Harper can let the Senate simply implode

In literature and in drama, there are the characters who scheme in the shadows, who always seem one step ahead of everyone else and who — even at the moment of their downfall — manage to emerge victorious.

Politics is one breeding ground for such archetypes.

What is it, almost eight years ago now, that prime minister Stephen Harper won his first election promising open and transparent government? Oh, and also wasn't there something about Senate reform?

In the time since, we've seen more of literature's Cardinal Richelieu than we'd like, in the prime minister's office. We've seen power fully locked into the Prime Minister's Office, obsessive control of spin and messages, misdirection via unreadable omnibus bills pushed through by cabinet bulldozers, and a determined downgrading of the role of Parliament and its elected members.

And no action on Senate reform. Rather, Harper's most famous appointees have ended up reducing the Senate into a partisan circus.

In spring, the prime minister had no knowledge that his then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had cut a personal cheque to help Mike Duffy pay back $90,000 in expense subsidies that he allegedly double-dipped.

Wright would become an “honourable man” who honourably resigned when existence of the payment became known. Later, when it became expedient to say so, the resignation was revised into a firing.

But Duffy made public that the plan for his “repayment” was imposed, not by the Senate (whose arcane rules were not broken), but by the PMO. Duffy says that staff in the PMO even concocted a narrative for him, that the money came from a bank loan he took out with his wife.

And that “just us three” — Duffy, Wright and Harper — held a meeting to begin the process.

Now, Harper says he and all Canadians were victims of a deceit by his former most trusted advisor. A government known for throwing its staff under a bus when it served to do so, backed up the bus and plowed over Wright a second time.

The senate scandal's storyline reads like a television ad. “Wait, there's more!” And more. And more.

All of this is occurring just as the party's national convention is set to begin in Calgary this weekend, and as two vital by-elections are set to engage.

Has control-obsessed Stephen Harper truly lost control of events? Or is this simply an opportunity Harper can use to further the goals he said he had in mind almost eight years ago?

It's not much of a leap to get there.

Instead of having to engage a years-long program of Senate reform, complete with Supreme Court challenges from every side and a politically-deadly constitutional battle, Harper can simply let the Senate implode.

He can come out of this with a well-crafted statement that includes a promise never to appoint anyone to the Senate again. Just let vacant seats remain vacant until there's no one left.

Meanwhile, he can create some kind of blue-ribbon committee of worthy statespeople to come up with a plan to replace this no-longer-existent body.

But what about all that important work the Senate supposedly does? He can give that work to Parliament backbenchers. Designate all-party committees as needed and give them deadlines to produce reviews and reports on the policy issues the Senate deals with now.

In other words, give backbenchers something visibly important to do. There's a lot of talent on both sides of the house, that's not being used.

Allow these committees to inform policy well in advance of its being introduced by his government, or a government to come. Take the long view on things like poverty, health care, education, pension reform, prison reform, the environment, while cabinet moves the current agenda day-to-day.

Be broad-minded. Allow the committees to critique policy, to review and report on the various sections of omnibus bills, so other Parliamentarians can understand them well enough to explain them to us.

The result, to my mind, would be to attract a better grade of backbencher. It would enhance the role of an elected Parliament, rather than putting these powers in the hands of people who never had to ask for our mandate.

Canada could probably get all that for less than the financial cost (and certainly the ethical cost) of maintaining a dysfunctional, partisan Senate.

I don't think Harper planned for events to go this way. But planners like him often seem to find a way to turn such dark, cynical moments into sunshine, just before the final act.

Cash for kidneys? We'd rather eat worms

Would you sell one of your kidneys for $10,000? Lianne Barnieh of the University of Calgary has a study suggesting you might.

She and co-authors of a report for an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology say that both an ethical and financial case can be made for paying people for their body parts. Or failing that, at least a case for expediency.

We've known for a long time that maintaining a kidney patient on dialysis is a costly proposition. Think $60,000 a year, not counting doctor fees for office visits, plus lost time at work and other costs.

