The ironic hand of government

The opposition Wildrose Party calls it “blatant dishonesty,” a “flat-out lie,” that the provincial government quietly granted its senior managers in the civil service the same rate of pay raise that they negotiated with their unionized workers — a year and five months after announcing a three-year wage freeze.

The Alberta Union of Public employees calls it an irony.

Either way, it's more egg on the face of a government that by all appearances has lost control of its agenda.

Last November, the government proposed Bills 45 and 46, which essentially stripped the right of AUPE to act like a union. They also made the entire union liable for punishment with fines for anything said by any individual union member.

The government and the AUPE were in contract negotiation at the time.

We'll see you in court, said the AUPE. In short order, the courts put those bills in abeyance. They died and became irrelevant when a three-year deal calling for a total 6.75 per cent pay hike was reached last month.

In February of 2013, citing budget difficulties, the government announced it was “leading by example” and saving taxpayers a total of $54 million with a three-year salary freeze of its pay for top managers. Additionally, said finance minister Doug Horner, public sector management would be cut 10 per cent during that time.

No news on any management cuts yet — and there probably won't be any until the PC Party gets a new leader — but it is policy for the government to give its managers the same deal they give the front-line workers.

There's the irony, says AUPE. Government said publicly the managers were worth no pay hike at all, but privately agreed to give them the same rate of pay raise as workers got through negotiations.

That's 6.75 per cent over three years, on a much larger starting pay envelope for managers.

A cabinet minister's right hand is the deputy minister — who, by the way, earns rather more than the minister. Three years from April 2014, a deputy minister, who researches, advises and implements the policies of the elected masters, will earn just under $300,000. There are perks, benefit packages, retirement packages, etc., etc. along with that.

The opposition likes to point to egregious examples of government policies, and the press likes to print them. And a juicy example for today is Gary Mar, a former cabinet minister and one-time leadership candidate.

He's hard at work selling the Alberta Advantage in Hong Kong right now, and he'll be making salary, plus cash benefits, plus non-cash benefits totalling almost $600,000 a year in Year 3 of this deal — assuming he's not to become one of the staff cuts under a new leader.

Candidates for the leadership and the premier's chair have quickly lined up to say they'll re-instate the freeze if elected. That's as hollow as Bills 45 and 46, because these wage agreements will continue at least two years and a general election past the leadership vote. That's, like, eternity.

Maybe the Tories really are being a whole lot smarter than this situation makes them look. Maybe currying favour with tens of thousands of unionized workers and their managers — plus teachers, doctors, nurses and all health care workers — in the years prior to an election is a smart thing to do.

Especially when it is so-o-o tempting to bait the Wildrose alternative into going out for every government-paid worker's blood.

On the ground, Alberta is squarely in the middle of the national pack for both per-capita spending, and per-capita revenue (according to a chart provided by the Alberta Federation of Labour). That makes half the country even worse drunken sailors than we are.

The budget envelope that pays the civil service — from forestry workers to prison guards to social workers and more — is in balance.

There is a lot of upside room on the revenue front, for any party that wants to bring Alberta from the bottom of the global energy royalty list to the middle. Just ask Ed Stelmach how easy that would be. But it's there.

There's upside room on the revenue front in tweaking our flat income tax rate, giving low income people a slight cut, and high income people a slight rise.

And the economy is booming, employment is high and median wages (especially after taxes) are the country's best — so you're a genius if you do nothing at all.

Eventually, there comes a point when you truly cannot believe any government promise. (That's one reason why the public sector needs to be unionized.)

But cynicism and fear of any alternatives rocking the boat make for a very thin mandate to govern.

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

Canada's tax agency is dangerously dabbling in politics

A couple of years ago, journalists connected to WikiLeaks revealed a trove of information on hundreds of wealthy Canadians who may (or may not) be hiding piles of cash in offshore bank accounts in order to evade paying their taxes.

Until that public revelation, the Canada Revenue Agency did not act on the leak, because they did not have the information. They did not have the information because, unlike its American and European counterparts, the CRA at the time did not pay for information.

