My friend Corey Hogan cut me in one one of the best political leadership quotations I have ever heard. It embodies the very quality that I think we all thirst for...the ability of a leader to scoop up our collective spirit, hold it in his or her hands, and describe us to ourselves in a way that makes us as big and as confident as we can be.
It was JFK who said:
"If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America. And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year.
But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task. It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product—if we judge the United States of America by that—that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs that glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. "
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Some of us respect you, Alberta civil servant!
(If you’re an Alberta provincial civil servant, be aware this is a long piece, but you ARE going to want to read it. It’s likely the first positive thing you’ll have heard about your job in a very long time. This posting also appears on the Alberta Liberal Party website )
Controversial as what I have to say may be in these redneck times, the very fact of its controversiality is why we Albertans need to have a very serious think about the place of government and its employees in our society.
It’s long past time for us to re-appreciate our provincial civil servants as intelligent, highly-trained, deeply dedicated and powerful creative forces in so many aspects of the potential overall improvement of our lives.
It’s amazing that an otherwise highly-educated province has fallen so deeply into its blind worship of Reganomics, the bonehead philosophy that drove California’s Proposition 13 which so starved the state and its municipalities of funds (without reducing public demand for services) that California’s state and local debt now totals nearly $2 trillion, or roughly 4 times the Canadian per capita debt load!
Since the 1980s, Alberta’s Conservatives have religiously chanted the Reganomics mantra – government and bureaucrats bad, private sector good – and their policies have reflected the belief that cutting taxes and downsizing government leaves more money flowing through the economy to generate more overall wealth.
In theory, at least, it’s not a bad philosophy…if it weren’t for the fact that 99% of us have learned that most of the money flows not into barber shops and restaurants and retail stores, but instead straight into the hands of the rich. And it more or less stays there.
The bottom line is that we’ve still got a government of swaggerers and gunslingers (the epitomes being Ron Liepert and, before him, Steve West) who curl their lips at government in general and openly disdain civil servants as a featherbedding underclass that’s constantly in need of a good downsizing. Their egos are tied directly to the size of their…budget cuts.
These are the guys who actually believe that it you decimate the ranks of workplace safety inspectors, or environmental enforcement officers, bad-guy employers and polluters will eagerly report their transgressions so they can be duly punished by the few remaining staff in government service.
These pol-honchos care far, far, less for the service that government is supposed to perform on behalf of the people who pay the taxes, than they do for the accolades they’ll get from fellow Reganomics-believers-voters-donors for having cut government budgets.
Pity the poor civil servant
You have to feel awfully sorry for the poor souls that have so far dodged the cutters and slashers in successive Conservative governments.
As more and more of their dedicated colleagues have been thrown under the bus by their employers, their work loads have increased by factors that would be unconscionable in efficient private sector companies. In some areas, these workloads have resulted in the loss of life – just ask someone in the child welfare department.
The scope of the civil service has also incredibly narrowed, from delivering (or supporting the delivery of) important services that protect, assist or enable Albertans to improve their lives, to sheepishly performing niggardly roles that mostly consist of telling people NO and keeping them away from government instead of bringing the government to them.
Civil servants these days have been forced into saying NO to this, NO to that. More and more, they’ve been forced by their bosses to aspire to, and deliver, less and less.
And they know it. Every time they go to work, they know how different it should feel in their gut to open that office door. They yearn to once again feel good about their work; they thirst for employers who understand how important it is for them to do what they’re trained to do, to provide whatever service they’ve chosen as a profession that makes them feel needed, valued and appreciated by the people they serve.
Instead, every day they re-enter a siege mentality, hunker down, shut up and just get through the day…chalking up one more day toward retirement. Everywhere around them they see the way things are done, or not done, and they know better. They also know it’s no use speaking out, because they’ll just doom themselves for the next downsizing.
How it could be
OK, now for the positive pitch…and ironically it starts with a guy named Peter Lougheed, our first Progressive Conservative Premier who was elected more than 40 years ago.
There was a guy who GOT government – enlightened government, supported by a competent, respected and empowered civil service.
Under him, everyone had their roles on straight. Elected officials made policy and pointed the way. The civil service (below the Deputy Minister level, largely non-political in those days) advised the government in the process of making policy, then carried out the programs that flowed from the policy decisions. In those days, undue Ministerial interference in the delivery of programs actually caused minor scandals.
It was a good time to be a civil servant. You were respected for your skills and your goals. You were given the resources to do your job. You were encouraged to come up with new ideas and innovative approaches. And you were appreciated by your political employers for a job well done.
