Access to public officials cannot be for sale

Think back a few months, to a time when Alberta still had a Tory government. If that benighted group had been caught offering one-hour of access for a private chat with the premier — as a party fundraiser — what do you think the tiny NDP opposition would have said?

Well, you don't have to think too hard, because shortly after Ed Stelmach became premier, the Tories tried to do exactly that. It was fodder for all the wretched pundits like me, who saw this as selling private access to public office.

In very short order, the plan was cancelled, and Stelmach probably never got another chance to find out what the rich and well-connected class in Alberta was thinking. Right?

I do not recall the NDP being silent on this at the time. Quite the opposite.

So imagine our surprise that the NDP under Rachel Notley has been planning to do the same thing.

On Tuesday, the party held a fundraiser at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, where for $250, you could be seated in the sumptuous quarters of the gallery, mingle with the Alberta cabinet and hear a stirring speech.

Except, for an hour or so before the main event, a select group of private invitees were offered a much more intimate gathering with the premier and members of cabinet, for $1,000. You know, a unique chance to bend the premier's ear, give some well-considered advice — and press for funding of your favourite project.

When word got out Monday that the party was planning to do this, there was a fire drill in party headquarters.

Party president Chris O'Halloran told The Canadian Press that the special access event was cancelled.

Notley spokeswoman Cheryl Oates then said no, it's not cancelled. The event has been cleared by the province's ethics commissioner. The event is on.

I suggest nobody cares if the event was cleared by the ethics commissioner. People generally would say otherwise.

O'Halloran said the event was sold to select people through phone calls and e-mails as an opportunity to give them “more time to share their opinions and feelings.”

While he denied people (like me) might consider this as selling access to the highest decision-makers in the province, he would not tell reporters the real reason why the party decided not to go forward with the $1,000 fundraiser add-on.

The only other reason I can think of to cancel would be that nobody in Alberta thought an hour alone with the NDP cabinet would be worth $1,000. And this isn't the case, because the president of the party was somehow over-ruled.

This cannot turn out well. There is not enough money in all of Alberta to make public trust of the impartiality of our government worth selling. Particularly for the NDP and particularly now.

There has been too much complaining from the moral high ground of the opposition benches, reflecting ever-declining trust of the previous regime for the public to accept even a sniff of that sort of cynicism now.

Our government doesn't have a track record of good stewardship yet — and could not possibly have one for several years. Right now, in a significant economic downturn, when trust for the future is vitally needed, trust is all we have for the government to use to work its agenda.

Between elections, public trust is the government's mandate from heaven.

The new NDP government must remain squeaky clean, above reproach in its actions, or there's nothing left to work with.

If not, then after 40 years of Tory rule, it would really be true that all governments are the same. And we'd lost trust of the last one.

I don't know how many thousands of dollars it takes to disappoint either the true believers or the soft supporters of the governing party, but I suggest Tuesday's fundraiser tally is not near enough.

A party fundraiser to hear a speech, with a nice meal and a cash bar? Perfectly fine. But a closed-door pre-event to whisper unrecorded nothings into the premier's ear?

I said Stelmach's group was crazy, and they had the benefit of decades of experience in what you can do and what you cannot do, when you hold power in a democracy.

The NDP was supposed to have a better conscience.

Common sense hasn't worked to curtail the rise in poverty among seniors

Suggested head: Common sense hasn't worked to curtail the rise in poverty among seniors

Back in in the 1960s and ’70s, being old and being poor were pretty well synonymous. The generation that started their families during the Great Depression and then endured the sacrifices of the Second World War simply had no chance to build savings to last through retirement.

The nation had only recently created the Canada Pension Plan, and as that generation's grandchildren, the baby boomers, entered adulthood, it became clear more would be needed to address poverty among seniors.

By the early 1970s, more than one in three seniors was living in poverty. The Canada Pension Plan was never intended to be a full living income, but a huge portion of older people had little else. So Canada created the Old Age Security/Guaranteed Income Supplement programs.

And the poverty rate for seniors dropped like a stone.

