For Alberta, and for Mary Ann Jablonski, the future is a clean slate

Last August, when he was still an outsider wanting to get inside, Jim Prentice proposed a three-term limit for provincial MLAs. Now that he's premier, that hasn't been so much on the radar, much less the agenda.

But MLAs in all three major parties in our province have been doing a lot of that work for him. In the next provincial election, not one of the current party leaders will have fought a provincial campaign before, not as leader.

Rachel Notley, leader of the NDP will be the senior statesperson in the next election — and she has only been in leading the NDP since last Oct. 18.

“Officially,” Prentice has had premier-like status since winning the party leadership last Sept. 15, but he gained fully-elected status in a by-election Oct. 27, nine days after Notley. That's if you're in the mood to split hairs.

Wildrose has an interim leader, Heather Forsyth, in office since just before last Christmas. That Christmas horribilus saw the mass defection of Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, along with eight other Wildrose representatives, to the Tories.

And now, the Liberal Party of Alberta is also officially leaderless. Sherman could have held senior status in the next election, coming to the leadership wa-a-y back on Sept. 12, 2011.

But he announced Monday that he was stepping down, following a decision he made “walking a beach.” The usual reasons — a new direction, spending time with family, etc. — were given.

The cumulative result is as clean a slate as this province has ever had electorally. There are fewer incumbents in high office known to be running today than I can remember in all my years of watching politics.

Last August, while Prentice was promising things that only $100 oil could provide, the Calgary Herald ran a list of 23 Alberta MLAs who would have been in their last term of office, had the three-term rule been in force then. (For the record, in case you need to know, there is no three-term limit now.)

That list included Forsyth, who was then serving her sixth term as an MLA, albeit her first term as a member of the Wildrose.

That list also included Red Deer North MLA Mary Ann Jablonski, who is currently in her fifth term. Jablonski has also announced she would not be running in the next election — a decision that will not come as a surprise to the people who know her well.

I did not like the tone of the Herald column last August in one major regard. The headline referenced people who have passed their “best before date.” One paragraph metaphorically suggested a “severance-free ice floe.”

I'm no fan at all of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, but I am a fan of Mary Ann Jablonski. That might have caused me some major stress at the ballot box on a few (4) occasions, but for a miracle of geography that put my home just south of the border of her riding.

I was free to vote both my heart and my principles. For all the effect that it would have.

As it is, Jablonski is nowhere near her best-before date. For her, I sincerely hope (and expect) the best is yet to come.

Five terms is a long time. So we will need some reminding that Jablonski replaced the Red Deer MLA who bequeathed Alberta its asinine flat income tax: Stockwell Day.

Jablonski won in a by-election to replace Day — who had definitely passed his best-before date in provincial politics, though not before saddling taxpayers with the legal expenses required to defend a defamation lawsuit for comments he made in a letter to the Red Deer Advocate.

We like to elect people who can deliver, people who can get things done.

Jablonski had shown that political ability long before being elected. She successfully lobbied the federal government for dental care for members of the armed forces and the RCMP. As well, she advocated for greater rights for military spouses. Her husband Bob Jablonski had been a member of the military, and was transferred to Penhold in 1980 — to our benefit.

It's all right there, in Wikipedia.

Successful private members bills are like hen's teeth. Jablonski has championed two of them. One would give the parents of drug-addicted youth the right to force them into rehab. Another would increase attention for screening into Irlen Syndrome in school children, to give those children a better chance at making the most of their educations.

And that's overlooking a lot of the rest of her accomplishments.

I don't know about the value of any severance package for Jablonski, but I do know any reference to an ice floe is supremely disrespectful.

My line is open to suggest any number of local agencies for her attention, that could benefit from having a person on board like her. A person who can get things done.

Since when did we need tools to talk? Since now

Communication is our business, not our practice. That's one of the quotes I'll always remember from the old days, back when newspaper types used to gather at provincial conferences to discuss their dark trade.

