Defections only a part of Wildrose Party's problems

If anyone enjoys the cut and thrust of partisan debate, it would be two former Wildrose MLAs from Central Alberta, Joe Anglin and Kerry Towle.

Anglin has been regarded as sort of a lone wolf for some time now, so it's fitting that if he could not sit as a member of the Wildrose Party in which he was first elected, he would sit as an independent.

Towle, on the other hand, is more naturally bent toward the team. She's a joiner, not a loner. So her defection Monday to the governing Tories carries double importance. Probably more than double.

It takes a huge amount of stress to make a committed partisan switch teams. So I look to the factors behind Monday's events to help explain why Anglin, Towle and Ian Donovan of the Little Bow riding left their party.

They did not leave the party in disarray. It was that way before they left.

Read what you like into this: on Monday, the Wildrose caucus passed a motion that was defeated by party membership at the party's annual meeting.

Former Tory— now Wildrose MLA — Rob Anderson said Monday caucus would follow the policy they voted on, not what was passed by the party in general at its annual conference.

What does that tell you? It tells me there's serious a divide between the members the party elected, and the people who took out party memberships.

NDP leader Rachel Notley said that Monday's defections were “not a good sign of democracy in the province.” I disagree. I say it's a very strong sign of a resurgence of democracy in this province. I wish we could have more of this, including (maybe even especially) at the federal level.

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith had a brief statement for the press and took no questions later. But she mentioned two prominent Conservative MLAs who had earlier crossed the floor, to join Wildrose.

She spoke darkly that Donovan and Towle will have to answer for their decision to abandon the party that got them elected. Not so much Heather Forsythe and Rob Anderson, who went the other way. Anglin would remain beneath her radar.

I say it's a good day for democracy when elected members switch parties. I say it's a good day, when an MLA decides constituents and personal values should govern a member's voting pattern in the legislature, not party membership.

Both Towle and Smith mentioned that Wildrose is a party of free votes. Smith is balancing denial of the will of party members, and the public line on the issue. Towle is balancing an espousal of free votes, while joining a government that is measurably less free in that regard.

Wildrose has only two female members left of its 14 remaining MLAs, and Forsythe has already said she will not run again.

Wildrose membership watered down a policy statement on protecting the equality of minority groups, particularly gay, lesbian and transgendered people. Elected MLAs, who know their constituents and the facts on the ground better than the party card-holders, actively rejected their will.

Smith says she won't be leading the party if it doesn't win the next election. Is that confidence in the party's promise, or an ability to read writing on the wall that party members cannot seem to decipher?

In my version of democracy, any group can create a political party with a declared set of values, and seek candidates who would reflect those values. But once elected, the members are beholden first to their voters, not the party.

I'm not about to suggest that any of the five MLAs who crossed the floor since the last election (Anderson, Forsythe, Anglin, Donovan and Towle) did so to gain perks or score points. I have no basis to believe that was their motivation.

Rather, I believe such decisions can show integrity to personal values. We should have more of this, both federally and provincially.

The more that party leaders (and party membership) understand that elected members are not the property of their party whips, the better.

For their part, the party leaders have not gotten the memo. But I sense a sea change among an electorate that is tired of being tuned out between elections.

We want more voter participation in elections, but why bother if elected members are simply forced to a party line, rather than what people want?

Rachel Notley was a bit too cynical Monday, describing the forces that brought Towle and Donovan to the Conservatives. She said phase one of the Tory plan is “break your promises.” Phase two, she said, is to “become Wildrose.”

When even the Wildrose leader and her MLAs don't want what the Wildrose Party membership says they should want — and a couple left the party because of it — I don't think the Tories will want to be Wildrose.

When you think about it, as things stand now, neither will Alberta voters.

A scary movie plot, played in real time

Here's the bare bones of a movie plot I've dreamed up. OK, I didn't dream it up — as you can see from the headlines, this is actually happening.

Over a period of months, someone had been calling the 911 services of cities around North America with false emergency calls and bomb threats. There were at least 30 such calls. One high school in Calgary was shut down by such a prank, called “swatting” because the local police force needs to call out its special weapons group.

Eventually, police in Ottawa tracked down a 16-year-old kid who was foolish enough to brag about his exploits, and who even invited suggestions online for his next pranks. He even posted a photo of a Bitcoin account, suggesting he could be paid to do this.

