The best conservationists are the ones who own the land

As every farmer knows, if you don't plant, you don't get paid. There's not a lot of future in keeping farmland out of crops.

Agriculture Canada reports that even though crop carry-overs from the previous year are at near-record lows, near-record plantings and a rising Canadian dollar are expected to put downward pressure on prices for most cereal grains.

For the farmer, that means more pressure to get the most production from the land that you've got.

Here's a picture from the U.S. midwest that crossed the globe Tuesday. The Associated Press has interviewed one farmer who bought a golf course, to convert it to cropland.

South of the border, corn and soybeans are the flavour of the day, and high prices are encouraging farmers there to tear up windbreaks, clear out old buildings, drain wetlands, plough over conservation areas — and even push down headstones to plant over a pioneer cemetery — in order to cash in.

Estimates there suggest if you can keep corn production costs to $5 a bushel, selling at the current price of $7 a bushel (last year it reached $8) can make you money — if you have a lot of acres to collect on.

On whatever remaining natural or ecologically sensitive zones a landowner may have, preserving land for wildlife or for water quality protection represents a significant financial sacrifice.

So it's good to see the County of Red Deer become Alberta's third to partner with Delta Waterfowl, a conservation and research group, in a program that will take up some of the burden of good land stewardship. That includes both the financial and practical tools needed to help landowners preserve the natural heritage we all started with when this part of the world was settled.

Delta Waterfowl promotes the Alternative Land Use Services program, which Red Deer County joined in April. ALUS promotes itself as incentive-based. Their start point is that creating and enforcing environmental regulations is expensive, and in the final analysis, doesn't work.

That's because of the law that says if you don't plant, you don't get paid.

ALUS connects farmers to the tools needed to make conservation less costly. It makes use of the leadership of farmers and ranchers as conservationists.

The program also acts as a link to both government and the public, because without their support, all the regulations in the world cannot overcome the financial law of farming.

Ultimately, that means some of our tax money must go to farmers to have them refrain from putting sensitive zones to the plough.

In the partnership Red Deer County just joined, we're not talking about a whole lot of cash, though. The County of Vermillion River is the lead applicant in the partnership, and they are only asking for $250,000 to cover the three counties involved. And that's over two years.

Viewed in the light of the costs of farming, a quarter million over two years ain't much. But with the other tools and assistance ALUS brings to the table, important bits of land here and there that are not currently under crop can be preserved as wetlands and habitat for wildlife.

In Canada and in the U.S., there are a lot of different programs that pay farmers to keep land out of production. But not all of them work.

In the U.S., the federal Conservation Reserve Program pays farmers directly not to plant on land that could easily erode, or is ideal habitat for wildlife. But the area under that program is dropping.

A farmer can simply make more money renting the land to another farmer who would plough it over. And the more direct payments you make to farmers to compete with land rentals, the higher the rents offered will grow — when grain prices are high as they are now.

When prices are low, taxpayers rightly complain about farmers cashing in on conservation programs for land that would not have been planted anyway, because it's not economical to farm marginal land.

But once land is disturbed, it takes many years for it to return to something like it was before, and if the wildlife that used to live there or migrate through there is gone, it's simply gone.

Some other means needs to be used to help landowners use their land in a way that both allows them to plant, and keeps the costs of not planting certain areas within reasonable limits.

That's what Delta Waterfowl and the ALUS program appear to be trying to do.

Instead of voters pressuring government to push down on farmers to preserve natural areas, ALUS supports farmers who want to lead in being conservationists — apparently using a lot less money.

Hopeful news, as we watch this year's crop go in the ground.

Duffy's playbook reads like comic-book satire

By most accounts, Nigel Wright is a standup guy. By most accounts, Senator Patrick Duffy is not.

When news of Wright's $90,000 “gift” to Duffy passed through the fan over the May long weekend, Wright (wealthy enough on his own account) resigned from his job as the prime minister's chief of staff.

