Albertans won't change religion, so don't ask

If Alberta adopted the tax regime of any other province, it would collect at least $10.6 billion more a year in revenue. Thus saith the provincial treasury and finance board.

But Alberta doesn't need to collect $10.6 billion more in revenue a year, does it? That's because they can allocate $10,500 per person per year in programs, services and capital projects, by simply spending every cent of oil and gas royalties, as they come in.

When energy prices are high (as they are now), there's lots of money to spend, and no reason at all to save. When energy prices drop, we just have austerity and pray God for another boom.

That's the Alberta way. We hold to it as an article of faith.

As a portion of income versus public spending, Albertans pay less taxes than almost anyone. People in Arab sheikdoms might pay less, but when you consider the general abundance of wealth, versus taxation and publicly-built infrastructure, we get as close as anyone can to a free ride into a modern, egalitarian economy.

So why would Alberta even bother to house tax policy experts of national renown, like Jack Mintz of the Calgary School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, and colleague Philip Bazel? Must be for the export value.

Mintz and Bazel are suggesting that most Albertans can get away with paying no income tax at all, and that our free-world low corporate tax rate could be cut even more.

All we need to do is forsake our religion. Institute a provincial sales tax, and harmonize its collection with the federal GST.

Sorry, but Albertans' souls have already been sold to the royalty gods. We don't switch religions, just because the new one is cheaper and more fair. And we definitely, definitely, won't save for a future when oil royalties might decline or disappear.

In other modern economies, the accepted wisdom is that lower personal and corporate tax rates serve to encourage investment. A generally-applied sales tax discourages consumption. Put together, they set the stage for long-term economic growth.

But very few other modern economies can drill for money straight out of the ground, so conventional wisdom doesn't really apply here.

Here's what we would get, if we fell down and worshipped Mintz and Bazel's report calling for a sales tax of 8 per cent, harmonized with the federal GST:

• a flat income tax rate of 9 per cent, instead of 10;

• no income taxes at all, for Albertans with taxable incomes lower than $57,250 — or a couple with a combined income of less than $114,500. (That's 70 per cent of us, by the way);

• a cheque to all low income Albertans to rebate their spending on the sales tax;

• corporate sales taxes lowered from 10 per cent to 8.43 per cent.

The downside of having the HST is that it punishes people on low incomes and small businesses.

The low-income burden falls mostly on people working part-time for minimum wage, or youngsters on an allowance. They wouldn't get the HST refund, because they don't make enough money to even file tax returns. Defninitely a consideration (and an incentive to file anyway).

Small businesses would have to absorb the extra cost and time burden of the paperwork involved with the HST. But, really, the GST, already built into most accounting systems, would merely be switched to HST, at 13 per cent. The feds do the rest.

Discouraging spending with the HST is also bad for small businesses, because most mom-and-pop businesses are small retail enterprises. Where's the first place where consumers cut spending? Restaurants and coffee shops — small businesses.

But if an Alberta couple has $10,000 more disposable income (or more), because there's no income tax, don't you think they'd go out for coffee more often, not less? Do they really think we're all going to rush out and just buy stocks all of a sudden?

The Canadian Restaurant and Food Services Association reports very little change in sales, in areas where the HST has been adopted.

Even good old Jim Dinning, former Alberta finance minister headed up a blue-ribbon panel to examine B.C.'s ill-fated HST. They found that the HST would create 24,000 better-paying jobs by 2020, if they would keep it. The B.C. economy would be $2.5 billion larger with an HST, than with GST and a provincial sales tax, collected separately.

Low-income people were also found to be better off with the HST.

But we know what happened in B.C., don't we? Voters killed the HST.

Taxes are as much a matter of burning faith as cold economics. Our Alberta religion forbids even talk of it.

For better or for worse (and mostly for the better), the wisdom of the masses trumps that of nationally-renowned tax experts.

What kind of city do you want to live in?

Three years ago, I was assigned to do a series of columns on that year's civic election. Agreeing to do it was probably my first mistake, but others soon followed.

I kicked off by listing the candidates, and listed the occupation of one of them as “housewife.”

Time, and our misjudgements do catch up to us, and an apology for that was only one of several I've needed to do over my career. Besides, I now happen to be a housewife myself (part-time, which is the best arrangement possible).