Guess what happens next? Last May, the kid is walking home with his parents, and a bunch of plainclothes Ottawa police have him slammed to the ground. They also have a warrant to search the house, and what do they find? High tech stuff, and firearms.

The kid is facing a long list of charges. His dad protests the boy's innocence. He claims the authorities won't listen to them, or look further for the real culprit(s).

Then, things get interesting. The online activist group Anonymous gets involved. They support the kid.

They send the dad a trove of electronic information which he says exonerates his son. Here's how he described it to a reporter at the Ottawa Citizen: “Think of it this way: There's a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that has been thrown on a table. You have no idea of what the jigsaw will ultimately look like, but you have this little piece with an alias, and this piece with a website and this piece with a domain registration.”

"This little piece" is where the techie details leave me behind, and I'm forced to believe what I see, because I don't have the tools to disbelieve it.

But the dad, who works privately as a web designer himself, seems to understand. Good enough, I'm not falling asleep at the movie just yet.

Then the Citizen reporter gets a tweet during an interview: “I hear you're talking with the youth's father right now.” Later, during a phone conversation with the father: “Just got word that the youth might be speaking to media in the coming days.”

This was over the last weekend. After the websites of the Ottawa Police , the City of Ottawa, the Supreme Court of Canada, the Parliament of Canada and the federal Conservative Party were all serially shut down by denial of service attacks.

I had to look this up: denial of service attacks are not hacking. No data is stolen in such attacks; robot computers are simply instructed to request certain web pages so fast and so frequently that their servers get shut down.

But other reports suggest data would be stolen. “We're going to completely rape those sites,” said a message reported in the Ottawa Sun.

That, I would take seriously. Anonymous has a reputation. Just ask the Church of Scientology. Or the credit card companies who refused to transact donations to the defence funds of WikiLeaks whistle-blowers.

One Ottawa detective and the police chief's private phone numbers and email addresses were published.

This weekend, the dad and his lawyer, Joshua Clark, showed reporters light bulbs that had been altered to become listening devices.

I wouldn't recognize a listening device rigged into in a compact fluorescent light bulb if someone shoved it in my ear and turned it on. More, I wouldn't know how some teenager's dad could successfully fake doing that, to falsely discredit a police investigation. So I tend to believe what I see.

We are told the dad was coached to look for them and find them in his home, by Anonymous.

So, here we are in the movie: some dumbass is faking 911 calls, which is an incredibly stupid thing to do. Someone saw fit to put listening devices in somebody's home. A kid gets arrested. A global self-appointed watchdog with a strong reputation for online mischief and random acts of activism decides to work on the kid's behalf.

In an environment where corporations and governments seem able to spy on us at will, who do you believe? The police, or the people in the Guy Fawkes masks? And if they are spying on us, wouldn't it be nice if they could guarantee their information was correct?

Either the kid is a little pisher who deserves everything that's coming to him, or the police are blinded by tunnel vision, or society needs a geek squad to protect us from the people we pay a whole lot of money to protect us.

This is a movie we can watch unfold in real time. I just hope nobody gets hurt in the real world. And that, in the end, we still have a shred of privacy and the right of free speech to preserve.

Sometimes it's better not to share

There will always be plans and proposals that look better on paper than they turn out to be in reality. I would suggest that high schools sharing gym space is one example of that.

High schools sharing space for a career and technology lab that would include manufacturing, design, construction, trades and heavy-equipment programming sounds even more complex than co-ordinating gym time for schools in separate divisions with a combined population that could reach 3,000 students.

That kind of project looks more college-level than high school level to me.

If there is a difference of opinion between planners in Alberta Education and local school boards, it's almost always better to side with the local school boards. But not in this case.

Red Deer Public had initially endorsed a high school development proposal for a large piece of property on the northeast corner of 67 Street and 30^th Avenue. Three high schools are proposed for the site: public, Catholic and Francophone.

That's a whole lot of people coming and going to one place, every day. But let's assume that if Alberta Education can OK the land use designation, Alberta Transportation can also approve safe access and egress on what's going to be a very busy corner in this town.

