A win for the Tories, a loss for Wildrose

The four Alberta by-elections Monday were a major win for now-elected premier Jim Prentice. Prentice now also has both an elected education minister and health minister — and a mandate to continue the Tory Party dynasty in this province.

The by-election results were a loss for the opposition Wildrose Party. Not as disastrous a loss as may seem (though repeating this result in a general election would be a disaster for the party). But enough for leader Danielle Smith to see the need to convene a leadership review.

Wildrose did not even come second in two of the races. In Edmonton/Whitemud, the health minister and former mayor Stephen Mandel outpolled a doctor, Bob Turner of the NDP by about 3,000 votes, with Wildrose candidate Tim Grover another 470 votes back.

In Calgary Elbow, the closest of the races, education minister Gordon Dirks beat an unknown entity, Alberta Party leader Greg Clark, by a scant 800 or so votes. In former premier Allison Redford's riding, that's called a squeaker.

So, a distant second in two races and a more distant third in two others. Hardly the stuff of growth.

For their part, the NDP is calling their nearly two-to-one defeat in former premier Dave Hancock's Edmonton riding a moral victory. It's a doubling of support since the last election. No such silver lining for Wildrose.

I will suggest these results may be more a reflection of the big-city/smaller-centre divide, than the party's actual performance as an opposition.

You can't call this an urban/rural divide, because in Alberta, that doesn't really exist anymore. Alberta is Canada's most urban province now, with around 80 per cent of the population living in cities. Twenty per cent of the electorate, scattered around the province dotted by growing towns and small cities won't qualify too many Alberta ridings as “rural” anymore.

Only four of the 16 Wildrose MLAs represent totally urban ridings. Two are in Calgary, one is in Airdrie (which is big-city in flavour, if not in size) and one is from Medicine Hat.

Nothing wrong with any of that, but a political party that can't resonate widely in both Calgary and Edmonton will never form the government.

Thus, what I am calling Danielle's Smith's rather courageous call of a leadership review. She got 90-per-cent approval at the last leadership review, just following the last election. And after the next general election, there will be another.

One measure of leadership is willingness to withstand some scrutiny, and Smith seems up for all of it.

But you can expect some big adjustments in platform from the party to follow.

Smith has already hinted at the biggest among them: Wildrose needs to stop being the party of grievance, and start being the party of positive alternative.

Albertans already know very well what happens to a political party that holds power for too long. Complacency and a sense of entitlement result. So is the notion that what's good for the party is good for the province.

Insider-ism is another result. Why would so many Alberta towns have spent municipal tax dollars to send their councillors to Tory Party functions — and not even think it to be morally offensive, never mind illegal? Because of the perception that they needed to be seen with the group in power, to get their local issues on the government agenda, that's why.

This sort of nonsense would bring down a government almost anywhere else in Canada. But on Monday, voters in four Alberta ridings said that as little as they may trust the government, they trust the opposition even less.

Voters will need to hear how Wildrose will build schools and long-term care centres, in an environment of declining resource revenue — without raising taxes.

The NDP have come out and said they would do away with our ridiculous flat income tax rate, and raise business taxes slightly (to still remain among the lowest in the industrialized world) to accomplish their agenda. At least, a moral stance on things like this can lead to a moral victory, on occasion.

But the activist agenda of Wildrose remains largely undeclared. Beyond griping about Tory excesses (which I can do myself, sitting in my chair) we don't know all that much about Wildrose solutions.

Danielle Smith and her advisors are smart enough people. I suspect she'll do OK at her leadership review.

What people will need to see after that, is something to vote for, rather than a reason to vote against.

If negative reasons to cast a ballot were enough to win an election in Alberta, Prentice and his party wouldn't have swept four by-elections Monday.

Free speech requires courage and a public face; online trolling merely spawns an online remedy

The reason we cherish the concept of free speech is the same reason we also have libel laws: people disagree. On everything.

Isaac Newton's law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, applies as much to opinions as to physics. Where opinions clash, sometimes truth emerges. But often there is only wreckage.

I seldom read the comments that follow online news stories or opinion pieces. Not because I don't care what people think, but because reading conversations between anonymous identities is simply not very helpful.

But I do read anonymous online opinions about consumer goods that I might buy, or services I'm shopping for, like hotel accommodations in places where I plan to travel. Until recently, I'd missed the connection between them and the comments sections following news stories. My bad.

