Are poor people worth $20,000 a year?

A conference of academics held over a 5-day long weekend, when more people are watching rain clouds than news reports, is hardly a time to make a splash of chatter among Canadians.

But such a conference was held last weekend at McGill University. It drew more than 100 speakers, and what they had to say should not be lost, just because there were important soccer games on the telly, and even more important meals cooking on the barby.

So let's spare a moment or two to think about their topic: a guaranteed minimum income plan to reduce the effects of poverty.

Now there's a idea that doesn't get a lot of traction in a place like Alberta, where it's an article of faith that good people work for good pay and people who don't work . . . may not be so good.

But even here, where the good people want to keep more of their good pay, people who crunch numbers suggest a program ensuring every person has the means to cover the cost of basic living may be cheaper than the patchwork quilt of social programs that provides more warmth for bureaucracy than people in need.

Here's the question the conference was talking about: if government ensured that no adult earned less than $20,000 a year, would the nation as a whole be better off?

In the minds of most of the academics at the conference, the answer is yes.

Half of all families in Canada make less than $76,000 in total income, half make more. On average, an employed Canadian makes $48,250 a year.

The low-income cutoff — one of the best understood measures of poverty in an industrialized country like ours — is 50 per cent of the median income, with adjustments for local factors like housing and transportation costs.

In Ontario, (where I was able to find data easily enough for discussion purposes) the LICO for a family of two adults and one child is $28,000. Federal statistics tell us that of all the families below the LICO standard, just under half have members who work.

That makes them good people, right?

But boosting this family's income to $40,000 with direct federal subsidies is a rather large step. You'd have to find a lot of tax savings from other programs — and convince a lot of taxpayers that doing this is worthwhile — for the idea to fly.

So first, where would the savings come from?

Well, here's an unintended boost that might have helped former Tory party leader Tim Hudak in Ontario last month: a guaranteed income plan needs only a federal tax return to qualify. Administration would cost no more than expanding the system that sends GST refund cheques to low-income Canadians.

There would be no army of caseworkers doing screening interviews, scrutinizing documents, keeping track of monthly earning statements and doing follow-up visits with welfare clients. There would be no bureaucracy watching how much a disabled person earns working part-time, in case the next month's support cheque can show a deduction.

That's more than the 100,000 civil servants in Tim Hudak's Ontario to lay off the public payroll.

Where $12,750 for an individual on welfare in Alberta becomes a trap against trying to re-enter the workforce (you lose your benefits if you try — it's practically a 100-per-cent tax on income), $20,000 becomes a more comfortable floor (with a roof over your head).

A person on the program can attempt to find work at the bottom of the income scale, knowing the gap between wages and expenses can always be covered.

A retired guy — like me — can leave a job after 40 years and be a volunteer. StatsCan puts the value of volunteer work at about $50 billion a year. Include stay-at-home parents and all other types of unpaid work, and that total rises to about $297 billion a year.

Crime costs attributable to poverty would drop $1 billion to $2 billion a year, according to the academics at the conference. Health care costs attributable to low income could drop anywhere between $8 billion and $17 billion a year.

And there's that old study from Dauphin, Manitoba to consider. A guaranteed annual income experiment was done there under Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s. The data from that was compiled, but never digitized and fully studied, and only recently have academics begun sifting through boxes of documents in archives, to quantify what really happened when everyone in town was guaranteed a minimum income.

All we know is that a socialist Armageddon of layabouts did not rise in Dauphin. Poor people still went to work, their kids stayed in school longer, and had better lives.

They were good people. Are good people worth $20,000 a year?

Now that we're over the five-day break, let's not allow what was said at this conference to simply fade away.

A natural impulse to save lives is made a crime

Squirrels can be the worst. They play a deadly game of chicken with drivers, seemingly timing a desperate dash across the street, just as you are about to pass them.

I've even hit a squirrel while riding a bike.

It's a natural reflex to stomp on the brakes or swerve wildly when you come upon wildlife trying to cross a roadway. So there needs to be at least some sympathy for Emma Czornobaj who took her concerns for some roadside ducklings a step or two too far. She stopped her car in the left lane of a highway near Candiac Que. in an effort to capture the baby ducks who appeared to be orphaned.