The public board's understanding was that the whole project was to be built in phases (as provincial construction funding comes available, and who can predict that?). On paper, there were synergies that could be developed for some of the more high-ticket items that come on a list of things that a school needs.

One would be a gym. I don't know how many other smaller gyms were planned to be part of the total package, but in all the time I've spent in the stands of a school gym, there's no way I can see how one gym would serve three high schools — even if it was only to be a “game” gym, with teams doing their practices elsewhere.

Can you imagine how many teams and other groups needing gym time there would be at three high schools? It would list into the high dozens. Even if some uses were scheduled for midnight, there aren't enough hours in a week outside of school time to accommodate.

For each sport, game day or practice day is every day, before and after school hours. Each sport has junior and senior teams, for girls and boys. In my days with kids at Lindsay Thurber, players who didn't make the senior or junior squads got another chance to play in the league for smaller regional schools, adding yet another layer of need for gym time.

You don't build a multi-million-dollar gym for a school with more than 1,000 students, and only 10 girls and 10 boys get to use it for league basketball, for instance.

That's just for after-school activity. Phys ed classes would be a whole other scheduling problem.

What would a gym for more than 3,000 students look like? I'll suggest the main gym at Red Deer College would be too small (and about four or five gyms too few).

Whose logo would be painted on the wall? If you think that's not important, you don't know the value of team sports to the functioning of a school. I know this from experience: the logo on the wall and the championship banners in front if it are a prime connector for a community of students with pride in what they do.

Bottom line: I can't see how high schools can share a gym.

Unless it's an entire sports and fitness complex, like the Collicutt Centre. Red Deer needs another, larger, one of those, and proximity to three high schools would definitely be useful. But a useful thing like that is not on the table here.

Nor, when you think about it, is a shared career and technology centre. Our schools really are doing a good job these days in giving young people a wide range of options in the training they receive.

Even “academic” students can benefit from taking an option class in construction or some other trade. High school is too early to stream your education totally in or totally out of the academic or trades stream.

But the wonderful shared lab that was proposed on paper looks like something a college should be doing. If I managed limited funding, that's where I'd put the money.

So it was a good decision — on a variety of levels — that the Red Deer Public district board changed its mind and let the idea of shared facilities go.

Red Deer Catholic is now free to proceed quickly on their plans for St. Joseph's High School. Red Deer Public will get funding for a high school at the site, whenever Alberta Education makes it a priority. Same for the Francophone high school.

Each will design a building to match its programming. The synergies will develop out of parents choosing which school's programming best suits their own children's desires for their future.

Less cost-efficient on paper, but most likely better for the students.

Government looked, and found we are watching them

If you think governments or political parties don't listen to their critics, you need to pay attention to what came out of the two provincial party meetings held in Alberta over the weekend. That, plus our federal government's behaviour at the meeting this weekend of the leaders of the G20 group in Australia.

If you haven't been paying attention to them, here's some assurance that they are paying at least some attention to you.

I'm heartened by the confluence of these events. I think democracy in Canada might just have gotten a bit stronger over the weekend. So let's pay attention, and see how things work out.

Traditionally, the annual general meetings of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party have been pretty happy affairs. Not so much in the past couple of years, perhaps, but this weekend's party meeting in Banff reminded me of meetings past.

A premier and party leader in full control of the agenda. A nice standing O for former leader Dave Hancock (and no mention of Allison Redford). Confidence, all round, but the reports I saw contained less swagger than in the past.

Other than Prentice's comment that Albertans sleep better with the province in Tory hands, those of us still awake want to see government working a little harder. And Prentice seems to be getting that.

He promised in a CBC interview that he's not going to be the kind of premier who hangs around for a couple questions in the Legislature, and then leaves. He says he's seen that we want him to be available and answerable, even in the noise and swordplay of Question Period.

He's not going to “snap back” at cheap shots, he says, and he expects his cabinet colleagues to follow suit. Watch, and see.

In the Red Deer meeting of the opposition Wildrose Party, we got the promise that there will be less negativity from them in the coming months, and a greater elaboration of policy alternatives.

At a meeting that might not have gone well at all for leader Danielle Smith, we got a tone of second chances, rather than ultimatums. Even though Smith gave the party a sort of ultimatum of her own as the meeting began.

