Go for the savings, go for yourself

The question is asked: if you were presented with the dollars-and-cents, years-of-your-life evidence that differences in lifestyle choices produced, would you change your choices accordingly?

For most Canadians, the answer seems to be no.

While evidence mounts that the best known preventative for disease, mental illness, loss of disposable income and early death is simple exercise, most people either ignore or disbelieve the evidence and go on with their lives. Or make attempts at positive change that they cannot seem to maintain.

The Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences followed the case histories of 79,300 people in Ontario, comparing their diet, activity levels and smoking choices with their health records.

They discovered commonalities that could be predicted in a mathematical model. And they were on their way to calculating the life outcome of anyone.

They posted a questionnaire/calculator online — www.projectbiglife.ca — which will rate your chances of seeing your grandchildren get married, say. Or it can posit the number of days you will spend in hospital over the rest of your life.

They are building a database that so far shows less than eight people per hundred have none of the lifestyle risks that could put them in hospital and/or put them in hospital for longer periods.

They also found that for Ontario alone, poor lifestyle choices — failing to exercise being the top bad choice — accounted for more than 900,000 days worth of hospital stays per year.

That's at an average cost of $7,000 a day, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. The Project Big Life calculator will even tell you how much of that can be attributed to you.

Think about that the next time you're tempted to complain that tax-funded infrastructure for active living is a waste of money.

Think also about the money you can save right now if you took the National Commuter Challenge and left your car home for your commutes this week. June 1-7 marks this year's Challenge, and if the Project Big Life evidence inspires you, go to commuterchallenge.ca and take the one-week pledge.

Just a week. To walk, cycle, car pool or take transit, and see what difference it could make for you.

The average commute in Red Deer is around five km one way. Pretty short, compared to most other Canadian cities.

Using yet another online calculator (this one from the Canadian Automobile Association) the cost of operating an average type sedan for your 10-km round trip is just under $1.70. That's $1.70 every time you open your garage door and head down the driveway. 

Those figures are from 2013, long before the price of gas shot up. Boost that to $2 or more, and you won't be far off today's costs.

Want to know what doing that for the week will run? The CAA calculates the use of a mid-sized sedan for a week costs about $58 (assuming you drive about 18,000 km a year, and using 2013 fuel costs).

How's that for incentive to leave the car at home, just for one week?

Last week, medical journal The Lancet reported that a third of all the people on earth are now overweight or obese. Despite what we have learned about the medical costs of obesity, we as a society are finding it almost impossible to change the behaviours that are making us unhealthy.

Almost anyone can walk five kilometres. Certainly almost anyone can ride that far on a bike.

Doing these commutes under your own power constitutes all the exercise you need to fill the medically-recommended 60 minutes a day to keep you fit.

Even if you change nothing else in your life, even if you smoke while you walk, you benefit.

If you do it for one week, you can do it for two. One more week, and that beats the standard of making a lifestyle change that will stick; one that you'll miss if you stop doing it.

The Project Big Life calculator can tell you more or less exactly what that lifestyle benefit will be. Find the change in days of hospital stays that this one change alone can calculate, and multiply it by $7,000. That's your gift to yourself and the lowering of the provincial tax burden for health care attributable to you.

Save the $58 — tax free — if you walk or bike to work for a week. Who would refuse the money in their pocket?

Who would refuse a chance to stay out of the hospital for more days of our lives? Who wants to dance at their grandchildren's weddings?

Canadians' lifestyle choices need to change. This seems like a good week to start.

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

Cricket, anyone? Let's take on Turks

I think foreign affairs minister John Baird reacted rashly when he put the kibosh on yet another hint that the British protectorate of Turks & Caicos would be amenable to becoming Canada's 11^th province.

Perhaps he was just distracted. Baird was in Ukraine at the time , with, as it happens, the current MP championing the idea of annexing T&C, Edmonton East MP Peter Goldring. Both were assisting the international effort to ensure fair and free elections there.

Bad timing, I guess. But Turks & Caicos have a history of that when it comes to the annexation idea. The last time that issue arose, the Tory government of the day was also distracted — by free trade negotiations with the United States. Not a time for aggrandizement in the Western Hemisphere.

Back then, all three parties in Nova Scotia voted to include the tropical islands — with their miles and miles of beautiful beachfront — into their own province, to, you know, help bring them into the Canadian family.