The best quotes always came while at the bar, after the workshops and seminars.

The same can also apply to politicians. (The quote, not the bar sessions.) Perhaps even more so now, when the higher up the political ladder one goes, the more spin staff are hired to tweet to us, but not to communicate.

In that aspect, Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is indeed the message now.

So perhaps it would be inevitable that civic government — the one closest to the voters — would develop a need to standardize the way it talks to the public. On everything from dandelions in the playgrounds to the effects of addiction and homelessness in the city.

Our particular city began to change its governance model two or three elections ago to include an evolving four-year plan within a system of planning outlines (our “charters”). As that came about, it became apparent that everyone in City Hall needs to be on the same page, when voters get engaged.

So when you've all these other planning tools already, what's to do next, but build a toolkit to talk about it?

Elaine Vincent, director of Development Services for Red Deer, said the City of Victoria had recently developed a communications toolkit to make sure the message from City Hall is getting out in a consistent way through all departments. Vincent also says the toolkit standardizes how the message from us voters travels through the City Hall maze of offices.

Vincent told me Red Deer caught a bit of a bargain working with Victoria's consultants to adapt the toolkit for here. There's not a whole lot of important stuff that you can get for less than $31,000 these days.

Time will tell if wrapping talk in a package is indeed such a bargain, but I figure it's worth trying.

Think of it this way: in an election, candidates tell us what they're going to do for us. They hear stuff on the campaign trail, for sure, but what they say to us is hugely filtered through the candidate's vision. In any event, voters cast their ballots based on what the candidate says he or she will do.

After the election, their cell phones ring constantly, with people telling them what to do. What happens to the vision?

Well, in Red Deer, it's hammered out in the four-year plan. And all our phone calls and meetings get prioritized by how closely they fit into the plan, and by how broadly-held the messages are from those phone calls and meetings.

Vincent says the toolkit helps both elected councillors and admin staff prioritize the message, when people call about their issues. How many people are affected? Is action required now, or later? How can we guarantee the right people are hearing the message?

Vincent also says the toolkit helps staff get your message through overlapping departments, and that when staff anywhere in the city's large organization talk to the public, they speak with a more unified voice.

That's the plan anyway. And if there's anything our city is thoroughly engaged in right now, it's creating plans.

So how does that affect you? If you as a citizen want to comment on a direction the city is taking, you'll probably need to at least be familiar with the plan. There's plenty of information on that on the city's web site.

If you're not right up to speed on the plan, this toolkit is supposed to make it so that councillors and city managers can all explain it to you — in the same way.

The whole effort is to help get you more engaged with the direction the city is growing.

You can still call a councillor and gripe about your neighbour's dog barking all night. You're the taxpayer.

But from dandelion control, to rebuilding our city's core, or from traffic problems to defining what we want to be as a city in the next 20 or 30 years, this toolkit is supposed to make sure your part of the message isn't lost in the maze at City Hall.

You'll never get this kind of treatment from the province or the feds, for all the tax money you send them. So perhaps we shouldn't get too snarky about the $31,000 spent on a toolkit to package how we talk.

The medium — the plan and the toolkit to explain it — has indeed become the message.

Our world as Downton Abbey

There's poverty and there's poverty, so the saying goes. When do-gooders talk about poverty in a place like Red Deer as a root cause of family breakdown, depression, drug addiction, crime and homelessness, do-nothings suggest the “poverty line” here is way too arbitrary.

Here's a widely-held public perception: Even street people in Red Deer get food to eat and shelter (most of the time), with money left over for drugs and a cell phone. Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong.

As if living one missed paycheque away from being homeless doesn't count.

If you want to see real poverty, we're told, look around the world.

Oxfam International has looked around the world, and what they see relates to Red Deer.

If you ask 48,643 people in 44 nations around the world, as the Pew Research Centre has done, you will find what people in developed nations fear most: economic inequality.