Well, now they do. And that must make it easier for the agency to go after waitresses who don't declare their tips, or day labourers who work on construction sites for cash.

The millionaires with their fortunes in Zurich or the Caribbeans? There's been some tough talk, but so far, not a whole lot of recovery reported. A CBC News story — about a year old now — noted the CRA had discovered about $22.4 million in unpaid taxes due from offshore accounts, and recovered about $8 million.

Peanuts. But that's what the CRA likes best.

In a much-heralded campaign in January, the CRA did an aggressive audit of restaurant workers in St. Catherines, Ont. After dragging who knows how many servers through the wringer, the CRA found — gasp! — $1.7 million in unreported gratuities!

At the tax rate paid by your average waiter, that means the CRA would recover about $255,000, plus penalties. A few probably also lost their GST refunds designed for low-income Canadians.

Well, that experience ought to keep Canada's wait staff honest.

You'd hope the government would make good use of the $8 million they dragged out of the offshore accounts of wealthy people. Eight million happens to be the sum the Harper government gave the CRA's charity auditors, so non-profit advocates for the poor, for the environment and for human rights would just shut up.

Since the charity audit campaign became public, and scholars began writing papers on its effects, news is trickling out from charities dealing with the demands of the CRA auditors.

Oxfam Canada was told they could not use their funds raised to “prevent” poverty in Africa, because as the CRA pointed out, millionaires could get together to find ways to prevent themselves from becoming poor.

The CRA, with its non-use of information on offshore tax evasion, would likely know a thing or two about that.

PEN Canada, the national arm of a global association of writers and journalists dedicated to freedom of speech, is also under audit. They are accused of using free speech as a political tool. Which is not a charitable activity in Stephen Harper's Canada.

PEN, as you may recall, criticized the federal government for putting a muzzle on its scientists who do research on things like the environmental effects of energy exploration. Can't have all that science going public, can we?

As with its experience with rich offshore tax evaders, the supposedly non-partisan CRA also seems to know a thing or two about using its funds for political purposes.

Edward Jackson, a professor at Carleton University, wrote in a recent blog that the CRA “has lost its way.” What used to be a politically-neutral enforcer of tax law has become a political arm of government, which can be used to punish enemies.

His article, which you can look up and read for yourself, is titled: Why the CRA is no longer an effective instrument of public policy. Jackson says Canadians should be taking out memberships in and making donations to PEN and other non-profits undergoing these special audits. He says we should also be contributing to a fund to launch a court challenge to the whole program, as it has been rolled out.

The CRA maintained in a recent release that its audit targets are not politically selected. It just looks that way.

Appearances are all the government needs to create the chill required, so that nobody dares question their policies or actions, unless the critics' resources are government-deep.

Or held privately offshore.

Crime rates are down: who can we punish?

While Statistics Canada reports that both the severity and incidence of crime continues to drop year after year across the nation, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association reports our jails are clogged, mostly with (assumed) innocent people awaiting trial.

Canadians are more safe in their homes and on our streets than we have been in a lifetime — and far more safe than polls reveal we think we are. Yet our prison population is at an all-time high.

Canada has more than 15,000 convicts in federal lockup, costing us more than $100,000 each per year to house. The federal budget for this has grown 40 per cent, to $2.6 billion, just in the last five years. And we are building more prisons, as if hell itself wouldn't have them.

There is both a connect and disconnect between Canada's dropping crime rates and our overpacked lockups.

All provincial and federal governments will eagerly take credit for dropping crime rates, citing almost-universal tough-on-crime policies. Of course crime is down, politicians will tell you; we've got the bad guys behind bars.

That may be the case, at least in part. But more thoughtful people who actually study crime and social policy will tell you things are more complicated.

That's the disconnect. Long jail setences do not actually relate to the fact there is less actual crime. The clogged jails, the double-bunking, the backlogs of court cases, the increases in mandatory sentences — all these things happen after the crime. Prison crowding has virtually a zero effect on preventing crime.

Or, as has increasingly become the case, after alleged crime. On any given day, says a recent report from the CCLA, there are more people in jail in Canada who have not been convicted of a crime, than there are actual convicts.

