We need less province, more city, in our power structure

A discussion of Red Deer's budget is a pretty dismal topic to start the New Year. So let's talk about Edmonton's and Calgary's budgets instead.

The combined populations of Edmonton and Calgary are greater than all of Canada's provinces and territories, except Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

Depopulate Calgary, and all of Nova Scotia, or New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador or Prince Edward Island would fit inside — with room left to include everyone from the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut.

More than eighty per cent of Alberta lives in urban areas, which also happen to be Canada's fastest-growing population centres.

That creates huge planning and budget headaches for the mayors and councils of our cities — something our own mayor and council can surely appreciate.

No matter how much the federal and provincial governments like to remind us of the valuable services we taxpayers get from the 30-40 per cent of our total annual income that we send them, almost all the services we rely on day-to-day are provided by our cities.

Yet, beyond the handouts strictly controlled by the provincial government, our cities rely on the worst conceivable method of revenue gathering: property taxes. They also get revenue from business taxes, of course, but it is property tax rates that end up creating the bottom line of every city and town's local budget.

Not to mention, the most grief for locally-elected officials.

Other than your own personal comfort and security, your home provides no added value to the economy at large. A few people (like me) earn a few dollars working out of their homes, but that contribution is immeasurably small (especially mine).

The resale value of your home adds nothing to the economy, so why tax it? It is only cultural inertia and laziness on the part of federal and provincial governments that keeps the system as it is.

The mayors who must budget for two of Canada's largest and fastest-growing population zones say they want power to generate city revenue out of the economic activity, not land value, of their economies.

Predictably, the province is not overwhelmingly behind them.

Premier Alison Redford and Doug Griffiths, her former minister of municipal affairs, were dead against Edmonton and Calgary gaining additional tax powers in a new set of charters. Especially if it meant the province got less revenue.

They both sang the common refrain: “there's only one taxpayer.” They have that taxpayer solidly chained to themselves, and they had no intention of sharing.

With the recent instalment of Ken Hughes as the new minister, Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi and Edmonton mayor Don Iveson see an opportunity to re-start talks on a charter idea that had been sitting idle since 2012.

While Griffiths said new tax powers were off the table, Nenshi scoffed that they were always on. You can't simply say an idea doesn't exist, just because you're the provincial minister. Hughes sees that light, and says he's willing to at least talk about the idea.

Redford says that if Edmonton and Calgary got any new tax powers, any revenues raised would be deducted from the Municipal Sustainability Initiative grants the cities receive. Last year, Calgary got $254 million and Edmonton got $170 million.

Don't you feel so protected by that? Of course, there is no mention at all that the province would offer any tax relief at all to anyone, to offset the revenues that would no longer be sent to the major cities in MSI grants.

See the dichotomy? Taxpayers in Edmonton and Calgary certainly would.

Danielle Smith of the Wildrose opposition says that transit, homelessness and traffic issues will require extra revenue for our cities to pay for them. The pressures of rapid growth are unassailable; you can't just close your doors to newcomers.

Smith doesn't know how or where an agreement for that would arrive. I do. It arrives from the province and feds taking less, because they are doing less.

But as you can surely appreciate, there's an idea that's off the table.

Cities do all the heavy lifting for the daily life of this nation. Roads, power, sewers, water, safety, law enforcement — the provision of our daily bread — all are made available where the people live.

When Canada was founded, that was done on farms. Today, it is in cities.

Taxing property value is a quagmire of willful ignorance. We need less province, more city, in the power structure of this nation — with a revenue system to match it.

Laws should protect people, not endanger them

A few years back, when the horrific crimes of Robert Pickton were still top of mind, I was on my way downtown for a meeting at a city non-profit. I chanced to arrive just as one of the agency outreach workers was “calming down” after a verbal altercation with a known user of prostitutes.

If you can call it that. The engagement was pretty one-sided.

I was told this particular purchaser of sex liked his girls young, below the legal age of consent. He had the additional poor judgement to park his pickup right in front of the outreach worker's offices.

He was more or less forced to sit there stone-faced in his truck, staring straight ahead, while the worker gave him a loud, public and prolonged cussing-out.

As far as I have ever seen, that's about the extent of enforcement of Canada's laws governing prostitution, and the protection of the vulnerable women who work the sex trade.

I realize both police and helping agencies do much better than that, but just as the sex trade operates well out of public view, so do the forces that seek to regulate it, and mitigate its harm. And for all most of us know, a public cussing-out is about as effective as any of it.

Justice minister Peter MacKay and heritage minister Shelley Glover have been on the front lines in the past few days, to explain first reactions to the Supreme Court of Canada's striking down of three major planks in federal law meant to control prostitution.

Both were eager to point out their top concern was for the victims of the selling of sex, the prostitutes themselves. They are going to work diligently, etc., etc., to ensure Canada's women are protected from the predators who rule the sex trade, the pimps, the johns and all the parasites who profit from selling women's bodies for sexual pleasure.

The Supreme Court gave the government a year to do exactly that.

Yet the laws struck down were the very ones that make working the streets so exceedingly dangerous.

The ruling, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, specifically mentions that in Vancouver, while Robert Pickton was murdering hookers and feeding their bodies to pigs, it was illegal for the women to seek shelter while plying their trade.

It was illegal to have a driver or bodyguard to help assess the safety of their clients. It was illegal for them to have a safe bedroom to work from, where someone else could screen the men who arrived with their money.

It was illegal even to have a financial adviser to help them build enough security to leave the business. Taken far enough, even their local grocer could be said to be profiting from the avails of prostitution.

The organizations that have the government's ear on this issue want to criminalize the sex trade altogether, thus driving it even deeper underground into darker, more dangerous territory.

Moreover, Parliament's own research finds that the laws themselves are rarely enforced, and when they are, they are enforced badly.

