The Neighbourhood Critic

Words of Wisdom from JFK

2012-01-25T16:37:00.000-08:00

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. "

Some of us respect you, Alberta civil servant!

2012-01-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

(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.

Surprise-surprise. Feds had another shoe!

2011-01-31T18:52:00.000-08:00

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!

Look Gift Cards in the Mouth!

2010-12-28T12:24:00.001-08:00

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!

Even Consumer Reports does it!

2010-12-28T12:07:00.000-08:00

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!

Edmonton's Chamber Wimps Out - Again!

2010-10-07T17:18:00.000-07:00

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!

Magazine scams - Premature Renewal Notices

2010-04-11T15:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Daughters, singing sons!

2010-02-26T03:06:00.000-08:00

Well, the gender bias in Canada's national anthem finally hit the sheer ridiculous last night.

There they were, freshly re-minted Olympic gold medalists all, the Canadian women's hockey team proudly singing along as the Canadian flag was raised in full world view: "O Canada, Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command."

Isn't it time we shook out a few cobwebs and joined the modern world? No argument is capable of surmounting the unfairness inherent in those lyrics.

In all our hearts command...In all of us command...what 'sons' is replaced with is far less important than the very act of replacing it.

Nudge-nudge, wink-wink: wireless 'competition' in Canada

2009-11-18T07:57:00.000-08:00

Late Note, first: After I wrote the following blog, the federal Minister of Industry absolutely gobsmacked me by reversing the CRTC decision preventing Globealive from becoming Canada's fourth major wireless competitor. How about them Conservatives? Let me see, the last time they got something this right was.....

Here's a belly-laugh for you, the first sentence on the CRTC's web site: The CRTC does not regulate the rates, quality of service or business practices of wireless service providers because the market for wireless services is sufficiently competitive.

Competitive, my petard!

The average Canadian pays something like 60% more for wireless service than US customers do, and even US customers pay a lot more than people in Europe and many, many third world countries.

In the US, you can get an unlimited data plan for an iPhone 3GS from AT&T for $30 a month. In Canada, it's $75 for 2 GB per month (with a 500 free weekday minutes plan – which any businessperson would exhaust in a couple of weeks, only to pay another $175 for the balance of the month PLUS long distance. AT&T offers an unlimited voice and unlimited long distance plan for just $99).

Funny, given all this competition that there is supposed to be in Canada, none of our big three wireless companies (Bell, Telus and Rogers) seem to be competing on price. Their wireless plans are all different, only same.

Which brings me to an upstart called Globealive. It's the brainchild of a young Central Canadian entrepreneur who saw that there is a great market in Canada for a price-competitive wireless company, found investment capital from a really rich Egyptian who runs successful, efficient, competitive wireless companies all over the world and used the money to win the auction for the last remaining significant share of the wireless band in Canada.

Anthony Lacavara then twiddled with the company's structure in an attempt to conform to CRTC rules about Canadian ownership of telecommunications. He arranged it so while the company may have been financed by an Egyptian, it was controlled by Canadians. The CRTC, nevertheless, ruled Globealive still contravened ownership regulations.

Now Telus, Bell and Rogers have appealed to Industry Minister Tony Clement not to accede to Globealive's application to overturn the CRTC ruling.

They're blowing all kinds of smoke in the direction of the flag, but anyone who's dealt with the biggies as a customer knows the real message – don't screw with the world's most profitable wireless industry; don't force us to respond to a lower-priced competitor. Bottom line: don't do anything to help Canadians pay lots less for wireless service.

The irony of this is unbelievable...all these proponents of free market competition using patriotism to shield their full intention to continue bleeding us of every dollar they can squeeze.

Tony Clement, when he decides, as I fully expect he will, that the CRTC decision will stand, will be the biggest hypocrite of all. The voice of the Conservatives' free market philosophy will kow-tow to mightiest and most influential of our free market business community, and in so doing will limit competition to the wink-wink, nudge-nudge crowd and indirectly cost average Canadians – whom the government is elected to protect – untold billions of dollars that could otherwise go to food, housing, education, shelter and the like.

I was eagerly awaiting Globealive's roll-out. I would have switched from Bell in a flash as would, I believe, hundreds of thousands of others.

