This seething hatred of supposedly-ill-conceived tax redistribution is only stoked by the need for the province to go hat in hand to Ottawa to get back what they can via the Canada Health Transfer to help pay for Alberta’s nearly $15 billion annual healthcare bill. Premiers from across the country will soon have an opportunity to renegotiate these deals with Ottawa when the Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer expire on March 31, 2014, after which new legislation, and perhaps a new approach, will be needed. We all know that former Alberta Finance Minister, cosignatory (along with our current Prime Minister) of the infamous “Firewall letter,” and now Alberta Progressive Conservative (PC) leadership candidate Ted Morton would try to pry back more of Albertans’ money from Ottawa. But we know much less about what out next Premier – whomever that might be – will do for Alberta’s cities.

Cities you ask? What do they have to do with this conversation on taxes and transfer payments?

Well, it may shock some of you to hear that the very same folks throwing Ottawa under the bus for transfers are giving the same sort of raw deal to Alberta’s cities.

Municipalities deliver many of the core services Albertans rely on every day. Roads, parks, land development, affordable housing, public transit, parking, electricity, water treatment, libraries and recreational facilities are only a handful of examples. Many of these services require massive and often ongoing capital investments to get and keep them running, but there’s a big problem: cities can’t afford to pay for any of them on their own. Municipal governments can barely handle the operating expenses even while raising property taxes every year, much less the capital investments demanded by citizens.

Even though Alberta’s cities are home to some 82 per cent of Albertans (2006 census), they must still beg Edmonton and Ottawa for much of the funds they need to construct just about everything most people actually use daily. In a throwback to an earlier, much more rural time, Alberta’s Municipal Government Act gives relatively few taxation powers to Alberta’s cities.

While Calgary can levy property taxes – one of the most regressive forms of taxation, particularly for those on fixed incomes, like seniors – the province still takes a full two thirds of those funds. Much of the City of Calgary’s revenues come from user fees, tickets and levies, like the hefty charges aside from your power consumption on your monthly ENMAX bill. The truth is, municipalities are left with few good options to ensure they have the predictable, stable funding required to run a city.

So it came as little surprise to me this week when Calgary’s city council decided to “take the room” left by the $42 million reduction in the provincial take of property taxes, even with The Dinger going off like a broken fire alarm about how the mayor has his hand in your pocket, or something like that.

Misplaced attempts at fiscal conservatism aside, Calgary is using debt to finance some important and some time-sensitive infrastructure projects like the airport (t)underpass in lieu of the regular allotment of infrastructure funding from the other levels of government which possess greater taxation powers. So using whatever funds the province can free up to help us pay down the principal on what we’ve borrowed now is better than having to pay hefty interest on a bigger debt later.

But having the province hand over random bags of money is hardly the best way to ensure Calgarians get the roads, new libraries and LRT cars they demand, but are reluctant to pay for via increased property taxes. In fact, this system of province-to-city transfers ends up leaving millions in extra piles of unallotted, must-spend cash lying around – in this case, the Municipal Sustainability Initiative – resulting in the much maligned $25 million pedestrian “Peace Bridge,” and a nearly a coronary for The Dinger.

So if the Harper Government loses one of the three confidence votes it’s facing this week, I recommend reviewing where each of the federal parties stands on funding for municipal infrastructure. And while you’re off pondering your provincial leadership choices for the PCs, the Alberta Liberals and the Alberta Party think about what each one will do for how cities pay for their services and infrastructure. You could ask “why should Calgarians hand two thirds of their property taxes to the province to redistribute to who knows where?” and hope Ted Morton has a good answer.

Says McIver: “[Police Chief Hanson] can’t stand by and let somebody falsely malign his department.”

Says [Barb] Higgins: “I think the chief wants the accurate story out there and I think that’s a great thing.”

All of which would be fine — if Hanson was making any effort to put the accurate numbers out there and prove Nenshi wrong. But he hasn’t. So McIver and Higgins come off looking like they’re blatantly pandering to the law-and-order crowd, and at the same time, they’re helping further the “McBarb” narrative that Team Nenshi is pushing (gist: that McIver and Higgins are more or less the same).

And Nenshi? He comes off looking like the upstart candidate who happened to ask a good (albeit provocative) question and got in trouble for it. Not a bad place to be, and Nenshi knows it. Here’s one of his quotes from this morning’s Herald story: “I’m trying to get the facts on the table, and if the chief helped me get on the front page of the newspaper with my questions that still haven’t been answered, I’m not going to complain about that.”