And the enlightened approach that Peter Lougheed brought to his relationship with government employees translated in his government’s similarly enlightened approach to its programs and services.
All kinds of smart, exciting, valuable, wonderful and just plain fun things happened in Lougheed’s days. He started the Heritage Fund. He bought an airline to retain control over transportation policy in a fast-growing, geographically isolated province. He bought an oil rig so he could sue Pierre Trudeau over royalties. He opened government’s eyes to protecting and enjoying the environment. His programs built or improved all kinds of local community facilities. He recognized Alberta’s multicultural wealth. And he invested heavily in encouraging the growth of our visual and performing arts.
All of that was done with the eager support of a truly empowered, appreciated civil service.
It can be that way again!
An Alberta Liberal government will begin by ending decades of Reganomics-based attitudes toward the place of government in society.
To us, an enlightened government is a social mechanism to make life better, safer, more fulfilling, more promising and hopeful, for all of us.
To us, the cost of government is an investment, not a waste.
(Here we need to take a side-step and assure fellow Albertans that we are also highly aware of the need for government to respect the taxpayer’s dollar, and to run as cost-efficiently as possible.)
But in the overall scheme of things, an Alberta Liberal government would represent an enormous attitude shift about just where government fits in the lives we live.
We would say YES – not always, but certainly more often. YES to our citizens. YES to the value of our civil servants.
We would challenge both Albertans and our civil servants to become more proactive, more creative…to take more chances in promoting new ideas and new ways of doing things…and to feel safe while doing it.
We would protect whistleblowers big-time, but we would need to protect them much less often because our brand of government would be far more welcoming to (and therefore far less threatening as a result of) the internal venting of concern about how we’re doing things.
Save for our Deputy Ministers, we would sweep politics out of the higher ranks of the civil service with tough, new civil service ethics rules that severely limit managers’ ability to apply their personal politics to the workplace.
And we would completely remove the ever-present political strong-arm from the awarding of government contracts across the entire spectrum of government spending - from construction to IT.
It’s dead wrong – actually, it’s almost literally criminal – that we’ve come to the point where people in every nook and cranny of Alberta feel compelled to donate money or volunteer time to the Progressive Conservative Party if they want even a hope of getting provincial work.
Given how pervasive this nudge-nudge, wink-wink political rot is these days, doing away with it is a big job.
So, how would we do it? Easy!
Under the Raj Sherman Alberta Liberals, all major provincial contracts would be awarded in full public view, by a committee chaired by an Opposition MLA and attended by the media. Pros and cons of various bidders, and civil service recommendations, would be part of the discussion leading up to the contract award.
Similar, open processes not involving MLAs would be set up for the awarding of smaller contracts focused more on local or regional projects.
Imagine! Awarding contracts solely on the basis of merit.
Poof!...political pressure, gone.
Imagine that!
Imagine what this change alone will do for the position of the civil servant in the process of government. Suddenly, employees’ training and judgment will count for something. They’ll be more in control of delivering cost-effectiveness – not votes and donations – in the spending of public funds.
Imagine citizens having the individual freedom to say NO to an invitation to attend the local government MLA’s annual golf tournament!
So take heart, faithful provincial civil servants. There are people out here who get what you do, who know how important it is and who empathize with how frustrated you must be subjected to the ideological whims of people who still haven’t awakened to the fact that Reganomics landed the United States in $14,000,000,000,000 in debt and didn’t do a thing to reduce the public’s need for government services.
Please, talk to us
If you’d like to talk to someone who understands, please call us and talk to us about the frustrations of your provincial job.
Call 780-504-4905. My name is Alex, and I’m the guy who’ll answer.
My non-government email address is: alex.macdonald@incentre.net
Be assured, I’m discreet.
I’ll hold your confidence.
Controversial as what I have to say may be in these redneck times, the very fact of its controversiality is why we Albertans need to have a very serious think about the place of government and its employees in our society.
It’s long past time for us to re-appreciate our provincial civil servants as intelligent, highly-trained, deeply dedicated and powerful creative forces in so many aspects of the potential overall improvement of our lives.
It’s amazing that an otherwise highly-educated province has fallen so deeply into its blind worship of Reganomics, the bonehead philosophy that drove California’s Proposition 13 which so starved the state and its municipalities of funds (without reducing public demand for services) that California’s state and local debt now totals nearly $2 trillion, or roughly 4 times the Canadian per capita debt load!
