Nova Scotia budget: the cost of cutting v the value of investing
In the all-too-brief interregnum between Thursday’s bad-news federal budget and tomorrow’s more-bad-news provincial budget, it’s worth noting the across-the-board, cost-cutting Kool Aid fiscal policy makers in Ottawa and Halifax have swallowed is not the only—or necessarily best—way to slay the deficit dragon.
The Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, for example, a progressive think tank, recently released its annual alternative provincial budget. Its “Forward to Fairness” document calls for “strategic investments” while finding “creative ways to save money and increase revenue.” Instead of rushing to balance the budget in 2013-14 “to fit the timing of the electoral cycle,” the CCPA wants the government to stretch the back-to-balance timetable to 2015-16 to “reflect the actual fiscal situation.”
“Austerity does not come for free,” says the CCPA’s Nova Scotia director, Christine Saulnier. The CCPA says the government’s decision to cut $772 million in public spending over four years will mean the loss of “well over 10,000 jobs.”
By contrast, the CCPA’s approach involves investing $492.5 million in social infrastructure and programs, including everything from $40 million to establish 10 new community health centres, fund 10 more nurse practitioners and 12 more midwives, to $45 million to phase in an early learning and child care system and $21 million for rural public transit.
Where would the money come from to pay for all of this. Primarily by shifting the tax burden, says the CCPA, from low and middle-income taxpayers “to the upper 45 per cent of income earners, especially the top 10 per cent,” those who have gained the most in the past decade.
Graham Steele
Don’t expect to hear any of this on Tuesday. While the CCPA had what Saulnier calls “a serious and engaged exchange” with Finance Minister Graham Steeele, the finance department “has framed the problem and the solutions in a way that precludes our proposals. In other words, they see declining enrollment in P-12 as a way to justify cutting; we see it as an opportunity to finally catch up with the rest of Canada and begin to really address quality.”
Pity.
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
Shipbuilding contract: the good, the better but not the best
The good news is we won. The better news is that we won fair and square. The best news would be for the process by which Halifax’s Irving shipyard last week won a $25-billion federal shipbuilding contract-for-a-generation become the new norm.
But that last, of course, is least likely.
That’s because the shipbuilding contract was that rare special case in which the always tempting opportunity to claim credit smacked up against the even more critical need to deflect blame.
Usually, when politicians dole out big-ticket largesse, they either try to spread the wealth around so every no-name MP of the right political persuasion from every unlikely constituency—“Calgary sure is a fine place to build a destroyer”—gets their own say-cheese moment... Or they simply plunk all the cash where they think it will win them the most votes.
Sometimes, such cynical schemes backfire. Spectacularly.
In 1986, for example, Brian Mulroney’s government awarded a maintenance contract for its CF-18 fighter jet fleet to a Quebec firm instead of rewarding a clearly better bid from Winnipeg. Western anger over that slight helped spawn the Reform party... and we know where that led.
The current Reform... er, Conservative government certainly didn’t want this contract to go CF-18 on them, especially given competing bids from both coasts and Quebec.
But the Tories—to their credit— also wanted to use this once-in-a-generation contract to create more-than-a-generation centres of shipbuilding excellence in Canada.
So Harper shut out the lobbyists and muzzled the partisans. It’s no surprise he benched Nova Scotia’s “Patronage Pete” MacKay, and no surprise either that MacKay lashed out at the provincial NDP for claiming the (equally undeserved) credit he wanted all for himself.
Instead, Harper turned the process over to senior civil servants and a private sector “fairness monitor.”
By all accounts, the process worked—so well Canadians are asking why not use the same process for other big contracts, like Harper’s recent sketchy $9-billion, no-tender fighter jet deal?
And why not extend this fairness idea to provincial, even municipal contracts?...
Uh, right... This is Canada. Pity.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Is this any way to run a country?
One last—I promise—look back in befuddlement to the results of last week’s federal election.
