Time to get serious about a BIG idea

In the past weeks, the federal government and the government of Ontario have both mused aloud about bringing the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) to the front burners in their next budgets.

Opposition parties in other provinces have also promised to put this in their next election platforms, and even the mayors of both Edmonton and Calgary have expressed support for testing BIG.

It's become a make-work program for economists and pundits of all stripes to weigh in on both sides of several complicated questions:

• Would a guaranteed annual income for every Canadian adult significantly reduce poverty in Canada?

• Would it be a cheaper, fairer redistribution of tax revenue than the paintbox of welfare, disability support, senior support, child support, student support, employment insurance and minimum wage policy that requires massive federal and provincial bureaucracies across the country?

• Would BIG become a disincentive for people to look for better work than part-time minimum wage — or to look for a job at all?

There are enough studies out there and enough economic projections both for and against BIG to warrant a field trial. And if Ontario wants to host a pilot project on that, then all of Canada should watch.

My bet (more on gut instinct than anything else) is that we can do more good and less harm for more people, with less money, through BIG, than with any amount of tinkering with the status quo.

We can pretty well take it as read that current supports like welfare, tax credit programs, EI, GIS, student loans/grants and all the rest add up to a bureaucratic nightmare. Here in Alberta, we are well aware how long wait times and the burden of paperwork for assistance for newly laid-off workers has become a huge stress both on the people affected and the offices that are supposed to help them.

We also know that there's opposition in small business and the service trade to raising the minimum wage to a living level.

We're also no strangers the the disincentive for the levels of advanced training Canada needs, in ever-rising tuition and living costs for students.

And we know the current welfare system across Canada is costly, and isn't reaching its goals.

So why not test the idea of the basic income guarantee, to see if it's an improvement on all of the above?

Right now, the accepted poverty rate in Canada is about nine per cent. Let's just include the bottom decile of incomes in that category.

The number most people bandy about for BIG is a guaranteed income of $18,000 a year — just to start the discussion.

What would be the administrative cost savings if we eliminated welfare, the child tax credit, the working income tax benefit, the GST refund, the GIS for seniors — the whole menu of income-tested government supports that require regular reporting and constant tinkering to function?

Do you meet the mandate of the particular program, is every line of the application done perfectly? Can you wait weeks or months to find out if you are accepted, or have to go back and apply all over again?

Nationally, admin costs for these systems must be in the high tens of billions a year.

Instead of paying an army of bureaucrats large salaries to monitor it all, we direct a few platoons to issue monthly cheques, based on tax or payroll returns so that nobody slips below $18,000 a year. If you find employment, you don't lose all your benefits — you should always be better off working than not working.

Additional tax savings could be found in reduced public expenditures like emergency ward visits, mental health care costs, prescription drug expenses and crime, costs which are all strongly linked to poverty.

Canada's decades-old experiment in Manitoba reported that BIG did not create a class of welfare layabouts. Only two groups of people took BIG exclusively rather than work: women with infants who used BIG to “buy” their maternity leave; and older teen males who decided in greater numbers to graduate high school rather than drop out for a low-skill job.

But it's true, all the talk about a guaranteed income as a means of reducing poverty — and the total tax cost of our attempts at reducing poverty — are speculative. Economic projections are still theory, and you can buy any kind of economic projections your political views might support.

All the more reason to test the idea over a period of several years. The potential gains right now seem much greater than the losses.

Shipping in refugees, shipping out the homeless in Saskatchewan

Back in the good old days in Alberta, when oil prices fell and government revenue dropped, part of the solution of the day was to cut the welfare cheques of single mothers, and buy the single unemployed males a one-way bus ticket to B.C.

I couldn't find out how many tickets were issued under then-premier Ralph Klein, but it was enough for the B.C. government then to pass a law saying any newcomers arriving to their province needed to establish residency for 90 days before they could access social services.

For the females (mostly) the 20-per-cent cut in welfare payments and the increased barriers to application for Aids to Daily Living dropped Alberta's roster of 3.1 million cases to around 2 million between 1994 and 2000.

On paper, both policies were a great success. Not so much for the poor and homeless, but the Tory base loved it.

It appears that the Saskatchewan government has learned a thing or two from the Alberta experience, at least as far as shipping homeless people to B.C. is concerned.