When people post anonymous opinions, it's often more work than it's worth, to find the grains of truth behind the invective poured out by people, who would silence themselves very quickly, if their true identities were revealed.

That's what happened recently to Ottawa student Olivia Parsons. According to her story, she had a bad experience with a landlord. After she had moved to a new address, she posted a negative review of the management company on consumer complaints web sites like Yelp, Pissed Consumer and Google.

Under an assumed name, of course.

What surprised her (and me) is that the landlord, CLV Group, discovered her true identity and new address — and sent her a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action if her critical posts were not taken down in five (5) days.

Disputes between landlords and tenants are pretty common. So is the clench in one's gut when a corporation backed by a legal firm sends you the message: “We know who you are, we know where you live, stop saying bad things about us.”

So the posts came down.

If being named publicly is enough to stop an anonymous troll from spewing whatever it is that anonymous trolls spew, being exposed by a well-known consumer advocate like CBC's Go Public can also have a cease-and-desist effect.

I'm not interested if Parson's complaints as reported by Go Public would stand up in court as defence against a libel suit. I'm interested in what's become of our notion of free speech in the age of the Internet.

Our concepts of free speech and fair comment grew up in a public marketplace. If your opinions can be repeated face-to-face in a public square (assuming you have the courage to say them in the public square), they can be weighed by the legal system that also grew up in the public square.

People claim the Internet is the ultimate public square. But really, it isn't.

Not when people of insufficient courage or plain bad intentions can anonymously post online judgements against people or organizations in the real world.

Would you call this an erosion of free speech? I would.

But the online world does not worry about such concepts. The Internet simply adapts.

Imagine being the operator of a hotel, and a malicious review of your establishment is posted online, for all the world to see on a giant consumer review site like Trip Adviser.

What do you do? You contact an online reputation and reassurance service, like Kwikchex.

So, instead of publicly determining if the hotel's restaurant really did serve bad mussels, or if there really are bedbugs crawling the room, you pit one online giant against another, using more legal resources than anyone could possibly afford on their own.

So, as Kwikchex claims, thousands of negative online reviews are taken down, and large entities like Trip Advisor get challenged in court.

Or, an individual consumer like Olivia Parsons contacts an online advocate.

How much of this even has brushing contact with free speech? In my view, not much.

If you think your landlord has done you wrong, there are agencies set up to help determine the truth of the matter. If you don't think a hotel gave good service for the money, sign your name to the complaint.

If you think I — or anyone else — may be full of baloney, don't hide behind a baloney moniker to say so.

Our ideas about free speech and fair comment are not fully transferable to the Internet. Not yet, anyway. Until they are, the Internet grows its own adaptations.

Should life include a state worse than death?

Is there a state of life that's worse than death? A lot of people — a large majority of Canadians, in fact — think so.

That's why about 84 per cent of poll respondents recently agreed that a doctor should be able to help terminally ill patients end their own lives, under certain well-defined conditions.

If it were not true that there can be states of life worse than death, the Supreme Court of Canada would not be considering overturning its own 21-year-old ruling against medically-assisted suicide, in a case beginning this week.

If people throughout society did not believe there are states of life worse than death, suicide itself would not be as common as it is in Canada.

Still, a philosophical argument holds that it is never rational for a person to choose to die, therefore we cannot allow irrational people to decide their own fates.

A second philosophy, held by the federal government, says that a mentally-competent person living in pain with an incurable degenerative disease cannot be allowed to request medical assistance to end their suffering. That is because once the absolute ban on assisted suicide is broken, vulnerable people will be pressured to request it, or feel as if their own lives have been devalued.

It's hard enough to live with a severe disability. Nobody in that position needs to struggle for meaning in one's own life, believing there are people out there who would rather you just asked to die.

Whatever the letter of the law might say, it is these philosophies that the Supreme Court must weigh in their deliberations.

Lee Carter is the daughter of Kathleen Carter, who was 89 years old and suffering from ALS when she left Canada for another country where assisted suicide is legal. She died there, under a doctor's care.

Kathleen Carter could not take advantage of a B.C. Supreme Court decision in favour of her right to choice, because the federal government successfully appealed that decision in the B.C. Court of Appeal a year later.

Gloria Taylor was also a plaintiff in that case, and she became the only Canadian to win the right to a medically-assisted end of life. But she died from her illness before she could make use of the choice the B.C. Supreme Court temporarily gave her.

