The one commodity selling well these days? Fear

If you're out to peddle fear these days, you'll find a ready market. Optimism, the antidote to fear, is about as hard to find nowadays as a job in the Alberta oilpatch.

Fear, anger and cynicism are toxic to governments trying to fill a postive mandate. Thus, they can paralyze entire nations.

Even outside of our economic downturn, you don't have to look far for things to be frustrated, angry and cynical about. It's easy enough to say we can't trust government — or investment bankers or global corporations and in some places even the local police. How about counting on your next paycheque?

Personally, I'm glad the U.S. primary season is finally set to begin. After so many months of the bombast, bullying and BS in the run-up to these elections, I'm looking forward to seeing voters pass judgement.

I'm glad because we're seeing a resurgence of the negative politics that so dominates the United States creeping back into Canada.

Doesn't it seem like a lifetime ago that Donald Trump used to be the set-up for a punchline? Doesn't it seem long ago that we rejected our own negative-styled prime minister, in favour of a leader with a more positive view of our potential?

But really, how long did it take before we changed course, and “sunny ways” became a punchline?

Here are three examples of how the negative politics of fear can paralyze government, if we let it.

First: our reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis. Canadians widely endorsed bringing in 25,000 refugees to Canada. We still do. But we missed arbitrary deadlines on the speed at which we intended to do it.

Is this a catastrophic failure? The people pushing negative politics would have us believe so. But an optimist would celebrate that even if late, we will reach our goal, and that thousands of families will find safety and freedom, to help build a better, more inclusive Canada.

Second: Alberta's review of energy royalties. No doubt, releasing the review's report this was a tough moment for the provincial NDP, which held for so long that Albertans were not getting fair return on our non-renewable resources. But the independent review suggested otherwise, so there will be no appreciable change in royalties for the next 10 years.

You could look negatively at this in two ways. One way would hold that current market conditions overshadowed the long-term view of what appears to be a rather low rent on our energy deposits. But if you supported calling a review, you can't cry foul if you didn't get the result you thought you deserved.

A second view is the negative politics of the Alberta opposition. “They were wrong all along, we were right all along,” was the immediate message of the Wildrose. By inference, the current government are a bunch of boneheads.

But in both examples, government did something the people widely agreed needed to be done. Both times, outcomes were not entirely as expected. Both times, government admitted the reality of things and moved forward.

How, exactly, is that bad government?

A third example: the emergence of Albertans First movement. Founder George Clark was in Red Deer recently, to gather support for plebiscites against both Bill 6 and the provincial carbon tax.

His talk took a strange turn when he argued against expanding wind power in Alberta — on environmental grounds. He pointed to scientific studies of bird mortality at wind farms.

I did find one good study by the Society of Canadian Ornithologists and Bird Studies Canada that seem to back his position, that a giant windmill would likely kill perhaps 10 birds a year. That same study concluded “population effects are unlikely,” since less than 0.2 per cent of population is lost due to collisions with windmills. That's less than mortality due to collisions with wires, towers, windows or cars — and far less than mortality due to our household cats.

He said oil and gas companies that have “bent over backwards” to protect natural habitat. Really? Would that be by clear-cutting seismic lines all over the province, driving heavy trucks through trout streams, all the chemical and oil spills that occur, and the poisoning of farmers' water wells?

Clark says we should fight to save birds, but not farm workers and children on farm families with Bill 6, or to have people realize the full cost of fossil fuels through a carbon tax?

Strange. But we don't want to be negative, do we?

The Alberta and federal governments did not cause the collapse of the oil and gas industries. Their reactions to current realities have not made things worse; indeed, they've had no time to have any effect at all yet.

So don't buy the fear. Or at least, we should look honestly at what's causing our frustration, anger and cynicism.

Why are we falling over ourselves to trade with a mass murderer?

On Saturday, I had the opportunity to be a speaker for one of the films featured at this year's Justice Film Festival at Red Deer College. That allowed me to preview the movie Human Harvest.

The preview was chilling, the research that followed was depressing and the second viewing at the festival was saddening. In all, several evenings well-spent.

Released in 2014, the muiltiple-award-winning film presents a disturbing picture of the world's favourite potential trade partner: China. It also raises serious questions about our collective complicity — a turning-of-the-eyes away from a program of mass murder within China's health care system, where thousands of prisoners of conscience are harvested every year, and their organs sold to “transplant tourists.”