A parliamentary committee reported that 92 per cent of all people charged with communicating for the purposes of prostitution were female. Of the women charged, 68 per cent were convicted.

Of the tiny minority of males charged, 30 per cent were convicted.

And you thought it took two to communicate, right?

The image of the prostitute as a victim has a lot of basis in fact. Studies by both the government and by academics point out that most sex trade workers come into the business very young. Many start out as young as 14 — to the delight of the pervert in the pickup downtown.

They have as much as 40 times higher mortality rate than the national average. A high percentage attempt suicide.

A high proportion of girls who become prostitutes were abused as children. In Canada, aboriginal women are represented far above their proportion of the population.

And the laws dictate they should face a much higher risk of violence.

But the most sordid face of the trade most of us see is only a small part of the business. There are far more sex trade workers in Red Deer than the women who look at us a little too closely downtown.

Most prostitution in Canada's larger cities occurs in hotel rooms, managed by (necessarily) discrete operators who do exactly what the law now prohibits — they protect their workers.

That's better than what the Tory party plans to do. Last month, at their policy convention in Calgary, the party passed a resolution to develop a “Canada-specific” plan on prostitution. They specifically seek to criminalize the purchase of sex as well as criminalizing any third party earning money from the sale of sex.

If MacKay and Glover are as concerned for the women in the sex trade as they say they are, and want to work to protect them, they're starting out at the bottom of a very steep hill.

Do Canadians need to be forced to save for retirement?

As a worker earning a paycheque, do you need to be forced to save for your retirement? As an employer, do you need to be forced to contribute to the retirement plans of your workers?

In Canada, the answers seem to be yes, and yes.

If you accept that, the reqirement then is to find the most efficient and reliable means to achieve that.

Bottom line, in Canada, the most reliable and efficient means to ensure everyone has a “savings account” on which to live when they get too old to work is the Canada Pension Plan.

The CPP beats private RSPs in that they have far lower fees, and don't suffer a loss of benefits during economic downturns. And since all workers (and their employers) must contribute, everyone has something in the kitty for their old age.

The problem with this is that the kitty only pays an average of about $7,000 per year per retiree, with a minority of workers receiving the maximum $12,150. Not much of a kitty, is it?

There is, of course Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which bring that up to about $16,000 in total. The poverty rate for seniors has been dropping for a long time, but there are still many older Canadians living on $16,000 a year.

In order to save yourself from this, you need to save money while you work.

How much do you need to save? CARP (formerly known as the Canadian Association of Retired Persons) suggests you need about half a million bucks saved to provide a decent living after you retire. The sources include your account with CPP, RSP and other savings, but that seems to be the standard.

How many Canadians are on track to have that accomplished by the time they plan to stop going to work every day? Not nearly enough to have policy wonks worried about the future stability of the nation.

So that's why the provincial premiers wanted the federal government to boost CPP benefits, over time. They're not worried about the boomer generation, as much as they are about today's 20- and 30-somethings.

Far too many of these Canadians are up to their eyes in debt, and don't have the employment prospects early on in their careers to begin amassing $500,000 in retirement funds on their own.

Idelologically, the feds don't like coerced savings and national benefit plans. As we've seen this week, some of them don't even like helping to feed their neighbour's hungry kids.

In their world, you're better off on your own.

But in the real world, most people don't have much regard for the future.

At age 20, when a plan to amass $500,000 in lifetime savings is the easiest, retirement is just a theoreticall horizon. At age 30, there's still time for a reasonably painless plan, but kids, a mortgage, car loans, student loans, credit card debt and vacations all come first.

At 40, you'd better get it going. Seriously. But seriously, who changes their financial habits at 40?

And at 50-plus, two or three major economic downturn cycles later, your RSP( if you have one) looks pretty ordinary. Voluntary retirement savings plans end up quite a bit less exotic than the photos on the RSP rep's brochures.

Ideology be damned. It takes more discipline (and financial acumen) than most people have to look 30 or 40 years down the road and voluntarily save for their retirement. That's even when the tax code provides you a return up to 40 per cent in your first year of RSP investment, dollar-for-dollar, in tax refunds.

If fear of the future won't induce Canadian workers to save for their retirement, and even a 100-per-cent tax writeoff incentive for RSP contributions doesn't work, what's left?

Outside of Alberta, provincial leaders recognize that federal ideology needs to include a higher degree of forced savings. And the Canadian Pension Plan is about the world's best vehicle to get it.

Not much of a boost is needed, if you start early in a worker's lifetime. Certainly not enough for the phony doomsday scenario federal finance minister Jim Flaherty paints — on the days when he's not saying the Canadian economy is strong.

Flaherty says he won't commit to a CPP reform plan that's farther down the road that he might expect a Tory government to survive. In fact, he won't even be alive when any CPP reform benefits would accrue.

But ideology is a terrible reason to do nothing, when doing nothing will lead to a very bad outcome for a large group of Canadians.

For a young worker, if your government won't force you to save, you'd better learn far more financial discipline than your elders ever had.

Sometimes it's best not to follow the trend

About the only thing we can say with confidence about media trends, is that they occur faster than most of us can keep up with them. “Everybody” always seems to be about two years ahead of us.

In the world of television and radio, even the federal regulators acknowledge they cannot keep up, as higher and higher numbers of Canadians (currently reported to be more than 25 per cent of us) unplug from traditional suppliers of content, and go online.

Peter Menzies, a vice chairman of the CRTC told an audience that his organization “can no longer define ourselves as gatekeepers in a world in which there may be no gates.”

No gates? Peter, you are years behind. It's not that there are no gates to keep, but too many to keep track.

If Menzies doesn't like that observation, he may have grounds for reply. On the contrary, he might say, it's not that there are now infinite gates through which Canadians can access TV and radio content, it's that almost all of them are owned and controlled by only  three massive media conglomerates.