I think it is worth going a bit further and examining just how disingenuous Ric McIver’s response was in the Herald article. McIver’s claim that the chief “can’t stand by and let somebody falsely malign his department” rings hollow when Nenshi’s questions are derived from the police budget and StatsCan numbers. No thinking person believes that Nenshi’s data is false, especially since no one – not the police or any of the four campaigns criticizing him – have provided a shred of evidence to refute his data.

More importantly, I agree with Jeremy’s assessment that ”it’s been a really good week for Naheed Nenshi” but for different reasons. I think the police issue is actually a secondary or tertiary point in an argument why this past week was the best of Nenshi’s campaign.

So, aside from handling the police issue masterfully, what made last week the best of Nenshi’s campaign?

Monday was a huge news day for the municipal election. Aside from being the formal start of the campaign (a.k.a. nomination day) we also saw two important developments:

1. A CTV/Calgary Herald poll indicating that Nenshi had broken out of the pack of over a dozen challengers vying for the third place spot in the Higgins-McIver “two horse race.”
2. After a “sleepless night ” when the poll numbers came out (early Monday morning) Calgary-Buffalo MLA Kent Hehr gracefully dropped out of the race telling FFWD that he was “impressed with Nenshi, not with McIver.”

Losing one of the top 5 candidates (according to the polls), while clearly breaking out of the pack of would-be third place candidates, presented a Nenshi with a huge opportunity: he started calling the mayoralty contest a “three horse race.”

By week’s end, the “three horse race” narrative had percolated into the way many media outlets were framing the election, especially in relation to the headline grabbing dust up with police chief Hanson. The strategic importance of the media’s and the public’s acceptance of  the “three horse race” narrative to Nenshi’s campaign cannot be understated. While both McIver and Higgins have thus far ran conventional, low risk “frontrunner” campaigns – lots of vague bullet points, buzzwords like “vibrant” and relatively few concrete ideas – Nenshi played to his strengths and based his entire campaign on a ton of well researched, very specific “Better Ideas.”

The approach seems to be getting some traction. As DJ Kelly noted in Friday’s Metro, Nenshi handily won two post-debate audience polls this week and has recruited so many engaged volunteers and social media supporters that he’s effectively turned the #yycvote twitter hashtag (being used to discuss the election) into an “echo chamber” for his campaign. #yycvote is now averaging nearly 1,200 civic-election-related tweets per day and saw 1,500 on nomination day.

As a betting man, I’d wager that Nenshi and his “Better Ideas” are going to target the 44 per cent of Calgarians that intend to vote, but are still undecided. But before anyone suggests that I’ve drank the kool-aid, I will acknowledge that Nenshi has a huge hill to climb to beat the name recognition and the truckloads of money behind the early success of the Higgins and McIver campaigns – especially with only 23 days left to do it. But as one regular Calgarian pointed out on #yycvote:  ”All a person has to do is get others to read the candidates platforms and inevitably, they become @nenshi supporters.”

…I truly don’t know of another area of public policy where relevant facts and salient debates are more divorced from the public discussion — where ignorance and fear have more currency — than is the case with tech policy. The unreality of the debate tends to work out fine for the defense contractors, industry consultants, and major corporations involved in tech policy. But that state of affairs leaves the public in the dark.

Nancy Scola, writing for The American Prospect blog on the INTERNET KILL SWITCH (!!!!1) and “The Trouble With Tech Reporting“

Particularly fascinating is the potential for the proliferation of low cost digital cameras to exponentially increase the opportunities to hold accountable authorities who break the rules.  Two weeks ago, the Braidwood inquiry concluded that the RCMP (in CBC’s words) were “not justified in using a Taser against the Polish immigrant and that the officers later deliberately misrepresented their actions to investigators.” The basis for these damning conclusions is the now infamous bystander video of Robert Dziekanski’s taser-induced death at the Vancouver airport in 2007, which lead me to tweet the following:

Rhetorical question of the day: Would there have been a #Braidwood inquiry without the video?