Duffy, whom we are told could is too poor to wangle a $90,000 bank loan, despite having at least two residences and a base pay of $135,000 a year plus generous perks, keeps his job.

And the fan continues to churn, while the prime minister who appointed Duffy and defended him through a week of dubious explanations of bad judgement, unclear legal requirements of Duffy's job — and possible malfeasance — stands in the fan's exhaust.

If you published this plotline in a comic book, only its followers would believe it. And only then for entertainment value.

Duffy's bread was buttered for decades as a CTV Parliament Hill chief correspondent on stories that fall far short of his own for unbelievability. But he expected Canada to believe the following:

• That the reporting requirements of what constitutes a “residence” for the purposes of obtaining a Senate housing allowance are so unclear, he could not even determine the spirit of the rule;

• That billing expenses for Senate work, while on vacation in Florida was a “clerical error;”

• That the $90,000 Duffy used to make an internal audit on his conduct "go away" was a loan he obtained on his own;

• That repaying the $90,000 housing allowance he collected “in error” satisfies the questions that triggered the audit, and that he no longer needs to co-operate with it;

• That he did not double-bill taxpayers for Senate pay, while he was being paid by the Tory Party as an election campaign fundraiser;

• That he still deserves to sit as a Senator and collect his pay.

Over the weekend, CTV's Robert Fife reported the Senate’s internal economy committee originally found Duffy broke “very clear” and “unambiguous” residency rules. A sanitized version of that report was published, leaving out that bit, leaving Duffy and others under scrutiny some wiggle room to save their jobs, if not their reputations.

Fife also reported Duffy's lawyers attempted to have him exempted from the Senate committee's forensic audit. In what has arisen since, one needs to ask why.

Are there other instances of double-billing and clerical errors that Duffy wishes would not become public?

Wright, who until Sunday was the most powerful unelected person on Parliament Hill, has been spun as a close friend of Duffy, concerned with the embattled Senator's poor health. So close, that he handed over $90,000 of his own money to Duffy, to remove the onerous stress of poverty that would follow repaying the illegally-obtained housing allowance on his own.

Without telling prime minister Stephen Harper.

This is not credible on a number of fronts.

First, agents of Parliament do not give other agents of Parliament “gifts” of $90,000. That just stinks from the outset, not to mention that the gift was made while the receiver is facing a forensic audit by an ethics committee.

Second, insider sources are saying Wright and Duffy may be close, but not $90,000 close.

Third, it is out of the realm of believability that micro-manager Stephen Harper would not know about this, or would approve of such a gift, unless there were reasons far beyond poor Duffy's health for keeping skeletons in the closet.

Another nationally-known former news correspondent, Pamela Wallin has also resigned the Conservative Senate caucus while the audits are being conducted. Tory Senator Patrick Brazeau is fighting a ruling his $48,000 needs to be repaid, while he also fights allegations of a violent sexual assault.

And Liberal Mac Harb is indignant over his $51,000 housing tab.

A comic-book writer could spin a yarn about a politician who got elected promising Senate reform, while appointing sleazebags into a system chiefly upheld by insider advantage, if not outright corruption.

And then defending them, while his brilliant and honourable lieutenant falls on his own sword.

But you'd have to be a comic-book subscriber to believe it could actually happen.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at readersadvocate.blogspot.com

Red Deer's expressway won't arrive by express

I share some of city councillor Paul Harris's skepticism about the proposed 20^th Avenue expressway. Although experience in both Edmonton and Calgary shows that a ring road on the edge of the city does indeed improve traffic movement, I just don't see Red Deer ever needing a six-lane route.

Experience also shows that whenever a major project such as this is undertaken, it's far cheaper when the land for the route has been set aside in advance. Witness the upheaval and astounding land acquisition costs for any city trying to retro-fit LRT routes into existing neighbourhoods.

But as a person descending the slope into curmudgeonhood, my vision doesn't extend to a Red Deer of 300,000 by 2040, at which time current planning models suggest a six-lane fast corridor around the city would be a good idea.