In the past few days, the CRTC closed another independent gate to TV and radio content, by allowing Bell Media to purchase Astral Media, in a merger worth $2.8 billion.

BCE, the 2,000-kg gorilla on the Canadian media scene, also owns Bell Mobility (among many other assets). Bell Mobility offers smartphone data plan users some 43 channels of TV content — 12 of which are owned by Bell. That includes CTV, TSN, Much Music, Movie Network, Family Channel, Teletoon and others.

In Canada, it appears that the way to adapt to the rapid rate at which people are unplugging from cable and satellite plans, is to also own the content that customers pay to access though other means.

Over the weekend, one customer decided Canada's media content and distribution system needs a shakeup.

Benjamin Klass, a grad student at the University of Manitoba, filed a formal complaint to the CRTC, that Bell was using its vast presence in the industry to unfair advantage.

Smartphone and tablet owners pay a monthly data plan, so they can watch their favourite shows online, anytime, any place.

They pay the same way some of us still pay for long distance phone calls — by the minute. Except they're not charged by the minute, but by the volume of data they download.

Subscribers pre-pay for a set amount of data per month, and they watch movies and TV in their bedrooms and at the mall — and hope they don't exceed their data limit, which can be quite costly.

Most customers have no idea what their Gigabyte limit is, or how fast they use it — until after they get their bills.

That's a side issue. Klass asserts Bell is charging people an 800-per-cent markup on downloads, when the content is not from a Bell-owned channel.

If you have the Bell Mobile TV app on your smartphone, you get an extra 5 Gb of data to download — from mostly Bell channels, naturally. If you go over your limit, you are charged $3 per additional hour. A customer without the app will pay $51 for that much content, over and above their monthly plan limit (which most customers don't track very closely at all).

Klass says that's unfair use of Bell's overwhelming presence in the industry. Taken to its logical end, customers' choices will soon be to buy Bell data plans and watch Bell content exclusively, or pay through the nose.

Bell, Shaw and Telus already hold more than 90 per cent of the market. That whole gamut includes internet access, phone access, TV content and online radio content.

Streaming audio and video was supposed to open infinite gates to a universe of choices for people. In many ways they have.

But the system runs on money. The digital revolution cost the music industry billions. In 1999, we are told global music sales were around $38 billion. With the onset of options like iTunes (and piracy) that figure fell to something like $16 billion a year today.

The wider industry is determined not to let that happen to them. So a few giant players have vertically integrated. They own the TV shows, the networks that air them, plus the cable and satellite systems that distribute them, as well as the online alternatives to see them.

What gates are left for the CRTC to keep? They can't even enforce Canadian content rules any longer.

Canadians who unplugged from what they thought were oppressive cable plans will have fewer choices, not more. It will be the restrictive (and increasingly exclusive) plans offered by the Big Three, or pay through the nose for every byte of data.

Those of us who fell behind the media trends will miss out on some good content, while saving money to buy the services of a niche provider that will someday find a way around this insanity.

There's peace in the centre, if you will look there

It's not often I find myself in agreement with the opinionaters and columnists in Maclean's. I'm more often likely to tell myself: “OK, that's it. I'm definitely not going to renew my subscription. And this time, I mean it.”

Of course, as you can see, I don't. Mean it, that is.

What keeps a person on the subscription list, when he is easily riled by intemperate notions expressed in print, are the moments when you find an insight that is true to its time.

This week, a magazine that normally seems out to provoke its readers more than to inform them issued two calls for social peace in Canada. The spirit of Christmas must reach deep, even into the most secular editor's mind.

The opening editorial titled: The partisan problem is spreading bemoans the decay of public speech on social issues. Elected leaders — and the people who support them — are too quick to race to the ethical bottom in their interaction with the opposition.

Witness Wednesday's report in which Toronto's mayor-in-name-only Rob Ford obliquely suggested a Toronto Star reporter might be a pedophile.

Really? This is what passes for public discourse in the highest offices of democracy?

Well, and at the lowest, too. If you're one of those modern types who reads the comments underneath online articles, you'll find no shortage of far less oblique references made by people who ought to be very thankful they are nameless.

That leads to columnist Emma Teitel's piece: The thin line between love and hate clicks.

Teitel's thesis is that it's too easy for online conversations to become so extreme they are no longer helpful to anyone. Absent of actual human contact, and often provoked by anonymous trolls, people find it too easy express rage that they would suppress in a more rational environment.

Sometimes, there is unmitigated joy (I'm thinking of dancing kittens here). But far more often, according to the data miners, people prefer to jump on the Hate button — and then spread the very ideas that anger them to all their friends, instantly.

That's how trolls make their living. More eyes, more clicks, more profit.

Teitel's conclusion is that these meaningless exchanges make people lazy and boring, which is true enough on its own.

But there's another facet to this idea that's not expressed here: political parties have discovered that lazy and boring is really profitable.

The race to the ethical bottom that online exchanges make so easy is a treasure trove to party bagmen. Ardent haters easily become reliable donors.

In Canada, where political donations are not considered free speech (and therefore can be severely limited), you need a lot of donors to achieve and keep power.

Ordinarily, you might think restricting the dollar value of allowable donations would force party policies toward the middle, where most of the voters reside. But the reality has become just the opposite.

You need to keep that hate for the other guy flowing, because the data miners have discovered that's the easiest route to getting the millions of dollars parties need, coming in 20 or 50 bucks at a time.

Thus the incentive to be extreme in both language and policy comes from the top, so that it can echo in the bottom.

If Rob Ford insinuates that a reporter is a pedophile, there will no doubt be hard-core members of Ford Nation who will send his campaign some money as a result.