Transplanting a healthy kidney into these patients not only improves the outlook for the patient, but saves the health care system a lot of money. Think $23,000 per transplant, plus another $6,000 for other medical costs.

A successful transplant saves the health care system about $250,000 over five years. Over the last decade or so, Canada has performed just over 1,000 transplants a year.

The barrier preventing the cheaper, better treatment, of course, is a shortage of organ donations. The Kidney Foundation Canada puts the wait list at about 3,000 patients. Wait lists stretch into years — at $60,000-plus per year for dialysis — even though chances of success for a transplant operation drop steeply after a two-year wait.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information reports that for every million Canadians, 14 are kidney donors. That's half the donation rate of Americans. Alberta has one of the lowest donation rates in the country.

So it should be no surprise that professionals who study health care should explore ways to increase the donation rate. Last week, Barnieh and colleagues suggested paying people $10,000 for a kidney could be a way around that barrier.

"Our model demonstrated that a strategy where living donors are paid $10,000, with a corresponding assumption this strategy would increase the number of transplants performed among wait-listed dialysis patients by five per cent, would be less costly and more effective than the current organ donation system," Barnieh said to CBC News last week.

That's doctor-talk for freeing up $150 million a year for other health care priorities.

Last year, another U of C researcher, Dr. Braden Manns opened the discussion on paying for transplants. Barnieh's report last week is an extention of that discussion.

Manns pointed to an online survey he conducted in 2011 of 2,004 Canadians that found 70 per cent support for paid organ donations to the estates of people who have died, and 40 per cent support for financial incentives to harvest live organs from live donors.

One idea that seemed to resonate was that organ donors would be given free funeral services.

No surprise, but the officials at the top of the health care authority chain do not publicly support opening this ethical can of worms.

As an alternative, I have some additional ethical questions in the discussion on paying for organ donations.

For instance: If the financial case for increasing organ donations is so strong, why is the financial case not being made for reducing the incidence of kidney failure in the first place?

If $10,000 a pop for a kidney makes sense financially (and improves patient outcomes) why is so little spent removing the chief causes of kidney failure, namely: obesity, hypertension and diabetes?

One of three kidney failures in Canada results from diabetes. A major cause of diabetes is sedentary lifestyles combined with poor dietary habits.

Philosophers commenting on cash-for-kidneys say donors under such a program may be “inappropriately incented.” People already talk about institutions using emotionally coercive methods to convince relatives to donate for a sick family member. Cash could be just one other type of coercion.

But in Alberta, we can't even suggest having “opt-out” programs, where all people are considered donors unless they carry a card saying they refuse to be.

This is about saving lives and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet pennies on those dollars that could be destined for incentives toward healthier living to prevent the need for either dialysis or transplants are described — even in our recent municipal election campaigns — as a waste of money.

Truly, there are more worms in the can than we care to examine. The cost of refusing the discussion is rising, too.

Post-election: great prospects

Red Deer's prospects have always been bright, but in the afterglow of our civic elections, I have to say I like them even better now.

That's not because all my choices got elected (sorry Ms. Veer, I voted for the other candidate). Rather, the overall makeup of our next city council promises an even mix of perspectives. That means whatever initiatives get on the agenda in the next four years, people are really going to need to have their facts arranged in convincing order.

On some issues, at least one councillor will need a change of mind for a vote to pass without the mayor's vote deciding everything. There will need to be compromises and teamwork. Council will need a willingness to let predetermined attitudes relax in favour of an eagerness to find solutions with broad support.

As voters, we will need to allow councillors to decide matters according to what's on the table, not what was believed coming in — without one group or another raining condemnation down on their heads.

If our mayor and council can accomplish that, there are bright days coming.

Not just for us, but for the entire province. The three cities representing the lion's share of the province's population all have young mayors with a vigorous agenda.