Since the 1980s, Alberta’s Conservatives have religiously chanted the Reganomics mantra – government and bureaucrats bad, private sector good – and their policies have reflected the belief that cutting taxes and downsizing government leaves more money flowing through the economy to generate more overall wealth.
In theory, at least, it’s not a bad philosophy…if it weren’t for the fact that 99% of us have learned that most of the money flows not into barber shops and restaurants and retail stores, but instead straight into the hands of the rich. And it more or less stays there.
The bottom line is that we’ve still got a government of swaggerers and gunslingers (the epitomes being Ron Liepert and, before him, Steve West) who curl their lips at government in general and openly disdain civil servants as a featherbedding underclass that’s constantly in need of a good downsizing. Their egos are tied directly to the size of their…budget cuts.
These are the guys who actually believe that it you decimate the ranks of workplace safety inspectors, or environmental enforcement officers, bad-guy employers and polluters will eagerly report their transgressions so they can be duly punished by the few remaining staff in government service.
These pol-honchos care far, far, less for the service that government is supposed to perform on behalf of the people who pay the taxes, than they do for the accolades they’ll get from fellow Reganomics-believers-voters-donors for having cut government budgets.
Pity the poor civil servant
You have to feel awfully sorry for the poor souls that have so far dodged the cutters and slashers in successive Conservative governments.
As more and more of their dedicated colleagues have been thrown under the bus by their employers, their work loads have increased by factors that would be unconscionable in efficient private sector companies. In some areas, these workloads have resulted in the loss of life – just ask someone in the child welfare department.
The scope of the civil service has also incredibly narrowed, from delivering (or supporting the delivery of) important services that protect, assist or enable Albertans to improve their lives, to sheepishly performing niggardly roles that mostly consist of telling people NO and keeping them away from government instead of bringing the government to them.
Civil servants these days have been forced into saying NO to this, NO to that. More and more, they’ve been forced by their bosses to aspire to, and deliver, less and less.
And they know it. Every time they go to work, they know how different it should feel in their gut to open that office door. They yearn to once again feel good about their work; they thirst for employers who understand how important it is for them to do what they’re trained to do, to provide whatever service they’ve chosen as a profession that makes them feel needed, valued and appreciated by the people they serve.
Instead, every day they re-enter a siege mentality, hunker down, shut up and just get through the day…chalking up one more day toward retirement. Everywhere around them they see the way things are done, or not done, and they know better. They also know it’s no use speaking out, because they’ll just doom themselves for the next downsizing.
How it could be
OK, now for the positive pitch…and ironically it starts with a guy named Peter Lougheed, our first Progressive Conservative Premier who was elected more than 40 years ago.
There was a guy who GOT government – enlightened government, supported by a competent, respected and empowered civil service.
Under him, everyone had their roles on straight. Elected officials made policy and pointed the way. The civil service (below the Deputy Minister level, largely non-political in those days) advised the government in the process of making policy, then carried out the programs that flowed from the policy decisions. In those days, undue Ministerial interference in the delivery of programs actually caused minor scandals.
It was a good time to be a civil servant. You were respected for your skills and your goals. You were given the resources to do your job. You were encouraged to come up with new ideas and innovative approaches. And you were appreciated by your political employers for a job well done.
And the enlightened approach that Peter Lougheed brought to his relationship with government employees translated in his government’s similarly enlightened approach to its programs and services.
All kinds of smart, exciting, valuable, wonderful and just plain fun things happened in Lougheed’s days. He started the Heritage Fund. He bought an airline to retain control over transportation policy in a fast-growing, geographically isolated province. He bought an oil rig so he could sue Pierre Trudeau over royalties. He opened government’s eyes to protecting and enjoying the environment. His programs built or improved all kinds of local community facilities. He recognized Alberta’s multicultural wealth. And he invested heavily in encouraging the growth of our visual and performing arts.
All of that was done with the eager support of a truly empowered, appreciated civil service.
It can be that way again!
An Alberta Liberal government will begin by ending decades of Reganomics-based attitudes toward the place of government in society.
To us, an enlightened government is a social mechanism to make life better, safer, more fulfilling, more promising and hopeful, for all of us.
To us, the cost of government is an investment, not a waste.
(Here we need to take a side-step and assure fellow Albertans that we are also highly aware of the need for government to respect the taxpayer’s dollar, and to run as cost-efficiently as possible.)
But in the overall scheme of things, an Alberta Liberal government would represent an enormous attitude shift about just where government fits in the lives we live.
