Sometimes it's better not to share

There will always be plans and proposals that look better on paper than they turn out to be in reality. I would suggest that high schools sharing gym space is one example of that.

High schools sharing space for a career and technology lab that would include manufacturing, design, construction, trades and heavy-equipment programming sounds even more complex than co-ordinating gym time for schools in separate divisions with a combined population that could reach 3,000 students.

That kind of project looks more college-level than high school level to me.

If there is a difference of opinion between planners in Alberta Education and local school boards, it's almost always better to side with the local school boards. But not in this case.

Red Deer Public had initially endorsed a high school development proposal for a large piece of property on the northeast corner of 67 Street and 30^th Avenue. Three high schools are proposed for the site: public, Catholic and Francophone.

That's a whole lot of people coming and going to one place, every day. But let's assume that if Alberta Education can OK the land use designation, Alberta Transportation can also approve safe access and egress on what's going to be a very busy corner in this town.

The public board's understanding was that the whole project was to be built in phases (as provincial construction funding comes available, and who can predict that?). On paper, there were synergies that could be developed for some of the more high-ticket items that come on a list of things that a school needs.

One would be a gym. I don't know how many other smaller gyms were planned to be part of the total package, but in all the time I've spent in the stands of a school gym, there's no way I can see how one gym would serve three high schools — even if it was only to be a “game” gym, with teams doing their practices elsewhere.

Can you imagine how many teams and other groups needing gym time there would be at three high schools? It would list into the high dozens. Even if some uses were scheduled for midnight, there aren't enough hours in a week outside of school time to accommodate.

For each sport, game day or practice day is every day, before and after school hours. Each sport has junior and senior teams, for girls and boys. In my days with kids at Lindsay Thurber, players who didn't make the senior or junior squads got another chance to play in the league for smaller regional schools, adding yet another layer of need for gym time.

You don't build a multi-million-dollar gym for a school with more than 1,000 students, and only 10 girls and 10 boys get to use it for league basketball, for instance.

That's just for after-school activity. Phys ed classes would be a whole other scheduling problem.

What would a gym for more than 3,000 students look like? I'll suggest the main gym at Red Deer College would be too small (and about four or five gyms too few).

Whose logo would be painted on the wall? If you think that's not important, you don't know the value of team sports to the functioning of a school. I know this from experience: the logo on the wall and the championship banners in front if it are a prime connector for a community of students with pride in what they do.

Bottom line: I can't see how high schools can share a gym.

Unless it's an entire sports and fitness complex, like the Collicutt Centre. Red Deer needs another, larger, one of those, and proximity to three high schools would definitely be useful. But a useful thing like that is not on the table here.

Nor, when you think about it, is a shared career and technology centre. Our schools really are doing a good job these days in giving young people a wide range of options in the training they receive.

Even “academic” students can benefit from taking an option class in construction or some other trade. High school is too early to stream your education totally in or totally out of the academic or trades stream.

But the wonderful shared lab that was proposed on paper looks like something a college should be doing. If I managed limited funding, that's where I'd put the money.

So it was a good decision — on a variety of levels — that the Red Deer Public district board changed its mind and let the idea of shared facilities go.

Red Deer Catholic is now free to proceed quickly on their plans for St. Joseph's High School. Red Deer Public will get funding for a high school at the site, whenever Alberta Education makes it a priority. Same for the Francophone high school.

Each will design a building to match its programming. The synergies will develop out of parents choosing which school's programming best suits their own children's desires for their future.

Less cost-efficient on paper, but most likely better for the students.

Government looked, and found we are watching them

If you think governments or political parties don't listen to their critics, you need to pay attention to what came out of the two provincial party meetings held in Alberta over the weekend. That, plus our federal government's behaviour at the meeting this weekend of the leaders of the G20 group in Australia.

If you haven't been paying attention to them, here's some assurance that they are paying at least some attention to you.

I'm heartened by the confluence of these events. I think democracy in Canada might just have gotten a bit stronger over the weekend. So let's pay attention, and see how things work out.

Traditionally, the annual general meetings of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party have been pretty happy affairs. Not so much in the past couple of years, perhaps, but this weekend's party meeting in Banff reminded me of meetings past.

