New column day

Here, on how the City of Regina's actual treatment of key information runs contrary to its stated commitment to open government.

For further reading...
- Natascia Lypny's report on the City's delays and denials of access to information about Regina's new stadium and wastewater treatment plant is here. 
- I previously wrote about the City's initial open data policy announcement here, featuring this warning which seems particularly on point:

(E)ven the most cynical governments are often eager to use selective “open government” (in the form of limited operational data) as a distraction from opaque political decision-making – with a one-way flow of politically-convenient information substituted for any particular effort to interact with citizens or respond to their concerns. So while we should look forward to what can be done with the information that is included in the city’s data portal, we should keep an especially close eye on what’s left out and how information is handled going in the opposite direction.

- And the new policy discussed in the column is found here (PDF).

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Robert Frank comments on the connection between recognizing the luck and social support which lead to one's own success, and being willing to fund a state which will ensure opportunities for everybody:

I've seen even brief discussions of the link between success and luck temper the outrage many wealthy people feel about taxes. At an intuitive level, it's not puzzling that successful citizens like Schwarzman might view mandatory taxation as unjustified confiscation of what's rightfully theirs. But extensive public investment was an essential precondition for the economic prosperity of those very same tax protesters, and we can't have public investment without taxes.

Sensible views about taxes or any other subject do not reliably triumph over less sensible ones in the short run. But we should all take comfort in the fact that the long-run historical narrative bends toward truth. One reason is that when evidence for a particular view becomes compelling, the number of people who embrace it tends to snowball. Beliefs are contagious.

Public opinion shifts one conversation at a time. In my own recent conversations with highly successful people, I've seen opinions change on the spot. Many who seem never to have considered the possibility that their success stemmed from factors other than their own talent and effort are often surprisingly willing to rethink. In many instances, even brief reflection stimulates them to recall specific examples of good breaks they've enjoyed along the way.

So I hope you'll talk with your friends about their experiences with luck. In the process, you may persuade them to support a more ambitious program of public investment. But even if not, you'll almost surely hear some interesting stories.

- Meanwhile, Dean Beeby writes about RESP grants as just one example of how programs labelled as helping people in need actually benefit higher-income families. But on the bright side, Bryan Mullan reports that a small investment by the Canada Revenue Agency in investigating tax evasion produced three times the expected return in public revenue.

- Karthik Ramanna and Allan Dreschel discuss the corporate war against accountability. And Chris Sagers points out that antitrust law represents a readily-available - but seldom-used - option to address the growth of unrestrained corporate power.

- David Dayen rightly asks what social purpose hedge funds serve - and suggests that it's time both to redirect public assets which currently prop them up, and to stop giving them special regulatory treatment. 

- Finally, Andrew Jackson highlights the Parliamentary Budget Officer's attempts to wring information out of a Lib government whose first inclination was to be even more secretive than its predecessor - and finds that the information eventually produced shows stagnation or cuts in social investments. And CBC offers a reminder of the potential of open government.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- John Ross makes the case for a focus on the social determinants of health in all kinds of public policy-making:

Many studies show that if you work long hours in low-paying jobs and live paycheque to paycheque, constant life stresses have far more negative health effects than the causes listed on public health posters.

Life for many Canadians is more complicated than recommending a “healthy lifestyle.”

Society broadly needs to change the circumstances for all members of our society to enable people to have options and live differently. In our small province we could actually achieve this.

Donald Berwick, former CEO of the Institutes of Healthcare Improvement, said, “Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must — must — redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition re-distributional.”
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How about this radical suggestion?

Start spending proportionally less on disease care and more on addressing the inequities of the determinants of health (and disease)?

‘Quality health care’ should be access to equitable income distribution, education, employment, food and housing security. That is not currently the case.

- Meanwhile, the Toronto Star calls for a concerted effort at all levels of government to address the needs of precarious workers. And Lois Weiner sees the Chicago Teachers Union's strike as an important step in challenging fundamentally unfair laws designed to silence workers. 

- Scott Vrooman points out that for all the bleating over relatively small budget numbers, there are far more important deficits that we should be addressing - including the glaring gap between any progress to limit greenhouse gas emissions and the steps needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. And Robert DeConto and David Pollard find that the feedback loops created by a warming planet in fact look to be substantially worse than typically assumed.

- Solomon Israel canvasses how the system of low-threshold arrests and peace bonds set up under Bill C-51 (and seemingly to be left in place by the Libs) raises severe civil rights concerns without making anybody safer.