But one thing I believe I had right back then is still right today. The issues of the day are not the issues that ought to decide your vote in the civic elections on October 21.

If you think holding a strong position on bike lanes or potholes qualifies anyone to be a city councillor, let me be the first to disabuse you. It doesn't.

Being “someone who listens” is an excellent personal trait, but I have news for you — city councillors have to listen whether they like it or not.

Business experience is valuable in many spheres, including being a city councillor, but many a business person on council has quickly learned that working in a service environment requires a much more nuanced skill set.

You can't do anything by management decree. You can't simply raise prices to meet costs, and you're not allowed to close the shop.

If creating a sound business plan and a workable budget for business is an art, doing the same for the city is more like the Sistine Chapel, with the vision of Judgement Day right over the exit door to council chambers.

These admirable qualities, on their own, do not a good councillor make.

What I wrote three years ago holds true today, and is even more important in this election, because of our high number of candidates.

I suggest you screen candidates against your own view of what kind of city you want to live in. Select the ones that best reflect back to you a representation of what you would like Red Deer to be like, four years from now.

And then, give up one whole hour of your next four years, and vote.

This is much more difficult than it sounds, and gets more complicated the more deeply you think about it. Especially when you think about how our city is growing.

For instance, if you want to avoid increasing traffic congestion in a city that has about three thousand more people a year using the roads, how can we achieve that?

If you think Red Deer's capital debt is already too high, how can we build infrastructure that matches our growth without having to borrow, and without falling too far behind?

If you want to live in a city where people can feel safe on our streets, do you really think putting more cops on the streets will achieve that? 

I'm writing here as someone who has lived through a horrendous, violent robbery against a family member: what do you mean when you want to feel “safe?” Safe from crime, or safe from the fear of it?

Here's what is most important: what do you like about Red Deer, and what do you want to see more of, four years from now?

From the outset, this campaign has been pretty negative. If there's anything you don't like about Red Deer, you will certainly find a full slate of candidates who will reflect that back to you.

But I suggest “voting against” won't get you the kind of city you would want to live in, four years from now.

For my vote, I want to hear something positive about what Red Deer could be like with a population of 110,000, four years from now.

I will also want to hear good familiarity with the planning charters we've built as our roadmap to a city with 100,000-plus people in it. Failure to do so disqualifies you from being a city councillor, on my ballot.

Candidates can say what they please, but I want voters to concentrate on what's good about their lives now, and what city council can do to make them better over the next four years.

There are voters in Red Deer today, who were not here three years ago, and who, if they all voted as a bloc, could elect a complete council slate.

More than 10 per cent of the people who could vote in civic elections four years from now, don't even live here now. What brings them here? What makes them want to stay?

Wellness Foundation can't deal with what's killing us

Does Alberta need another arms-length or autonomous foundation, funded by a dedicated tax levy, to convince us that better lifestyle choices can lead to better health?

Apparently most of us do. An informal coalition of communities and organizations representing fully a million Albertans is asking the provincial government to create a new foundation that would fund wellness initiatives around the province.

It's easy enough to get those kind of numbers if you ask municipalities to join your cause. It's not like Red Deer city council, for instance, would be using any of its own money to promote this initiative. So last week's decision to join the coalition doesn't come with much of a downside.

Quite the opposite. The upside potential for the city is huge, considering what is spent here by the city and partner organizations dealing with the outfall of illnesses and conditions that better lifestyle choices can easily prevent.

A poll was taken last April by the Coalition for Chronic Disease Prevention (the group spearheading the Wellness Foundation campaign). It found that 80 per cent of their responders (869 people were polled) want public investment in wellness promotion.

Their report says 78 per cent support the creation of the foundation; 79 per cent support funding it with a dedicated levy on tobacco; 68 per cent support a price hike on alcohol and 65 per cent support a levy on sugar-sweetened beverages. That, they say, should raise the $170 million required to get the foundation started.

More, the Alberta Party, the Liberal Party and the New Democrats all told the coalition they support creating the foundation.

The Wildrose Alliance replied to their query with their standard health platform: tax-free medical savings accounts, enhanced support for our Primary Care Network, local hospital boards, more patient choice and more long-term care beds. Questions about levies and foundations got no response.