While the world's developed countries have years-long wait times for patients needing a new liver, kidneys, corneas, or a heart, for $30,000 and up, you can get replacement parts in China in a couple of weeks. China has no functioning organ-donor registration system, but somehow they can find you a tissue match, from a living donor, within a few days.

As the movie heartlessly points out, the donors are not willing— they are pulled from a prison system that houses tens of thousands of mostly Falun Gong religious practitioners. Uighurs, Muslims, Christians and criminals bound for execution round out the roster, but the overwhelming harvest is of Falun Gong believers.

It's a billion-dollar industry which could not exist in this scale in any other country without global attention and outrage. But — because it's China — trade delegations turn a blind eye, looking more to profits in the world's second-largest economy.

The movie follows a report compiled in 2006/07 by former MP and secretary of state David Kilgour, and David Matas, a respected immigration and human rights lawyer. Their efforts won them a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2010, and the ongoing enmity of China.

One question that immediately comes to mind on seeing the film is: why hasn't the world heard about this? I like to think of myself as reasonably informed, but I had no idea this gruesome industry existed in China and I doubt many others of general society were that much ahead of me.

While by no means a well-kept secret, why hasn't this issue come to wider discussion?

Another question: Why have there been no international sanctions for what is by any definition a crime against humanity?

In 2009, Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskj introduced a private members bill making it illegal for Canadians to get a transplant abroad if the organ was taken from an unwilling donor. I couldn't find any evidence that bill ever passed.

Should such law ever pass, a Canadian discovered to have travelled to buy a kidney or a heart could be prosecuted as a participant in a murder.

Kilgour and Matas say we should go further. They want the names of all the doctors and nurses in all the hospitals in China that annually kill thousands of people in order to sell their organs, so we can prosecute them in an international court.

It's no less a crime against humanity than the Holocaust, and indeed, Matas and Kilgour draw parallels. First, you demonize and dehumanize the victims, as was done in pre-war Europe, or in intertribal conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Then, you have people simply remain silent about atrocities.

Wrzesnewskj, who has proposed and supported a wide variety of human rights causes over the years, particularly in the Ukraine, himself trod lightly on the Chinese tiger's tail.

He said that although Canadians benefit from trade with China, and that we want even more trade in the future, “it does not exonerate us for addressing the issue of organ transplantation in the People's Republic of China.” Well, yes, but . . .

He warned against “trusting a country that would engage in this sort of horrific crime against its own people.” Do feel warned?

I would suggest that in any country other than China, such a program of mass-murder-for-profit would result in global trade sanctions, if not military invasion.

And once you know about this, a share of the responsibility falls on you.

ISDS: a potential ICBM on sovereignty

In today's global economy, you no longer need nuclear weapons to destroy or take over another country; you can just sue them to death under free trade agreements.

In my youth, we used to fear intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with multiple nuclear warheads that could destroy us all in a matter of minutes. Today, we shudder at the thought that some refugees might want to bomb or shoot up a Canadian mall or movie house.

But the real threat to our sovereignty and control over our own lives is planeloads of lawyers representing transnational corporations seeking to tear down our environmental, food safety and labour laws — or any laws that might potentially reduce their profits.

Their tool is ISDS: Investor-to-State Dispute Settlement rules buried within our free trade agreements.

Canada has recently completed negotiations on two huge international trade deals. But there's a good chance neither the Canada Europe Trade Agreement nor the Trans Pacific Partnership will be ratified — at least not in their present form.

“Their present form” ought to be moot, because officially, the negotiations are over. Canada has signed on in principle to both. Officially, no country is supposed to be able to re-open negotiations, only to ratify, or not ratify.

But in news reports from Europe, where prime minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet are working hard to sell our diversity and resourcefulness, diplomats are working to re-work the wording on CETA, in order to save it.

CETA is not a done deal, and may never get done, because hundreds of thousands of Europeans don't want their national parliaments to cede sovereignty over their air, water, labour laws, food safety, health care and natural resources to foreign corporate interests.

Huffington Post reported last year that Canada is the most-sued nation in the developed world. Under Chapter 11 of the North America Free Trade Act, American companies have launched no less than 35 claims against us, seeking something in the order of $6 billion in damages.