We would say YES – not always, but certainly more often. YES to our citizens. YES to the value of our civil servants.
We would challenge both Albertans and our civil servants to become more proactive, more creative…to take more chances in promoting new ideas and new ways of doing things…and to feel safe while doing it.
We would protect whistleblowers big-time, but we would need to protect them much less often because our brand of government would be far more welcoming to (and therefore far less threatening as a result of) the internal venting of concern about how we’re doing things.
Save for our Deputy Ministers, we would sweep politics out of the higher ranks of the civil service with tough, new civil service ethics rules that severely limit managers’ ability to apply their personal politics to the workplace.
And we would completely remove the ever-present political strong-arm from the awarding of government contracts across the entire spectrum of government spending - from construction to IT.
It’s dead wrong – actually, it’s almost literally criminal – that we’ve come to the point where people in every nook and cranny of Alberta feel compelled to donate money or volunteer time to the Progressive Conservative Party if they want even a hope of getting provincial work.
Given how pervasive this nudge-nudge, wink-wink political rot is these days, doing away with it is a big job.
So, how would we do it? Easy!
Under the Raj Sherman Alberta Liberals, all major provincial contracts would be awarded in full public view, by a committee chaired by an Opposition MLA and attended by the media. Pros and cons of various bidders, and civil service recommendations, would be part of the discussion leading up to the contract award.
Similar, open processes not involving MLAs would be set up for the awarding of smaller contracts focused more on local or regional projects.
Imagine! Awarding contracts solely on the basis of merit.
Poof!...political pressure, gone.
Imagine that!
Imagine what this change alone will do for the position of the civil servant in the process of government. Suddenly, employees’ training and judgment will count for something. They’ll be more in control of delivering cost-effectiveness – not votes and donations – in the spending of public funds.
Imagine citizens having the individual freedom to say NO to an invitation to attend the local government MLA’s annual golf tournament!
So take heart, faithful provincial civil servants. There are people out here who get what you do, who know how important it is and who empathize with how frustrated you must be subjected to the ideological whims of people who still haven’t awakened to the fact that Reganomics landed the United States in $14,000,000,000,000 in debt and didn’t do a thing to reduce the public’s need for government services.
Please, talk to us
If you’d like to talk to someone who understands, please call us and talk to us about the frustrations of your provincial job.
Call 780-504-4905. My name is Alex, and I’m the guy who’ll answer.
My non-government email address is: alex.macdonald@incentre.net
Be assured, I’m discreet.
I’ll hold your confidence.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Surprise-surprise. Feds had another shoe!
If you take a peek at my November 18 2009 blog in which I admitted begrudging respect the the federal government's decision to allow low-cost competition to the large wireless companies, I should perhaps have hedged my respect.
The feds, it seems, have dropped the other shoe. What they 'gave' the public in the way of lower cell phone charges because of heightened competition, they have now taken back Big Time and handed straight over to the large carriers like Rogers, Bell and Telus.
The big guys are going to laugh all the way to the bank now that, as a result of a CRTC decision today, the big internet providers are allowed to cap their excess bandwidth, which will force prices for internet video streaming way, way up. One expert I saw interviewed today estimated that whereas people pay something like $40 a month for unlimited use of high speed bandwidth right now, after the CRTC decision works its insidious way to the marketplace, that $40 will look more like $100 to $140 a month.
The big guys are now free to charge whatever the market will bear for the service just about everyone is learning to need in so many ways.
With the world moving towards internet delivery of video (witness Netflix's direct delivery service via internet), today's decision has just slapped a $100 monthly 'tax' on every web user who wishes to move ahead with technology.
Hey, how about reversing both of the decisions I've referred to here. It'd be a lot cheaper to have less competition for wireless phone service than it will be to pay $100 more a month to be on the technological front edge of the web.
Please, tell me how the CRTC decision helped the average Joe-Jane out there?
Tell me I'm wrong wrong in suspecting that today's decision was a politically-driven payback for the previous decision.
Bastards, all!
The feds, it seems, have dropped the other shoe. What they 'gave' the public in the way of lower cell phone charges because of heightened competition, they have now taken back Big Time and handed straight over to the large carriers like Rogers, Bell and Telus.
The big guys are going to laugh all the way to the bank now that, as a result of a CRTC decision today, the big internet providers are allowed to cap their excess bandwidth, which will force prices for internet video streaming way, way up. One expert I saw interviewed today estimated that whereas people pay something like $40 a month for unlimited use of high speed bandwidth right now, after the CRTC decision works its insidious way to the marketplace, that $40 will look more like $100 to $140 a month.
