Skewed perspectives could make for bad policy in 2017

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute claims it exists “to make poor public policy unacceptable in Ottawa.” I'd bet people along the entire political spectrum in Canada would suggest the've had a rather poor success rate at that over the years — but that at least does bolster its second claim of being non-partisan.

Managing director Brian Lee Crowley wrote an essay in the Globe and Mail this past week debunking what he called popular myths that could lead to poor public policy for 2017.

The problem here is that if policy-makers in Ottawa accepted his arguments, the result would be an outpouring of poor public policy in the coming year. Because his so-called “myths” are described from the perspective of someone who can't see the forest for the trees.

First, Crowley seeks to dispel the thought “endlessly repeated that we must get off fossil fuels or we are all doomed.”

From his perspective, fossil fuels are so cheap, storable and transportable, so energy-dense that chasing after alternatives is foolish. Fossil fuels are actually an irreplaceable protection against the climate's ravages, he writes.

To lend a whiff of scientific credence to this, Crowley claims that the rate of climate-related deaths has fallen recently. Unfortunately, there's less connection between that, and the incidence of extreme weather events than he believes. Maybe, with all our practice, we're just getting better at saving people during storms.

What he does not mention is that Arctic temperatures have been measured at more than 20 degrees Celsius above long-term averages, and that the ice sheets that control weather patterns in our hemisphere (also just under 2 degrees warmer than normal) are smaller and thinner than they've ever been.

Likewise, he does not mention that technology is making fossil fuels less irreplaceable for many purposes. This year, in many countries, unsubsidized renewable energy reached a production cost to match or beat carbon-based alternatives.

When Bloomberg analysts suggest oil prices could drop as low as $10 a barrel in coming decades (a supply/demand prediction), when energy giants are turning off fossil fuel plays and investing in wind and solar, when Saudi princes want to sell off parts of family-owned Aramco, I'd say the writing is on the wall.

We'll be drilling and mining fossil fuels for a good while yet, but we'll just be doing less and less of it. Which has a public policy impact, when considering multi-billion-dollar investments in things like pipelines.

Another myth Crowley seeks to debunk is the assumed control over global government policy held by giant corporations. In this, I agree with him — to a point.

History shows us over and over how large empires, both political and economic, are not eternal. They always create niches for disruptive ideas and technologies that bring them down and create new ones.

For instance, public acceptance of the dangers of climate change will lead to policies to account for widespread changes in the way we lead our lives.

In the same way, public policy must eventually address the dangers inherent in the growing income gap between the vastly wealthy and everyone else, both nationally and internationally.

On this topic, Crowley suggests that poor people and poor nations merely haven't learned the lessons about the forces that cause economic growth. In other words, they're poor because they're stupid.

That is about as blatant a basis for poor public policy as you'll ever find.

A final comment: Crowley invokes Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, the great lamenter who in ancient days predicted doom if God's Chosen People didn't return to pious right-living.

These days, you'll find a Jeremiah in every crackpot blog or fringe political party, he says.

Trouble was, in his time, Jeremiah was right. Israel was in fact doomed to being conquered and its people enslaved, but they would later return to their homeland.

Crowley might also have referenced Greek legend Cassandra. But he'd have been wrong on that as well. Her prophecies were also spot-on, but her doom was that nobody would pay attention to her.

Not paying attention to the narrow perspective of groups like the Macdonald-Laurier Institute would be a good first step in creating better public policy.

Their business-as-usual, everything's-fine conclusion will not see us into a better future.

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

Have we abandoned Syria? To whom should we give it?

For a short while at least, there is a cease-fire in Aleppo, and time for the world to witness the exodus of refugees fleeing whoever it is that will take over their ruined city next.

It is heart-breaking to see. Syria's civil war has left behind a nation that I cannot imagine any despot would actually want to rule. Every media image is of ruin and destruction.

How is it that anyone at all has survived the battle for Aleppo? How is it that after the refugees leave, that there could be anyone left, other than more fighters trying to level the last two rocks still standing one upon another, in the hopes there may be someone left behind them that they could kill?

And yet we are told by pundits and agency spokespeople that somehow the West has abandoned Aleppo, Aleppo in particular and Syria in general. This must be some sort of attempt to paint us with the guilt of the butchery of Bashar al-Assad and his ally Vladimir Putin on one side, versus the rebels and the collection of violent religious fanatics and ethnic warlords who are their allies.

There is no one in this battle that I as an ordinary Canadian can support. Only the many thousands of victims — and they include the doctors and aid agencies who were targeted by Assad's barrel bombs, Putin's missiles — and for all I know, rebel suicide bombers.