Why? For banning fracking of gas wells in Quebec, for one thing, when people got nervous about its effects on water. Or for another, a national ban on neurotoxin MMT (a gasoline additive). Or for insisting that PCB wastes be disposed in proper facilities as prescribed by another international treaty. Or that Newfoundland and Labrador took back some water and hydro rights on land after a pulp and paper company closed its last mill in the area and moved out. Or when local resistance persuaded the Ontario government to refuse a permit for a company to develop a quarry, over concerns regarding groundwater contamination.

American companies have a 100-per-cent success rate in suing Canada. Huffington Post reports it's cost us about $65 million so far to defend against these lawsuits, in which we've had to change laws to suit the companies and/or pay penalties so far of about $170 million. More suits are pending.

Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians goes further (you had to know she would). She says that under NAFTA, CETA or the TPP, companies could forbid Canadian provinces or dozens of other nations from raising their minimum wage, for instance. Or they could insist that Canada allow the sale of milk products containing bovine growth hormone, which is currently illegal in Canada.

A national Buy Canadian policy? Couldn't happen.

She's in Europe right now with all the bigwigs at Davos and talking to local interest groups in various European countries,warning them against the dangers of signing away their sovereignty so that powerful corporations can guarantee themselves higher profits.

News reports now suggest the message is being heard — and the European agreement is in danger. American lawmakers are angry that corporate lobbyists saw the text of TPP long before the deal was done and are raising a stink about loss of U.S. sovereignty. If the U.S. doesn't ratify — and tells us why — TPP is dead.

CETA needs to be ratified by all the countries concerned. That means it must be translated into 23 languages, and all the different copies must agree on what the deal means, legally.

That's the window through which European diplomats are talking to Canadian diplomats right now. The ISDS portion of CETA needs to be watered down so that nations can remain in control of their own laws, social policies and environments.

In other words, still call themselves nations and not branch offices.

The global economy has already changed how we all live. You can't can't build a blue jean factory in Canada without competing against child labour costs in Asia.

But our water is still our water. Our forests are still our forests and wild areas. We've already given up ownership of oil and gas resources, but we don't need to give up the right to develop green energy technologies within our borders as a result.

In the alphabet soup of international deals, ISDS could be the ICBM that either nukes our notions of nationhood, or the deals themselves.

Should we care if the rich are getting richer? Yes, but only enough to make sure they pay their taxes

So, just 62 people own as much wealth as the bottom half of all humanity put together. That number decreases every year, but it's like we're waiting for the point where it's only one person who's rich as half of humanity before we'll be impressed.

Either we're becoming jaded by constant reports of income inequality, or we're not paying attention because we're being asked to draw the wrong conclusions. Probably both.

International charity Oxfam releases a report on global wealth inequality every January. This year's report just happens to come right before the rich and powerful gather at Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. Oxfam's report is giving the politicians there a gold-plated opportunity to talk about the wrong things.

It is true, the share of global wealth is concentrating in ever-greater extent, to the top percentile of people. In 2010, it took 388 people to amass as much wealth as the bottom 50 per cent of people in the the world, according to Oxfam. That dropped to 177 people in 2011, then 159 in 2012, plummeting to 92 in 2013, and in the global economic struggles beginning in 2014, a slight drop to 80. Now, it's 62.

But that's not the information that should outrage us the most, or the one that decision-makers should concentrate on. The report is just data.

What should outrage is how little this group gives back, considering their vastly disproportionate wealth.

Oxfam reports that of the fortunes of this group, about $7.6 trillion resides in the accounts of tax havens.

Are you weary of being asked to contribute, over and over again, to alleviate the worst effects of poverty in Africa? Oxfam reports almost a third of the total wealth of that continent is held offshore. Gabriel Zuchman of the University of California, Berkeley estimates that $14 billion has been lost as revenue for African countries to improve their own economies and infrastructure for education and health care.

In my view, that's more important than the data of mere inequality.

But don't think it's just Africa that offends in this way.

A sidebar to the Oxfam report tells us that five Canadians hold the equivalent wealth of the bottom 30 per cent of all Canadians.

Global News has the list posted, and it includes all the usual suspects. But smack in the middle of that list is Garrett Camp, owner of the Canadian arm of Uber and a major web developer.