Calgary's Naheed Nenshi has turned his office into a national template for success as a mayor. He was returned to office with 74 per cent of the vote.

In Edmonton, Don Iveson, age 34, won 62 per cent of the vote, and a strong mandate to proceed with a massive (and costly) rebuild of the city's central core.

Here in Red Deer, Tara Veer took 46 per cent of the vote in a much closer race. (For comparison's sake, Lethbridge had an election ballot similar to Red Deer's, with four mayoral candidates and 31 council candidates. Chris Spearman, a longtime businessman and school board member, won the mayor's seat with 46 per cent of the vote.)

Red Deer has much in common with both Calgary and Edmonton, being a centre of growth. We also have a city centre that is embarking on a major overhaul in the next decade. It's up to this council to begin building on the stage set by the previous one.

Add in another 60 acres or so of prime, parklike city-centre land to be redeveloped in the next decade, as the province decides the future of the Michener Centre. By the time this council's four-year mandate is over, we are going to have a rather different city horizon than we do now.

Transit service from Red Deer to Blackfalds and Lacombe is being hammered out. Regular flights by Air Canada now land and take off from our airport.

Our manufacturing base is the envy of many a troubled Ontario heartland city. In sectors that pay very well indeed, employment opportunities abound.

With the trend toward greener, more physically active lifestyles, our access to mountain trails and a relatively untouched river valley corridor has a huge potential upside to tourism, along with our regular list of festivals and attractions.

We have broad consensus that infrastructure for recreation and culture should not be ignored in pursuit of immediate paycheques.

The whole Hwy 2 corridor is poised to hit a strong stride of growth that other Canadian regions simply cannot match.

All of this bodes toward more people wanting to come and live here. Lots more.

If our city council can find its way to a middle ground where they can pull together for the next four years, Red Deer stands on the cusp of something truly great. A golden age, peopled by a much more diverse society.

The only barriers are stubborn ideology, and a lack of vision of what our city can become in the next decade.

If we cannot find pragmatic compromises needed to allow us to move forward, Edmonton and Calgary (and their economic regions) definitely will. Opportunities such as we have now will never return.

I didn't get everything I wanted in this election; I don't think anybody did.

What we have instead is a terrific opportunity bury what divides us, and find common goals. I like our prospects.

You can't dictate what knowledge is valuable

Of the guest columnists in the Comment section of the Advocate, a byline I particularly like to follow is that of Gwyn Morgan. He's an Albertan who has achieved business success, and his opinions are a healthy mix of practical business and social studies.

But his article Monday: When skills, jobs at odds stands as a good example of why business leaders can create rather poor public policy.

Morgan believes so strongly in the correctness of a skills model for higher education, he sets aside his belief in freedom of choice. He also attempts to dictate the roles of our colleges and universities. And while doing so, he just adds more rotation to a failed practice of professional associations chasing their tails.

You can't dictate what kind of learning is good, and what kind is useless, and then wonder why the university graduates who listened to you can't find jobs in their field of study.

Alberta seems to cycle through oversupply and shortage of all kinds of professional skills, like the rotation of an oil sands bucket wheel.

If borrowing $30,000 (plus savings and summer employment earnings) for a basic degree is a good investment, Gwyn points to a CIBC study that says tacking on another $25,000 or more, for an advanced degree is even better.

But the CIBC statisticians (and Gwyn himself) might have done better to poll the grads themselves.

Doctor shortage? Not any more. As of 2010, Canada had 70,000 working physicians. That was 203 per 100,000 people, up 35 per cent since we recognized the shortage in 1980.

New physicians, graduating with enormous debt, can't make student loan payments, house payments and set up a practice on a new physician’s salary. So they are going back to school for the specialties that pay better — and then find they can't find a clinic that will take them on, and they're back in general practice.

Alberta has a high proportion of nurses with science degrees. But barely over 30 per cent of our nurses have a full-time job (it's over 60 per cent for the rest of Canada). Monday's Advocate actually had an ad for full-time nursing positions. How many new grads will even have their applications read, for those gems? Not many, if any, I suspect.