So don't tell me I have abandoned Aleppo. I don't see that Canada has anything with which to save it that wouldn't be bombed to oblivion the minute it arrived.

Instead, dear pundits and spokespeople, tell us who on the ground there can save Syria; someone who is not a plundering serial murderer or megalomaniacal monster with an extreme religious agenda.

The United Nations agency that monitors refugees globally puts the current registered refugee count at 4.8 million from the Syrian conflict. That's just the ones who got counted and put into camps in the hopes of resettlement in places like Canada.

What country can survive losing 4.8 million people, including their doctors, lawyers, teachers, builders, entrepreneurs and all the rest? That's from a population estimated in 2011 at 23 million (which included more than 2 million refugees from places like Palestine and Iraq). By 2016, the group World Population Review estimated Syria's population at just over 18 million.

For its part, Aleppo held about 2.1 million people in 2004. There's no telling what the population is now, but aid agencies tell us that 5,000 people flee Syria every day. CNN news agency tells us that about 400,000 people have died in the fighting in Syria since the civil war began — a lot of them in Aleppo, which was Syria's largest city.

What's left there to fight over? And what fault is it of mine, or of Western democracies, that Bashir al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are butchers, or that anyone connected with rebel or ISIS groups should even be considered an improvement over them?

But it is a Canadian trait to constantly apologize. So forgive me for not wanting Canada to get involved in this game, other than to take in and support as many refugees as we can.

And forgive me also for not feeling guilty about having “abandoned” Syria.

Assad and all the rest have caused many graves to be dug; they are also eventually digging graves for themselves.

We cannot stop them or hinder them. And we will not assume blame for them, either.

Money and power: the co-joined twins of politics

It's too easy to simply get angry when province after province — and including the federal government — sells special access to governors as a partisan fundraiser.

If you want to believe that government acts on behalf of groups that make large donations and not on behalf of the people that voted for them, you need look no further than that. Special, exclusive — and paid — access to lawmakers damages the legitimacy of elections, and brings our whole concept of democracy into contempt.

Not to say that very many Canadian governments haven't sunk to that level. They have. But when they're caught, parties of all stripes learn that offering private interviews to wealthy clients in return for generous donations comes at a price.

That's why six of our provinces, most recently Ontario, have proposed or passed laws limiting the size of donations that can be made, and limiting the list of who can be donors.

In Alberta not long ago, when it became widely known that municipalities and tax-supported institutions were regularly sending donations to the long-ruling Conservatives, that insidious practice was stopped.

In Saskatchewan, Canada's last bastion of Wild West fundraising rules, there's no cap on how much corporations or unions can donate to political parties. In fact, out-of-province groups have sent millions to Brad Wall's Saskatchewan Party (by far, mostly from Alberta).

You can even set up a numbered corporation in Alberta and donate unlimited amounts to a political party in Saskatchewan, making it much more difficult for any average voter to know who is behind the donation. You can gather that money from anywhere, and who would know?

So when Brad Wall opens his mouth in opposition to Canada's efforts to mitigate climate change, whose voice is really speaking?

So let's go ahead and put a tight cap on political donations. (Quebec, which has been stung by perceptions of influence peddling, now has a cap of just $100 per year for political donations. That's a full third more than the Quebecers' median donations to charity, but there you are.)

But be careful how you do that. Money and power are the co-joined twins of politics everywhere, and it would take better surgery than that to make some room for justice and equity.

The reason why is right in front of us.

In early January, Kellyanne Conway, the manager of US president-elect Donald Trump's poisonous election campaign, will be come to Alberta for a paid speech to Calgary business leaders. And for a tour of the oilsands projects at Fort McMurray.

Personally, I'm hoping for minus 40 with a howling windchill for that week, but climate change, unpredictable it is, will likely disappoint me.

I don't object to her visit or her speech. I object to the reason for it.

She was invited to headline a fundraiser for a new group called the Alberta Prosperity Fund. It's our version of America's political action group (PAC) and their billionaire-run big brothers, the Super PACs.

This is what we'll get if we ban or cap political donations without thinking things through. Alberta Prosperity Fund, managed by longtime Tory insiders, has chosen Jason Kenney to become leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party — and there's not much inside it that appears to be progressive.

Their web site claims need for action because of all the “special interest groups” that are currently running our whole society into the ground, according to the fund's backers.

Those enviro-pinkos who oppose pipelines for instance; they have a lot of money behind them, right? Ditto those obstreperous native groups. Same with those bleeding-heart refugee-lovers.