Not climate change, not religious hatred and terrorism — economic inequality.

Those people have the data on their side. Oxfam recently released a report — conveniently before the next meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — that the globe now resembles Edwardian England. That was the time of Downton Abbey, when the rich were very rich indeed, and everyone else lived on their table scraps.

According to Oxfam, the top one per cent of the world's richest people (those with assets over US $2.7 million) hold just under half the wealth of the entire world. Oxfam projects that next year, it will probably be more than half.

A year ago, 85 people held as much wealth as the bottom 50 per cent of humanity combined. Today, says Oxfam, it only takes 80 of the world's wealthiest people to do that.

Looking at GDP per capita through history, researchers at the University of Warwick once calculated that 13^th Century peasants in Europe got to keep just over $2,000 a year, in today's prices. GDP per capita is less than $2,000 per year in 26 countries of the world.

Yes, there is poor and there is poor. Just as there is rich and there is rich.

But how does that relate to Red Deer?

I can't give you figures dollar-for-dollar, but I can say that Oxfam rated income inequality highest in the United States. Economically and socially, are we really that much different here?

Remember how I said people in developed nations fear income inequality more than anything else? That's mostly in Europe, and particularly in countries like Spain and Greece which are facing real social turmoil that stems out of income inequality.

Here, as Franklin Roosevelt said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. But that was said just as the New Deal was embarking.

The era since then until now has been the longest period of social well-being in North America in a century. The era following the Second World War, more or less until 2000, was the era of greatest economic equality since North America became widely settled.

Incomes were stable and relatively equal for generations. In the 1950s and up, it became easy to think that in order to be poor, there had to be something wrong with you.

But in the last decade or so, when wealth became more and more concentrated in the hands of a few, North America's sense of well-being has declined.

The middle class, which set the values on which we base our view of society, has shrunk both in numbers and in power. Being middle class today is less attainable than it has been since the 1930s, and once you get there, you find it's less wealthy than you thought.

We know now that there's not always something wrong with the poor. That would be just too many of us now. Rather, people are starting to think maybe there's something wrong with the rich.

Like the useless fops in Downton Abbey, surrounded by low-paid servants who did everything for them.

Thus, I believe, the fear that the Pew pollsters discovered.

Civic leaders in Red Deer are rightly concerned with the effects of poverty here, even if it's not like poverty in Africa, even if there are shelters, soup kitchens and food banks.

Families who are promised that hard work will produce success are finding that promise is rather hollow. More and more, success is inherited, and enjoyed by people who really do not work much at all — not the way poor people must.

The rich in rich nations say losing their wealth is their greatest fear. But losing some of their share of wealth may be the salvation from their fears.

Back to the future, Alberta style

Remember the good old days, back in the early Klein years? Ah. . . the five-per-cent wage rollbacks for everyone, even school teachers and nurses; the one-way bus tickets out of town for people on welfare; the phony consultations with party faithful on the “hard decisions” that needed to be made.

Yes, for conservatives, those were glorious days.

Today's premier Jim Prentice has inherited the same economic conditions that favoured Tories in the early Klein years, times ten. If there's anything that Tories do well, it's a recession.

It's the good times that they fail at. Yes, I know I'm not being completely fair here; it's Albertans in general that can't handle prosperity.

Just as well then; it looks like we'll be having a lot less of it for a long time.

Face it, Alberta, we've bought and paid for what's about to befall us in this current deep drop in oil prices. And all of Canada with us.

An economist's article printed this week studied the history of energy prices in North America. He concluded we're not in an oil price slump at all. Actually, we're closer to historical norms.

It's easy to convince yourself that $100-plus oil is permanent, when you're shipping all you can get out of the ground at that price. It's easy to forget what things were like when oil was as low as $20 a barrel — as it was when Klein got his first majority.

So it was always easy for Albertans to laugh at anyone who said we should be saving a good part of the revenue from our non-renewable resources.

