Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Dennis Howlett comments on the distortions in Canada's tax system which redistribute money upward to those who need it least:

It’s time for Mr. Morneau to deliver a comprehensive and comprehensible tax strategy that will work in 2017 and beyond because, currently, tax breaks for the richest 10 per cent amount to almost $58 billion.

That includes the nearly $1 billion a year lost to the stock option loophole that Liberals promised — and failed — to ditch after pressure from CEOs and their lobbyists. Corporate tax loopholes cost another $23 billion.

That’s $80 billion not working the way it is supposed to. That’s over $80 billion the government is giving to the very richest, making them richer.

That $80 billion could provide affordable child care, free university tuition, clean water to First Nations reserves. It could kickstart a pharmacare program, address child and seniors’ poverty, boost international development funding and allow us to invest in affordable housing and clean energy.
Imagine how much more robust our communities and democracy would be if we spent that money wisely.

Imagine how much more competitive we could be if emerging Canadian companies were on the same playing field as those that currently use tax haven subsidiaries to avoid paying their fair share.

Money talks. Many Canadians might not appreciate the message they’re getting from this preferential tax treatment.

- Meanwhile, Richard Shillington and Robin Shaban offer the strongest critique yet of the Fraser Institute's torqued "tax freedom day" spin, while also noting that our tax rates are already on the low end within the OECD. And PressProgress wonders whether Canada's media will finally apply at least some scrutiny to anti-tax spin rather than reproducing it uncritically.

- Norman Farrell comments on the scandal that is the B.C. Libs' use of power contracts to systematically enrich donors at public expense. And Chrystia Freeland's announcement that the federal Libs will be delivering billions to the military-industrial complex after breaking promises of social investment signals that Justin Trudeau too is focused mostly on further entrenching existing wealth.

- Peter Prontzos reviews Keith Payne's The Broken Ladder as a useful discussion of the relationship between economic inequality and social problems. And Andre Picard comments on Canada's continued failure to provide anything approaching a reasonable standard of living and health to Indigenous children. 

- Finally, Stephen Tweedale sets out the case as to why Christy Clark shouldn't be able to force British Columbia into another election after the one which elected a majority of MLAs for change. And David Climenhaga reveals how the Wildrose Party is telling its members they can ignore political financing laws based on a plan to change them retroactively for partisan benefit.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Albert van Senvoort points out that poverty is more difficult to escape in Canada today than it was two decades ago. And Jean Swanson discusses the desperate need for more action from all levels of government to ensure the right to housing is met in British Columbia.

- Danielle Ivory, Ben Protess and Kitty Bennett shed light on the U.S.' widespread privatization of emergency services - with its obvious implication of putting profit before the most urgent needs of citizens:

The business of driving ambulances and operating fire brigades represents just one facet of a profound shift on Wall Street and Main Street alike, a New York Times investigation has found. Since the 2008 financial crisis, private equity firms, the “corporate raiders” of an earlier era, have increasingly taken over a wide array of civic and financial services that are central to American life.

Today, people interact with private equity when they dial 911, pay their mortgage, play a round of golf or turn on the kitchen tap for a glass of water.

Private equity put a unique stamp on these businesses. Unlike other for-profit companies, which often have years of experience making a product or offering a service, private equity is primarily skilled in making money. And in many of these businesses, The Times found, private equity firms applied a sophisticated moneymaking playbook: a mix of cost cuts, price increases, lobbying and litigation.

In emergency care and firefighting, this approach creates a fundamental tension: the push to turn a profit while caring for people in their most vulnerable moments.

For governments and their citizens, the effects have often been dire. Under private equity ownership, some ambulance response times worsened, heart monitors failed and companies slid into bankruptcy, according to a Times examination of thousands of pages of internal documents and government records, as well as interviews with dozens of former employees. In at least two cases, lawsuits contend, poor service led to patient deaths.

- Michal Rozworski points out that a combination of corporate tax slashing and generous treatment of tax havens has led to massive amounts of cash being stashed offshore rather than being invested in

- Finally, Robert Reich argues that the key issue for Hillary Clinton in the midst of a tumultuous presidential campaign should be to clean up the mess that is the U.S.' political system and make democracy work for citizens. And James Wood examines the proposals on tap from Alberta's political parties to do the same at the provincial level.

#elxn42 Platform Reviews - Overview

The combination of a majority government and an extra-long campaign period has left Canada's major political parties with ample time to refine their election platforms. And regardless of what your disingenuous neighbourhood Wildrose MLA might tell you, those platforms represent the best indication as to what policies you can expect each to pursue if given the chance.

All three major parties put in the time and effort to prepare a detailed platform of 80 pages or more. But each also left relatively little time for that platform to be reviewed by the public.