If enough people (like me, I suppose) repeat the notion, well, the remark spreads to more people elsewhere, some of whom will get mad enough to write a cheque to somebody's campaign.

There is a lot more peace in the centre, where most of the good ideas can be found. But also a lot less money.

Maclean's is rightly disturbed by the dual trends of anonymous online extremism and the feral name-calling and outright lying that goes on when political organizations engage their opponents. It disturbs me, too. So for now, I guess I'll keep my subscription.

But there comes a point where people will take Teitel's advice, and instead of jumping on the Hate button, they'll just disengage. Let the trolls rule the kingdom of the trolls.

When you look at the declining status of political leadership and the decline in voter turnout, one can only hope that a leader for the centre can peacefully emerge.

It's time to listen to judges on crime policy

If repeated Supreme Court challenges are not enough to dissuade the federal government from its largely useless campaign to put more Canadians in prison for longer and longer periods of time, what will?

Canada's dropping crime rate hasn't done it; that's been a trend for longer than the Harper Conservatives have been in government. On a per capita basis, there's less crime for the government to get tough against now than has been the case for decades.

Nor does the stupendous cost of its prison program, which government sources recognize could reach $10 billion a year by 2015.

Nor has it been the human toll of warehousing thousands of what one judge calls “broken souls” in segregation units. Up to 10 per cent of men and as many at 30 per cent of women who are sent to prison arrive there with a mental illness that makes them unfit to live in the general prison population.

Figures that Correctional Services must work with tell us that as many as 35 per cent of inmates in federal penitentiaries have mental impairments that require treatment. This includes people with serious untreated addictions, and/or brain injuries that affect behaviour, as well as people dealing with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or fetal alcohol syndrome.

Stats Canada says that even with a new $600-million investment for special treatment beds in prisons, about a third of inmates don't get sufficient treatment to actually help them — or don't get any at all.

So if Charter of Rights challenges, an exploding cost to taxpayers, a dropping crime rate and the mounting evidence of lives damaged by their policies — if none of this works to convince the Tories to change their minds on its prison policy, what will?

Well, we'll have to see if the actions of individual judges might.

Court justices, already grating under new laws requiring long minimum sentences for crimes that don't often deserve them, are beginning to rebel.

One of the regulations that arrived off the get-tough omnibus requires that when a convict is sentenced to pay a fine in a federal court, there must be a 30 per cent surcharge to go toward services for victims of crime. When there is no fine, there is a flat fee to be paid of either $100, or in serious cases, $200, on top of other penalties.

But as Ontario Court Justice Colin Westmore told the Globe and Mail over the weekend, the surcharge becomes absurd for perhaps half of the cases that he sees.

“Can you imagine a person who's got a mental illness, who lives under the local underpass, at the hospital or on a park bench, who eats at the soup kitchen, and you're going to have them pay $100 because they had their day in court?”

Besides, even if the surcharges are levied, what's the government going to do to make them pay, form a corps of bill collectors to accost people under bridges? Or — surprise — just up the ante and have them sent to prison for contempt?

That doesn't look like a healthy response to fears regarding our public safety.

Some judges are assessing the fines, but giving convicted persons up to 99 years to repay. Other judges — including some in Alberta — are assessing fines of one dollar, plus the 30 per cent surcharge.

That ought to relieve a victim's pain.

In our experience, a family member did receive compensation from the Alberta fund for victims of violence. Two city lawyers even met us in Edmonton to argue an appeal on our behalf, when our original application to the fund was assessed a token sum — at no cost.

Shortly thereafter, the province changed the rules so that payments to victims were capped at something below an amount that would provide real help to anyone — and the right to appeal was struck from the system.

So it's not like victims of violent crime are getting that much from the fine surcharges, not in Alberta anyway. Certainly not as much as the bureaucrats the fund requires to administer it, by any stretch.

So at some point, the advertising on the crime-fighting omnibus needs to stop.

“Getting tough” on crime doesn't work, isn't needed, costs a fortune, may in fact violate our Charter of Rights — and in thousands of cases actually makes things worse.

A prison is the most expensive and inefficient means any government could devise to treat addictions, brain injury and mental illness. The largest group of criminals by far have little means to pay surcharges to any fund for victims of crime.

And if government expects the general populace to respect the wisdom of judges, don't you think the government should do the same, and listen to some good advice?

You cannot govern through societies of one

There is a letter to the editor in the current Newsmakers edition of Maclean's magazine that betrays such utter stupidity and ignorance of how our society works, that it bears national attention. Especially so, because some of the sentiments (and pure lack of thought) that it betrays resonate all the way out here in Alberta.

The thought seems to be: “I am a society of one. As long as government keeps my personal taxes low, government can do anything it wants.”

Here's what Tahir Yahya Yousouf Zai, of Toronto, wrote to the magazine about his mayor, Rob Ford: “If a crack-smoking mayor doesn't take any money out of my pocket and makes my city a better place to live in, I will vote for him again.”

How, exactly, does a crack-smoking (add drunken, profane, barefaced liar who abuses his own staff) mayor make any city a better place to live?

According to Zai (and a lot of voters across the country), by pretending to cut taxes.

Never mind that it is impossible for anyone to smoke crack cocaine, come to work drunk, and make law in a civil society. The people who make and distribute crack are criminal parasites who destroy lives, rule their fiefdoms through threat of violence, take untold billions of dollars out of the economy — and pay no taxes.

Criminal gangs will not build Ford's promised subway line. Nor do they help to plow Red Deer's streets, keep Alberta's schools running or pay for the federal prisons they should all eventually inhabit.

Therefor, even though people like Zai say they would vote for him, Rob Ford has no right to public office, and no right to govern.

Voters in Toronto do not live in some sort of bizarro kingdom far from here. The attitudes that drive their decisions on what sort of government they will support can be found in Alberta, and all across the country.