(Just the same, and as an aside, if Red Deer ever does reach a population of a quarter-million-plus, then would it be OK to spend tax money on a covered 50-metre swimming pool?)

On balance, though, my vote is to trust the council majority and plan for the need, and to have capacity to build infrastructure if and when need arises.

Even if we do not ever need a full six-lane expressway, we'll find that green space is never a waste. We'll have one of the most pleasant, four-lane ring roads (with anoff-road cycle route, of course, complete with its own on and off-ramps) in the province.

Here's a factor that both Harris and I might wonder if planners considered: the driving habits of our aging population by 2040.

In the United States, where such stats are kept, the total miles being driven have been dropping. Adjusting for population growth, through both recession and recovery, the distance people travel each year by car has been steadily declining. The trend has held for seven years now.

There could be any number of explanations for this, and they all relate to Canada.

Adjusted for inflation, new cars have never been cheaper, but the ability of the much-punished middle class to afford one has steadily dropped. And the costs of operation — gasoline, insurance and repairs — have risen greatly.

As well, the pace of urbanization has grown. Small towns well outside city commuter range are struggling, as the migration to much more efficient large cities continues.

Large cities provide transportation alternatives that make personal driving less desirable and less needed, so people drive less.

Also, as baby boomers retire on fixed incomes, more cars will just spend more time in the garage, and less time on the streets. From my own experience, if you don't need to drive to work every day, you don't need to drive that much at all — particularly if you live in a neighbourhood where most other errands can be easily achieved by walking or cycling.

I believe a combination of all these factors will mitigate against Red Deer needing a six-lane expressway. But I've been wrong about other things, so I'm glad city council is planning now, to avoid much more expensive solutions in the event we ever do such an expressway.

Speaking of the future and of transportation, I was drawn to the May edition of the Alberta Motor Association's member magazine, Westworld.

This edition contains an article on urban cycling, and definitions of the various types of bike lanes, plus safety instructions for both drivers and cyclists on all forms.

What caught my eye was a report on their annual member survey. The AMA has thousands of members, and can provide a representative insight on personal transportation and travel habits of Alberta drivers.

Here's what they found about urban cycling:

• 57 per cent of respondents (car drivers) also own bikes;

• 41 per cent self-describe as active cyclists;

• 55 per cent (and higher among younger Albertans) say they want to use their bikes more as regular transportation, rather than simply for recreation or physical exercise;

• 37 per cent say they feel safe sharing the streets as cyclists, while 59 per cent say they feel safe sharing the streets as drivers.

My reading of this says bike commuters are not the tiny minority some people say they are. These numbers also say cyclists could be a major part of the plurality of commuters, if safety issues could be addressed. (Cyclists are up to 14 times more likely to be seriously hurt or killed in a collision, compared to car occupants.)

If we're driving less and cycling more in both the present and the future, it makes sense to plan — and spend money — to make it safe. It's a lot cheaper than building expressways.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at readersadvocate.blogspot.ca

B.C. students lean to the left. Is that leadership?

If I were a B.C. resident, realizing that my children and their classmates at school were the only ones in the country whose mock election ballots did not match those of their parents, I'm not sure how I'd like it.

Goodness knows (and so does my family) that my lifelong attempts at raising a brood of rampant socialist ideologues hasn't quite worked out. But that's just me. 

Oh well, there's always the grandchildren.

But in British Columbia, politics has always been half-art, half-sport. (Alberta may have had a short spell of Bible Bill Aberhart, but B.C. can boast no less than Amor de Cosmos and Bill Vander Zalm as resident in their Hall of Fame).

As well, you'd kind of expect kids to experiment with rejecting their parents values by rejecting their politics in mock votes, taken while studying their provincial elections at school.

For 10 years now, the Student Vote program has been enhancing provincial social studies curricula, by engaging a parallel provincial election campaign for students from Grade 1 through High School — all across the country.

Students take part in a mock vote, operated much like the adult vote.

Their votes are generally taken just before the real vote, counted and held secret until after the provincial election, for which all their parents line up at the polls in order to do their civic duty.