A premier and party leader in full control of the agenda. A nice standing O for former leader Dave Hancock (and no mention of Allison Redford). Confidence, all round, but the reports I saw contained less swagger than in the past.

Other than Prentice's comment that Albertans sleep better with the province in Tory hands, those of us still awake want to see government working a little harder. And Prentice seems to be getting that.

He promised in a CBC interview that he's not going to be the kind of premier who hangs around for a couple questions in the Legislature, and then leaves. He says he's seen that we want him to be available and answerable, even in the noise and swordplay of Question Period.

He's not going to “snap back” at cheap shots, he says, and he expects his cabinet colleagues to follow suit. Watch, and see.

In the Red Deer meeting of the opposition Wildrose Party, we got the promise that there will be less negativity from them in the coming months, and a greater elaboration of policy alternatives.

At a meeting that might not have gone well at all for leader Danielle Smith, we got a tone of second chances, rather than ultimatums. Even though Smith gave the party a sort of ultimatum of her own as the meeting began.

Two hard-fought election battles into their history, and two decisive defeats later, Wildrose could easily have collapsed on itself. But it didn't, at least publicly. There was far less internal strife reported than could have been the case. Far less recrimination and finger-pointing, and more forward thinking.

Smith promised that a third defeat would be her last; she either emerges from the next general election as premier, or as a footnote of history. That assures that the long knives stay hidden, for now.

Again, we'll see. But with Prentice's promise of more decorum from the ruling party, and the opposition's promise of more debate on policy alternatives, the next session of the Legislature might actually produce a working government.

Isn't that what we've been saying we wanted for the past few years?

And speaking of leaders who give us what we want, I'll take it as a positive that prime minister Stephen Harper was able to talk about the need for action on climate change at the G20 summit without looking positively ill.

OK, Canada has no policy regarding climate change. But now, there will be funding from Canada for action on the issue for developing nations. When you're starting from zero, even a one is a step forward.

At previous summits, Harper wouldn't have even been in the room, if climate change was likely to be mentioned. I say the change came because the federal party has been paying attention, even while they pretended not to, while pretending to pay attention. Catch my drift?

Harper knows we appreciate him being a tough guy, confronting Vladimir Putin over Russian activities in Ukraine.

But what we really want is some assurance that he understands Canadians are as worried about climate change as everyone else in the world. Call me a rose-coloured optimist here, but this could be evidence of a thawing process. Let's watch and see.

And that's the whole point today. If you pay attention, I think you'll find that government pays attention, too.

How bad do things have to get in government, before people start paying attention? In Alberta, we found that out about two years ago.

Lobby groups and self-appointed watchdogs can bark all they want, but you won't see a change in government attitude, until they notice that you're noticing.

You may want honest, civil government, but it won't come until governors truly believe they're being widely watched — and widely judged.

On a variety of levels, we seem to have their attention now. So pay attention back. See what the next months bring — and expect that it's not business as usual.

Security, and my private heartbeat

Would you pay $100, and tether yourself to an electronic device every day, just so you won't have to remember the passwords and PINs to your various debit and credit cards, laptop, tablet, smartphone and all their apps? Or to make growing your credit card debt more secure (and probably more convenient than is good for you)?

At the rate we have accumulated these things in our lives, $100 seems almost worth it. If you (like me) have avoided upgrading your computer's operating system, or declined subscribing to what might be a useful service, or couldn't reboot after a crash, all because you couldn't recall your password, being able to do all these things with a wave of your hand seems . . . almost useful.

Especially if all these transactions could be as secure as your individual heartbeat. Nobody can steal, copy or forge that.

Call it the result of paying for research at universities. A group of tech-heads at the University of Toronto was thinking about biometrics as a means of instant, secure identification. Rather than finding another way to read a fingerprint or retina scan, they looked into the possibility that the electronic signature of every person's heartbeat is likewise unique.

Anything that can be read electronically — like an ECG — can be digitized and stored. So they rounded up 1,000 or so volunteers at the U of T, gave them an ECG and found that no two of them matched exactly.

What do you do with information like that? You spin off a company and look for seed money.

