Take a small step on inequality

Around this time of year, I like to remind people to be a little charitable. Just a little. To decide to make gifts so small you don't even notice them.

If all of us did this, the cumulative power of many small donations to local charities can be extremely powerful. It only takes a mass acceptance that this is needed, and that it works.

I was about to write about exactly this — all over again — when I came across an essay by David Foot and Daniel Stoffman. You'll remember these guys, they're the authors of the book that made generational warfare socially acceptable: Boom, Bust and Echo.

On this occasion, they wrote about another revolutionary author who has also become a best-seller: Thomas Picketty. His book, Capital in the 21^st Century, made it socially acceptable to criticize the rich.

The rise in inequality of distribution of wealth in society is a topic of discussion that is much like climate change. Everyone complains about it, but nobody does anything substantive about it.

Even the bankers are getting concerned. TD Bank recently released a report filled with charts and graphs and a whole lot of dense economic prose. Titled The case for leaning against income inequality, their report warns that wealth is good (yes, we all want to be wealthy), but past a certain (undefined) point, a rise in income inequality of just one per cent hurt GDP growth between .6 per cent and 1.1 per cent.

How they came to that conclusion, I cannot tell you; I am not literate enough to read economic reports. But I scanned through it, looking for suggestions on how to solve the problem, and found nothing substantive beyond suggestions for making housing more affordable, improving health care and early childhood development and decreasing barriers to higher education.

You know, things a bank would never do. TD Bank prefers to lean, not stand.

Nobody talks about taxing the rich. In our society, redistributing income is a Bad Idea. Even though we have been redistributing wealth steadily upwards for decades.

That's the topic Foot and Stoffman wanted to tackle. They say the obvious conclusion drawn by Prof. Picketty is good, but must be disregarded simply because it will never happen.

The 20 per cent that owns 67 per cent of all wealth in Canada (and 100 per cent of government) will never allow it.

Therefor, Foot and Stoffman read the same pages that I read about fundraising for charities. It is all well and good for rich people to make million-dollar donations to good causes here and there.

But if you really want to get the work done, you need the power of mass willingness to make small sacrifices.

Example: if everyone passing through a grocery checkout tossed an average of one thin dime into an SPCA cash can, pretty well every time they bought groceries, that charity could function very well indeed. And never need to organize any other fundraiser. Ever again.

And not one donor would ever notice the sacrifices made to achieve that.

Foot and Stoffman follow a theme raised by multi-billionaire Bill Gates. They suggest that rather than a surtax on wealth (which would be expensive to manage and impossible to impose anyway), governments should tax financial transactions.

For discussion purposes, they start off with a suggested one-tenth of one per cent surtax on stock purchases. Further, they propose a one-fiftieth of a per cent tax on bond purchases.

I've never bought stocks on the stock market, and I've never signed up to hold government or corporate bonds. But I've got a pile of them anyway — through my RSPs, my union pension plan and even my Canada Pension Plan. I also hold some in a Tax Free Savings Plan, because my government says I should.

And so, I presume, do you. We all pay management fees many multiples higher for all of this — without one single death resulting.

Further, Foot and Stoffman suggest an undefined tax on foreign currency exchanges: “a small fraction of one per cent, split between buyer and seller.”

Considering that about $12 trillion enters and leaves Canada every year, they say a tax like that would wipe out all government debt very quickly, leaving room for investments in the things the banks like: affordable housing, childhood development and higher education.

Financial institutions already “tax” these transactions, as fees that supplement their hefty profits every year. And the sky does not fall, the economy does not come crashing down around our ears.

The cumulative power of these tiny fees, scarcely felt by most individuals, is massive. They're like dimes in a cash can.

All we need to do is accept them.

Good intentions must allow for good judgement

It was with the best of intentions that members of the Surrey B.C. community reached out to assist a distraught three-year-old who witnesses say was slapped across the face by an adult and abandoned at a bus stop, wet and not dressed for the weather.

Shoppers at a liquor store across the street from a bus stop in the city on Saturday noticed a child all alone, wandering near traffic. When a store employee went out to him, he came to her with his arms up, wanting to be picked up.