Canada has begun to use unattainable bail provisions applied by the courts as a first-tier prison system, absent of the messy process of obtaining convictions.

In one of those egregious sound-bite examples, the CCLA reported of a teen crime suspect being told he would go to jail if he did not make his bed when he was told him to. If he did not obey his mother explicitly, he would violate his bail provisions and be put behind bars. (Obviously, there's more to that story than we're being told, but we do not generally jail disobedient teens. Yet.)

Others are told that being five minutes late for an appointment with court officials is cause for bail to be revoked. Remember, these are people who are supposed to be presumed innocent.

Set aside the injustice of thousands of (assumed) innocent Canadians sitting in overcrowded jails waiting too long for a trial.

What happens later to those convicted and imprisoned likewise has less to do with justice than an un-Canadian government desire for vengeance — or simple exhaustion in social policy.

If prison populations are exploding, the numbers are being driven disproportionately in the numbers of aboriginal people (especially aboriginal women) — a 75 per cent rise in visible minorities in the past decade, 80 per cent for aboriginal women.

A large number of these people have family and sexual abuse in their history — 80 per cent for aboriginal women. About half of all federal inmates require mental health treatment each year.

Tough-on-crime supporters have used this for decades as a source of derision: “Your father didn't love you, so we'll have to excuse your drug addiction and robbery charge.”

That's extremely funny — until you're the person whose father was never ever around, your uncle raped you as a teenager, and nobody anywhere came forward to help you. Prison is where we send these people when they are left to deal with this on their own. Hilarious.

And dangerously costly. Despite the ballooning Corrections budget, the federal government is cutting back on prison guard pay. Austerity within overcrowded prisons, not a good situation going forward.

And all this in a climate of declining crime rates.

Governments should be very grateful for the declining crime severity indexes. If our homes and streets were not indeed safer than they've been in decades, today's policies on crime would have long ago created not just prisons, but gulags.

Canadians should be a lot more outraged about the injustices within our justice system.

Canada is supposed to use prison as a last resort, but we use it as a housing project for victims of family violence, abuse, mental illness and drug addiction.

Canada once used prison to punish people for something bad that they've done, so that they don't do it again. Now we use prison as a place where we send people to get punishment that has nothing to do with the crime for which a sentence was imposed.

And often, before there is ever a trial.

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

Would you like to have an argument? Call the CTF

Whenever I see news articles by or about the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, I am reminded of the the old Monty Python sketch, wherein a customer walks into an office, wishing to purchase an argument.

The scene degenerates into comic absurdity as the hapless customer vainly attempts to satisfy his desire for a rational debate.

Here, too, with the CTF.

Their travelling road show on Alberta's debt, which stopped in Red Deer Saturday, contains a litany of misdirection, false arguments and missed connections — all mixed with well-researched facts taken out of context.

Plus my favourite bugbear: missing the obvious entirely.

It is often quoted during religious arguments: “A text, taken out of context, is a pretext.” Let's put some context on the CTF argument concerning Alberta's debt.

We can accept that Alberta's debt stands at $10.1 billion now, rising by about $100 per second and reaching $21 billion by the end of the 2016-17 fiscal year. (That's assuming CTF — or anyone — can predict the price of energy, interest rates and the value of the Canadian dollar that far into the future. Which they can't.)

By then, according to the CTF, we will be paying $1.4 billion a year in service payments. By my calculations, that's working out to 6.7 per cent interest, which I find pretty hard to swallow. Alberta's bond rate is 3.3 per cent.

Whatever. On to the context.

Derek Fildebrandt, Alberta director of the CTF, is quite correct in saying the $1.4 billion a year we should be paying in three years, is money that can't be spent on roads, bridges, schools and hospitals.

The trouble is, were it not for the debt, there'd be precious little spent at all on roads, bridges, schools and hospitals.

Alberta's debt is not operating debt — services, teachers, doctors — it is capital debt. We need those capital expenditures now, for precisely the reason Fildebrandt says we should not have them at all.

Alberta's growth has been bringing us record revenues, but it has also placed huge demands on capital infrastructure: we are short on schools and hospitals.

