A tax hike by any other name

Back in 2009 then-premier Ed Stelmach made good on an election promise to kill the Alberta health care premium. When he did it, the saving to Albertans was the equivalent of a 12-per-cent cut in income taxes.

With a big energy-based revenue problem on his hands, and having already ruled out a sales tax, or any increases in income taxes and corporate taxes, there's not much revenue room to make a significant move on the revenue side of his next budget. Royalty fees are so far off the table as to never be mentioned.

But dress up a huge spike in income taxes as a health care premium, and you're talking significant dollars.

Finance minister Robin Campbell is tickled pink with the idea. “I'm keen on it,” he told reporters after a speech Wednesday to the Chamber of Commerce in Chestemere.

Both he and premier JimPrentice seem convinced that a steep hike in taxes via health care premiums are the preferred option of Albertans for the next difficult budget. In fact, it's a done deal.

“It would be based on per-person,” said Campbell. “I'm just not sure yet how we'll bring it in.”

That sounds like a bit more than a Klein-era trial balloon, don't you think?

Health care premiums are just another flat tax. If you're making six figures, what's $1,000 per year? You can live with it. But if you're the lone breadwinner with a family, a per-person health premium could see an average wage earner missing mortgage payments.

Last time out, the health premium experiment turned out to be a total joke. There was almost zero revenue for the government, because the feds ruled the fees to be a violation of Medicare rules, and they cut provincial tax transfers by an equivalent amount — for years.

In fact, doing so cost us billions, because those transfers were Alberta federal income taxes withheld, so for us to get health care, we had to pay twice.

A lot of people couldn't (or simply wouldn't) pay. If you believe the Liberal critics, some were chased by bill collectors. Then came the ethical choices health care providers needed to make when sick people came to their doors.

Do you provide health care to someone whose premiums aren't up to date? Do you let them die, in the same way some U.S. municipalities let peoples' homes burn down, if they haven't paid their fire protection premiums? Are there health premiums, but only if you can force people to pay them at the hospital door?

Why is Jim Prentice, the governor of the lowest-taxed, highest per-capita spending regime in the developed world, so afraid of charging a reasonable tax rate for a reasonable program of government services?

Of course, what's “reasonable” is a fluid term. By Alberta Tory standards, all of the U.S. and all of Canada are “unreasonable” in what their people pay, for what they get in stable government services.

Why make the tax increase specific to health care? Health care is the largest (and rising) portfolio in the province’s program budget. So maybe it makes sense that tax increases be specific to the most expensive services government provides.

But that would mean some steep cuts in all other aspects of Alberta's social safety net, while the big shots in Alberta Health Services don't have to face the same hard decisions.

I say if my taxes are going up (big time) for only one program, I want to see some performance guarantees. Actionable guarantees.

Nobody likes to read or hear about someone else's health complaints, but I've been bumped from non-elective surgery three times in the last month. I'm sure I'm not the only person who can say this.

How many Albertans are walking around with a potential cancer inside them, who get booked for surgery over and over again, only to be sent home from the hospital because the surgery rooms ran out of time and need to close for the day? Quite a few, I'll bet.

Now, raise my taxes 10 or 12 per cent — specifically for health care — and ask me to quietly accept it. No sale.

That's why a sales tax makes more sense. We know everyone else in the world accepts and pays it, and they seem to live just fine. We know it's a steady, stable revenue stream that exists outside the energy price cycle. And it's a tax the rich actually pay.

A “reasonable” tax regime and “reasonable” expectations of what those taxes should provide us, is a better way forward than keeping a flat income tax with another flat health care tax plopped on top it.

People keep saying Jim Prentice is the steady hand on the tiller that Alberta needs. What I see is a guy veering all over the place in an effort to avoid the decisions a reasonable leader needs to make.

The Thought Police are among us, and Stephen Harper is leading their charge

Our weekend news feeds were supposed to be distracted by other things: how to find love on Valentine's Day; how people in Eastern North America were supposed to find their neighbours buried under two meters of snow; how to spend quality time with family on the long weekend, with our February snow melting all around us.

Instead, we were instructed to watch what we say in front of the television.

Who, in their right minds, would buy a TV set that can listen in to your private conversations, and have them transcribed by software owned by an unknown third party?

Canadians, apparently.

So-called 'smart televisions' have a microphone either built into the screen itself, or onto the remote control, theoretically so that couch-potato owners would not even need to exercise their thumbs to raise the volume, change the channel, or find another reality show on cable. Just continue reclining and say: “More Honey Boo Boo!” What could be more convenient?

But it's still early years for voice-recognition technology, so researchers need to listen in on what people actually say, so the algorithms can learn to deduce what you mean. Maybe you thought you said “Duck Dynasty” but what came out was “Overthrow the government!”

