No freedom without information

Are Mongolia and Colombia more democratic than Canada? If you believe the equations of Canada's Centre for Law and Democracy, and the Eurozone's Access Info Europe, it's a question worth asking.

People equate democracy with freedom to vote and ability to hold governors accountable between elections.

If leaders are not accountable to the voters, then the equation is incomplete — and so is democracy.

Voters cannot hold leaders accountable if they do not have the information they need to ask the right questions of their government, or to assess the answers.

So, when Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy ranks Canada 55^th of 93 countries for upholding freedom of information, that's a pretty serious charge.

So serious, that the government's response to the centre's study was to deny that it's true — months after the Canadian Press asked if the government was even taking the study seriously.

Suzanne Legault is Canada's information commissioner. She said "the analysis that this group has done is going to be a really useful tool" in her own work.

But according to documents the Canadian Press received after their own Access to Information request, the reaction in the highest offices was somewhat different.

An internal memo last summer to Treasury Board President Tony Clement cites the report's "weaknesses," saying the methodology "does not allow for an accurate comparison of the openness of a society and of its government."

It took five months for CP to get that much. Part of the international study scored timeliness of responses to requests for information. Thirty days is the standard; longer than that is cited as failure.

But fair enough, let's look at other studies and other methodologies.

Newspapers Canada is a joint project of the Canadian Newspaper Association and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association.

They've been doing annual audits of information freedom in Canada since 2005. If they can't judge the comparative openness of Canadian society and its governments, nobody can.

Their study included the federal government, all Canadian provinces and major cities. It ranks those who actually believe people have a right to information, and those who merely pander slogans.

In their 2012 study, the federal government got an F. That means fewer than half of information requests made in the study were returned on time, and contained the actual information requested.

Did this study take into account Canadian societal values of openness?

Well, the provinces collectively got a C, indicating 62.5 to 75 per cent compliance with requests made. (Alberta received a B grade, 75.5 to 87.5 per cent compliance)

Canadian municipalities collectively got a B, while Calgary and Edmonton each picked up an A.

The study was done by having students mail identically-worded requests for information to each level of government (examples: How many cell phone contracts do you pay for? How big is your government's vehicle fleet? How much did the government pay for the minister to attend a conference?). They waited for responses,and graded them.

Is the federal Treasury Board, which oversees Suzanne Legault's commission, satisfied with that methodology, or is there a structural weakness here as well?

Go ahead and ask them. Just don't hold your breath waiting for an answer.

One of the barriers that could get a government downgraded in the study concerns whether a cost estimate comes before an answer to a question. 

The federal government rarely puts a cost burden on a request for information. So for them to get an F in that light requires rather active duplicity from a supposedly democratic government.

Alberta does charge for completing information requests, but even with that barrier in the way, its performance was much better than the federal government's.

One measure of accountability and democracy says that when government fears the people, rather than the other way round, you get far better government.

Two recent multi-year studies show our federal government isn't afraid of us at all.

Thanks to the efforts of watchdog groups like Newspapers Canada and the Centre for Law and Democracy, voters should know where our treasured democracy is being eroded.

And where we need to demand better performance.

They give awards for this?

Why on God's still-green Earth would anyone give Red Deer an award for its bike lanes pilot project? Because it's there, of course.

Last week, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities recognized the city for its work in the transportation category of its 2013 Sustainable Communities Awards in Windsor, Ont.

The award isn't for imposing bike lanes, but for looking at ways to plan for sustainable growth, in a city that's becoming more diverse as it grows.

Councillor Dianne Wyntjes was at Windsor with a delegation of councillors when the award was given. She noted the irony that a national body would approve of a pilot project in a town where disapproval of it is so high it threatens to overwhelm the next municipal election.

But there you are. Perhaps the federation doesn't understand the situation.

Or perhaps a lot of us don't.

(Some due disclosure: I'm president of the cyclists' association working with the city and other groups on the bike lanes pilot. I both drive a car and ride a bike to commute. A lot of the time, I just walk. And I pay my taxes.)