But in a democracy, that does not make them right, nor allow those attitudes the right to govern.

A civil society cannot agree that all measures are acceptable to a government, if people say they broadly support the government's cause.

Consider Bill 46 in Alberta. Actually, I wish somebody would.

The people who provide vital services in Alberta have no right to strike in contract negotiations. Teachers, health care workers and the thousands of people employed by government cannot go off the job while their union representatives bargain their contracts.

In exchange for losing those rights (enshrined in law nationally and internationally), contracts can be settled through arbitration. The employer (government) and the workers (through their union), each make their case in front of a tribunal, which decides what's fair for the next contract.

Bill 46 erases that. The government says this measure will apply to this contract only, and that it is needed because of hard budgetary conditions.

But anyone with experience with government knows that cannot be true. A bill 46 passed this year means that another Bill 46 can be passed at any other time — perhaps even retroactively.

A government claiming to act with a majority mandate to cut taxes for a million societies of one cannot cancel the legal rights of its people arbitrarily. Not while claiming a moral right to govern.

Prime minister Stephen Harper cannot govern with a mandate to “get tough on crime” while acting as if he believes the laws do not apply to him — any more than an ignoramus like Rob Ford can claim he can quarterback a major city, drunk, or while smoking crack in the company of criminal gang associates.

Any more than premier Alison Redford can claim Canada's richest province is in a financial emergency so extreme that it's workers must be denied the protection of labour laws.

Arbitrarily announcing a freeze on MLA pay (before the matter even passes through the legislature) does not give government the moral high ground to do the same to 22,000 of its workers.

Our teachers, nurses, doctors and a host of other provincial civil servants are all well-paid. That's a given. If they are indeed so well-paid, and if the budgetary coffers are indeed bare, it should not be difficult to make a convincing case to an independent tribunal.

The results are binding, and the union would need to accept a pay freeze, if that's what the tribunal awards.

But no government can side-step the law, even if a million societies of one would vote for it. That's not how democracy and civil societies work.

Black Friday will turn a Canadian grey

Canadians get so much American content on TV and their personal portable entertainment devices that it's possible to think there's not a lot of cultural differences between our countries.

We also do so much of our import and export business with the U.S., that our economic behaviours should not differ that much, either.

But we've been hearing that story for decades, and our cultural and economic borders remain intact. The Canadian experience with the irrational phenomenon of Black Friday may just be the proof of it.

This year is a bit of an odd duck, as far as Christmas shopping goes. The season officially kicks off with Black Friday, which coincides with American Thanksgiving, which this year also coincides with Hanukah. Both also coincide with a season containing six fewer shopping days before Christmas.

Calendar buffs tell us such a triple confluence will not happen again until long after humanity is wiped out by an asteroid. Even then, surviving species will probably still line up overnight outside whatever Wal-Mart stores remain standing in what used to be the U.S.

And, as I heard one commentator remarkt, while still digesting the feast they ate to give thanks for all the stuff they already have.

But not in Canada. We're smarter than that.

Depending on whose web site you can trust, Christmas shopping can account for as much as 30 per cent of total U.S. retail sales, and 40 per cent of American retail profits.

That includes the deep discounts purportedly offered on Black Friday, and Cyber Week to follow.

Statistics Canada puts that figure at just 10 per cent of total retail sales for us, which is only 1.5 per cent above the monthly average. (To allow that percentage, January, February and March are significantly below average.)

Yes, Christmas shopping is indeed significant to our retail economy — it is the basis of the Christmas season as we have come to live it. But Black Friday will probably never catch on here the way it has south of the border.

Why not? Three reasons.

First, the Black Friday frenzy of violent shopping is already burning out in the U.S. Early reports show sales are down about three per cent from last year, and represent the first drop since the Great Recession.

Analysts point to a 17-per-cent one-year surge in online shopping as a reason. All those electronic devices shoppers got in previous sales are actually being used for their intended purpose: online commerce.

Second, despite the hysteria around the event in America, consumers are waking up to a realization the discounts, however deep, are less than they believed.

Consider clothing and fashion (which my friends remark that I seldom do).

In Red Deer, Hudson's Bay opened up at 7 a.m. on Black Friday and handed out $20 gift cards to the first 200 customers who crashed the gates. Compared to the videos we see from the U.S., reports say ours was a rather slow-motion crash.

But even at 40 or 50 per cent off that designer sweater, you're still paying $40 or $50. For a sweater consumers can reasonably suspect cost less than $5 to produce.

It makes you wonder who was ever dumb enough to pay full price.

Which plants the seed of the demise of Black Friday. Certainly, retailers offer loss-leader discounts on some items, but when the whole store is discounted all day (or longer) and they still make money, you have to wonder what's up about the rest of the year.

This leads to consumer cynicism, which leads to greater use of our first point: online searches for discounts year-round.

A third consideration is our more Canadian retailing tradition: the Boxing Day sale.

With the steady rise of gift cards as Christmas presents, Boxing Day sales are a far more logical follow-up. We get our Christmas presents twice; once under the tree in a nice envelope, and once again as a bonus discount on an item on Boxing Day (or Boxing Week nowadays).

And it's always just what we wanted for Christmas, because we pick it up ourselves.

The retail association spokespeople quoted on the articles I saw tell us the industry cannot support both Black Friday and Boxing Day.

It is more rational to delay gratification (while doubling it) on Boxing Day. That is why I believe Black Friday will remain grey in Canada.

Merry Christmas, and happy shopping to all.

Changing the story from homeless to hopeful

For all there is to be negative about, serving the city's most fragile — and often difficult — population, Kath Hoffman, executive director of the Central Alberta Safe Harbour Society manages to stay pretty positive.

She credits her staff, people who work at the butt end of our city's effort to end homelessness.