If we don't want to to see schools with 40 kids crammed into classrooms designed for 28, we have to build. Now. If we don't like seeing emergency waiting rooms clogged with the sick and suffering, while treatment beds are held by seniors waiting for long-term care, we have to build. Now.

Given Alberta's favourable credit rating and our low-interest environment generally, it makes perfect sense to borrow now.

The cost of the CTF zero-debt budget policy — adopted (probably to be abandoned the minute they take power) by far too many Wildrose MLAs — would crush and kill Alberta's growth. We've seen this exact result in a host of U.S. cities and states: a gutting of infrastructure and services that drives out business and people, leading to a downward spiral of rising capital costs, but a shrinking tax base.

What's the economic cost of not having enough school spaces? CTF does not calculate that, but over time it is likely well above $1.4 billion a year. What's the cost to a whole province of not having timely health treatment? $1.4 billion would barely be a down payment on that.

Roads and bridges? Without taking on debt, forget them.

And that would be the end of Alberta's economic growth.

When interest rates are low, and investment opportunities are high (as has been the case for a few years now), a no-debt government policy is not just foolish, it's destructive. It's contrary to the well-being of this province.

Capital spending is on assets. Assets pay for themselves over time. We may be borrowing tax payments from the next generation, as the CTF alleges, but if we ask that generation in 15 or 20 years, they'll likely say they're glad we did it.

What do you think they would say if we refused to invest now, and the capital costs doubled, plus, as well might be the interest rates on debt that would be desperately needed then? They would condemn us as penny wise and pound foolish.

This leads to the final point, the bugbear.

I only wish the CTF would rally for savings the way they rally against debt. I wish they had been doing this for the last 20 years, so that our savings might be double and triple what they are now.

We have record revenues, our program budget is balanced, our capital investments are within our control. Why are we not significantly saving?

That, far more than debt, is the question the future will ask of us. That is the argument I wish I could purchase.

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

Save our summer: do nothing — and save the Senate, too

Summer is here, the government is on vacation. The chief job of our elected leaders in July is to serve pancakes at the Calgary Stampede.

Our chief job is to apply enough sun screen so we can enjoy the precious few weeks that pass between snow storms in our country.

So who needs a constitutional argument right now? Right now, that would be the CBC.

The national news network has been keeping tabs on the number of vacancies in the Senate, which the prime minister has thus far left unfilled. They are consulting experts, and even senators, about the crisis and are filing regular reports most of us cannot read on our iPads in bright sunlight.

It's a rare prime minister who refrains from packing duly-qualified and politically loyal Canadians to the Red Chamber. But Stephen Harper has experienced pain with both the concept and the practice of filling the Senate seats, so he can be excused for his lack of enthusiasm for the job.

In the past couple of weeks, the CBC has found that even Conservative senators are not feeling the love, and that the workload on some committees is becoming unbearable, due to a lack of membership.

There are 105 chairs in the Senate. Right now, 11 are waiting for new appointments. Three senators are suspended, and we are told that looming retirements will bring the membership shortfall to 17 by the end of the year.

Seventeen gone, out of 105 members. Yes, the workload must be absolutely crushing.

But with three of his own high-profile appointments sitting in limbo for overbilling, and having lost a top PMO advisor in the scandal, plus taking a legal setback from the Supreme Court over Senate reform, you can easily assume Harper would much rather flip pancakes than fill Senate vacancies.

He has the public's support on that. Saskatchewan, premier Brad Wall and even the leader of the opposition Tom Mulcair support allowing the vacancies to just pile up.

If the Supreme Court won't allow Senate reform without engaging Constitutional reform (a political impossibility), they (and likely most Canadians) agree that doing nothing — letting the Senate die of attrition — is doing something. Doing something positive, even.

Except that doing nothing probably can't work.

Eventually, someone will ask the Supreme Court to instruct the Governor-General to do his duty and compel the prime minister to put people in Senate chairs. If the prime minister refuses, he will be in violation of the Constitution (some say that anyway). Then the Governor-General will be required to dismiss the prime minister for constitutional non-performance.