People need to recognize, as Wyntjes has, that what we're talking about here is a pilot project. It's a search for solutions. City managers will, in due course, change what needs to be changed, grow what needs to be grown and try new courses — all based on what we learn from this project, which ends this year.

The award, to my way of thinking, is for the search, not the solution. Because, obviously, we haven't found the solution yet.

But we do need to search, because Red Deer is changing, along with the whole world around us.

People everywhere are feeling a greater imperative to make city living less costly and less harmful to the environment. It's no longer cheaper to just ignore the natural processes we live under.

For instance, Red Deer currently has a long future operating our garbage landfill site. But not an infinite one. As our neighbouring towns well know, it's almost impossible to get a new landfill approved, once the old one is filled up. Expensive doesn't begin to describe the process.

We need to make our current landfill last as long as possible. So council decided to search for solutions, well in advance of need.

The Plasco proposal to turn garbage into fuel for electricity didn't work so well, did it? But it was worth including in the search.

Next, we're going to try making every residence buy at least three standardized garbage bins. One for organics that can be composted, one for recyclables and one for unrecyclable garbage that needs to go the landfill.

These bins are pretty large, but every residence will have to dedicate space to store them, and put them out appropriately on collection day.

Whoever has the contract to collect garbage will need to buy new trucks that can automatically pick up and dump the bins, without needing workers to do this by hand.

It's going to cost a lot of money. There will be problems going in. People will complain. Their complaints will need to be heard, and appropriate adaptations made.

But we won't just scrap the project, because if it works, it will save taxpayers millions in the long run, and make our city more sustainable for generations of healthy growth.

If we can't make this work, we'll have to try something else, because the current process simply cannot last.

I see Red Deer's award-winning pilot project much in the same light.

The growth experienced by vibrant cities around the world, in cold and warm climates, tells us there will be more diversity in choices made by people in how they move through their daily tasks. Two cars — or in some cases, even just one — for every household cannot last.

This diversity of choices requires planning in city infrastructure, before changes are needed, not after.

In many areas of the city, sharing the street will work fine. In others, sharing recreational trails can work — at least as a stopgap measure. In some places, safety will require that bikes and other traffic be separated, either by lines, by barriers, or by building new dedicated routes.

The city's transit system will need to integrate all these choices. It will cost a lot of money, not to mention causing distress and complaints.

What's the best way forward? Doing nothing is not a viable option.

So a lot of people from different walks of life are volunteering a lot of their time to work with the city to find solutions. Doing this seems so obvious a course, you have to wonder why anyone would give Red Deer a national award for it.

That's ironic, too.

A rolling head gathers no perspective

When you see something as incendiary as the provincial auditor general's report on the financial accountability of Alberta Health Services' officers and admin staff, you need to work to keep your perspective.

AHS is a $12-billion-a-year operation. It employs about 100,000 people. When all that $12 billion is tax money, it's almost impossible to totally prevent some misuse of funds.

When that $12 billion has been collected and spent by a government that hasn't lost an election since wide plaid pants, platform shoes and huge hair were standard office attire — for men — it's almost impossible to prevent a sense of entitlement in the top levels of its bureaucracy.

So when auditor general Merwan Saher tells us that one or two per cent of expense claims of AHS staff were out of line, perspective might tell us that's an almost acceptable margin of error.

But that just shows why keeping perspective takes work. That margin of error involved more than $100 million, in just over one year.

You can see why AHS administrators in Edmonton might wish to fly to Calgary for a meeting, and then fly back the same day, for an average cost of about $460. That's cheaper than driving, when you consider the cost of time lost in travel, and the cost of an overnight stay in a hotel.

That's the perspective view. But $1,200? Who approved this?

There are a lot of other costly errors in the margins that Saher discovered, but rather than list them again, let's apply perspectives that are not in Saher's report.

We already know the Alberta budget is in for a squeeze. We already know that people under the care of AHS are going to see thinner staffing levels. Some pencil-pusher is going to count how many latex gloves are being used, how many adult diapers are distributed, in every one of hundreds of supply closets in the province.

That's called accountability, and AHS front line staff are going to get a double-dose of it, beginning next March, when the budget comes down. We know that.