“I can never say enough about our staff,” Hoffman said in an interview, praising “the remarkable skills they have to defuse situations.”

And for the winter, she gets one more staffer. After the $110,000 funding that had been covering the Winter Inn program was cut this year, the city found $13,000 for one more staffer to work November through March at an expanded operation at People's Place.

There's been a change in both provincial and municipal priorities regarding homelessness. Neither level of government sees much future in funding emergency shelters, winter after winter.

For her part, Hoffman agrees. Significant money is being poured into research and program planning to fight homelessness at its root — in addiction and mental health, family strife, trauma and brain function.

“There's a lot of good talk going on,” Hoffman said. And she's been part of it for years. She mentions that it would be a good idea for everyone to take a look at the Alberta Family Wellness Initiative web site, to see how resources are being put into keeping people at risk from ending up on the streets.

But in the meantime, it still gets pretty cold here at night in the winter.

Safe Harbour, Hoffman says, “is the agency between the dumpster and the referral. That's where we live.”

Against losing a program like Winter Inn, you'd think adding 12 beds at People's Place, and another six spots in the Mats program would be an inadequate response. Especially given that Red Deer has grown a lot since the last time either program had begun.

How could 18 emergency spots be enough to absorb all that growth?

Besides having great staff at Safe Harbour, Hoffman credits some of the very policy directions that led to the eventual loss of Winter Inn.

One solution has been the Housing First program.

Let's take it as given that people with addiction problems and mental health problems — and often both at the same time — are very difficult to get into housing. And even more difficult to maintain in housing.

That's a tough struggle, but there have been successes. Once safely housed in a place that a poor person can afford, and with supports provided to help them cope with some pretty serious problems, people do get off the streets.

Another way off the streets is People's Place. About 70 per cent of the people who come there are either employed or between jobs; they just need a safe, warm shelter for a month or so.

Hoffman says there's a whole lot of flow-through of people who need shelter, but who then find permanent housing, either on their own, or with the help of local agencies.

The room at People's Place has a fire regulation capacity of 46. With the bunk beds, the population is raised to 35.

Increased crowding at both People's Place and at Mats (where people must go if they are intoxicated) leads to fewer conflicts than you might think, Hoffman says.

Both places empty in the morning. Their clientele is walking the streets all day.

“They're bagged,” she said. “They just want to lay down and sleep.”

Plus, she says, she has good staff.

If someone walks out, they can't come back in. If they walk out drunk or on drugs, staff knows to advise police. Sometimes, a person drunk in public spends a night in a prison cell. Sometimes there are medical emergencies, and people end up in the emergency ward.

Those are two extremely costly consequences of not dealing with the fact that both mental illness and addiction are rooted in physical causes.

A person with cancer goes to a new cancer treatment centre. A person with a physical addiction or bipolar disorder gets a mat on the floor.

But access to medical treatment delayed by social stigma is being recognized, Hoffman will tell you. Even though Red Deer now has more people with these problems than ever before, her agency and others cope — for now.

“It's about changing the story,” Hoffman said. Medical science is catching up to the root causes of why people become homeless.

In the meantime, no one in Red Deer has recently frozen to death. Nor should it require that, to move the story forward.

For all that, Hoffman is optimistic.

Living longer, only to die of loneliness?

The Oxford Dictionary made “selfie” the word of the year this year, in recognition of, well, self-recognition. Thus, for a few days at least, Canada's news feeds were able to look away from the twin headlights of Rob Ford and Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy, and glimpse the current shiny thing: our obsession with ourselves.

What technology makes possible, people make cultural. In just one year, we are told, the word “selfie” — the act of using cell phones to take arms-length pictures of ourselves to share with a largely uncaring world — has increased in usage by 17,000 per cent.

Wouldn't you like copyright licencing power on something like that?

I don't believe that the explosion of selfies posted on boards around the world is evidence society is becoming yet more self-obsessed. I think we reached the psychological limits of that some time ago.

Rather, I think it might be evidence of something quite the opposite. Maybe the phenomenon is just billions of people putting their digital faces into the universe calling: is anyone out there?

I was cruising the news postings Sunday, in part using the hours before the football game could begin. (Let nothing healthy occur on Grey Cup Sunday.) On the recent postings that came up on my tablet was one story, then another elsewhere, unrelated, and again others — all mentioning the latest new health threat: loneliness.

In an age where we celebrate the advances that help us live longer, healthier, more active lives, it seems we're always finding new ways to kill ourselves early.

One story cited a study suggesting that being lonely has the same health effects on a person as being a heavy smoker. Most of the stories I saw were in the context of baby boomers — many of them divorced or widowed — leaving their work lives in droves to suddenly become alone.

Doomed to eventually wither in long-term care facilities, communities of people with nothing to connect them other than their own infirmities. I guess, posting pictures of themselves as they die.

Searching deeper, it's easy to find a multitude of studies and reports that treat the phenomenon of loneliness much more seriously. It seems a generation that perfected selfishness (because they could not invent it), faces its own undoing because it never bothered to connect that much to others.

Church and social club attendance are both in fast decline. Outside of a competitive and stressful professional life is . . . not much, for very many. People report close personal connections to ever fewer numbers of others, and do not realize the lack until late in life.

Work has become stressful enough in our fast-paced world. But for people who do not seek out and nurture personal ties with other people in an outside environment, retirement produces ample stresses of its own.

The reactions within our bodies to the drop in personal interactions with other people are the same, or worse, than the daily grind of employment.

Here's a shopping list of what happens to people who become lonely as they age: higher blood pressure, higher incidence of heart disease, more (and longer) hospital stays, higher use of prescription medications, reduced cognitive function, lower levels of physical fitness.

Of the 20-60 per cent of people aged 50 and up (the rate increased as people got older) who self-reported as being lonely to a study in Manitoba, a high proportion of them also reported having as many as four chronic diseases.

