Bill 6: a lesson in the art of what's possible

My grandfather died in a farming accident. A great aunt lost an arm in an auger. A boy I rode the school bus with stopped a country church service one autumn to cry that his brother had just been crushed to death in a combine.

In the last few months, four children have died in farming mishaps in the region around Red Deer alone.

In no other industry would such a poor safety record be allowed to stand unchallenged.

But in Alberta, it's just statistics — and poorly reported at that.

Alberta's non-profit Farm Safety Centre lists agriculture as Canada's third most dangerous industry. Other stats-gathering groups like FinancesOnline rank agriculture at nine in the top 10 most dangerous ways to earn a living, behind logging, fishing, flying, roofing, steel work, garbage collecting, power line work and truck driving. Police and firefighting didn't even make the list.

The difference between all these other dangerous careers and farming is that only in farming do we think it's normal to make our children do it. In Alberta, the farming community and the opposition in our legislature don't think labour laws regarding safety or mandatory insurance should apply to farm work. And that's unique in all of Canada — farms everywhere else operate just fine with those laws.

Extending occupational health and safety laws to the farming industry has been part of the Alberta NDP platform for years. Actually, it's been part of the Progressive Conservative platform for some time as well — former premiers Jim Prentice and Alison Redford both said they would consider such laws, according to Farmworkers Union of Alberta president Eric Musekamp.

And the NDP advocated this for so long that nobody thought bringing Alberta up to speed on farm safety should be so difficult.

But that's the problem: nobody thought.

So the introduction of Bill 6 became the first lesson to a rookie provincial government about the art of the possible. It had to happen sooner or later to this government, and sooner is probably better.

It's not that Prentice, Redford and other premiers before them didn't care about the safety of farmers or their children (not quite one in five farm deaths in Canada involve children 14 and younger). It's that a veteran government with a complex agenda didn't want to face the wrath of people who don't want change, even if their families would benefit most from change.

So the Conservatives let things slide, ignored the deaths and injuries, and allowed reporting of incidents to be incomplete.

Alberta's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner reported that there were 25 farm deaths in Alberta in 2014. The report and breakdown of all the grisly ways there are to die young on the farm included a note that due to poor reporting, the numbers are likely low.

On Monday, labour activists plan to gather in Edmonton to lay down 112 pairs of work gloves representing the lives lost on Alberta farms since 2009. Those gloves only represent the deaths we know of.

Will they lay down fingers of gloves for all those who have lost limbs or been otherwise seriously injured? It's unlikely, since those stats aren't kept.

How many of those lives could have been saved if safety regulations were in place? If farm workers with few rights had not worked overlong hours, had been properly trained regarding heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals, or been allowed to refuse work that just isn't safe?

After learning a hard lesson in the art of governance, the NDP introduced amendments to Bill 6, exempting family members from these safety regulations. Jobs Minister Lori Sigurdson said this was the plan all along, that farms kids were always to be allowed to drive without a licence, operate heavy equipment, handle large animals and work whatever hours would be required to keep the farm going – without labour protection.

I wish she hadn't said that but I'm not the one taking all the angry calls, standing in front of enraged crowds and being called all sorts of unmentionable names.

I also wish the Opposition Wildrose didn't see fit to make such political hay over the broken bodies and shattered families on Alberta farms. There are better ways to oppose and present alternatives.

But in our province, the government and the opposition are both very new to their roles. One side is still learning how far ahead of the crowd you can be and still lead – the other is discovering how far behind you can be of what would be the right thing to do, if one had the courage.

Charity vs taxes: Which side will the Alberta and federal governments choose?

There was a time in my life when I felt I was rich. My wife and I had paid off the mortgage, we had no car or credit card debt, our children had graduated and left home, and we were both still working full-time.

Good years. One can feel rich without actually being rich ― and it's a whole lot easier to achieve.

Along the way, there was always one tax break that in relative terms advantaged us more in our modest income bracket than ever advantaged the truly rich: the non-refundable tax credits for charitable donations over $200 a year.

Philanthropic foundation Imagine Canada sent out a warning recently that unless the federal government tweaks the tables for calculating that non-refundable credit, it may cost rich people more to give generously. In fact, they ran numbers saying top-level income earners will be taxed more harshly if they give significantly to charity, than if they simply keep the money.

As for the rest of us? Generosity will always pay. Here's how.

The feds set up the tax system to encourage charitable giving. Money given to charities would not be taxed as income. But instead of simply allowing you to deduct your donations off your income, they created a system of non-refundable tax points (“non-refundable” means they never disappear; they're yours until you claim them.)

The tax points count against your taxes, not your income ― and for almost all of us, that's a bonus. A subsidy, really.