- Finally, Jennifer Ditchburn writes about the future of open government in Canada. And Mike de Souza catches the National Energy Board deleting a sensitive internal e-mail.

On closed-door decisions

Memo to Don Lenihan:

It's well and good to point to past backroom policy debacles such as utterly unwanted Crown corporation giveaways as examples of a complete lack of public engagement.

But before lauding Kathleen Wynne as the face of open government, might it be worth noting that she's doing the exact same thing on too short a time frame for public consultation, while paying lip service to "dialogue" after it's too late?

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Edward Robinson laments the willingness of European centre-left parties to abandon any attempt to argue against austerity even when the evidence shows that's the right position to take:

Centre-left parties in Europe appear to have completely lost the argument for pragmatic fiscal policy, much in the way that US Democrats seemed to lose their own case precisely at the moment when stimulus was working. Consider again how little financial commitment it would have taken to have shored-up confidence in Greek sovereign debt via Eurobonds. Greek debt in 2010 represented only 3.6% of Eurozone GDP. François Hollande’s government was supposed to be making the case for Eurobonds.

What is worse, the centre-left now appears to have let the very explanation of (or blame for) the crisis slip away from them into the hands of neoliberals. Instead of constantly reminding voters and markets that sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios were falling in the Eurozone (and the UK) before the crisis, they have given up. Voters seem to have forgotten that the massive public debts accrued since 2008 had been private debts before then.

From this analysis flows austerity’s legitimacy. To social democrats, it seems profoundly misguided to be prescribing supply-side medicine to a problem which was fundamentally caused by a huge uptick in private-sector debt, necessitated by steadily falling effective demand for 30 years. Of course, there is always inefficiency or corruption, but these were not the primary causes of the crisis. Nonetheless, centre-left parties are assenting.
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While elections are on the table we must campaign hard, both within our respective national parties and within the broader argument at European level. But if that cannot shift the balance, then genuine social democrats will soon need to decide whether or not to stand by the fading hope of a return to economic pragmatism in the Eurozone or whether to throw their lot in with those calling for the tried and tested routes out of chronic indebtedness.

Choose the former and we risk being permanently subsumed into European austerity elites, choose the latter and we find ourselves, against the European project, with some unattractive intellectual companions and just as much uncertainty. It is a real dilemma.

But surely the status quo of never-ending internal devaluation is politically unacceptable, damaging to the ideal of a united Europe and harmful to democracy and economic development.

- Meanwhile, Matthew O'Brien writes that plenty of U.S. families with relatively high gross incomes are nonetheless living paycheque to paycheque - meaning that precarious financial situations aren't limited to the lower end of the income scale. And while workers across the board are struggling to get by, Paul Krugman highlights how the right is pushing for ever more giveaways to people who live off of wealth rather than labour:

In my last post I tried to document the extent to which modern Republican rhetoric has already adopted the values of “patrimonial capitalism”, even though America’s top one percent still owes its high incomes largely to compensation rather than wealth. On reflection, I thought I should also document the extent to which the GOP has put its money — or, actually, taxpayers’ money — where its mouth is, with concrete policies that favor wealth over work.

Consider, as Exhibit A, the Bush tax cuts. Bush did cut the top tax rate on earned income from 39.6 to 35 percent, a 12 percent reduction. But he cut the rate on capital gains from 21 to 15, a 28 percent reduction; he cut the rate on dividends from 39.6 (because dividends were previously taxed as ordinary income) to 15, a reduction of more than 60 percent. And he put the estate tax on a path toward zero — a 100 percent reduction.

The estate tax made a partial comeback thanks to the awkward fact that a Democrat was in the White House, and there have been some tax hikes on capital income. The point, however, was that Bush tried to give people living off wealth, inherited wealth in particular, much bigger tax cuts than he gave high earners.

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Even now, 6 of the 10 wealthiest Americans are heirs rather than self-made entrepreneurs — the Koch brothers plus a bunch of Waltons. There’s every reason to believe that the role of inheritance will only grow over time.

And if it does, half our political system will be cheering it on and offering the ever-more-empowered heirs as much assistance as possible.

- And Alison highlights how the Kochs in particular have used their money to warp Canadian politics in favour of their own interests.

- Mariana Mazzucato reminds us that public policy can set a necessary foundation for innovation, while pointing out that the Cons have preferred to hand free money to entrenched corporate interests and resource extractors rather than encouraging the development of new ideas.