That was four years ago. Last week, her act of concern became national news when a jury unanimously convicted her of two counts of criminal negligence causing death.

She now faces a potential lengthy jail sentence for that act, because Andre Roy, 50, and his 16 year-old daughter Jessie were killed when the motorcycle Andre was driving hit the rear of Czornobaj's Honda Civic at high speed.

Andre's wife Pauline Volikakis was riding a motorcycle of her own and watched in horror as her husband and daughter were thrown like rag dolls in the crash.

A horror. A tragedy. A terrible, preventable, loss of life. But criminal negligence? I have a little trouble with that.

For one thing, Roy was driving well above the speed limit at the time. A police investigation suggested Roy was running at anywhere between 113 km/h and 129 km/h when he applied the brakes to his bike.

Stopping in the left lane of a highway is not a very smart thing to do. Not turning on warning flashers brings this into dumb territory. Trying to herd wild duckings into one's car while your vehicle is parked on a highway takes this one level farther.

But criminally negligent? I'm not so sure.

Volikakis was driving slower than her husband, and was able to avoid the crash.

That must say something to the finding of responsibility for the crash.

The urge to do something potentially dangerous in your car is almost instinctive when you come upon wildlife.

I grew up on a farm, and have seen death for a pretty wide variety of animals. Cats, dogs, cattle, chickens, turkeys, hogs — all have met their demise on our farm at one time or another. I've shot a lot of gophers in the pasture, and plinked dozens of sparrows around the chicken run. An elderly black lab on our farm was a champion mouser, and we kids spent a lot of time in the summer, turning over fallen logs to expose nests for him.

But when a squirrel, or a family of ducks crosses the road in front of me, I make emergency avoidance moves, without thinking. The appearance of a deer or moose anywhere near the road is cause for a sudden deceleration.

If another vehicle — obviously speeding — were right behind me at those moments, could these natural reactions be considered criminally negligent?

These are not the exact facts of the case for Emma Czornobaj. But reading a news story like this one brings to mind: “there but for the grace of God . . .”

Czornobaj has her pre-sentence report set for Aug. 16. Her lawyer is considering an appeal. For Czornobaj and Volikakis, this sad event has dragged on for four years.

We have to trust the wisdom of the juries we pick for trials. We need to believe that judges weigh a lot of factors in sentencing.

Not every duckling that hatches in spring survives to make the fall migration. Trying to alter that is vanity.

But not every terrible, avoidable death on the highway needs to have someone to blame for it. Or maybe it does.

All told, this is just a terribly sad event.

Shame on Red Deer: non-profits are doing the city's work

The newspaper article on Tuesday said Red Deer is the largest city in Alberta that has no program for a lower-cost transit pass for low-income and disabled people. While that is true as far as it goes, the reality behind this is actually worse.

Red Deer doesn't have a subsidy program for the people who must stretch pretty hard to afford the cost of a bus pass, but who must rely on public transit the most for their mobility in the city. But Red Deer's transit system does get a five-figure subsidy, courtesy of some rather ceaseless fundraising by a local non-profit.

The day before the Advocate story appeared, Red Deer Action Group donated just under 2,000 regular single-use bus passes, and about 485 student/senior bus passes to Red Deer agencies that serve people in crisis.

The money for that was raised through their inaugural Donate-A-Ride campaign, which began in May.

Fundraising for next year begins again in November.

But that's not the only program for which the Action Group raises money. For three years now, the agency has been providing cash refunds to low-income and disabled people who rely on monthly passes to be able to move through the city.

Anywhere between $7,000 and $10,000 a year is raised, says Action Group director Jean Stinson. People bring in receipts, and those whose incomes are below $24,000 a year (that's a lot of people in Red Deer), can get a partial refund on their bus passes, up to $150 per person per year.

Stinson says the money goes pretty quickly, but they try to help as many people as they can. The poor, the elderly, people on disability, the sick (some people even use subsidized bus passes to get dialysis treatment, she says) and new immigrants can use the program.

