Some people in the oil industry just don't get it

We know the oil and gas industry in Alberta is suffering right now. We know that Alberta's energy-related businesses and their thousands of employees will need the goodwill and co-operation of government to turn things around.

So how would you go about achieving that? By placing a cutout photo of premier Rachel Notley as a fairway target at an oilmen's golf tournament and inviting people to take shots at her? Probably not a great starting point.

I mean, doing that is not illegal, right? We have freedom of speech here; we're not living in a totally communist regime here, are we? No, just a civil society, where the thread of civility is wearing thin.

And so Ernest Bothi, president of the the Brooks Big Country Oilmen's Association, honestly believes he has no reason to feel sorry for symbolically inviting violence against the Alberta premier.

He told reporters he would apologize to the premier as a person for this stupid and tasteless stunt, but not as a premier. One wonders if he actually tried to do that personally.

Bothi spent a lot of time with reporters defending his decision to place the target on the fairway at the golf tournament, but no time at all reflecting on the consequences.

“A lot of good people have invested their entire life into this industry and for what?” he said. “So that a government can strip it away from us?”

I haven't heard that the government was planning to nationalize the energy industry in Alberta, have you? I hadn't heard that the NDP was responsible for the overproduction and glut of oil on the international market leading to the price crash, had you?

Rather, I see the government doing everything it can to see that major pipeline projects are approved, to allow more Alberta bitumen and gas reach more markets. Part of that effort is to try to scrub the label of “dirty oil” off the Alberta brand, so that more buyers will accept it.

Is that the part that Bothi objects to? If so, he should be more clear.

“I just read online that her carbon tax is going to cost billions,” he said. Now there's a good reason to dehumanize our elected officials.

Let's try to help Bothi out here. The carbon tax has a variety of integrated goals, one of which is to get at least one of the proposed major pipelines built, so that people like Bothi can get back to their million-dollar profits. In this regard, I would think the government is the oilman's friend right now.

The best bet for a lot of highly-skilled former oilworkers to get a job again within our province is for the carbon tax to seed research and development in new technologies, beyond mining and processing ever-growing daily bitumen production levels.

When even the Saudis are actively retreating from the oil business, you'd have to think that, finally, Alberta might have to diversify its economy as well.

If people like Ernest Bothi want to be a part of that, they'd better start treating the government as a partner, not an enemy.

The world is what the world is. We've had too much airing of grievances in our politics today, and not enough educated people coming together to look for for solutions.

Oilmen are supposed to be pragmatists, realists, adapters. So act like them, not like junior-high dropouts.

The future ain't what it used to be, if you want to quote Yogi Berra. Whether you prepare for it or not, the future will come. In the eyes of many, that future includes oil and gas, but less of it in the mix of energy that will be sold on world markets. A global market, by the way, worth trillions of dollars.

Does crying that the dinosaurs are dying make them live longer?

When you depersonalize our leadership, make them symbolic targets, some jerk is going to conclude it's OK to make them real targets. How far is it from launching a golf ball at the face of the Alberta premier, to the shooting death of British MP Jo Cox, as a political statement?

Premier Notley has gotten too many death threats in the past year to allow making her face a golf course target into something funny. Or into something acceptable as free speech at an industry golf tournament.

News reports have it that although the target was out there in the open fairway, none of the participants was able to hit the mark. Maybe that's symbolic, too.

ISIS wants all-out war; we'd be fools to let them lead us to it

The time gap between action and reaction to moments of violent horror in our society grows ever shorter. People scarcely took the time to allow for the funerals of the victims of the Orlando massacre before politicizing it, and demanding violent retribution.

Don't wait for the full facts to come out, we need a lynch mob.

Act in haste, regret at leisure, as the saying goes.

Columnist Michael Taube, a former speechwriter for former prime minister Stephen Harper, wants Western democracies to declare all-out war on Islamic State, committing troops to hand-to-hand combat “to eradicate this evil presence from the face of the Earth.”

He wrote that it's a fight that would take years, cost enormously and require huge losses on the battlefield. But it's a sacrifice he is willing to make — from the safety of his desk.

He referenced a column in the National Review that said: “Islamic terrorist's war . . . will continue here as long as we refuse to exercise the tactics necessary to stamp it out.”

Taube suggests such tactics would include identifying anyone who supports “radical Islam” as an “enemy of freedom, liberty and democracy.” Such people need to be “constantly attacked and denigrated,” according to his column.