Two hard-fought election battles into their history, and two decisive defeats later, Wildrose could easily have collapsed on itself. But it didn't, at least publicly. There was far less internal strife reported than could have been the case. Far less recrimination and finger-pointing, and more forward thinking.

Smith promised that a third defeat would be her last; she either emerges from the next general election as premier, or as a footnote of history. That assures that the long knives stay hidden, for now.

Again, we'll see. But with Prentice's promise of more decorum from the ruling party, and the opposition's promise of more debate on policy alternatives, the next session of the Legislature might actually produce a working government.

Isn't that what we've been saying we wanted for the past few years?

And speaking of leaders who give us what we want, I'll take it as a positive that prime minister Stephen Harper was able to talk about the need for action on climate change at the G20 summit without looking positively ill.

OK, Canada has no policy regarding climate change. But now, there will be funding from Canada for action on the issue for developing nations. When you're starting from zero, even a one is a step forward.

At previous summits, Harper wouldn't have even been in the room, if climate change was likely to be mentioned. I say the change came because the federal party has been paying attention, even while they pretended not to, while pretending to pay attention. Catch my drift?

Harper knows we appreciate him being a tough guy, confronting Vladimir Putin over Russian activities in Ukraine.

But what we really want is some assurance that he understands Canadians are as worried about climate change as everyone else in the world. Call me a rose-coloured optimist here, but this could be evidence of a thawing process. Let's watch and see.

And that's the whole point today. If you pay attention, I think you'll find that government pays attention, too.

How bad do things have to get in government, before people start paying attention? In Alberta, we found that out about two years ago.

Lobby groups and self-appointed watchdogs can bark all they want, but you won't see a change in government attitude, until they notice that you're noticing.

You may want honest, civil government, but it won't come until governors truly believe they're being widely watched — and widely judged.

On a variety of levels, we seem to have their attention now. So pay attention back. See what the next months bring — and expect that it's not business as usual.

Security, and my private heartbeat

Would you pay $100, and tether yourself to an electronic device every day, just so you won't have to remember the passwords and PINs to your various debit and credit cards, laptop, tablet, smartphone and all their apps? Or to make growing your credit card debt more secure (and probably more convenient than is good for you)?

At the rate we have accumulated these things in our lives, $100 seems almost worth it. If you (like me) have avoided upgrading your computer's operating system, or declined subscribing to what might be a useful service, or couldn't reboot after a crash, all because you couldn't recall your password, being able to do all these things with a wave of your hand seems . . . almost useful.

Especially if all these transactions could be as secure as your individual heartbeat. Nobody can steal, copy or forge that.

Call it the result of paying for research at universities. A group of tech-heads at the University of Toronto was thinking about biometrics as a means of instant, secure identification. Rather than finding another way to read a fingerprint or retina scan, they looked into the possibility that the electronic signature of every person's heartbeat is likewise unique.

Anything that can be read electronically — like an ECG — can be digitized and stored. So they rounded up 1,000 or so volunteers at the U of T, gave them an ECG and found that no two of them matched exactly.

What do you do with information like that? You spin off a company and look for seed money.

The new company, called Bionym, got a total of $14 million from the federal government, through Export Development Canada, and investment partners like Ignition Partners, Relay Ventures — and MasterCard.

They used the money to design and build a slim bracelet, called a Nymi, that you activate with a reading of your heartbeat. That little bracelet would then be able to talk to your computer, laptop, smartphone — and your credit card — and act in your name.

It could work with any other applications a person could dream up that requires personal ID. Some articles have already suggested hotel room key access, or even ID at restaurants, which would instantly know your personal preferences and profile, just as you walk through the door. Italian sausage pizza, no pepperoni, with extra onions and mushrooms, coming right up.

I'm betting MasterCard got the link with the Royal Bank of Canada, which will be testing the devices in the near future. If things go as hoped, Royal Bank account holders would be able to purchase a Royal Bank Nymi, and use it as a debit or credit card at bank machines and whatever stores that are able to accept it.

After that, expect every bank to roll out their own versions of the technology.

We are so used to instant roll-outs of the latest gizmo, but just be aware that making a warehouse full of bracelets isn't all this involves. Think of all the places that will have to adopt the technology to accept these things, in numbers to make having a Nymi device worthwhile. That will take some time.