Not with the same result, one would hope, though.

Once the story broke, it took scant hours for the whole nation to learn that at least two homeless men, Charles Neil-Curly, 23, and Jeremy Roy, 21, were put on a Greyhound with one-way tickets to Vancouver.

Neil-Curly was staying at the Lighthouse homeless shelter in North Battleford, but his provincial funding was cut so he had to find someplace else to go. So he accepted a ticket to ride with his friend Roy who had also lived at the shelter.

Neither had any supports waiting for them once they stepped off the bus. One of them had never been outside the province before. That's the rub.

Governments often buy poor and homeless people bus tickets to somewhere else in Canada. But there are supposed to be case plans for family, friends or other agencies set up to meet them. Getting a new start in a new place is not always a bad idea, if you have supports lined up.

Shipping your problems out of town is not. Vancouver city counsellor Kerry Lang correctly calls it “inhumane.” “It's not good health policy. It's not good public policy,” he said in an interview with CBC News.

Now, there are always multiple views of a news story. The Lighthouse shelter is currently in a funding dispute with the province. A social services employee bought the tickets, as far as is known, contrary to “official” policy (scare quotes intended).

Social services minister Donna Harpauer says there will be a review of the bus-ticket policy — if the Saskatchewan Party is re-elected next month.

Oh, and both the two bus riders are First Nations (as if that should make any difference — but it does).

As much as social agencies and government agencies seem reluctant to go public when problems arise, something good did arise from that happening here.

Jason Stennes is the CEO of a construction company, 360 Crane Services, in Vancouver. When he heard of the men's plight, he immediately offered them a job.

Stennes said after growing up without much himself, he's now in a position where he can help. "I'm one of those guys that if I'm at a red light and there's somebody begging for change and he's 20 years old, I offer him a job. I give people a chance. It's just what I do."

A new start, indeed. Not enough of that to be found in Canada, that's for sure.

But here's the real sticking point: Saskatchewan has pledged to take in 2,000
Syrian refugees. They will be fully funded for a year, and housed in the province's four largest cities.

Nobody needs reminding that those four largest cities also house (or fail to house) large First Nations populations, with a myriad of social problems. A persistent homeless contingent is but one symptom of the cultural and cross-generational problems they face.

These two men are only the ones we've heard about, because somebody did go public. But it would appear they are as much displaced off their land — refugees, if you want to use the term — as the people who once lived in the now-bombed-out homes in any number of other countries, but coming to our shores.

New starts for them, too.

It's a sad irony that I'm sure will be lost in the tumble of a provincial election campaign.

People often don't give charity, they buy it

We're all busy at this time of year, getting our papers together for our annual tax returns. Did you locate all your charitable receipts?

If you're an average Canadian, you gave about $450 to charities last year. That's from StatsCan, which looks at real numbers.

The Association of Fundraising Professionals does a study every two years, looking at trends and attitudes regarding charities, via the Ipsos polling group. Their latest report contains a significant fudge factor, probably representative of what Canadians would tell a pollster versus what they're telling Revenue Canada.

Their report, titled What Canadian Donors Want, tells us the average annual donation is $924. Hmmm. Seems one thing Canadian donors want is more credit than they're entitled to.

But let's ignore that anomaly for now. More at issue for the fundraisers are the factors that bring people to be charitable.

That topic obviously interests the fundraisers, but it also impacts government policy and our whole Western capitalist culture. Because as it turns out, charity isn't everything we think it is.

Last fall, Canadian sociologist Linsey McGoey published a critique of modern big-money philanthropy titled No Such Thing as a Free Gift. Her book focusses on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and reveals some parallels found by the fundraising association, into what motivates people to give to charity.

The main parallel I found between the book and the report is that donors want results from their giving. Measurable results. Whether we are billionaires or 90-per-centers with chequebook in hand, we all want to know that our gift is accomplishing something.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, McGoey says there can be. Saying there's no such thing as a free gift, means we expect something back from our donations.

For individuals, supporting a religious institution is the top reason we donate money. Curing diseases is next on the list, supporting children and youth are next, with food sufficiency and environmental causes coming after that. The big foundations are quite secular, so those other motivations are bumped up the list.