This time around, Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall beat them to the punch. He wants the islands to be part of his province.

“Canada needs a Hawaii,” he said last week, after the idea rocketed to front of mind with the visit of T&C's premier (and tourism minister) Rufus Ewing.

Officially, Ewing visited Canada last week to open a trade office in Toronto, but as a head of state, he was obliged to visit the cold portals of Ottawa as well. Of course, as soon as the microphones were turned on for the press, questions flew about the idea of annexation.

Ewing smiled and said his objective was trade talks. Really. But he would not close the door to the idea of annexation, even if an exasperated and distracted John Baird couldn't slam closed it fast enough.

A time out, please, Mr. Baird. Let's give people a chance to think about this. Well, another chance, really. We've been thinking about it since 1917 when Robert Borden proposed the idea. Should have done it then, really.

Although the United States provides the lion's share of the more than 200,000 tourists who flock to the island (since they can't hop a small jet to nearby Cuba), Canada is the archipelago's largest economic partner.

More than 42,000 Canadians visit the islands every year, which is more than the combined population of natives on the islands.

Outside of tourism, Turks & Caicos is a politically stable, friendly offshore banking centre. Which might explain the government's official reluctance to cozy up to them.

If Canada is T&C's top trading partner, and that trade is offshore banking. . . well, you get the picture.

But all the more reason to make those foreign banks Canadian, and tax them, wouldn't you think?

Right now, the string of 40 islands, only eight of which are inhabited, is experiencing a population boom. And it isn't natural growth.

Good old Wikipedia reports that for the most recent year they have on record (2008), there were only 450 live births on the island, and 390 deaths. And that was peak natural growth.

But since the turn of the century, the islands' population has grown by more than half, from just under 20,000 in 2001 to more than 31,000 today. Almost 60 per cent of the people living in Turks & Caicos today are recent immigrants.

Being a British protectorate, their health care system is similar to ours, with a national health plan paid for out of payroll deductions, and a mix of public and private care delivery. Pretty much like us.

They have an elected governing body, with four appointees made by the governor from Britain.

And get this: Turks & Caicos is closer to Ottawa than Edmonton. Direct flights from our frozen cities would be easy, and we could breeze through to the beaches, without needing the irritation of a passport or customs search. No duty-free shopping on the way back, though.

We already have a growing population of people from cricket-playing cultures. Maybe it's time we studied the rules.

Considering our base of expats from India, the Philippines and other countries, mixed with newly-Canadian lifetime players from Turks & Caicos. . . I see the basis for a pretty strong national team.

At the very least, we would absolutely clobber the Americans.

Reason enough to give this a second thought. Or, in our case, a fourth.

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

You can't improve education by disrespecting teachers

These days, everyone is agog over Finland's model for public education, which seemingly produces the brightest students in the world. Likewise, people swoon over the performance of Asian students, particularly in math and science.

Alberta students rank right up there with them, but there's a Canadian ethos that says anything foreign must be better. So in our eyes, the Finns and the Asians rule the world today.

Except when they don't. Red Deer educators have told me that Alberta's public school curriculum is the top-requested program among countries looking to improve their own education systems, and international standardized test scores.

Why? Because our students are consistently top-flight, and the curriculum that brings the knowledge to the students is delivered in English.

Both Finnish and Asian languages are hard to adapt into educational polices for most nations. Alberta's curriculum is far more adaptable to other cultures.

As a result, I'm told that Alberta teachers with experience delivering our curriculum find the doors to international teaching opportunities open quickly.

That said, what are the commonalities between the programs in Finland, Asia and Alberta that a layperson can understand?

One that has been related to me — sometimes with pride and sometimes with despair — is that the role of the teacher is highly respected in top-flight programs.

It takes a lot of training to become a public school teacher in these countries, both academically and in experience. When people suggest that a high proportion of public school teachers should have — or should work toward — a masters-level degree, that implies a high regard for the importance of the job.

So there is a disconnect, then, when teachers feel they need to resort to job action to achieve the working conditions (and, yes, pay) needed to make the job and the program work.

Today's example of that disconnect is the ongoing dispute between the government of British Columbia and its 41,000 teachers.

Rotating one-day strikes are set to begin this week in an all-too-public battle over negotiations for a new provincial contract. While individual schools will be closed for one day, the province has moved to dock everyone's pay by 10 per cent, call the teachers greedy and try to set them against other public sector unions.

