Harper's half measure on Senate: what's the rest of the plan?

It's a matter of history that prime minister Stephen Harper has had problems with the Supreme Court of Canada on various issues — including Senate reform. So you'd think he would take a measured guess as to the court's reaction before announcing his moratorium on appointing new Senators.

My guess he has taken that measure and that a more rounded plan will be forthcoming before the election campaign becomes formal. Because announcing he'll not be naming any new Senators until the provinces solve his Senate problems for him is only a half measure. And a weak one at best.

So, really, what's the plan?

A federal court case has already begun, with Vancouver lawyer Aniz Alani asking the court to demand that Harper begins filling the 22 vacancies on the 105-seat upper body, on constitutional grounds.

Alani says he'll drop his case, and even swallow his costs, if Harper makes a request of the Supreme Court of Canada to rule if his moratorium is legal.

I'm guessing they'd rule against him. The court has already said the feds needs support of seven provinces representing 50 per cent of the population to reform the Senate, and unanimous provincial support to abolish it.

They also said the prime minister can't abolish the Senate by simply allowing membership to dwindle to zero. (Actually, the magic number is 15, which is the quorum for a legal meeting, set in the Constitution.)

So I'm asking myself, what's the real game here?

Part of Alani's suit points out that our Constitution requires the Governor-General to appoint Senators. By convention, that's always been done on the advice of the prime minister. But Section 32 of the Constitution does not say it must be done this way.

Retiring Edmonton MP Peter Goldring has suggested as much himself, pointing out that if we really do want a Senate that is not a partisan wart on the nose of the Prime Minister's Office, well, just let the Governor-General do his or her duty, and appoint all new Senators.

Since you or I are just as qualified to judge who is or is not Senatorial material, as much as any Governor-General, it makes sense that the G-G would appoint Senators on your advice and mine, through a provincial vote.

No prime minister needed. And no prime ministerial baggage to be held when it is discovered that too many Senators have too little a sense of personal honour around access to taxpayers' money.

This little change would require the agreement of the provinces, according to the 7/50 formula laid out in the Constitution. A difficult consensus to achieve, perhaps, but not impossible.

So why is this not what prime minister Harper is asking directly?

For Harper to suggest that not filling the 22 vacant seats saves the taxpayers millions of dollars, is a joke. What has the Harper government spent on self-congratulatory advertising in the past nine years?

Getting the provinces to agree to Senatorial elections, setting reasonable terms of office and ensuring proper financial oversight should not be an impossible thing to arrange.

I would think the task of leadership is to challenge the provinces directly to do this, not to announce some arbitrary moratorium that nobody even accepts is legal.

Stephen Harper has personally appointed 59 Senators to the 105-seat chamber in his years as prime minister. He's alternately said he wants to change how Senators get their jobs, how long they hold their jobs, and what they do on the job. He's also suggested he'd prefer Canada had no Senate at all — which is now the official position of the NDP.

The Liberal Party stripped all Liberal Senators of their party membership, unilaterally, with leader Justin Trudeau saying the Senate should have no party affiliations.

At the very least, it seems reasonable that voters might decide to elect MPs from one party, and Senators from another, if only to double-check their omnibus bills.

But while the status quo cannot stand as regards the Senate, neither can Harper's half measure to get the ball rolling to fix it.

So, prime minister, tell us: what's your real plan?

Harper's gift horse needs dental care

It's supposed to be rude to look a gift horse in the mouth. But the $3 billion price tag for the new Universal Child Care Benefit “Christmas in July” gift to Canadian families was paid for by all of us in the first place.

Plus, if the federal government wants to use our money to buy our votes, we should at least try to figure out how much they think our votes are worth.

The UCCB was supposed to be a reward to Canadians for the federal government having achieved a balanced budget. Just like the previously-announced income-splitting plan.

But it's already becoming clear there won't be a balanced budget by the end of this fiscal year. Especially with an additional $3 billion in UCCB spending.

So instead, they're calling this a fiscal stimulus program. Now, it's about creating jobs, as if only families with children can do this.

Pierre Poiliviere, Canada's shamelessly partisan economic and social development minister, spent huge dollars on vanity videos to hype the program.

Because, well, families with children under 16 who until now were getting $100 a month per child might be confused when their next cheque is actually $160 per child — retroactive to January. Plus, of course, there's an election coming and the government wants to make sure the 3.8 million families who will be getting their cheques know the source.

And just to be extra sure that we all know, stay tuned for more vanity videos about the UCCB — paid for by taxpayers — all summer long.

Never mind that a government seeking to spend $3 billion (plus millions more in advertising) on economic stimulus, would find the best way to do that is through infrastructure projects.