The big guys are now free to charge whatever the market will bear for the service just about everyone is learning to need in so many ways.
With the world moving towards internet delivery of video (witness Netflix's direct delivery service via internet), today's decision has just slapped a $100 monthly 'tax' on every web user who wishes to move ahead with technology.
Hey, how about reversing both of the decisions I've referred to here. It'd be a lot cheaper to have less competition for wireless phone service than it will be to pay $100 more a month to be on the technological front edge of the web.
Please, tell me how the CRTC decision helped the average Joe-Jane out there?
Tell me I'm wrong wrong in suspecting that today's decision was a politically-driven payback for the previous decision.
Bastards, all!
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Look Gift Cards in the Mouth!
OK, Albertans, it's time to rise up and use the law to prevent companies from making oodles from the fact that about 10% of gift cards are never used, or are used long after they're given.
You see, it used to be that stores that sold gift cards imposed artificial deadlines after which the card was no longer valid...a year or 2 years was common. They also imposed extra 'carrying' fees, $2 a month after a year, for example, until the balance was zero.
I recently had the same thing happen to me. I took three cards that I had forgotten about and tried to redeem them at Totem and Sears. As well, I tried to use a Capital One VISA gift card at a retail outlet.
In the end, I scored 0 for 3. The VISA card was no longer valid (no time limit was listed on the card). The Totem and Sears cards were, I was told by store employees, outdated.
Steaming mad, I checked the Alberta Fair Trading Act and found that a distant memory was indeed correct. These gift card practices are illegal in Alberta, and stores that practice them can be fined up to $100,000 for doing so.
I'm on my way back to Sears and Totem to flash the Alberta Gift Card Regulation fact sheet at the store managers and see how fast they say sorry. If they don't, I'm going straight to the provincial consumer affairs people to swear out complaints.
One glitch for may will occur if the stores' records show the cards were purchased before November 1, 2008, when the legislation came into effect. I'm pretty sure my cards didn't sit around that long, so I'm hopeful.
FYI, I have no legal grounds for complaint re the VISA card, because the provincial gift card regulations do not apply to financial institutions.
And BTW, the movie theatre companies (Cineplex comes directly to mind) have figured out a way around this legislation. The adult admission certificates you buy for discounted prices at the AMA, for example, have time limits on them (about a year, I think). If you try to use them after a year, they'll be rejected.
The loophole for the theatres is that under Alberta law, if the gift card (or certificate) is for a specific service rather than for a specific dollar value, the certificate does not fall under the Gift Card Regulations. So beware. It's still a scam, but you can't do anything about it. They're got your money, and that of everyone else who's not used a certificate in time...and they've got it forever!
You see, it used to be that stores that sold gift cards imposed artificial deadlines after which the card was no longer valid...a year or 2 years was common. They also imposed extra 'carrying' fees, $2 a month after a year, for example, until the balance was zero.
I recently had the same thing happen to me. I took three cards that I had forgotten about and tried to redeem them at Totem and Sears. As well, I tried to use a Capital One VISA gift card at a retail outlet.
In the end, I scored 0 for 3. The VISA card was no longer valid (no time limit was listed on the card). The Totem and Sears cards were, I was told by store employees, outdated.
Steaming mad, I checked the Alberta Fair Trading Act and found that a distant memory was indeed correct. These gift card practices are illegal in Alberta, and stores that practice them can be fined up to $100,000 for doing so.
I'm on my way back to Sears and Totem to flash the Alberta Gift Card Regulation fact sheet at the store managers and see how fast they say sorry. If they don't, I'm going straight to the provincial consumer affairs people to swear out complaints.
One glitch for may will occur if the stores' records show the cards were purchased before November 1, 2008, when the legislation came into effect. I'm pretty sure my cards didn't sit around that long, so I'm hopeful.
FYI, I have no legal grounds for complaint re the VISA card, because the provincial gift card regulations do not apply to financial institutions.
And BTW, the movie theatre companies (Cineplex comes directly to mind) have figured out a way around this legislation. The adult admission certificates you buy for discounted prices at the AMA, for example, have time limits on them (about a year, I think). If you try to use them after a year, they'll be rejected.
The loophole for the theatres is that under Alberta law, if the gift card (or certificate) is for a specific service rather than for a specific dollar value, the certificate does not fall under the Gift Card Regulations. So beware. It's still a scam, but you can't do anything about it. They're got your money, and that of everyone else who's not used a certificate in time...and they've got it forever!