- Finally, Don Lenihan offers a useful set of criteria for open government - while highlighting how far we are from the ideal.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Tim Harper and the Star's editorial board each offer up some hope that 2014 will be a more productive year in politics than 2013 was. And Nora Loreto offers a suggestion as to how to make that happen:

Young workers, like all workers, need the labour movement to invest in organizing... Through working at the grassroots, creative options will emerge that will make it easier for unions like CUPE to take on organizing workers that are difficult to organize.

Through a concerted and coherent effort to organize, CUPE could not just figure out how to get around the complicated issues that arise when organizing temporary, short-term or non-traditional workers, but they could leverage the strength they have within the sector to force widespread change. They could find ways to represent residence workers not just at Carleton, but at other residences too. Maybe it would look like a traditional union, but maybe it wouldn't.
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How about making 2014 the year of the organizer?

- Meanwhile, Adam Davidson points out that retailers figure to benefit from offering reasonable pay and greater respect to their workers, rather than treating them as a cost to be minimized wherever possible:

Even the most coldhearted, money-hungry capitalists ought to realize that increasing their work force, and paying them and treating them better, will often yield happier customers, more engaged workers and — surprisingly — larger corporate profits. This sounds Pollyannaish, sure, but a study co-authored by Marshall Fisher, a Wharton professor who specializes in retail-management studies, backs it up. For every dollar of increased wages, one retailer that was studied by Fisher brought in $10 more in revenue. For more-understaffed stores in the study, the boost was as high as $28.

The problem results from the way many companies consider their workers. Ikea, for instance, has more than 130,000 global workers. In order to manage all these people, it uses something called work-force-management software, which ensures that there are enough workers — but not too many — to handle the forecasted in-store shopping traffic. (Walmart, which has 16 times as many workers, does, too, as do most larger retailers.) The software typically codes workers as a cost — one of the biggest — and aims to find the most efficient number of employees that can handle expected traffic. A trip to a big-box store reveals this algorithm’s logic in practice. There always seem to be endless aisles of merchandise but no one to answer your questions.

Ton, however, argues that workers are not merely a cost; they can be a source of profit — a major one. A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them.

- Dan Leger highlights the Cons' selective populism - as the same government spending millions of public dollars attacking a few telecommunications providers is using far more resources to encourage the oil industry to extract whatever it can for minimal public benefit.

- Finally, in an interview with Derrick Harris, Jonathan Reichental argues that any good government should embrace open data - rather than seeking to control and suppress information which might prove inconvenient.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Thomas Walkom writes that the Harper Cons' much-hyped economic record in fact offers ample reason to demand a change in government:

The Conservatives insist that the economy is their strong suit. And for a while it was. In 2011, voters bought Harper’s pitch.

But voter patience can last only so long. For too many Canadians, life is not improving. Income gaps are becoming more blatant. Wages are sluggish. Students are taking on massive debts to prepare themselves for jobs that, in the end, fail to materialize.

Those lucky enough to have jobs — even good jobs — too often find their work being sent offshore to low-wage countries.

Other Canadians find themselves in competition with the tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers let in by Ottawa.

Latest immigration department figures show that, to date, more temporary foreign workers entered the country in 2013 than during the same period of 2012 — itself a record year for importing cheap labour.

These are the things that should worry Harper.

- But then, Michael Harris discusses how ethics issues - led by the combination of bribery and cover-ups in the Senate - will likely prove the undoing of Stephen Harper and his government. John Ivison recognizes that the Cons are flailing for a political lifeline as Thomas Mulcair gets the better of Harper in the House of Commons on a daily basis - though I'm at a loss as to how a Senate referendum would help their cause when it's the NDP that's decried patronage and corruption under Lib and Con governments alike. And Jeffrey Simpson points out that nothing in the Cons' latest string of scandals and missteps is anything new.

- And lest anybody think the elected Cons are any more ethical than the unelected versions, pogge highlights the latest revelations about Dean Del Mastro's attempt to cover up illegal election expenses.

- Stephen Leahy is rightly outraged that the Cons are trying to claim a complete failure to meet Canada's Copenhagen greenhouse gas emission targets as progress. And Stuart Trew criticizes the continued lack of transparency on CETA - as the Cons try to claim victory without allowing Canadians to see what's actually happened on the field.

- Finally, Don Lenihan sees more open government as the needed solution to citizen disengagement.

#mtlqc13 Priority Resolution - Governance

One of the most obvious sources of cynicism in politics - which the NDP should be seeking to combat at every turn - is the presence of issues where opposition promises turn into government inaction or even abuse. And the Cons have sadly offered a case in point when it comes to accountability and transparency.