The points count thus: On the first $200 of charitable receipts you enclose with your tax return, claim 15 per cent (that happens to be the lowest income tax rate, and the rate the vast majority of us pay on the majority of our income). On receipts above $200, claim 29 per cent (also the highest current income tax rate, which only the top income-earners in Canada pay).

Prime minister Justin Trudeau promised in his election campaign to add a new tax bracket: 33 per cent for taxable income over $200,000.

Until I read the warning from Imagine Canada, I felt I could pretty well ignore that promise; it will never, ever affect me. But I'm paying attention now.

Could it be possible that my donations over $200 might get me 33 percent in points off my taxes, even though my income is only taxed at 15 per cent? That's not a refund, that's a subsidy, and I'll gladly take it. Especially considering that the Alberta government tops that refund to half of my donations.

So, $1,000 in charitable donation receipts gets me $210 off my provincial taxes (refund at 21 per cent). That's the equivalent of what I would have paid on $2,100 of taxable income at my low rate of 10 per cent in Alberta.

That's on top of the $264 I get back from the feds, which represents just over $1,700 of federally-taxable income at my low tax bracket of 15 per cent.

But for rich guys, like our prime minister, it's a different story. If the top refund rate does not match the top income tax rate, the wealthy get “double-taxed” on the difference. They pay income tax on money they never got to keep.

That's a problem for Imagine Canada, and the big, industrial-scale charities that raise big bucks from wealthy donors.

In Alberta (as with all of Canada), the rich really do the heavy lifting when it comes to charitable giving. According to Imagine Canada, half of Alberta donors give less than $160 a year― not enough to trigger the big tax savings. But our average donation rate is high for the nation: $812. That means we have a good population of high rollers who happen to be generous.

What happens if they begin to find their generosity is not recognized the way it used to be?

Remember, Alberta is also adding new income tax brackets. Without going into detail, the rate is slated to slide up from the current 10 per cent everyone pays, to 15 per cent on taxable incomes over $300,000.

The higher the tax rate, the greater the disincentive for the rich to make big donations ― if the tax credits for being generous are not also recalculated.

December is “harvest time” for charities. About 60 per cent of Canadians will give a total of $5 billion to charity this month, which is about 40 per cent of the entire year's total.

But our charities' need is higher during this fiscal slowdown as well. Charities report higher traffic at food banks, soup kitchens, shelters, Christmas Bureaus, mental health supports and more. Canada can hardly afford to de-incentivize the rich from making large donations right now.

But the incentives are still there for the vast majority of us who should merely feel rich. If you look at the plight of refugees and the poor around the world, and consider a cold winter ahead for the newly-unemployed here at home, it's not hard to feel rich.

Find a charitable cause that inspires you, and see what it feels like to be a high roller.

Complaining won't soften the rock and hard place of the need for a reduced-carbon future for Alberta

You can understand that mayors and councils of towns that rely on coal mining for economic activity are concerned about the province's recently-announced program of carbon taxes and the 15-year phase-out of coal fired electricity. That's their job, their duty, to advocate for the interests of their communities.

But it's something else for groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to declare the planned phase-out a “war on coal” and the carbon tax as an attack on Alberta families.

That's far too narrow a view. In the big picture, the plans are meant to save the oilsands industry by making it politically possible for new pipelines to be built to carry our bitumen to new markets. Oh, and to reduce the province's carbon footprint in the face of science declaring it would be advisable to do so.

Communities whose economic lives revolve around coal mining and coal power generation recently sent a joint letter to the province outlining their concerns for their towns' future.

They have every reason to do so. There are many towns in Canada that in our history have withered and died when the local mine closed, or the local industry was shut down. It's not a pretty picture. One day, you're a vibrant community, the next, the jobs disappear, people leave, homes get shuttered and local businesses close, one by one.

But if you believe that Alberta needs to do its part in reducing greenhouse gas pollution — and to be seen by the world as doing its part — something's got to give.

It's totally ironic; according to government figures, there is twice as much energy in Alberta's coal reserves than there is in all our other non-renewable energy sources. As fossil fuels go, coal is energy in it's densest form. You have to burn a whole lot more “clean” natural gas to get the same energy release as you get get from burning coal.

More, we know exactly where all the reserves are located. Getting the coal out and turning it into electricity results in cheaper power than you can get from pretty much any other power source. In Alberta, anyway.

Until you put a price on the pollution it causes.

By 2018, the current Alberta plan will price carbon dioxide equivalents at $30 a tonne. That's on all the carbon we consume — natural gas, auto fuels, electricity, everything. What does that mean to us?

Well, groups like the CTF warn that's going to be $900 a year on average for Alberta families by 2030, when the last coal-fired plant is to be shut down.

The government puts the figure at just under $500, to be reduced by rebates from the $3 billion per year the government expects to receive from carbon taxes.

What's that mean in a city like Red Deer?