Uber doesn't pay taxes, or is at least reported not to pay taxes. The drivers are expected to, but 20 per cent of every Uber ride goes to a holding company in the Netherlands, which pays another holding company in the Netherlands for the right to Uber's intellectual property, which is not taxed in that country. From there the money goes to an offshore haven owned by the top holding company in San Franscisco.

The scheme is called by Fortune Magazine “double Irish with a Dutch sandwich” and it's used by a lot of international companies whose payments occur online and which don't become real money, until they're out of reach of the tax departments of the countries where the payments were made.

In fact, Oxfam says 188 of 201 leading global companies use offshore havens to avoid helping to maintain the infrastructure of the economies that generate their wealth. Uber drivers use the road, they block the parking stalls and the bike lanes of big cities — why doesn't the parent company contribute like their licenced taxi competitors, and everyone else?

That's where the anger should be focussed. The Canadian government under the Conservatives refused to accept data offered to them, listing the biggest Canadian tax cheats, who collectively owe hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to the nation. Canada helped build their wealth, why shouldn't they support our nation according to law?

There's plenty of criticism of Oxfam's methodology and reporting. Yes, CEO salaries increased almost a thousand per cent since 1982, while worker salaries increased a mere 10.9 per cent.

But wealth is not a finite pie. In that time, the value of S&P 500 companies increased by more than 500 per cent. That's a whole lot of new wealth, reflected in the value of millions of Canadians' RSP accounts — at least those who invested and held through the numerous up-and-down cycles over the years.

More, Oxfam's study calculates wealth as a simple assets-minus-debts equation. In that scenario, a young Canadian worker making $50,000 a year, but with a big student loan and a mortgage is listed among the world's poorest people. Apples and over-ripe bananas, as far as poverty should be considered.

I don't like seeing the egregious wealth-taking the world talks about. But what I hate more is how we ignore the ability of the super-rich to thumb their noses at tax-paying slobs like us who build the economy that makes them so rich.

Is Canada's own Donald Trump making a move into politics?

Canadian tycoon Kevin O'Leary's offer to invest a million bucks into Alberta's energy industry — but only if newly-elected premier Rachel Notley stepped down — was pure theatre. Did he really expect anyone to take this seriously? 

So what's with the cross-national bombast?

Well, it appears O'Leary has political ambitions. Talking with CBC News, the network that hired him on Dragon's Den and The Lang & O'Leary Exchange, O'Leary said he wouldn't mind taking a page or two from Donald Trump's latest bestseller: How to Make Friends, Influence People and Become the Greatest Leader, Ever.

He's toying with the idea of running for the federal Conservative Party leadership. “I thought at some point, someone is going to say to me, if you can be such a critic, why don't you do better? Why don't you try it?” he told CBC. “I thought to myself, hmmm, maybe I should.”

Note that he didn't claim — as politicians often do — that there's a groundswell of demand that he lead the Conservative Party. But you have to start somewhere; maybe the support will follow the idea, as it has in the U.S. for Mr. Trump.

Attacking a popular premier only recently-elected is a strange way to build a national consensus, but the Trump/O'Leary way seems up to the challenge.

Canada's previous Tory leader, Stephen Harper was known for his cool relationships with provincial leaders. Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador, Kathleen Wynne in Ontario come to mind. Things did not begin well with Harper's relationship with Notley, either, but that didn't have time to mature.

All in all, how did that work for him?

But never mind, O'Leary is new to politics, a place where you can't buy every agreement, and where simply walking away when you can't isn't an option.

Everyone knows it's difficult to govern — all the more so when one has inherited a financial crisis. Moving forward requires compromises to build consensus for decisions that will require sacrifice.

Bombast, disrespect and blame do not build consensus.

O'Leary says in Alberta he would “put his cards on the table” with the current review on provincial royalties. Considering that industry is being closely consulted during the review process, that promises are clear not to make any sudden changes, and that an Alberta perspective on what's fair (including acknowledging current problems within the energy industry) ought to be transparent enough, until the final report is made public.

O'Leary said he would cut corporate taxes in Alberta, not raise them to rough parity to the tax regimes of other provinces. He would “cut a deal” with business companies to maintain jobs (are we talking tax-subsidized wages in the oil patch here?) and he would run deficit budgets to do it.

A perception of government getting too friendly with business is partly what got the NDP elected in the first place.

But governments do steal opposition ideas, though some make more sense than others.