That would be sort of hard to do, since even America's top spymasters, listening in on our every phone call, reading every text, Tweet and email, can't locate ISIS operatives within their own borders.

That is, if Omar Mir Seddique Mateen even was an ISIS operative — which is far from certain.

Rather, these kinds of tactics will far sooner result in home-grown atrocities, perpetrated by our own governments, than wiping anything from the face of the Earth.

Let's consider a small portion of what our governments are doing now to identify and denigrate potential terrorists within our borders: the no-fly list.

It's a net that snares five-year-old children born with the wrong-sounding name. The snare never releases its catch, and there is no appeal process for even a young child to be shown he or she is not a terrorist, therefor they can never board an airplane.

And we would want to expand that to government powers of war for anyone who looks different, speaks different or prays different than us? There is no such thing as “radical Islam” any more than there is such a thing as gun-toting abortion clinic attackers who are “radical Christian.”

There are just good people and criminals. And if we make religion or ethnicity the first filters in deciding between them, we are on the road to destruction. Which, if you look at it, is exactly what ISIS wants from us.

There are still people among us who can remember the arrests and murder of innocent people identified as enemies of the state because of the way they prayed: Jews during the Holocaust.

There are still Canadians alive today whose perfectly peaceful homes and businesses were confiscated and who were imprisoned — without legal recourse — because they were of Japanese descent.

On the road between Banff and Lake Louise, you can tour the remains of the prison camp where, recently in our history, we put people who were too Ukrainian to be trusted to stay on their farms and milk their cows.

How well did all that go in protecting “freedom, liberty and democracy?”

And now there are people who want us to do this all over again, this time with Muslims. One such person wants to be president of the United States.

This is playing into the terrorists' game.

I don't know how one goes about eradicating mindless hate masquerading as pure faith. But I suspect massive bloodshed creating even more massive throngs of displaced refugees is not the best way to go about it.

As far back as the Crusades, those tactics have never worked.

So rather than acting on a knee-jerk desire for revenge, let's instruct our leaders to get the facts and think about what does work to eliminate the foundation on which this hate is based.

Hint: it's not religion.

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

Keeping local education alive in small communities like Benalto will take more than parent dedication

You have admire the dedication and drive of the group in Benalto that has been working so hard to keep the hamlet's K-to-6 school open. You also have to give credit to Chinook's Edge school division that runs the school, for their efforts over the past years to serve that community, despite falling enrolments.

Dedication and perseverance are a great starter for wonderful things that can change a town or a city. They're what make communities whole and worth living in. But there comes a point where resources need to match these great qualities.

Chinook's Edge serves about 11,000 students, a great proportion of them outside large urban centres. Their board and administrators see the stats every year — the general migration of young people to the cities, where the jobs and opportunities for raising families have moved.

In past decades, young people who chose to stay in the communities where they were raised were the fuel for the continued existence of vital civic amenities, like schools.

But when a certain critical mass is lost, when communities no longer have enough young families in them to maintain a school, hard decisions need to be made.

In Benalto's case, per-student funding for what eventually became a 22-student K-to-6 school rose to almost $16,000. The average cost that the school board administers ranges from around $7,000 to $9,000. The disparity could no longer be supported.

Enter the parents. Currently, there is an application before the province to grant a local non-profit group a licence for a charter school.

Reports have it there are 13 charter schools operating in the province, and they receive 70 per cent of the regular annual grant per student. They occupy 23 school buildings, 20 of which are owned by school districts in Edmonton and Calgary. Alberta is the only province in Canada that does this.

The non-profit groups must provide a program that meets the provincial curriculum for each level. They must pay their teachers (who must be Alberta Teachers Association certified, but who are not part part of the union), plus heating and maintenance and other costs.

Translation: there must eventually be tuition fees.

Right now, Benalto's parent group has 44 students pre-registered for Grades 1-6 from the community, plus another half-dozen ready for the kindergarten program. That's if education minister David Eggen agrees to grant a charter.

All of this is great. All of this shows the dedication communities have for their children's education.

All of this shows that for communities showing a loss of young families as a portion of their populations, costs to families will have to rise.

It is no secret that a lot of parents of public school kids gripe about school fees. Think about the costs about to fall on parents in small villages and hamlets, as an alternative to paying transportation costs to send their kids to school elsewhere. Not to mention the cost to the community of losing a school, which only accelerates the loss of young families.

Back in April, interim Tory leader Ric McIver proposed a motion that would have granted charter and private schools full per-student funding, plus the power to demand unlimited tuition fees.

