Do you have to believe in evolution to run for office?

Conservative MP for Nanaimo-Alberni — James Lunney — does not believe in evolution. In fact, he says any scientist who does “has already abandoned the foundation of science.”

Evolution is a theory, he says. Just like . . . I don't know . . . gravity. We can prove objectively through experimentation that they work, but we only observe their effects, not their inner workings or origins.

So until we solve Einstein's quest and complete the Grand Unification Theory of Everything, well, everything's still fundamentally unproven.

So just don't call evolution fact, Lunney says. And the same goes for what we know about climate change and the link between vaccines and autism, he says.

So how do you argue with a guy with his BSc and Doctor of Chiropractic about what really constitutes the fundamentals of science? Answer: you don't.

At least I won't. I belonged for years to a church whose pastor taught that the world was created in six 24-hour days, complete with the fossil record and the carbon-dating record already installed. We had a member who said you could count the days since creation in scripture, and find the date when the sun stood still for one day so the children of Israel could win an important battle.

You don't argue with them, either. In this world, there are no such arguments that can be less relevant.

My question is: does holding these beliefs disqualify anyone from holding public office in a secular society whose understanding of the “fundamentals of science” is so fundamentally different from what I've just described?

Not in parts of Alberta, nor in B.C.s Bible Belt. But I do suggest getting elected publicly proclaiming these beliefs on Twitter should disqualify a representative from ever holding decision-making power in education, health care or the environment.

All the party leaders know this. So why even bother to drag these questions back into the public sphere? Because they have.

In Ontario, the Liberal government is moving forward a new public education curriculum, which includes a new take on sex ed. The Conservative opposition, obviously, must oppose this. Things get uncharitable.

The Liberal education minister Liz Sandals gets prodded to respond to something, and uses a well-worn arguing technique — that of taking the other person's viewpoint to some illogical extreme.

If parental or local board opting out of the new sex ed program was to be allowed, she said, well, maybe some future PC government might opt out of teaching evolution.

“Not a bad idea,” retorted her heckler, Tory MPP Rick Nicholls, thereby ensuring that almost nothing to be said thereafter could ever be constructive.

His remarks were quickly disowned by interim party leader Jim Wilson, who added this kind of stuff “obviously didn't help our position.”

Nicholls found himself retreating from a media lake of fire, taking the usual refuge in saying his views on the reality evolution are purely a personal stance, not party policy. Stories don't record whether anyone asked if he thinks he'd been elected to take stands on public policy based on personal views, the views of his electorate, or party policy.

But clearly, Nicholls needed a friend — and apparently wasn't finding too many among his Ontario colleagues in the middle of a tense debate on sex ed curriculum.

So, from way out in B.C. (or maybe even Ottawa), Lunney steps up in his Twitter account. And the Twitter posts reveal someone who's been near this lake before, and did not flinch.

You can research the back-and-forth of it yourself. Again, I assert the argument is not relevant in any way to who we are and how we should live and treat other people.

What's relevant is our belief as Canadians regarding how our elected representatives should represent us.

We can have elected reps of every stripe — a Catholic prime minister ready to risk excommunication for legalizing same-sex marriage; a Muslim mayor in a cowboy hat, serving food at the Calgary Stampede I'm not sure a lot of Muslims would want to touch; a devoutly conservative protestant prime minister who will not allow same-sex marriage or abortion law back into the public debate.

This is behaviour that makes me proud to be Canadian. We have seen leaders who act like their neighbours' beliefs or sensitivities outrank their own.

Holding “lake of fire” views in any direction does not disqualify you to run for office. But Canada does hew to the centre. The centre has shifted in our history, but it has always held.

By the way, Lunney says he's not running again in this fall's election. That might explain the Twitter campaign that will distract us all from Ontario MPP Rick Nicholls's little problem.

A tax hike by any other name

Back in 2009 then-premier Ed Stelmach made good on an election promise to kill the Alberta health care premium. When he did it, the saving to Albertans was the equivalent of a 12-per-cent cut in income taxes.

With a big energy-based revenue problem on his hands, and having already ruled out a sales tax, or any increases in income taxes and corporate taxes, there's not much revenue room to make a significant move on the revenue side of his next budget. Royalty fees are so far off the table as to never be mentioned.