Now, yet again, I and they wait for a Conservative hypocrite to make a decision, then spin it so what's black (political power used to limit competition and enhance corporate profit) looks white (protecting us from the evil foreigners).

The more I think about it, the more I wish I spoke Norwegian.

Hey, Stephen, Hey Ron...the pandemic was coming!

2009-10-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Anyone with a teenager in school, especially one actively involved in sport teams, knows the difficulty of getting both you and your kid to an immunization clinic – then waiting four hours.

Given that teens are one of the prime targets for H1N1, I can't help but wonder why there isn't a busload of nurses pulling up to city high schools and running clinics in gyms.

Heaven knows, there is no nursing shortage – Stephen Duckett said so in one of his first news releases.

Presumably it was the same release in which he froze hiring and promised that service from Alberta Health would only get better...all of this about the same time the coming pandemic was becoming more and more imminent.

Duh!

And then there was Ron Liepert on Day One, figuratively standing in a deep pile of public anger doo-doo, proudly congratulating Alberta Health for accomplishing 38,000 immunizations on the first day.

Lemme see. If just half the population wants to be immunized, and they can do 38,000 a day, that's...46 days later they could tell us it's done. Oh, wait, there's a 14-day period before the shot takes effect, so make that 60 days (Boxing Day, folks!) before half the population is immune.

Right, Ron.

Good work!

Don't forget to issue a few news releases telling us how lucky we are to have you.

Looking outward can be profitable!

2009-10-26T19:59:00.001-07:00

Interesting article in the Calgary Herald October 25/09. In its midst, three amazing facts.

The UK charges the oil industry a tax of 70% on old oil production, and 50% on newer wells. Norway charges 70%.

Vue Weekly has reported that the Pembina Institute said that in 2004, Alaska charged $11.60 per barrel oil royalty, and Norway charged $14.10 per barrel. Alberta charged $4.30 per barrel.

Kinda gives you a new perspective on all the complaints wailing out of Calgary's downtown high country about Alberta's royalty regime.

I recall a couple of years back when then Liberal Leader Kevin Taft said that if Alberta had charged the industry the same rates as the industry had been paying in Texas, between 2000 and 2006, we would have received $16+ billion in EXTRA oil revenues.

Wow. Wouldn't that $16 billion have come in handy right about now?

Forget the rats - we're all lemmings!

2009-09-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Conservatives have now officially blown two oil booms.

Norway (population 4.4 million) started its Heritage Fund with an initial $400 million oil-revenue investment in 1996, and today the fund not only sits at CDN$429 billion, but it's projected to reach $800 billion within 10 years.

Just for magnitude's sake, $800 billion is a stack of $100 bills 1040 kilometres high. If you spent just over $1000 a second, 24/7, it would take you 25 years to blow it all.

Alberta started its Heritage Fund in 1976 with an initial $1.5 billion kick-off. After two oil booms and 33 years – 20 more years than the Norwegians have been at it – we've got all of $17 billion.

Lemmings stampede over the cliff only once every few years. Albertans have been doing it consistently for 38 years.

In any other jurisdiction, the people would be demonstrating in the streets and pounding on the doors of the Legislature to vent their fury over such financial incompetence. But, hey, this is Alberta we're talkin' 'bout here, pardner! They're the gover-mint 'n they bin the gover-mint since whenever, so they must know what they're doin'!

We MUST lose the mentality that equates (supposedly Progressive) Conservatism with the essence of Albertanism.

There's no other way to prove to the rest of the world that we're not just collectively very stupid.

Alberta Health: shades of George W & Dick

2009-08-28T11:04:00.003-07:00

After years of provincial handwringing about nurse, physician and medical technician shortages, how on earth can our newbie, whiz-bang import Mr. Ducket think we believe that he’ll offer buyouts only to people in the health system whose disappearance will have no effect on patient care?

Do the numbers – to achieve $300 million in savings means, at the very least, 3,000 fewer staff. No effect on patient care, Mr. Duckett? Ri-i-i-i-ght. Duckett truly must think we are Neanderthals, because he brazenly upped the PR ante by claiming that his cuts will actually improve patient care.

Maybe he’s right. After all, this is the guy who made a critical, province-wide nursing shortage go poof! with a news release and a hiring freeze.

Normally, we’d trust in political leaders to see through bafflegab the like of which Mr. Duckett and his spin doctors have spewed, and rein them in.