But if top brass needs a plush ride to a conference with politicos, they need only pick up the phone. It's all approved. Every time. Until they get caught. And even then, standard practice is only an insincere apology away.

Saher's report doesn't cover that perspective. But ours should.

Here's the perspective from another angle. Hundreds of millions of service dollars are provided by AHS to non-profits every year.

You want accountability? They get it in spades. Non-profits that do government contract work must first submit audited statements every year to their membership. They also complete complex annual reports to the federal government, in order to keep their charitable status.

If the non-profit accepts funding from a government agency — the lottery board, for instance — there's a whole other set of reporting rules. Add yet another audited statement for other funding agencies, such as United Way or the local Community Foundation.

Everyone wants to be assured their funding is 100-per-cent accountable, to be used only for their intended programs, and not for limousine rides or NHL hockey tickets.

The cost of all this reporting can eat up huge portions of a non-profit's non-funded revenue, because no outside funder wants their money to go to audits that cost thousands of dollars a year. Finding an auditor willing to do annual reports for a small non-profit is next to impossible — assuming the group could even afford it.

I know from experience what that's like. It's like volunteering to have your butt pulled through a gun barrel backwards, and examined.

Non-profits have to raise compliance and reporting cash themselves, and they squeeze salaries and cut every corner imaginable to do it.

Conference expenses, where staff could learn best practices and share information, are cut entirely.

Sometimes, even safety measures are paid for out of other budgets, because contract funders like AHS won't cover them. Remember, non-profits work with fragile and unpredictable clients — we've had a case worker killed by a person under care in this region.

So when Alberta's auditor general tells us that AHS administrators do not comply with the same accountability rules they demand of every front-line office in the province, and every non-profit service provider they contract, that's an incendiary report.

What's the perspective of a head that's rolling?

Pennies and profits

On Tuesday, I stopped in at a local grocery store to pick up a few things. The tab was small, so I paid with cash.

Usually when I do this, I like to toss some of the small change in my pocket into the charity can at the checkout counter. Even when I pay with plastic, if I have small stuff in my pocket, a few coins generally go into the can.

This time, however, there wasn't any small change involved in the transaction (or in my pocket), and although a light did go on in my head as to a discrepancy between the price on the till screen, and the change I got, it took a few moments for the light to get bright enough for me to notice it.

I had been overpaid in change. By one cent.

Not that I whisked to the parking lot yelling: “Start the car! Start the car!” I was by myself, and doing so would have been ridiculous. Besides, most of the time, I like to walk on my grocery errands. But on the way home, the light did not dim.

I had arrived on a sure-fire method of beating The Man on the disappearance of the penny, which began Monday. If the final price on the till tape ends with 1, 2, 6 or 7, I would pay with cash, because the price would be rounded down to the lower nickel. If the tag registers with 3, 4, 8 or 9 as the final digit, I would pay with plastic, in the exact amount, thus avoiding the rounding up.

You've gotta be sharp to stay ahead of The Man. Especially when pennies are involved.

Because, even though Canada will no longer be minting pennies, and will gradually take them out circulation, percentage points matter.

Paul Hunt is the president of Pricing Solutions. He's an international consultant and strategist advising clients on how to price their products in the marketplace.

An essay he wrote, back when the demise of the Canadian penny was first announced, says even a one per cent change in price makes a 12.5 per cent difference to the seller's bottom line. Don't ask me how, I'm no expert on this, but I suspect accountants are involved.

Canada has adopted the “Swedish rounding” method for dealing with cash transactions where there is no penny. But it's the Australians who have made the method famous.

In the 20 years Australians have had dealing in the matter, Hunt noticed a few lessons to be learned.

At first, instead of pricing something — a latte, for instance — at $3.99, retailers lowered the price to $3.95. The didn't want to suffer the “rounding up” effect that might hurt sales. But the one-per-cent/12.5-per-cent effect was brutalizing their profits.

So in Australia, you may find lattes and other items back at $3.99, and neither sales nor consumers have suffered from it.