The report did not answer the chicken-and-egg question: did having diabetes, heart disease, Crohn's disease or other ailments set the stage for people becoming very lonely, or did their loneliness make them sick?

Correlation is not cause, but the correlation apparently shocked the people doing the study.

Other news reports were a lot more graphic: being lonely, not being able to connect, bond and interact with others, will kill you. In California, there's even a clinic where people can go to receive a good, long hug from a volunteer.

Workers at long-term care facilities have long reported residents as being starved for affection, even for the touch of another person.

We are social creatures, after all. That goes beyond the time when we clear out our desks and have one last slice of cake with the people at the office.

Boomers who took great care to plan their finances and set goals for retirement need also to look around and build a community of friends.

Just an observation I found, before heading out to a friend's home where we were invited to watch the mass bonding of Saskatchewan Roughrider fans in Regina.

Time to say yes to aquatic centre

If Red Deer really gets behind the project quickly, our city population will be around 125,000 or so by the time we open up a proper aquatic centre with a competition-ready pool, to host the 2019 Canada Winter Games.

If we decide we'd rather pay an extra $45 million to begin the pool on the long schedule — 10 years from next year — we'll be a city of 150,000 and probably the largest in Canada with this extreme shortage of athletic facilities.

Do they give gold medals for that?

In the meantime, all that horrible debt people complained about in the last municipal election campaign will continue to cost each city residence a whopping $4.26 a month to service.

Talk about things running away from us. If we continue to refuse to build and upgrade our public fitness infrastructure in pace with our growth, even one-per-cent inflation will be able to run away from us.

The proposal to put a new aquatic centre on the city's 10-year capital plan, forwarded by councillors Lynne Mulder and Paul Harris, has two parts.

As Harris described in a phone conversation, one part is to say yes to building the pool. The other part is to put together a group with broad representation to plan how it will work. That group would include city and county levels of government, plus the hospitality and tourism industry and sports stakeholders (think Red Deer College), just for starters.

There are a whole lot of community areas that stand to gain from Red Deer having first-class (as opposed to what we have now) athletics infrastructure. The more stakeholders — not just athletes and people interested in a fit lifestyle — the more opportunities to share sponsorship.

Red Deer's bid to host the Winter Games puts some urgency into the conversation. If we say yes to a plan to have the pool ready by 2019, not only will it cost about $45 million less to build than under the long plan, but Red Deer will have access to additional provincial and federal funding and sponsorship tied to the Games.

That's one of the reasons Canada promotes national Summer and Winter Games in the first place.

We all like to see Canada's best athletes in action, but they need top-level opportunities to train and compete. By moving hosting opportunities around the nation for events like the Winter Games, Canada spreads the chance to place legacy projects around the nation, to allow athletes everywhere to train and to grow.

If we get excited for the Olympics every other year, one reason we can do so is because of the legacies of provincial- and national-level summer and winter events all around the country. We don't reserve the Olympic dreams to the largest cities far away, they grow in places like Red Deer.

But only if we choose to allow it. If we say no, the legacy projects — and the funding and sponsorships for them — will go to places with more faith in the future.

So far, there really only exists a plan outline and some artist's renditions of what the aquatic centre we describe might look like.

It will go in Rotary Recreation Park, in the space just south of the existing Recreation Centre. The two buildings will be connected.

In fact, all the sports, recreation and cultural centres in the immediate area will be connected.

From the Public Market, the Arena and Kinex, with the Pidherney Curling Centre, past the indoor and outdoor tennis courts, past the aquatic centre, the museum, Golden Circle, speedskating oval and splash park — all these will be on a promenade that connects to Alexander Way.

The city's cultural master plan says that new major projects need to connect with our parks system, and areas where people already naturally gather. Like the splash park, like the Public Market, like the Red Deer and District Museum and Heritage Square. And soon, from Barrett Park, all the way to the river valley.

Quite the legacy.

We already have a committee gathering sponsorships for the Winter Games. Adding an aquatic centre in conjunction to that opens up wider corporate and private sponsorship opportunities. Plus, there would be federal and provincial funding sources available, in addition to what we would get otherwise.

That's before we even begin to look at municipal debt, with a tax bill for all our existing debt that costs us less than the price of a lottery ticket per month.

Red Deerians deserve to live in a city with recreational, training and cultural infrastructure at least on par with Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Canmore and others. In fact, I suggest we can even do better.

Time to say yes.

Here's a job, take it or leave it

If the federal government is footing the bill for a jobs training program, shouldn't they be able to dictate the terms of the program?

Well, that depends if the goal is to claim credit for the money spent and to control the program, as opposed to actually doing some wider good.

Now, if you propose to pay less, and split the cost three ways, can you still dictate terms?

If you're federal employment minister Jason Kenney, I suppose you can. All the more so, if one the partners paying for this is business. When business and federal conservative ideology align, that's pretty much an unstoppable force.

So the provinces complained last week that — once again — the dictatorial federal government tramples provincial rights and unilaterally imposes major changes to funding agreements. Yeah, that and five bucks will get you a latte.

Complaining about federal dictators didn't help two years ago when the feds just up and announced that funding for health care would be capped, leaving the provinces to figure out for themselves what happens next.

The difference between the health announcement and the jobs deal is that while health care costs are rising with little progress to show for it, the current Labour Market Agreement is actually working well.

For unemployed people, that is. Not so much for the feds, and for specific industries that can't find people with the specific skills they need to make their industries grow.

The current LMA will expire in March. The new deal was broadly announced in the budget last spring.

But there was never a meeting between the federal government and the provinces to get into details, or to explain how this will work (or not, as the case may be). Until just recently.