By 1995, barely 3.9 per cent of seniors lived below Canada's arbitrary measure of the low-income cutoff, which was the policy-level definition of poverty. At that time, child poverty, by the same arbitrary measure, was around 18 or 19 per cent — and has sadly remained that way ever since.

For most people, retirement looked like it would be at least workable, if not comfortably rich.

Meanwhile, in the working lives of the boomers, a myriad of schemes were invented to encourage people to save for retirement. But it's clear the incentives we invented — registered savings plans (RSPs), a growth in company pension plans, tax-free savings accounts (TFSAs) and the introduction of pooled pension plans for people without company plans, plus an explosion in the value of home ownership — haven't worked well at all.

From that low point in 1995, poverty levels for seniors have crept back up to 11.1 per cent, says a report released this week by the Broadbent Institute.

And the future looks worse, not better, says the institute's report.

Less than half of boomers really saved anything at all during their working lives. Despite living through an age of prosperity, with all the incentive and advice they had, many have saved virtually nothing. What were they thinking?

The Broadbent Institute doesn't answer that question, but it does report some sad statistics on the profligacy of this generation.

Less than half of people aged 55 to 64 who are employed have a company pension plan as part of the wage packet. Private savings? Less than a quarter of Canadians contribute each year to an RSP. Fewer than one in five Canadian boomers have savings that would last at least three years. Even if you account for the equity in people's homes, we're told most seniors have less than five years' worth of assets saved.

Of existing retirees, a demographic that grows annually as a result of a new wave of retiring boomers, the average income for seniors falls about $5,600 below a median income of $20,000 a year.

How could this have happened?

One explanation is to look at the rising curve of income inequality. Are boomers really the richest generation that ever lived? The top two-tenths of wealthy people is firmly post-war. That's where the money is.

On Thursday, the Globe and Mail published a special section on estate planning for that group. Gotta plan for who gets the cottage, the summer home or the winter escape when the boomer parents die.

Except that a large part of that demographic earned less than $50,000 a year all their working lives. The Broadbent report says they hold something like $250 in savings. In the group that earned $50,000 to $100,000 a year, the average savings is around $21,000.

Go to any online retirement planner and it will likely tell you that you need a million or so in the bank to retire in the manner most people say they expect. That's quite the gap from reality.

Two generations after 1973 and the same problem looms, with the same response suggested. Boost the Guaranteed Income Supplement to something closer to a living income, says our new Liberal government. That notion is supported by the Broadbent Institute report.

Only this time, instead of taxing the rising incomes of boomers to pay for it, we'll be taxing the stagnant and falling incomes of millennials.

Because God forbid we should tax the incomes of wealthy baby boomers, or the incomes of the boomers who actually did save diligently for retirement.

The common-sense response — save for the future — applies no more to individuals than to governments. Only a few individuals — and very few governments — seem to have that kind of sense.

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

Alberta, you're on your own

Prime minister Justin Trudeau returned home recently after a brief visit to Alberta, leaving behind a $250-million tip, courtesy of an obscure federal stability program, and his promises that our current economic pain is not being ignored back east. Call it political tourism.

Pain? True enough, but pain can be relative.

A recent report from the right-wing Fraser Institute says Alberta's revenues currently are still on a par with revenues from 2012-13. That's down from the revenue peak in the years that followed, but I don't recall anyone claiming Alberta was a basket case four years ago.

Likewise, the report says though Alberta's unemployment figures are way up, they're still on a par with levels the rest of the country has dealt with for years. And for those Albertans still employed, average wages remain well above the national average, while taxes on those wages is well below the national average.

Pain? Get used to it, the message seems to be. This may be the new normal, if ever there was a state of normality in Alberta.

Trudeau's jet had just landed before our close and loving neighbours in B.C. were holding us up — as an example of how not to run a province.

Lieut-Gov Judith Guichon read the words set before her by premier Christie Clark, warning the people of her province in the speech from the throne, sounding like a mother warning her kids: “Don't you be like those Albertans in the house across the tracks!”

Well, good idea. But it's hardly likely that British Columbia will ever live like those Albertans across the tracks.