But wait, his boss is a tough-talkin’, high school diploma kinda guy who knows where he’s goin’, aims to git there – damn the torpedoes! – so he hired a gunslinger with a whole bunch of letters after his name to help him git there. He’s up there in the owner’s box, cheering Duckett on.

The whole thing reminds me of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, whose ideological deafness to enormous choruses of reason from a complete cross-section of the electorate left the US and the rest of world in one holy-doodle of a pickle.

Alberta’s health care system is in ‘bick’ trouble.

One more time, Lord?

2009-08-28T11:01:00.001-07:00

The way the provincial government ‘managed’ things during its second crack at an oil boom makes me wonder if someday I’ll have a bumper sticker that says ‘O Lord, give us oil boom #3, and we promise not to piss this one away!’

Credit is now a social utility - so regulate the bastards!

2009-05-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

This could be either a short blog or a real long one. But I feel a rant coming on about the credit card companies and how they rape us with the blessing of governments who believe that, God Forbid!, government has no place in telling the marketplace what it can and can't do.

Credit card companies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in making credit and bank cards ubiquitous, so much a part of everyday life that they can't be gone without. In 2007, they spent $19 billion in North America alone to market themselves. Their marketing works. These are very serious people!

I'm all for government staying out of the marketplace, as long as the product we're talking about isn't essential to life. When it's just a choice about whether or not you want a widget in your life, why should we get in the way of the competitive marketplace's ability to create, distribute, price and market various brands of widgets...as long as the widget isn't something like health care, clean drinking water, electricity, natural gas or...here it comes!...bank and credit cards.

These days you simply have to have a card or you can't rent a car, reserve a hotel, fly anywhere, buy things on the internet or, sometimes and quite ironically, prove your identity when you write a cheque.

I believe in tight regulation of mass utilities like gas, electricity, water and the like. You can short circuit arguments about pros and cons of government regulation versus the free market by looking at the not-so-long-ago privatization of electricity in Alberta. Within a few short years, the price had shot from 3 cents per kwh to something like 11 cents. And remember, the electricity producers made money at 3 cents!

Back to credit cards, though. Now that the companies have succeeded in making the posession of a credit card a necessity, the whole business is, in my mind, now a social utility and worthy of very tight federal government regulation.

Interest rates should be capped.
The fees that credit card companies charge businesses (currently 2% and more, an amount that gets added by the business right back into its prices, which affects everyone including those who pay cash) should be hammered back down to the 0.33% level charged by federally-regulated Australian credit card companies. (Just think about that...the Aussie credit card companies still make money charging businesses 600% less than our credit card companies do!)
Credit card companies shouldn't be allowed to contractually prevent business owners from giving a rebate to customers who buy with cash.
And fine-print-based, bait-and-switch promotions that suck customers into paying oodles more interest penalties on outstanding balances should be outlawed.

Regulate the suckers!

What the hell is government for, except to serve and protect the people?

The basic problem here is that current politicians (Conservatives all!) pay lip service to serving the people, but when they act, they do so to protect people...in business.

It won't grow if they don't know.

2009-05-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Globe and Mail, Canada's Torontocentric newspaper, did a great article about how kids these days just aren't interested in studying science beyond high school because careers in science are not attractive to them. The article mentioned many reasons, among them that there are 'sexier' occupations to aspire to in the IT world, that research funding is iffy, and a few others.

One thing the article skipped (I wonder why?) has to do with the massive downsizing that newsrooms across Canada have suffered in recent years. I'm not talking about radio station or most TV newsrooms...they've always been second-rate, staffed as they are with Kens and Barbies who don't know what a real story is unless someone else tells them (a PR person's dream). I'm talking about the major market newspapers.

I recently had a very enlightening talk with a man who spent more than 20 years reporting (very well, I must say) for a major Western Canadian newspaper and who thankfully took a buy-out a couple of years ago. He told me his old newsroom is a shadow of its former self after massive budget cuts. In proportion to its city's population growth, the newsroom has about half the reporting staff today as it had when he began his career. He told me that 'beats' that used to have two or more people assigned now have just one reporter, and that the assigned reporters are pulled away constantly to handle the latest sensational police & fire-type emergencies. They just don't have time to develop contacts and investigate what their contacts tell them, either on or off the record.