If we didn't like groups with special interests giving big donations to parties that support their views — out in the open where it's all easily seen — we're really going to hate shadow groups who claim no official party affiliations, but support just the opposite.

It's called free speech and freedom of association.

You can't separate money from power in the dark. It's hard enough to do that in the light of day.

As the federal Liberal Party has amply shown us, the current fundraising rules can be stretched pretty far. At least now, when they are stretched to the point of abuse, we can know who's done it — and punish them if we want to.

Kellie Leitch likes Trump's politics: that's Canadian values?

Federal Tory leadership candidate Kellie Leitch wasted little time in praising the outcome of the most horrid election campaign we've seen in living memory. Donald Trump, as silver spooned an elite as ever there was, threw out the elites in Washington to become the next U.S. president.

Fellow elite on the Canadian side, Leitch, says it's an example that needs to be followed in Canada.

“Tonight, our American cousins threw out the elites and elected Donald Trump as their next president. It’s an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well,” Leitch, a former cabinet minister and practising orthopaedic paediatric surgeon, says in a report in the National Post.

“It’s the message I’m bringing with my campaign to be the next Prime Minister of Canada. It’s why I’m the only candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada who is standing up for Canadian values.”

Leitch is proposing that the 250,000 people wanting to immigrate to Canada each year should be screened in special face-to-face meetings for Canadian values. That would be about as easy to implement as building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border

Just the same, would an admitted sex abuser and known liar, a misogynist, and racist individual who doesn't pay taxes who has stiffed his workers on their wages and who is currently facing numerous legal suits against him pass Leitch's test? Just asking.

From her elite position, I wonder if Leitch herself wonders if the sort of campaign she wants to drag into Canada would have happened as it did, if Trump's competitor not been a woman.

You can bet Sandra Jansen and Donna Kennedy-Glans have stared that issue, right in its ugly face. Both were running for leadership of the Alberta Conservative Party, and both quit on the same day after experiencing that unique kind of harassment reserved for female politicians. And much of it in Red Deer.

I don't know how many death threats have been sent to other Alberta premiers, or how many violently sexualized comments have been directed to her predecessors, but Rachel Notley has certainly gotten her share. As if one example would not be too many.

She says the reports of harassment against the two candidates is “troubling.” Um, yes ... troubling.

"If a party or a campaign cannot conduct itself in a way to ensure the most basic of rules around inclusivity — for instance anti-harassment — then quite frankly that party or that campaign is not equipped to govern the province," Notley told reporters at the legislature Wednesday.

But then again, Donald Trump was widely viewed as unfit for office, too.

We're told this kind of thing happens in politics everywhere. The point today should be: why do aspiring politicians normalize it? Because the politics of dividing and dehumanizing people seems to be a winning formula, that's why.

Alberta got an NDP government, not because the good folks in Wild Rose Country suddenly woke up and found themselves to be socialists. It was because voters were tired of the moribund and corrupt Tory party that had been in office for as long as most Albertans have been alive.

Canadians got Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, not because we woke up one day with a Sunny Ways disposition, but because we had ceased to trust the current leadership of the federal Tory party.

The difference today is that both provincially and federally the rank-and-file of Conservative persuasion seem ready to double down on the politics of division.

If you don't like big-tent Conservatism, with all its compromises and accommodations to larger society, you now have licence to demonize and harass those Conservatives you don't like. If those Conservatives happen to be female, all the better, and all the easier.

Alberta leadership candidate Jason Kenney, as partisan a Tory as anyone needs, wants to unite the right in Alberta, and merge with the Wild Rose.

The Wild Rose, the larger and richer party of the two, doesn't see the advantage in merging. Historically, Alberta's pure-blue Conservatives have been much more to the centre, than the Wild Rose.

Well, today, perhaps not so much. At least Wild Rose at one time had a female leader, as did the Alberta Conservatives.

And look what happened to them.

The high cost of child care may be holding our economy back

A confluence of headlines outlining dangers to the Canadian economy have a common thread. We read about high levels of household debt, families under stress due to unemployment, stresses on schools dealing with children living with stress at home, and declining birth rates leading to worries about who is going to power the economic engine when seniors retire.

The common thread is that more than ever, it takes two full-time incomes just to keep the roof over our collective heads. Signing trade deals, building pipelines or pushing debt-funded infrastructure projects will not be able to fix this.

Not when taxes eat up half of a two-income family's pay, and certainly not when paying for child care eats up another 22 per cent, as a recent OECD study has shown.