Big — we're talking huge — money changes a lot of things, but it doesn't change basic human nature. Speaking of philanthropy, we want to help others, but the more our donations help us, the more likely we are to give.

Here's one example McGoey points to: charitable funding of charter schools. In the 1980s Bill Gates declared public high schools to be 'obsolete.' So he put $2 billion into new schools for 800,000 pupils, in a whole new program of learning.

The result? Students from these schools graduated not much better than average, with no statistical advantage in entering college. So Gates admitted he was wrong — and pulled his funding.

But in many neighbourhoods, the new charter schools had drained and killed local public high schools. When they closed, thousands of students suddenly found they had no local school to go to. Graduation rates plummeted, as did college entry rates.

In short, Gates tried to play God with the education system. There was too much emphasis on results, and when he didn't get the results he wanted, he walked away. And he wasn't in it to stay, in the same way taxpayers are in the education game with funding for public schools.

Locally, I was a board member of a non-profit that helped people with severe disabilities. There's not a lot of room for improvement for this group — we weren't going to help them get jobs or anything like that. But they still need supports.

Unable to get hard statistical numbers from us — results — a local funding agency stopped funding us. Their contributors want success stories, not hold-the-line stories. But what if success means just living with your disability?

McGoey mentions in detail how large industrial foundations fund projects that enable people to buy their products — often insisting recipients buy only their products. That ain't charity.

Wanting to create a society where every social agency has to prove numerically how they improve the lot of the people they serve — that ain't charity, either.

Governments like to fund non-profits with tax dollars to provide community supports. It's can be about half the cost having government employees do it.

But funders can be onerous bean-counters. Reporting and transparency costs can be more than a funding grant is worth.

But while we expect non-profits to report how much ink they use in their printers, we still allow giant foundations to act as they please. The Gates Foundation is larger than the United Nations World Health Organization, for instance, and really only answers to two people: Bill and Melinda Gates. It's their money, and they can spend it how they want.

But if you want some kind of payback for your generosity, is it really charity?

Platitudes will not save our planet

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. That saying has been around a long time and had been used to mean a lot of different things.

In today's Canada, it means that while we might generally support the goal of reducing our total carbon footprint to prevent a looming climate disaster, nobody wants to sacrifice lifestyle — or even pay the full price for our lifestyle.

That's the hurdle the federal government needs to overcome if we are even come close to meeting the climate change goals we applauded at the global climate conference in Paris last December. Our commitment to that is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions until they're 30 per cent of what they were in 2005 — and do it by 2035.

That's everybody's job. Miss the local goal, miss the global goal, reap the storm of runaway climate change.

That's easy to grasp, but it's been harder to get consensus on what actually needs to be done to get there. This week, prime minister Justin Trudeau met with the provincial and territorial premiers to talk about solutions to climate change.

Four provinces representing more than 80 per cent of Canadians are already on board with the idea of pricing carbon emissions as a means to discourage wasteful energy use and/or to fund development of cleaner technologies. But a national agreement seems out of reach.

Why? Because it's such a hard sell, politically.

Right now, the city of Red Deer is in the process of developing its own plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. A consultant is leading a broadly-based group of people through a process that must eventually lead to city council adopting standards that will affect our future development. Due disclosure: I am a volunteer in that process.

What have we learned so far? That the way forward is possible, but not for free.

Currently, every person in Red Deer is responsible for more than 17.5 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. If our population grows as planned — to 157,000 by 2035, final goal year of the Paris agreement we signed — our total emissions will be in the order of 2.88 megatonnes per year.

That's the business-as-usual chart curve. Canada's goal, represented by us, is to slice that by nearly half.

The majority of those emissions do not come from our gas-guzzling trucks and cars (which we each drive about 7,000 km a year on our commutes). As much as our community discussions liked to chat about neat electric cars, and transit that very few of us use regularly, or the prospect of developing walkable, bikeable communities, these alone will not get us there.

The largest portion of Red Deer's carbon footprint comes from operating our buildings; heating them by burning natural gas and lighting them with coal-fired electricity.

All these things have been easy to acknowledge. Where the barriers spring up is when our individual lifestyles are challenged by change.