Currently, the city is in the process of creating its own greenhouse gas reduction plan. I was pleased to be invited to help with the creation of that plan, representing that part of Red Deer interested in more sustainable and active transportation. A wide variety of representatives from government, business, power regulators, and citizen groups are at the table.

Here's a bit of what we know so far. Every person in Red Deer is responsible for about 17.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent gas emissions per year. In 2010, the start-point for the plan, that came to 1.77 mega-tonnes of CO2 equivalent every year, most of which will remain in the atmosphere for many decades.

The goal, as set by the International Protocol on Climate Change, is to reduce that number to 30 per cent below what it was in 1990, which is the global goal required to avoid temperatures rising by more than the “tipping point” of two degrees.

How can we possibly get there? By everyone ditching their cars and biking or walking to work? Nope, not even close.

The largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta cities is not from our cars, but from our buildings. That's because they're 55-per-cent powered by coal, and almost all heated by natural gas.

There will be no approaching our share of the GHG reductions, without switching away from coal-fired electricity. In British Columbia, where there is so much hydro power, the balance is much different. In Norway, where almost all electricity is hydro, the government wants the entire country to eventually run all its automobiles on electricity.

But Alberta needs a giant technology switch from coal to renewables for electricity, or we will forever be known as a “dirty” producer of energy, which will hurt growth in our most valuable resource industry, the oilsands. 

That's both the rock and the hard place the province is in.

Robin Campbell a former Alberta energy minister and former environment minister, is now president of the Coal Association of Canada.

He says a significant portion of that $3 billion in carbon taxes should be directed toward technologies to reduce the emissions from burning coal. Good luck with that.

In a province that has always done the easy thing when it comes to everything from energy production to urban planning, the easiest thing is a technology switch to renewables.

You can't get there without charging a price for carbon emissions from everyone that creates them. Whining about the short-term cost doesn't help, either.

A neophyte Canadian leader assumes a new role for Canada on the world stage

The checklist continues for our new prime minister as he works through a series of international meetings before he can settle down in Ottawa and worry more about Canada.

Justin Trudeau met the Queen on Wednesday. This weekend, there's the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Malta. After that, he will barely have time to debrief, before attending the Paris round of international talks on climate change.

And don't forget the the crowds of groupies in Manila, at the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum earlier this month, all looking for a selfie with Canada's “hottie” prime minister.

Attending all these global events, while dealing with the complexities of setting up a new government at home, would make anyone's head spin.

Still, Trudeau says even a neophyte national leader like ours has a role to play on the world stage. According to the The Associated Press, he said U.S. president Barack Obama and German chancellor Angela Merkel “were very pleased that I was going to the Commonwealth, because they wanted me to make a real effort to talk about climate change” ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Paris next week.

That's a pretty hefty pair of endorsements for a nation that's had zero presence on the climate change docket up to now (and that's putting it generously).

The agenda for the Commonwealth group does include the current top-of-mind issues: climate change, international terrorism, the refugee crisis. Add to that their internal agenda of promoting what is purported to be the purpose of the Commonwealth's existence: democracy, equality, rule of law.

Because on those fronts, the Commonwealth hasn't really performed all that well.

The Commonwealth is comprised of 53 nations, mostly former British colonies, with a combined population of 2.2 billion people. As a trading group, that represents a lot of potential market, but you also need to remember that Commonwealth nations take up about 20 per cent of the world's international economic support payments.

And for all the talk of the “civilizing influence” of Britain on these nations, that influence is questionable.

Following a protest at the Commonwealth's London headquarters, Peter Tatchell, a gay rights campaigner, said 40 of the 53 Commonwealth nations still criminalize homosexuality. Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria and Brunei actively persecute gays, with murder, imprisonment and torture part of their official anti-gay policies.

Equality and rule of law are not always a given in Commonwealth nations, either. In fact, this year's meeting is being held in Malta, because Mauritius refused its turn to host, and boycotted the previous meeting in Sri Lanka, in protest of Sri Lanka's abhorrent record on human rights.

So what's the point of listing the issues confronting Canada's presence at all these big events?

I believe it's the change of expectations being put on government here at home. For 10 years now — a very long time in the life of politics — Canadians have been led to expect less and less of the federal government. Doing less has been official government ethos for a very long portion of the electorate's memory.

That pendulum has reversed. Trudeau senses people want our government to do more, to be more than the mere holder of the national economy. And attending these international events in such early days of his taking office must surely affect that sense.

Just recall your own feelings upon return from a major convention for your business or volunteer group. I've been to more than a few of these, and if you participate at all, you come home with a buzz of new ideas and energies.

Now, multiply that by becoming prime minister, being mobbed for selfies in Manila, being presented to the Queen, attending a Commonwealth summit with the endorsement of two of the world's most powerful politicians behind you, and then going to another global summit with a tectonic shift in expectations for some big decisions — all within a few weeks.