Why does the government need to tighten regulations on mortgages? Because young families can get in over their heads on their mortgages, should interest rates rise someday — which, eventually, they will.

I've lived through this. During a period of rapid, inflationary growth, a generational surge occurred in the 1970s, with thousands of new families being formed and having kids.

We were giving birth to Generation X, and we wanted to raise our kids in a house. A starter home cost a bit more than double the median salary of a single worker, and was rising quickly. Today, that cost can reach — or in some cities, surpass —10 times the Canadian median income.

In the late 70's, mortgage rates spiked to 20 per cent and more, and even though most mortgages totalled less than $75,000, young families found themselves in over their heads.

The numbers have changed, but that same potential appears likely today.

When our family started having children, we made it possible to survive on one income. That was because after paying taxes on a second income, plus child care costs, the second bread winner got very little bread for her labour. (Then as now, most stay-at-home parents were females.)

Today, I can't see how everyday working families could possibly keep home and family on one regular income. The cost of a (new, more restricted) mortgage isn't the only reason for this. It's the cost of child care.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canadian families pay more for child care than just about anyone in the developed world — up to 22 per cent of family income. The Trudeau government's much-vaunted family support program barely touches those costs.

If a second working spouse essentially works for no take-home pay, what's the incentive to work? If the desperate need for cash flow forces the need for a second income anyway, what value is that labour to the economy?

Not only is there a disincentive to work (and pay taxes), there is also a disincentive for educated families to have children. If populations cannot be sustained by natural growth, and if we cannot pass our culture on to a sufficiently large next generation, what changes can we expect in our national makeup?

Almost all other nations in the OECD solve this dilemma with generously subsidized child care — costing 10 per cent or less of family income in many countries.

If two incomes are required for a Canadian family today, and if a nation wants to collect the benefits of educating women into well-trained career paths, it makes sense to subsidize quality child care for them.

Would we rather tell women not to bother getting a good education because their labour will only be eaten up by student debt, taxes and child care costs? Would we rather see families default on mortgages in large numbers, or see the costs of our own homes plummet as fewer and fewer young families can afford to buy a home? Would we rather signal to young people that having children is too much of a burden? Would we rather rely on immigration alone for a stable population?

It seems the cheapest alternative is the one chosen by almost all other developed economies: nationally-subsidized child care.

We're always told that our people are our greatest resource. But in Canada, half of our family-producing population seems only to be a resource for governments, banks and day care operators.

In my retirement, I've become a grandparent day home operator. It's a lot of work for the money (yes, I'm being paid). But the pay is substantially less than what regular daycare for three children would cost.

Not every young working family has that alternative available. And I can't see how our federal government believes its new national support plan for young families fills any gap at all.

That unfilled gap — as much as the lack of a new pipeline, or a trade deal with Europe or infrastructure projects that never seem to materialize (though we pay for the debt with our taxes) — is what is holding back growth in our economy.

We're not making best use of our best resource: our young people.

On minimum wage, every dollar is spent

I can remember a time not too long ago in Alberta, when workers with minimal training and not much experience would refuse to crawl out of bed for a job that paid less than $80,000 a year — not counting substantial overtime.

I recall the stories from young members of my family living in the northern part of the province of friends working the fast food business, who would simply walk out their employer’s door to the restaurant down the street, and sign up for better pay — no interview required.

Good times, right? During the boom, even small Alberta businesses managed to make money paying their workers substantially more than the new minimum wage of $12.20 an hour.

I don't recall the price of a burger and fries or a double-double dropping that much since oil dropped below $50 a barrel. But it seems now that it has, minimum wage seems too much to pay for many Alberta small business owners.

The Federation of Independent Business has pulled out the same notes they used five years ago, to warn of rampant business closures, or of drastic cuts in jobs or hours, if the legal minimum wage should ever be raised.

News outlets like the Globe and Mail gave them plenty of space to argue that now is not the time to make a law such that people working full-time could actually live on their salary. Not that $12.20 an hour is a living wage in most Alberta cities, but that point has been lost in the rhetoric.

Besides, we were told while reading from the old notes, Alberta has very few workers earning minimum wage, and anyway, they are mostly teenagers living free in their parents' homes.

Well, back in 2010, Alberta did only have 22,200 workers on minimum wage, according to Stats Canada. But by 2015, that number had blown up to 51,600.

And according to Alberta Labour Department figures, more than 296,000 Alberta workers earn less than the nominal living wage of $15 an hour — the minimum wage mandated for Oct. 1, 2018. Right now a living wage is calculated to be $17.29 an hour in Calgary,

Almost 80 per cent of minimum wage earners work permanently on minimum wage in Alberta, while 54 per cent of them work full-time, and 38 per cent of them have children to support. Not surprisingly, 62 per cent of them are female.