Lee Carter, who helped her mother throughout the court battles, and into Switzerland, says her entire family has been living under a cloud of potential federal charges ever since.

Obviously, they hope that whatever comes out of the Supreme Court next, will provide some closure.

In Canada, it is considered immoral to keep a pet alive, suffering the pain of an incurable disease. But in Canada, it is illegal for a person living in the same condition as a sick and dying animal, to request the same grain of mercy.

The morality or immorality of that condition is not considered in the letter of the law.

Believe it or not, it is the questions of morality and the prevailing social standards of the day, not the letter of the law alone, that are on the desk of the court today.

Two years ago, before the B.C. Supreme Court decision in favour of Carter and Taylor was overturned on appeal, the federal government was given a one-year deadline to re-write the laws concerning the issue of choice, for a right to die with dignity.

Instead, the government will fight the issue in the next higher court. Meanwhile, speeches are being made about improving the state of palliative care in the nation. Also needed, but not quite to the point.

In 1726, British satirist Jonathan Swift wrote his third volume of Gulliver's Travels. In the book, Gulliver visited the land of the Struldbruggs, a race of people who were immortal. They had endless years to pursue science, art and philosophy.

But they were also condemned to suffer the consequences of old age. They lost their hair, their eyesight, their health as they sunk into ever-increasing frailty. A state of life, you could say, worse than death.

This week, Advocate columnist Talbot Boggs reported how a Canadian born today has a 50/50 chance of living to age 90, and a one-in-10 chance of living to 100.

For many thousands of these children, how will the last 10 years or so of life be experienced? As vital, whole people, or as a sort of Struldbrugg?

Our generation always thinks the laws are about us. The Supreme Court needs to think the laws are about the future.

Refugees vs civilian casualties: how many of each will we accept?

It's pretty well a done deal; Canada will go to war — in a limited way, at first anyway — in the Middle East.

The majority of government MPs in Ottawa will see to that rather quickly. The promise to consult and debate the proposal regarding our active combat role in the fight against the terrorists in ISIL was concluded in one day Friday.

A majority of Canadians, even those who self-identify as Liberal or NDP supporters politically, support sending air strike equipment and personnel to Iraq and probably to Syria. The evidence of that was shown in several polls conducted last week.

Here's the extent of Canada's commitment to the international military effort in Iraq right now: 10 aircraft of various kinds, 600 military personnel, for six months.

No Canadian ground troops will be sent, and prime minister Stephen Harper promises he will consult and debate again if the six-month engagement is to become something longer.

Although the goal suggested by U.S. president Barak Obama is to eliminate the ISIL threat, Harper says Canada will deem our mission a success if we “seriously degrade the capabilities of ISIL.”

Our aim is to stop the terrorists' ability to conduct military movements of scale, or to operate in the open.

Harper has also said that if the president of neighbouring Syria requests it, he will authorize Canadian planes to do bombing runs at targets in Syria.

That, we can do in six months. In fact, current information says the stated Canadian goal has already been reached. ISIL does no longer conduct military movements “of scale.” They are hiding in the villages, towns and cities — among civilians.

For his part, Obama is already speaking publicly about the probability of civilian casualties, the men women and children who get blown up by the smartest of smart bombs nearby the buildings identified as containing ISIL forces, leaders or equipment caches.

In Canada, Harper is not talking about such things. He is also not talking about his government's cutbacks to accepting refugees fleeing towns controlled by ISIL.

Canada's official goal for helping to alleviate the humanitarian crisis for over a million Syrian refugees already waiting in camps, is 1,300 people.

If Canadian sponsors can be found for these refugees, that is how many Canada will accept. About 1,100 such people have already been allocated to enter Canada, sponsored mostly by churches and non-profit groups, who promise to take responsibility for these people until they settle as landed immigrants.

How many have actually landed so far? A couple hundred or so.

Canada's largest sponsor is the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto. After going public with their difficulties in dealing with Canadian immigration officers, their 135 refugee claims were fast-tracked.

The archdiocese has no more applications allotted to them.

A whole lot of immigration offices have been closed by the federal government, leading to a backlog lasting years for all current applications, never mind any new ones.

Either the process in approving refugee claims is too time-consuming, or the offices are starved for staff, or the federal government is deliberately delaying the fulfillment of its humanitarian goals. I believe the reality is a combination of the three.