In my day (more than 30 years ago), The Edmonton Journal assigned me to a medical beat that included a hefty time commitment to pure medical research as opposed to the politics of medicine which at the time were comparatively tepid. This was decades before Edmonton developed its true muscle in medical research, when the field was just finding itself. The paper saw the possibilities, however, and dedicated the nearly-full time of one of its (many at the time) reporters to share with the community what was happening, primarily in the labs at the University of Alberta.

The newspaper's vision and my subsequent efforts resulted in many interesting stories about research and the people conducting it. Among the most memorable to me was the world-leading transplant immunology research being done by Dr. John Dossitor. His discoveries about the 'mechanics' of tissue rejection set the stage for huge leaps in organ transplantation.

So, back to my main point.

Kids these days, and those parents involved enough with their kids' lives to be positive influences on their career choices, are media-smart. If the information is out there, they'll find it, whether it's in print or on the web. But because of the huge cutbacks in major newsroom staffing levels, no one is out there digging to find the great stories that must be happening every day in the worlds of scientific research. The result is that their world is not being provided with the information about, and the excitement in, scientific research to stimulate their imaginations.

No information, no interest.

No interest, fewer new scientists.

Fewer scientists, less government commitment to funding.

Less funding, less research 'action'

Less action, even less reason for media interest in research.

It's a vortex, and I fear this one is headed down the drain.

A smarter way to retire

2009-04-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

We have this big – and now, unfortunately, growing yet again – National Debt. We're collectively getting older and many people, though not nearly enough, are saving for their retirement through RRSPs. It seems to me that, with some creative thinking, we could do something that would help a whole lot on both issues.

The change in the near term would be to do away with income deductions for RRSP contributions, requiring contributions to be made with money that had already been taxed. This is important: The tax the feds get on RRSP contributions would go straight to national debt paydown.

Heresy, you say? Not at all, because at the other end when the RRSP is withdrawn, the federal government would NOT tax withdrawals, or the growth the RRSP had produced.

In 2007, Canadians contributed $34.1 billion to their RRSPs (regrettably,only 6% of the actual contribution 'room' they had). Figure the average marginal tax rate at 22%, and under a new regime, the additional tax revenue available for debt paydown under this new regime would have been $7.5 billion. With that amount applied directly to national debt, in the following year, we would have paid about $450 million less in debt interest than we did. In 2009, we'd save $450 from 2008's paydown, PLUS yet another $450+ million 2007's paydown. And so on...

A more quickly disappearing national debt would free up progressively more more of our taxes to actually be used for the delivery of government programs instead of debt interest and principal payments. The overall effect would be to reduce, or keep the lid on, tax rates over the balance of our earning years. (As the debt goes down in progressively larger chunks over the years, perhaps our leaders could decide to spend some of the interest savings either on enhanced programs for increasing numbers of seniors, or at least to stop the erosion of such programs!) They could also decide to actually reduce personal income tax rates.

The new system would also guarantee that if future governments do, God forbid!, raise taxes to spend even more than the interest savings, those increased taxes will not be applied to any of our future retirement income deriving from RRSP contributions under the new system.

Think of it as an insurance policy against politicians!

Obviously, the government would have to maintain the current system for all pre-existing RRSP contributions.

But wait...there's more!

I'm a strategic communication consultant. Under the new regime, I can also make a case for the feds to spend an enormous amount of money over several years on a marketing campaign to convince more of us to contribute, and to contribute larger amounts, to our RRSPs. Achieving a total shift in national attitude toward retirement saving would perhaps cost several billion dollars over a decade or so. In magnitude, the campaign would be akin to the WWII effort to convince people to buy war bonds.

But just for a moment, imagine that today we were contributing an average of, say, 50% of the RRSP room we already have, instead of just 6%. In 2007, that would have produced $284.2 Billion in contributions. At even the lowest marginal tax rate of 15%, under a new RRSP regime the federal government would have collected an extra $42.6 Billion in income tax in 2007 and applied it all to paying down the national debt, saving us something like $2.6 Billion in 2008 interest payments.

The interest savings over the years would be additive (using the same figures for simplicity, in 2009 we would again save the original $2.6 Billion from the 2007 paydown, plus $2.6+ Billion from the 2008 paydown, for a total interest saving exceeding $5.2 Billion). And so on. At that rate, we'd pay off the net national debt in 10 or 12 years! Imagine...without a national debt we'd have $42 billion extra to spend every year – $1200 for every single citizen – without raising taxes.