Recently, the Advocate ran a column saying what a waste it has been for Alberta to try to diversify its economy. The column pointed to a list of early losses on investments of public money that led Klein to declare the province would no longer “pick winners.”

That article was a disservice to all of us. It proposed that only made-in-Alberta solutions existed to diversify our revenue opportunities, and that we had to manufacture them out of thin air ourselves.

Had Alberta simply been a prudent saver of the windfall money our resources have brought us since Peter Lougheed inaugurated the Heritage Fund, we'd easily have half a trillion dollars in that sovereign wealth fund by now.

How much diversity would the global interest on half a trillion buy us? How much of a cushion against the price cycles of energy?

Where did all the money go? In short, we spent it. We spent it on artificially lowering our tax rates below what a prudent industrialized economy could sustain.

While conservatives were arguing that good people “pay as they go,” they were robbing the future so they wouldn't have to pay at all.

Here's something I really like about the budget the City of Red Deer has just passed: we will save one per cent of our tax base per year — even in a bad year.

Provincially, we haven't done that for a generation, through any number of good and bad years. And quite a few of those years have been spectacular.

Because Alberta has no savings plan and no sales tax, we have a much-reduced revenue base.

For example, our province supplies all the services required of a modern economy to the workers in Fort McMurray — and up there, government services are much-needed. But Alberta doesn't collect income taxes from all the wages made by of out-of-province workers. They pay taxes in their home provinces — and it's hundreds of millions a year.

That would be OK, but Alberta doesn't even get a sales tax benefit from the hundreds of millions these workers spend. The feds do with the GST, but Alberta gets nothing.

The revenue stream from sales, plus the revenue from prudent savings, would be all the diversification Alberta needs to unshackle itself from oil price cycles.

Much is made of the economic recovery being enjoyed in the U.S. A whole lot of it is financed by out-of-control government borrowing. But state budgets are also financed by state sales taxes, which remain steady, because people almost always spend everything they earn, good years and bad.

Premier Prentice says we're all in this together. He's says everything's on the table to deal with our current crisis — even a sales tax.

I'll bet he's not serious. If the past is an indicator of the future, he's threatening now to hit us with a baseball bat, so we'll thank him later for only just hitting us with a pool noodle.

It won't be enough. We needed to face the tax hit decades ago, when it would have been much smaller, and which would still have been far less than the tax hit borne by people in every other democratic government on earth.

And we needed to save, even in the bad years.

I say being Tory means never having to learn from the past. That's why Alberta's history is so circular. Our future is our past, times ten.

Charlie Hebdo: publish and be damned?

I haven't been there often, but in this business, sooner or later you are going to offend someone.

Fortunately, the consequences are most often a blow to the ego (a metaphorical punch-back in the nose) or financial (repent publicly, or pay a fine).

People may get angry at perceived offences, but they don't storm the newsroom with assault rifles. Just the same, the doorway to the newsroom where I contribute is numeric-coded. Can't be too careful.

Like the editors of all Canada's newspapers, I've been mulling the question of whether we should all just publish the cartoons of Muhammed that led to fundamentalist cowards murdering staff at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

My first reaction was that, well, we'll show them. If everyone in the publishing business was in solidarity with the publication, that “We Are Charlie”, we should blast those cartoons all over the world.

But what, exactly, would we be proving? That we are all capable of gratuitous religious insult? That we will all provoke anger, just because we can?

CBC News, in its public debate on the issue proved that the network can provoke gratuitous anger, no matter what it does. Even Canadian MPs and senators managed to weigh in on both sides.

Employment minister Jason Kenney — probably with the help of the spinsters on his staff — discovered that CBC had reproduced an image of a crucifix in a jar of urine, and rightly asked why the CBC was content to gratuitously insult Christians, but would not do the same for Muslims.