But this is not just a small business problem. Government figures say 58.5 per cent of people on minimum wage work for employers with more than 100 workers.

The point which could have been stressed five years ago when the the small-business case was last being made, is this: if the success of your business model includes paying wages that require a full-time employee to rely on the Food Bank month to month, maybe it's your business model that's wrong.

The grocery store managers and thrift store workers in Alberta all know exactly when government support cheques come out every month. They can track the date by their sales figures.

A basic text on economics will tell you that every dollar in an economy will eventually be spent. It's a rule. For people on the bottom end of the wage scale, every dollar that is earned is spent locally. That's a rule, too.

Differently stated: if a poor person gets another dollar, it doesn't take long for a rich person to obtain it.

So the business case that has been made over and over again, against expecting employers to support a fair minimum wage, has not been convincing.

All the money workers earn gets spent (and for many, spent and then some). All the places where that money is spent is owned by business owners. The money goes round and round. Watching that occur is called economics.

In a time when disparity of income between the rich and the poor has become the root of some rather dismal politics in North America, I fail to see how the moral importance of workers being able to live on their pay levels is somehow wrong.

Especially when it's absolutely known that when there's more money at the bottom, it just flows upward all the faster.

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

I like the carbon tax because it makes me money

When it comes to discussions about taxes and public policy, everyone gets to grind their own axe. So why not me?

Well-funded business lobbies — and there are plenty of them — push their agendas for lowered taxes. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation claims to represent my interests as an ordinary citizen, but they've never asked me what my interests might be.

For my part, I support a carbon tax both in my home province of Alberta, and federally. Not just for environmental reasons, or to improve Alberta's and Canada's image regarding climate change. No, I want a carbon tax, because under the rules explained to me so far, I'll make out like a bandit.

In fact, I can hardly wait for January to arrive so our household can collect its first $300 rebate cheque.

We've already invested in energy-saving technology in our little home, so the increase in utility and gasoline costs that we will see as a result of carbon levies ought to be much less than those of other less efficient households. Carbon taxes are linked to energy consumption but rebates are linked to income, so families like ours will be ahead of the game.

What's not to like?

In the past, I had calculated the economic benefit of my riding a bike to work to be worth about $1,000 a year as a tax-free increase in my disposable income. With the added cost of a carbon tax, if you decide to bike to work for the nine or 10 months of the year when it's easily feasible in 2017, that benefit would rise.

Who doesn't want an extra $1,000 of spending money a year, plus another $200 or $300 cash rebate from the government for the privilege of not burning so much fuel? Well, in Alberta — and Saskatchewan — a lot of people don't.

There are yard signs in Red Deer saying Kill the Carbon Tax. Apparently, these people don't like their money.

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall declared the proposed federal carbon tax will siphon $2.5 billion out of his province, once it is fully implemented by 2022. That statement has been rated as Mostly Baloney by CBC's fact-checking site, Baloney Meter.

That's because there are two sides to the taxation coin, something most business lobbies and even the Canadian Taxpayers Federation don't cite as often as they should. There's the taking with one hand and the spending with the other. There's also the social benefit of the purposes behind taxes, which viewed globally are worth money.

The federal government has vowed that the money taken in carbon taxes from the provinces will be returned to the provinces. Brad Wall, like all premiers, can allot that money as he sees fit.

He could lower business taxes if he thinks that's a good idea. The Alberta government will lower its own small business tax from three per cent to two, once our carbon tax comes into effect. Who doesn't like a two-per-cent tax rate?

In fact, over the weekend, a Globe and Mail article put forward numbers suggesting that each dollar increase in business taxes produce between three and five dollars in losses to business. If that's so, then the $865 million the Alberta government intends to allocate toward our small business rate cut should produce a rather hefty return.

Raising the $9.6 billion Alberta says it will collect over the next five years is one thing, deciding how that money is spent is another.

Right now, what we've got is pretty vague: $6.2 billion to diversify the energy industry and create new jobs, plus $3.4 billion in rebates to businesses and communities (I hope that means municipalities). And to households, which means me.

And that's the part that should be getting the scrutiny.

Years ago, Alberta put a levy on car and truck tires. It's a tax. The spending of that levy to find innovative ways to recycle those tires has been widely hailed as a money-saving, job-producing success. The costly effort of a previous Alberta government to capture and store carbon dioxide has not been hailed as a money-saving, job-producing success. Let's just leave it at that.