Even Consumer Reports does it!
If you're a magazine subscriber of a certain age, it's likely that you can never really remember when you renewed your subscription. So when the magazines send you a series of zappy, insistent, 60% OFF IF YOU ACT NOW!!! letters, at some point you panic and send them their damn money.
Well, it's a real scam. And even Consumer Reports does it.
Consumer Reports will mail you these re-subscription letters repeatedly even if your subscription isn't due for renewal for a full year or more. I've even received my Consumer Reports wrapped in one of those "Don't let this be your last issue!" covers when I had 12 months left to run on my paid subscription.
The scam is that they collect your money a year early, bank it and receive interest until the time REALLY comes for you to renew. For one subscriber, that interest doesn't amount to much. But if you've scammed 400,000 readers for $40 each, that's $16,000,000 sitting in THEIR bank account collecting 90-day T-Bill interest.
Even these days, with those rates around 1%, that's $160,000 that they're collecting. When interest rates return to sane levels, it could run $1 million or more a year.
So if this scam wrankles you and you want to do something about it, here's my suggestion...
Use the magazines' web sites to check the status of your subscriptions, and when you get VERY premature re-subscription notices, simply mail them back to the magazine, in their postage-paid envelopes, only mail them empty.
Believe me, doping this will give you a devilish kind of pleasure!
Well, it's a real scam. And even Consumer Reports does it.
Consumer Reports will mail you these re-subscription letters repeatedly even if your subscription isn't due for renewal for a full year or more. I've even received my Consumer Reports wrapped in one of those "Don't let this be your last issue!" covers when I had 12 months left to run on my paid subscription.
The scam is that they collect your money a year early, bank it and receive interest until the time REALLY comes for you to renew. For one subscriber, that interest doesn't amount to much. But if you've scammed 400,000 readers for $40 each, that's $16,000,000 sitting in THEIR bank account collecting 90-day T-Bill interest.
Even these days, with those rates around 1%, that's $160,000 that they're collecting. When interest rates return to sane levels, it could run $1 million or more a year.
So if this scam wrankles you and you want to do something about it, here's my suggestion...
Use the magazines' web sites to check the status of your subscriptions, and when you get VERY premature re-subscription notices, simply mail them back to the magazine, in their postage-paid envelopes, only mail them empty.
Believe me, doping this will give you a devilish kind of pleasure!
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Edmonton's Chamber Wimps Out - Again!
There is a real irony in the fact that the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to be silent when it comes to the closure of the City Centre Airport.
This city's business community has been hurting the city over the airport issue for at least 10 years longer than most people think.
In the early 1980s, when scheduled passenger service from the City Centre Airport (then called the Municipal Airport, or the ‘Muni’) to Calgary was killing our International Airport's passenger load and, with it, the airport's connections to the outside world, Mayor Laurence Decore convened a series of day-long, monthly meetings of a group he called Enterprise Edmonton.
This group was composed of every politician in the Edmonton area – from all three levels of government, regardless of party – and the Presidents and General Managers of every single business-related organization in the city, including the Chamber, Northlands, the Convention Centre, Tourism and Economic Development Authorities, and of course, the Airport Authority. I attended the meetings as Decore's Chief of Staff.
Decore's single challenge to this group was: let's all agree on Edmonton's top challenges to economic growth, and let's make a plan to meet those challenges, and win.
The group heard many pitches on a wide variety of issues, but in the end, the only issue they ALL agreed on, completely agreed on, was that there needed to be a closure of all scheduled passenger traffic into and out of the Muni. Only in that way, they agreed, could we protect the International's position and allow it to compete with Calgary for airline flights.
The group had heard horror story after horror story about how the Edmonton International’s continued losses to Calgary’s gains was hurting our economy. We lost conventions. We lost brainpower. We lost branch or head offices. We lost Big time!
It was agreed that in order to make this decision 'fly' in the city, absolute unanimity had to be displayed by the politicians and groups who had come to this conclusion.
They all agreed to attend a news conference at which Mayor Decore would announce their collective decision to end scheduled passenger service to the 'Muni'.
The amazing, unbelievable, sick thing is that late on the afternoon of the very day before the news conference was to occur, the President of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce phoned Decore and said that the Chamber was withdrawing its support because a few of its members (presumably the Kingsway Mall businesses, the Chateau Louis and Edmonton Inn hotels and some others) had objections to the Chamber taking a stand against the City Centre Airport. He said the Chamber felt uncomfortable taking a stand that didn't benefit ALL of its members.