If we are to believe the pundits—and who are we not to—Canada has just gone through a dramatic, head-shaking, concussion-making electoral re-alignment in which our national consensus has become far more conservative and the political centre has disappeared, leaving us with only a bi-polar, left-right, take-it-or-leave-it choice.
In the process, the Conservatives have become our new Natural Governing Party (NGP), the Liberals and Bloc are wiped out and the NDP is in the process of making itself over as a kind of leftish Permanent Opposition (POed).
And yet…
And yet, if we are to believe a couple of young Facebook buds with calculators, the real difference between all of the above and almost none of the above is actually 6,201 votes out of the 14.7 million cast last Monday.
If 6,201 voters in the 14 most closely contested Conservative ridings in the country—none in Atlantic Canada; don’t blame us—had voted a different way, Stephen Harper’s unassailable majority would be yet another minority government.
“When one becomes aware of how easy it is for the intentions of the voters to become distorted,” notes Matt Peters, who did the “’rithmatic,” “it is hard not to conclude that some kind of electoral reform is needed.”
Indeed.
If Peters’ what-if history had happened, we would now be speculating—given that two million more Canadians voted against Harper than voted for him—on whether the man the pundits have seemingly anointed prime minister for life actually had a political future at all.
Or… what if the Liberals had received the number of seats their percentage of the popular vote merited. They would have 58 MPs instead of 34, still nowhere near the 77 they started with, but more representative of their current level of voter support…
Representative of their level of voter support… What a concept!
Is there a rational reason why we’re one of only four countries in the industrialized world that still employs an electoral system that allows a party chosen by a minority of voters to govern like they have just won the winner-take-all sweepstakes?
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Election 2011: a strange sweet trip that may not be over
What a short, strange, sweet trip it’s been—made all the sweeter because not a single politician, party insider, pollster, pundit or person predicted it. Including me. My first post-election-call column was a lament that—in a campaign focused so tightly on just 50 swing ridings—the votes of the rest of us wouldn’t count.
Uh, right…
What happened? The short answer is Canadians took back their politics—on social media, in vote mobs, in their own minds. They rose up—though not the way Michael Ignatieff hoped—and told pollsters they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.
“It” was Stephen Harper and his smarmy, controlling politics of fear and loathing of any other. But it was also the Bloc Quebecois and the Gilles-one-note clanking call to non. And Michael Ignatieff, who ran a mostly solid campaign but couldn’t escape his pre-election Tory tarring as the outsider-other, or the reality his so-recently-discredited Liberals represented a tired alternative that wasn’t.
This negative, none-of-the-above frustration almost certainly fed the tsnunami that has swept the NDP from its nadir of 13.2 per cent in polls two weeks into the campaign to the giddying heights of official opposition, perhaps even minority government territory today.
But if the NDP surge is, in part, a negative response, it is also—in perhaps larger part—a reflection of voters’ hope for better.
Jack Layton isn’t new, and neither is the NDP platform.
But after 4.6 million of us watched his performance in the leaders’ debate, the ground under this election began to shift seismically.
Why?
The NDP engaged Canadians in discussions about their issues, and the avuncular, unflappable Layton steered clear of the personal negatives—our attack ads, he joked, are about attacking poverty—that were other parties’ staples.
The NDP’s sudden surge, of course, means its platform—and how it gets paid for—hasn’t been scrutinized nearly carefully enough (although the Globe Friday trotted out 10 bank and business economists who concluded “no one appears to be shaking” at the prospect of an NDP government).
However it all turns out, Canadians have already shaken conventional political assumptions. That is reason enough to hope.
But stay tuned. This trip may not be over yet.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
It’s don’t-blame-me-I-voted-for time
Rick Howe was interviewing the organizer of an upcoming all-candidates’ debate on poverty issues. Three of the four major parties, the man told the News 95.7 talk show host, would be sending a representative.
“Let me guess which one won’t,” Howe cut in.
He didn’t have to guess.