That, we are told, is why groups like Nuance Communications Inc. needs to hear what Canadians say when the wrong team scores a goal in a hockey game. Hint: if you wouldn't say it in front of your mother, why say it in front of a digital eavesdropper?

The TV people say they just want to serve us better. They will not be coaxed or coerced by any government's secret police into passing these conversations along to their transcribers, to be filtered through their algorithms.

Nor can these devices be hacked. Please, don't worry your little head about that. Couldn't happen. The technology may be in its infant days, but it's rock solid, foolproof. 

Just the same, best never to say your credit card number out loud.

Samsung is one manufacturer of such technology, LG is another. Both companies were put on the media defensive over the weekend when people realized the Orwellian potential of such a device.

Myself, I wonder if Prime Minister Stephen Harper has. Giving CSIS access to remote-control of the microphone switch in such a TV would be right up the dark alley his Bill C-51 would create.

That was another thing we weren't supposed to be concerned about over the weekend.

According to the news coverage, Bill C-51 effectively frees CSIS, the subterranean arm of the RCMP, from official government oversight.

They will be allowed to arrest you and hold you without having to charge you with anything. They will be able to secretly monitor not only your crazy blog, but lthey can isten in on your phone calls and read your e-mails.

In other words, Bill C-51 will create Canada's version of the KGB.

That's all to protect us, says Harper. If not communists, there are ISIS extremists hiding under our beds, and our national security agency needs the tools to find them.

The trouble, of course, is that these very tools undermine the same freedoms the terrorists would destroy in all the places they control (not that any of the countries ISIS wants to overthrow are all that free right now). But a few nut-case attacks here and there in truly free countries like ours can create conditions where people will give up their freedoms willingly.

Seems to already have happened.

With Bill C-51, we will have two enemies, not one. And both want the power to control what we think and what we say.

I neither tweet nor facebook. A while back, I joined LinkedIn in order to contact someone to arrange an interview, and now I can't get out of it. People keep endorsing me, and I don't know for what.

My aversion to social media really hurts my blog status, but there you are. If you can't even get your family to follow you online, what's the use? I'm grateful if anyone pays attention to my screed, but maybe if the federal Tories and the RCMP signed up as followers, I could get some serious stats.

But I will throw my television onto the city's electronic waste pile before I allow it to monitor my basement rants. And I will put an election sign on my yard (if my wife agrees) for any candidate in the next election who promises to undo the effects of Bill C-51.

ISIS wants to control what you are allowed to say, and even your very thoughts. Apparently, so does Stephen Harper.

The Thought Police are here, and until they arrest me, I won't even know if they're listening. And while CSIS is (or isn't) listening, I'm sure the prime minister isn't, either.

A competent government would already have an assisted-suicide law in the works

Of course I have no insider's access, and I do not know what is said in cabinet meetings, but I suspect the Harper government already has a team of civil servants drafting a law to allow suffering and dying patients to request the help of a doctor to ease and aid their death.

A competent government would not be caught flat-footed by something like last week's Supreme Court decision which unanimously told the feds they have one year to put such a law into the books.

That's what a civil service is for in a modern democracy.

Aside from tweaking the wording to reflect the court ruling, the only delay for introducing such a law would be politics.

But we should not discount the politics in a decision like this one.

For the nation, it might be better to delay introducing a bill on doctor-assisted suicide until after the federal election, expected in October. A new government, with a new mandate, could summon the civil servants to produce their draft law, tweak it again, and bring it to Parliament.

If it requires too much courage on the part of federal candidates to discuss the issue on the campaign trail, Harper can remove that from the campaign by introducing the law now, pushing it through to the Senate, before dissolving Parliament this summer.

In fact, a draft of such a bill does already exist. Tory MP Steven Fletcher has introduced a private member's bill that would allow assisted suicide for some individuals. And I do not doubt his bill has received assistance — with the knowledge and quiet approval of cabinet — from the civil service in its formation.

But again, political realities must be acknowledged.

About three quarters of Canadians polled by Ipsos recently supported such a law, and 84 per cent of them agreed with the statement: “a doctor should be able to help someone end their life, if the person is a competent adult who is terminally ill, suffering unbearably and repeatedly asks to die.”

Even so, the concerns of the minority need to be heard and addressed.

One such group would be people with disabilities. Another group would be people in palliative care, now and in the future.

Heidi Janz sits on the Bioethics Committee of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. Born with cerebral palsy and confined to a wheelchair, she wrote that resources for high-needs disabled people are too slim to justify a law simply making it easier for them to die.

She says between 16 and 30 per cent of Canadians have access to palliative care, but in the disabled community it's closer to five to 10 per cent.

“We won't do anything to help you LIVE,” she wrote in an email to CBC in an online discussion of the Supreme Court case, “but now, we're prepared to hasten your death.”