The new company, called Bionym, got a total of $14 million from the federal government, through Export Development Canada, and investment partners like Ignition Partners, Relay Ventures — and MasterCard.

They used the money to design and build a slim bracelet, called a Nymi, that you activate with a reading of your heartbeat. That little bracelet would then be able to talk to your computer, laptop, smartphone — and your credit card — and act in your name.

It could work with any other applications a person could dream up that requires personal ID. Some articles have already suggested hotel room key access, or even ID at restaurants, which would instantly know your personal preferences and profile, just as you walk through the door. Italian sausage pizza, no pepperoni, with extra onions and mushrooms, coming right up.

I'm betting MasterCard got the link with the Royal Bank of Canada, which will be testing the devices in the near future. If things go as hoped, Royal Bank account holders would be able to purchase a Royal Bank Nymi, and use it as a debit or credit card at bank machines and whatever stores that are able to accept it.

After that, expect every bank to roll out their own versions of the technology.

We are so used to instant roll-outs of the latest gizmo, but just be aware that making a warehouse full of bracelets isn't all this involves. Think of all the places that will have to adopt the technology to accept these things, in numbers to make having a Nymi device worthwhile. That will take some time.

In the meantime, perhaps we should sit back and think about whether we really need this.

Even considering my own difficulties with passwords and PINs, I'm not sure this gizmo is worth 100 bucks, plus the effort of having to learn how to use it, connect it to everything in the known universe, and keep it running.

Isn't it enough that I can just tap my bank card on the machine in the store, and the money in my bank account is transferred to the retailer?

I'm already shamed sometimes because I so seldom carry cash. It's like I have to make an extra trip to pick up a poppy for Remembrance Day, or remember to grab a few coins at home before I go shopping, to have something for the charity box at the grocery store, which used to be so usual as to be thoughtless.

And I certainly don't need anything that makes buying more stuff more convenient. Or another reminder that I'm “not the target demographic.”

I've been wrong about these things before. Years ago, I was happily convinced I would be one of those people who would go through life without having a personal computer. Or a digital camera. Or writing a blog. Or until this year, without owning a cell phone.

I still vow never to Face my Book or tweet my twitter. Lines need to be drawn.

I also maintain the hope to complete my time in this world without every store that I walk past knowing who I am and my complete shopping history. Maybe The Machine has already taken over, but I prefer to be the least active cog within it.

For now, my heart, it is my own. That, and the hundred bucks. And may the junk in your life be limited by the number of passwords and PINs you can remember.

The Poloz solution to youth unemployment: voluntary slavery

Don't you find it odd (and ironic) how wealthy people can say that raising the marginal tax rate on the top 10 per cent of income-earners is theft, and bad for the economy. But at the same time they can believe that unemployed people should work for zero pay — for just the privilege and experience of turning a profit for the 10 per cent.

Bank of Canada chief Stephen Peloz didn't suggest that directly when he said recently that unemployed millennials living in their parent’s basements would be better off volunteering their skills in an area close to their university degrees, as a means of padding their resumes.

But the message his unintended audience received was the ironic one.

Peloz himself said his speculations on why the unemployed should work for no pay at all was “not a monetary policy matter.” Well, good for that. Can you imagine him saying we should turn our economy around by creating wealth, for free?

He said he was merely relating the advice he gives to young people who ask him for advice on starting a career. Giving something of value away for free, in the hopes you might get paid for it later, is bad career planning.

There are about 200,000 Canadians with recent university training who cannot find work. The unemployment rate among this group is nearly double that for everyone else.

Working for free, says Poloz, would fill the gap in one's resume between getting a degree or diploma and getting a job. Peloz called the gap the “scarring effect” — the time spent when your credentials erode while others gain experience in your area, and yet others graduate with “fresher” skills.

As governor of the Bank of Canada, Peloz knows that every time he opens his mouth, people will parse every syllable of his sentences. They will search for meaning in every facial tic, while he gives his reasons why the Canada's central bank will do essentially nothing for another 90 days.

So he should know better than to publicly advise people to work in an underground economy. Can he explain the difference between employers taking on workers but not paying them, and people taking pay for their work, but declaring no income for tax purposes?