In the meantime, perhaps we should sit back and think about whether we really need this.

Even considering my own difficulties with passwords and PINs, I'm not sure this gizmo is worth 100 bucks, plus the effort of having to learn how to use it, connect it to everything in the known universe, and keep it running.

Isn't it enough that I can just tap my bank card on the machine in the store, and the money in my bank account is transferred to the retailer?

I'm already shamed sometimes because I so seldom carry cash. It's like I have to make an extra trip to pick up a poppy for Remembrance Day, or remember to grab a few coins at home before I go shopping, to have something for the charity box at the grocery store, which used to be so usual as to be thoughtless.

And I certainly don't need anything that makes buying more stuff more convenient. Or another reminder that I'm “not the target demographic.”

I've been wrong about these things before. Years ago, I was happily convinced I would be one of those people who would go through life without having a personal computer. Or a digital camera. Or writing a blog. Or until this year, without owning a cell phone.

I still vow never to Face my Book or tweet my twitter. Lines need to be drawn.

I also maintain the hope to complete my time in this world without every store that I walk past knowing who I am and my complete shopping history. Maybe The Machine has already taken over, but I prefer to be the least active cog within it.

For now, my heart, it is my own. That, and the hundred bucks. And may the junk in your life be limited by the number of passwords and PINs you can remember.

The Poloz solution to youth unemployment: voluntary slavery

Don't you find it odd (and ironic) how wealthy people can say that raising the marginal tax rate on the top 10 per cent of income-earners is theft, and bad for the economy. But at the same time they can believe that unemployed people should work for zero pay — for just the privilege and experience of turning a profit for the 10 per cent.

Bank of Canada chief Stephen Peloz didn't suggest that directly when he said recently that unemployed millennials living in their parent’s basements would be better off volunteering their skills in an area close to their university degrees, as a means of padding their resumes.

But the message his unintended audience received was the ironic one.

Peloz himself said his speculations on why the unemployed should work for no pay at all was “not a monetary policy matter.” Well, good for that. Can you imagine him saying we should turn our economy around by creating wealth, for free?

He said he was merely relating the advice he gives to young people who ask him for advice on starting a career. Giving something of value away for free, in the hopes you might get paid for it later, is bad career planning.

There are about 200,000 Canadians with recent university training who cannot find work. The unemployment rate among this group is nearly double that for everyone else.

Working for free, says Poloz, would fill the gap in one's resume between getting a degree or diploma and getting a job. Peloz called the gap the “scarring effect” — the time spent when your credentials erode while others gain experience in your area, and yet others graduate with “fresher” skills.

As governor of the Bank of Canada, Peloz knows that every time he opens his mouth, people will parse every syllable of his sentences. They will search for meaning in every facial tic, while he gives his reasons why the Canada's central bank will do essentially nothing for another 90 days.

So he should know better than to publicly advise people to work in an underground economy. Can he explain the difference between employers taking on workers but not paying them, and people taking pay for their work, but declaring no income for tax purposes?

Both practices are common in Canada — and both are illegal. Unless a worker is required to undertake job experience as part of a certified education program, it is against the law not to pay that person.

It is against the law for a person to agree to work for less than minimum wage, and against the law to ask them to do it.

There is a reason Canada has laws governing labour standards. These internships and Poloz's suggestion that young people offer their work for free both subvert Canada's minimum wage and labour laws.

We already have a history of young people literally being worked to death for no pay as interns.

In Edmonton, an intern fell asleep while driving home after a 16-hour (unpaid) shift, and was killed in a car crash. Bell Canada was the subject of official complaints for rotating hundreds of people a year through unpaid internships, with little or no hope of a job at the end of the “experience.”

Walrus magazine was only one Canadian publication that was forced to stop taking on unpaid internships after their subscribers learned how a high portion of the product they paid for was produced for zero pay.

A business can get pretty used to not paying some of their staff. They can come to regard it as an entitlement.

It's not as if the work of these interns has no value. If an employer does not have work to offer requiring more skill than flipping hamburgers (which is at least paid work), what are they doing? Why would an employer demand university training to do work that has zero value?

We already know that interns often do the same work as paid staff in many cases.