Only several days later, I watched the crowdsourced panopticon that was the G20 vandalism, and the resulting overreaction from police, via photos uploaded in realtime to Twitter (and on television).  In a few of the photos I saw, it looked like much of the crowd was there to gawk and photograph everything that moved. Listening to a podcast from The Globe’s @IvorTossell, who was live-tweeting and sharing photos of the protest, my suspicions were confirmed. The 4 minute piece called “All the world’s a cellphone-equipped stage” noted the same observation: that much of the crowd was there to take pictures and shot video; a change that signified a new era accountability and scrutiny towards both the vandals that broke windows and set fire to police cars and the riot-gear-clad cops who stormed peaceful protesters singing the national anthem.  The resulting images and footage were pretty incredible, even mesmerizing.

But even more astounding is this report from The Globe: the man shot the video of the death of Robert Dziekanski was at the G20 capturing more examples of the police behaving badly with the very same camera.

“I saw two different people get surrounded by police and beat down pretty bad,” [Paul Pritchard] said. “They didn’t get released until the crowd chanted for their release.”

He realized his cellphone camera was not adequate for what he expected was about to happen. He raced home on his bicycle to retrieve a trusty Sony Cyber-shot camera.

It was with that camera that Mr. Pritchard once captured the shocking images of a man’s death.

At 1:21 a.m. on Oct. 14, 2007, Mr. Pritchard, who had been teaching English in China, was at Vancouver International Airport on his way home to Victoria to see his father, who was dying of cancer. A ruckus in the arrivals area led him to train his camera on a distraught passenger. Four minutes later, police arrived and, in a stunning sequence later aired for millions of viewers, the traveller was zapped by a taser, his anguished cries the last sound he would make before dying. Mr. Pritchard continued shooting over the objections of a security guard.

This man personifies the new era we’re only just beginning to understand.

While size of these already-powerful devices continues to shrink – the power of the smartphone in your pocket now exceeds that of the computer you bought in 2001 – the quality and storage capacity, and the digital distribution network transmitting the media they create, only continue to expand exponentially.

This expansion is predictable. It follows along a smooth exponential curve when graphed, representing the rapid doubling of the speed and price performance of all information technology. But while the continued acceleration and ubiquity of technological expansion are assured, the resulting social and political consequences are still very much up in the air.

What will this future mean for Canadians and our democracy? I’m anxious to find out.

From the start, General McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,”  joked General Stanley McChrystal as reported in the New York Times in April.

General McChrystal recently got lost in the complexity of this spaghetti and meatballs plan for “winning” the war in Afghanistan, of which he was one of the chief architects. Michael Hastings, a shrewd reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, appears to have blended into the war-imbedded background as the proverbial fly on the wall while McChrystal and his senior aides’ frustrations boiled over.  To empathize, McChrystal’s agitation seems justified given the laughably quagmire-prone strategy that  he is attempting to execute (see above) and the recent report to the UN Security Council noting an “alarming” 94 percent increase in roadside bombings.

Correctly observing that “McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war”  in his impressive exposé piece published today, among the numerous incendiary comments made by the top General and his posse, Hastings reported these additional gems:

In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side.

…

The most striking example of McChrystal’s usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of [Afghan pseudo-president] Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan.

…

McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

…

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire.

This is major scandal: a top military leader and his aides playing fast and loose with the facts,  undermining the authority of elected officials to create policy and pushing the United States and her NATO allies, including Canada, further into an incredibly expensive war. A war fraught with loosely defined, fuzzy objectives and tactics, as well as lacking: much public support to speak of, many key personnel and a clear exit strategy.

Undoubtedly, the continuing Western military operation in Afghanistan is being exploited for PR and recruitment purposes by al-Qaeda just across the porous border in Pakistan. And America’s policy towards Pakistan looks as though it is exacerbating the problem.  Three days into his presidency, Obama authorized the continuation of a Bush-era neoconservative policy (that persists to this day), which allows the CIA to conduct attacks from unmanned drones. Ignoring the fact that the US congress has never formally declared war on Pakistan, the results of the potentially illegal drone missions haven’t always been pretty. (As an aside, in a sort of  surreal post-modern haze, soldiers stationed in south-western United States are flying drone missions as a 9:00AM-5:00PM day job and are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder just like soldiers on the battlefield.)

But to give a final hat tip to Hastings’ incredible reporting work, I’ll conclude with his analogy comparing the futile development effort (which is part of the bottomless-pit-of-blood-and-treasure-Afghan-war-plan) to America’s schizophrenic quasi-war policy towards Pakistan:

Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock.

General McChrystal is expected to tender his resignation this morning.

A bird is mired in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, via The Big Picture)

This is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.

Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute on what the ongoing BP oil spill disaster means for humanity’s need for energy.

Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.

…a bit of ridiculousness from the NYT’s story ‘Video Shows American Killing of Photographer‘ on the video leaked via the power of the interwebs and Wikileaks, which is well on its way to becoming the Internet’s foremost repository of documents exposing government secrets.

Wikileaks’ upload page reads:

WikiLeaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance.

…

The information you submit will be technically anonymized and we do not retain any information on you. We will never cooperate with anyone seeking to identify you.

Not long after its role in the disclosure of the Trafigura “Super Injunction” leak – the documents pertaining to a gag order in a UK toxic waste dumping scandal – The Guardian’s editorial ‘In praise of… Wikileaks‘ had this to say:

The site…serves as an uncensorable and untraceable depository for the truth, able to publish documents that the courts may prevent newspapers and broadcasters from being able to touch.

Unsurprisingly, there are many powerful interests spending lots of money on lawyers attempting to have Wikileaks shut down. You can help here, a link that reads: wikileaks.org/#Change_you_can_believe_in

The Intenet: the only place where you can find the Smooth Jazz version of Metallica’s Enter Sandman and as many censored documents as your heart desires.

EAVB_DHLUYPKEGH

Is it a “standard unite the left” movement? Or maybe it’s a right wing plot?

Is it a bunch of out-of-touch “elitists” as Hugh MacDonald would have us believe? Or is it a nearly irrelevant “debate society” ?

Could it simply be a vehicle for a new political party? Or maybe it’s a support group for those fed up with partisan politics and yet somehow, simultaneously, group therapy for committed partisans?

Is it a group of people focused on democratic reforms that will re-engage Albertans in the political process, or just another division of Alberta’s rapidly shrinking pie of voters?

Alberta's pundits examining the Reboot Alberta elephant

There’s an ancient parable from India about seven blind monks touching different parts of an elephant and jumping to conclusions about what an elephant must be:

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

… and so on.

The moral of the story is that each monk was partly right, but none could describe the true essence of the elephant.

Reboot Alberta is our elephant.

It began as an experiment without predetermined outcomes or set expectations starting from this simple premise: put a bunch of politically engaged Albertans in the same room for a weekend and encourage thoughtful, respectful discussions about politics and Alberta’s future.

What emerged was a buzz of new ideas, new discussions and new relationships among the politically engaged.

In hindsight, the first Reboot conference was about creating a space for these important conversations to take place. The beauty of this idea was its simplicity. Tapping into a deep desire for renewed engagement, a decentralized community formed around Alberta’s political blogs and the #rebootab tag on twitter.

But who were these people? What bound them together?

Having actively engaged in this online community and participated in both conferences, here are the four things that I believe characterize the Reboot Alberta elephant, as refined by the discussion at my table on the bright Sunday morning of February 28th at Reboot 2.0.

Rebooters are already actively involved in their communities and share a desire to:

1. create a better Alberta -  a place where we all can “live and flourish.”
2. course correct with meaningful democratic reforms to address broken aspects of our system and encourage more Albertans to “dust off their citizenship.”
3. connect with other people who want to foster democracy and establish a new vision for Alberta’s future.
4. link together our existing organizations, communities and political vehicles to work towards these goals, both together and independently.

Some participants’ high expectations for the second conference were not met. And there are some genuine and very legitimate concerns about how to make these in-person meetings more accessible to those Albertans without a few hundred extra dollars to spend on a luxury hotel for a weekend. Yet I remain optimistic about these simple, action-oriented goals for Reboot Alberta.

So if you have something important to contribute to this ongoing discussion, I encourage you to take ten minutes and start a blog, sign up for twitter and start sharing your thoughts on how best to advance these goals.

I’ll be listening.

It’s a reasonable question and one that has dogged Ed Stelmach since 2007 when he “initiated a public review of the province’s royalty and tax regime to ensure Albertans are receiving a fair share from energy development through royalties, taxes and fees.”

An important reason why Ed seems to be hated by much of Calgary’s oil and gas sector is the conventional wisdom (a.k.a. convenient myth, for some opportunists) that this royalty review drove away investment from the province and is primarily responsible for our continued economic woes.  The real blow to Alberta’s “one sector economy” occurred not long after the review when the global market for oil became extremely volatile and the price fell from $142 to $34 abarrel as the global finance industry melted down in the fall of 2008. The price eventually stabilized around $65-75 after the stock market began to recover last March.