There was a recent meeting between the premiers and Kenney, which was described as “frosty.” The provinces told Kenney he was destroying an existing formula that works very well, while Kenney just stuck to Tory speaking points.

CBC News reports that with the existing LMA, the vast majority of participants are still employed in their provinces two years later.

In B.C., where 94,000 workers have gone through the federally-funded LMA, two-thirds are working. That province is already looking for 100,000 more skilled workers to build their liquified natural gas pipelines and seaport.

In Saskatchewan, under the existing plan, fully 60 per cent of participants are aboriginal, who already live close to where that province's new jobs will be located.

The provinces assert that aboriginals, youth, older workers needing to change careers due to layoffs, people on social assistance or who have been unemployed for a long time — these are the people who stand to lose most, if Kenney's changes are imposed as proposed.

Tough beans, says Kenney. We already spend billions on aboriginals, the disabled, people on welfare, etc. If the provinces want an additional employment readiness program for them, they can fund it themselves.

The new Canada Jobs Grant (better named and branded for the federal government) cuts $200 million from the existing $500 million LMA. It will require two matching funding shares from each of participating businesses and the provinces, for a total of $15,000 per participant.

So, for a maximum $5,000 investment, the feds can claim $15,000 worth of success — if the provinces choose to participate. If not, tough, says Kenney.

“If they don't want to participate at all, then I've been clear that we will end up delivering a job grant directly in those provinces that do participate,” he said in an interview.

Reading from the usual script that vilifies all dissent, he says the existing programs merely turn most of their participants into habitual welfare recipients anyway.

The Canada Jobs Grant virtually guarantees you a job, says the government. That is, if you want a job requiring hard physical labour, some risk of serious injury or death if things go wrong, working 12-hour shifts round the clock in a cold, remote part of the country. But for serious, serious cash.

And once the pipelines and ports are built, you can apply for another grant to pursue that career you always wanted in anthropology, right?

Just as with the health funding announcement, the provinces will probably just have to take it. In Ottawa's eyes, consultation and negotiation are highly overrated.

And anyone who doesn't fit the federal cookie-cutter is just a parasite, anyway.

Flaherty's surplus somewhat less than advertised

Of course Jim Flaherty's mid-year budget report is as much a political document as it is a financial one. When the news is generally good, when has it ever been otherwise?

That doesn't mean you should discount what Canada's finance minister said when he made his update in front of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce Tuesday. But neither does it mean the federal budget is actually on track for a budget surplus in time for the 2015 federal election.

An election, by the way, for which Flaherty announced his intention to run.

After all, as the opposition NDP were quick to remind us, last year's updates were inaccurate to the outcome, by a full one-third.

Rather, let's take it as read that finance minister Flaherty and prime minister Stephen Harper actually believe they can deliver a real cash surplus in 2015, which they will use to buy votes in that year's federal election.

So instead of carping on the methods — which the NDP and Liberals have done — I'd rather carp about the plan.

Let's just quickly dispense with the methods by which Flaherty promises that this year's $17.9-billion deficit will become a $3.7-billion surplus in just two years. With an economy growing at best by an average 2.5 per cent over the next 36 months, you don't get there without cooking the books.

The Liberal Party knows this quite well. A whole whack of that number will come from overcharging on EI premiums. In fact, employment insurance (which is actually more of a tax-and-spend program than insurance plan) provided the billions Liberal Paul Martin needed for his miracle surplus budgets, back in the Chretien days.

But even with a gold mine like EI, you don't create a $22-billion turnaround in two years. A freeze on federal hiring (eliminating more than 20,000 well-paid jobs) and selling a few government-owned assets — like shares in General Motors and a couple of coal mining properties — won't get you there, either.

Flaherty must really be counting on major job growth over the next two years to provide income tax and GST revenues to make up the balance. Well, maybe he'll be right. Maybe we'll build a couple big pipelines or something.

But I'd rather think about what Canadians would rather think about, such as: what's he going to do with the money?

Family income-splitting seems to be Priority One for the Tories right now.

The question is frequently asked: why should a family (with children under 18) where one spouse earns $65,000 and the other $35,000 pay more income taxes than a family where both earn $50,000?

That's the sort of thing income-splitting is proposed to cure. It's estimated engaging this plan would put $2.7 billion more after-tax dollars into the hands of Canadian families a year. Kids are expensive, you know, and the money would surely help.

Personally, I don't believe a word of it. Unless the government caps the plan severely, income-splitting looks more designed to buy the votes of families where one member earns $100,000 a year, so the other can stay home and look after the kids.

On the face of it, that's not such a bad idea. It's just not good public policy. In this scenario, income-splitting will mostly end up allowing rich families to simply buy a bigger house.

About 28 per cent of Canada's children live in single-parent families. Very few of these single wage-earners make $100,000 a year. Quite the opposite — they earn far less than the median family income, and they get no break from income splitting.

If we're going to spend $2.7 making life better for families with children, why not build a national child-care plan? Sorry, not on the priority list.

Doubling the levels of allowable savings into a Tax Free Savings Plan is a good incentive for people who already know how to save, but again, the benefits will not go to the highly-indebted middle class.

The cost of this is only $600 million a year, so it's a pretty minor interference in the economy. But it's a heck of an election plank, so this is a no-brainer.

Nowhere is there anything for unemployed and underemployed young workers. Flaherty is counting on that 2.5-per-cent growth curve to solve that for him. Nor is there even a nod to growing income inequality. The 90 per cent must not vote.

In sum, Flaherty's announcement adds up to much less than advertised.

The revenue growth curve looks pretty unlikely, and the spending cuts aren't enough to make a $22-billion difference in two years.

Worse, the feel-good pre-election goodies don't do all that much for most of us.

Any good news is appreciated, but did you expect something really astounding?

Nope, just something astounding enough to get the government re-elected.