The Progressive Conservatives went the coalition a bit better. Where the coalition wants one per cent of health funding to be directed at wellness initiatives, the governing party is ready to make that three per cent. But through existing systems and networks, not with a Wellness Foundation, or levies on consumables.

I'm a fan of the Primary Care Network myself — particularly our local PCN branch. Early on, they took a significant portion of their per-capita funding for health care, and directed it to wellness and prevention.

They received some skepticism from other PCN branches for taking money out of “sick patient” care, but in recent years they are being asked to share their practices with the other PCNs.

Prevention pays, particularly where health and lifestyle choices are concerned.

As of now, I'm skeptical of the benefits of a boost in “sin taxes” to pay for wellness initiatives via another bureaucracy, with another highly-paid CEO and board, essentially tasked with spending money they did not earn.

Nor is health spending the monster that ate the budget anymore. Nationally, health spending per capita used to rise 2.5 to three per cent per year. But last year, per capita spending on health care — adjusted for inflation — increased just half of one per cent.

I don't know if this is a cyclical event, a trend, or the calm before the baby boom spending storm. I don't think anyone knows that. It's just there.

But I do know that prevention pays. And so do our doctors.

The Canadian Medical Association as much as stated that pouring more money into health care will not produce commensurate improvement in health outcomes. In fact, Canada's doctors agreed health care spending wasn't even the primary determinant of health outcomes.

What, then, really determines if you get sick or die too soon? Here's the top four factors, as listed by Canada's doctors: income, housing, nutrition, early childhood development.

The determinants of health are more social than biological. The rich getting richer while the bottom income groups share less and less of the nation's wealth produces the kinds of costs we see in emergency wards, on wait lists for surgery or long-term care beds.

Making sure children have safe homes to live in, proper suppers and good schools reduces health care costs for decades to come.

I rather doubt the Wellness Foundation even wants to deal with those determinants of health outcomes.

God bless 'em for recently suggesting investment in cycling infrastructure has a health payback, but even I'm not ready to suggest it's a tonic to turn society toward choosing health, instead of demanding more sickness care.

So until I see different from the coalition, I'd stick with policies that deal with the base causes of disease and early death in our society: income inequity, costly housing, and unequal access to education and public recreation that lead people to choose better lifestyles on their own.

No tears shed as bike project laid to rest

Though conceived with the best of intentions, it was born in confusion, and became an object of hatred before people even knew its name.

It's presence spawned a backlash that blamed cyclists for every evil you could name in society — including a robbery with a sawed-off shotgun. The backlash spawned a special interest group that wants to take over city council, but which has yet to say anything positive about Red Deer.

Through its short life, it suffered multiple amputations, and on its last day was given a final symbolic decapitation.

So it was only fitting that the demise of Red Deer's despised Commuter Bike Pilot Project should turn into a procedural dog and pony show.

There are 87 pages to the final project update prepared for city council's review Monday. The majority of it is negative, and because of the methodologies of the survey sampling, the statistics in it are hardly reliable, either from people for, or against cycle commuting in this city.

But the numbers were hardly a concern in the minds of councillors, as they struggled to find a dignified way to put this episode behind them.

They all heard, loud and clear, the complaints that there are very few cyclists in Red Deer. They also heard that accommodating cyclists creates unbearable traffic congestion and unacceptable tax increases.

We live in a democracy, and the facts about bike lanes were about as irrelevant to this discussion as George Bush's claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Few resources were allotted to learning the actual number of cyclists who now commute every day in our city. The best estimate city engineer Michael Williston could provide from spot surveys around the city was that about 400 people a day bike to commute on city streets.

My personal assessment says that's rather low, but — due disclosure — as president of the Red Deer Association for Bicycle Commuting, what should I know?

Monitoring auto traffic was easier, because that's what traffic engineers do all the time. Increased congestion at the intersections most complained about, he said, was minor and fell well within engineering guidelines. If you want to see congestion that exceeds parameters for a modern city, you have to leave Red Deer.

No matter. The people have spoken.

So a three-part motion was passed, that essentially froze the situation as it is, leaving future plans to a future council.

Then, it was unpassed. Councillor Frank Wong wanted the last major section of bike lanes removed — along 39^th Street, east of 40^th Avenue. He was tired of all the griping.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, Diane Wyntjes supported his call for a revision of the motion to include special “attention” to 39^th Street.