Neither do you.
An hour before what was supposed to be another all-candidates event in Bridgewater last week, Gerald Keddy, the riding’s Conservative incumbent, gleefully tweeted: “Heading to a special event with Senator MIKE DUFFY!!! It’s going to be a wonderful evening.” The special event was not the one at which he might be grilled publicly on his performance or his party’s views; it was a private hob-knob fundraiser with Tories in Chester Basin.
Is this any way to run an election?
It seems to be.
Parties leading in the polls traditionally run risk-averse campaigns. But Harper’s control-freak control team have taken that calculatingly anti-democratic strategy to new, demagogic heights. No discussion, no debate, no mistakes.
Not that they do it well. The Tory campaign has careened wildly out of control from day one. Consider Bruce Carson. Consider Bruce Carson gain. And again. Throw in leaks about G20 spending and heavy-handed prime ministerial political interference in appointments. Don’t forget all those supposedly vetted Tory candidates who keep popping up to support the Tamil Tigers, or jump out of the Air India bombing closet, or claim credit for cutting funding for Planned Parenthood and boy-just-wait-until-we-get-our-majority…
So why do the polls still say Stephen “Five-questions-time’s-up-on-to-the-next-staged-invitees-only-photo-op” Harper will form the next government—and might actually win a majority?
There are lots of reasons, but let’s pick one. Our electoral system encourages targeting swing ridings rather than campaigning for broad support, which discourages people from voting in ridings where the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, which will then encourage Harper, should he prevail, to claim we’ve given him a mandate to do what he will.
Here’s one small antidote. Vote. Even if you’re in a riding where it won’t change the result, every vote is one more that says I-didn’t-vote-for-this-so-don’t-pretend-I-did.
If nothing else, you’ll have earned your right to sport the sticker: “Don’t blame me, I voted for…” It’s not much but it’s something.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Stephen Harper meets the Facebook election
Is it just me and my Facebook friends or is Stephen Harper in deeper doo doo than we know?
I will acknowledge—before someone else does—that I am of the artsy, progressive-left-when-it-suits-my-personal-interests persuasion, so it’s no surprise many of my friends are fellow travelers. I live in a federal NDP riding in a province governed, for the moment, by the NDP. But I have plenty of Facebook friends—Facebook being Facebook—who are Tories, including a few current federal candidates, and many more of no, or no-known affiliation.
Which is why I find our first full-on Facebook federal election so intriguing.
Many Canadians are using social media to get, share and comment on campaign news. Mainstream news stories, YouTube videos, online petitions, Twitter posts, fan pages all rocket around the social media echo-chamber with dazzling speed.
Much of it is do-good, get-out-the-vote stuff—the clever Rick Mercer rant, the dog’s breakfast of I-pledge-to-vote pages—or partisan postings re-posted by more partisans.
But Facebook—my Facebook, at least—seems dominated by one overweening theme: get rid of Stephen Harper.
Every time I open Facebook, a few more friends have changed their profile pictures to an anti-Harper image.
Stephen Harper is both polarizing and galvanizing, which makes him a perfect Facebook organizing foil.
There are dozens of anti-Harper pages: “Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper,” “Vote No Confidence in Stephen Harper,” “Get Stephen Harper Out of Office,” etc.. There’s even one entitled “Can This Onion Ring Get More Fans Than Stephen Harper?” The answer is yes: it has 158,170 fans compared with 49,952 for the official Stephen Harper page.
There are links to videos like “The Harper Song: ‘Steve, It’s Time to Leave’” and “ShitHarperDid” (which boasts a million views). And strategic voting sites like Project Democracy and Catch-22, whose purpose is to make sure Stephen Harper doesn’t get his majority, or—better—loses power.
Which means…? I don’t know. Nothing so far seems to have budged Harper’s numbers. But what do poll numbers tell us about real support for a party leader when so few of us willingly talk to pollsters anymore? And even fewer of us bother to vote.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.