they say. 

Fuel is trucked from Alberta to Montana, unloaded, and then reloaded and trucked back. Somebody gets a tax-paid incentive to do so. 

Often, we are told, barges shuttle product back and forth, either to keep inventory in transit (and off the books), or to collect export incentives – both ways. 

The shippers are told to shut up and drive. Which they do, because their companies have contracts to ship stuff around, not ask difficult questions.

Well, as you can imagine, difficult questions are now being asked everywhere. 

What's the real purpose of government incentives to make green fuels? Is anyone monitoring where the product is actually going, and whether the tax incentives are achieving anything? How much phantom product is just running around on gravy trains and on truck fleets for the purposes of collecting export incentives, with no benefit to taxpayers?

All this on the basis of allegations from people who don't even give us their names.

As far as the news goes, we just don't know the facts yet. But in the comment section, it's a hurricane of malfeasance by corporations and governments on both sides of the Canada/U.S.border.

How do you think this will affect decisions the next time a government committee suggests it might be a good idea to use tax money to subsidize any kind of export program?

We need to make decisions based on facts, not nameless allegations. More corporate and government secrecy will not solve this discrepancy. Just ask the premier of Alberta.