Good question. The answer probably includes consideration of credible death threats. My question in return would be: does Kenney's right to decide to give insult include personal responsibility for the deaths of his staff?

Does that mean the terrorists have won? We'll see. The battle rages on.

Among English newspapers in Canada, only the National Post in Canada republished a cartoon depiction that Muslims would consider blasphemous. Eleven French publications in Quebec decided that “nous sommes tous Charlie” and reprinted a Charlie Hebdo cover showing Muhammed.

I'm not sure that we are all Charlie. When the publication began in 1960, its slogan was “dumb and nasty.” I hope you don't believe that describes you.

We have quite enough of that in the digital age. A wide number of newspapers are considering, or have already decided to disable the comments capabilities of their online news feeds.

Our concepts surrounding free speech did not inspire higher debate on the issues covered in our information universe. Rather, they just opened the door to “dumb and nasty.”

For many major publications, monitoring the conversations in the comments section of online stories and opinion pieces simply became pointlessly onerous. It's not a job I would want. Who would want to rule the kingdom of the trolls? The biggest troll?

That has been part of my consideration in the question of whether we should reprint cartoons deemed so offensive they inspire murder.

What were these cartoons anyway? I didn't look too hard to find them (I'm sure they are widely available). But one I did see (dated from 2006) was a depiction of a distraught Muhammed weeping. The caption in the thought balloon translates: “It's hard to be loved by fundamentalists.”

Would that I could see a depiction of Jesus doing the same. It would likely become part of the collection of wallpaper images on my computer.

In Islam, to produce a graven image of the prophet is blasphemy. Some say the punishment for such an insult is death.

But is it not blasphemous to put yourself in God's place, and deliver the punishment yourself? To murder people to avenge blasphemy is blasphemy itself, right?

That's what the We Are Charlie people should be saying. At that point, I'd join them.

Everyone knows there's a line between satire and insult. A good satirist dances on that line and sometimes oversteps.

But don't try to convince me that it takes a troll to defend freedom or to express any love for democracy. That these trolls can operate in this particular democracy is gratis of freedom, not the other way round.

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

Audits: a costly (but necessary?) evil

You might think that the biggest challenge facing non-profit and service agencies in Red Deer — and the whole province — would be fundraising for core services. How do you keep raising the money you need, to do the good things you want to do?

From my many years on boards and committees, I'd say that would be true. But the most aggravating challenge — by far — for me has been data gathering and financial reporting for funding agencies.

Granting agencies, be they governments, foundations or the United Way, want to know two things: is there a need for the service you are providing; and how careful are you with your money? And they want hard numbers, not your word on it.

Trust me, satisfying those two questions sucks more life out of a volunteer board than any other questions you could ask of it. It's easy to get enthused about a fundraiser for needed services. It's a killer when you find the cost of reporting (for which you must also fundraise) costs almost as much as the rent on the office. Every year.

For some years now, taxpayers have been insistently asking the same questions of government.

Enter the value-for-money audit. Exit all the oxygen in the room, and with it, a whole pile of money.

In this year's city operating budget, all city departments together are asking for a total of $468,000 increase for 2015. But city administration is also asking for $200,000 to do a value-for-money audit, for just one of their departments. My reading on this is that they want to do these things for years, one department at a time.

Until they are all so efficient, all that's left in their budgets will be the $200,000 needed for the audit to study themselves.

Plus, admin wants another $100,000 to create Corporate Performance Management Metrics — which is just a six-figure way of saying “survey”.

When children are in school, they want to be astronauts, firemen, doctors, scientists. A smart parent would sing the praises of them becoming accountants and auditors.

That's where the growth is.

Red Deer taxpayers were ready to storm City Hall with torches and pitchforks over $800,000 spent to improve access and safety for city cyclists. Whenever anyone has a grievance against the city — for any reason you can imagine — bike lanes forms part of it.

But if this pilot goes forward, we will have spent that much and more by the time we host the Canada Winter Games. To receive a few reports that hardly anyone will ever refer to.