You wouldn't want the outcome of informed students, who actually watched debates, made signs and campaigned, to influence the choices of adults.

In every region of the country, the student voters have predicted the outcomes of the provincial elections, says Tayler Gunn, who founded the Student Vote program, and who has kept track of more than three million votes in 19 mock elections across Canada.

Except in B.C. In that province, the students tend to select the loser. Or rather, the students in B.C. tend to vote to the left of their parents.

Who do you credit, the parents, or the public education system?

In the B.C. campaign, which ended in Tuesday's vote, there was a lot to interest students. Environmental concerns, and interprovincial pipelines figured large in the debates.

Objectively, it's easier for parties on the left to make promises that students would tend to approve concerning greenhouse gasses, alternative energy sources, recycling and defying the multinational corporations.

Call me idealistic, but I expect younger people to see environmental questions in green and white, where parents, who pay for the link between energy and the economy out of their own pockets tend to see things more in shades of green.

Likewise, the link between taxation and services (like education), which also figured in the provincial campaign.

Viewed in that light, instead of wondering why B.C. kids vote strongly pro-environment and pro-services, like education, I think Gunn should be asking aloud why students in the rest of Canada tend not to vote just a bit left of their parents.

At any rate, Gunn and the Student Vote program are doing our education programs a good service.

Perhaps keeping the data would be difficult, but it would be interesting to discover if following provincial elections during school years translates into increased interest in political events, participation and voting, in adulthood.

Or do we compartmentalize, keeping school separate from non-school? There's no telling how much Shakespeare I've forgotten over the years, and I know my Math 30 is like, gone, forever. I can't even read a high school math text today, much less figure out the questions. (Have you tried recently? It's not even English!)

Either way, if the supper-table conversation sometimes turns to “how was your day at school?” having the kids inject a little political leadership at home might be a good thing.

Especially, it seems, in B.C.

Alberta's $35,000 brochure: politics as usual

The opposition Wildrose Party has gotten itself worked up over the government's use of $350,000 for a glossy, eight-page information brochure, decked out in Tory Party colours, to be sent out to all the province's households. Orange and blue have been the official Alberta colours since, like, forever.

The Alberta NDP and Liberal parties are likewise put out that taxpayer dollars have been used to inform Albertans of its government's accomplishments. If a government wanted to inform people — in its own words, not those of an intermediary, like a reporter or columnist — of what it's doing, where else would the funding come from?

This vast amount of spending cost each taxpayer what? About 20 cents?

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith says that amount is more than the cost of building a safe house for abused women in Calgary. Really? Remodelling an existing building to be a shelter, perhaps, but to also actually run it? I sort of doubt that.

Anyhow, women's groups should be watching for Wildrose announcements of promises of support for safe housing. Apparently, it's a whole lot cheaper than building schools.

At least NDP leader Brian Mason was able to step beyond the obvious in his critique. He suggested the mailout titled Report To Taxpayers has less to do with informing voters about government work, than informing Tory Party members that they have a leader worth supporting at the upcoming leadership review.

In either case, getting one's 20 cents' worth of coloured ink isn't going to change the world.

The government will be the government until the next election in three years. When that happens, $350,000 in partisan spending will be chump change (We just expect that the parties themselves will fundraise the amounts. No bending of the rules, now, kids.)

As for the party leadership review, only chumps would vote anything other than resounding support for leader Alison Redford at this stage of the game. Not unless they actually wanted to just hand the reins of government to Wildrose immediately and disappear forever.

Can you imagine a seasoned political group like the Alberta Tories sending a lame-duck premier into the Legislature at this point in the cycle? Ain't gonna happen, folks.

So all this brochure brouhaha is really just politics as usual. The Tories are keeping their bases covered, the opposition parties are keeping the heat on any issue that rises on a particular day — and we pay for it all.

Really, this isn't such a bad deal. When you get your brochure, take the time to read it. If you're like me (which would be a really sad reflection on life in Red Deer), you'll make notes, underline stuff, and backcheck items that interest you.