To beat the system, consumers would need to order lattes in groups of three. The $11.97 price would be rounded down to $11.95, and two of the group would save a penny. (Or someone would have to drink more lattes than is healthy.)

It's estimated that Canada has about 6 billion pennies in circulation. It's going to cost taxpayers about $7.3 million a year to de-circulate them for six years. That's a net cost, over the annual revenue realized from recycling the copper and zinc in the coins.

But there is also the $11 million a year that taxpayers save by not having to mint coins that mostly end up in little jars in your bedroom, instead of going back into circulation. It's called hoarding, and it's one reason why Canada needed 6 billion pennies in the system.

The hoards are about to be emptied, and many charities are already at work to take advantage. Six billion pennies comes to $60 million in currency — or $750 million, if accountants are involved.

Even a small percentage of that would be a boon to a lot of charities.

So if you're looking at the hoard in your bedroom, consider dumping it on a charity of your choice. It's money you've already written off in your mental accounting, so you won't miss it.

In future, you can keep a steely eye to the bottom line and pay with cash 40 per cent of the time, and with plastic 40 per cent of the time. The 20 per cent is cash-neutral.

And take your time walking your groceries home. That saves pennies, too.

No poverty of statistics

On Saturday, it became widely known that Alberta Human Services had released its report, following a province-wide consultation on poverty. By Monday, the government site hosting the report, titled Albertans' Perspectives for a Social Policy Framework, had gone down. 

When I called the department, I was assured IT staff would be dispatched to get it running again.

We are told the report is groundbreaking in scope, outlining the views of 14,000 people who took part in creating it, plus another 350 people who contributed views on poverty in the Aboriginal population.

Without being able to immediately quote the report directly, it is still commendable the province undertook to consult people in what is called Canada's richest province. Because by no means is the wealth of this province felt by everyone in it.

Thus, one of the reported strategies contained in the report, listed as “levelling the playing field” should be of interest to all of us.

The most recent Vital Signs report for Red Deer listed poverty, housing and hunger as the Number One top-of-mind issue for the city. Nearly one in five workers in Red Deer earns less than $12 an hour.

Considering Alberta's higher cost of housing, it follows that a lot of families are spending a higher portion of income on housing, leading to cutbacks in other areas. This affects the federal Low Income Cutoff (LICO) rates, which counts families whose regular daily expenses are fully taken to simply get by month-to-month.

Families with children and older people on fixed incomes will always feel this first. Vital Signs suggests about 17 per cent of Red Deer families with children live below the LICO standard. The national LICO average for all families is 10 per cent, according to the Conference Board of Canada. That means families with children are almost doubly represented among the ranks of the poor in Red Deer.

A recent study by Edmonton's Social Planning Council (which, thankfully, is available online) says poverty rates for families with children in Alberta increased 40 per cent in the last recession.

Red Deer had its representatives in the provincial consultation, but this was by no means the only regional effort into reducing poverty.

Just a couple weeks ago, Red Deer joined a national effort at poverty reduction. On Jan. 24, the Central Alberta Poverty Reduction Alliance (CAPRA) launched Red Deer as a member of Vibrant Communities Canada: Cities Reducing Poverty. That national association shares information and strategies, says a press report, “to reduce poverty through a systemic and universal approach.”

Whatever that means. This leads to my main complaint about these kinds of initiatives.

Lord knows, I've joined my share of them in the past as well. But if all we get from all the hard work CAPRA will put into its mandate; for all the years of study and investment from the Red Deer Community Foundation to create the annual Vital Signs reports, if all we get from this is more strategies and more statistics, nothing will be accomplished.

What's the distance between the Alberta human services department (and minister Dave Hancock) and the finance department (with minister Doug Horner)?

Much too distant, I fear, for the strategies in the province's new social policy framework to gain any real notice. Especially if the strategy is not “Conservative.”

Let us suggest that one effective way to reduce poverty in Canada's richest province would be to reduce the nation's highest provincial gap between rich and poor. To "level the playing field." 

If that is so, why does Alberta tax its lowest income bracket higher than most all other provinces in Canada?