From there, common compassion took over. He was being cared for so well at the liquor store that police let him stay there for hours while they sought after the person who struck him and left him cold and alone. Representatives from the province's Ministry of Children and Family development came later, and the child was reunited with his mother.

A man, said to be the boy's father, was found and faces a number of charges, including for the theft of a few juice containers from a nearby store.

If ever there was an incident than can be red-flagged for more details before people render judgement, this is one of them.

In none of this has the boy been identified by name — for which we should all be thankful. In the end, it was a blessing the child barely spoke to his amateur protectors, who obviously only wanted to help. They did not learn his name before they could publish it without consent.

These Good Samaritans violated a cardinal rule in dealing with vulnerable people, and especially minors. You never, never, identify a minor without consent of a parent or legal guardian. You just don't.

Never mind that the youngster had been slapped around and left in the rain at a bus stop wearing only a swim suit and light clothes.

But smartphones and social media overtook good sense and the customers at the store snapped his photo and spread it around on both Facebook and Twitter.

Several news reports on the incident say the people wanted to help locate the child's mother. A laudable thing, except that their method violated an unwitting child's right to personal privacy.

To make this worse, police praised the help of the people who did this. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Further compounding the violation, the CTV news bureau for B.C. got the photo (easy enough since it was floating in both Facebook and the Twitterverse) and published it on their web site, only partially blurred. Anyone who knew the boy could recognize him from that photo, I'm sure. I wonder if legal advice on this was sought before publishing. In any case, they should take it down, now.

I've been in the news biz since I was 19. I was a news photographer for 12 years and back in the day, I probably violated this rule. . . I don't know how many times. I won awards for this stuff.

I would ask for a parent's permission to take a photo of a kid in the park, say. But if the parent wasn't around, in those days you shot anyway.

For a short while at this newspaper (I would say 1977-1978), we were required to publish the full name, parents' names and address of children we photographed. Rules of the managing editor at the time.

All of this, we know now, was totally and utterly wrong.

These days, every school board, every social agency that deals with minors, has extensive FOIP training. That also includes news agencies.

Freedom of Information and Privacy has been a verb for so long, people barely remember it was ever a noun. “Has that child been FOIPed?” That's a question that a reporter must be able to answer, along with the Five W's of news gathering.

No FOIP, no photo. Probably no story, unless it is carefully edited.

Yet in the age of social media, a helpless crime victim can have his or her identity published around the globe at the speed of light. By people who only mean well. But it's a picture that can be seen by thousands who may not mean well — or really have no right to know in any event.

What if that child has been the victim of a sexual assault, prior to the incident at the bus stop? Do we now splash the face of rape victims all through the Internet without consent?

To all those kind and loving people who helped the child, bless you, thank you.

We see so few news stories that redeem humanity’s basis instinct for good, that many people wonder if it even exists anymore.

Let us all hope no further harm comes to this child because of outside interventions, and that he grows up happy, healthy and as anonymous as anyone else could be.

And let us all keep in mind, that in our compassion, we do not use poor judgement, which could cause even more harm.

Our friend Danielle: what's she doing with this guy?

You would have thought there would be nobody in Alberta politics who could make us forget Alison Redford. The former premier's name has appeared as a single paragraph in virtually every news story about Alberta party politics — almost like some press secretary has it to copy and paste into every news release, which is then dutifully reprinted and sent on the wire.

You'd think her political legacy bears more repetition that that of Ralph Klein. Maybe it does.

But now we have a new footnote: Danielle Smith.

For the past month or so, since the disastrous Wildrose Party annual meeting in Red Deer, and the four by-election losses that preceded it, I had been regarding her like you might regard a friend in a bad relationship.

As in: “What's she doing with this guy?” What was Danielle Smith doing leading a party that the membership obviously would not follow?

Smith, engaging and erudite, a fierce debater with the facts at her fingertips, did her best to seem comfortable as the face of a supposedly grassroots party. But those roots contain a vigorous flat-earth faction that will never allow it to govern in a modern, secular and increasingly diverse democracy.

News flash: Bill Aberhart's been gone a long time, and there's no bringing him back, Tea Party or no Tea Party.