Not bad for the leader of a party that preaches austerity.

Meanwhile, survey after survey shows strong public support for not publicly funding private schools with tax dollars — at all.

People ask: why do we take tax dollars out of the public system to fund elite schools in big cities?

Well, because regular schools in small communities need the help.

Apples and oranges? Sure. Alberta's two big cities house almost the entirety of Alberta's charter schools under a philosophy that parents deserve choice, not to support places like Benalto, struggling to keep a school of any kind at all.

Best of luck to Benalto as a whole. The dedication and passion of your people do you proud.

But sooner or later, these parents will likely be faced with the same questions as Chinook's Edge: how do you fund public-standard education in a school not big enough to maintain it?

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

Time for the feds to cede fuel tax powers to cities

On Friday, prime minister Justin Trudeau meets with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. A main topic for discussion is sure to be about where the first round of the $120 billion federal infrastructure grants will be spent over the next decade.

Canada's municipalities all have long lists of upgrades for existing roads and water lines, plus plans for a lot of new building that has languished on the books for a lot of years. All that's been missing is for either the provinces or the feds to turn on the taps for funding. That's because municipalities are restricted on how they can raise money to support the general health of the places where the vast majority of Canadians live.

Which may lead you to wonder — as it has occurred to most Canadian big-city mayors — why the other two levels of government are so loathe to give up their taxation powers and cede them to the cities where the people live, and where all their public services are located.

This week, a pair of federal watchdogs raised concerns that municipalities are not keeping up with their reporting duties to the federal government, telling them where their gas-tax refunds are going.

The federal Environment Commission works through the Auditor General's Office and its commissioner, Julie Gelfland, is complaining that Infrastructure Canada isn't getting its data on the state of city infrastructure spending in a timely way.

It's federal money, she says, so the feds need to know how it's being spent.

I say this shouldn't be federal money in the first place, and barring ensuring good accounting and the need to keep good statistics, it shouldn't be any of their business.

Currently, the federal government collects 10 cents on every litre of gasoline and four cents on every litre of diesel fuel we buy. Plus GST (or HST in provinces where that applies).

On the fuel tax alone, the take is about $5 billion a year. Of that, $2 billion a year goes to Canada's cities for infrastructure spending. As we all know, that's not nearly enough to keep our current streets, water and sewer lines and public transit in good repair across Canada, much less allow for growth.

In its first federal budget, the Trudeau government announced an ambitious spending program for municipalities of more than $120 billion over the next 10 years. But at least one province — Quebec — is complaining that bureaucratic delays have ensured that none of the money will be put into projects this year.

It's not just cities not getting their paperwork in order, it's the federal civil service dragging its heels, sending projects back to Square One with a variety of new conditions for cities to meet the needs of the program. At least from Quebec's perspective.

I say the feds should get out of the city-building business altogether.

Getting a program as big as this online in a year is pretty well impossible for a government. Especially a government facing deadlines to pass laws governing doctor-assisted deaths. Oh, and completely overhauling the electoral system in the meanwhile. Throw in Senate reform, if there's not enough else to do.

If we're going to lose a year getting the economic benefits of stimulus spending on much-needed city projects, far better to spend that year negotiating a transfer of taxation powers so that cities can plan their own futures with their own revenues.

If that power is to become (at least partially) fuel taxes, so be it. Anything's better than taxing the real estate value of our homes.

Right now, Vancouver, Victoria and Montreal have a city tax on fuel. In Vancouver, it's a whopping 11 cents a litre. No wonder the buses are so crowded. No wonder the routes are at five-minute intervals.

If we're afraid that allowing cities access to $5 billion more a year in tax revenue could lead to corruption, well, that fear has already been raised in the federal sphere with the rushed-forward stimulus spending plan. For their part, provincial governments have been no strangers to envelope-passing and bid-rigging on public contracts, either.

We'll need safeguards, and full reporting on spending could be part of that. If anything, the federal government is far better placed to be a watchdog than a sugar daddy. Especially if it's not their money the government is watching. Which it shouldn't be.

Canada isn't a small-town country anymore. We have cities with larger populations than some of our provinces. Mayors get more votes than premiers in some places.

So mayors — whose jurisdictions manage the delivery of all our tax-paid services — need the ability to do long-term planning, based on predictable budgets, not the largesse of federal election promises.

Time for the feds to give up the fuel tax, and cede that power to the cities where people pay them.

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