In the skills that Morgan cherishes, engineers are finding long waits to land an engineering job. Two-thirds of our graduating engineers end up working in a field outside of engineering, almost 30 per cent of them in “survival jobs,” according to the Council for Access to the Profession of Engineering.

How many lawyers are too many in a society? The answer, it seems, is about the number we have right now. The hunt for unpaid articling positions is extremely competitive, and the prospects for young lawyers to move up the ladder in their firms is not great. But we graduate more and more each year.

These are in the professions that restrict the number of students who can enter, but the demand for entry is way beyond what the professions can bear.

Alberta has one school for dental hygienists. At the University of Alberta, entrants must first complete one year of a regular university program, and they only take about 40 new students a year.

So what happens? An 18-month program in Ottawa becomes 70-per-cent Alberta students.

You can't tell students which careers they should pursue, and you can't tell universities where they should be putting all their resources.

The CIBC report rather snorted about the practicality of a degree in medieval history. Gwyn suggests that humanities classes with only 10 students ought to be cut outright. But a more rational approach says they should be kept, or even expanded.

For most students, these are not their core programs; they are options that students in science, arts, and education can take to round out their studies, to develop a rational world view. That's what makes a university degree different than a tech school diploma.

A technician monitoring the readouts at a gas plant will make more money than a new lawyer, teacher and perhaps even a new doctor. So will a welder with experience and a willingness to work long shift rotations far from home.

That's the money market. The knowledge market runs on different parameters. Life is more than just gaining the biggest possible paycheque.

Morgan claims that our ivory towers are graduating students without “foundation knowledge” as he puts it, while expecting businesses to fill the gaps.

That's backwards thinking, in my view. The “foundation knowledge” is taught in the programs Gwynn says have no value.

The middle way, it seems, lies in programs like Red Deer College's Donald School of Business, in apprenticeship and trades programs — alongside the humanities.

Besides, decades of pushing the professions is resulting in decades of indentured labour from highly-qualified people who can't find jobs to match their training.

But if you try to dictate through control of the budget process which programs are useful and which are not, you will only end up chasing your tail.

At the brink — and it's a long fall from here

As of Wednesday's writing, the U.S. government is back in business, as the deal reached Tuesday night was approved.

So, sanity may have peeked out from under the desk where it was hiding in the Senate and Congress. If it hadn't, the North American economy would truly be tipping over the brink — and it's a long fall to come.

From here, it's hard to keep up with all of the economic deadlines the American government faces, but laying off 800,000 government workers constitutes a pretty costly down payment. (On a note that may satisfy some, one arm of government tshut down does income tax audits.)

U.S. government workers are no different from us; most live paycheque to paycheque. One missed payday is bad, but miss two, and real trouble soon follows.

Already it's being seen in consumer confidence. The lower the family income, the more people report they are cutting their spending. Even of families earning $100,000 or more, a third say they are eliminating plans to buy items like cars and appliances.

That's a shock that reverberates right to Ontario's manufacturing base, and Alberta's energy base. And once people lose confidence in the future, it is very hard to turn that around.

The new deal only allows the U.S. government to pay its bills until mid-February. At that, who would rush into financing a car over several years, if they are not confident they'll have a job at this winter's end?

So, what kind of government bills are we talking about? Here are some early deadlines I was able to find:

• Oct. 24: $93 billion in treasury bills come due. They are expected to be covered by a T-bill sale that begins Oct. 21, but if that goes off the rails because of lack of confidence . . .

• Oct. 31: $6 billion interest on government debt comes due (total debt now sits at about $17 trillion)

• Nov. 1: $25 billion in social security benefits need to be paid, plus $18 billion in Medicare reimbursements, $12 billion in military salaries, and $3 billion in other government benefit programs (think school lunches for kids)

• Nov. 15: another $15 billion in interest payments on the debt

And so on. . .