That's why the elected members of the Wildrose Party passed a caucus resolution on equality rights that effectively repudiated one passed by the card-holding party membership at their Red Deer AGM.

There was a definite rift between the elected Wildrose members as to their expectations of what will pass in society today and that of the grassroots members who expect to create party policy in their image, and bring it to power.

But, like everyone, I was shocked when she and eight other Wildrose MLAs crossed the floor to become Tories. Even more so when I read that negotiations to do so had been going on for a month.

To her credit, I suppose, Smith was bringing herself to leave a bad relationship. But for the leader of the opposition to become a Tory? With expectations of a “meaningful position” in the party? What has politics become? An episode of the TV series House of Cards?

And then everyone in Canada got to look at the photo of what has got to be the most awkward political embrace of all time. Premier Jim Prentice and Danielle Smith — with their hands on each other! And smiling!

I'm not on Facebook, but I figure that almost everyone who is has probably got at least one cringe-worthy photo of themselves in its unerasable archives.

Look at that photo of Smith and Prentice. Ask yourself: what's she doing with that guy?

We can easily surmise the fates of the MLAs who crossed the floor with her. From their first meetings in their new caucus, they are going to learn as backbenchers what “transparent” means in a transparent Tory government.

It means being invisible. As in: “See right through me, walk right by me, and never know I'm there.”

The fate of Smith is less certain. There will be an election, and all the MLAs who crossed the floor will be judged by the voters.

As a partisan writer, I have come to believe the bar for electability of a Tory candidate in an election (federal or provincial) in Alberta is pretty low. In a whole lot of ridings for a whole lot of years, all you ever needed was that signed nomination paper.

Wildrose changed that. More than any other party, Wildrose showed Albertans that they could vote other than Tory, and the heavens would not fall.

I do regret the recent historic events. I do not see any infusion of new strength, new ideas or vitality for our province in them.

Perhaps Smith will be given the social services portfolio. Then she could become the face of government, explaining why we need more cutbacks.

Or, given the Wildrose interest in surface rights of landowners, she could be given that portfolio. Then she could explain (as Advocate columnist Bob Scammell so ably describes) how surface rights should apply to leaseholders on crown land who would be paid handsomely when land they do not own is torn up for oil exploration, but not for Farmer Brown, who doesn't want a fracking well on property his family has held for generations.

Historic change, this. But long term, business as usual.

Albertans may never know how much they lost when Smith & Co. changed relationships.

Government resorts to magic and voodoo to make good on promises

There is no creature on earth more risk-averse than a politician in government. Likewise, there is no one more likely to make expensive promises without the resources to make good on them. How do they rationalize both positions? They rely on magic and voodoo.

No doubt about it, the Alberta government is in a tight spot right now. Premier Jim Prentice promised us 90 new schools, and renovations for 70 more. He promised that hospital expansions and renovations would proceed quickly.

All this, he said, without seriously altering Alberta's 10 per cent flat tax, or adding a sales tax to raise the money.

Never mind that this is impossible, especially when the price of energy tanks.

We are told in every news story on oil prices that every $1 decline takes a $215 million bite out of government revenue, when it is sustained for a year. OK, what's the bite on a $30 drop sustained over five months, which will be the case by the time the government needs to table its next budget?

I have no idea what that would be, but I know it's a big number. Premier Prentice has already said the government could fire its entire staff and shut down all its services, and still not save enough to balance the books.

But the promise is out there: 160 schools either built new or renovated. Hospital maintenance will continue. So how's he going to do this?

Obviously, he can't do this. Promises will need to be broken.

On the revenue side, there's lots of room for breakage. For both income and business taxes, Alberta has pretty well the lowest regime in the industrialized world. He could issue a significant hike on either and Alberta would still be at the bottom of the tax list.

On the spending side, he could cancel the school and hospital promises, and Alberta could clunk along with more children than school spaces, and more sick people than there are beds to hold them.

He could also announce new debt initiatives, this being an emergency and all.

Or, Prentice could espouse a new round of P3 projects, and punt all the costs 30 years down the road. If you were a risk-averse politician, which would you do? It's a no-brainer.