But dress up a huge spike in income taxes as a health care premium, and you're talking significant dollars.

Finance minister Robin Campbell is tickled pink with the idea. “I'm keen on it,” he told reporters after a speech Wednesday to the Chamber of Commerce in Chestemere.

Both he and premier JimPrentice seem convinced that a steep hike in taxes via health care premiums are the preferred option of Albertans for the next difficult budget. In fact, it's a done deal.

“It would be based on per-person,” said Campbell. “I'm just not sure yet how we'll bring it in.”

That sounds like a bit more than a Klein-era trial balloon, don't you think?

Health care premiums are just another flat tax. If you're making six figures, what's $1,000 per year? You can live with it. But if you're the lone breadwinner with a family, a per-person health premium could see an average wage earner missing mortgage payments.

Last time out, the health premium experiment turned out to be a total joke. There was almost zero revenue for the government, because the feds ruled the fees to be a violation of Medicare rules, and they cut provincial tax transfers by an equivalent amount — for years.

In fact, doing so cost us billions, because those transfers were Alberta federal income taxes withheld, so for us to get health care, we had to pay twice.

A lot of people couldn't (or simply wouldn't) pay. If you believe the Liberal critics, some were chased by bill collectors. Then came the ethical choices health care providers needed to make when sick people came to their doors.

Do you provide health care to someone whose premiums aren't up to date? Do you let them die, in the same way some U.S. municipalities let peoples' homes burn down, if they haven't paid their fire protection premiums? Are there health premiums, but only if you can force people to pay them at the hospital door?

Why is Jim Prentice, the governor of the lowest-taxed, highest per-capita spending regime in the developed world, so afraid of charging a reasonable tax rate for a reasonable program of government services?

Of course, what's “reasonable” is a fluid term. By Alberta Tory standards, all of the U.S. and all of Canada are “unreasonable” in what their people pay, for what they get in stable government services.

Why make the tax increase specific to health care? Health care is the largest (and rising) portfolio in the province’s program budget. So maybe it makes sense that tax increases be specific to the most expensive services government provides.

But that would mean some steep cuts in all other aspects of Alberta's social safety net, while the big shots in Alberta Health Services don't have to face the same hard decisions.

I say if my taxes are going up (big time) for only one program, I want to see some performance guarantees. Actionable guarantees.

Nobody likes to read or hear about someone else's health complaints, but I've been bumped from non-elective surgery three times in the last month. I'm sure I'm not the only person who can say this.

How many Albertans are walking around with a potential cancer inside them, who get booked for surgery over and over again, only to be sent home from the hospital because the surgery rooms ran out of time and need to close for the day? Quite a few, I'll bet.

Now, raise my taxes 10 or 12 per cent — specifically for health care — and ask me to quietly accept it. No sale.

That's why a sales tax makes more sense. We know everyone else in the world accepts and pays it, and they seem to live just fine. We know it's a steady, stable revenue stream that exists outside the energy price cycle. And it's a tax the rich actually pay.

A “reasonable” tax regime and “reasonable” expectations of what those taxes should provide us, is a better way forward than keeping a flat income tax with another flat health care tax plopped on top it.

People keep saying Jim Prentice is the steady hand on the tiller that Alberta needs. What I see is a guy veering all over the place in an effort to avoid the decisions a reasonable leader needs to make.

The Thought Police are among us, and Stephen Harper is leading their charge

Our weekend news feeds were supposed to be distracted by other things: how to find love on Valentine's Day; how people in Eastern North America were supposed to find their neighbours buried under two meters of snow; how to spend quality time with family on the long weekend, with our February snow melting all around us.

Instead, we were instructed to watch what we say in front of the television.

Who, in their right minds, would buy a TV set that can listen in to your private conversations, and have them transcribed by software owned by an unknown third party?

Canadians, apparently.

So-called 'smart televisions' have a microphone either built into the screen itself, or onto the remote control, theoretically so that couch-potato owners would not even need to exercise their thumbs to raise the volume, change the channel, or find another reality show on cable. Just continue reclining and say: “More Honey Boo Boo!” What could be more convenient?