The teachers rejected a $1,200 signing bonus for a new contract, saying they'd rather have rules instituted on class size caps, and a policy that enforces better supports when classrooms exceed pre-set limits for special-needs children.

B.C. does have the second-lowest per-student funding regime in Canada. B.C.'s teachers have not seen a raise since 2010 and want to play catch-up, but those are issues for the negotiating table.

What can be seen by outsiders here is that you can't build a top-flight public education system when you don't respect the professional opinions of teachers.

It must be noted that premier Christy Clark was B.C.'s education minister when the government outlawed having classroom conditions as part of the collective bargaining process with teachers.

A decade of court battles that followed — in which the government lost every round — had its most recent round end in January with a B.C. Supreme Court ruling that you cannot separate the working conditions of the classroom from the contracts of teachers.

In the industrial world, the conditions of any job — workload, safety, physical workplace standards, etc. — all have a bearing on wage expectations and quality-of-product standards.

In education, you can't expect world-level quality of education in a system in which there are no limits to classroom size, or when a good portion of students who need special attention aren't getting support.

What those class sizes should be, and what levels of support there should be are well-documented in international studies: check Finland, Asia and Alberta, where these workplace standards have negotiated numbers attached.

In the working careers of pretty well all B.C. teachers, there have only been two contracts settled without some kind of job action or arbitration needed. Only once has this been achieved in the last 10 years.

Clearly, following B.C.'s old script isn't working. And it wouldn't work here, either.

Either you trust your teachers to know how to deliver one of the most envied curriculums in the world, or you don't. Either you listen to their professional advice as experts on the ground, or you denigrate them as greedy, and try to have the cheapest education system in the country.

A world-class public education system can't be delivered without collaboration, and without public investment.

Canada deserves its D-minus score

That Canadian kids get a D-minus for being physically active is hardly news. Really, it's just a “minus” drop from 2012, when they got a straight D.

When Canadian kids dropped scarcely a point in international math scores (still among the highest in the world), governments, school boards and pundits held a mass fire drill. We all but declared a national state of emergency and developed a whole new kind of math to cure the “crisis.”

But when we find out our children are at historic high risk for major killers due to their sedentary lifestyles, Canadian parents just switch to the Cartoon channel.

An additional $4 billion or so for direct and indirect health care costs as a result of being sedentary? Get in the car, kids, let's see something in 3-D.

Active Healthy Kids Canada has been releasing these reports for years, tracking the activity levels of Canadian children and comparing it to that of 14 other countries.

Really, nobody's doing really all that great on the scores. Nobody wants to move to Mozambique, where kids are active. And besides, we can always sit back and laugh at Scotland, which got an F.

But the message is getting through. This year, AHKC released Canada's test results at the first-ever global summit on youth health and activity, in Toronto.

Somebody, somewhere, is paying attention. Somebody, somewhere, is starting to get scared.

Even though three quarters of Canadian children are reported to take part in organized sports, and almost all have good access to gyms, pools, rinks and parks, only about seven per cent get their medically-recommended 60 minutes a day of physical activity.

It's not that our kids are too busy. A huge portion of Canadian children get more than two hours of TV time a day. If you count cell phone, school and screen time, Canadian kids average just under eight hours a day looking at a screen, says AHKC. Every day.

The Canadian Paediatric Society strapped accelerometers onto children between 2007 and 2009, and got much the same results. They reported that kids sit on their butts for 6.8 hours a day.

Kids who spend more than two hours a day in front of the TV are more than twice as likely to be obese than kids who get an hour or so of TV time a day.

We like to blame TV for the rising sedentary habits of our children, but actually we ourselves are to blame. In last year's report (in which Canada got a D-plus), AHKC singled out Mom and Dad.

When Mom and Dad were kids, almost 60 per cent of children walked or biked to school. Today, 62 per cent of children use inactive forms of transportation exclusively, says AHKC.

It's not that kids say they want it that way. In the 2012 AHKC survey, 92 per cent of children said they would rather play with friends than watch TV. But in reality, they spent 63 per cent of their time after school and on weekends just sitting around.

The World Health Organization reports that in industrialized countries, between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of adults do not get an hour of physical activity every day. What's your average?

Hardly surprising, then, that Type 2 diabetes — a major complication of obesity — is on the rise. A major complication of Type 2 diabetes is kidney failure.

Young people in North America are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in numbers never before seen.