Those are precisely the concerns that politics are meant to address.

Dr. James Downar, a physician with Dying with Dignity — which commissioned the Ipsos poll — says the idea that this ruling will become a slippery slope into devaluing the lives of vulnerable people, has not occurred in the jurisdictions that already allow doctor-assisted suicide.

Rather the opposite, he says. The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and others are world leaders in providing palliative care for very sick people who want to live.

The option, the legal choice that people have in those countries, has led to improvements in palliative care, Dr. Downar claims.

We should have no doubt that our government knows these things, and has found models of compassionate policy that can be copied into Canadian law. Laws that I suspect already exist in draft form on health minister Rona Ambrose's desk.

They would simply be waiting for final tweaks of wording and political timing for it to be introduced.

The Supreme Court has set a deadline, and government would not wish to risk being in contempt of court. A strong majority of support and opinion on this subject already seems to exist in the electorate.

Watch, then, how this — or the next — Canadian government approaches us with material any competent government would already have in hand.

What have governments done for our cities recently?

The 2015 winter conference of Canada's premiers passed last week. Alberta premier Jim Prentice did not attend; he was otherwise engaged with an oil price crisis and an election date to call.

Prime minister Stephen Harper likewise did not attend. He simply does not engage, not with premiers.

Off the top of my head, I can't recall a single headline or major issue being raised from this conference — and I was watching (sort of).

No matter. The really important national conference of Canada's political leaders is set to take place in Toronto this week. And this group isn't even fully recognized in our constitution.

The political leaders who most come in contact with our daily lives are our city mayors. Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi is the one most often quoted, and he puts the importance of Canada's cities this way: if the feds make a major decision, most Canadians will hear about in three weeks; if it's made by a province, you'll know it in three days. When a major decision is made in a city, Nenshi says most people will know about it in three hours.

The Toronto conference is for the top 22 largest Canadian cities. If you go by the 2011 census, the cutoff is Kitchener, population 220,000 at the time. Together, these 22 cities contain almost half of Canada's total population.

An aside: for the record, Red Deer was No. 57 in 2011. And here's something I'll bet most Albertans don't know (and I'm certain most MPs in Ottawa, nor most of the federal cabinet): in the 2011 census, Calgary was Canada's third largest city. Edmonton was No. 5. Vancouver, which everyone talks about as a major city right after Toronto and Montreal, was No. 8.

The issues these cities face affect more people, in a more direct and daily way, than the issues handled by the feds or the provincial governments.

Do you really care if a barrel of oil or the Canadian dollar is up or down a point or two today? Or do you care that you can get to work on time, that your family is safe and that when you open the tap, clean water comes out of it?

Far more than the federal government, far more than any provincial government, the cities are united by the common issues they face.

Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail ran an excellent story quoting several Canadian mayors on a short range of issues. What impressed me about their comments was their common cause.

What do the mayors of Canada's largest cities fret most over? Infrastructure costs, with transportation and transit topping the list. Housing problems seem follow closely after that.

If people cannot move easily in their cities, they quickly make their city councils very unhappy. Here's one reason: in a U.S. report I read, for cities that have public transit, cycling and walking fully integrated, about nine per cent of annual household expenses go to transportation. In cities that do not, just moving around can consume up to 25 per cent of average household costs.

The feds worry about terrorists in Afghanistan or whereever. The provinces worry about their regional economies. City governments worry if their people are unhappy. Unhappy cities don't grow, and if they don't grow, they shrivel.

Fixing the structural causes of people's unhappiness in cities take money. The cumulative wish lists of Canada's mayors for upgrading transportation and mass transit is many tens of billions of dollars.

But our Canadian Constitution does not give cities the power to raise money for these projects — even if by doing so, they could save their residents 10 per cent or more on their yearly household expenses. Taxing the value of real estate in their borders is about all the revenue power cities have, and it's by no means enough.

So they have to get that money as tax transfers from the agencies that have the power to raise it: the feds and the provinces. It's supposed to be our money, for our benefit anyway, isn't it?

But from the article I read, contact between mayors and federal decision makers looks pretty thin. Only Toronto mayor John Tory — a former head of Ontario's PC Party — seems to claim regular conversation with a wide number of Ottawa decision makers.

Nenshi reported his personal contact with the prime minister happened at the last Calgary Stampede pancake breakfast: hi, and bye.

The vast majority of Canadians live urban lives today. In Alberta, all of our major cities rank in the top 100 in Canada (Grande Prairie being the smallest at No. 91 in the 2011 census).

Politicians should forget trying to define who's middle class. Define the needs of what makes Canadians happy in cities, and you'll win their votes.

In Alberta, we will have both a provincial and federal election this year. For all the money we city-dwelling taxpayers send these governments, what have they done for us recently?