But it's still early years for voice-recognition technology, so researchers need to listen in on what people actually say, so the algorithms can learn to deduce what you mean. Maybe you thought you said “Duck Dynasty” but what came out was “Overthrow the government!”

That, we are told, is why groups like Nuance Communications Inc. needs to hear what Canadians say when the wrong team scores a goal in a hockey game. Hint: if you wouldn't say it in front of your mother, why say it in front of a digital eavesdropper?

The TV people say they just want to serve us better. They will not be coaxed or coerced by any government's secret police into passing these conversations along to their transcribers, to be filtered through their algorithms.

Nor can these devices be hacked. Please, don't worry your little head about that. Couldn't happen. The technology may be in its infant days, but it's rock solid, foolproof. 

Just the same, best never to say your credit card number out loud.

Samsung is one manufacturer of such technology, LG is another. Both companies were put on the media defensive over the weekend when people realized the Orwellian potential of such a device.

Myself, I wonder if Prime Minister Stephen Harper has. Giving CSIS access to remote-control of the microphone switch in such a TV would be right up the dark alley his Bill C-51 would create.

That was another thing we weren't supposed to be concerned about over the weekend.

According to the news coverage, Bill C-51 effectively frees CSIS, the subterranean arm of the RCMP, from official government oversight.

They will be allowed to arrest you and hold you without having to charge you with anything. They will be able to secretly monitor not only your crazy blog, but lthey can isten in on your phone calls and read your e-mails.

In other words, Bill C-51 will create Canada's version of the KGB.

That's all to protect us, says Harper. If not communists, there are ISIS extremists hiding under our beds, and our national security agency needs the tools to find them.

The trouble, of course, is that these very tools undermine the same freedoms the terrorists would destroy in all the places they control (not that any of the countries ISIS wants to overthrow are all that free right now). But a few nut-case attacks here and there in truly free countries like ours can create conditions where people will give up their freedoms willingly.

Seems to already have happened.

With Bill C-51, we will have two enemies, not one. And both want the power to control what we think and what we say.

I neither tweet nor facebook. A while back, I joined LinkedIn in order to contact someone to arrange an interview, and now I can't get out of it. People keep endorsing me, and I don't know for what.

My aversion to social media really hurts my blog status, but there you are. If you can't even get your family to follow you online, what's the use? I'm grateful if anyone pays attention to my screed, but maybe if the federal Tories and the RCMP signed up as followers, I could get some serious stats.

But I will throw my television onto the city's electronic waste pile before I allow it to monitor my basement rants. And I will put an election sign on my yard (if my wife agrees) for any candidate in the next election who promises to undo the effects of Bill C-51.

ISIS wants to control what you are allowed to say, and even your very thoughts. Apparently, so does Stephen Harper.

The Thought Police are here, and until they arrest me, I won't even know if they're listening. And while CSIS is (or isn't) listening, I'm sure the prime minister isn't, either.

A competent government would already have an assisted-suicide law in the works

Of course I have no insider's access, and I do not know what is said in cabinet meetings, but I suspect the Harper government already has a team of civil servants drafting a law to allow suffering and dying patients to request the help of a doctor to ease and aid their death.

A competent government would not be caught flat-footed by something like last week's Supreme Court decision which unanimously told the feds they have one year to put such a law into the books.

That's what a civil service is for in a modern democracy.

Aside from tweaking the wording to reflect the court ruling, the only delay for introducing such a law would be politics.

But we should not discount the politics in a decision like this one.

For the nation, it might be better to delay introducing a bill on doctor-assisted suicide until after the federal election, expected in October. A new government, with a new mandate, could summon the civil servants to produce their draft law, tweak it again, and bring it to Parliament.

If it requires too much courage on the part of federal candidates to discuss the issue on the campaign trail, Harper can remove that from the campaign by introducing the law now, pushing it through to the Senate, before dissolving Parliament this summer.

In fact, a draft of such a bill does already exist. Tory MP Steven Fletcher has introduced a private member's bill that would allow assisted suicide for some individuals. And I do not doubt his bill has received assistance — with the knowledge and quiet approval of cabinet — from the civil service in its formation.

But again, political realities must be acknowledged.