One other aspect of achieving a 50%-of-room RRSP level would be a massive infusion – close to a third of a trillion dollars every year – of extra investment capital into the economy. Assuming that RRSP contributions were left ‘at work’ in the economy, after just 10 years, we’d have $3 trillion fueling the economy that we don’t have now. Not bad when you consider that our entire current GDP (2007) is just over $1.2 trillion. All that investment capital would produce a real whack of increased federal income taxes – with which we could pay the debt down even faster.

So undertaking a long-term attitude-shift marketing campaign with sufficient strength to motivate a change of RRSP contribution behaviour would pay for itself many, many times over. If there was a new RRSP regime, and the marketing campaign succeeded, it would likely be the second-wisest investment ever made by the government of Canada, outclassed only by the decision to build the CPR.

Sometimes I wish you could explain stuff like this in 20 seconds or less.

Pity the English language (3)

2009-04-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

Yep, there are less calories in whatever it is, and supposedly intelligent people spend millions telling us so.

What we need are fewer examples like this.

Pity the English language (2)

2009-04-06T23:12:00.000-07:00

I'm obliged to say that I'm not obligated.

Hard hearts on the right

2009-03-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

I just read a column by Alberta's Rush Limbaugh, Lorne Gunter, which he led off with:

"The CBC will never be able to exorcise its left-wing missionary zeal — for global warming, for Islam, for big government, Barack Obama, multiculturalism, public health care, human rights commissions and so on."

Unbelievable hypocrisy! The fact that someone feels secure saying that because a media entity pays attention to issues & people like those he lists makes that entity politically-biased is a clear indication to me of how successful the right wing (from Washington all the way to little-'ol-Edmonton) has been at brainwashing the public.

It's OK for him to paint the CBC as biased for dealing with those issues, but it's also OK for him and others of his ilk (Fox News and Macleans are a good start) to hammer, and hammer, and hammer away at the very same subjects, consistently twisting the facts in their promotion of the ideology of the right. Short form: its fine to be biased these days if you're biased against what they call 'the left'...which is generally a large group of people who have social consciences, balance, and a belief that enlightened government can be a very good thing.

It's fine in my book to have a different opinion, but I am disheartened with the meanness, the arrogance and the dishonesty of far-right commentators. They remind me of very scary TV evangelists: "Surrender to me all your thoughts, your compassion and your reason and I will deliver you unto the perfect world, in which taxes will be near zero, 'good people' will tell 'bad people' how to live, jails will be full, you'll be as free as possible to fight everyone for a bigger slice of whatever you want and along the way you won't have to pay for all those losers." I am amazed that the pervasiveness of their thinking – the result of the Regan-Mulroney years and, in Canada, still being fed by the Harper gang – has won them the magnitude of the forums they enjoy.

Paula Simons, thanks for your balance, and for The Journal's in giving you a forum.

Jackie Flanagan, thanks for your courage...and in Calgary, no less!

Linda Goyette, you were ahead of your time. Let's hope there really is a pendulum!

When the time comes, I don't want to retire into Lorne Gunter's idea of society. I'd like to think that, instead, I and others like me were actually able to make Alberta and Canada better places to live, places where good-hearted debate, compassionate thinking, emotional and artistic expression are respected at society's very core, and not ridiculed before millions by people with narrow vision, hard hearts and mean minds.

Flagpoles and death

2009-03-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Even the Ultimate Protector of the English language, the BBC, has fallen away from the proper use of the term to describe a flag which has been lowered in honour of a fallen soldier or 'important person'.

Everyone these days uses the term 'flying at half-mast'.

In fact, that term is only correct when the flag is on board a ship, where masts are used to fly flags.

On land, flags fly from flagstaffs, so the correct term is 'half-staff'.

(Curmudgeonly yours, I remain ever vigilant....)

Pity the English language (1)

2009-03-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

How ever did the word 'orientated' creep into our language?

What was wrong with 'oriented'?