That means it's particularly important for the NDP to establish a strong message on accountable government which fits into the party's grassroots values. And luckily, there's just such a resolution up for discussion:

5-28-13
Resolution on Open Government Submitted by Terrebonne-Blainville
WHEREAS new information technologies enable citizens to interact more directly with government and participate more directly in government decision-making;
BE IT RESOLVED that Subsection 5.8 of the Policy Book be amended as follows:
New Democrats believe in:
f. Promoting an open government strategy with the objective of encouraging public participation, facilitating communication between government and citizens, and making information accessible to citizens while tracking which information is most sought after by the public with a view to gradually making this government information accessible to the public in a user-friendly, modifiable form.

Once again, another, higher-ranking resolution deals with much the same subject matter (5-14-13). But the difference between the two lies in the distinction between transparency merely as a way of peering in on goverment activity, and two-way communication which facilitates citizen participation. And the NDP should be seeking to emphasize its commitment to the latter ideal.

New column day

Here, on the opportunities and limitations associated with the City of Regina's new open data portal.

For further reading, see David Eaves generally, but particularly his analysis of data licensing (where the City looks to have met rather well).

Parliament In Review: October 20, 2011

The main topic of debate on Thursday, October 20 was the Canadian Wheat Board - with extensive discussion in Parliament of both the Cons' steps to shut down debate, and the substance of what should happen with the Wheat Board.

The Big Issue

The passage of the day goes to Niki Ashton, linking the Cons' choice to both stifle debate and refuse to conduct a required plebiscite to a general unwillingness to hear from Western constituents:

The loss of the Wheat Board is a loss for all of us across this country. Today's debate also amplifies the fact that the government's agenda is not just about the dismantling of the Wheat Board, but about the silencing of our voices.

Just some short weeks ago, the results of a plebiscite administered by the Canadian Wheat Board came out. That plebiscite showed that a majority of Canadian western farmers in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta believe that the single desk ought to be maintained. The government not only ignored that plebiscite but is also ignoring section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act, which states that farmers must have a say in any proposed plans to alter the operation of the Wheat Board.

Today is a dark day, given that we are not just hearing about the government's plan to dismantle a successful institution that has supported the livelihoods of so many farmers and so many rural communities across western Canada, but that once again the government is not allowing westerners to have their voices heard through our Canadian democracy.

Peter Julian echoed the theme, while expressing due incredulity about the Cons' claim that they've never met anybody who disagreed with their plans to torch the Wheat Board. And of course several calls for a genuine expression of the desires of Wheat Board members through a plebiscite - including those of Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, Pierre-Luc Dussault and Kevin Lamoureux - fell on typically uninterested ears. Robert Aubin connected the Wheat Board to co-operative movements as means of pooling labour and value. All of which led Sadia Groghue to point out a pattern of the people who are most affected by Con policies being excluded from any input.

Meanwhile, Groghue noted that the Australian "success story" which the Cons present as their vision for the Wheat Board's future involved farmers going from receiving a $99/tonne premium to a $27/tonne loss for their wheat. Alex Atamanenko highlighted Gerry Ritz' explicit promises not to demolish the Wheat Board "arbitrarily" without consulting farmers. In response, Ritz himself expressed the view that MPs don't really represent voters in any poll which didn't support them, while Rob Merrifield made clear that he has no clue how Saskatchewan's political ridings are drawn by asserting that there's no wheat or barley farming in any opposition-held prairie riding - including the urban-rural split riding of Wascana which Merrifield helpfully placed in "downtown Regina". Helene Leblanc and Atamanenko discussed the food security implications of losing the Wheat Board. Ralph Goodale reviewed the market failures and power imbalances that led to the Wheat Board being established in the first place. And Lee Richardson made clear that the Cons' goal for the Wheat Board is "full private ownership", signalling that effectively none of the public role of the current institution is even intended to survive.

Time Allocated

Meanwhile, following Peter Van Loan's motion to limit debate on second reading of the Cons' Canadian Wheat Board demolition bill - leading to this entirely justifiable response from Joe Comartin as to what the parties could expect in discussing the maneuver:

(B)efore I ask my question, I would suggest that you should probably not let the minister answer anything so we can use up some of the time on meaningful comments rather than the responses we will get from him.

Meanwhile, Helene Leblanc pointed out the interest of new MPs in speaking to issues which they haven't had a chance to address before. Phil Toone pointed out several examples of Stephen Harper criticizing closure when imposed by the Libs. And Andre Bellavance criticized the Cons' bulldozing tactics.