Maybe that's Mulcair's game plan. But doing nothing is seldom a good solution to a problem.

But while the summer sun sets on the Senate, a new light shines in the east.

A group of 15 Conservative and Liberal senators is reported by The Hill Times to be holding secret wildcat meetings of their own in an Ottawa Hotel. NDP senators are not invited, obviously, because the NDP wants the Senate abolished outright.

The meals and room rentals for this are being paid out of the group's own pockets. Completely outside of Senate authority, they are meeting as concerned citizens, discussing ways and means of making the Senate relevant once again — and worth the prime minister's attention. And ours, too.

The Hill Times reports they discussed doing away with their question period. They want to restructure their committees (overworked as they are). They want to end all partisanship (the Liberal members are already officially non-partisan anyway, by decree of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau). They also want to elect their own speaker, once current speaker Noel Kinsella retires in November.

There. If the prime minister cannot reform the Senate because of that darned Canadian Constitution, maybe the Senate can just reform itself. Who'd have thought?

Apparently, there was a motion passed last May calling for a Special Committee to report back on internal measures to make the Senate more transparent, accountable and relevant to Canadians. By Dec. 31, 2015.

By then, who knows how many Senate seats might remain vacant? And we surely wouldn't want yet another summer ruined by a constitutional impasse.

So bravo to the Group of 15. Summer saved. Inaction justified.

And if we didn't pay attention to CBC and The Hill Times, we'd never have known. Please enjoy your summer.

When audits work like a weapon, they're a weapon

I've been active in various charities for a lot of years, in a variety of capacities from street-level volunteer to board president. Some of those charities do what some people would call “political activity.”

If you advocate for the poor and disabled, or seek changes to government policy, that's “political activity.” The base level of democracy is to raise issues and present a case on questions upon which you and I vote. Who better to present a case, than the non-profits who work in the areas concerned?

We happen to live in an era when governments don't like that. An effective way to get the advocacy arm of a charity to “shut the hell up” is to starve them of resources.

If you're the federal government, you do that by tasking an arms-length agency, like the Canada Revenue Agency, to find a way to have your federal charitable licence number revoked. No licence number, no ability to issue tax-deductible charitable receipts to donors, no fundraising — no advocacy.

Here's a short list of some of the “political activity” I've been involved with, through the work of local non-profits:

• Improvements to the province's Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped program, to increase supports to a liveable level, and to make it possible for adults with disabilities to risk trying to work part-time, without losing their benefits;

• The creation of the Alberta Brain Injury Network, one of the nation's most cost-efficient provincial programs doing case management for people who survived horrific trauma, and were then more or less left to fend for themselves;

• And yes, that brain-eating monster of municipal programs anywhere: bike lanes.

I mention these only to illustrate my innate suspicion of the federal government’s motives in tasking the CRA with millions of dollars in special funding to audit charities the government just happens to loathe — environmental groups arguing against pipelines, human rights groups and charities that receive funding from labour unions.

It is hugely expensive for non-profits to comply with audits. Can you imagine launching a public appeal for donations, so that the money raised can be paid to six-figure accountants, rather than the people your board members and staff have dedicated themselves to help?

Federal and provincial rules need to be followed, so that donors can be assured the agencies they support are on the up-and-up. That is self-evident.

But the costs for this are very high. I once served on a board that eventually lost United Way support; I simply could not stomach fundraising the equivalent of return tickets to a villa in Provence just to comply with their regulations on reporting, never mind providing a community service.

It was such a dispiriting experience, I doubt I will ever volunteer for membership on a fundraising board, ever again.

The federal government's audits take this to a whole new level. Their resources have no limit, and even though the charities currently undergoing audits are large enough on their own, this isn't seeking a just outcome. This is intimidation.

Shut the hell up. Or else.

Revenue minister Kerry-Lyne Findlay says the CRA is arms-length from government. They do the government's work, but they do it without interference from government officers.

Except the CRA audits can be launched on the basis of complaints against the non-profits involved.

Who launched a flurry of complaints against the environmental groups? A group called Ethical Oil. Who was a founder of Ethical Oil? Alykhan Velshi, currently an aide to prime minister Stephen Harper.