But if you have to spend a few hundred thousand to show taxpayers that you're not wasting their money, well, that's what you have to do.

What we ask of any charity should be no more than what we ask of government.

I recognize that both city administration and councillors are doing their best to be efficient. After all, didn't they trim $25,000 off the Ross Street summer patio project? Nine more of those, and a value-for-money auditor gets a week with his family at a villa in France.

My question is: which would taxpayers rather have?

I admit it, I'm griping. A city is a very complex organism, and keeping its services running with a minimum of waste is not easy. As well, the people putting up the money for all of this have a right to know they are being respected.

I'm just peeved that this is what it takes. I'd bet that this audit report — if it ever gets published — will show there are efficiencies to be gained in some areas of the department that will be studied. Nothing that a diligent manager couldn't handle, mind you. That's what the $100,000 performance metric study would tell us, wouldn't it?

An value-for-money audit might even produce benefits worth more than $200,000. At least that would be value for money.

But from everything I've learned about audits, I'm glad I'm not in the department to be targeted.

I need my oxygen.

Does the problem at Dalhousie stem from male domination of dentistry?

The University of Dalhousie's school of dentistry finally announced on Monday that there will be a partial suspension of the 13 students, members of a “Gentleman's Club”, for misogynist Facebook postings.

That hardly makes them special, since the entire fourth-year dentistry class has yet to return from the Christmas break and get back to work. All other classes have already resumed, but school management is keeping the fourth-year class out for now.

The “partial” part of their suspensions refers to the clinical experience portion of their studies. They can attend classes with their peers (when classes resume in a week), but they cannot do any work at the clinic.

A stint of “restorative justice” and counselling is also required of the 13, along with any of their female classmates who choose to participate.

That's it. After the Gentlemen posted a list of female peers they'd like to chloroform and have “hate sex” with (lets just call it rape), suspension of classes for everyone, suspension of clinical work for the 13 men and restorative justice for their victims is all we know about for now.

Of all the medical professions, dentistry remains the last bastion of near-complete male domination.

Joan Rush, a lawyer specializing in health law and ethics, has taught both medical and dentistry students at the University of British Columbia.

She notes in an article for the Globe and Mail that the professional association that governs the practice in Canada is nearly all white male. There are 18 directors of the Canadian Dental Association, and only one is female. There are no visible minorities represented on the board. The deans of all 10 faculties of dentistry in Canada are male.

As well, says Rush, since dentistry is completely privately run, its practitioners are free to offer only the services they wish, to whom they wish, at the price of their choosing.

This confluence of conditions has led to Canada's rating of “poor” for ensuring equitable access to dental care among 34 OECD countries.

These factors have also led to a male-oriented sense of entitlement in the profession, something which is not shared in the others. Or if it does remain in other professions, at least it is not held to the same extent and the professions themselves are working to change.

The Gentleman's Club at Dalhousie is partially a result of top-down attitudes in the whole profession that are out of touch with society.

That puts the problem and the crisis at Dalhousie smack in the dean's office.

Are we talking about young, bright male students who have done something stupid? Of course. But the messages being sent in the handling of the crisis do not square with Canadian values.

Especially not the values that dominate Canadian universities.

When I went to university, there were slightly more male than female students on Canadian campuses. Today, almost two-thirds of university students are female. Among Canadian adults, women are more than 17 per cent more likely to have higher education than men.

There has been a lot of discussion about this; even Statistics Canada has studies examining the new gender imbalance in higher education.

That's a whole other issue, but in the context of the discussion here, it shows that management of schools of dentistry have some catching up to do.

Restorative justice alone will not be enough. Nor is it fair that 13 students who paid a whole lot of money for their education and who have done a whole of of hard work to become trained, should be completely kicked out of school, four months before the end of their fourth year.