This week, Ontario auditor-general Bonnie Lysyk reported that taxpayers in her province are stuck with $8 billion in extra debt, as a result of P3 building projects in the past decade or so.

It seems governments all over the world are discovering P3s makes good immediate headlines, but they're bad economics.

It's not that P3 projects cost more, though they do, big time. It's not that businesses can't borrow to finance these projects as cheaply as governments can, they can't.

It's not that legal and consultant costs are far higher in the private sector than the public sector, though they are.

It's not that the profit motive has caused some pretty shoddy design and construction quality cuts, they have. Roofs that leak, classrooms that reach 28 degrees in the hot sun, gym lights that start to fall off the ceiling and can't be repaired for more than month. These are the some of big items.

The small ones are irritations that add up to a full-scale rash: janitors aren't allowed to touch anything attached to the building. School board staff can't get a ball down off the roof or get a light bulb changed. You need special paperwork to hang a display from the ceiling.

You can't fundraise for school items like a scoreboard in the gym, or stage equipment — those items belong to the contractor. Some schools can't even tap the money from the vending machines. Community gym rental rates shot up 800 per cent in some cases — and the contractor gets the money.

That's if you can find a contractor willing to build that many schools — which you can't.

But none of that matters: it's all costs punted down the road.

The big thing is risk. All big projects end up costing more than advertised and always arrive late. An expert contributing to the discussion in Ontario says you can add about five per cent to the up-front cost for these add-ons.

But governments pay on average 16 per cent to avoid those risks. They employ complicated formulas in “value for money assessments” to prove that private enterprise is always cheaper than public. Which — for schools and hospitals anyway, — is turning out to be not true.

Lysyk called these assessments “junk science.”

But governments love junk science when they remove the risks involved with filling promises than only magic and voodoo can create.

Relying on magical solutions is so much easier than leadership.

How a free preventative can save our health care system

On Monday I made a special trip to the Ticketmaster office in Red Deer. I wanted to be certain we got a group of tickets to a play, as a Christmas present to the family. (No spoiler alert needed here: the family already knows about the plan, and besides, I'm not so sure they read my blog anyway).

I got there half an hour early, and had my info written down: the date and time of the performance (a matinee would be best). I even had time to talk about the play with a lady who was also waiting for ticket sales to open. She'd seen it in New York, and was eager to see it again when it comes to Edmonton in March.

So when the ticket booth opened, I was ready. Except, right at that moment, I couldn't recall the name of the play. The words disappeared.

My brain was racing in circles. You know, the funny play, the one that was such a hit in New York, the South Park one. Ah yes, to my relief, the words “The Book of Mormon” surfaced — hopefully without too much of a pause.

Not my first such moment, and I hope to be around long enough that it won't be my last.

Having words, or the names of people and things, just vanish en route between memory and speech is not uncommon as we get older. Nor its it reason to panic for fear that one is descending into Alzheimer's.

But it gives one an uncomfortable pause, and more than just an uncomfortable pause in conversation.

We're told that about 10 per cent of Canadians over 65 suffer from dementia, notably Alzheimer's. We're also told that in the coming decade or so, the number of cases diagnosed in Canada is expected to triple.

Outside of a particular gene that is responsible for about 25 per cent of cases, there is no known cause of Alzheimer's. There is no pill you can take for it. There's nothing much you can do about it once you have it, and nobody screens you for the risk of getting it.

Alzheimer's disease is the grey terror of the greying generation.

But there is one proven preventative, and one therapy that's been proven effective. It's free; no drug company can put a patent on it.

The preventative and the therapy is simple exercise — and the more the better.

This week, the culmination of 17 years of research on 150,000 volunteer study participants put some numbers around how much exercise prevents how much Alzheimer's.

It's 150 minutes a week, minimum, in doses as short at 10 minutes, for effective levels to be reached, says Dr. Paul Williams, author of a study titled National Runners' and Walkers' Health Study.

That's just the minimum effective dose. Double it, and Dr. Williams says his study subjects reduced their risk of dying of Alzheimer's disease by as much as 40 per cent.

Considering the size of our aging population, that's huge. If a similar number of people came down with the flu, for instance, we'd call it an epidemic. Yet if that number of cases could be prevented... we call it nothing at all.