But then, we voters would suffer additional confusion about the source of the money and give credit to the provinces and municipalities where road, power and water projects would occur. Can't let that happen.

If we're talking about voter confusion, the new Universal Child Care Benefit will be taxable. The Ottawa Citizen reported on government calculations that federal taxes on UCCB income will top half a billion a year. There's provincial taxes on top of that, plus sales tax and GST when the money is spent.

Some parents are already reporting they plan to tax-shelter UCCB income in a RESP plan for the kids. Good planning, bad job creation.

This makes the math for income-splitting in families with children somewhat complicated. The UCCB will be taxed as income to the lower-income spouse, and if that spouse also makes use of income-splitting, he or she may get bumped up a tax bracket and lose a lot of the benefit at tax time.

The parliamentary budget officer reports that just over half of 3.8 million families with children under 16 do not make use of day care.

Even when you rule out families with children going to school and families making other arrangements than licensed day care, that's still a lot of families.

These families are supposed to be the Tory constituency — targets for votes in the next election.

If there's one blind spot in Stephen Harper's view of Canada, it's that he's no fan of children being in day care. That's why, in 2006, he cancelled a funding agreement with the provinces for day care and instituted the $100-per-month child care benefit we've had until this month.

That money was tax-free and was supposed to help parents make choices about child care which did not necessarily include licensed day care.

Obviously, $100 a month buys you virtually no child care at all. As well, for many thousands of families, quality day care they could afford even with the $160 bonus is very hard to find. (Think something around $1,000 a month. Per child.)

One-income, stay-at-home-mom families — the ones that benefit most from income-splitting and the UCCB — do not constitute a voting block large enough to elect anyone.

These families are the target of the NDP. If Thomas Mulcair had said he'd cancel the UCCB for some other plan, the Tories could campaign on that plank, saying the evil NDP would cancel your Christmas-in-July present.

Instead, Mulcair promises to give families what they really want and really need: affordable quality day care. Plus, of course, the UCCB.

The Liberals promise an even richer tax-free child benefit. All of the parties promise that all this new spending can arrive within a balanced budget. (This is an election year, after all, so fantasies are quite allowable.)

The vast majority of Canadian families with children need two incomes to even think about being middle class. The vast majority of young mothers have post-secondary education that is career-oriented.

They need day care, and $160 a month won't get them much of it, especially when the money is taxed back next April.

Harper's gift horse needs some dental work.

A small step for a big gain in public health

I read the news story about Red Deer becoming the only Canadian city to get attention for being an international leader in promoting active living — with a grain of salt rubbed into old wounds.

That's because some of the scars are still fresh, two years after Red Deer received a national award for our pilot project on bike lanes. That whole experience (I became personally involved in assisting with the project) descended into the nastiest storm of negativity I can remember in our city's history.

Still, this latest trip back into the spotlight reveals how little it often takes to make big differences in how people look at us, and how we look at ourselves.

You want to know what ultimately got us that global attention? It was the fact that a good portion of our parks trail system is being kept cleared of snow through the winter.

That's the nub of it. Of course, the nub of it is surrounded by a lot more good fruit. Inefficient or not, our multi-use trails are an important part of Red Deer's transportation system. That's above being an important part of our city's recreation system — and through that, an ever-growing part of our entire city's culture.

We built it, kept it clear for use year-round, and the people came.

Here's a side note to illustrate how our trails have become such a valuable resource for both travel and for healthy living.

It literally took years for the Central Alberta Regional Trails Society to get a paved trail built between Blackfalds and Lacombe. The barriers were tremendous — not just the physical logistics, but because of the entire culture of this region.

People want trails, just not not near them. Even though trails immediately enhance property values and is proven to improve the life outcomes of people who live near the trails. With the upside so well-documented by now, landowners should be pounding on council doors for a trail extension to go near them.

But our culture has been to say no to trails — and especially to say no if tax money is to go into building them.

But the Blackfalds-Lacombe trail got built, and in its first year, guess what the biggest complaint about the trail has been. It's that more money isn't being spent to keep the trails clear for use year-round.

Now that we have it, Red Deer could not cease snow clearing on our city trails, any more than the TransCanada Trail network could pull out the Blackfalds-Lacombe portion of it. The benefits are just too real, too immediate, too culturally-altering, to turn back.

Global sports equipment supplier Nike is the sponsor of their Designed to Move campaign, which seeks to inspire governments at all levels to pay attention to how their polices regarding design affect people's health, for better or for worse.

The campaign hired a consultant, 8-80 Cities, to look around the world for places where governing bodies actually notice that their actions can either promote or impede the health of their citizens. The consultants discovered that Red Deer's trails are widely networked, integrated into our transportation plans — and heavily used.