That has got to affect the next few discussions at cabinet.

It's exhausting enough to get a new government going, for a rookie prime minister and cabinet members, plus a host of first-time MPs. Now try it after being in the room with King Mswatti III who has 15 wives, all of whom he got pregnant before marrying, and being expected to discuss with him British notions of equality.

And then being asked to do big things to help to save the planet.

This is not something Canadians have ever seen before. If we have not recognized a change of eras in our history by now, wait to see what happens next.

New times, new governments, new problems for opposition parties

It's not easy being in opposition these days. Especially not in Alberta, nor in Ottawa, where radical regime change has elected governments with radically different ideas about how governments should do business.

It is plainly obvious that voters have rejected the old way of doing government business, so how does the opposition (which represents that old style) successfully oppose the new?

That's the challenge for both the Wildrose Party in Alberta and the federal Conservatives in Ottawa. If you like, it even poses a tangential challenge to the governing Saskatchewan Party whose leader Brad Wall seems to have manoeuvred himself as an opposition leader who just happens to hold the reins of power.

In Ottawa, it's way too early to tell if the Conservatives can morph from a decade of being increasingly autocratic government leaders to becoming opposition defenders of democracy against government autocracy.

Suffice to say that adopting a slogan like “change of tone” will not be enough.

Interim Conservative Party leader Rona Ambrose strode out to meet the press following her appointment, to begin this process. She promised a more open and inclusive approach to federal politics, took three quick questions, then turned her back and walked away.

It appears “change of tone” will not come easily.

But you have to give them points for trying. Friday's headlines hint at something more positive. The Huffington Post, for instance, reported Friday that the Tories will give the “benefit of the doubt” to the Liberals on climate change.

If that's the path forward, it's a smarter one. It reflects the tone of the Liberal Party during the election campaign when leader Justin Trudeau said he wanted to see the details of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement before deciding whether to support it.

The NDP under Tom Mulcair rejected the TPP out of hand — a classic opposition move, but one that did not resonate with voters who have gotten tired of government-by-competing-autocracies.

Compare this example with Alberta's Wildrose Party statements on the issue of what governments should do about climate change.

On Thursday, party leader Brian Jean suggested that because Alberta environment minister Margaret McCuaig-Boyd even spoke to her federal counterpart, Catherine McKenna, on Wednesday, that it was complicity toward a new round of the National Energy Program. Whoa, Nelly. Really?

From 1980-85, when that debacle occurred, the Progressive Conservatives under Peter Lougheed were governing Alberta, and Justin Trudeau's father, Pierre, was prime minister. The NEP was a stun gun that froze investment in Alberta, killing thousands of jobs. It also killed Liberal Party prospects in the province. There has been no forgiveness since, earned or offered.

Now, said Jean in a party release, the NDP are in charge and they “are more than happy to go along” with a new federal scheme for a repeat. He said the fact the two ministers were even talking shows that the Alberta government is willing to let the federal government dictate how we run our energy-based economy.

Never mind where people may stand on the issue of what governments should do concerning the environment; this is about what opposition parties need to learn to persuade people, in today's political realities following regime change.

Alberta voters have rejected the tone and substance of us-versus-them governance. Canadians in general rejected the notion that ideologues can dictate a narrow viewpoint from a small office onto the country, with no accommodation for anyone else.

In today's reality, an opposition can't win hearts (or votes) by throwing stones (or mud) anymore. Not in a time when people feel threatened enough already.

Alberta is on the verge of economic crisis driven by low energy prices. Canada needs a policy on how to react to a global refugee crisis driven by sectarian violence and terrorism. The whole world is looking for unified leadership on preventing a potential climate disaster that we have all worked together to create.

The change is this: we have elected political parties with policies of co-operation on these issues. An opposition party cannot succeed by simply refusing to co-operate.

Whatever core support a rather overconfident premier Brad Wall may have in Saskatchewan, it's a minority view to say he doesn't want to co-operate on faster processing of Syrian refugees. That ship has sailed, and the non-profits are already at the table with money and resources to bring them in.

His announcement that Saskatchewan will be 50-per-cent reliant on renewables for energy supply sounds more like a government people will want to elect (or re-elect).

How will opposition parties there or in Alberta win debates now? By creating bogeymen of higher-priced electricity (which people can offset by being more efficient) or of potential loss of profits for large corporations with large pollution footprints? These just won't fly in an era when people are looking for solutions, not excuses that solutions are just too much change.

In a climate where people want change, being in opposition is not easy.

Brad Wall isn't building a wall — he's just writing bad things on it

“Let's not be mistaken, the people who are seeking refuge are not the barbarians. They are fleeing the barbarians.” — Nicolas Chapuis, French ambassador to Canada

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall wants prime minister Justin Trudeau to suspend his plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees into Canada by the end of the year. He fears that such an accelerated program would allow a few Islamic State barbarians to slip through the screening process.