Here in Red Deer, we called it a victory when we got funding for more dialysis machines. Well, when your house is on fire, you've got to call the Fire Department — and they had better be there for you, quick. But far better that you prevent the fire.

Obesity in youth is known to lead to obesity in adulthood. Obese adults die three to seven years younger than their peers, and their lifetimes are marked by higher use of costly health care.

Alberta cities score higher than the national average for obesity — and that includes Red Deer.

Simple activity is the cheapest and most effective prevention of all of that. Sixty minutes a day, every day, that's what it takes.

Canadian kids who walk or bike to school get on average 45 minutes a day, just by doing that. So would their parents, if they rode or walked to work.

But instead of embracing prevention, Red Deer puts up barriers to it, calling it a waste of money to build the infrastructure needed to make safe non-car commutes.

Less than a million on new infrastructure, versus crisis spending of billions for easily preventable health care costs.

That's a D-minus score on a lot of levels.

All aid short of help for Ukraine?

Back in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war, Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, and U.S. president John F. Kennedy, were not getting along.

Diefenbaker viewed Kennedy as arrogant, JFK saw Dief as dithering and uncommitted.

So when Canada failed to ramp its military to high alert in lockstep with the Americans, the quote was created in the White House that Canada was willing to give America “all aid short of help,” when the going got tough with the Russians.

That crisis passed, and years later the Cold War ended. But once again the world is dealing with an aggressive, expansionist Russia. Armed Russian insurgents staged-managed the annexation of Crimea, and others created unrest in the eastern sections of the country, to destabilize Ukraine's elections coming this weekend.

This time, in this current crisis, Canada is far from alone in standing up to Russian aggression armed with news reports and sound bites.

Along with Europe and the U.S., we will bring Russian president Vladimir Putin to heel with economic sanctions. Foreign assets owned by a list of Russian businesses have been frozen, and travel bans have been imposed on individuals close to Putin, to stop the inflow of money that it takes to mobilize an armed piecemeal annexing Ukraine.

Sort of. Nobody really wants to poke the Russian bear, at least not too hard. In a world economy that is far more integrated than it was in the Cold War, it's difficult to freeze out an economic giant without shooting your own economy in the foot.

Especially for those parts of Europe that get their natural gas from Russia.

But Visa and Mastercard accounts issued by Bank Rossiya were blocked, for one thing. Cardholders could only access their money at bank ATMs, leading to long lineups and mass conversions of foreign accounts back into roubles.

Boston Univeristy professor Alya Guseva explained in an interview with online publication Professor Voices that those sanctions do indeed hurt. Only someone with insight into Vlad Putin's brain can tells if they will change his behaviour, but for now, that seems unlikely.

Before this weekend, he announced that troops massed on Ukraine's borders will be withdrawn, in a step to reduce tensions in advance of the Ukraine elections.

But NATO announced over the weekend that no movement has yet occurred. The first casualty of any public relations war is indeed the truth.

That's why some people are saying economic sanctions should be stepped up.

Canada, ever the willing provider of aid, has left out at least three prominent Putin associates from the sanctions list.

CBC News reports that while the United States has sanctioned Sergey Chemezov, who runs industrial and military corporation Rostec, and Igor Sechin, CEO of oil company Rosneft, the two have not been banned from travelling to Canada or had their assets frozen. CBC says both are reported to have significant business ties to Canada.

For instance, Rosneft owns 30 per cent of a major oilfield in Alberta, along with Exxon Mobil.

Rostec has close ties with Bombardier, with a joint venture lined up to build 100 short-haul aircraft in Russia, for Russian use.

Meanwhile, Vladmir Yakunen, president of Russian Railways, is persona non grata in the U.S. but is still welcome in Canada.

A few months ago, these connections were all positive things. It's hard now to make them negative. Not without paying a price. And Canada seems to be dithering on the price.

From this perspective, it does not appear Canada enjoys the same “honest broker” global reputation it built during the Pearson and Diefenbaker era. “All aid short of help,” seems closer to the truth.

Our government seems willing to talk tough for the folks at home. But we will never stand up to a determined Russia, if we cannot even stand up to the lobbyists that got their employers' interests excluded from the sanctions list.

What price is democracy in Ukraine worth to Canadians? Is is worth risking a slowdown of oil development in Alberta? Is it worth a drop in the share price of Bombardier or other Canadian firms with international interests?