While I was trying to figure out what this means to us, I came across a lecture (a sales pitch, actually) from a New York financial consultant who was offering wealthy American clients assistance in moving their assets out of U.S. dollars.

He points to news reports (which I had actually seen myself — that's why a I stuck with the lecture, until I found out it was a sales pitch) of China, Russia, the European Union, India and countries in South America and Southeast Asia rushing to sign deals to trade in their own currencies, without converting to U.S. dollars as a go-between.

I also saw a story about European countries significantly increasing their holdings of Canadian dollars — which is really scary. Here's why.

The gist of the financial adviser's pitch was that as other nations drop the American dollar as the world's reserve currency, America will no longer be able to simply print money to solve its problems. The day that happens, the U.S. dollar will drop like a stone on global markets, and America will engage hyperinflation.

The scary part about Europe buying hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars — in that scenario — is that they probably paid for them with American dollars. In other words, we gave them real money, while they gave us paper.

A few days ago, a friend, wanting conversation, asked me what I thought of the shutdown crisis in the U.S. What the heck should I know?

It was just idle talk, so I said at least I have a house paid for, with a yard that can grow a lot of fruit and vegetables. I also put a big value on owning four laying hens. We both chuckled.

At least, I thought we were laughing. I hope to God we were trying to be funny.

It does no good to focus on worst possible outcomes. Besides, the crazy American brinksmanship may end up as just one more episode in their partisan game of thrones, and the money presses will just continue to run. For another few months.

But the shutdown of consumer spending has already begun — at least in 800,000 U.S. homes.

Maybe it's good the agencies that measure unemployment and consumer spending were shut down. Maybe we were better off not knowing whether our two economies are on the brink, or already over it.

To ward, or not to ward?

Opinion leaders in Red Deer have taken a look at the city's growth, and are suggesting city councillors ought to represent distinct parts of the city, rather than the city as a whole.

So in addition to casting your ballot for mayor, councillors and school boards on Oct. 21, you will also be asked to vote Yes or No on adopting a ward system for future councils.

For my part, I'm skeptical the change would do us much good, at this point in our city's development.

Electing city councillors on the basis of two per ward, rather than eight in a group, in my view, solves problems that we don't have yet. And creating electoral divisions in the city could well create problems that we don't need.

This current election has been a challenge for voters, sifting through this record number of candidates. But if one pays attention, one can still find four, six, or eight individuals you believe make a good fit for the job.

After all, a whole lot of people here manage to sort through the entire NHL roster of players to construct their hockey pools, so asking people to pay enough attention to their own homes and their own city over the course of a month-long campaign is not asking too much.

Nor is it asking too much of a city councillor to wrap one's mind around the makeup of our city, over the course of four years.

I do acknowledge that Red Deer has indeed evolved cultural and social differences, based in part on our regions.

Our central area is residentially and economically different than our neighbourhoods around the perimeter. The northwest corner of our city has a different feel than the southeast.

West Park — Red Deer's first suburb — is evolving into a city centre type of neighbourhood.

Different regions, different ways that people live their lives.

But no one area of Red Deer has as yet been so overlooked — or is so fundamentally different from the others — that it needs specialized representation on city council.

In fact, the simple act of drawing lines on a map might make perceived differences a concrete rule. Lines do divide.

This leads to my major concern with a ward system, that we will not get that any better representation on a city council, just more costly representation.

One ward gets a street upgrade, a rec centre or an outdoor rink, and the representatives of the ward on the other side of the city will have to get one, too. Not out of demonstrated need, but out of “fairness.”

Ward seats will very quickly be determined by which candidate can promise the most to their region, not for what's best for the city as a whole. That's not the goal of a ward system, but in politics, it is the result.

The result is competition, winners and losers — and council effectiveness based on who is able to negotiate for their re-election in one zone of the city, not the city as a whole. For our size of city, it's not the most cost-efficient way to conduct business.