Both practices are common in Canada — and both are illegal. Unless a worker is required to undertake job experience as part of a certified education program, it is against the law not to pay that person.

It is against the law for a person to agree to work for less than minimum wage, and against the law to ask them to do it.

There is a reason Canada has laws governing labour standards. These internships and Poloz's suggestion that young people offer their work for free both subvert Canada's minimum wage and labour laws.

We already have a history of young people literally being worked to death for no pay as interns.

In Edmonton, an intern fell asleep while driving home after a 16-hour (unpaid) shift, and was killed in a car crash. Bell Canada was the subject of official complaints for rotating hundreds of people a year through unpaid internships, with little or no hope of a job at the end of the “experience.”

Walrus magazine was only one Canadian publication that was forced to stop taking on unpaid internships after their subscribers learned how a high portion of the product they paid for was produced for zero pay.

A business can get pretty used to not paying some of their staff. They can come to regard it as an entitlement.

It's not as if the work of these interns has no value. If an employer does not have work to offer requiring more skill than flipping hamburgers (which is at least paid work), what are they doing? Why would an employer demand university training to do work that has zero value?

We already know that interns often do the same work as paid staff in many cases.

Agreed, the thousands of young people coming out of our very expensive colleges and universities with poor job opportunities in their area of training is a problem. Telling these highly-trained (and highly-indebted) people that they have no value is not the answer.

One critic said Poloz was “tone deaf” on the issue. I would say he was being deliberately obtuse.

If Canada's industry is so uniquely skill-selective that no university or college can prepare someone to do that work, the employers need to provide the training themselves. After all, they're the ones profiting from it.

St. Paul, the world's first missionary (and a tent-maker by trade), said that every worker deserves his pay. And every slave must be properly fed, clothed, housed and cared for when sick.

What has changed since?

Income splitting? On average, forget it

Back in the day as they say, when we were raising children and paying our mortgage, I might have liked Stephen Harper's plan for family income splitting and the Universal Child Care Benefit.

Not really thinking too hard about things, I might have even voted for it. But I wonder if it would have gotten me ahead in the world.

We were Harper's target demographic: one-income family with kids. That would be one-income married family with kids. Single parents are not Stephen Harper's target demographic.

I've been trying for a while now to figure out if we would have been better off back then, if we had income splitting — and I can't definitely judge either way.

Maybe that's why I have someone else do our income taxes. Or maybe that's because the income splitting benefit is so marginal, you can't see it on the back of an envelope.

I was an average income earner, most of my life. My income didn't surpass the national average until after we'd paid our mortgage, and the kids were gone. The benefits of a university education, I guess.

Half of Canadian workers earn less than roughly $32,000 a year. Because high income-earners raise the average, the average Canadian wage slave these days earns just over $48,000.

But suppose I became Mr. Average today, with a wife at home and four (4) kids 8 years and under, as I was for a while back then. Would Stephen Harper be as good a friend to me as Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney were?

Hard to say, but on average, not likely, or not much.

Today, on my average $48,000 income, I can deduct $11,038 for myself, $11,038 for my non-working spouse, plus CPP, EI and all that other stuff to lower my taxable income. The refund for a dependent spouse today: $1,655.

The maximum benefit from income splitting: $2,000. Well, the equivalent of $350 would have been quite welcome, back in the day. I guess.

If I received the average benefit calculated for families with income splitting, it would be $1,140. But today's Mrs. Average has an income, and can't be deducted as a dependent.

That would mean child care. That would mean costs.

Registered daycare costs up to $950 a month in Red Deer. Being average, we would make that $850 a month, per child.

The Universal Child Care Benefit is being raised to $160 a month for the kids not yet in school, and $60 a month once they get to school, through age 17. So we, with three pre-schoolers costing a total of $2,850 a month for child care, would need to keep our receipts and claim the $2,160 a month the benefit does not cover.

The $8,000 cap on what you can claim per child would have come almost $2,000 a year short of total actual costs. (I'm told by people who looked at the numbers, that with three kids, it's cheaper to hire a live-out nanny, or for two kids, if the nanny lives in the house with you.)