So council voted to rescind passing the resolution, so it could entertain an amendment about 39^th Street. Never mind, as Cindy Jefferies pointed out, that it had been less than six months since council last adjusted the bike lane project, and the rules say you can't do that without rescinding their decision made last April, too. Nobody wanted to go there.

Monday's motion was rescinded, and they held a fire drill wordsmithing the amendment, until it no longer contained Wong's intent, which was to kill the bike lane there altogether.

That's because of the same problem council had putting bike lanes on the streets in the first place: cold weather. 

Engineering could not guarantee that a call for private tenders to grind out the lane markings, patch them up and paint new ones could be completed before it got too cold. The whole street is slated for new pavement next summer anyway, so it would then need to be re-painted twice.

So, even though a new council would inevitably be passing judgement on bike infrastructure anyway, council led itself to believe that an even-better solution could be found for 39^th Street in the next budget. With a complete off-road bike trail, and four lanes of traffic, no less.

No to pre-judge the election, but it looks possible that the Anti-Everything Party that grew out of the anti-bike backlash, could likely just blow the whole thing away anyway, after the next election.

After all the talk about lessons learned, and community inclusion, we're back to the three main facts that started this whole exercise, three years ago:

• Cyclists have a legal right to the road. Not just the bike lanes and the bike share routes and the recreational trails. All the streets. And even the sidewalks, if they want to use them. That's the law.

• Every year, more people discover how pleasant, cost-effective, efficient and healthy it can be to just leave the car at home when on their commutes. Red Deer's cycling population grows every year, despite the willful blindness of people who say they've never seen anybody ride a bike in this town.

• People who do not commute by car pay taxes, and have every right to safety when using public infrastructure their taxes pay for. There is no minimum number of cyclists needed, for their safety to be a legitimate concern of city council.

So what's the best, most inclusive and respectful-of-everyone way for tax-paying citizens to exercise their legal right to infrastructure that they paid for?

Something better than what we got Monday.

Getting old takes planning for the young

Just two years after I was born, Elvis Presley recorded and released Heartbreak Hotel. If you were an early adopter of new technology, you could have listened to it on the the world's first commercially-built solar-powered radio, also released that year.

John Lennon, then 15, first met a 13-year-old Paul McCartney in the basement of a church following a performance of the Quarrymen. He was impressed that the young lefty could tune a guitar by himself.

Presley and the Beatles would go on to enthral baby boomers and enrage their elders. Now, we are the elders, and we are becoming just as much a problem to younger society as we felt our elders were to us when they ordered us to turn that damned music off.

In my birth year, less than 200,000 Canadians had reached the age of 80. In my lifetime, the group that has survived to reach and surpass its expected average life span, is moving toward 1.4 million in number.

The warnings of demographers regarding our rapidly-aging society are coming to pass, and we are only beginning to recognize the fact.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the retirement state of Florida was no longer the oldest state in the U.S. In fact, an entire region of the U.S. has surpassed it: the Northeastern (and formerly industrial heartland) of the country.

The combination of boomer demographics and the outsourcing of jobs has led to an exodus of young families from that region, leaving these states to become the early warning system of what happens to a North American economy when its population turns grey.

By the time a child born this year reaches school age, more than one in five Tennesseans will be over 65. By the time that child graduates high school, almost a quarter of Maine will be in retirement.

Are state legislators and governors getting worried there? You bet they are.

Are they able to do anything significant to avoid an economic collapse from rising costs of social services and a declining cohort of working taxpayers? (Maine, population 1.3 million, already has a waiting list of over 1,500 for geriatric health and home care services.)

We'll see. Crisis often assists consensus.

This represents a unique opportunity for us here in Alberta. While looking for Canadian equivalents of the Washington Post piece, I found a stat from the most recent census that I found surprising.

In Alberta, 70 per cent of us are still of the “working age” group, 15-64 years of age. That's the highest in Canada.

That means whatever is going to happen in New Hampshire and West Virginia will happen here last, if at all. We are going to be able to observe what policies worked there, and which ones didn't, to ease an entire society into an older, less productive format.

When your house is burning, you don't get to consider fire prevention strategies. But the risks are rising in many places in North America, and it's worth it for local authorities to plan now, to prevent the future from packing up and leaving.