We cannot cannot guarantee that the world will be made more safe, by always playing it safe, and letting others take the risks.

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

The best tip? Just pay your staff

Restaurant owner David Jones works his trade in Parksville, on Vancouver Island, a long car drive from anywhere else. But the “anywhere else” around this town is ocean-front temperate rainforest paradise.

So his Smoke 'N Water restaurant can do decent business, but I expect keeping good staff might be a problem.

His solution? Pay servers up to $24 and hour, cooks up to $18 an hour, plus medical and dental coverage — with no tipping allowed. If someone leaves a tip, it is given back. If it can't be given back, the money goes to charity.

Doing that required an 18-per-cent hike in the menu price, but Jones believes his patrons will appreciate the change.

Paying food service staff low wages (in some cases even below minimum wage), on the premise that tips from patrons will make up the difference toward a living income is a “broken business model,” says Jones.

The no-tip plan, which is common throughout Europe and gaining traction in the U.S., is not going to change the industry in Canada overnight. It might not even be the best business model in some markets.

But as a restaurant patron, and the parent of university students who worked their way through school partly in the food trade, I like the change.

One of my kids worked a summer at a local Boston Pizza. She never knew what her labour over a shift would bring her, but it was one of two or three jobs she worked through the summer months while in university.

One evening, in walked Ron MacLean with a group of friends. MacLean is notorious for his generosity in tipping, and that night's table raised her hourly income considerably.

Another daughter once served a large group at a restaurant in Regina — and was tipped with a Bible. She had to pay a percentage of her total food tab to the bartender and cook staff, so she essentially worked for no pay at all that day.

I leave it to the Christian residents in Regina to determine which chain restaurant ended up with a Bible in its trash bin that night.

Working for tips might be a good supplement to a student loan (especially if you don't report the income) but it's a hard career choice. I wonder if we'd need fewer temporary foreign workers in the food service industry, if more restaurant owners had the vision of a David Jones.

Ian Tostenson, head of the B.C. Restaurant and Food Association applauds Jones' foresight. He says people should be tipping 15-20 per cent of their bills, but that standard isn't being met, not by a long shot.

People argue that tipping is supposed to be an incentive for good service, but the figures show that's largely a myth. Bottom line, people tip whatever the service, which is generally good. Very often, the tips are not.

Problems with service are sometimes not the server's fault. And if service was indeed sub-par, the manager should be told personally.

Whatever the protestations of people who prefer the current system, the practice of making people work for tips isn't so much about incentives. That idea begins with an assumption that staff who serve others are out to screw you over, unless you withhold some kind of reward.

Tipping is more about an expression of power over someone who serves you. Come hither, pretend you really like me.

Where service is not great, people don't return, and that's an incentive that works on management, not staff.

A company called Square issues software that works on the credit card readers at restaurants and any other place where tipping is part of the paying culture. You've seen it when the card reader asks you if you want to add a tip, either as a percentage of the bill, or as a flat amount.

Guess what? Your tipping habits are being tracked.

Albertans — wealthy oil barons that we all are — are Canada's worst tippers (Bible donations excluded). Vancouverites are next. Ottawa patrons are Canada's best, according to the stats released by a Square survey of its data.

When the check was done in Calgary, less than 60 per cent of meal payments contained a tip. The average tip was 13.3 per cent.

I have no reason to believe Calgary is an isolated island of Alberta's cheapskates, so let's just let the survey stand as representative.

In a whole lot of establishments, working for tips isn't working. Not as a long-term job choice. Maybe that's why restaurant owners need so many labour Market Opinions to get those poor foreigners on staff.

A tip: restaurant managers who require experienced staff long-term might take a serious look at the business model at Smoke 'N Water out in Parksville, B.C.

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

When you have ideology, who needs facts?

Four years ago, the federal government killed the mandatory long-form census because it was, well, mandatory. It was also too intrusive. Big Government, they said, had no right to demand that millions of families reveal the things the long form asked them to reveal.

I once got the long form census. My beef with it then was was that even though I am fourth-generation born-and-bred Canadian, and that my family scarcely even left Alberta since settling here, I was forced to say that I was an ethnic German.

Other than that, I can't recall any questions I would have thought too intrusive.

But the Tories could, and they killed the long form part of the national census. They replaced it with the voluntary National Household Survey (NHS), and intend to repeat that in the next census in 2016.

