In Philippines, assess first, then help

It was a long weekend Monday, so Canadians had time to pause, and honour our military services and remember their sacrifices in battle. But the day also allowed us time to try to comprehend the magnitude of superstorm Yolanda, which devastated the Philippines over the weekend.

And, as always happens in these events, to examine Canada's response to an international crisis.

There has been a lot of pressure, both internally and externally, for Canada to do more, faster, to aid the millions of people suddenly placed in horrific conditions in the wake of the storm.

Yolanda, known as Haiyan in the rest of Asia, was the strongest storm ever recorded to make landfall. Winds reaching 275 km/hr pushed a storm surge or seawater more than four metres high far inland, while torrential rains simply washed entire forests and the land holding them down toward the sea.

Almost 10 million people are directly affected.

In some places, there is no longer a town or city, much less the expectation of road access, communications or even electricity. It is reported that, days after the fierce winds and rains struck, bodies are hanging from trees, or floating in brackish water.

There is no way yet to even begin counting the dead, though a figure of 10,000 killed has been the most often-quoted so far. But that could be just from one major city, Tacloban, a provincial capital which was described by military spokesmen as now resembling a garbage dump, with people crawling through it.

Guiuan, a city of 40,000 is reported to be essentially destroyed. Cebu and Baco are reported as 80 per cent under water.

Since the Philippines is not a contiguous country, but a string of 7,000 islands holding about 97 million people, it is extremely difficult just to assess damage, much less mount a military-style aid campaign.

So let's not be too hard on our federal government for not rushing to be first on the scene. When you're talking about thousands of islands, where is the scene, anyway?

First off, Canada has pledged $5 million in direct aid to the Philippine government. In addition, the government had promised to match the donations Canadians make, dollar for dollar, to registered charities working on disaster relief there.

As of Monday (situations can change quickly in events like this) Canada is also ramping up its first response team, the Interdepartmental Strategic Support Team. They are the first on the ground, ahead of Canada's better-known DART, or Disaster Assistance Response Team.

Even though news crews can instantly bring us video of people pleading for food, water and shelter immediately (who wouldn't, in such a situation?) the Canadian response is more likely to do lasting good.

In a lot of places, there is no functional society remaining. Looters have stripped the stores, and local military attempting to bring a first wave of aid to some regions are worried about attacks by mobs. The country is under martial law, but that only applies when the martial is present.

Richard Gordon, the head of the Philippine Red Cross, said the situation in the country is “absolute bedlam.”

So in order to not make the relief program more complicated than it already is, a first wave of cash for local authorities to be able to get themselves back up and running is a good step.

Sending in an professional assessment team, while DART gets packed up and ready, will help ensure that Canadian aid arrives in a place where it can be made quickly effective. There's no point in landing a fleet of heavy aircraft on one island and then asking “what do we do now?”

Meanwhile, Canada's substantial Filipino population — make that all Canadians — do not need to wait.

Probably the easiest and most effective way for the rest of us to “do something” is to simply go to www.redcross.ca/typhoon. You can donate to the relief effort, knowing that every dollar you give is turned into two dollars by the federal Philippine Crisis matching Fund.

And that the Red Cross will efficiently turn your donations into real aid.

Canada's experience helping in the humanitarian efforts following Haiti's massive earthquake in 2010 informs us that this new effort will carry some extra tactical complications.

So, good marks to the federal government for what it has done so far. The world is watching to see how the situation develops, and we will try to do this right.

The rest is up to us.

Successful food banks, unsuccessful cities

The concept of food banks was first developed to be a stop-gap measure against hunger, especially for families with children. Local charities would collect boxed cereal and milk, bread, peanut butter, canned beans and pasta to help families facing hunger, just for a short term.

That isn't how things have evolved, is it?

Today, across the country, food banks are now too large a part of a broader strategy for coping with poverty. Depending on how you look at things, either the coping strategy is failing, or food banks have become a great success.

In Red Deer, after more than doubling during the past recession, demand at our food bank has settled back and has remained more or less steady at something like 50 per cent higher than it was before the recession hit.