Stinson agrees that it does not make sense for the city to simply reduce fares, below the $2.50 regular ticket that now stands.

Looking at the experience in Edmonton, from which Stinson copied the Donate-A-Ride program, transit needs to earn its way, in order to survive and grow as a vital city service.

But even at $2.50 for a one-way pass, some people who need the service are excluded. And these are people who have few if any other options. It's $5 for a round trip, or you don't see the doctor, or don't arrive for therapy, skills training — or any of the multiple reasons people need to get from Point A to Point B and back again.

So rather than break the bank — and probably harm the service — by keeping fares low, other cities have found that a tax-subsidized program for passes for the lowest income groups works better.

Those of us who can pay, do. And those for whom even a regular bus ticket presents a financial barrier, a subsidy program can increase ridership on our transit system as whole.

The very fact that volunteers need to spend long hours organizing and fundraising for this service is proof enough that the program is needed and the subsidies are appreciated.

But something as basic as transportation in the city should not be the purview of non-profits.

Think of it this way: how many hours are you willing to put in, writing grant applications, attending meetings, writing policy, and generally begging for money, month after month, year after year — to fix potholes on our streets?

You wouldn't do it. Properly-maintained streets are a basic service you expect for your tax dollars.

The elderly who can't drive, people on disability, people in crisis fleeing family trouble, people too sick to work — they still need to move through the city, and nobody asks them if they'd want the potholes fixed, rather than get a monthly bus pass they can afford.

As it is, Red Deer taxpayers are being subsidized by volunteers who have to work pretty hard to raise money for a basic, vital service for seniors on fixed incomes, people living on a disability allowance and people in crisis who have no income at all.

Shame on us. Other Alberta cities smaller than ours have managed to write policies that work to figure this out. The program in Edmonton, for instance, can be applied here almost cut-and-paste.

Stinson says she's been told for years, by elected city officials and professional managers, that “we are looking into it.” What's to look?

She and the Action Group are doing the city's work for it, for free. Shame.

The city needs to step up here. Either take over the subsidy program, or give the volunteers the money so they can do the job for them.

Getting the youth vote includes giving it to them

With but three months to go before a national referendum on independence, Scotland is turning to its youth for leadership.

Residents as young as 16 can vote in the Sept. 18 national referendum on whether Scotland should become an independent nation. At present, polls suggest the No side has the lead, but both sides are claiming a strong turnout by voters 16-24 years old could seal them a victory.

That age range represents 12 per cent of the country's population, so a decided swing in the vote among that group could swing the referendum outcome as a whole. If they actually decide to vote.

It will also be the first time people that young will have voting rights in the United Kingdom.

That aspect of this race makes the Scotts' referendum worth watching, never mind the prospect of seeing the world peacefully create a new country.

Convincing young people that exercising their democratic right is worth the effort has gotten more difficult in recent years. Even with the rise in popularity of social media and its use by political parties in campaigns, young people seem to get turned off when the discussion moves from celebrity gossip to current events.

But when relevance rises, so does participation.

Student protests over tuition fees in Quebec drove young adult participation in Quebec's 2012 election to 62 per cent (it was 36 per cent in the previous election in 2008). Organizers are hoping that a similar connection can be made for youth in Scotland in September.

The clincher, it seems, is to convince people that they have a personal stake in the outcome of a vote, and that their input matters. But shouldn't that be the case for all people, in all campaigns?

It shouldn't take much effort to convince people that one's national identity is important — especially at those moments in history when you get to choose what it will be.

But surveys of young people show that in Scotland, people aged 15-17 are quite able to imagine the consequences of the vote, and that rhetoric alone will not be enough to gain their support.

Carrington-Dean is a Glasgow-based financial group that provides advice to personal and corporate clients. They're the largest independent group in Scotland that people turn to when they get into debt trouble, for instance.

Their poll, taken in May, shows that young people are quite capable of looking into their own futures, and questioning the outcomes of large questions.

Almost two-thirds of more than 1,000 15-to-17 year-olds said they worried about their country's economic outlook. An equal portion also worried about their families falling into debt. Just over half worried they themselves might fall into debt.