Alberta has the lowest income tax rates in the industrialized world, but it's most effective only at the top income scale. The poor in Alberta pay more income taxes than the poor in Ontario, for instance.

Will that information leap the gap between the human services and finance departments? Sorry, not this year. We'll work on accessibility, dignity and inclusivity instead. We will strategize in systemic and universal ways.

The greatest product of the collision between government and poverty has been statistics. Nobody is ever short of statistics. Or strategies.

Or reports, languishing in the ether of a failed government web site.

The problem for all taxpayers, as noted in all the reports, is that failing to act is far more costly than acting, even if the action ends up being less than was hoped.

Power purchasing change is just more hypocrisy

Energy minister Ken Hughes' announcement of changes to electricity purchasing rules, as if it were some kind of benefit to consumers, is simply another example of government saying one thing, while doing something else.

Yes, it is entirely possible that extending the forward-buying powers of power utilities for four months, instead of the current six weeks, will result in some savings in the cost of power.

But those savings will be so small that very few of us will be able to see the change on our monthly bills. Far more likely, the savings will just disappear into the bottom line of the utilities.

More, if consumers could actually realize a drop in price, I doubt a whole lot of us could find the appropriate numbers on their statements to prove how many pennies were saved over the period of a month by this announcement.

The critics are right about Alberta's foray into deregulation of electricity; the government just doesn't get it.

Nobody should need an economics degree and maintain a constantly-updated spreadsheet program to make the comparisons that will determine if they're getting a fair deal in Alberta's so-called free market in power. Buying power is not like going to the grocery store and comparing the cost per hundred grams of the various sizes of canned beans.

You can almost see Hughes throwing back his hands and rolling his eyes, when he's asked why so few Albertans lock their power rates into long term contracts with suppliers. Why do the majority of Albertans — me included — opt instead for the floating rate?

The answer is simple. We don't have any data presented in an understandable form that would show how locking in is a good idea for anyone other than the utility. The utilities simply won't provide it. Stemming from that is the perfectly understandable response of widespread consumer distrust of the utilities.

In our household, we've tried the long-term fixed rate option and the floating rate option, with three different providers over the years. In our experience, there is no difference between them. The bills only go up over time.

No matter how diligent you are in unplugging things that are not used, if you switch to more efficient lighting and run around turning things off all day long, there is no noticeable savings in the monthly bill. You may feel better about your carbon footprint for your effort, but there is no financial reward to a residential customer for conserving power.

Simply put, if everyone in Red Deer was as much a cheapskate as me, the drop in demand would have absolutely no effect on the cost of supply. And even if it did, you would notice no more money in your pocket at the end of the month for your diligence.

The cost of the power is such a small portion if your monthly bill, you would need to severely crimp your lifestyle for conservation to have a noticeable effect.

Demand — therefore presumably (laughably?) price — is driven by industrial consumers, not by people in their homes who only use their clothes dryers in the middle of the night.

That's how power deregulation in Alberta has evolved, and neither forward buying by utilities, nor university-level price comparisons of delivery options will save you the price of a cup of coffee per month.

When ranting about free markets and deregulation of power, one must also acknowledge that under Alberta's system, the total cost is more honestly expressed. It's more costly, but it is more honest.

In Saskatchewan, for instance, the whole system is owned by SaskPower. The province (that is, the taxpayers) own the generators, the power lines, the power meters and the whole billing system.

Customers there don't fully know what portion of their bill is due to costs of production, infrastructure, delivery and administration. More than likely, parts of some of these costs are contained in the general tax system. Pension costs for retired SaskPower employees comes to mind, as one small example.

Therefore, monthly bills will be lower — consumers are mostly likely paying for some of it elsewhere in the provincial budget. 

But we pay through the tax system, too. The investors in private power generators, and the private builders of power lines get significant grant and tax support from taxpayers. That, plus a guaranteed minimum rate of return, with profits built into the power rates, access fees, admin fees and every other confusing thing you see on your bill.

Tory ideology says that private industry is always better — at everything. The profit motive always makes products and services more efficient and cheaper for the consumer, than, say, the same services provided in Saskatchewan by the government.