Last year, 16,500 people made use of the food bank in Red Deer, some of them multiple times. Since our food bank also serves people from communities in our immediate region, we can surmise that roughly 10 per cent (or perhaps less) of our local population required help to keep from going hungry at one time or another in the past year.

That's way too high.

Nationally, while the Canadian economy continues to make small gains, the number of people going to a food bank in March 2013 was more than 833,000, a drop from just over 872,000 in March of 2012.

I know this is poor math, but let's use this to make what comparisons we can. Extrapolated over a year, that national monthly figure works out to roughly a million people — or just under three per cent of the Canadian population.

While admitting these are rough figures, the comparison is still rather jarring.

Years ago, while Stockwell Day was Red Deer's MLA, he used an economics model to explain food bank growth. You could view it as a success story, I suppose.

He said demand for a free product would grow infinitely, as long as the supply lasted. The Red Deer Food Bank was simply being successful in growing with this demand, but ultimately would fail, since supply could not possibly grow infinitely.

If my math is poor, Day's understanding of economics and poverty was even worse. People do not go to the food bank because the food is free, they go because they cannot afford to buy food. And people need food to live.

Whatever, in the decades that have followed, the group of Canadians with direct contact with a food bank has grown. Two years ago, the national office of the Salvation Army hired Angus Reid to determine what portion of Canada had direct experience with homelessness and hunger at some point in their lives.

The answer: about one in four. That's really high.

About seven per cent of respondents in the survey said they had been homeless at some point in their lives, and had either slept on the street, or made use of a shelter. About 25 per cent said they made use of a food bank, either now or at some time in their lives.

That's with a three-per-cent national usage rate.

My math is either unbelievably poor, or at our local rate of food bank use, we will surpass the national figure very soon, if we haven't already. One in four? That is not success.

What do we do with this information?

I believe the success of food banks has to include an admission of failure in other areas. We cannot accept the poor economics of supply and demand where food is concerned, but we also cannot grow the food bank indefinitely.

One food bank in Nashville has a kitchen where people devise recipes from whatever donations come in. They cook meals in an industrial pressure cooker and flash freezes them (these meals store for a year or more), and distribute free nutritious heat-and-eat meals.

I don't think we want to go there.

Poverty, housing, minimum wage, living wage, illiteracy, social supports, none of these are the the purview of cities. But cities are where all the services in these areas are delivered. It's where these issues live.

Therefore, cities do need to be at the table where they are discussed. Cities should not just get behind the non-profits who advocate on issues around poverty, homelessness and hunger, but lead the efforts to make decision-makers at higher levels of government pay better attention.

Changes in quality of life affect how cities grow, and determine whether cities prosper or whither.

If we can't convince our local civic leaders to take the lead in this, we are left with needing to continuously restock our food banks. That's not success — for food banks or for cities.

Harper can let the Senate simply implode

In literature and in drama, there are the characters who scheme in the shadows, who always seem one step ahead of everyone else and who — even at the moment of their downfall — manage to emerge victorious.

Politics is one breeding ground for such archetypes.

What is it, almost eight years ago now, that prime minister Stephen Harper won his first election promising open and transparent government? Oh, and also wasn't there something about Senate reform?

In the time since, we've seen more of literature's Cardinal Richelieu than we'd like, in the prime minister's office. We've seen power fully locked into the Prime Minister's Office, obsessive control of spin and messages, misdirection via unreadable omnibus bills pushed through by cabinet bulldozers, and a determined downgrading of the role of Parliament and its elected members.

And no action on Senate reform. Rather, Harper's most famous appointees have ended up reducing the Senate into a partisan circus.

In spring, the prime minister had no knowledge that his then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had cut a personal cheque to help Mike Duffy pay back $90,000 in expense subsidies that he allegedly double-dipped.

Wright would become an “honourable man” who honourably resigned when existence of the payment became known. Later, when it became expedient to say so, the resignation was revised into a firing.