The Wildrose claims authorship of this week's wage freeze for about 7,000 non-unionized government workers (including highly-paid trade representatives, board chairs and deputy ministers). They were due to get a 2.5-per-cent wage hike in April on salaries that range between $110,000 and $287,000 a year. Grid advancement will also be banned, saving taxpayers about $57 million over two years, according to an article in the Calgary Herald.

But that idea came long before the birth of Wildrose, with former PC governments freezing wages, unfreezing them months later, then promising to re-freeze them, claiming strong leadership each time, in each direction.

Like our current recession, this freeze will also thaw. In the meantime, we need to gather people together, not pull them apart. Canada doesn't need a Donald Trump, or any would-be politician that seeks to create enemies.

We need a healthy debate on what comes next, and that will include some passionate argument. But Canada has three brand-new governments in it now, with two more — Saskatchewan and Manitoba — to come in 2016.

We need to respect democracy enough to give them a chance to bring their consensus into practice. In our current business cycle, that's going to require some sacrifices.

O'Leary says Rachel Notley isn't qualified to “manage Canada's Number One resource.” If he meant the energy industry, managing that isn't her job. Besides, we're always being told our Number One resource is our people, not our tight gas and bitumen reserves.

One can't be sure, yet, if O'Leary is really serious, or just enjoying causing a little trouble along with a few headlines. As a businessman, he can stand or fall on his own. But as an aspiring political leader, he's short of the mark.

Power to the people: how we can have our electricity cake, and eat it, too

We've been waiting for some months now for details on how Alberta's new carbon tax and greenhouse gas reduction policies will affect our monthly bills. We'll still need to wait until after the government presents its first full-year budget to get them.

But that doesn't mean we can't speculate on outcomes, and hope to affect how the decisions are made.

Speculation: all this is going to cost us more, if we make no changes to how we live. Hope: that individual efforts to conserve and to invest in green energy will produce an appreciable payback.

We can reasonably assume that introducing a provincial carbon tax is going to affect the unit price of all the forms of energy we use. That's the point of the whole exercise: paying closer to the full cost of our energy use — including the cost to the environment. But that should also mean that reducing consumption and/or switching to green renewables should have a real payback.

With electricity in Alberta, that's not exactly the case right now.

I've been keeping a file of my old power bills for a couple of years now. In fact, that's become quite easy, as my utility keeps them for me with the switch to online billing. Here's what I've noticed.

Our monthly power usage varies widely over a year, but our household runs quite nicely on less than 500 Kw of power per month, averaged. As every householder knows, there are variable costs and fixed costs within each monthly bill.

I found it a bit ironic that in the months in which we conserve best, the delivery costs are higher than the energy costs. In other words, try as we might, we can't conserve our way to appreciably lower power bills. Add to this the new costs of a carbon tax, plus the downloaded costs of the new power lines being built (which we won't use, but are widely expected to serve export opportunities), it all means that saving money on our power bills through conservation alone is just about impossible for Alberta householders.

You may as well just leave all the lights on, for all the difference it makes to your monthly bill.

That anomaly can't help the province's plan to reduce our carbon footprint.

So incentives to conserve, and to invest in green power alternatives must become part of the plan. I want to suggest a way for Alberta consumers to get a break — to have their electrically-produced cake and eat it, too.

Alberta needs a healthy dose of home power generation. Solar panels on our rooftops already make long-term sense today — there are about 1,000 solar-powered homes already connected to the grid. More than half of those were added to the grid in the past two years and we should see many thousands more of them after carbon taxes are introduced, and if the province removes some administrative barriers.

One Alberta site I have found, Solar Hero, suggests a 6-Kw solar array on my house or garage would have a payback of 16-19 years, under current billing conditions, and assuming annual 3.5 per cent inflation of regular grid costs through 25 years.

We all know that in the past 13 years, our electrical power bills have gone up by just over eight per cent per year, compounded, since deregulation. With the addition of the carbon tax, plus having Alberta power customers pay for two huge new power lines, power generators and distributors together will not likely keep power bill inflation to less than 3.5 per cent.

Solar Hero reports the cost of one watt of solar power installed on a home was about $9 in 2007. In 2014, you could have that for as low as $2.50 per watt, and the price continues to drop as efficiencies increase. After an initial investment of $13,000-$17,000 (Solar Hero's figures) for a 6-Kw array, you would wait for 16 years or so to get your money back, and then make a slight profit.