You'll just never see it on your power bill. Ken Hughes should stop pretending otherwise — it's embarrasing. 

What's in a royalty?

Back in the last provincial election campaign, newly-chosen Progressive Conservative Party leader Alison Redford was in the fight of her party's life. A whole lot of people didn't think the Tories would actually receive its usual coronation.

That meant Redford had to spend time with the lowest of political life forms — that being newspaper editorial boards in small centres. I've been doing this job for a long time, and I can't remember a sitting (or even campaigning) premier ever wasting an hour with the likes of me.

That' s one whole hour she will never get back, and one which I will not likely forget.

Details on what was said are muddled by poor memory and worse archiving of interview notes, but one detail does stand out, because I challenged her on it. She said then that Alberta was losing more than $100 million a month of potential energy revenue, due to a lack of pipeline capacity.

I was wondering if I heard her correctly, so I asked her to say it again. Redford affirmed that, yes, that was what she said, and her press secretary promised to get back to me with exact figures, if I wanted them.

Over a hundred million a month. And today, that adds up to about $6 billion annually in provincial revenue that could have been collected if Alberta's oil sands could recover that “price bubble” the premier referred to last week.

That's the discount on oil sands bitumen below the benchmark West Texas Intermediate price of oil. The final figures for 2012 have just been posted, and the WTI, averaged for all of 2012, was $95.07. The last budget was based on a 12-month average of $99.25.

The cost of the “bubble” is beyond my capacity to guess because it changes every day, but Alberta finance minister Doug Horner recently told the Calgary Chamber of Commerce it has reached as high as $47 a barrel.

The average discount is reported to have been about $10 more than what the government had budgeted for last year, which was just under a $16-per-barrel discount.

That's the difference between WTI and the real price of Alberta bitumen. The concern for the province is that we (the resource owners) only get royalties on the bitumen price. Even though nobody buys bitumen — nobody can, it won't flow through a pipe.

In fact, hardly anybody buys the diluted bitumen that is proposed to flow through the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast and then to China. Even that is too crude a product for buyers — and is considered too costly to transport profitably.

Right now, there is no such thing as a major pipeline carrying dilbit, or diluted bitumen, much less a double pipeline carrying the diluent back to the source, like Northern Gateway is supposed to be.

What the pipelines are carrying today is semi-processed West Canadian Select , a partially upgraded synthetic crude that operators like Syncrude or Alsands can almost make to order.

The differential on that is less, but Alberta still only gets royalties based on the price of raw, dry bitumen that nobody buys.

Even at that, bitumen royalties accounted for fully 10 per cent of all provincial revenue in the budget year 2010-2011. At this time last year, prognosticators were prognosticating that bitumen royalties would cover 20 per cent of all government revenues by 2014-2015.

These days, bitumen is worth about $50 a barrel, and we owners get something like 4.7 per cent of that, on projects that have not yet fully recovered their cost. At $50 a barrel, minus royalties and production costs, it takes a long time for a multi-billion-dollar mining and upgrading operation to pay for itself.

For comparison, when Peter Lougheed first created the Heritage Fund, he expected Albertans to take a royalty rate of about 35 per cent.

But don't feel too angry at those foreign owners who are still realizing good profit on roughly 1.85 million barrels a day. Considering all of Canada's big pension plan investors, chances are good that most every Canadian with an RSP portfolio has a piece of that action.

The big corporate decisions may be made by foreign boards, but most of the money still stays here, and governments in every province tax it.

So what's with the panic over the $6 billion “lost” revenue, and the hard decisions said to come in the budget? Horner and Redford have both been in government long enough to know about price cycles.

What's with the panic is that through cycle after cycle, the government has every time failed to save more than pocket change in the good times. We've eaten all the returns of the Heritage Fund, and consumed most of the money in the Sustainability Fund that replaced it.

We have nothing, other than a lack of a sales tax, to show for it — and the rich benefit from that most of all.

While we take the long view and wait for the cycle to turn yet one more time, just watch the Tories recycle old promises to be prudent with your money — and your share of the energy royalties.