How you can do more than what the United Nations has already done to pre-screen for families (as opposed to single young men), already separated from the unscreened refugees flooding Europe's borders, is hard to say. Suffice that any process would fall short of 100-per-cent security.

But in setting that as some kind of standard, Wall is building a wall of fear and suspicion around all Muslims — which is exactly what experts tell us the barbarians want from us.

Creating an underclass of people among us — and providing tacit government permission to hate and distrust them — makes it that much easier for recruiters to convert young people already here into becoming the terrorists we fear from abroad.

But one thing Wall's letter to the prime minister accomplished immediately was to expose the divisions already separating Canadians over the issue of fast-tracking immigrants from a war-ravaged country where not a whole lot of us can really tell if any faction there can be deemed “the good guys.”

I followed the news coverage of this story posted by major news outlets in Canada: CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, National Post and Maclean's.

In every case, the story about Brad Wall's letter was presented fairly and evenly. A lot of people like to complain that Canada's news media is inherently biased (invariably against them, whatever their position on any issue may be). But I saw no such bias in their coverage, which supposedly will become the primary information source for most Canadians on this issue.

Where the bias played — and it played huge — was in the comments section.

I don't pretend to know if — or how — online each news media moderates the comments that appear at the bottom of stories. Most often, I don't read them. People should have better things to do than walk through the valley of the trolls.

But this time, I looked at the comments below the stories, and here's what I found — at least in the news window of Monday afternoon. I found a wall. Between Canadians.

On the CBC site, the posted reactions were almost completely to reject Wall's request that we suspend the refugee program. A (very few) supported Wall's request, but overwhelmingly, readers were appalled that a Canadian political leader would say what he did.

Comments on the CTV site, on the other hand, were virtually 100-per-cent Brad Wall-for-prime-minister. Even if under an assumed name, it seemed nobody wanted to challenge the group.

Readers of the Globe story seemed more willing to see two sides of an issue, but generally, the comment consensus was that Canada should push ahead with the refugee program.

Maclean's only had one posted comment. Maybe their filtering system is more rigid, or maybe more Canadians wait to read Maclean's in print than online. But that comment rejected Wall's request.

I repeat, the news stories themselves were entirely balanced and should not elicit the kinds of comments that appeared. Not on their own, anyway; this is a reflection of readership, not of journalism.

National Post, for their part, did something outstanding, in my view. They interviewed surviving people who went through our last similar epoch of fear and racism: Jews who fled Europe to Canada at the outbreak of the Second World War. One had escaped the Dachau concentration camp, ended up in Canada, and spent years under armed guard as a suspected enemy of Canada.

If anyone would have reason to not be a Nazi sympathizer, it would be these Jews (plus a few communist academics and homosexuals fleeing persecution in their homelands).

Frederick Blair, immigration minister at the time, was determined to keep Jews out of Canada by any means, but shiploads of prisoners of war — including at least 2,300 Jewish civilians — found themselves behind barbed wire in Canada. One prison camp was called the Plains of Abraham camp. Doubly ironic, when you think about it.

It speaks to the times that these young men did not become suicide bombers, but rather a group of upstanding Canadians after the fact. But the infuriating unfairness and racism behind their imprisonment cannot be explained away by that.

Wall's request is far too close to Frederick Blair's campaign for comfort. That Canada turned away shiploads of Jewish refugees during the Second World War to their deaths does not speak well of us trying to do the same today with Syrians.

Many Canadians may not know who the “good guys” are in the fighting in Syria, but we do know the refugees are not the bad guys.

Ultimately, morally and politically, we are obliged to let them in.

Carbon capture is not real progress

The Alberta NDP did the right thing in not pulling the plug on the money the government and the Shell corporation had already spent on its Quest carbon capture and storage facility near Fort Saskatchewan. It wasn't the best thing, but it was the right thing, a start.

For about $1.3 billion, Quest will strip carbon dioxide out of “process gas streams” at the Scottford Upgrader and shove it deep underground. That's not the same as stripping carbon from its waste gases, or from the exhaust of all the vehicles that will burn the gasoline and diesel Scottford's customers will refine down the pipeline.

But it's an easy meme to say the process is the yearly equivalent of taking 250,000 cars off the road. I figure that's less than all the cars, trucks and buses in Edmonton.

The Alberta government, under the previous Conservative regime, dedicated $745 million to the project over its first 10 years. The federal government gave $120 million, and the rest is coming from Shell and its Athabasca Oil Sands partners Chevron Canada and Marathon Oil.

The government needs something for show and tell at the Paris conference on climate change. This, along with Saskatchewan's similar project are at least something large to put on the table.