Winter, we have found, need not be a barrier to moving ourselves outdoors for either work or play — and that got the consultant's attention.

I paid a visit to Nike's web site www.designedtomove.org and found one of their primary goals is to interest children in growing to become active adults.

They have a lot of science on their side. The site opens with the premise that today's kids may well be the first generation ever to have poorer expected life outcomes than their parents. That's because our car-centric, computer-centric, sedentary economy has produced a large population of overweight, unfit people.

Their thesis is that if we design walking, biking, running, sports and general activity into our day-to-day lives, starting early, that the current unhealthy trend of rising obesity, diabetes, heart disease and even some cancers can be reversed.

My thesis is that if we believe that exercise is good medicine, we will find ways to take it. When a significant portion of us realize that just walking or biking to work imparts a whole host of personal and societal benefits, we will demand that our city councils remove the barriers that keep us from just doing it.

But the belief has to come first.

Red Deer's status as an international leader in designing active living right from our front doors to our work places and all places that we gather is only deserved if it stems from a belief that a healthy lifestyle matters — for us and for all those who will live here after we're gone.

Two years ago, we tore out the bike lanes just weeks after getting an award for them. That's OK, if we still believe it's important to remove the design barriers that exist now for people to live a healthy, active life.

That may end up costing us a lot more money up front than simply clearing trails in winter. But hey, it's the gumption that wins the awards.

Red Deer's debt not as scary as people make it sound

While the heavy equipment grinds away at the end of my street, closing off access from that end of the road for the rest of the summer, I'm reminded of why I'm glad Red Deer is so easily able to finance capital projects with debt.

Alongside the the new concrete water pipes being piled up to be put into place, stands a pile of 60-year-old existing line that's been torn out so far. A much smaller calibre of line, which homeowners on my street know is leaking.

You can follow the connections of the sewer line leading to the houses on my street, either by the slumps and cracks in the pavement where the subsoil has been washed out by leaky lines, or by the new pavement, where one by one, the connections have been replaced.

Projects paid for, I expect, by debt.

In fact, were it not for my ability to take on debt far in excess of my annual income, I would not be living in my own home. Nor would most of you be living in yours.

So I'm wondering about the irrational fears people have been whipping up in Red Deer over the past few years about our city's capital debt.

The matter arises because City Council passed a motion limiting Red Deer's ability to borrow money for capital projects, from the provincial standard of 90 per cent of projected annual income, to 75 per cent.

For as long as I've lived in Red Deer, I can't recall us being anywhere near either limit. That's despite fear-mongering during the past election campaign that we would reach the provincial limit this year.

Back in 2013, the city's audit committee (chaired by then-councillor Tara Veer) warned that Red Deer had been on track to reach the 90-per-cent limit this year. In 2013, city debt was about 46 per cent of the limit.

One web site I found, StatTracker, compared the debt loads of several Alberta cities over the past six years. Red Deer's debt was well in the low range for these cities, peaking at 48.85 per cent of the provincial limit in 2011 (the year I believe we began some heavy construction in water treatment and wastewater treatment and carried on with the north side ring road project).

Since then, our debt load has declined steadily — all while some council candidates were declaring we were on the road to Greek-style ruin. StatTracker said Red Deer's portion of allowable debt was 39.63 per cent by 2013.

By way of comparison, in those same years, Grande Prairie — a city experiencing its own unique growth pains — had a debt load of 75.29 per cent in 2011 and 59.73 per cent in 2013.

I wonder: do they fear the future as much as we seem to? Hard to say. But their new Eastlink recreation centre is a thing of beauty and utility, and also contains a 50-meter swimming pool. Built with debt, to be repaid over the years that the city grows and people come to use it.

Today, we carry 44 per cent of our provincial debt limit, while paying a large fleet of heavy equipment to dig up the street near our house for months, a major traffic circle project on 67^th Street that will provide a barrier to guests at Discovery Park and Riverbend Golf Course  well into next spring, and the next phase of the north side road project.

Plus, paying down whatever we've borrowed for water treatment projects, laying a big new power line and reinventing our downtown.

That's a pretty good record of investment, I'd say.

People who want us to fear the future say the debt Red Deer takes on today is like stealing from our children. We're getting services today that our children will pay for.

Not so. Ask our children. Ask them if they would even be living here if Red Deer did not take on debt for capital infrastructure, such as roads, water projects recreation facilities, and culture. Ask yourself if you would be.

As far as I understand the system, we're not taking debt for services. That's all pay-as-you-go. We're taking on debt for sewer pipes people will make use of on my street (and in the new Riverlands development) long after I'm dead and gone. Shouldn't they pay for their share of it?