But Duffy made public that the plan for his “repayment” was imposed, not by the Senate (whose arcane rules were not broken), but by the PMO. Duffy says that staff in the PMO even concocted a narrative for him, that the money came from a bank loan he took out with his wife.

And that “just us three” — Duffy, Wright and Harper — held a meeting to begin the process.

Now, Harper says he and all Canadians were victims of a deceit by his former most trusted advisor. A government known for throwing its staff under a bus when it served to do so, backed up the bus and plowed over Wright a second time.

The senate scandal's storyline reads like a television ad. “Wait, there's more!” And more. And more.

All of this is occurring just as the party's national convention is set to begin in Calgary this weekend, and as two vital by-elections are set to engage.

Has control-obsessed Stephen Harper truly lost control of events? Or is this simply an opportunity Harper can use to further the goals he said he had in mind almost eight years ago?

It's not much of a leap to get there.

Instead of having to engage a years-long program of Senate reform, complete with Supreme Court challenges from every side and a politically-deadly constitutional battle, Harper can simply let the Senate implode.

He can come out of this with a well-crafted statement that includes a promise never to appoint anyone to the Senate again. Just let vacant seats remain vacant until there's no one left.

Meanwhile, he can create some kind of blue-ribbon committee of worthy statespeople to come up with a plan to replace this no-longer-existent body.

But what about all that important work the Senate supposedly does? He can give that work to Parliament backbenchers. Designate all-party committees as needed and give them deadlines to produce reviews and reports on the policy issues the Senate deals with now.

In other words, give backbenchers something visibly important to do. There's a lot of talent on both sides of the house, that's not being used.

Allow these committees to inform policy well in advance of its being introduced by his government, or a government to come. Take the long view on things like poverty, health care, education, pension reform, prison reform, the environment, while cabinet moves the current agenda day-to-day.

Be broad-minded. Allow the committees to critique policy, to review and report on the various sections of omnibus bills, so other Parliamentarians can understand them well enough to explain them to us.

The result, to my mind, would be to attract a better grade of backbencher. It would enhance the role of an elected Parliament, rather than putting these powers in the hands of people who never had to ask for our mandate.

Canada could probably get all that for less than the financial cost (and certainly the ethical cost) of maintaining a dysfunctional, partisan Senate.

I don't think Harper planned for events to go this way. But planners like him often seem to find a way to turn such dark, cynical moments into sunshine, just before the final act.

Cash for kidneys? We'd rather eat worms

Would you sell one of your kidneys for $10,000? Lianne Barnieh of the University of Calgary has a study suggesting you might.

She and co-authors of a report for an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology say that both an ethical and financial case can be made for paying people for their body parts. Or failing that, at least a case for expediency.

We've known for a long time that maintaining a kidney patient on dialysis is a costly proposition. Think $60,000 a year, not counting doctor fees for office visits, plus lost time at work and other costs.

Transplanting a healthy kidney into these patients not only improves the outlook for the patient, but saves the health care system a lot of money. Think $23,000 per transplant, plus another $6,000 for other medical costs.

A successful transplant saves the health care system about $250,000 over five years. Over the last decade or so, Canada has performed just over 1,000 transplants a year.

The barrier preventing the cheaper, better treatment, of course, is a shortage of organ donations. The Kidney Foundation Canada puts the wait list at about 3,000 patients. Wait lists stretch into years — at $60,000-plus per year for dialysis — even though chances of success for a transplant operation drop steeply after a two-year wait.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information reports that for every million Canadians, 14 are kidney donors. That's half the donation rate of Americans. Alberta has one of the lowest donation rates in the country.

So it should be no surprise that professionals who study health care should explore ways to increase the donation rate. Last week, Barnieh and colleagues suggested paying people $10,000 for a kidney could be a way around that barrier.

"Our model demonstrated that a strategy where living donors are paid $10,000, with a corresponding assumption this strategy would increase the number of transplants performed among wait-listed dialysis patients by five per cent, would be less costly and more effective than the current organ donation system," Barnieh said to CBC News last week.

That's doctor-talk for freeing up $150 million a year for other health care priorities.