Dr. Jordan Antflick, of the Ontario Brain Institute says his reading of some 800 similar studies suggests even the progress of Alzheimer's can be slowed, and even if you don't take your exercise medicine until after diagnosis.

This is big news. The collective wisdom on Alzheimer's has been that once it takes hold in your brain, it is inexorable, unstoppable. Resistance is futile.

Not anymore. We now realize we can indeed repair our brains — at least where memory and cognition are concerned.

As early as 2010, author Barbara Strauch reported in her book The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain that neurologists had pinpointed a small portion of the hippocampus — called the dentate gyrus — that grows amazingly fast in people (and white lab mice) who exercise vigourously. The dentate gyrus is critical to memory formation and assimilation with older memories.

Dr. Antflick says simple exercise can prevent more than one in seven new cases of Alzheimer's. The minimum dose — 150 minutes per week of exercise vigorous enough to get your heart rate elevated — can also lessen the depression suffered by people who have the disease. Exercise lowers the incidence of people falling — often the last physical insult a senior's body takes before death. Exercise keeps people living independently at home longer.

A total population prescription of 150 minutes (or more) of heart-stimulating exercise per week can save our health care system hundreds of millions of dollars a year. With virtually zero up-front cost.

Walk, run, swim, ride a bike, anything at all. The more energy you expend, the better. (Example: you need to walk twice as long to get the same benefit as a short run, but the doctors say it all works out the same.)

It's the best medicine ever found for lifting depression, improving cognition and preventing a host of other ailments from mental illness to heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure and even some forms of cancer — all of which threaten to overwhelm our health care system.

And then, if you can't remember the name of a play you want to see, you can laugh about it. Sort of.

The right to a safe, publicly-funded education in Alberta is 'never absolute:' Premier Jim Prentice

The first major test of new premier Jim Prentice's leadership came early. He failed it.

Prentice said last week there is “clearly no consensus in Alberta on the constitutionality or the wisdom” of Bill 10, the government bill which would have (sort of) allowed the creation of student-led gay-straight alliance clubs in publicly funded schools.

Therefor, he has instructed the speaker of the legislature to delay third reading of the bill until after the New Year, which is really a tactic to kill the bill entirely.

Well enough that bad legislation should be delayed, forgotten and replaced with something better. As the premier said at a press conference, balancing competing rights in legislation is something that “should not be done in haste.”

That begs a couple of questions: if haste is wrong in the creation of legislation that attempts to balance the competing rights of Albertans, why was the bill drawn up so quickly, and why was closure invoked to see that it passed two readings in the same day?

Doing that wouldn't have had anything to do with the embarrassment of using whipped votes to down Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman's private member's bill, Bill 202? Well, would it?

Bill 202 would have obliged publicly-funded high schools to allow the creation of student-led gay-straight alliance groups on their campuses, as a means to stem harassment and bullying of non-straight students.

Having these alliances seems to accomplish just that, in the experience of schools in other jurisdictions.

Here's a sampling of how badly Bill 10 was drafted: it would have allowed individual school boards to deny the formation of these student clubs, on religious grounds. Students in this position would then have needed to take their school board to court to get the local ruling quashed.

Do you wonder how bullying and harassment of students is reduced by forcing teenagers to sue their school boards for the right to form an association in which they could feel more safe and accepted?

A lot of people wondered exactly that. So somewhere before closure was enforced on second reading, an amendment was made, releasing school boards from the threat of lawsuits and allowing students to appeal directly to the education minister for a decision to allow an end-run around legislation he just helped to create.

Apparently, government members can read a tweet while they pursue the onerous burden of governing a province. Except they didn't read the full 120 characters of the social media debate that exploded in their faces.

It happens that among the many accomplishments that qualify our education minister (and they are indeed genuine) is that the minister, Gordon Dirks, is also an evangelical pastor whose theology says homosexuality is a sin.

If you were part of a committee comprised of a handful of teenagers, just how would you word your appeal for him to overturn a lawfully-made school board decision?

When you think about it, you would need to suggest that the minister look past his personal religious convictions, to his wider responsibilities to a diverse society governed by the Canadian Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

When you think about that, you would need to realize that school boards, even school boards that are religiously-based, should be able to do the same.