It was unlucky political timing for a new Premier having difficulty articulating a vision for Alberta’s future, but even worse for the thousands of Albertans that lost their jobs as a result.

Brent barrel petroleum spot prices, May 1987 – March 2009

Last year’s tough economic times affected Alberta’s entire economy and this year’s $4.7 billion deficit is strong evidence that these circumstances endure. But even with the price volatility ushered in by the greatest financial collapse in 70 years, the question of whether Albertans are getting their fair share for the resources we own remains a reasonable, albeit limiting, one. I would prefer to see us asking how our government can act as more responsible and effective steward of our natural resources, our climate and Alberta’s environment. We also need to look at how to reduce the province’s ridiculous over-reliance on variable resource revenues and make large strategic investments to our post-secondary education system to help diversify our economy, (the exact opposite approach of the 2.7 per cent cut we saw in budget 2010).

Bearing all this in mind, yesterday the Edmonton Journal reported that:

Alberta least competitive in oil and gas: U of C report

EDMONTON — Alberta is dead last in terms of competitiveness for oil and gas development and should drop its current royalty regime, says a University of Calgary professor.

Jack Mintz, director of the School for Public Policy, ranked five provinces plus Texas for the ability of their tax and royalty structures to attract investment, and found Alberta’s current royalty regime “creates a burden on investment that is twice as high on oil and gas” compared with other sectors in the economy.

Interesting findings. Here’s the PDF.

Although the comment is now removed from edmontonjournal.com website, the following was pasted from a Forbes.com database of board of directors’ compensation disclosed by publicly traded companies:

Director Imperial Oil

57 Years Old

Jack M. Mintz, Palmer Chair in Public Policy for the University of Calgary. President and chief executive officer, The C.D. Howe Institute (public policy institute) and professor, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Director Compensation (Imperial Oil) for 2008

Fees earned or paid in cash	$69,000.00
Stock awards	$138,200.00
Option awards (in $)	$0.00
Non-equity incentive plan compensation	$0.00
Change in pension value and nondisqualified compensation earnings	$0.00
All other compensation	$0.00
Total Compensation	$207,200.00

Serving on Imperial Oil’s board of directors, Mr. Mintz has a direct financial stake in the success of a subsidiary of the largest oil company in the world that just happens to have billions invested in projects in Alberta.

The introduction to Jack Mintz’s research states that:

it is crucial to know just how much government tax and royalty policies affect the investment decisions the oil and gas industry makes relative to those of other sectors of the economy.”

If the conflict of interest couldn’t be more glaringly obvious, look no further than imperialoil.ca where you find them crowing: Imperial Oil Foundation gives $1 million to the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

Ridicule is the only appropriate response to this mockery of “public policy research. ”

For the record, I agree it is important to ask how much do “government tax and royalty policies affect the investment decisions the oil and gas industry?”

Without independently funded studies, free of direct financial conflicts of interest on the part of the researcher and the university department undertaking the study, I have little faith in our ability to get a straight answer to this important question… which is another compelling reason for the government to properly fund our post-secondary researchers.

The Journal took some flack on this in the comments for churning out a preliminary story on this naked and seemingly effective, attempt to grab headlines. There are 70 (AHHH!!!) related articles and it looks like most are  churnalism.

Ok. Deep breath.

Can we please all work together and put in a little more effort to ensure that we aren’t being spoon fed bullshit?

K thx.

Not so fast.

Today the Calgary Herald’s Jason Fekete tweeted Mr. Fjeldheim’s comment when addressing the role of the Chief Electoral Officer in encouraging people to vote: “I’m not sure that’s the role of the chief electoral officer.”

Let’s quickly review the vision and mission statements for Elections Alberta:

Our Vision

To inspire and engage participation in the democratic process

Our Mission

“To provide leadership and support to democracy through the conduct of open, free and fair elections, by creating awareness and promoting participation in the election process, and by ensuring compliance with Alberta’s election laws.”

So my question is this: when will Alberta get a Chief Electoral Officer that will work to fufill the mission of the organization he or she leads?

UPDATE: Brian Fjeldheim’s first order of business as the new chief electoral officer was to change these mission and vision statement to a much more wishy-washy stance on encouraging Albertans to vote:

Our Vision

Albertans have confidence in an easily accessible electoral process.

Our Mission

Deliver effective non-partisan services that meet the electoral needs of Albertans.

@BreakenNews has the goods on these changes here.