So, for us, the decision today would have been pretty much the same as it was back in 1980s. Have Mrs. Average work full-time, and put half her take-home pay into child care (hoping for a refund at tax time)? Or just forget the hassle, stay home and be poor, rather than working full-time for an average salary, but really keeping less than minimum wage at the end of the month?

We opted for full-time parenting, and until the youngest was in school, we all just learned to be frugal. Well, thereafter as well.

The numbers Stephen Harper has on the table today contain negligible new financial incentive to put Mrs. Average into the workforce when there are preschoolers in the house.

So how did we do it back then? Our average house was an eighth the cost of an average house today (though mortgage rates were triple today's rates).

Utility bills back then were a tenth of what The Averages pay today. Car costs? The total price of gas in the 1980s was less than just the tax component of gasoline today. Gas mileage sucked, but nobody cared.

If Harper really wanted to buy our support, he'd ditch income-splitting altogether, and just lower income taxes for the Modern Averages.

The Averages today earn $74,500. If they live in Alberta, that would be $94,460. That's almost always with two-incomes, and almost none of them will get any benefit at all from income splitting.

They don't have four kids, either, so the Universal Child Care Benefit (which doesn't cover much) and the child care expenses deduction (which doesn't last long considering the life of a family), don't make for the hard decisions we made back in the day.

You know, I really don't think Stephen Harper cares that much about us Averages.

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

A win for the Tories, a loss for Wildrose

The four Alberta by-elections Monday were a major win for now-elected premier Jim Prentice. Prentice now also has both an elected education minister and health minister — and a mandate to continue the Tory Party dynasty in this province.

The by-election results were a loss for the opposition Wildrose Party. Not as disastrous a loss as may seem (though repeating this result in a general election would be a disaster for the party). But enough for leader Danielle Smith to see the need to convene a leadership review.

Wildrose did not even come second in two of the races. In Edmonton/Whitemud, the health minister and former mayor Stephen Mandel outpolled a doctor, Bob Turner of the NDP by about 3,000 votes, with Wildrose candidate Tim Grover another 470 votes back.

In Calgary Elbow, the closest of the races, education minister Gordon Dirks beat an unknown entity, Alberta Party leader Greg Clark, by a scant 800 or so votes. In former premier Allison Redford's riding, that's called a squeaker.

So, a distant second in two races and a more distant third in two others. Hardly the stuff of growth.

For their part, the NDP is calling their nearly two-to-one defeat in former premier Dave Hancock's Edmonton riding a moral victory. It's a doubling of support since the last election. No such silver lining for Wildrose.

I will suggest these results may be more a reflection of the big-city/smaller-centre divide, than the party's actual performance as an opposition.

You can't call this an urban/rural divide, because in Alberta, that doesn't really exist anymore. Alberta is Canada's most urban province now, with around 80 per cent of the population living in cities. Twenty per cent of the electorate, scattered around the province dotted by growing towns and small cities won't qualify too many Alberta ridings as “rural” anymore.

Only four of the 16 Wildrose MLAs represent totally urban ridings. Two are in Calgary, one is in Airdrie (which is big-city in flavour, if not in size) and one is from Medicine Hat.

Nothing wrong with any of that, but a political party that can't resonate widely in both Calgary and Edmonton will never form the government.

Thus, what I am calling Danielle's Smith's rather courageous call of a leadership review. She got 90-per-cent approval at the last leadership review, just following the last election. And after the next general election, there will be another.

One measure of leadership is willingness to withstand some scrutiny, and Smith seems up for all of it.

But you can expect some big adjustments in platform from the party to follow.

Smith has already hinted at the biggest among them: Wildrose needs to stop being the party of grievance, and start being the party of positive alternative.

Albertans already know very well what happens to a political party that holds power for too long. Complacency and a sense of entitlement result. So is the notion that what's good for the party is good for the province.

Insider-ism is another result. Why would so many Alberta towns have spent municipal tax dollars to send their councillors to Tory Party functions — and not even think it to be morally offensive, never mind illegal? Because of the perception that they needed to be seen with the group in power, to get their local issues on the government agenda, that's why.

This sort of nonsense would bring down a government almost anywhere else in Canada. But on Monday, voters in four Alberta ridings said that as little as they may trust the government, they trust the opposition even less.