Who's in favour of solar panels on our homes? Anybody? Anybody? A representative of the local home builders association told us they have a show home in Red Deer equipped with solar panels that they can source in bulk cheaper than you our I could on our own. It's the toughest sell on the new home market.

Other representatives quite frankly admitted that climate change or no, they're not giving up their extra-large homes or their motorized vacation vehicles. So don't ask.

Even though Alberta already has a carbon tax on the books, the talk I heard around the room during our discussions is that people resent paying for the right to pollute and resent the thought that the cost of a carbon tax might impinge on their lifestyle.

And this is a well-educated group that has already accepted the message about how important it is that we keep Planet Earth from heating up by more than 2 degrees in the next 20 years.

It's just too easy to justify that “my” contribution must be small, and that someone else's contributions must be large.

Trudeau was correct in saying Canada's resource-based economy needs to thrive, but it needs to happen in a way that pollutes vastly less. The sacrifices required for that must become personal as well as structural.

Red Deer is still some distance away from adopting a greenhouse gas plan, against which future development will, by law, need to be measured. Other Alberta cities have already done this, and only the future will show if any of this was helpful.

Setting goals is as easy as repeating a platitude. Achieving consensus to get there, that's the tough part.

Can the media stop Trump? Cluck. Cluck.

Mainstream media in America is spinning on its head trying to stop Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. Mainstream media in Canada and abroad are watching the attempt in the way people would watch an agonizingly slow-motion train wreck.

My question is: who decided it's the media's job to overtly campaign in a presidential race in this way?

Granted, Donald Trump really is the worst choice possible to lead the world's largest economy and command the world's most powerful military. Full stop. But beyond informing voters of their choices — and, yes, suggesting a better option — it's up to voters to choose who will lead them, not the media.

The picture I get comes from old-time farming, when families supplied their own larders. People would select a broody hen, and have it sit on a few duck eggs to hatch them. The little ducklings would follow the hen around until they caught sight of water and they'd happily toddle in. The hen would pace back and forth on the shoreline, clucking like only a mother hen can, while the ducklings did what ducklings do naturally.

That's what mainstream media is doing right now. Clucking on the shoreline while their duckling readers flock to Donald Trump.

We're talking about the big guys here — Washington Post, New York Times, National Review, The Atlantic, and Huffington Post to name a few. In Canada, it's the Globe and Mail, National Post, CBC News and more. All are wondering aloud how a certified bozo like Donald Trump could possibly become President of the United States. In Europe, if anyone pays attention at all to the U.S. primaries circus, they are horrified (but they have other, real, problems to worry about).

All are worried about the disaster that must certainly follow the moment American voters decide they'd rather have a serial liar, a proud hatemonger, an unrepentant misogynist, a wannabe war criminal and economic buffoon as president, rather than the candidates selected for them by the elites in the backrooms, and the billionaires that fund them to enrich themselves.

Oscar winners, hyperventilating as they clutch their golden statues, exhort America to Stop Trump! while the ushers direct them offstage. TV comedian/commentator John Oliver set himself up for a lawsuit to begin the minute Trump is elected and “loosens” American libel laws — the Constitution be damned.

Everyone who is anyone wants to Stop Trump and everyone else doesn't seem to be listening. Cluck. Cluck.

It's become an online game to discover the worst transgressions ever committed by The Donald. My personal favourite (so far) is his agreeing with shock radio host Howard Stern that, yes, he could have “nailed” Diana, Princess of Wales. “She was supermodel beautiful ... she had the height ... she had the magnificent skin.”

Do voters know what it says about a person who can sexually objectify dead royalty? Eeww.

Do voters know what ignoring all this says about them? About all the other candidates?

The worse things seem, the worse things get. But still, it's the voters who decide. Perhaps the mother hens in the media should check their clucking, lest the duckling voters cast their votes both in open defiance of party big shots, and the media big shots together.

People like Hollywood metaphors, so here's the one with Donald Trump. America is the female lead, who wakes up in a garishly glitzy hotel room the morning after the election. She looks across purple fake-satin sheets at Trump and realizes she has made The. Biggest. Mistake. Ever. A dark, pathetic spiral ensues.

In the end, the voters decide. In the end, you get the government you deserve.

Access to public officials cannot be for sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NDP was supposed to have a better conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

And the poverty rate for seniors dropped like a stone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How could this have happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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