For the most part, we can fully expect each platform to mirror a party's broader election messaging. But in order to see if there's either more or less than meets the eye, I'll take some time today to examine each of the platforms, with a particular focus on:

• any noteworthy themes or patterns within a platform itself; 
• anything particularly important that hasn't been the subject of much public discussion;
• anything that contradicts or conflicts with a party's public messaging; and
• any glaring omissions from a party's platform.

For those interested in doing the same, the platforms are available in PDF as follows: Conservative - NDP - Liberal. And I'll suggest that even people who have already decided or voted may find them worth a look to see how the parties are looking to portray their planned actions in government.

On credibility blows

Presumably, at some point in the future, the Wildrose Party will run in another Alberta election campaign, with Derek Fildebrandt as one of its candidates.

And plenty of us will have the popcorn ready to see how they try to explain their now-on-the-record belief that it's somehow a betrayal - rather than a desirable state of affairs - for a government to fulfill its promises.

On fitting results

It will be some time yet before we see how Rachel Notley translates the Alberta NDP's election triumph into policy. But we have had a chance to see Notley's response to frivolous attacks on the NDP's newly-elected MLAs - and she's had absolutely the right reaction so far in not letting those attacks undermine elected representatives:

Premier-designate Rachel Notley says she doesn’t see Drever’s Facebook photos as a big problem for the NDP.

“I think transition and the challenges that come with transition are what happens when governments change, which is something that happens in normal, healthy democracies,” Notley said.

In other words (and as expanded on by other observers in the same report), Notley isn't about to let fabricated controversies get in the way of the NDP's work. And that looks to represent one more step along the road toward distinguishing between the trumped-up and the relevant in assessing candidates and MLAs.

Now, one might expect the opposition parties to take the hint that they're wasting their time scouring for meaningless personal details in the hope of driving MLAs out of public life. Unfortunately, the Wildrose Party has already made clear that all-out personal attacks on NDP MLAs represent a major part of its strategy.

But the more the Wildrose spends its time insulting elected officials and the constituents who voted for them, the better the NDP figures to look in comparison.

Working across the aisle

Among the other lessons learned from Alberta's recent election, let's point out one more with implications for the federal scene.

While the main opposition parties recognized that they were too far apart in their general policy orientation to justify a formal coalition, both the NDP and the Wildrose Party were happy to point out some of the areas which were ripe for cooperation as part of their criticism of the governing PCs.

In other words, neither tried to pretend that there was no room to discuss post-election cooperation, nor to claim that some areas of disagreement or personal differences rendered it futile to even talk about shared interests. And both were rewarded with improved seat totals - while the majority-or-bust PCs were severely punished.

Which raises a couple of questions for discussion.

How different would the Alberta election have looked if either of the main opposition parties had taken the position that it was prepared to accept continued Prentice government if the alternative was working across party lines?

And if even the Wildrose Party can find areas of common ground with the NDP as part of a shared goal of achieving a change in government, how in the world can the federal Liberals keep a straight face while pretending that cooperation is impossible?

On rebuilding projects

I'll have plenty more to say about last night's resounding Alberta NDP election victory in posts to come. But for now, here's a quick take on what comes next for the PCs.

I had earlier wondered whether the PCs might effectively take a majority-or-bust position in contrast to the other parties.

Going into last night, the NDP and Wildrose Party each had reason to draw something positive out of winning, say, 20 seats and/or a role as the Official Opposition. And that may have implied some willingness to put resources into achieving those outcomes even if it meant falling short of winning power.

But having started with a majority government, the PCs spent the entire campaign sending the message both that nothing less would do, and that they were close to achieving that result no matter what the polls said. And they seem to have campaigned accordingly - making no pleas to save the furniture or offer a platform for rebuilding.

What's more, they did prove the polls wrong to some extent - coming in second in the popular vote where the last wave of projections saw them plummeting below the Wildrose. But that wasn't enough to save more than a handful of seats - a disconnect which might be explained if the PCs directed proportionally more of their efforts toward losing battles in seats which might have represented the margin between forming government and not.

Obviously, the end result didn't make for a situation which Jim Prentice wanted to bother facing. But it's an open question whether other Alberta PCs share his disdain for the work of building in opposition - and the answer will likely determine the identity of the NDP's main opponent in election cycles to come.

Failures of imagination and arithmetic

Colby Cosh's latest includes this explanation as to why he wants to write off the party which holds a strong lead in Alberta's polls:

The province-wide NDP numbers, whichever set you prefer, are conceptually hard to translate into large numbers of seats outside Edmonton. Former Calgary alderman Joe Ceci, running for the NDP, is thought to be strong in his old stomping ground of Calgary-Fort, as is Shannon Phillips in university-influenced Lethbridge West. There is bound to be a third name on this list—a name no one knows yet. Some shrewd, hard-working NDP candidate is knocking on the last door in his riding right now, scarcely suspecting he is about to beat some country-fried PC cabinet minister who got careless.