But even Shell CEO Ben van Beurden allowed this wasn't the best possible arrangement. For carbon capture to grow — a very real necessity if Shell is to continue extracting oil in the future — van Beurden says there needs to be an economic imperative.

He means a price on carbon of between $60 and $80 a tonne. This cost, tacked onto the price of our fuel and electricity is what he's talking about.

And no doubt, the Alberta government has been listening. Prepare for a carbon tax to pay for more projects like this in the future.

A better path forward would be a cap-and-trade system, but that seems about as politically possible in Alberta as a provincial sales tax. We'll have to wait and see on that.

Here's a reason cap-and-trade would work better than the straight taxing of the carbon as it comes out of the tailpipes of consumers' cars.

One of the rock stars of the climate change movement is John Schellnhuber, born Hans Joachim Shellnhuber. He's been named a science and climate change advisor to the pope, and is a Commander in the Order of the British Empire, among many other honours and accomplishments.

Last June the Executive Intelligence Review named him a “Satanist in the service of the British Royal Family” who has “in effect declared himself Pope.” So what's not to like about that?

Shellbnhuber will be a key player in the Paris climate change talks. His message is that you can do all the carbon capture you like, and do all the conservation efforts you can imagine, but none of it holds a smoky candle to switching to renewables.

Solar, wind, tide, whatever — nothing Shell or its partners can do will bring us closer to the greenhouse gas cuts we need, the way renewable energy can.

Renewable power has already proven scalable in many of its forms, and the so-called problem of intermitancy (when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow) is merely an engineering problem that engineers get closer to solving every day.

Remember how people once said you can't get crude oil out of the tar sands without putting more energy (and money) into the process than you can get out? Well, that was an engineering problem too.

A carbon tax on its own does not promote the growth of renewables, except insofar as it raises the price of all energy, making renewables more profitable.

Cap-and-trade, on the other hand, works at both ends of the production process. Producers get paid for their energy, and they get paid just because they produce energy without burning fuel.

That's why cap-and-trade probably won't fly in Alberta. If you cap our total carbon emissions at something even a bit below current levels, every tonne of growth will be taxed and the money paid to industries whose very existence is to put the fossil fuel industry out of business.

That's also why the big energy players are working so hard to look less like bad guys these days.

But just as big oil and gas needed tax subsidies over the years, so will renewables. The source of that cash needs to be cap-and-trade because it taxes all major producers directly, not the buyers of gasoline and diesel.

A carbon tax needs to be more or less revenue-neutral, offset by tax cuts in other areas (like income taxes), or it won't get off the ground. Cap-and-trade is a cash transfer which need not be revenue-neutral. Nor would it be profit-neutral for the big emitters (oil sands developers and coal-fired power generators — the kingpins of the Alberta fossil fuel economy).

But rock stars like Prof. Shellnhuber are adamant that the only way to reach our emission goals is to get off the carbon economy.

In his words, we need “an induced implosion of the carbon economy over the next 20-30 years. Otherwise we have no chance of avoiding dangerous, perhaps disastrous climate change.”

So, taking some of the process carbon out of making more gasoline is not really making progress.

I wonder what our government will come back with, along with its souvenirs of Paris.

On the agenda for our new Canadian cabinet: give CBSA a wake-up call

In the real world, it's called a snafu. That would be one order of magnitude below fubar.

It's today's headline in the shadow world of the Canada Border Services Agency, which imprisoned a man who's dedicated himself to fighting terrorism and the unholy forces that dupe of Muslim youth into becoming terrorists.

The CBSA arrested Mourad Benchellali Tuesday when his plane from France landed in Toronto — even though he had been cleared to enter Canada by the RCMP and CSIS (who had a closed-door appointment with him to learn about how groups like ISIS recruit young Canadians.)

The CBSA put him in an orange suit in maximum security prison and  — until his story became public — refused to allow him to voluntarily return to France.

This is the second time Benchellali had attempted to enter Canada to further his own private crusade against terrorism. In June, he was barred from getting on a plane in France, because his flight to Canada would cross American airspace.

Benchellali is on the U.S. “no fly” list. Organizers bringing him to Canada this time around had him fly in via Iceland, which, they were assured by Canadian security officials, would be OK.

Someone forgot to inform the CBSA.

Filmmaker Stormy Night Productions is making a documentary for the CBC, centred around Calgary mother Christianne Boudreau. Her son was sucked in to the thought of becoming a jihadi, and he died as an ISIS fighter in Syria. Benchellali was to meet her in Montreal.

Death as a deluded jihadi might well have become Benchellali's fate as well. In 2001, at age 19, he was contacted in France by his older brother Menad, and persuaded to take a “dream vacation” in Afghanistan. Mourad made a very big mistake.

He and four friends found themselves in an al-Qaida training camp and were subjected to non-stop brutal training. This is Mourad's own testimony, but he says when his 60 days was up, he tried to get the heck out of there.