To do that, you'd need a 40-year run of boom-and-bust resource cycles that contained a lot more boom than bust. You'd need to see many billions worth of foreign money invested in the province, and many billions more removed in the form of profits and dividends.

You'd need the discipline to not save a significant portion of your share of those profits and dividends through all that time. You'd need to buy your way out of labour problems in education, health care and civil service. And you'd need to spend your resource money every year on a services that a minimal tax regime could never support, to keep everyone else happy.

Rock-bottom income taxes, no sales tax and no saving for the future. That's what you'd need. For 40 years.

B.C., you don't have that kind of discipline. If you're fortunate, and maintain prudent management and stay away from pie-in-the-sky, we’ll-be-an-energy-superpower, you'll never need it.

B.C.'s warning should have come earlier, and it should have been directed to our loving neighbour to the east, Saskatchewan. Their energy boom was just gathering steam when the global oil price collapsed.

But there was no plan there for prudence, either. No plan to save significantly to smooth the cycles and to prepare for the day when energy revenues no longer flowed like a gusher from the ground. They never had a chance to be like our family, across the tracks.

I don't see a significant reason why the rest of Canada should feel particularly sorry for Alberta. Neither do I buy the argument that the billions we sent to Ottawa in the form of equalization money demands some kind of special payback.

When you're rich, you pay your taxes. You don't get to ask for them back if you piss your fortune away, or fail to prepare for an inevitable future.

I don't much care for the Fraser Institute. Research is one thing, spinning the numbers is something else. But it is still true when they tell us that in the last years of the long death of our Tory dynasty, government spending ramped up nearly double the rate of our population growth, plus inflation.

A series of weak premiers, beginning with the last few years of Ralph Klein's reign, through Ed Stelmach, Alison Redford, Dave Hancock and Jim Prentice, all used the province's cash flow to minimize the effects of decades of poor planning — or no planning at all.

If you don't see parallels between the Alberta experience and the CBC show Schitt's Creek, you're not looking.

You can blame the NDP government for whatever happens next, but for what got us here, look in the mirror.

When even a friendly federal government has only a tip to leave on the table for us, and when other provinces hold us up as a bad example of provincial stewardship, that means we're on our own.

As Voltaire once wrote, we need to learn to take care of our own garden.

Jingle mail in Alberta: everything old is new again

I was a humble-but-brilliant news photographer back in 1980s Red Deer. With my wife at home with our young children and about three years left in a locked-in mortgage at 8.75 per cent, I was far luckier financially than I was smart.

Mortgage rates had crept past 15 per cent and would head north of 20 per cent before dropping and eventually being bought down to a luxury rate of 12.5 per cent by then-premier Peter Lougheed. It was one of few times that I was happy we had a nice, socialist Tory government, willing to give us our tax money back, every month.

I remember being sent on assignment to nearby Innisfail where the current oil price crash had caused a large number of homes on a certain street to be posted with For Sale signs.

We were told that most of those homes were now owned by the banks. Either that, or in the process of of repossession from so-called “dollar dealers” — people who bought homes with underwater mortgages for a dollar, to rent them out and collect as much money as possible in the months it took for a bank to foreclose.

Dollar dealing quickly became illegal in Alberta, but another fine Western practice still exists: jingle mail. And news reports tell us we're seeing it again.

In Alberta and in Saskatchewan (but with a few more restrictions), you can still get an uninsured mortgage. You need to put at least 20 per cent of the home's value down in cash but if something unthinkable happens (like, say, a business cycle) you can pop the keys into an envelope, mail it to the bank and walk away.

All you'd lose was your equity, and your credit rating for a few years.

Back then the saying was that if you owed $20,000 and couldn't pay, you had a problem, but if you owed a million dollars and couldn't pay, the bank had a problem.

That's still true today, but you do have to increase the figures a bit.

Alberta mortgage providers surely don't want to see that problem again, because the dollar figures today are much, much higher than in 1983-84.

In some Alberta real estate markets, home values are in steep decline. That includes the upper end of the Calgary market and decent parts of remote oil-dependent towns like Ft. McMurray.