About three quarters of Canadians polled by Ipsos recently supported such a law, and 84 per cent of them agreed with the statement: “a doctor should be able to help someone end their life, if the person is a competent adult who is terminally ill, suffering unbearably and repeatedly asks to die.”

Even so, the concerns of the minority need to be heard and addressed.

One such group would be people with disabilities. Another group would be people in palliative care, now and in the future.

Heidi Janz sits on the Bioethics Committee of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. Born with cerebral palsy and confined to a wheelchair, she wrote that resources for high-needs disabled people are too slim to justify a law simply making it easier for them to die.

She says between 16 and 30 per cent of Canadians have access to palliative care, but in the disabled community it's closer to five to 10 per cent.

“We won't do anything to help you LIVE,” she wrote in an email to CBC in an online discussion of the Supreme Court case, “but now, we're prepared to hasten your death.”

Those are precisely the concerns that politics are meant to address.

Dr. James Downar, a physician with Dying with Dignity — which commissioned the Ipsos poll — says the idea that this ruling will become a slippery slope into devaluing the lives of vulnerable people, has not occurred in the jurisdictions that already allow doctor-assisted suicide.

Rather the opposite, he says. The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and others are world leaders in providing palliative care for very sick people who want to live.

The option, the legal choice that people have in those countries, has led to improvements in palliative care, Dr. Downar claims.

We should have no doubt that our government knows these things, and has found models of compassionate policy that can be copied into Canadian law. Laws that I suspect already exist in draft form on health minister Rona Ambrose's desk.

They would simply be waiting for final tweaks of wording and political timing for it to be introduced.

The Supreme Court has set a deadline, and government would not wish to risk being in contempt of court. A strong majority of support and opinion on this subject already seems to exist in the electorate.

Watch, then, how this — or the next — Canadian government approaches us with material any competent government would already have in hand.

What have governments done for our cities recently?

The 2015 winter conference of Canada's premiers passed last week. Alberta premier Jim Prentice did not attend; he was otherwise engaged with an oil price crisis and an election date to call.

Prime minister Stephen Harper likewise did not attend. He simply does not engage, not with premiers.

Off the top of my head, I can't recall a single headline or major issue being raised from this conference — and I was watching (sort of).

No matter. The really important national conference of Canada's political leaders is set to take place in Toronto this week. And this group isn't even fully recognized in our constitution.

The political leaders who most come in contact with our daily lives are our city mayors. Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi is the one most often quoted, and he puts the importance of Canada's cities this way: if the feds make a major decision, most Canadians will hear about in three weeks; if it's made by a province, you'll know it in three days. When a major decision is made in a city, Nenshi says most people will know about it in three hours.

The Toronto conference is for the top 22 largest Canadian cities. If you go by the 2011 census, the cutoff is Kitchener, population 220,000 at the time. Together, these 22 cities contain almost half of Canada's total population.

An aside: for the record, Red Deer was No. 57 in 2011. And here's something I'll bet most Albertans don't know (and I'm certain most MPs in Ottawa, nor most of the federal cabinet): in the 2011 census, Calgary was Canada's third largest city. Edmonton was No. 5. Vancouver, which everyone talks about as a major city right after Toronto and Montreal, was No. 8.

The issues these cities face affect more people, in a more direct and daily way, than the issues handled by the feds or the provincial governments.

Do you really care if a barrel of oil or the Canadian dollar is up or down a point or two today? Or do you care that you can get to work on time, that your family is safe and that when you open the tap, clean water comes out of it?

Far more than the federal government, far more than any provincial government, the cities are united by the common issues they face.

Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail ran an excellent story quoting several Canadian mayors on a short range of issues. What impressed me about their comments was their common cause.

What do the mayors of Canada's largest cities fret most over? Infrastructure costs, with transportation and transit topping the list. Housing problems seem follow closely after that.

If people cannot move easily in their cities, they quickly make their city councils very unhappy. Here's one reason: in a U.S. report I read, for cities that have public transit, cycling and walking fully integrated, about nine per cent of annual household expenses go to transportation. In cities that do not, just moving around can consume up to 25 per cent of average household costs.

The feds worry about terrorists in Afghanistan or whereever. The provinces worry about their regional economies. City governments worry if their people are unhappy. Unhappy cities don't grow, and if they don't grow, they shrivel.