Agreed, the thousands of young people coming out of our very expensive colleges and universities with poor job opportunities in their area of training is a problem. Telling these highly-trained (and highly-indebted) people that they have no value is not the answer.

One critic said Poloz was “tone deaf” on the issue. I would say he was being deliberately obtuse.

If Canada's industry is so uniquely skill-selective that no university or college can prepare someone to do that work, the employers need to provide the training themselves. After all, they're the ones profiting from it.

St. Paul, the world's first missionary (and a tent-maker by trade), said that every worker deserves his pay. And every slave must be properly fed, clothed, housed and cared for when sick.

What has changed since?

Income splitting? On average, forget it

Back in the day as they say, when we were raising children and paying our mortgage, I might have liked Stephen Harper's plan for family income splitting and the Universal Child Care Benefit.

Not really thinking too hard about things, I might have even voted for it. But I wonder if it would have gotten me ahead in the world.

We were Harper's target demographic: one-income family with kids. That would be one-income married family with kids. Single parents are not Stephen Harper's target demographic.

I've been trying for a while now to figure out if we would have been better off back then, if we had income splitting — and I can't definitely judge either way.

Maybe that's why I have someone else do our income taxes. Or maybe that's because the income splitting benefit is so marginal, you can't see it on the back of an envelope.

I was an average income earner, most of my life. My income didn't surpass the national average until after we'd paid our mortgage, and the kids were gone. The benefits of a university education, I guess.

Half of Canadian workers earn less than roughly $32,000 a year. Because high income-earners raise the average, the average Canadian wage slave these days earns just over $48,000.

But suppose I became Mr. Average today, with a wife at home and four (4) kids 8 years and under, as I was for a while back then. Would Stephen Harper be as good a friend to me as Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney were?

Hard to say, but on average, not likely, or not much.

Today, on my average $48,000 income, I can deduct $11,038 for myself, $11,038 for my non-working spouse, plus CPP, EI and all that other stuff to lower my taxable income. The refund for a dependent spouse today: $1,655.

The maximum benefit from income splitting: $2,000. Well, the equivalent of $350 would have been quite welcome, back in the day. I guess.

If I received the average benefit calculated for families with income splitting, it would be $1,140. But today's Mrs. Average has an income, and can't be deducted as a dependent.

That would mean child care. That would mean costs.

Registered daycare costs up to $950 a month in Red Deer. Being average, we would make that $850 a month, per child.

The Universal Child Care Benefit is being raised to $160 a month for the kids not yet in school, and $60 a month once they get to school, through age 17. So we, with three pre-schoolers costing a total of $2,850 a month for child care, would need to keep our receipts and claim the $2,160 a month the benefit does not cover.

The $8,000 cap on what you can claim per child would have come almost $2,000 a year short of total actual costs. (I'm told by people who looked at the numbers, that with three kids, it's cheaper to hire a live-out nanny, or for two kids, if the nanny lives in the house with you.)

So, for us, the decision today would have been pretty much the same as it was back in 1980s. Have Mrs. Average work full-time, and put half her take-home pay into child care (hoping for a refund at tax time)? Or just forget the hassle, stay home and be poor, rather than working full-time for an average salary, but really keeping less than minimum wage at the end of the month?

We opted for full-time parenting, and until the youngest was in school, we all just learned to be frugal. Well, thereafter as well.

The numbers Stephen Harper has on the table today contain negligible new financial incentive to put Mrs. Average into the workforce when there are preschoolers in the house.

So how did we do it back then? Our average house was an eighth the cost of an average house today (though mortgage rates were triple today's rates).

Utility bills back then were a tenth of what The Averages pay today. Car costs? The total price of gas in the 1980s was less than just the tax component of gasoline today. Gas mileage sucked, but nobody cared.

If Harper really wanted to buy our support, he'd ditch income-splitting altogether, and just lower income taxes for the Modern Averages.

The Averages today earn $74,500. If they live in Alberta, that would be $94,460. That's almost always with two-incomes, and almost none of them will get any benefit at all from income splitting.

They don't have four kids, either, so the Universal Child Care Benefit (which doesn't cover much) and the child care expenses deduction (which doesn't last long considering the life of a family), don't make for the hard decisions we made back in the day.

You know, I really don't think Stephen Harper cares that much about us Averages.

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