Red Deer will probably need ward divisions in the future, when stellar growth in some zones creates an unfair advantage for services that are also needed in zones that had built the fundamentals for that growth. If an older neighbourhood doesn't get needed repairs, or transit routes, a crime prevention program or recreation facilities, it becomes what council makes it.

My vote will ask our next city council to look forward to the day wards are needed, but not to assume it has already arrived.

One more short election comment on mayoral candidate Tara Veer's platform of rebranding Red Deer as a “City of Choice.”

Red Deer is certainly my choice already. But Veer knows that work to rebrand the city has officially been under way for quite some time now. Red Deer's identity is one of the pillars of our charter program, and council has been working on that for years.

A whole lot of staff hours and expenses have already been spent on this charter, which is being made ready to present to council after it is elected.

So, just what are we doing here?

City of Choice makes a great sound bite, but is Veer suggesting we throw out work that's already been done, before we're even able to see a report for our money? Or are we re-making the Identity Charter in a particular image, to take credit for work that's already been done?

City of Choice. I like it. But for my money, I want to see what the work on the charter has produced, first.

Red Deer First? Are you kidding?

Suggested head: Just a question: Are you kidding?

An election pamphlet from Red Deer First does exactly what these kinds of leaflets are designed to do: elicit discussion. And a question: Are you kidding?

The pamphlet lists its candidates on one side with a nice group photo. The other side suggests it’s time for “serious change” on city council.

Red Deerians are asked to consider the cost of “no change” with a list of recent capital expenses and a tally of the city’s debt, intending to convince voters that these expenses are bad for the city.

Wrong, wrong.

They list $750,000 to repaint the city’s iconic water tower. This was the first repainting since the tower was built in 1958. Maintenance needed to be done and $750,000 is what it cost. The painting, and removal of rust spots, mean the job won’t need to be done for as many as 50 more years. And yes, the tower is significant part of our water delivery system.

Averaged out over 50 years, that’s an annual cost of $15,000 to help ensure quality water delivery to a large portion of the city. Is someone suggesting there was some kind of fraud involved in the project? Are you kidding?

There is also the favourite whipping boy of budget hawks, moving the civic yards out of the downtown, for $120 million.

If Red Deer First can be specific about where there was deliberate waste, let’s hear it. But moving the civic yards away from the downtown riverbank was not just an expense; it was the opening of a once-in-forever opportunity to gain an asset worth many hundreds of millions.

Gaining a development property of that size, with still-natural riverfront, in the city’s downtown core, is like finding a diamond the size of a baseball at one of our canoe launches.

The Ross Street and Taylor Drive rebuild at $17 million made the list. I have my own quibbles with the Ross and Taylor project; it is the downtown’s most pedestrian-unfriendly intersection. It gives virtually no pedestrian link to the keystone Riverlands area.

But at some point you have to trust the engineers that there is a plan for the area that includes walkers in the phenomenal growth that area is about to see.

Absent from the list is the millions already spent on the North Connector ring road and bridge. Oh, there it is, hidden in our $241-million debt (with a good chunk of federal and provincial grant money in it as well). The debt made the pamphlet’s list. In fact, as of June 30 the city’s debt was $199.1 million.

Let’s get serious here. There are but a handful of transportation corridors that handle the flow of money that keeps the Canadian economy running.

One is Toronto’s Yonge Street. The Trans-Canada Hwy, particularly as it approaches Vancouver, is another. The central portion of Hwy 2 is on that scale.

The highway and the adjacent rail line is a river of money. Red Deer, and our partner counties, straddle that river and would starve without access to it.

Money attracts people. Red Deer has grown almost 300 per cent in my time here. It will be 20 to 30 per cent larger than it is today, sooner than some may think.

What does a city of 130,000 get? A full university, for one thing — they are a very stable producer of residential taxes and consumer activity, and a lot of cities would love to have one.

We get an airport worthy of the name, with regular flights all over this part of the continent — perhaps even the funhouse of Las Vegas, or the winter retreats in Arizona.