When the questions were taken a step deeper, the results got more complex, indicating the people taking the survey are quite able to connect the dots between Scotland's independence, and their own futures.

The answers suggest they're not sure, and are questioning what they're being told.

About 41 per cent said they believed their families would be worse off in an independent Scotland, versus 21 per cent who believed they'd be better off. A smaller minority — 39 per cent thought they themselves would be worse off, versus 25 per cent who thought they as individuals would prosper better in an independent country. Being unsure is a good response, if it means one is looking to become more sure.

That should have lessons for the rest of the world.

Perhaps today's youth are not the entirely self-absorbed and personally entitled group they are often characterized to be. Maybe the superior educations and opportunities we've given them have indeed led them to a maturity that we've hoped they would grow into.

If youth as young as 16 can be trusted with helping to decide a national future in a referendum, maybe we can trust them with referenda on other long-future topics as well.

Should British Columbia call for a referendum on allowing the Northern Gateway pipeline to cross their province — and don't believe that question isn't likely — perhaps 16 year-olds should have a say in the outcome.

That's only one question that pops into mind.

A city council like Red Deer's, interested as it is in public consultation, could easily think of several others.

We've invested a lot in our youth. If they — like anyone else — can be convinced they have a stake in the outcome of questions, and that their input matters, why not trust them with a share of power over the answers to questions of the day?

A computer tells lies to try to become a real boy: this is progress?

As a sci-fi reader and the parent of a philosopher (the two interests are definitely related), I'm not surprised that a claim has been made that a computer program has managed — according to some — to have passed the famous Turing Test.

What surprises me is that the world is not agog over the news. Or that it has not been made fearfully irrational by it.

Eugene Goostman is the name of a 'personality' created by programmers that recent history has made unlikely collaborators.

Vladimir Veselov is a Russian, Eugene Demchenko is Ukrainian. They've been working at Princeton Artificial Intelligence since 2001, and decided their shot at the Turing prize was to create a digital 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. That way, the program could claim to know everything when being tested, but could be believably wrong at the same time. Smart, that.

The aim of the test, as mathematical genius Alan Turing proposed in 1950, was for the program to be able to trick human questioners into believing it was a real human. Later on, a standard was set at 30 per cent success to be considered a real pass of Turing's test, which then touched off arguments that have continued ever since.

Sci-fi, meet philosophy.

The ability of a computer to mimic genuine intelligence is serious stuff. Not because people seem to long for a HAL or a Commander Data as a friend, but because the quest to create intelligence touches the base of our own notions of who we are.

And how vulnerable we are in the presence of our technology. More on that later.

The program Big Blue was able to defeat a grand master at chess, because it could compute a massive number of outcomes for any series of moves within the game. Eugene was pre-loaded with a massive roster of possible responses to comments and questions typed in by a human interviewer.

Neither power can be considered evidence of the self-awareness or intentionality that marks a human. Nor is it evidence of the functions of greed, compassion, desire to dominate or willingness to sacrifice that humans — and many other members of the animal kingdom — display naturally.

But last Saturday, Eugene Goostman convinced 10 of 30 judges that it was human, in 30 simultaneous unrestricted interviews. Other programs taking the test at the same time failed. I haven't seen a report on how many of the human interviewees set as test cases inside the exercise also failed.

Here's where the fear should set in. Nobody is saying that some point has been passed where robots can begin to enslave humans a la science fiction.

But if 10 of 30 skeptical judges can be fooled by a chatbot that something fictional is actually true, imagine what can happen when chatbots are released into the World Wide Web, able to convince massively gullible societies of anything at all.

Why do Nigerian princes still ask you to give them your banking information? So they can actually deposit a fortune within your account? It's because a whole lot of people believe false promises.

A human-like simulacrum can work 24 hours a day, keep track of millions of lies simultaneously, follow thousands of conversations uniquely while never getting confused or losing track, remembering every detail you let slip — and can be guided to steal everything you own.

“9Contact me for a profitable transaction i have for you.Regards” Sorry, mrs.liung, but you are now soooo obsolete.

“Is your email active? I have an urgent proposal to discuss with you.” Sorry, Wing Lok, but there's a robot on the line.