Even though the NHS cost $22 million more than the long-form census did. Even though the data it produces is not considered accurate.

Meanwhile, the government spends hundreds of millions to spy on us in ways far more intrusive than Statistics Canada ever could be. So much for privacy.

Last week, a flurry of news reports surrounded reports that the federal auditor general and the Treasury Board both blasted the uselessness of the NHS as being too vague, and virtually unsearchable for the data it does contain.

The Canadian Press also reported through an Access to Information request that a major release of data planned for last fall had to be delayed because staff at Statistics Canada discovered major last-minute inaccuracies.

Is Canada's middle class actually better off than it was in the past, and better off than the U.S. middle class (even though their economy is growing faster than ours)? These days, it depends on who you ask.

Are job vacancies rising or falling? Is there really a labour shortage? Again, it depends on who you ask.

The answers to just those two questions have huge implications to our economy, and right now, the experts who mine the data say Canada has a four-year gap in reliable information. Soon to become eight years.

In the past two years, Statistics Canada lost 18.5 per cent of its work force, due to budget cuts. Over time, those budget cuts will prove extremely costly, when government ideology fails to match reality.

The Tories also cut 20 per cent of the research budget of Justice Canada. Canadian Press cites internal documents that say the cuts were a result of legal research that undermined the ruling party's get-tough-on-crime agenda.

Henceforth, Justice Canada was instructed to create reports that support government policy, not refute it. When it comes to justice, ideology trumps the facts.

The government also cut $1.6 million in subscriptions to printed and online legal databases, meaning that accurate information on the effects of current government policy on crime, prisons, and mandatory sentencing cannot as easily be gathered in the future.

Federal statistics on Canada's makeup (our age, work, ethnicity, how we move through our cities, our housing choices, education levels and a host of other important cultural and economic actions) is now considered so inaccurate that the City of Toronto will not use them.

Red Deer will, though. Global News reported that Franklin Kutuado, our city research and evaluation co-ordinator, says we cannot afford to do the research to get our own data on the level of need for seniors housing, for instance.

So Red Deer will reply on the NHS data, questionable though it may be. He said the city will also consult other databases available to try for a wider picture on the way Red Deer's future will be roll out.

He suggested this could result in something better than simple reliance on Statistics Canada. (It should be noted that StatsCan was regarded as a world leader in providing reliable national household data, at least before the Tories killed the mandatory long-form census).

But Kutuado may have a point there. Who knows? Actually, that is the point.

Red Deer will also be increasing its reliance on word-of-mouth data in the future to affect city planning.

Council's next Let's Talk session is on the budget, to be held Wednesday May 21, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Festival Hall. Come and rail all you want, and let the loudest voice decide how this city will grow. Now there's accuracy for you.

City councils absolutely must listen to their ratepayers. All governments do. But governments also need accurate facts on demographics, employment, incomes, crime, transportation patterns and housing.

Without that, you're left with ideology — which ultimately becomes abuse of power.

A union solution for Canada's so-called labour shortage

Local 1118 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union is based in Red Deer. It's not a large local, representing people who work in the province's meat packing industry.

But a report uncovered by CBC News suggests they hold a key to solving the worst aspects of the federal government's temporary foreign workers program.

Their answer: write it into the workers' contracts that the employers must assist all temporary foreign hires to become permanent Canadian residents, if the workers can meet the standards required by immigration laws.

Believe me, in my experience, new arrivals will work very hard indeed to meet the standards, if they are given a chance to succeed.

Right now, Local 1118 represents 4,300 members, and about 2,500 of them are temporary foreign workers who have either become permanent residents or are in the process, says the CBC report.

My own rather limited contact with people in the TFW program comes from volunteering in the Optimist Club's bicycle recycling program. Over the past couple of years, I've noticed a significant increase in the number of foreign arrivals with limited English coming to us, looking for a free bike.

Demand seems to come in cycles, pardon the pun.

For a while, we were fixing up donated bikes for Spanish speakers. (We always need more bikes of all kinds and sizes; if you have an unused bicycle taking up space in your garage, the Optimist Club of Red Deer can put it back on the road, for people who would be very grateful to have it.)

These days, we're helping more people from Eastern Europe, plus a number of people from Muslim countries — mothers in traditional dress, bringing children and other relatives who often help translate.

The TFW program does not allow souses and children to be brought to Canada while the worker is here temporarily. Yet there is a small but steady flow of people coming to our program with children, all seeking the traditional mode of workers' transportation where they came from — a good working bike.