A good politician, Decore knew he couldn't possibly win the issue if he didn't have the active support of the business community.
He killed the initiative and canceled the news conference.
And for the next 10 years, Calgary continued to win the airline flight war, and to attract more conventions and both head and branch offices.
Of course, later in the 90s, a modified shutdown of scheduled air traffic came into effect at the airport, but only after our city lost – in my opinion, given the impacts of full passenger service at our second airport that were described to the Edmonton Enterprise group – way over a billion dollars in revenues.
I believe that the decision of the Chamber of Commerce to welch on its commitment – made to every other economic development organization in the city and to all of its elected politicians – to closure of passenger service was the single most costly error ever committed against the interests of the city as a whole.
So you can see why I find it no surprise at all that, yet again, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to sit firmly and decisively on the bloody fence on the airport closure issue!
They chickened out because (they say) it's a 'political issue'.
The hell it's simply a political issue!
It's an economic issue, an issue with profound impacts on the city's future financial health, on its image in the eyes of both its citizenry and the outside world, on the 2nd largest polytechnical college in Canada, on the cost-effectiveness of the NAIT LRT line and on oodles of other things.
Ironically, a 'new town' of 30,000 people living on the old airport site is sure to bring a big economic surge to the very businesses which have been fighting to stop change for so many years...the shopping centre and hotels in the immediate area. But Envision Edmonton and the Chamber seem to share a willful blindness of this fact.
Envision Edmonton seems essentially a group of old-fart, status quo businesspeople. And now it appears that the Edmonton Chamber isn't very different.
Isn't it ironic that the force that delivered such a big financial hit to Edmonton in the mid-80s and the forces that are working so hard today to resist (or to actively not support) positive change with big economic payoffs is, in fact, the city's business community?
Our business community has a real penchant for living in the past, no matter how hard it hurts the rest of us!
This city's business community has been hurting the city over the airport issue for at least 10 years longer than most people think.
In the early 1980s, when scheduled passenger service from the City Centre Airport (then called the Municipal Airport, or the ‘Muni’) to Calgary was killing our International Airport's passenger load and, with it, the airport's connections to the outside world, Mayor Laurence Decore convened a series of day-long, monthly meetings of a group he called Enterprise Edmonton.
This group was composed of every politician in the Edmonton area – from all three levels of government, regardless of party – and the Presidents and General Managers of every single business-related organization in the city, including the Chamber, Northlands, the Convention Centre, Tourism and Economic Development Authorities, and of course, the Airport Authority. I attended the meetings as Decore's Chief of Staff.
Decore's single challenge to this group was: let's all agree on Edmonton's top challenges to economic growth, and let's make a plan to meet those challenges, and win.
The group heard many pitches on a wide variety of issues, but in the end, the only issue they ALL agreed on, completely agreed on, was that there needed to be a closure of all scheduled passenger traffic into and out of the Muni. Only in that way, they agreed, could we protect the International's position and allow it to compete with Calgary for airline flights.
The group had heard horror story after horror story about how the Edmonton International’s continued losses to Calgary’s gains was hurting our economy. We lost conventions. We lost brainpower. We lost branch or head offices. We lost Big time!
It was agreed that in order to make this decision 'fly' in the city, absolute unanimity had to be displayed by the politicians and groups who had come to this conclusion.
They all agreed to attend a news conference at which Mayor Decore would announce their collective decision to end scheduled passenger service to the 'Muni'.
The amazing, unbelievable, sick thing is that late on the afternoon of the very day before the news conference was to occur, the President of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce phoned Decore and said that the Chamber was withdrawing its support because a few of its members (presumably the Kingsway Mall businesses, the Chateau Louis and Edmonton Inn hotels and some others) had objections to the Chamber taking a stand against the City Centre Airport. He said the Chamber felt uncomfortable taking a stand that didn't benefit ALL of its members.
A good politician, Decore knew he couldn't possibly win the issue if he didn't have the active support of the business community.
He killed the initiative and canceled the news conference.
And for the next 10 years, Calgary continued to win the airline flight war, and to attract more conventions and both head and branch offices.
Of course, later in the 90s, a modified shutdown of scheduled air traffic came into effect at the airport, but only after our city lost – in my opinion, given the impacts of full passenger service at our second airport that were described to the Edmonton Enterprise group – way over a billion dollars in revenues.