Voters will need to hear how Wildrose will build schools and long-term care centres, in an environment of declining resource revenue — without raising taxes.

The NDP have come out and said they would do away with our ridiculous flat income tax rate, and raise business taxes slightly (to still remain among the lowest in the industrialized world) to accomplish their agenda. At least, a moral stance on things like this can lead to a moral victory, on occasion.

But the activist agenda of Wildrose remains largely undeclared. Beyond griping about Tory excesses (which I can do myself, sitting in my chair) we don't know all that much about Wildrose solutions.

Danielle Smith and her advisors are smart enough people. I suspect she'll do OK at her leadership review.

What people will need to see after that, is something to vote for, rather than a reason to vote against.

If negative reasons to cast a ballot were enough to win an election in Alberta, Prentice and his party wouldn't have swept four by-elections Monday.

Free speech requires courage and a public face; online trolling merely spawns an online remedy

The reason we cherish the concept of free speech is the same reason we also have libel laws: people disagree. On everything.

Isaac Newton's law which says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, applies as much to opinions as to physics. Where opinions clash, sometimes truth emerges. But often there is only wreckage.

I seldom read the comments that follow online news stories or opinion pieces. Not because I don't care what people think, but because reading conversations between anonymous identities is simply not very helpful.

But I do read anonymous online opinions about consumer goods that I might buy, or services I'm shopping for, like hotel accommodations in places where I plan to travel. Until recently, I'd missed the connection between them and the comments sections following news stories. My bad.

When people post anonymous opinions, it's often more work than it's worth, to find the grains of truth behind the invective poured out by people, who would silence themselves very quickly, if their true identities were revealed.

That's what happened recently to Ottawa student Olivia Parsons. According to her story, she had a bad experience with a landlord. After she had moved to a new address, she posted a negative review of the management company on consumer complaints web sites like Yelp, Pissed Consumer and Google.

Under an assumed name, of course.

What surprised her (and me) is that the landlord, CLV Group, discovered her true identity and new address — and sent her a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action if her critical posts were not taken down in five (5) days.

Disputes between landlords and tenants are pretty common. So is the clench in one's gut when a corporation backed by a legal firm sends you the message: “We know who you are, we know where you live, stop saying bad things about us.”

So the posts came down.

If being named publicly is enough to stop an anonymous troll from spewing whatever it is that anonymous trolls spew, being exposed by a well-known consumer advocate like CBC's Go Public can also have a cease-and-desist effect.

I'm not interested if Parson's complaints as reported by Go Public would stand up in court as defence against a libel suit. I'm interested in what's become of our notion of free speech in the age of the Internet.

Our concepts of free speech and fair comment grew up in a public marketplace. If your opinions can be repeated face-to-face in a public square (assuming you have the courage to say them in the public square), they can be weighed by the legal system that also grew up in the public square.

People claim the Internet is the ultimate public square. But really, it isn't.

Not when people of insufficient courage or plain bad intentions can anonymously post online judgements against people or organizations in the real world.

Would you call this an erosion of free speech? I would.

But the online world does not worry about such concepts. The Internet simply adapts.

Imagine being the operator of a hotel, and a malicious review of your establishment is posted online, for all the world to see on a giant consumer review site like Trip Adviser.

What do you do? You contact an online reputation and reassurance service, like Kwikchex.

So, instead of publicly determining if the hotel's restaurant really did serve bad mussels, or if there really are bedbugs crawling the room, you pit one online giant against another, using more legal resources than anyone could possibly afford on their own.

So, as Kwikchex claims, thousands of negative online reviews are taken down, and large entities like Trip Advisor get challenged in court.

Or, an individual consumer like Olivia Parsons contacts an online advocate.

How much of this even has brushing contact with free speech? In my view, not much.

If you think your landlord has done you wrong, there are agencies set up to help determine the truth of the matter. If you don't think a hotel gave good service for the money, sign your name to the complaint.

If you think I — or anyone else — may be full of baloney, don't hide behind a baloney moniker to say so.

Our ideas about free speech and fair comment are not fully transferable to the Internet. Not yet, anyway. Until they are, the Internet grows its own adaptations.