In Brief

Anne Minh-Thu Quach rightly questioned the Cons' refusal to participate in a global conference on the social determinants of health, only to be told by Leona Agglukaq that the Cons' focus is on Canadian investors. Marie-Claude Morin called attention to the need to address poverty and homelessness. Hoang Mai called for the Cons to match the U.S.' interest in tracking down tax cheats. Alexandre Boulerice wondered whether Tony Clement's "open government" announcements would include any of the still-hidden details of his G8 scandal. And John McKay pointed out that the choice of countries to bail on the F-35 program (and understandably so) would only raise Canada's costs if the Cons obstinately push ahead.

Friday Morning Links

Content goes here.

- In case there's any doubt whether public-sector alternatives are a must to avoid getting taken to the cleaners by the private sector, the answer is an unequivocal "yes". And the fact that corporate mouthpieces are actually objecting to more efficient public service should leave no doubt that the public interest is the further thing from their minds.

- Dimitri Pantazopoulos provides what may well be the worst advice I've ever heard for a political party:

Mr. Pantazopoulos, who is leaving Ottawa next month to work for Christy Clark’s government in British Columbia, says the NDP should broaden its focus and show how it can propel its working-class base to an upper-class position. “Rather than engaging in class warfare, the NDP should emphasize what every member of the working class wants – to rise out of the working class.”

Even leaving aside the logical impossibility of a call for everybody to be upper-class, does anybody really see "The NDP: Those Working Stiffs Can Eat Your Dust" as the message to appeal to the base and swing voters alike?

- Having been invited to unveil the federal government's open data pilot project, David Eaves points out where there's loads of room for improvement.

- Finally, while the book itself looks to be an absolute must-read, even Joan Baxter's review of Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World goes a long way in tracing the reasons why we're perpetually told to expect less and less from our public institutions:

Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes. That was in 1789. Mr. Franklin might be surprised to learn that today his axiom no longer holds, at least not for the rich and powerful among us. Truth be told -- as it is in British investigative journalist and author Nicholas Shaxson's meticulously researched and riveting book, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World -- taxation is only certain for the ordinary law-abiding citizen, the non-rich. The wealthy and the ultra-wealthy can quite easily get by paying little or even no tax, thanks to the shadowy spider webs of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions that span the globe.

Shaxson's aims in the book, he says, are to challenge the common idea that it is acceptable for a place to get rich by undermining the laws of other places and to offer a lens through which to view the history of the modern world. "Offshore business," he writes, "is, at heart, about artificially manipulating paper trails of money across borders." It is not a "colourful outgrowth of the global economy, but instead lies right at its centre." It's not about efficiency or any genuine production or real economic growth -- it's about people and corporations making vast amounts of money through tax evasion.
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Way back in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to drive the tax havens "out of existence" and more recently Barack Obama co-sponsored the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act in 2008, before he came to power.

Shaxson writes that crucial reforms such as these are always blocked by lobbying from the rich and powerful. So the problem has only been getting worse, as globalization allows more and more shifting of wealth around the world in seconds from one secret place to another, out of sight of the public eye and out of reach of tax authorities. Hedge funds and private equity funds flourish in the secrecy afforded by the offshore, where tax authorities have few and sometimes no rights to tread. While the offshore financial industry didn't cause the financial crisis of 2007, Shaxson finds, it certainly enabled it.
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Shaxson ends the book with a list of potential solutions and on a note of hope. "The veil of silence and ignorance can be lifted and the message spread," he writes. " If we all work together to "contain and control financial secrecy," we can avert a future in which "A tiny few will have their boots washed in champagne while the rest of us struggle for our lives in conditions of steepening inequality." This is one of those extremely rare books that doesn't just change the reader, but could also change the world -- for the better.

Steps forward

It's easy enough to get accustomed to the steady stream of bad news on a federal scene where the party in power displays the Cons' combination of incompetence and disdain for government. But there are a couple of positive developments on the opposition side worth noting.

First, Brian Masse's proposal to remove the political influence that allowed the Cons to gut the long form census looks to solve most of the issues with trying to legislate what gets asked. About the only danger is the question of what would happen in the event that a Con ideologue actually took over the position of chief statistician - but since that doesn't seem to be an issue even after the Cons named Munir Sheikh's replacement, Masse's bill looks to have the potential to resolve the current mess.

Meanwhile, to my pleasant surprise, the Libs have joined the NDP in calling for an open data policy. There's a ways to go for both parties in translating that goal into practice (both through legislation and a philosophical change in government), but the odds of it becoming a reality have to be better if the Libs' braintrust doesn't plan to fight the party's supporters on the need for transparency.