We get recreation facilities that can stage provincial and national events. We get a performance stage large enough to carry major touring shows. All big revenue producers.

A city grows on three pillars: industry, education and tourism potential. If one of these is ailing, the whole city gets sick. Just look at the bankrupt cities in the U.S. that have lost their industrial base.

Red Deer has all three bases covered. We are a manufacturing and service centre for the energy and agricultural industries. We have a college with a vision for the future, we stage a long list of major festivals (which sometimes shut downtown streets), and we have a natural resource along our river that other cities could only dream of.

None of this moves forward without smooth access to that river of money.

We will grow 20 to 30 per cent in the coming decades, but we will not grow our footprint by that degree. That’s because we spent $120 million getting the city yards out of the way, to open up profits and opportunity to come right at our core.

The cost of “no change?” You’ve got to be kidding. It’s an investment in huge change.

Looking at the experience of other cities, I’ve concluded you can’t really manage growth. It happens on its own, because of location and opportunity.

But there are more ways to deal badly with growth than to deal well with it.

Failing to invest when opportunity knocks is to deal badly with growth.

Red Deer has done that in the past, and that failure came back to bite us.

I don’t think the Red Deer First election pamphlet puts Red Deer first at all.

Greg Neiman is a retired Advocate editor. Follow his blog at readersadvocate.blogspot.ca or email greg.neiman.blog@gmail.com.

State ownership of our resources? Only for foreigners

It certainly looks like prime minister Stephen Harper has pulled out a plum with the announced $36-billion investment by Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned energy company that bought Alberta-based Progress Energy Inc. last year.

We really won't know the full outcome for 30 years, the time frame of the deal Harper sealed with a public handshake Sunday with his counterpart, prime minister Mohd Najib.

But we do know a liquified natural gas pipeline to the B.C. coast is high on their list. The price tag on that? A reported $19 billion.

By now, foreign government ownership stakes in Canada's energy industry match, outstrip (or are part of) all but the largest of the international conglomerates that mine, refine and ship our energy resources.

But we generally don't approve of government-run energy firms. At least, when it's our government investing.

Alberta's oil sands, conventional crude, natural gas and coal make up the largest non-government-controlled energy reserves in the world. No other country on Earth has resources even remotely close to ours, without the states where these resources are found nationalizing their development.

Let's see: a quick top-of-memory list of foreign state-owned companies in our oil patch includes Norway, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands, China. That's just the short list.

Why are foreign state-owned energy firms invited — courted, even — to buy in to our provincial resources with promises of long-term profits for their citizens, when our own citizens apparently do not get such access?

It was not always thus. I was in university during the Arab oil embargo crisis of 1973. The sudden spike in oil prices and the prospect of supply shortages had governments around the world worried.

Canada recognized we had a lot of reserves, but it was thought the easiest pools of oil and gas had already been discovered and claimed. The next generation of development would not be done solely by Calgary mavericks setting up exploration companies on a shoestring and then selling out to the big guys as soon as they hit a gusher.

Deep, tight reserves and oil chemically tied up to clay and sand needed the kinds of capital that only governments can rally.

Pierre Trudeau had a minority government then, with the NDP holding the balance of power, and Canadian people were genuinely worried over the cost of filling up their God-almighty V-8 cars with leaded gas every couple hundred kilometres.

So, with $1.5 billion startup, Petro-Canada was begun, and it eventually swallowed the stakes the feds held in Panarctic Oil, Syncrude, Atlatic Richfield, Pacific Petroleums, Petrofina and all the service stations owned by BP Canada.

Out West, they hated Petro-Canada, though company ran until 2009, when it was all sold to Suncor. And now we like them.

Alberta had its own energy company once, too. In 1973, 60,000 applications were selected to buy shares in the province's newly-formed Alberta Energy Corporation.