While we work, our clients often converse in their mother tongue, and one word I pick up mid-sentence is “Olymel.” The name of Red Deer's hog processing plant is the same in every language.

In an environment of temporary foreigners in Red Deer, doing what we all can agree is hard work in a slaughterhouse, what are all these spouses and children doing here?

Local 1118 of the UFCW resolves the disconnect. I don't do interviews in the shop, but I suspect these are families of Olymel workers who are on their way to becoming Canadian citizens.

That's what the TFW program should be: a route for Canada to access workers in all the trades that need workers, from people around the world who want to build a peaceful, prosperous life for their families.

Here are some numbers I picked up from another labour group, the Alberta Federation of Labour:

• Alberta gets more than half of the Labour Market Opinions allowed by the federal government, for job openings that apparently can't be filled by local applicants.

• In 2011, there were 58,840 job openings of all kinds in Alberta, from top skilled pressure welders to fast food workers which gained LMO approval.

• That year, about 25,500 temporary foreign workers entered the province, in a workforce that must rotate pretty rapidly — there were about 25,000 TFW workers in Alberta in 2011.

• Alberta job growth created about 77,500 new jobs that year, in a population that reports 121,000 unemployed people in the work force, but looking for a job.

• Alberta's population aged 20-24 has remained pretty stable in recent years, at just over 200,000. Yet the number of these people earning less than $13 an hour has risen to just under 55,000. (No figures on the numbers in this group earning “skilled worker” wages could be found in my search.)

Obviously, simplistic answers will not fix the problems within and created by the TFW program.

But in the meat packing trade for a start, employers and labour are working together on one solution which makes a bad program better. When workers have rights that can be enforced under contract, everyone benefits.

All of Red Deer benefits from growth of permanent residents and their families. The housing market benefits, schools benefit, consumer businesses that aren't even connected to the TFW program benefit.

Very few benefit from permanently rotating workers through our job market who live and work under constant threat of deportation, who do not have the rights the rest of us take for granted.

What labour crisis? Government may be relying on unreliable data

In the past four months, I've replied for two jobs ads posted on Kijiji. They were for semi-skilled work (assembling bikes), part time, for relatively low pay. A good match for an older guy who likes to work on bikes, who's looking to make a few bucks while keeping busy.

No response. Zilch. Therefor, were I to rely on the data available to me, I'd have to say there are no such jobs available here.

What I am doing is just an extreme version of what the federal government is doing with its apprehended labour shortage crisis and its temporary foreign workers program.

My job search is far from thorough. I can live with that.

But neither is the research being done by government. And that is costing Canada a lot, in funding wasted on programs that may not be needed, in creating expectations based on conditions that do not exist, and even in harming our international reputation as a caring, humane employer.

Instead of assigning their statistics professionals to the task, the feds outsourced data mining to a group called Wanted Analytics, which uses software to scan online classified ad sites, to see how job opportunities meet the number of people looking for work.

In essence, they did what I did.

Their reports suggest that instead of there being an unemployment problem, Canada has a job vacancy rate of four per cent.

Based on that, the government developed policies in its recent budget to boost the match between these tens of thousands of unmet jobs and people who need work. A big part of that was a boost to education and training for aboriginals and a boost to employing temporary foreign workers.

But as we have seen, the training policies for first nations isn't being very well received right now. And the TFW program is getting an awful lot of bad publicity.

Over the weekend, yet another serious abuse of the TFW program was brought to light by CBC News, who reported that a numbered company in B.C. was keeping foreign workers in slave-like conditions.

The workers in some cases were paid well below minimum wage, for 12-hour shifts, if they were paid at all. Cash fines were set up for imaginary offences, like checking one's cell phone, or talking to co-workers.

The result was that workers sometimes ended up owing money to their employer — which meets the definition of slavery. The employers' actions and their apparent misuse of the government's TFW program also meets the definition of human trafficking.

The important job that could not find Canadian workers? Selling phony energy wrist bands from a mall kiosk — on commission, minus living expenses, minus all the fines the employer could dream up. Not exactly the $13 an hour promised. Not a chance to build a new life in Canada.

Facing physical threats and deportation, including threats to his life if he did so, one worker went public to CBC. The company is still in business, and the government has not lifted its TFW licence.

All based, as is coming to light, on faulty data.