Now, as it became quite evident that the Alberta public is able to think more clearly than the provincial cabinet, the premier pushed Bill 10 to the trash can.

When football players in Calgary can hold off celebrating their Grey Cup victories to ridicule a proposed law that thwarts its own premise — the right to a safe, publicly-funded education in Alberta — it's time to toss this one out of bounds.

“Rights are never absolute,” said premier Jim Prentice at a press conference.

Hmmm... was he thinking about the rights of religious-based school boards that accept a great deal of tax money from a diverse, secular society, or the rights of individuals, whose claim to personal safety may be at cross-purposes to the decisions of those boards?

It takes a lot of one's time, figuring out a way to keep the government budget from sliding down a blocked pipeline, while not resorting to predictable and stable revenue sources available to every other government on earth.

But somebody needs to be paying attention to the kids. Having a place of acceptance and comradeship helps keep teenagers more focussed on positive things in their lives. Otherwise, we find they sometimes think about killing themselves.

That trumps party politics, or even religious dogma.

Jim Prentice has reason to panic; here's why

Let's face it, the Keystone and Northern Gateway pipeline routes are not likely to go ahead soon — if ever. Energy East seems more promising, but there are still a lot of hoops to jump through before any of our province's bitumen begins to flow through it — if ever.

In short, Alberta premier Jim Prentice has good reason to panic.

In the coming months and years, we're going to see the full impact of decades of government mismanagement of our energy resources, a virtual giveaway of one of the world's biggest buried pots of money.

People are starting to ask: how can a jurisdiction producing more than 2.5 million barrels of bitumen a day not balance its rather modest provincial budget?

We already have the lowest spending per capita on government services in the nation. We have the second-lowest number of government employees per capita in the nation. We're middle of the pack for total per capita spending.

Alberta is not a profligate spender of its revenue. The Alberta budget is in deficit because we just don't claim the revenue that would rightfully be due in any other jurisdiction in the world.

Norway produces 40 per cent less oil than we do. But they post annual budget surpluses of about $44 billion a year, while spending way more on government services per capita than we do. Norway has a sovereign wealth trust fund worth over $650 billion (to be over a trillion dollars in five years), which currently spins about $25 billion a year in interest.

The same global energy companies at work in Alberta are at work in Norway. In Norway, they're perfectly OK paying 70 per cent of their profits in royalties to the government.

In Alberta, those same companies begrudge us 10 per cent of the total market value of oil, gas and oilsands production. And if anyone talks about raising our royalties, it's like somebody suggested an armed insurrection.

Oil rich Alberta? Not for all Albertans.

If you want a picture of how unequally energy wealth accrues in Alberta, consider that we have the highest median income in Canada. Something to be proud of, right? But of the province's total wealth, about 6 per cent is shared by Albertans earning less than the 50^th percentile of income. That's half of all wage-earners.

Oil rich Alberta? Not so much for taxpayers, either. Alberta gets more revenue from selling lottery tickets and licensing slot machines than we do from developing our vast energy resources.

Without those pipelines, we're still exporting a vast amount of oil and bitumen every day. Why isn't Alberta just sitting back and posting surpluses every year on the royalties from that?

Because Alberta doesn't prosper from oil production, in the same way it prospers from investment in ever-increasing capacity to export more. Were only rich when the oil patch grows.

And therein lies the reason for Prentice to panic. Without those pipelines, our capacity to grow will soon reach its limit. No matter how big those oilsands plants get, if they aren't growing, Albertans don't get much from them.

Royalties from our current production should be more than sufficient to buffer boom-and-bust cycles of global prices, considering how little (comparatively) our government spends.

In 2012 (when prices were quite a bit higher) total oilsands revenue was $49 billion. The province got $3.7 billion in royalties.

But $27.2 billion was spent building capacity to produce more bitumen for export. That's the wages that drive up our median incomes, home values and our feeling of wealth.

That's the figure Prentice fears may drop. But it has to drop someday. Albertans know this in their bones; no boom ever lasts. Eventually, expansion will stop completely, because there's either no place left to expand, and/or we can't export the product anyway.