You'll try to see what's missing in the report — like how long the government expects to take repaying the cumulative debt it has incurred so far, plus the debt it expects to take on before the next election.

You'll want some assurance the infrastructure projects being built today will pay for themselves while their part of the debt is being repaid.

I'd want to see the brochure show me easy access to a web site that publishes the daily price gap for bitumen versus the West Texas price for crude. The Advocate publishes the WTI crude price every day, but I want to see the price upon which our royalties get paid.

I'll also be looking for specific numbers of dollars that will be put into the Heritage Fund today, and for years to come. Any party that cannot tell me that will never get my vote, in any election.

Advance copies of the brochure were handed out to Legislature reporters, but no mention was made on any of these issues. Just the colours and the cost.

So far, all colour and fluff. No substance. Politics as usual, and we all pay for it.

The most substantial comments I could find on this came from the Globe and Mail. They compared the brochure to a short video recently produced by the Alberta Federation of Labour. 

The video (which can be seen on Youtube) cost $50,000 in union dues to make, and another $185,000 to have it shown in movie houses, as entertainment before the main feature.

It shows a rich guy in an opulent office being served ice cream by a shapely assistant who smiles into the camera as she puts a gold bar through a shaving machine to create golden sprinkles for the rich guy's sundae.

“Thank you, Alberta, for making me sooooo wealthy” the guy says, slipping a silver spoon of ice cream into his mouth.

I wonder what the union membership thinks about their dues (submitted in part, I expect, by the government, and therefore the taxpayer) going to that little project?

Also politics as usual.

Finding answers is the game

I don't do Facebook. I don't Tweet. On those rare occasions when I need to borrow someone's cell phone, I have to ask the owner how to turn it on. Texting? Forget about it.

Divorced from the social network, I am quite outside the global discussion that will likely formulate answers to the great questions of our times. But if one has friends (not to be confused with the Facebook variety), and if they trust you to listen, you can eavesdrop on the parts of the chatter that are interesting.

A family member Facebooked (is that really a verb now?) my wife, knowing that an online discovery would be drawn to my attention. That item was a blog entry by a UCLA professor who encouraged his students to cheat — and cheat egregiously — on an exam he promised would be “impossibly difficult.”

Peter Nonacs is a Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at UCLA. He studies the evolution of the social behaviour of animals and relates his findings to human behaviour. It's one aspect of game theory.

The single exam question, to be answered in writing in one hour, was: “If evolution through natural selection is a game, what are the players, teams, rules, objectives and outcomes?”

Outside of violence or other criminal acts, there would be no rules to the exam process of finding the best answer to the question, in order to get a good mark.

The story contained in the blog is interesting enough to repeat, but for time's sake, we'll condense to the outcomes. The students put game theory into practice, and found that even in as competitive an environment as obtaining a good grade at university, altruism and co-operation work best.

The group did not do better than all individuals who decided to take the test alone, and there were probably a few “scroungers” in the group that got a bigger benefit than their contributions warranted. But the best outcome for the largest number occurred when people pooled resources, shared openly and then selected the best answers.

This looks a lot like what many people hope the online social network could achieve, when it works at its best.

As an outsider to that system, I still say the wider process (or game, if we want to call it that) applies to the “impossible questions” that the world faces today.

Consider climate change as one example. Who are the players, what are the rules, and what are the goals (as in “how will we know we've won?”) for the game of an economy based on fossil fuels, vs the planet's ecology?

Just over the weekend, a NASA-led study which compared a dozen climate models concluded that the current trend of climate change is leading to some regions of the planet (the American Southwest and the Mediterranean) becoming dustbowls. At the same time, areas that already get a lot of rain will get a lot more, leading to frequent flooding.

You can get hung up on the causes — man-made or natural — while millions of acres of cropland dry up, or disappear into swamps. Or, you can join the group that's looking for a united response to an apprehended disaster.

And we should have no doubt that large numbers of people can solve impossible problems, when they agree to co-operate and share findings.

