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.

The one commodity selling well these days? Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How, exactly, is that bad government?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISDS: a potential ICBM on sovereignty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A national Buy Canadian policy? Couldn't happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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