Gareth Kirby is a journalist who is now a grad student at Royal Roads University in Victoria. He wrote his master's thesis after interviewing 16 agencies who could potentially come under a CRA audit for “political activity.”

They cited a definite chill in their work, not just because the revoking of their charitable licence could shut them down, but because the cost of legitimately surviving the audit is so high, it would consume them.

Whether innocent or guilty, the audit could be ruinous.

In my own small way, I've seen how this works.

An audit — or just the threat of one — keeps non-profits honest. But when the audits act like a weapon against agencies the government doesn't like, they are indeed a weapon.

Arms-length or not, this is the effect. Shut the hell up.

To ease traffic pain, use alternate means

As a cyclist — and also as a motorist — there are few things I like better than fresh, new asphalt. Especially riding, when you hit a stretch of new pavement, it feel like glass and you (almost) feel sorry for those fellow commuters who insist on riding knobby tires designed for dirt tracks, on perfectly-paved streets.

But of course, to achieve perfection, you have to tear up the imperfect. And there's a whole lot of tearing-up going on in Red Deer right now.

When the city engaged street work on Gaetz Avenue, both north and south, closed 55^th Street entirely, and restricted Taylor Drive for the entire summer, you can be forgiven if you think the flashing signs saying “Use Alternative Route” is more like a practical joke than practical advice.

Only when our usual travel routes are this severely restricted do we really get a sense of how important they are to the quality of life in the city. Our daily lives really are tied to the ways we move.

Yet, at the risk of irritating a whole lot of already-frustrated drivers who are just trying to get on with their lives here, I'm going to suggest that as well as “Use Alternative Route” there should be signs saying “Use Alternative Means.”

The quickest, most efficient means travel through the city's central core during this sumer of road construction will be by bike.

Several times, while traffic is backed up downtown in places where three lanes of traffic need to converge into one, I have found a careful cyclist can cruise through a commute at near-normal speed. Very little time is lost due to congestion.

More — and this is a definite tip of the helmet to Red Deer drivers — I have found people to be very considerate of the cyclists with whom they are sharing too-little road.

It's no fun being trapped in a vehicle idling through a traffic jam extending front and back as far as you can see. Yet, I see that far and away the majority of drivers make good eye contact with riders, allowing them to merge into the flow of traffic, or to cross intersections which are already close to gridlock.

As a measure of thanks, I would extend an invitation. Join us. This would be a good summer for a whole lot more people to make use of the many advantages of two-wheeled commuting.

When traffic is slow, there is almost zero time advantage in driving. In fact, on some routes through town, cycling is now faster than driving.

There is a definite cost advantage. Everyone is aware of the high price of fuel these days.

This summer, the United States (make that North America, for this really is a continental market) sealed it's spot as the world's top oil and gas producer. Together, we put more oil into the pipeline than Saudi Arabia, and more gas into the market than Russia.

The experts who report on fuel markets tell us the only reason this new production hasn't brought the price of fuel down, is the continuing war and violence in the Middle East. The markets don't like this uncertainty, so the price of fuel will remain high, we are told.

So that's all the reason you should need to let more fuel just stay in the pumps. Riding your bike to work each day gives you a real tax-free boost to your disposable income.

If you drive an economy car the average distance per year, Wikianswers.com estimates you will burn up about 1,400 litres of fuel. At today's prices, riding diligently through just the four months of summer, you'll save roughly $150. The savings increase, of course, if you own a gas guzzler.

That's not enough to buy you a premium commuter bike. For that you have to go hardcore and ride for a whole year. But if you already own a bike, would you rather spend $150 idling your vehicle in a traffic jam, or doing something else?

Ride your bike just for the summer, and I promise that you will feel the benefits to your health and well-being. I talk with a lot of people about cycling, and I have yet to meet anyone who “took the pledge” and rode diligently for a few weeks, who did not remark how much better they felt for the exercise.

And now, you can also ride to reduce traffic congestion. If you don't like sitting in a hot vehicle, burning gas and going nowhere, you can be one of the riders still getting places. The more riders, the fewer cars, and the less congestion for people who can't ride.