Fixing the structural causes of people's unhappiness in cities take money. The cumulative wish lists of Canada's mayors for upgrading transportation and mass transit is many tens of billions of dollars.

But our Canadian Constitution does not give cities the power to raise money for these projects — even if by doing so, they could save their residents 10 per cent or more on their yearly household expenses. Taxing the value of real estate in their borders is about all the revenue power cities have, and it's by no means enough.

So they have to get that money as tax transfers from the agencies that have the power to raise it: the feds and the provinces. It's supposed to be our money, for our benefit anyway, isn't it?

But from the article I read, contact between mayors and federal decision makers looks pretty thin. Only Toronto mayor John Tory — a former head of Ontario's PC Party — seems to claim regular conversation with a wide number of Ottawa decision makers.

Nenshi reported his personal contact with the prime minister happened at the last Calgary Stampede pancake breakfast: hi, and bye.

The vast majority of Canadians live urban lives today. In Alberta, all of our major cities rank in the top 100 in Canada (Grande Prairie being the smallest at No. 91 in the 2011 census).

Politicians should forget trying to define who's middle class. Define the needs of what makes Canadians happy in cities, and you'll win their votes.

In Alberta, we will have both a provincial and federal election this year. For all the money we city-dwelling taxpayers send these governments, what have they done for us recently?

For Alberta, and for Mary Ann Jablonski, the future is a clean slate

Last August, when he was still an outsider wanting to get inside, Jim Prentice proposed a three-term limit for provincial MLAs. Now that he's premier, that hasn't been so much on the radar, much less the agenda.

But MLAs in all three major parties in our province have been doing a lot of that work for him. In the next provincial election, not one of the current party leaders will have fought a provincial campaign before, not as leader.

Rachel Notley, leader of the NDP will be the senior statesperson in the next election — and she has only been in leading the NDP since last Oct. 18.

“Officially,” Prentice has had premier-like status since winning the party leadership last Sept. 15, but he gained fully-elected status in a by-election Oct. 27, nine days after Notley. That's if you're in the mood to split hairs.

Wildrose has an interim leader, Heather Forsyth, in office since just before last Christmas. That Christmas horribilus saw the mass defection of Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, along with eight other Wildrose representatives, to the Tories.

And now, the Liberal Party of Alberta is also officially leaderless. Sherman could have held senior status in the next election, coming to the leadership wa-a-y back on Sept. 12, 2011.

But he announced Monday that he was stepping down, following a decision he made “walking a beach.” The usual reasons — a new direction, spending time with family, etc. — were given.

The cumulative result is as clean a slate as this province has ever had electorally. There are fewer incumbents in high office known to be running today than I can remember in all my years of watching politics.

Last August, while Prentice was promising things that only $100 oil could provide, the Calgary Herald ran a list of 23 Alberta MLAs who would have been in their last term of office, had the three-term rule been in force then. (For the record, in case you need to know, there is no three-term limit now.)

That list included Forsyth, who was then serving her sixth term as an MLA, albeit her first term as a member of the Wildrose.

That list also included Red Deer North MLA Mary Ann Jablonski, who is currently in her fifth term. Jablonski has also announced she would not be running in the next election — a decision that will not come as a surprise to the people who know her well.

I did not like the tone of the Herald column last August in one major regard. The headline referenced people who have passed their “best before date.” One paragraph metaphorically suggested a “severance-free ice floe.”

I'm no fan at all of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, but I am a fan of Mary Ann Jablonski. That might have caused me some major stress at the ballot box on a few (4) occasions, but for a miracle of geography that put my home just south of the border of her riding.

I was free to vote both my heart and my principles. For all the effect that it would have.

As it is, Jablonski is nowhere near her best-before date. For her, I sincerely hope (and expect) the best is yet to come.

Five terms is a long time. So we will need some reminding that Jablonski replaced the Red Deer MLA who bequeathed Alberta its asinine flat income tax: Stockwell Day.

Jablonski won in a by-election to replace Day — who had definitely passed his best-before date in provincial politics, though not before saddling taxpayers with the legal expenses required to defend a defamation lawsuit for comments he made in a letter to the Red Deer Advocate.