Not every government initiative succeeds. So we need vigilance to see that we get not just a revenue-neutral carbon tax, but a profitable one. Rather than griping about a tax — which is easy — we need to be able to judge the financial return.

I get a good financial return from leaving my car in the garage as much as possible, and walking or cycling on my daily commutes. With the carbon tax, I fully expect that return to increase. Multiplied throughout the province, such a small change has been studied and shown to potentially save families and municipalities many millions of dollars every year.

If business can lobby for its narrow interests in the making of tax policy, why can't I? Bring on the carbon tax, I say. I have plans for the money.

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

Be wary of trade deals with China

Of all the coverage I've seen about prime minister Justin Trudeau's recent visit to China, and the return visit of Chinese premier Li Keqiang, the Globe and Mail stands out for being openly skeptical of our signing a comprehensive trade deal with the economic giant.

Thank goodness somebody is.

My question has long been: why are we tripping over ourselves to do business with these guys?

Set aside for a moment our concerns over China's record on human rights, its arbitrary application of its own laws, or its disregard of the laws of other nations — it's a tough world, and we trade with nations with corrupt regimes that have bad records on these issues all the time.

The bottom line is that China simply is not a reliable trade partner. Their history is rife with production of shoddy goods, of adulterated food products and their lack of standards of business accountability. They bring the maxim caveat emptor to a whole new level.

Just days ago, Canada announced a new trade deal with China on agricultural goods (canola and beef products) said to be worth $5.6 billion. The federal release noted our exports to China of canola for crushing is worth $2 billion a year, and beef is worth $255 million, set to grow by another $10 million a year.

Prior to premier Li's visit, the Canadian canola industry was set in a tailspin when China announced an intention to restrict our canola imports, using a bogus claim of too high a content of foreign materials in the grain.

This from a country with no significant inspection or enforcement system for its own food exports. The list of suspect food products from China is as long as your Google search; reports of suspect or even toxic shipments of fresh vegetables, gluten, beef, chicken, pet foods, honey — even infant formula — have been in the news.

But eight per cent of plant stems and such in a shipload of canola seeds from Canada can result in an import ban? Clearly, the announcement was a ruse to obtain concessions in a trade deal. And, apparently, the ruse worked. Only we are left to ask: what did Canada give up to obtain the deal?

That brings up the matter of human rights. Just as premier Li was coming to Canada, China released a Canadian prisoner, held without charge, held without access to legal assistance, accused but never proven as a spy: Kevin Garrat, a missionary worker.

Canadian media have widely reported that China routinely — and illegally — spies on our businesses, and have even been linked to high-level internet hacks of our Finance, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada departments.

But a lonely Canadian missionary in a nowhere town in China is an espionage threat?

Wealthy Chinese nationals in Canada accused of corruption at home have seen their families arrested and their assets seized, while being given false promises of leniency by government agents (who entered Canada as tourists) to pressure them to return home to face trial.

China wants Canada to sign an extradition treaty to speed up the return of these people. Reports of negotiations toward such a treaty have split the governing Liberal caucus, and even the cabinet. Are we negotiating extradition of people who have essentially been tried in absentia by a country that executes more people every year than any other? Where rule of law is arbitrary and politically influenced?

How do we know? That's the problem of relations with China.

Earlier this year, I was privileged to lead a public discussion on the documentary The Human Harvest, made by Vancouver filmmaker Leon Lee. The documentary featured the work of Canadian Nobel Peace Prize nominees David Matas and David Kilgour, who uncovered and made public China's ongoing mass detention, torture and murder of Falun Gong practitioners, for the country's trade in organ transplants.

The film was shown at Red Deer College, just before Trudeau's first visit to China as prime minister.

In essence, the charge is that China's health care system kills tens of thousands of political prisoners and sells their organs for transplant services to foreigners, as a fundraiser.

My question, asked then, still remains: Why are we falling over ourselves to do business with these guys?

There is no justice except that which you bring from within yourself

Have you or a member of your family or close friend ever been victim of a violent crime? Has your home or vehicle suffered a break-in or robbery — perhaps multiple times?

If so, you will probably understand the premise of this article quite quickly, even viscerally.

There is no better explanation for how this world has gotten so messed up than our human desire to gain an eye for an eye. If you have experienced violence on your person or if the safety and sanctity of your home has been violated, it can be extremely difficult to let it go. You cannot return to being the person you once were.

When it seems that the people who commit crimes against us are going unpunished, or the crimes just continue in other families and other homes, it feels like a portion of our own humanity has been stripped away. We are left with more animal reflexes.

