Posts tagged democracy

Cities, Taxes and Transfers

By admin on March 22, 2011
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For decades Alberta politicians have blustered over how Albertans send more money to Ottawa, over $21 billion a year, than we receive back in transfer payments. Equalization, the National Energy Program and a Parliamentary system favouring central Canada have been the omnipresent thorns in Albertans’ sides for what now seems like ages. The identification of voters with the conservative parties selling these popular narratives, both federally and provincially, has cast Alberta a bright, nearly immutable shade of Tory blue.

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.

Examining Calgary’s “three horse race” for mayor

By admin on September 25, 2010
This entry is filed under Politics and tagged , , , , , , .View Comments

As always, local writer Jeremy Klaszus did a great job in his post analyzing why the brouhaha with the Calgary Police Service – more specifically, chief Rick Hanson – is a winner for mayoral candidate Naheed Nenshi. For those not as addicted as I am to Calgary civic politics, I’ll fill you on the situation: the police chief stepped into a debate between Nenshi and mayoralty frontrunner Ric McIver, calling Nenshi’s open questions about the pre-approved police budget “ill-informed” and “irresponsible”. As Jeremy explained:

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.”

“Internet Kill Switch” phrase leaves the public in the dark

By admin on July 13, 2010
This entry is filed under Media, Politics and tagged , , , , , , , .View Comments

…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“

A new era of exponentially increasing accountability?

By admin on July 8, 2010
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Lately I’ve been thinking about the role of technology in changing the relationship Canadians have with all levels of government. The potential for open data to create transparency and direct citizen engagement in deciding how their city is run, and how an MP can now speak directly with the Canadian public across the country to address concerns and respond to criticisms about recently introduced legislation, are two recent examples of how technology is creating opportunities to reshape the way the public interacts with government.

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.

#Change_you_can_believe_in?

By admin on April 5, 2010
This entry is filed under Politics and tagged , , , , .View Comments

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

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