As early as last spring, the Financial Post revived the term “jingle mail” leading its story in Grande Cache. A townhouse bought four years earlier for $175,000 (how's that for cheap?) had dropped to a resale value of $75,000, tops, in a newly-depressed market.

With a mortgage of $150,000, and possible rents far cheaper than a mortgage payment, the question was asked: at what point do you simply give your house back to the bank?

The answer was: it depends if you're willing to declare bankruptcy on an insured mortgage. But if that mortgage was of the special Alberta non-recourse type, the line where it made sense to abandon ownership for renting had passed on that house long ago.

Suppose you're a welder who may need to move to where the jobs are — and you make decent money while you are employed. You might find a mortgage to be a dead-weight financial anchor on the bottom of a sea of endless bank payments.

Suppose you're a skilled professional in Ft.McMurray and just got laid off. Your home cost $750,000 — you bought near the peak, and it ain't gonna sell for that anytime soon. The average drop in house prices there is around $125,000.

If you've got the non-recourse mortgage, that price drop is perilously close to 20 per cent of the home's value — the point where jingle mail becomes an option for people who can no longer make monthly payments of $4,000-plus, as would be the case on the home in this example. (I got the figures on an online calculator: 20 per cent down, uninsured, 2.8 per cent mortgage over 20 years).

Same deal in Calgary, but were talking about homes with an initial purchase price well above a million dollars and a mortgage in distress. Same problem, bigger figures.

Which is why I don't think a long-threatened interest-rate hike from the Bank of Canada is going to happen any time soon. Because in that scenario, the banks that over-loaned into over-heated housing markets (Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto) would be in big, big trouble.

They prefer the jingle of interest payments. Not the jingle of keys in the mail.

I'd rather be known as a citizen than a taxpayer

With CTV's Power Play droning as background to supper preparation, I heard one of host Don Martin's guests refer to a statement she got in an interview, that prime minister Justin Trudeau doesn't like to refer to Canadians as taxpayers.

I perked up in time to hear he prefers to see us as citizens, and that “taxpayer” is a term referenced most often by the former government of Stephen Harper.

The whole exchange lasted a few seconds and the show's discussion moved on to something much more important, which, hours later, nobody can recall.

But those few seconds stuck, and it's worth talking about the differences in meaning, especially as tax time and a federal budget loom.

We all pay taxes, federally, provincially, municipally. But we should see ourselves — and be recognized — as much more than the suppliers of money to government.

Being merely a taxpayer implies a client relationship with government. Being a citizen implies partnership. If a leader can make that distinction stick in our minds, there's a whole lot more that can be accomplished.

We've had a few decades now of “taxpayer” politics. We even have a national taxpayers federation which by its name claims to represent us as clients of the governments we elect, supposedly, to represent us.

The result has been a better recognition that government must be accountable for the money it collects and spends. But when you look at government as a spender and not a partner, you can see how the connection between government and the people has gotten lost.

We vote — in declining numbers — for governments to have the right to tax us and spend on our behalf. We vote even less nowadays for governments to lead our country, provinces and cities toward a more just, stable and happy society.

The implication is that we “buy” government and its services with our taxes. You can see where that has gone: the rich can buy more than the rest of us. If you buy something, you own it, and it is very easy to notice how big money buys its way in the halls of power.

So if government is something you buy, why vote? The ethos that we are primarily taxpayers means our primary job is mostly just to get the best deal possible for ourselves.

But that should not be the ethos that drives a democracy. The strongest governments — the ones most able to act — are the ones that include us in shared responsibilities. Think of the national unity and shared sacrifices that people made to win victory in two world wars. Think of what was accomplished in the United States under Roosevelt's New Deal.

That's the notion of citizenship in action.

In a previous life, I used to be president of a local nonprofit advocating for people with disabilities. Back then, I often suggested that what my group wanted was “full citizenship.”

People with disabilities want to be full partners in society, not just consumers of assistance provided either by charity or government mandate. Everyone should have something to contribute to the greater good.