News reports have already detailed an ongoing genocide of ethnic Christians in Iraq and Syria. That's a major source of the explosion in refugees from the areas where ISIL operates.

None of this is any secret nor is it recent news.

That leads to my questions for the government, and for the people who support our military role in stopping ISIL:

How many civilian casualties will Canada accept on its bombing runs in Iraq (and probably Syria)?

Will that number be greater than, or less than the number of legitimate refugees we can pry through our under-staffed Immigration Canada offices, before our six-month combat stint is supposed to be over?

Innocent lives saved, versus innocent lives taken. When the casualty reports come in, I hope someone will keep track of the score.

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

Families should not be health care's dumping ground

At Monday's debate in Red Deer for leadership of the Alberta NDP, it was difficult — make that impossible — to separate the candidates according to their platforms. They all agreed on everything.

Among the things they agreed on: the governing Tories have been unethically downloading their responsibilities in health care to municipalities — and especially to the elderly and to the family members who care for them.

We've all heard about the “sandwich generation.” They're the demographic who just finished working two jobs to pay for day care through college for their children. Now that their children are older and more independent, the parents can begin to pay — in time and in money — to help with continuing care for the aging grandparents.

The government calls it “aging in place.” But the caregivers can call it just one more tough sandwich to chew on.

The news story in Thursday's Advocate (Region short 70 beds) is an example of both the Tory program, and the Wildrose Party response to it. Both are lacking, in my view.

To make the criticism fair, as much as I pressed for numbers and specifics from the NDP at the debate (I was the moderator for the evening), I didn't get much of either. But we'll look at what we know now.

First comes the jaw-dropper: despite a chronic shortage of long-term care beds for seniors who need them, our region has 64 fewer of them this year than last.

Wildrose MLA and health critic Kerry Towle makes a good point in that despite her repeated questioning over two years, the government repeatedly denied they were closing any long term care beds.

Sense a discontinuity there? Pick up your jaw, so you can drop it again. Last week, Alberta Health Services CEO Vickie Kaminski confirmed they were abandoning a plan to actually close 1,000 long term care beds over four years.

So if you were sitting in the Emergency ward recently, or trying to get an elective surgery scheduled, part of the reason things were taking so long is that seniors in active care hospital beds can't get into substantially cheaper and better-suited long term care beds.

And there was actually a plan to cut them back? How's that supposed to work?

Part of the answer is that in Alberta there is health care, and there is health care, and there is the care provided by families to make up the gap between the two.

Aging in place is a great concept. As I get older and my faculties diminish, I plan to make full use of it.

The Wildrose solution is to put another $50 million into home care services, to make aging in place work better.

It's cheaper (and much more pleasant for most) for seniors who need some help with day-to-day needs to stay in their own home, and to have professionals come in regularly to check on your diet, your hygiene, to make sure you're taking medications properly (who can read that fine print anyway?) . . . and likely to eventually recommend when it's time you moved out.

When aging in place fails (and it fails earlier for seniors who don't have adult children living nearby), there is supported living. In this event, seniors live in specialized apartments, but with some autonomy.

The government is pumping up that aspect of care as well. In the past five years, Alberta has added 4,100 more continuing care beds to its roster.

But neither the government nor the Wildrose tackle the immediate problem.

There are people in Red Deer General Hospital right now in an extremely expensive active care bed, who are waiting for a long-term care bed to “open up.” You know how this happens in Alberta; don't ask for whom the bell tolls.

In Alberta, it apparently occurs to neither the government nor the Wildrose that you can “open up” some long term care beds by adding them to the system.

A decade or so ago, it was proposed that specialized long term care beds be added in a new building, for the more than 100 aging and severely handicapped patients then living at the Michener Centre.

The old, inefficient buildings housing these people would be closed, and Michener Centre would move into history.

As those beds “opened up” there would be spaces for respite care for handicapped people in the community who were going through rough spots, and who needed some close attention.

Later on, some spaces could be used for seniors with dementia needing long term care, but not a hospital bed.

The Ralph Klein government killed the idea, and we are left with the abhorrent mess we have now.

To my last sentient breath, I plan to make use of all aid as I age in place. But meantime, we need solutions for people who need appropriate care right now.

It is not unexpected that families should help to care for themselves. But there comes a point when families are squeezed into a sandwich of stress, guilt, frustration and anger that they can no longer reasonably handle themselves.

It's not right that governments should cut budgets by downloading their part of social responsibilities onto families.

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