Those plans need to include strategies that councillor Buck Buchanan touched on last week. He suggested we need to act now to build better recreational capacity and add more of the amenities that young families look for when they decide to settle down.

If the choice is between building a new rec centre with more covered fields and a 50-meter pool today, or having an unnaturally large portion of your people sick at home or on waiting lists for institutional care (and few family members nearby to provide care) in the future, it seems like a good idea to look at the long term.

After a certain point, encouraging seniors to stay in the workforce longer just isn't going to cut it. The type of economy we have built depends on having a large cohort of working-age people — and children — in it.

Alberta is well situated to avoid the demographic calamity that is already building in other places. We're a young region, with the type of job prospects that attract young families.

But for every time we've heard that “our people are our most valuable resource,” we too often act like we mean “ourselves” instead of “our people.”

As we get older, it gets more important that we cater to the young. Legislators in the U.S., Japan — even France and Britain — are getting a little more desperate every year, as social service costs grow, but the tax base does not grow.

Alberta — make that all of Western Canada — has a chance to preserve resources (that is, the pool of people of working age). We in Red Deer and area have a competitive advantage in attracting that pool to our communities.

Doing so can make our future more secure, even if there are infrastructure costs up front.

Elvis and Lennon were not immortal. Nor are the boomers who worshipped them. Retiring boomers will dominate the economy for a few years yet. But if we wish to leave a legacy, shouldn't it be a healthy, stable society?

Middle class? What middle class?

The buzz around the mythical water coolers of the nation (has anyone actually gathered to talk around a water cooler?) is about to grow over Statistics Canada's latest report on household income.

There's absolutely nothing in the report that everyone doesn't already know, but the numbers will give our water-drinking debaters a good conversation opener.

The upshot? The rich are getting richer, the poor are doing slightly better — and the middle class is stalled and slipping backward.

Looking out our own windows, it may be harder to see the negative changes in the way incomes were distributed over the last 20 years or so. Outside of Toronto, Alberta has the highest proportion of wealthy people in the nation. We're doing great in Alberta, so people tend ignore news that doesn't fit their daily experience.

But in the wider view, Canadians who are not earning above $135,000 a year (average income of the top 10 per cent of wage earners) or $381,000 (average income for the top one per cent) are feeling the pinch.

When all the incomes of all Canadians are ranked in some federal statistician's algorithm, the middle of the middle of middle class is an income of $50,000 a year, before taxes. How do you rank there, fellow water-drinker?

But if you take the one-percenters out of the equation, half of Canadian workers earn more than $28,000 a year. Half earn less.

This is taken from the StasCan National Household Survey, using numbers from 2010 (latest figures available), in a study that the federal agency itself warns we should take with a grain of salt.

Their survey was voluntary, they say, and there could be gaps in the data. Big gaps. As in: people on the lowest income levels and immigrants tended not to participate.

This tells us that inequalities in income distribution may be even greater than reported, because we don't have all the data from the bottom percentiles.

But as we stand, glass of water in hand, people will ask: what's the problem?

In terms of our total economy — especially from Saskatchewan west — there is no problem.

In fact, this and other studies show that fewer Canadians today qualify for low-income cutoff supports than at any time since 1996. So, if we're doing a better job supporting the bottom, does it really matter how rich the rich get?

For a full answer, you'd have to ask the middle. Average real, inflation-adjusted, after-tax incomes for the middle group dropped from $42,000 a year in 1976, to $36,000 in 1996, rising just two per cent from 1996 to 2010. That's a whole lot of disposable cash lost.

But even that is not the full picture, or the full problem. Canadians earn what Canadians earn, and individually, the vast majority of us find a way to cope.

The problem is for government.

Government spending always rises. Revenues from taxes does not. The majority will always demand we tax the rich — but we forget we already do. And there is a limit to how much we can tax these guys (they're mostly males) without hurting the economy.

We can do our best to support the bottom — and we do as well as anyone at that. So well, in fact, that there are disincentives for people to graduate from lower incomes to middle class.

That's because when you pass a certain point, you lose government supports for the poor. If you get a good raise in income, income tax, plus the loss of supports results in higher deductions than the one-percenters would pay, if they got a similar raise.