There are few true innocents around the shooting death of Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan. The racist furore on all sides in social media proves it. Violence begets violence, and when the “sides” are identified by race (as in the Boushie case) or by religion (as in the Middle East) our shared human impulses for revenge harden into lines that are extremely difficult to cross.

Boushie, 22, a resident of the Red Pheasant First Nation, was shot and killed at a farm residence near Biggar. He and three friends were apparently seeking help with a flat tire.

Gerald Stanley, a 54-year-old farmer has been charged with second-degree murder. There is obviously more to the story, but for now, we'll let the courts deal with the details.

Today, we need to look at our own human reactions to the story.

This one mirrors another killing in 2008 in Lethbridge, where George Many Shots was beaten to death by Bradley Gray, a man who did not react well when his truck was broken into by a pair of Aboriginal people.

His was not the only property violated in the neighbourhood, where a native shelter had recently opened.

Many Shots was assaulted and beaten in an unprovoked attack. He was just the wrong guy in the wrong skin in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After being convicted of second degree murder, an appeal reduced Gray's charge to manslaughter. Then the case went back to the original judge for sentencing — and the result was that the killing was deemed a hate crime, because the judge was convinced Gray simply hated natives, and wanted to get his own back upon them.

This is how the cycle of violence is perpetrated. This is how it comes to the point where nobody gets the benefit of the doubt.

Houses get broken into. Red Deer, in fact, has been tabbed by Macleans magazine as the Canadian city most likely for one's home to be broken into. That adds up to a lot of victims with personal feelings of violation — and identification of the kinds of people who do these things. Individual responsibility be damned; at some point groups of victims assume for themselves outrage at groups who look like they break into homes.

Our family was rocked by a violent night attack years ago. It took a long time — years actually — for the case to be resolved. In that time and after, the feelings of helpless anger would surface almost of their own volition and suck up the energy needed to become a normal, trusting human being.

It helped me to become a volunteer. I served on a board advocating for people with brain injuries. I also cooked at a downtown soup kitchen for a time. I often wondered if I had worked all day to feed the people who had attacked my family.

In the end, after a court conviction was achieved, we faced the media in the court parking lot. We were asked if we had found closure.

There is no closure, not the kind you can lock away and forget. In that time, I learned the police cannot bring you justice. The courts cannot bring you justice. They are concerned only with the person charged with the crime.

The only justice for you is that which you seek from within yourself, however you try to find it.

Homes and farms and businesses get robbed. By people from an identifiable group. The police do not always catch those responsible.

It is wise to be wary. It is wise to take precautions. It is not wise to blame people whose story you do not know, or hate them because of how they look.

Forgiveness? That's a personal question. But with taking an eye for an eye, soon everyone is blind. No one can see that no one is innocent anymore. This blindness has messed up the entire world.

Our Olympic athletes should be lottery-funded

A trip to London, England, is wasted without spending a few hours in the National Gallery or their lavish British Museum, to see the wealth of plundered cultural artifacts of a global empire.

Entry to these — and more — is free, thanks to perpetual funding of the British National Lottery. With the money you save (versus what you would spend just to enter The Louvre, or any of the grand museums of Berlin) you can spend in the gift shop on art books to bring home.

From a tourist's point of view, that's lottery profits well-spent. From the point of view of a fan of our national sports teams, lottery funding our local athletes would likewise be a good investment. And from a taxpayer's point of view as well.

According to the CBC, Canada's Own the Podium program allots around $30 million a year to athletes aspiring to represent us at the Olympics.

The money is carefully targeted toward those who are expected to come home with medals, versus the happy amateur toilers who sacrifice and train every day just to “do their best” on the international stage.

As such, Canada spent about $5.5 million for each of the medals our athletes won at the Rio Games. That's half of what Australia paid per medal, says CBC.

In fact, Canada spends less per capita supporting national sports teams than Australia, New Zealand or the Netherlands. If you look at it in these terms, our Olympians are pretty cost-efficient.

Where does the money come from? Far and away, it comes from corporate donors. In all, there are 34 major donors listed by the COC on their web page.

Even you and I can send a cheque to the Canadian Olympic Foundation, and get a refund at tax time.

I propose that this is an inefficient method of funding our national athletes, and that greater funding can be had, with more generalized support for all athletes on all teams, as opposed to targeting “winners.”

The vehicle of choice should be our lotteries.

There is something unseemly in how much of the roughly $14 billion a year in profits from legalized gambling in Canada finds itself in the general revenue pots of provincial governments.