Last year, another U of C researcher, Dr. Braden Manns opened the discussion on paying for transplants. Barnieh's report last week is an extention of that discussion.

Manns pointed to an online survey he conducted in 2011 of 2,004 Canadians that found 70 per cent support for paid organ donations to the estates of people who have died, and 40 per cent support for financial incentives to harvest live organs from live donors.

One idea that seemed to resonate was that organ donors would be given free funeral services.

No surprise, but the officials at the top of the health care authority chain do not publicly support opening this ethical can of worms.

As an alternative, I have some additional ethical questions in the discussion on paying for organ donations.

For instance: If the financial case for increasing organ donations is so strong, why is the financial case not being made for reducing the incidence of kidney failure in the first place?

If $10,000 a pop for a kidney makes sense financially (and improves patient outcomes) why is so little spent removing the chief causes of kidney failure, namely: obesity, hypertension and diabetes?

One of three kidney failures in Canada results from diabetes. A major cause of diabetes is sedentary lifestyles combined with poor dietary habits.

Philosophers commenting on cash-for-kidneys say donors under such a program may be “inappropriately incented.” People already talk about institutions using emotionally coercive methods to convince relatives to donate for a sick family member. Cash could be just one other type of coercion.

But in Alberta, we can't even suggest having “opt-out” programs, where all people are considered donors unless they carry a card saying they refuse to be.

This is about saving lives and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet pennies on those dollars that could be destined for incentives toward healthier living to prevent the need for either dialysis or transplants are described — even in our recent municipal election campaigns — as a waste of money.

Truly, there are more worms in the can than we care to examine. The cost of refusing the discussion is rising, too.

Post-election: great prospects

Red Deer's prospects have always been bright, but in the afterglow of our civic elections, I have to say I like them even better now.

That's not because all my choices got elected (sorry Ms. Veer, I voted for the other candidate). Rather, the overall makeup of our next city council promises an even mix of perspectives. That means whatever initiatives get on the agenda in the next four years, people are really going to need to have their facts arranged in convincing order.

On some issues, at least one councillor will need a change of mind for a vote to pass without the mayor's vote deciding everything. There will need to be compromises and teamwork. Council will need a willingness to let predetermined attitudes relax in favour of an eagerness to find solutions with broad support.

As voters, we will need to allow councillors to decide matters according to what's on the table, not what was believed coming in — without one group or another raining condemnation down on their heads.

If our mayor and council can accomplish that, there are bright days coming.

Not just for us, but for the entire province. The three cities representing the lion's share of the province's population all have young mayors with a vigorous agenda.

Calgary's Naheed Nenshi has turned his office into a national template for success as a mayor. He was returned to office with 74 per cent of the vote.

In Edmonton, Don Iveson, age 34, won 62 per cent of the vote, and a strong mandate to proceed with a massive (and costly) rebuild of the city's central core.

Here in Red Deer, Tara Veer took 46 per cent of the vote in a much closer race. (For comparison's sake, Lethbridge had an election ballot similar to Red Deer's, with four mayoral candidates and 31 council candidates. Chris Spearman, a longtime businessman and school board member, won the mayor's seat with 46 per cent of the vote.)

Red Deer has much in common with both Calgary and Edmonton, being a centre of growth. We also have a city centre that is embarking on a major overhaul in the next decade. It's up to this council to begin building on the stage set by the previous one.

Add in another 60 acres or so of prime, parklike city-centre land to be redeveloped in the next decade, as the province decides the future of the Michener Centre. By the time this council's four-year mandate is over, we are going to have a rather different city horizon than we do now.

Transit service from Red Deer to Blackfalds and Lacombe is being hammered out. Regular flights by Air Canada now land and take off from our airport.

Our manufacturing base is the envy of many a troubled Ontario heartland city. In sectors that pay very well indeed, employment opportunities abound.

With the trend toward greener, more physically active lifestyles, our access to mountain trails and a relatively untouched river valley corridor has a huge potential upside to tourism, along with our regular list of festivals and attractions.

We have broad consensus that infrastructure for recreation and culture should not be ignored in pursuit of immediate paycheques.