This summer, with its high degree of road construction, could be the time more people really notice the difference that alternative means can make.

And when the tearing-up of roads is done, and that new, smooth asphalt is laid down, there's a whole new level of enjoyment waiting for people on their commutes. There's an advantage in that, too. I promise.

Greg Neiman currently president of the Red Deer Association for Bicycling Commuting.

Education minister summons up a summer squall

Alberta education minister Jeff Johnson is on a mission. He believes that any organization with 35,000 professionally-certified employees — such as the public school system at 62 school boards across the province — is bound to contain a few duds.

Johnson wants to find those duds.

In the past 10 years, not one Alberta teacher has been fired for incompetence. There have been those extremely rare instances of misconduct that ended up in the legal system (think sexual interference). But no member of the Alberta Teachers Association has ever been found to be such a bad fit in the classroom that the employer needed to let them go.

School board members — the teachers' direct employer — might (or might not) tell you that sometimes teachers are quietly asked to retire, resign, take long-term disability, or be outright paid to leave. Once this process is completed, both sides sign legal non-disclosure agreements; that's why they might not tell you about it.

It is far cheaper and easier to buy a resignation, than undergo the convoluted and costly process of legal documentation needed to justify complaints of poor professional conduct against an ATA member.

It's like once a teacher gets that professional certification, you'd almost have to kill someone to have it revoked. That certification is there for life.

But you just can't have 35,000 human beings performing vitally important and extremely complicated tasks involving children from God-knows-what family backgrounds mixed together with kids with special needs in overcrowded classrooms that have far too few supports— and not have a few failures. Spectacular failures, actually. Mathematical probability demands it.

At least, that's how Johnson and a lot of critics of the current system see it.

Yet, by standards recognized around the world, Alberta's public education system works. Works very well, in fact. You can't be a global leader in public education from K to 12— as is the case in Alberta — without a consistently strong staff base.

So that's why the teachers union — along with a lot of others — don't trust the motives behind the minister's demand that all school boards cough up private dossiers on all their teachers who have ever been subject of a complaint in the past 10 years. By July 11. Or else.

The ATA has lodged a complaint of its own against the ministry with the government's privacy commissioner, Jill Clayton. That ought to clog the wheels in Johnson's plan for a while.

But Johnson remains adamant. Tick, tock.

More, Johnson appointed a task force that reported last month, with a recommendation that teachers submit to formal renewal of their certificates every five years.

We're told other jurisdictions do this. Like New Zealand and several states in the U.S. Let's see, the U.S. is ranked where, somewhere around 62^nd in the world for the quality of its public education system, and Alberta — at No. 3, is going to emulate their professional practices? How's that working for you, down in Michigan?

Other recommendations from the task force suggest a program of mentorship for new teachers (with time and resources for that paid, of course), and financial rewards for high performers (likewise paid extra, not taken out of existing classroom supports, right?).

But anything that costs more isn't going to be part the plan. Just the get-the-teacher thing.

Bottom line, this is going nowhere. The long-governing Tories are having a leadership battle right now, and no candidate is going to alienate 35,000 well-organized, well-educated voters.

Campaign leader Jim Prentice has already come out publicly against any plan to require teacher recertification. And that demand for private employment record dossiers? Forget about it.

Johnson claims that although school boards are tasked with hiring and firing, he's in charge of the school boards. He says he can dissolve any board that doesn't comply with his directives.

Go ahead and try. His ministerial power, plus five bucks, will get him a latte in a coffee shop somewhere, where he can contemplate the end of his political career.

In a short time, Alberta will have a new premier. Then we will have a new cabinet. In a short time after that, we will have a general election — the first in living memory whose outcome is uncertain.

As much as Jeff Johnson would like it, the time period going forward is no time for the Tories to create blood enemies among teachers, civil servants, doctors, nurses, health care support workers or long-term care staff. Or, among Albertans who feels these workers are important to Alberta's future.

This is a summer squall that will soon blow over. Johnson needs to ensure the rain doesn't all fall on him.