The people who imagined a world containing genuine AI must have believed themselves to be some sort of god. But even God who created Eden saw it fall into jealousy and murder pretty quickly.

I don't think Turing, or anyone else, imagined this outcome. Nobody set out to invent email so that people could be robbed of their life savings. Nobody set out to create social media, so that teenaged girls could be coaxed into publishing nude photos of themselves, and then be bullied into suicide.

Cyberneticist Mitchel Kapor bet $20,000 against futurist Ray Kurzweil that a widely-accepted pass of their specific Turing Test would occur before the dawn of 2029.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, says the mark will be passed before the end of 2018.

I — and the philosophers — ask: why would we want that?

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

Ontario is caught between a wall and a cliff

When you begin spending time looking at politics and public issues, trying to form opinions, you quickly get lured into thinking that politics is important. That the decisions our decision-makers make actually represent choices we ourselves could make.

These decisions do matter, but by the time they reach the public sphere, the most important ones seem to have already been made. So your input, though publicly courted, in private, it doesn't seem to count for much.

For instance, you can help decide if Red Deer keeps its downtown plaza open year-round. But your opinion on conditions in our public schools, while recorded, will in all likelihood be ignored by the officials who control those conditions.

I found myself lured into following the provincial elections in Ontario. I wanted to see if there were parallels between the Ontario mindset that of Alberta.

The most significant insight that I have been able to find is that people generally can't be bothered to invest in the big decisions that will affect their futures. So a minority of people with vested interests in those decisions will.

Less than half of registered voters cast ballots in the last Ontario election. That race put Liberal Dalton McGuinty into the premier's chair, which was followed by, shall we say, less-than-stellar outcomes.

McGuinty was replaced by Kathleen Wynne, who has had to bear public responsibility for the previous administration's spending scandals, a worsening economic climate, and a hard charge from the right from Tory leader Tim Hudak.

The Ontario campaign features high provincial power rates, serious charges of wasteful spending, rumours of a bloated government payroll, rising provincial debt, along with rising inequality of incomes, limited expectations of a better future for many, leading to a disaffected public.

Seen from a distance, the party platforms are allow for branding of the parties themselves. But voters know the realities of being the government in Ontario will force them all to behave much the same.

See any parallels to our situation here?

I thought I did, so I started following the election news. What I've seen is that despite the hard work being done on the campaigns, the preponderance of voters appear to be tuning out.

Even given the differences in the economies of Ontario and Alberta there are reasons why people in both provinces give up on the debate over the public policies that will govern their futures.

For one thing, the challenges facing the provinces are too complex to be resolved at the ballot box. For another, anyone can see that the solutions being offered either can't work, or won't be followed after election day in any event.

There's just no way a government can tackle a provincial debt of 40 per cent of GDP and create a million jobs in a stagnant economy, by reducing the public payroll by 100,000 positions — as Hudak is proposing.

Likewise, voters know you can't dig yourself out of a problem by doing more of the same things that got you into trouble in the first place, which is what the Liberals are essentially promising.

Ontario represents Canada's version of the fiscal cliff.

Columnist Gwynne Morgan points out that California is considered the poster child of how public debt can ruin a society's prospects. But Ontario's debt is 70 per cent larger in real terms. Annual interest payments on Ontario's debt are rising, soon to be on the scale of Alberta's investments in our Heritage Fund.

And nobody but the NDP is talking tax hikes?

When almost a third of Ontario's unemployed have given up even looking for a job, whose campaign platform can gain majority support?

I believe this is where democracy hits a wall. People know the problems facing their province are more complex than they can describe. People know existing conditions, not party platforms, will dictate policy in the future. And they don't see how their input can make a difference.

So the big decisions have already been made — by bond-holders, lobby groups and organizations that can swing just enough voters in just enough ridings to assure their influence.

From here, I don't see any simple solutions for Ontario. But for Alberta, I see a warning that people need to stay on top of their government, to keep the big problems manageable, and to find a consensus that we can force our leaders to follow.

If you don't believe politics is important, you can get to a point where your vote really and truly doesn't matter.