The whole Hwy 2 corridor is poised to hit a strong stride of growth that other Canadian regions simply cannot match.

All of this bodes toward more people wanting to come and live here. Lots more.

If our city council can find its way to a middle ground where they can pull together for the next four years, Red Deer stands on the cusp of something truly great. A golden age, peopled by a much more diverse society.

The only barriers are stubborn ideology, and a lack of vision of what our city can become in the next decade.

If we cannot find pragmatic compromises needed to allow us to move forward, Edmonton and Calgary (and their economic regions) definitely will. Opportunities such as we have now will never return.

I didn't get everything I wanted in this election; I don't think anybody did.

What we have instead is a terrific opportunity bury what divides us, and find common goals. I like our prospects.

You can't dictate what knowledge is valuable

Of the guest columnists in the Comment section of the Advocate, a byline I particularly like to follow is that of Gwyn Morgan. He's an Albertan who has achieved business success, and his opinions are a healthy mix of practical business and social studies.

But his article Monday: When skills, jobs at odds stands as a good example of why business leaders can create rather poor public policy.

Morgan believes so strongly in the correctness of a skills model for higher education, he sets aside his belief in freedom of choice. He also attempts to dictate the roles of our colleges and universities. And while doing so, he just adds more rotation to a failed practice of professional associations chasing their tails.

You can't dictate what kind of learning is good, and what kind is useless, and then wonder why the university graduates who listened to you can't find jobs in their field of study.

Alberta seems to cycle through oversupply and shortage of all kinds of professional skills, like the rotation of an oil sands bucket wheel.

If borrowing $30,000 (plus savings and summer employment earnings) for a basic degree is a good investment, Gwyn points to a CIBC study that says tacking on another $25,000 or more, for an advanced degree is even better.

But the CIBC statisticians (and Gwyn himself) might have done better to poll the grads themselves.

Doctor shortage? Not any more. As of 2010, Canada had 70,000 working physicians. That was 203 per 100,000 people, up 35 per cent since we recognized the shortage in 1980.

New physicians, graduating with enormous debt, can't make student loan payments, house payments and set up a practice on a new physician’s salary. So they are going back to school for the specialties that pay better — and then find they can't find a clinic that will take them on, and they're back in general practice.

Alberta has a high proportion of nurses with science degrees. But barely over 30 per cent of our nurses have a full-time job (it's over 60 per cent for the rest of Canada). Monday's Advocate actually had an ad for full-time nursing positions. How many new grads will even have their applications read, for those gems? Not many, if any, I suspect.

In the skills that Morgan cherishes, engineers are finding long waits to land an engineering job. Two-thirds of our graduating engineers end up working in a field outside of engineering, almost 30 per cent of them in “survival jobs,” according to the Council for Access to the Profession of Engineering.

How many lawyers are too many in a society? The answer, it seems, is about the number we have right now. The hunt for unpaid articling positions is extremely competitive, and the prospects for young lawyers to move up the ladder in their firms is not great. But we graduate more and more each year.

These are in the professions that restrict the number of students who can enter, but the demand for entry is way beyond what the professions can bear.

Alberta has one school for dental hygienists. At the University of Alberta, entrants must first complete one year of a regular university program, and they only take about 40 new students a year.

So what happens? An 18-month program in Ottawa becomes 70-per-cent Alberta students.

You can't tell students which careers they should pursue, and you can't tell universities where they should be putting all their resources.

The CIBC report rather snorted about the practicality of a degree in medieval history. Gwyn suggests that humanities classes with only 10 students ought to be cut outright. But a more rational approach says they should be kept, or even expanded.

For most students, these are not their core programs; they are options that students in science, arts, and education can take to round out their studies, to develop a rational world view. That's what makes a university degree different than a tech school diploma.

A technician monitoring the readouts at a gas plant will make more money than a new lawyer, teacher and perhaps even a new doctor. So will a welder with experience and a willingness to work long shift rotations far from home.

That's the money market. The knowledge market runs on different parameters. Life is more than just gaining the biggest possible paycheque.