That's why the wealth of a healthy nation needs to be held more in the middle. A dynamic middle, with lots of people moving in and moving up, provides governments with the revenue they need for their sacred spending programs.

But we already know the middle class is becoming a hollow shell.

This week, class-conscious Britain actually began a national debate on a new definition of what constitutes “middle class.” So many Britons think they are middle-class (and act as if they were, but can't afford it) that the self-delusion is driving up housing prices and with it, personal debt.

The British majority is no longer middle class; they are “working class,” which should represent a step down in expectations of lifestyle. Working Britons do not save their money (interest rates on savings are a farce), and they spend everything trying to look more prosperous than they really are.

Does that look familiar to us in Canada? Mass delusion is not the basis of a healthy economy. Neither, I would suggest, is an extreme disparity of income, relative to value of labour.

Our society hasn't the first clue on how to change the trend of growing disparity of income. Perhaps the survival strategy for us water-drinkers is to simply downgrade our expectations.

Just who should we shoot at, in Syria, this week?

There are a lot of people around the world who are demanding that somebody “does something” to punish the Syrian armed forces and their leader president Bashar Assad for using sarin nerve gas against civilians in its second largest city, Damascus.

Damascus is the seat of the country's war-torn government. The evidence we in the West are seeing is that Assad's forces used nerve gas against women and children in his own capital, with perhaps as many as 1,500 casualties.

Syria is in the midst of a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and left more than 6 million either displaced inside the country, or in vast tented refugee camps outside the country.

And nobody who believes in democracy would want the leaders of either side of this conflict to win.

But there are people in Canada who are disappointed in the lukewarm reactions of our own federal government in condemning this crime, and who are embarrassed that the official response of promising “all aid short of help” is being used once again.

The question that bothers me is that if Canada were to join a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria (don't bother hoping there will be one led by the United Nations), just who would be be shooting at?

Brutal (and possibly insane) dictator Assad and his forces, or brutal (and possibly insane) religious extremists who would supplant him? There does not appear to be a rational, moderate leadership option in the wings with much hope of producing a stable, peaceful democracy.

So who are the criminals we should be taking out?

Assad cannot be trusted to give you an honest weather report, but I put some credence in his statement that once outside military powers intervene in Syria, this whole thing is able to spin into more evil than we want to think about.

Assad has two allies: Russia and Lebanon. Russia keeps the UN from doing anything useful; Lebanon keeps the world from doing anything at all.

As of Tuesday, there were about 720,000 Syrians in refugee camps in Lebanon. You can get your family into Lebanon on one tank of gas, from Damascus.

How many of them might be capable of exporting their civil war outside Syria, and how many of them might end up becoming helpless targets of Lebanese military?

Just south of Lebanon lies Israel. Israel is beefing up its missile defences in the event some nutbar to the north decides to go their direction to avenge any U.S. incursion into Syria.

What happens after that is a shopping list of bad consequences.

That, I suspect, is why president Barak Obama overruled his advisors on Monday, and said he wanted to consult Congress — and thereby, the American public — before using military power to “downgrade” Assad's ability to launch chemical weapons again.

Congress is coming into election mode right now. There must be enough Viet Nam vets still around to warn against putting military boots in Syria today.

“We should have this debate,” Obama said Monday. Yes, perhaps we should.

I wouldn't want to predict what the situation in Syria would be, by the time Americans have had their debate.

The number of dead already exceeds 100,000, and international news reports tell us the country is bleeding itself of women and children fleeing the violence.

About a third of Syria's total population has already fled the country.

I agree with the critics that it is distasteful to see despotic leaders use genocidal-scale attacks against their own people. But the extremists waiting to take over when Assad is finally gone are far from gentle by comparison.

Perhaps, then, Obama does have the right proposal: bomb the bejeebers out of Assad's missile delivery systems, and assure the populace that the world does feel for their plight, while leaving it to the Syrian people to decide the outcome of this civil war.

That would seem rational. But rationality, like truth, was one of the first casualties in this conflict.

Canada has no capability of intervening in Syria to disable Assad's chemical weapons, and it is rather unseemly for us to suggest someone else do it for us.

Until we know exactly who we want to shoot at, and for how long, it's best we just not shoot at all. As distressing as that may be, while the videos play, showing us the innocent dead.