Knowing you have civic duties to society at large — and that those duties are a function of both variable ability and resources — makes you a citizen.

When government sees me first as someone working to carry out my civic duties as I perceive them, and not primarily as a taxpayer, then I think we get better government.

If we all thought more along those lines, then our national conversation might be more along the lines of what we can accomplish, than about how much doing something will cost.

Both considerations are important, but the accomplishments should come first.

Therefor, if any elected representative uses the word “taxpayer” less, and “citizen” more, that would be fine by me.

A simpler road to electoral reform

One sure-fire way to make sure nobody is happy with our government is for the Liberal Party to keep its promise on electoral reform. Putting a stronger dose of democracy in the formation of our Parliament is pretty well the most wished-for change we could see in Ottawa. Achieving that is a process that everybody hates.

We know that Canada can do better than first-past-the-post, which almost always gives us majority governments built on the strength of a minority of voters. But change the system? Make a to-do list, and you'd find Canadians would rather everyone donate a kidney.

That's the reason reform referenda have failed in the past. The difficulty of explaining options for change outweighs dislike for the current less-than-perfect voting system.

So how can we make Parliament more accurately reflect the diversity of today's Canada? And how can we do that with a voting system simple enough not to scare people away from the ballot stations?

When you look at the options that will be on the table for an all-party committee soon to be announced, you can be forgiven for saying “none of the above.” The St. Lague method of voting? The revised St. Lague method? Who the heck is St. Lague?

I googled it and found he's not the patron saint of voters. Andre Sainte-Lague was a French mathematician who came up with a formula for deciding proportional representation in elections. His formula says the Quotient is equal to the number of Votes, divided by 2 times the number of Seats plus 1. (Q=V over 2S+1).

After the votes are tallied, successive quotients are calculated. The party with the highest quotient gets a member, then formula is run again for the next seat... in today's Parliament, 338 times.

Simple, right? Imagine watching TV all election night waiting for that to transpire.

One should be able to vote for the candidates and policies of one's choice without needing a math degree. One should expect that everyone's voice should get a fair hearing in Parliament without needing a system of charts and statistics.

Mind if I suggest something easier?

Let's first have fewer ridings, but more members per riding. In today's Canada, the major cities could each be one riding, with multiple members per riding according to population. Outside the major cities, we can divide the provinces into a few ridings each, but with as many members to elect proportionally as the big cities get. That shouldn't be hard.

Then, you get as many votes for as many MPs as there are in your riding. For instance, Edmonton has eight MPs now, Red Deer has two. So, each party would be able to nominate that number of candidates, along with as many independents as can get themselves nominated.

Voters may really like one candidate from a particular party, but not another. You would be free to pick the Tory you like, plus a Liberal you like — or go totally Green. Or just vote for the few people you really know about in what could become a long list while ignoring the ones who couldn't make an impression.

An Edmontonian who really hated one candidate could in effect cast eight votes for anyone but that candidate. Or, if you just totally love the person, mark one vote, and none for anyone else.

This is how we choose our City Council in Red Deer, and we get a pretty broad spectrum of views represented. They have to learn to work together, or nothing gets done, and voters will be mad at all of them. (As a reference, witness the deadlocked U.S. Congress, linked to the rise of “outsider” presidential candidates such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders).

I know in my city of Red Deer, there were candidates in the last election I wished I could have voted for, but I was in the “wrong” riding. So enlarge the riding and increase voters' access to representatives they want, regardless of party affiliation.

In places like Greater Toronto, people might agree that's creating too large a ballot. Then divide some major cities to make it manageable.

This system rewards candidates who can appeal to a broad spectrum of voters and gives independents and minor parties a fair shot. It would tend to eliminate extremists who might be able now to rally enough votes to overcome the split votes of people who don't want them. If an extreme candidate does win, he or she would just be one of several representing that riding.

Fewer ridings, more MPs per riding, in all likelihood from differing parties, representing a broad range of views. Without getting all mathematical about it, isn't that what we really want in government?

You're welcome. And no need to name the system after me. I'm no saint.