I prefer to be fear-averse, but here's my fear over the motion our council passed this week: the artificially-lowered limit automatically raises the number which people can quote as to how near we are to reaching it.

Right now our provincial debt ceiling is $501million. Our actual debt is $222 million, around 46 per cent of that. Now, we're suddenly closer to 60 per cent of the new limit. Sounds much more scary.

The debt limit reduction passed this week doesn't raise the actual debt, but it does raise the percentage of allowable debt substantially, making it substantially easier for fear-mongers to try to make us afraid of the future.

Under the new bylaw, our debt limit will be around $376 million, assuming our revenues do not rise. That means that as long as we're building a ring road or some other major pavement or pipeline project, we will never build a new rec centre or major parks project. Too close to the debt limit, you know. Gotta leave some some borrowing room for unforeseen things, like a big flood.

This motion hasn't saved taxpayers one dime, but it has made it much more difficult for future city councils to spend a dime, in order to save a dollar. Or just to make Red Deer more welcoming to growth.

Planning to retire? Life intervenes

We boomers are a self-indulgent, narcissistic lot. Since we still make up the largest portion of the economic pie chart, holding most of the nation's private wealth, of course the world revolves around us.

But you know, time does catch up to us. Faster than a lot of us thought possible.

Where we used to talk to friends about career, kids and school, now we talk about aging parents and retirement. And if we want to talk about something pleasant, we talk about grandchildren. But somewhere in most conversations between boomers that I observe, the talk touches on retirement.

Three studies cited in news reports in recent months (the latest, from the Angus Reid Institute, reported in the Globe and Mail) point to an alarming fact about the way boomers are entering retirement. Alarming, because once seen, some warnings should have been obvious.

Most older workers have some sort of plan concerning the time when they will end full-time work. But plans often turn out to be just dust. It appears about half of my demographic enters retirement somewhat earlier than planned.

Two studies that I have seen, the Angus Reid study and one done by the Brondesbury Group for the Ontario Securities Commission both say that whatever plans we make for retirement, about half don't play out the way we wanted.

For most of those who were forced into retirement early, there was some sort of major financial crisis. Health problems of a family member (often aging parents or a spouse), or an early layoff resulting in lost employee benefits, or a loss taken in investments were cited as reasons someone's life plan got radically changed.

It's obvious, and John Lennon said it best: life is what you get while you're making other plans.

Whatever the reasons, about half of us still manage to “stay OK” in retirement — planned or not — although there's not a lot of money for extras. The rest truly struggle, or are living the dream.

That's where the advertising aimed at older workers and retirees does not meet reality.

We are shown pictures of cruises and beaches. For more than half of us, it's mostly visits with family. We are told we deserve Europe after 40 years of work, but fewer than half of us actually achieve 40 years of full-time employment, much less Europe.

Half of us — working or retired — worry we might outlive our savings. Some 57 per cent of retired people say their Canada Pension is their major source of income. About 30 per cent also rely on RSP savings.

(To me, that's a real-world argument for an enhanced Canada Pension Plan, but there are other days to argue about that.)

Just the same, the real-world experience of retirees belies the goals sold to us by the investment industry: that we need about 70 per cent of our working income to be comfortable in retirement.

What we're finding is that most people can be comfortable on about half their pre-retirement income — just with fewer beaches, fewer cruises. For boomers, who have less and less time left to accumulate savings each year, the 70-per-cent goal is simply not achievable anyhow.

Especially when life intervenes and half of us need to retire, sometimes years before the date set in our plans.

A report from CBC News also notes a steep rise in the numbers of older people going bankrupt. Nationally, about 10 per cent of all people who declared bankruptcy last year were aged 65-plus. Seniors in Ontario make up 30 per cent of bankruptcies in that province.

Blame life intervening, if you wish. People fall ill and cannot work, and do not have a health insurance plan for expenses our public system does not cover.

Blame unrealistic expectations as well. It's not just young families building all the half-million-dollar homes in our expanding cities. Holding a 20-year mortgage at age 60? Not such a good idea.

But while boomers chatter to each other about their fears, for most the fears will prove unfounded.

Take the fear that we'll miss work. Please.

Some 62 per cent of older workers tell pollsters they will miss the satisfactions they got from their jobs. Once people actually retire, that drops to 39 per cent.

Work, if you must know, is quite overrated.

Through the next 15 years or so, the numbers of retired or semi-retired will boom well past the 6.4 million Canadians in this group today. About half will enter this group well before they planned to.

And most of us seem to be doing OK despite life's interventions. As long as you can release your expectations.