He planed to escape to Pakistan, but while he was in Afghanistan being programmed by al-Qaida, 9/11 happened and the border was closed. He tried entering the country through an unguarded border crossing, was caught, handed over to U.S. forces and sent to the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

His experiences are contained in a book he wrote titled Voyage to Hell, an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled Detainees in Despair, and numerous interview accounts since.

At the time of his arrest and detainment in Guantanamo, Benchellali says newspapers attempted to paint him as an unhappy teenage loner, an outsider in European society. But he says that was not true.

In an interview with McClatchy News Service, Benchellali said: “I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.”

What he got was 60 days of forced mind-control. “I was trapped by my own fear and stupidity.”

Benchellali has since dedicated himself to being a warning against the propaganda sent to entice young people to join groups like ISIS. He speaks throughout Europe to Muslim youth warning them against thoughts of joining radical terrorist groups. He was there, he paid the price, his words have a credibility no government security agency could ever have.

And he would have shared his message with Canadian youth, Canadian police and Canadian intelligence — except for a snafu by the CBSA.

CBSA refuses to comment on their mistake. Understandable, considering the world they live in.

But one hopes they will talk to their new boss, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale. Perhaps new Immigration Minister John McCallum might have some time to sit in on that.

One can only imagine what either of them might have said as opposition members, if this had been done under the former Conservative government.

No one expects CBSA to talk to us mere Canadians. But they do have a lot of explaining to do.

One small data study, a few small surprises

Early this summer, I wrote a column about Red Deer's project to count the users of our trails network in certain areas. I suggested that people would be surprised by the numbers, perhaps even me.

Well, I have to admit I am surprised. While the city parks department seems pleased that there are more than 200,000 crossings a year at the CPR pedestrian/bike bridge (based on usage in the three-month study), I actually thought the numbers would be double or triple that — or more.

I had no doubt that the Three Mile Bend off-leash dog park would rank highly on user counts, as would Bower Ponds — which always seems to be busy. And it should surprise no one that trail usage at McKenzie Trails — as pretty a park as any in this town — would count fairly low (more on that later).

It's just that, as good as the numbers appear for trails usage in the city, I expected more.

I really thought that there would be points on our trails network that would peak above 1,000 crossings on some days. The CPR Bridge, for instance, is a major transportation route for non-motorized traffic accessing our city centre, and it was declared “busy” with an average of 560 crossings a day.

(Again with the due notice: I serve on the board of the Central Alberta Regional Trails Society, and am president of Red Deer Association for Bicycle Commuting. My bias is clear and unapologetic, as is my interest in this topic.)

City parks superintendent Trevor Poth reported one interesting item the study uncovered: trails usage is an everyday occurrence, not just a weekend or good-weather thing. There are peaks and surges in places, of course, but the study found that overall, we use our trails pretty well the same every day.

This is probably the most important finding of the trails count study so far. Red Deer rightly regards our trails network that links our city parks as a recreational and active-living gem. It is that, and more.

Our trails system is also a transportation corridor for people moving through the city to take care of the necessary tasks of their daily lives. As such, it is woefully incomplete and will never achieve its potential until it is made so.

We are all very sensitive to the costs of things in local government. Most of all, in no other area than in sustainable non-car transportation.

So, as Poth noted in his talk with Advocate reporter Crystal Rhyno this week, knowing the numbers is vital to planning our spending for repairs, upgrades and expansion of our trails network.

But I would caution planners that trails usage is not a popularity contest. The CPR Bridge is busy because it is useful. The trail to the McKenzie Recreation Area is less busy because it is less useful.

McKenzie Trails is an end-of-the-road destination. Unless you are willing to climb almost straight up the river escarpment trail to reach Garden Heights, there is no place else to go.

Bower Ponds is a nice destination, too, but from there you can easily reach Riverside Meadows, Oriole Park, Fairview, Heritage Ranch, West Park and downtown without having to reverse course. No knock against McKenzie Trails; the numbers there merely reflect usage of visitors for one purpose: to enjoy the park.

A far larger number of people pass the electronic counters at Bower Ponds because they are going somewhere. The same applies to the Devonian Trails near Sunnybrook. I suggest that trail is a transportation link as much or more than anything else — and the numbers reflect that.

Here's a point I want to highlight from this study so far: in the absence of separated bike lanes to make non-car transportation pleasant and safe, our so-called recreational trails are carrying people who choose not to drive to every errand they conduct in their daily lives. Therefor, in order to be useful, the trails need to be linked and networked to the places where people want to go.

In many places, they are not. Along the south bank of the river past the Riverlands construction project the trail is closed and will be for quite some time.