Research from more credible sources than trawls of online want ads is showing there is no labor crisis in Canada.

There are indeed shortages of workers with specific skills in specific regions, such as in Alberta and Saskatchewan's oil patch. But nothing to justify a TFW bolus of transient and vulnerable workers.

Studies by TD Bank and Statistics Canada, backed up by research from both the University of Alberta and University of Lethbridge suggest Canada is actually doing OK in balancing workers with jobs.

Dire crises in some sectors were based on assumptions that project, for instance, that Canada will be short 25,000 truck drivers in six years. Really?

Other phenomena have not been accounted for, like the high participation rate of older workers, and the rise of part-time work among boomers who haven't been retiring according to accepted projections.

Neither has the supply/demand ratio been fully factored for labour. Industry CEOs made million-dollar bonuses in the past decade by laying people off, freezing wages and getting efficient.

It's not easy for huge conglomerates to change gears, and (just a suggestion) increase wages, when labour is short.

Business has the ear of government, much more so than labour. Government listens to the lowest-cost bidder on an IT contract, instead of its own professionals.

Perhaps government has not been asking the right questions, has not been getting accurate data, and is reaping the fruit of policies based more on ideology than the facts on the ground.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at Readersadvocate.blgspot.ca

Brian Mason led as a minority

It’s not easy being the political leader whose party never wins an election. It’s not easy being popular in your riding and among your constituents, but never to be among the majority in any legislature. Always on the wrong side of the aisle.

It’s not easy, but man, is it ever important.

I expect that Brian Mason, who announced his retirement this week as leader of the Alberta New Democrats understands that though he has never been a winner in the traditional political sense, he is far from being a failure.

Alberta has never been kind to the Opposition. Albertans, who like to view themselves as independent thinkers, mavericks who figure things out for themselves, vote as a herd. Always.

Since the Tory defeat of the Social Credit dynasty that had held the province for decades after the Great Depression, the Progressive Conservatives sometimes held all but two seats. Holding four members in Opposition was like a landslide.

I can’t remember what the big political crisis was, but in 1986, the NDs won all of 19 seats with Ray Martin as leader.  In 1993, things returned to normal, and the NDs lost them all, and did not return to the legislature until 1997, when they gained their traditional two seats.

For almost all his career as MLA and party leader, Brian Mason was in that tiny minority. It takes a special type of grit for a caucus that small to hold to accountability a government so powerful that it can lose sight of the difference between party and government. Between party interest and taxpayers’ money.

But I suppose Mason got used to that early.

His grandfather was a Tory senator. His dad was reported as being a Red Tory, who later stepped to the right and helped Preston Manning form the Reform Party. Mason’s biography notes his mother voted Liberal.

So when politics came up at the supper table, I wonder how many votes young Brian won.

He was a minority voice when I first met him at the University of Alberta. I was the editor of the student newspaper, Mason was a vice-president of the Students Union, and a director of the Alberta Federation of Students.

The issues then for the Alberta union? Rising tuition fees and oppressive student loans.  Like I said, ever in the wilderness.

Official biographies can exaggerate, but we are told that Mason’s experience as a City of Edmonton bus driver on a route covering the lower-income north side, brought home to him how working-class people struggled in Alberta’s booming economy. Even more so when Alberta’s economy went bust.

He was urged to run for city council, and represented the people on his northeast city route for 11 years.

He made the jump to provincial politics in the same region, in a by-election, and has been the popular minority voice ever since.

It’s easy to make fun of an opposition that almost never polls above 15 per cent of the popular vote. But among that 15 per cent live Alberta’s true maverick thinkers.

So what’s his legacy?

Some useful pressure on the government to look at lowering your car insurance costs is one thing. Being among the first to note the looming crisis in seniors care was another.

Another would be making Albertans remember that running roughshod over the province’s own health care, social services and educators is not a good idea — even if large numbers of them obviously vote Tory. It must have worked, they’re the highest paid in the country.

Political prognositcators, who are correct almost as often as random chance, suggest there could be a saw-off on the right in the next provincial election, the battle to lead the herd between the Tories and Wildrose.

In that event, a minority party might hold some sway in a minority government.

If that happens, it would be a new universe for the Alberta New Democrats. The old school would be out of step. Time for a new leader.

Knowing when to step down is leadership of a higher degree than is usually seen in Alberta politics.

In the minority there, too.