I believe that the decision of the Chamber of Commerce to welch on its commitment – made to every other economic development organization in the city and to all of its elected politicians – to closure of passenger service was the single most costly error ever committed against the interests of the city as a whole.
So you can see why I find it no surprise at all that, yet again, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to sit firmly and decisively on the bloody fence on the airport closure issue!
They chickened out because (they say) it's a 'political issue'.
The hell it's simply a political issue!
It's an economic issue, an issue with profound impacts on the city's future financial health, on its image in the eyes of both its citizenry and the outside world, on the 2nd largest polytechnical college in Canada, on the cost-effectiveness of the NAIT LRT line and on oodles of other things.
Ironically, a 'new town' of 30,000 people living on the old airport site is sure to bring a big economic surge to the very businesses which have been fighting to stop change for so many years...the shopping centre and hotels in the immediate area. But Envision Edmonton and the Chamber seem to share a willful blindness of this fact.
Envision Edmonton seems essentially a group of old-fart, status quo businesspeople. And now it appears that the Edmonton Chamber isn't very different.
Isn't it ironic that the force that delivered such a big financial hit to Edmonton in the mid-80s and the forces that are working so hard today to resist (or to actively not support) positive change with big economic payoffs is, in fact, the city's business community?
Our business community has a real penchant for living in the past, no matter how hard it hurts the rest of us!
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Magazine scams - Premature Renewal Notices
If you're like me, you're always getting magazine reminder notices just about the time that you've forgotten whether you, in fact, did renew only a couple of months ago. I usually recycle the reminder until something screams FINAL NOTICE!!!, then I send in my cheque...and the cycle repeats itself a couple of months later.
In mid-March, my in-laws received a notice from Maclean's magazine. Nicely designed, not to scream-y, kind of businesslike. At the top, it said INVOICE #6, and the due date was March 30, 2010. In the lower portion was a box containing the word "CRITICAL".
The message began: "Your subscription payment to Maclean's is several months overdue – please take immediate action. Attend to this right away!"
Funny thing, though. When I went to the Maclean's website and entered my in-laws' account number, I discovered that their subscription expires on November 15, 2010, fully 7.5 months after the 'due date' on the 'last-minute renewal' notice.
OK, so let's follow the money.
The subscription rate was $48.59 including GST. If we had paid the way-too-early renewal, our payment would have gone into an account somewhere that would pay Maclean's interest until such time as the subscription really need to be renewed and the GST paid.
In short term bonds at, say 1.5% interest, Maclean's (or rather its owner, the Rogers Media Group) would have reaped a total of 45.55 cents in interest from my in-laws' payment.
Multiply that small amount by the number of subscribers to Maclean's, TV Times, Canadian Business, Flare, L'Actualite, Chatelaine, Money Sense and Today's Parent subscribers, and you're talking about a huge money-grab, based solely on the fact that most of us are too busy to remember details like when we renewed a subscription.
Forty-five cents is not a lot of money.
It's the principle, though: Why give someone money if they're scamming you?
And as far as I'm concerned, the wording of the mid-March Maclean's notice was, indeed, a scam.
In mid-March, my in-laws received a notice from Maclean's magazine. Nicely designed, not to scream-y, kind of businesslike. At the top, it said INVOICE #6, and the due date was March 30, 2010. In the lower portion was a box containing the word "CRITICAL".
The message began: "Your subscription payment to Maclean's is several months overdue – please take immediate action. Attend to this right away!"
Funny thing, though. When I went to the Maclean's website and entered my in-laws' account number, I discovered that their subscription expires on November 15, 2010, fully 7.5 months after the 'due date' on the 'last-minute renewal' notice.
OK, so let's follow the money.
The subscription rate was $48.59 including GST. If we had paid the way-too-early renewal, our payment would have gone into an account somewhere that would pay Maclean's interest until such time as the subscription really need to be renewed and the GST paid.
In short term bonds at, say 1.5% interest, Maclean's (or rather its owner, the Rogers Media Group) would have reaped a total of 45.55 cents in interest from my in-laws' payment.
Multiply that small amount by the number of subscribers to Maclean's, TV Times, Canadian Business, Flare, L'Actualite, Chatelaine, Money Sense and Today's Parent subscribers, and you're talking about a huge money-grab, based solely on the fact that most of us are too busy to remember details like when we renewed a subscription.
Forty-five cents is not a lot of money.
It's the principle, though: Why give someone money if they're scamming you?
And as far as I'm concerned, the wording of the mid-March Maclean's notice was, indeed, a scam.
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