Brainwashing from the right

2009-03-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

I actually remember a time when government – the civil service, that is – was respected, a time when civil servants were seen as dedicated, intelligent people who managed important things on our behalf, who provided information and advice to politicians, and who then diligently carried out political decisions. Government was seen as a positive thing, the most important outward sign that as a society, we were maturing, consistently improving the quality of life both for ourselves and for those who needed a leg up.

But after two decades of pounding from the right, government has somehow become a sign of stupidity and waste: 'We need relief from taxes!' 'No new taxes!' 'How can sane people support the bloat that government represents?' 'The private sector can always do better!'

The right wing has spent many years quite successfully planting in our collective minds the concept that taxes are bad. Any tax, all tax, they would have us think, merely supports the fat paycheques, fat benefits and fat retirements of idiot civil servants. What the hell do they know, anyway?

Small government, says the right, is the only good government. Leave tax money in the hands of the people and everyone will profit from the wealth it creates.

When you acknowledge the right's manipulation of the public mind against the concept that taxes are an INVESTMENT in a better society and that government means, and can actually do, well, you become acutely aware of how easy it is these days for the right wing politicians, and especially for the media, to make statements based on the underlying assumption that taxes are bad, and that government is a waste of taxes. It's just assumed by those people that that's what everyone thinks....it's a self-perpetuating operating reality.

Well, I'm a fan of everything from pothole-less streets to clean air, highly competent teachers and flood aversion plans. I like the idea that independent safety inspectors make sure workers are safe and the work they're doing poses no public danger. I don't buy the pitch that refineries, petrochemical companies and other major industries like pulp mills are capable of policing their own environmental compliance. I like integrated, multi-jurisdictional transportation planning.

Those things are what government's for. They're really important. And so, therefore, is paying taxes.

What my province, my country and the rest of North America needs is a change of attitude toward respect for the rightful place of government, and all the services it provides, in a civil, enlightened society.

Let's agree once again that paying taxes is an investment. We can demand efficiency from our civil service, but let's start celebrating what they do for us, and stop resenting every penny it costs.

Poor Tim!

2009-03-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

OK, I really wanted to save my first post for something a little more than this, but what the heck:

Poor Tim Geithner. He's charged with conceiving and executing a strategy to prevent a global economic catastrophe of unparalleled proportions, but it seems all we hear of him these days concerns his part-or-no-part in $165 million worth of AIG bonuses.

Here we are again, victims of our addiction to sensationalism, and the media's addiction to stoking and feeding our addiction.

Even if Geithner personally considered the bonuses and made the call, the amount of money involved is less than 1/10,000th of the magnitude of the package that he and Obama have so far come up with...to avert the catastrophe!

The bonuses were wrong-headed, but they are not the story that will affect our financial future. If Geithner goofed, so be it. Given the Big Picture he is dealing with, I can forgive him the goof. And so should all news editors, and their Kens and Barbies who are feeding us this never-ending, ET-style hype.

The Neighbourhood Critic says hello!

2009-03-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm Alex Macdonald, and my neighbourhoods include Canada, Alberta, and Edmonton.

I'm an ex-newspaper-journalist, an ex-government PR type (culture, recreation), a sometimes pro photographer, an experienced political strategist at both civic and provincial levels, and mostly these days a strategic communications consultant to organizations I respect, including construction unions, whose thinking these days would amaze anyone with old-time union stereotypes in their head-RAM.

I'm fascinated by the positives & negatives of the Alberta Oil Boom and how we Albertans just can't seem to get the 'managing wealth' thing right. Most people would love our problems, but when you're us, believe me, they're problems!

I'm amazed at how sheep-like Albertans are about Alberta. I'm amazed that people here (anywhere, for that matter) don't have a clue how big a Billion actually is!

Every time I hear the radio news, I am also amazed that they let some of those people write, because they can't.

I'm still awaiting the arrival of a Canadian politician at any level who is capable of 'spiritual' politics, that being the ability to tap into the spirit of the people, add ideas and hope and creativity and encouragement and energy, then beam it back to the people in words they actually get and act upon. From that perspective, I'm jealous of both the Americans and the people of Newfoundland & Laborador.

There are some things I'm happy with, like how my city is being run, how people where I live are into recycling, the coming of larger-scale alternative energy, and TV shows like Damages that don't assume I'm stupid.

This blog will take some time to develop, so please come back.

Drop a comment if you're motivated.

Let's see what happens.