We like to elect people who can deliver, people who can get things done.

Jablonski had shown that political ability long before being elected. She successfully lobbied the federal government for dental care for members of the armed forces and the RCMP. As well, she advocated for greater rights for military spouses. Her husband Bob Jablonski had been a member of the military, and was transferred to Penhold in 1980 — to our benefit.

It's all right there, in Wikipedia.

Successful private members bills are like hen's teeth. Jablonski has championed two of them. One would give the parents of drug-addicted youth the right to force them into rehab. Another would increase attention for screening into Irlen Syndrome in school children, to give those children a better chance at making the most of their educations.

And that's overlooking a lot of the rest of her accomplishments.

I don't know about the value of any severance package for Jablonski, but I do know any reference to an ice floe is supremely disrespectful.

My line is open to suggest any number of local agencies for her attention, that could benefit from having a person on board like her. A person who can get things done.

Since when did we need tools to talk? Since now

Communication is our business, not our practice. That's one of the quotes I'll always remember from the old days, back when newspaper types used to gather at provincial conferences to discuss their dark trade.

The best quotes always came while at the bar, after the workshops and seminars.

The same can also apply to politicians. (The quote, not the bar sessions.) Perhaps even more so now, when the higher up the political ladder one goes, the more spin staff are hired to tweet to us, but not to communicate.

In that aspect, Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is indeed the message now.

So perhaps it would be inevitable that civic government — the one closest to the voters — would develop a need to standardize the way it talks to the public. On everything from dandelions in the playgrounds to the effects of addiction and homelessness in the city.

Our particular city began to change its governance model two or three elections ago to include an evolving four-year plan within a system of planning outlines (our “charters”). As that came about, it became apparent that everyone in City Hall needs to be on the same page, when voters get engaged.

So when you've all these other planning tools already, what's to do next, but build a toolkit to talk about it?

Elaine Vincent, director of Development Services for Red Deer, said the City of Victoria had recently developed a communications toolkit to make sure the message from City Hall is getting out in a consistent way through all departments. Vincent also says the toolkit standardizes how the message from us voters travels through the City Hall maze of offices.

Vincent told me Red Deer caught a bit of a bargain working with Victoria's consultants to adapt the toolkit for here. There's not a whole lot of important stuff that you can get for less than $31,000 these days.

Time will tell if wrapping talk in a package is indeed such a bargain, but I figure it's worth trying.

Think of it this way: in an election, candidates tell us what they're going to do for us. They hear stuff on the campaign trail, for sure, but what they say to us is hugely filtered through the candidate's vision. In any event, voters cast their ballots based on what the candidate says he or she will do.

After the election, their cell phones ring constantly, with people telling them what to do. What happens to the vision?

Well, in Red Deer, it's hammered out in the four-year plan. And all our phone calls and meetings get prioritized by how closely they fit into the plan, and by how broadly-held the messages are from those phone calls and meetings.

Vincent says the toolkit helps both elected councillors and admin staff prioritize the message, when people call about their issues. How many people are affected? Is action required now, or later? How can we guarantee the right people are hearing the message?

Vincent also says the toolkit helps staff get your message through overlapping departments, and that when staff anywhere in the city's large organization talk to the public, they speak with a more unified voice.

That's the plan anyway. And if there's anything our city is thoroughly engaged in right now, it's creating plans.

So how does that affect you? If you as a citizen want to comment on a direction the city is taking, you'll probably need to at least be familiar with the plan. There's plenty of information on that on the city's web site.

If you're not right up to speed on the plan, this toolkit is supposed to make it so that councillors and city managers can all explain it to you — in the same way.

The whole effort is to help get you more engaged with the direction the city is growing.

You can still call a councillor and gripe about your neighbour's dog barking all night. You're the taxpayer.

But from dandelion control, to rebuilding our city's core, or from traffic problems to defining what we want to be as a city in the next 20 or 30 years, this toolkit is supposed to make sure your part of the message isn't lost in the maze at City Hall.

You'll never get this kind of treatment from the province or the feds, for all the tax money you send them. So perhaps we shouldn't get too snarky about the $31,000 spent on a toolkit to package how we talk.

The medium — the plan and the toolkit to explain it — has indeed become the message.