Nothing more has yet been forthcoming, because school managers have reason to fear “self-harm” could result. Outside of the ethical questions, how would you like to handle the prospect of lawsuits — from all concerned?

Remember, nothing criminal has been alleged as yet. We're still taking about students doing something stupid in violation of an internal code of conduct.

Rush has a suggestion I kind of like. Let the 13 Gentlemen agree to whatever restorative justice their victims agree to. In addition, let them agree to have their first year of practice take place under supervision in hospitals or geriatric facilities. Or at non-profit clinics, preferably based in remote communities where residents have little access to dental care, much less care they can afford.

Canadian taxpayers cover about 70 per cent of the total cost of educating a new dentist. We have a stake in this, too.

For the students' female peers, for us, and for the lessons both the students and their governing institutions can learn, this suggestion seems like a way out of a huge legal and ethical maze.

How we all live — and die — with cancer

You know how people (and especially people who report on health studies) tell you that nearly everything you can think of will give you cancer these days? Or that nearly anything can prevent (or even cure) cancer, if you take enough of it?

You can hardly open a newspaper or an online feed these days without seeing the results of the latest study on cancer mortality. This week, red wine good; next week red wine bad. Or just munch on a truckload of acai berries.

Studying cancer is an industry, and producing conflicting or confusing reports is no deterrent to either its credibility or its ability to raise funds for more research.

But now, in the biggest cancer study bombshell of them all, scientists have produced a mathematical model showing that two-thirds of the cancers that afflict adults are not determined by the things we do, the things we eat (or smoke), or the toxins that we encounter.

The largest cause of all cancers in adults? According to the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Centre in the U.S., it's plain dumb luck.

In reports shot round the world, Bert Volgelstein, the Clayton professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University, said: “Cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, is often attributed to their 'good genes', but the truth is that most of them simply had good luck.”

What triggers the cancers this study referred to is the number of times the cells divide in certain organs (your colon, for instance). Despite our evolutionary protections, every time the cells in our body divide, there is a risk some divisions may produce a bad result. Runaway division — a cancer — is one of those results.

Getting an unfortunate cell division is losing the cancer lottery, he says, and it is not likely affected by the number of red-meat dinners you ate. Take that, you paleo nut-crunchers.

In two-thirds of the cancers we get, it now appears pure bad luck is the trigger.

In the rest — obesity, bad lifestyle, smoking, etc. — genetics and environmental factors do play a larger role. So virtue can still be its own reward in many cases.

But on the whole, this is depressing. As one doctor once told me, everyone will get cancer in one form or another, if they live long enough.

And trying to beat the odds by finding a cure is a waste of billions of dollars, says one long-time editor of the esteemed British Medical Journal.

Dr. Richard Smith recently wrote a blog essay suggesting that dying of cancer was a better way to go than dying of other causes, like dementia.

Getting a diagnosis of cancer, he said, allows the patient time to say goodby to loved ones and to wrap up one's affairs, which is denied to others who die either suddenly or slowly of other causes.

Smith was the editor of the journal for 13 years. He's seen umpteen thousand studies on mortality from all causes, in all their contradictory natures.

He wrote in a blog for the journal, that leaving aside suicide, there are four ways to go: sudden death (a traffic collision), the long slow death of dementia, the up and down of organ failure — and cancer, where people “go down usually in weeks.”

Death by cancer, he said, was the best option of the lot. Smith also deplored how many patients die while suffering futile programs of overtreatment of cancer, leading to a “horrible medical death.”

Well, you can imagine the stink this raised in the cancer research community.

Suggesting now that most of the cases of cancer that afflict our society may simply be random, or that influential people are proposing that resistance is futile, is not the best start to the New Year.

But when you think on it, perhaps this frees us from a lot of worry, or from labouring under the myth that we can all completely control our own destinies.

I will not attempt to rank which would be the best way to die.

Instead, I will continue to pursue what I believe would be the best way to live. That makes for a happier, more hopeful New Year.