Each lottery region spends millions a year on community sports, recreational and cultural infrastructure. Well and good. But hundreds of millions end up in the general revenue pot of governments, in lieu of legitimate taxation for legitimate spending.

On several levels, that's just not right.

As to the topic of funding our athletes to represent us on the world stage, it would be more ethical to tap the billions governments make from gambling for this, rather than using this money to build schools or hire nurses — a task which should be shouldered by fair taxation from everyone.

Likewise, it is better for Canada to assume responsibility for training athletes and presenting national role models, than to give large corporations tax incentives to do so.

Let legitimate taxation fund our public sphere, and keep the proceeds from gambling far away from political hands. Many a treatise on the corrupting nature of this has been written over the decades since governments became addicted to gambling.

There's more than enough money to go around. There's more than enough to build rinks, pools, fields and centres of excellence to foster the benefits of healthy living all around the country, at every level.

If we agree to pay our doctors more in the health care system, for instance, we need consensus to pay for it from a fair system of taxation. Or ring roads, or whatever.

It is more ethical that we can choose to participate in a lottery, for instance, knowing that the vast profits come back to us in better cultural infrastructure, of which sports and athletics play a huge part (especially during Olympic years).

There are always priorities for governments to balance at budget time. That's what we elect them to manage. But giving them a slush fund of lottery money, while squandering more in tax incentives for corporations to bolster their public images, is a corrupting force both on politics and our general support for the Olympic movement.

National assets like Britain's museums or Canada's athletes cannot get consensus for increased taxation. So we turned to corporations to gain “win-win” opportunities that taxpayers end up subsidizing anyway.

Let's just take gambling profits out of politicians' hands. Give these profits back to communities for better cultural amenities (including high-performance sports).

On balance, ranked ballots our best chance for best electoral reform

A recent Canadian Press story effectively debunks the theory that if the Liberal government imposes a ranked-ballot system for national elections, they will somehow guarantee themselves power in perpetuity.

Next week, as hearings into electoral reform resume, Conservative supporters will resume using stats gathered from voting patterns in past elections as proof of election results in future elections, if the current first-past-the-post system were dropped. Which, according to the experts quoted in the CP article, is extremely unlikely.

Brian Tanguay of Wilfred Laurier University, York University's Dennis Pilon and Ken Carty of the University of British Columbia all agree that if you change balloting systems, you also change voting patterns. So it becomes impossible to predict future performance by studying obsolete past performances.

Far more likely, they say, a ranked-ballot voting system will produce governments that more closely resemble the collective will of voters, without the complications and confusion of calculating winners and losers through a proportional representation system. And without having to change electoral boundaries or increase the number of MPs already crowding Parliament.

Under the current system, both national and provincial parties regularly gain local riding victories with substantially less than majority support from voters. More, the victors nationally and provincially regularly manage to assemble majority legislatures far in excess of the expressed support of voters.

The fear of this happening leads people to pull their votes away from candidates and parties that they actually support, in favour of candidates and parties they merely hope can defeat a candidate or party they despise.

Even worse, parties with platforms that many voters would like to support do not attract viable candidates in many ridings, because (a Donald Trump charge here) the system is rigged against them. A minority party has little hope of advancing its agenda in rock-ribbed ridings that have always voted a certain way — despite those ribs being much thinner than advertised.

In Canada, this is called democracy. It is anything but. First-past-the-post balloting cannot possibly produce democratically-elected governments that reflect the collective will of the voters in our diverse, interconnected society.

With a ranked-ballot system, voters with a minority view can much more effectively register support for their views at the ballot box. They are not “wasting” their vote in a hopeless cause, because other parties will need to change their platforms slightly to attract these voters' second choice or third choice.

Not every voter can be happy with the outcome of every race — that's just life. But every voter can at least be assured their votes were even counted.

That's a vast improvement over the current system, where winners are frequently declared minutes after the polls close, and with a mere fraction of the votes even counted. That is the greatest outrage of all, under our current system.

Electoral reform is a big deal and a huge undertaking for our rookie federal government. But they should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

A ranked-ballot system is easy to inaugurate, easy to understand, does not require Ottawa to house dozens more MPs, nor a wholesale re-drawing of electoral maps.

It does not guarantee victories for any particular party, nor even guarantee majority governments. But it does guarantee that every MP must get a majority of votes in their ridings, and it does force parties that hope to govern a diverse society like Canada to better consider voters outside their core support.

That looks a whole lot more like democracy than the system we've got now. It's also a whole lot more achievable than a messy constitutional battle and complex national referendum that would most likely result in no reform at all.

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