Morgan claims that our ivory towers are graduating students without “foundation knowledge” as he puts it, while expecting businesses to fill the gaps.

That's backwards thinking, in my view. The “foundation knowledge” is taught in the programs Gwynn says have no value.

The middle way, it seems, lies in programs like Red Deer College's Donald School of Business, in apprenticeship and trades programs — alongside the humanities.

Besides, decades of pushing the professions is resulting in decades of indentured labour from highly-qualified people who can't find jobs to match their training.

But if you try to dictate through control of the budget process which programs are useful and which are not, you will only end up chasing your tail.

At the brink — and it's a long fall from here

As of Wednesday's writing, the U.S. government is back in business, as the deal reached Tuesday night was approved.

So, sanity may have peeked out from under the desk where it was hiding in the Senate and Congress. If it hadn't, the North American economy would truly be tipping over the brink — and it's a long fall to come.

From here, it's hard to keep up with all of the economic deadlines the American government faces, but laying off 800,000 government workers constitutes a pretty costly down payment. (On a note that may satisfy some, one arm of government tshut down does income tax audits.)

U.S. government workers are no different from us; most live paycheque to paycheque. One missed payday is bad, but miss two, and real trouble soon follows.

Already it's being seen in consumer confidence. The lower the family income, the more people report they are cutting their spending. Even of families earning $100,000 or more, a third say they are eliminating plans to buy items like cars and appliances.

That's a shock that reverberates right to Ontario's manufacturing base, and Alberta's energy base. And once people lose confidence in the future, it is very hard to turn that around.

The new deal only allows the U.S. government to pay its bills until mid-February. At that, who would rush into financing a car over several years, if they are not confident they'll have a job at this winter's end?

So, what kind of government bills are we talking about? Here are some early deadlines I was able to find:

• Oct. 24: $93 billion in treasury bills come due. They are expected to be covered by a T-bill sale that begins Oct. 21, but if that goes off the rails because of lack of confidence . . .

• Oct. 31: $6 billion interest on government debt comes due (total debt now sits at about $17 trillion)

• Nov. 1: $25 billion in social security benefits need to be paid, plus $18 billion in Medicare reimbursements, $12 billion in military salaries, and $3 billion in other government benefit programs (think school lunches for kids)

• Nov. 15: another $15 billion in interest payments on the debt

And so on. . .

While I was trying to figure out what this means to us, I came across a lecture (a sales pitch, actually) from a New York financial consultant who was offering wealthy American clients assistance in moving their assets out of U.S. dollars.

He points to news reports (which I had actually seen myself — that's why a I stuck with the lecture, until I found out it was a sales pitch) of China, Russia, the European Union, India and countries in South America and Southeast Asia rushing to sign deals to trade in their own currencies, without converting to U.S. dollars as a go-between.

I also saw a story about European countries significantly increasing their holdings of Canadian dollars — which is really scary. Here's why.

The gist of the financial adviser's pitch was that as other nations drop the American dollar as the world's reserve currency, America will no longer be able to simply print money to solve its problems. The day that happens, the U.S. dollar will drop like a stone on global markets, and America will engage hyperinflation.

The scary part about Europe buying hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars — in that scenario — is that they probably paid for them with American dollars. In other words, we gave them real money, while they gave us paper.

A few days ago, a friend, wanting conversation, asked me what I thought of the shutdown crisis in the U.S. What the heck should I know?

It was just idle talk, so I said at least I have a house paid for, with a yard that can grow a lot of fruit and vegetables. I also put a big value on owning four laying hens. We both chuckled.

At least, I thought we were laughing. I hope to God we were trying to be funny.

It does no good to focus on worst possible outcomes. Besides, the crazy American brinksmanship may end up as just one more episode in their partisan game of thrones, and the money presses will just continue to run. For another few months.

But the shutdown of consumer spending has already begun — at least in 800,000 U.S. homes.

Maybe it's good the agencies that measure unemployment and consumer spending were shut down. Maybe we were better off not knowing whether our two economies are on the brink, or already over it.