There is a trail in the long-term plan for access from the new roundabout on 67^th Street to the Riverbend Recreation Area, as well as all the new housing developments to the south and east. But it's not complete now, and therefor the existing trails cannot be fully used.

Access from the city's north side across 67^th Street to the whole of the rest of the city is extremely restricted and I see no priority solutions for that in the city's long-term plans. It's a barrier many would-be cyclists and pedestrians choose not to cross.

All these things affect usage, which is not accounted for (yet) by the city's otherwise very good study.

In 2013, filmmaker Andreas Mol Dalsgaard produced a watershed documentary titled The Human Scale. You can find it on Netflix and it's worth a watch. It's premise, proved by actual experience in several cities, is that planners hugely underestimate the benefits of trails and bike lanes — when they are networked to places where people actually want to go in their daily lives.

That, I think, is the biggest surprise when we continue our study that we have yet to discover.

Death versus dollars and a cheap sub sandwich

Another week, another release of scientific studies calculating the risk of everyday activities that might kill you. This week, we have two: one regards for-profit nursing homes, and another looks at pastrami sandwiches.

It is so easy to inappropriately condense years of study over thousands of complex cases into a catchy headline. I'm often tempted to ask for a meta-study on the relationship between steady consumption of news reports regarding everyday health risks and depression.

There is a fair amount of salt to be taken with these kinds of news reports — which itself is probably not good for your health.

Especially, we are told, when it comes to salted or cured meats. The France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer now rates processed meats (hot dogs, sausages, smoked meats or fermented meats) as Group 1 carcinogens.

What's a Group 1 carcinogen? It is something that exhibits a strong link to cancer that can be proven in studies, but not the actual risk of how much cancer it causes. Tobacco is in Group 1, as are diesel fumes. So, if you're a long-haul trucker who smokes and eats ham sandwiches every day, that can't be good.

It's not good, but you have to compare risks — and that's what these studies do not really tell you. For each 50 grams of processed meats that you would eat daily, says the IARC, your risk of colorectal cancer rises by 18 per cent.

But what's the risk of getting colorectal cancer generally per 100,000 people? Well, it's the second highest cause of cancer death in the U.S.; 10 deaths per 100,000, according the list on Wikipedia. Bad, but way down the list of all causes of death. You are almost twice as likely to die in a car accident, for instance (19.1 deaths per 100,00). But who is out there striking fear in your heart about that?

If you want to fear anything, watch out for cardiovascular disease and heart disease, which together kill 385 people per 100,000 per year. Get your exercise, that's all I can say.

So, an 18-per-cent increase in risk, if you eat one hefty sub sandwich a day? People live with a lot worse things, smoking for one.

Red meat is a Group 2a cancer risk, along with glyphosphate (a widely-used weed killer) and diazinon (a widely-used bug killer). That means the evidentiary link between these things and cancer is pretty good, but not as strong as the link between tobacco or salami and cancer.

Is any of this going to change your behaviour? Personally, I love a smoked-meat sandwich once in a while.

Here's another study which might give you pause, along with government policy-makers. And here's another research institute with a long name: the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.

They found that mortality and instances of hospitalization within one year of being admitted to a for-profit long-term care facility is statistically higher than if you are admitted to one run by the government or a charity.

To boil the risk down to a headline: if you assign a value of 1 to the risk of death or hospitalization in a non-profit seniors care facility in Ontario, the risk hazard in a for-profit institution is 1.10 for mortality and 1.25 for hospitalization after one year.

Why in Ontario? Because of the laws. In Ontario, all core care is paid equally in seniors long-term care residences, whether it is for-profit or not. It is illegal to charge people more for core care services just to make a profit .

That eliminates a major variable in comparing outcomes of care. Of the 640 care facilities compared in this study, 60 per cent were for-profit, and 40 per cent were not. This compares well with both the U.S. and U.K., where the majority of long-term care beds are in for-profit institutions.

The study followed 53,739 admissions from 2010-2012, and examined outcomes at 3 months, 6 months and 1 year. They recorded who died, went to the hospital, or were transferred someplace else (like hospice — in which cases they were not part of follow-up study).

In my mind, the differences are statistically there, but I would still take the first bed locally available, when my need arose.

This is more a thing for government and care advocates. Tax-paid health care costs for seniors are rising. If there is a 25-per-cent less chance of needing to pay for someone's hospitalization when a government opts for government-run facilities versus allowing more for-profit investment in that area, it makes a strong case to do that.

Strong enough to do the math anyway. If the extra cost risk for health care is so many millions, is it still cheaper to have for-profit investors to put so many millions into long-term care beds, which taxpayers (and seniors themselves) pay back over a long period of time?

When we ask governments to absolutely balance their budgets each year, this is the kind of math that they have to do.

Perhaps they might keep the ham and hot dogs lower on the menus. But when I'm in my 90s, I'm gonna say the heck with it and bring me a pizza.