Some years ago, the rock band Nine Inch Nails printed tour T-shirts with certain letters on the back highlighted. That's all they did. Somebody noticed that if you arrange the letters a certain way, they say “I want to believe.” Somebody else entered those words in a Google search, and found a web site with numbers in it.

Thus was born one of the world's most famous alternate reality game, in which millions of players had to work online together to solve incredibly obscure puzzles.

The point here is not that online networking can solve the world's problems, but that co-operation can.

An article in The Atlantic over the weekend by U.S. academic James Kwak suggested a simple way for that country to guarantee stable funding for its entire social security system for decades to come. Will anyone in power examine the idea, or explain why it can or cannot work?

Not likely. That would require too much co-operation. Even if the idea were examined and found valid, could required legislation be proposed and passed into law to make the idea work?

Again, not likely. It is not in the nature of governors to co-operate with ideas they do not generate themselves.

Think of the mess the world seems to be in. If the real game is economic and ecological survival, why do we keep putting our hopes in elected officials who do not co-operate with each other?

Catch-22 catches up with Alberta

Bill Lough, president of the Society of Parents and Friends of Michener Services, gave voice to a demand that all governments elsewhere in Canada face routinely: give us what we want, or we'll vote you out.

That's been said in Alberta before, in letters to the editor and in small group gatherings, but in reality it's never had much force — nor even much conviction.

In Alberta, griping about government is about as effective as griping about this past winter, which has been here longer than we care to remember, and just won't go away.

But for the second time in a month, a significant protest gathering marched in Red Deer demanding something the government seems unprepared to give: cancelling the shutdown of Michener Centre.

This is not an Occupy group, Council of Canadians or other similar group that has taken to the streets. I happen to believe government does indeed pay attention to public interest and protest groups, but in Alberta, members of such organizations don't generally vote Tory, so there's no power behind anything they demand.

However, the Society of Parents and Friends of Michener Services — and for that matter (I surmise) a significant portion of prison guards picketing on the same day Tuesday — are part of that large group of true blue voters the Tories cannot afford to lose.

Lough said as much. “We’re going to tunnel under the fortress of the (Progressive Conservatives) and look for the soft underbelly. We’re going to make them think and make them realize we are voters. We voted them in. We can vote them out.”

Therein lies the Catch-22 of democracy that has finally caught up with the Alberta government.

In other jurisdictions, when significant numbers of voters gather to say what they want, government is under pressure to provide it. But no government anywhere can give people everything they want, not without angering a large group of other voters.

A whole lot of people are looking at the money being spent housing the fragile and aging Michener residents, and suggesting quite a few million dollars a year could be saved using other means of care.

Saving taxpayers money has become important in Alberta once again, and if you're looking for the soft underbelly of this government, look for a label that reads: “Spending.”

It was interesting to see two Wildrose MLAs at the protest Tuesday. They represent another side of the Catch-22 that governments face.

Wildrose makes daily condemnations of the Alberta government for the way it spends money. Yet here were Joe Anglin and Kerry Towle, demanding that the expense at Michener continue — and hoping to build party support by doing so.

No talk here about privatizing long-term care, no siree. They're solidly with the provincial labour union and families of residents on this one. And if you're ready to believe that, then by all means vote Wildrose.

If the NDP is consistently ignored by both government and voters, at least their leader Brian Mason's comments at this protest are consistent. “The government has allocated in this year’s budget $10 million not to keep (Michener) open, but to close it. They have announced that this is actually a budget decision. It’s not driven by improving care for the people in Michener.”

Opposition groups on the right and the left are free to interpret the decision to close Michener in ways that fit their ideology. But if either were government, they would face the same Catch-22 the Tories face now.

You can't always give people what they want.

Government has an obligation to do what's right for the residents currently living at Michener. I'm not qualified to judge what that would be, but doing what's right should include consulting the families and guardians of those residents.

After that, it's damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. In all other parts of Canada, that's called government. It's taken a long time for this to catch up to Alberta.