I want a better deal.

My next car is going to be a plug-in hybrid, meaning I will park it in the garage and recharge it on free solar power, which I will use exclusively for more than 80 per cent of my car trips. I'll run my dishwasher and do laundry during the day, when the sun is shining. I'll sell the power I don't use at the going rate, and just eat the monthly fixed costs of being connected to the grid.

I want my cake, and I want it free for the estimated minimum 25 years of a solar array's working lifetime on my property.

I want the government to make achieving that easier for me, and for all other consumers.

If we agree that we need a carbon tax, then we have to agree to remove barriers that hinder making conservation and investment pay.

I'm waiting, like you, for the details in the next provincial budget.

It may be messy, but Canada is doing the right thing for Syrian refugees

Back in 1999, Kosovo was not a great place to be. The whole Balkan region was breaking up — violently — into various new states based on ethnic origins that did not like or trust each other.

Local militias got access to police and military arms as governance broke down and entire regions were “cleansed” of families who no longer belonged there, being of the “wrong” ethnic origin for whoever locally claimed to be in charge.

Canada intervened by evacuating about 5,000 people from areas where terror, rape, arson and murder had become the norm, and resettled about 2,000 refugees into Canada — all within a period of months.

Gerry Van Kessel was a senior bureaucrat in the Canadian government at the time. He had a title with a lengthy name: Director General, Refugees Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration. Over his career he was also the the co-ordinator of intergovernmental consultations on asylum, refugees and migration policy in Geneva.

So he knows a thing or two about how bureaucracies work to implement government policy around determining who is or is not a refugee. That's important, because as a signing nation of accords on refugees, Canada is obliged to take them in.

Well, that was then and this is now. Taking in 2,000 refugees from a European region with Western-standard notions of justice and rule of law would be but a short introduction to the refugee crisis in Africa and the Middle East that Canada faces today.

In the intervening time, we elected a Conservative government that left more than a third of positions on the Citizenship and Immigration board empty, while abroad, thugs and terrorists got much more efficient at creating refugees. Canada's backlog of refugee claims became an embarrassment, and the government tried to fix it by putting an eight-day limit on processing claims, as well as designating “safe countries of origin” from which a faster claims process could proceed.

Now, even that has turned out to be just a short introduction to the refugee problem that Canada faces to day.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that even as professional a group as Canada's civil service would slip a few gears while attempting to process 25,000 refugee claims from Syria in just a few months.

Van Kessel, a long champion of our civil servants as non-partisan professionals, doesn't like how the process is going. So, over the new year he gave an interview on the matter.

He sees — rightly — that when the force of political policy hits the wall of practical reality, something has to give. A newly-elected government cannot undo the policy and practice of a 10-year government that had a completely different ideology concerning refugees and immigration, all in a matter of months. Much less while taking in 25,000 new permanent residents from abroad.

What irked Van Kessel was the constant changing of targets. From the policy introduction last March, to the swearing-in of the new government in November to now, targets got serially readjusted such that the 25,000 Syrian refugees would be identified by the end of 2015, and resettled by the end of 2016.

For a lot of governments that's “immediately” as things can get for a project that large, involving that many thousands of vulnerable individuals.

Van Kessel just doesn't like the messiness of it all. Which is strange, because he says he immediately saw the mess arriving when the Liberal refugee policy was announced. Because he'd been there before, and he knows how things work (or not work).

Very well, complain that it's a mess, and that politics is being played in public while the professionals work in the background. How, exactly, is that a change, except in scale?

So far, Red Deer has 26 new permanent Canadian residents from Syria. The expectation is that we may receive as many as 60. Non-profits like Catholic Social Services and a long list of others, plus many volunteers and donors are putting in long hours getting them housed, settled, with medical attention and kids in school — the whole list of connections that families have with a city.

To use Western terms, this isn't our first rodeo. We've done this before.

Bottom line, when people become aware of need, they step up to help. That was proven over the Christmas season when local charities feared they might not reach their annual fundraising goals. Last-minute, they got there, and then some.

Nationally, setting the politics — the goal — was important. Without that, there'd likely be no new arrivals in Red Deer. That politicians will change the specifics of the goal when policy runs up against practice, is just something that happens.

Meanwhile, people keep on doing the right thing with the situation and resources in front of them. That's the Canada I like to see.