I was a student member of the Legislative Press Gallery back then, and the talk among the reporters upstairs during Question Period was whether it was ethical for an ink-stained wretch to get in on the action. I remember just wishing I had $100 that wasn't already allocated to rent or food, never mind buying shares at $10 a pop.

But only seven years' worth of dividends and growth later, when Alberta Energy got its three-for-one stock split, I remember regretting my need for food.

In 1993, Ralph Klein divested the province from Alberta Energy, and in 2002 a new company called Encana took the whole thing over.

Strange, eh? A state energy company started by Peter Lougheed goes public as soon as it gets really successful, which then will probably be taken over by a Communist Chinese state-owned Petro China.

Stephen Harper says (most of the time) that he's against the state-owned companies of foreign governments holding too significant a share in our strategic resources. Except when he's not.

But it sort of looks like that horse left the barn a long time ago. And then we sold the barn.

For governments and their people, the upside in direct ownership of energy resource development is huge. Energy supply stability, and the profits to be made supplying it are vital to a nation's security, and to world peace.

But for reasons Canadians probably can't even explain to themselves rationally, we don't believe in it for ourselves.

Getting old? Let me buy you a card

Tuesday was a special day around the world, and if trends continue, Oct. 1 could rival Valentines or Mothers Day in global importance: International Day of Older Persons.

Of course, they'll have to change the title before Hallmark issues a line of greeting cards, but that's just a marketing problem.

Canada is still one of the youngest countries in the Group of Eight developed nations, second only to the U.S. But in all of North and South America, Canada is the “senior” member. We've got the highest proportion of people over 65 in our hemisphere.

We've known this for a few years now. Since 2009, we've been warned that sometime between 2015 and 2020, a major demographic shift will occur. Canada will have more people 65 years and over, than who are 14 years and younger.

By 2030, when the last of the baby boomers hit 65, Canada's demographics will resemble that of Japan today.

Taking Statistics Canada's medium view of population growth projections, Canada will have close to 10 million seniors in a total population of around 40 million, before a child born this year can graduate high school.

That's roughly 100-per-cent growth in the senior demographic, since 2009, when these warnings were first made.

That's not much time, in the course of the life of a nation. Not much time for people to plan for a radically different type of Canada than the one we're used to.

Canada will weather this change better than most, though.

On Tuesday, the United Nations World Population Fund made its global demographic study public. It ranked 91 countries on the basis of well-being of seniors.

Sweden, where public pensions have been common for a century, and health care is mostly government-funded, came out on top, followed by Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada. Afghanistan was ranked last.

Not surprising once you think about it, but developing countries are seeing a seniors boom, the result of improved economics, education and health care. Of the 15 countries around the world with 10 million or more seniors, seven are in this group of nations.

But living longer doesn't necessarily mean living better, or that all changes are for the good.

Globally, about half of all children under 14 live in poverty, as measured by a family needing to spend a high portion of total income on survival. No room for savings, little capacity to handle emergencies. Less capacity to care for more seniors.

But by those same measures, we are told that three-quarters of the world's seniors will live in “poor” countries by 2040.

That's something humanity has never seen before — perhaps because we've never measured it before.

"Unless you measure something, it doesn't really exist in the minds of decision-makers," said John Beard, Director of Ageing and Life Course for the World Health Organization.

"One of the challenges for population aging is that we don't even collect the data, let alone start to analyze it. ... For example, we've been talking about how people are living longer, but I can't tell you people are living longer and sicker, or longer in good health."

But decision-makers are going to have to make some decisions, real soon. The world's population over age 65 is growing at better than 870,000 a month. With declining fertility, the rising chart line of seniors will cross the line of children under 14 sometime in the current generation.

We have no idea in Canada what things will look like when millions of people live more than 20 years in “retirement age,” with health and fitness declining a bit more every year.

Couple that with an unemployment rate of people under 25 double the national average — unable to contribute to the national pension plan.

Humanity has never seen this before.

Who's going to buy the Happy International Day of Older Persons cards?