Even so, we'll still be producing lots of oil, gas and bitumen. Every day. Taxpayers — the supposed owners of the resource — just won't see very much revenue from it.

When Peter Lougheed was premier, the government's share of the total value of oil, gas, and oilsands was 40 per cent. Pretty low, by world standards. That's how the Alberta Heritage Fund got started.

By today, successive Tory governments have cut our share to 10 per cent. That's why the Heritage Fund is a global joke.

Here's what the Parkland Institute reported in 2012: “The Alberta government will forego some $55 billion in potential revenue over the next three years as a result of overly-generous royalty cuts, and the government's failure to meet even the modest goals set by the previous administration.”

Without new pipelines and continuous growth in the oil patch, Albertans will feel in their own pockets how much has been given away by our government.

It's quite possible those pipelines aren't going to happen. That's why Jim Prentice has reason to panic.

CWB sale: Something for nothing and money for free

I've never been a fan of the Canadian Wheat Board. Growing up on a small mixed farm, I gained my resentment of the CWB, the railways and the quota system by osmosis.

If there was value in any of these, my dad and my family never saw very much of it.

So I shed no tears in 2012, when the Harper government put an end to the CWB monopoly. But as a taxpayer, I at least expected some payback when it would be privatized. As would, I assumed, the prairie farmers whose forced sales of their wheat and barley had built the CWB into a global grain marketing power.

Now, we discover, that won't be the case.

In addition to the marketing contacts and expertise within the CWB, there are physical assets that must be evaluated when the marketing entity goes public.

But as early as 2011, news reports quote federal ag minister Gerry Ritz saying the CWB has no assets. So, what about the 3,400 rail cars? Or a couple of Great Lakes freighters, or the four high-throughput elevators the CWB hastily ordered into construction?

The transition from public board to private business is necessarily being done in secret. The minister uses his executive powers to control all financial information about the status and operation of the CWB.

That much seems necessary. But I thought the government was doing this to protect my interests as a taxpayer. According to recent news reports, not so much.

Reports say Ritz also denies the government “owns” the CWB. The government fired the farmer-represented board, and appointed their own selected board — and they don't own it?

They gave the CWB $349 million in taxpayer dollars to facilitate the transition to private ownership, and the government says taxpayers have no stake or share in its assets?

And that, whoever ends up owning the CWB before the government-set deadline in 2016, for whatever price, neither farmers nor taxpayers will see a cent of it?

Right now, if you are a farmer who sells grain to the CWB this year, you are eligible to set up a contract, under which, for $5 a tonne of delivered grain in the future, you will get partial ownership of the CWB.

In other words, producers will be allowed to pay for their tiny slice of the new organization that will grow out of the CWB, but the new majority owners (most likely one of the U.S.-based transnational giants) will not put up one cent of the purchase price.

Taxpayers will get zero for their investment into the CWB. Prairie farmers whose forced sales created the assets the CWB now owns, get nothing.

And the Harper government sees this as a good deal.

I opposed the sale of Petro-Canada. It was a bad deal then, and looking back, taxpayers would have been a lot better off as owners of an integrated energy company, than as sellers of it.

As it stands now, the national oil companies of France, Norway and China own and control more energy assets in Alberta than Albertans do.

But at least we (the owners) got something back when Petro-Canada was privatized.

From the few facts available about the privatization of the Canadian Wheat Board, we get nothing.

A group of Saskatchewan farmers formed the Farmers of North America, which spun off Genesis Grain and Fertilizer. NFA claims about 10,000 members, and they put up a bid to buy the CWB, which they apparently valued at $270 million.

That bid was rejected, with no reason given.

Another group of farmers launched a lawsuit, saying over $17 billion in value simply disappeared when the CWB monopoly disappeared. That case will be heard in spring.

When the whole CWB privatization debate was ongoing, there were experts (and others) presenting facts about grain sales that could make your head spin.

But there was the gut acknowledgement that forced monopoly grain sales for Canadian prairie grain and for no one else, was wrong.

Expect further spin when privatization is summarily announced.

But it appears the gut acknowledgement that farmers and taxpayers would get some cash value from this will go by the boards.

That's wrong, too.