Alberta New Democrats’ dreams are much wilder than this. They envision a chaotic “wave” election: a butterfly farts in Banff and they unexpectedly quadruple or quintuple their support, as they would need to, in seats outside Edmonton. But unless things have changed very dramatically in places like Cold Lake or Drumheller, the New Democrat ceiling is a couple of dozen seats. That would leave the overall outcome to be decided by 60-plus PC-Wildrose fights in Calgary and the hinterland.

Needless to say, this type of analysis is rather familiar: in 2011, more than a few pollsters and pundits looked at the NDP's commanding lead in Quebec polls, then declared based on past results that the party couldn't hope to win more than five to ten seats in the province. This line of analysis did not prove prescient.

Granted, Cosh allows for the theoretical possibility of a "wave" while simultaneously writing it off. But in so doing, he misses the point that what he considers to be dramatic change is already playing out in the polls.

No, it's not preposterous - nor even unexpected - for a party to quadruple or quintuple its previous support when current polls already show more than that gain. The NDP's 2012 support by region included results ranging from 5% in Calgary and 5-8% in rural Alberta; the most recent polling shows the NDP in the 25-30% and 30-35% range, respectively. So if the right standard is to ask whether the NDP can increase its 2012 vote by five times or more, the answer is that it's already there or further across much of the province.

That said, looking at the NDP's historical vote is probably the wrong way of approaching the question.

It's doubtful that anybody can claim to have a clear, riding-by-riding picture as to how votes will shift. But the regional polls consistently show a tight three-party race in Calgary and "rest of Alberta", including some with the NDP running ahead in those regions.

Which brings us back to the Quebec problem: how can any reasonable observer look at a party which projects to win as many votes as its opponents over a substantial number of seats, and default to a presumption that it will win none of those individual seats (nor indeed contend for any of them)?

I'd argue that absent some coherent explanation as to how a region can be split up into a series of two-way races which render the three-party numbers unreliable, the best assumption has to be that the distribution of seats will be broadly similar to the distribution of votes (subject to distortion by the first-past-the-post system). And even that type of theory can't be based on Cosh's assumption that the NDP will simply be out of the picture over a set of ridings where its vote share is similar to that of the PCs and Wildrose.

That means the fundamentals of the Alberta race boil down to this: the NDP has a significant head start based on its whopping lead in Edmonton, while the rest of the province is a dead heat where any of the three parties could win a large number of seats, but the best baseline assumption is a relatively even split.

Of course, it's theoretically possible that a party could manage to lose dozens of ridings by small margins to two competitors without managing to get over the top in a single one. (In principle, that could even result in the party winning the most votes without taking a seat. Thanks, FPTP!) But surely that outcome should be seen as a remote possibility, not a baseline expectation.

Similarly, a small shift at the end of the campaign could easily change the three-party dynamic in many different directions. But here too, there's no obvious reason to think a shift can only operate in one direction: surely the NDP is at least as likely as its competitors to be the one to nose ahead at the end, particularly since it's been the only party consistently improving its popular perception throughout the campaign.

To be clear, it's entirely possible that Cosh's assumed outcome might come to pass - and that risk will hopefully serve as motivation for NDP activists as the campaign draws to a close. But that doesn't mean there's any reason for Cosh or anybody else to write off the very strong possibility that the NDP can win as matters stand now.

Update: As Cosh notes, the column was written before this weekend's polls strengthened the evidence as to the NDP's position across Alberta. So readers may want to look to the projections and polls as they stood earlier in evaluating it.

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Swing batta swing

Needless to say, the range of potential outcomes in the Alberta election (along with the continued flow of news battering the Prentice PCs as they try to regain some type of footing) has made for a fascinating campaign. But it's worth pointing out that single polls and seat projections may miss important parts of the picture - meaning that the actual state of the race is far less certain than it might appear at first glance.

Take for example this important explanation of Election Almanac's methodology:

Election Almanac uses a proportional swing model for its projections based on the latest election poll results. For example, if a poll gives a party a greater (multiplied by a factor greater than 1) share of the vote than they received in the last election, the projector assumes the party’s vote has gone up by the same proportion in every seat. Conversely, if a poll gives a party a smaller (multiplied by a factor less than 1) share of the vote than they received in the last election, the projector assumes the party’s vote has gone down by the same proportion in every seat. No projection model is 100% accurate. 

Now, a presumption that all seats will see identical swings between parties might make for a useful initial assumption. But the last Alberta election was based on a radically different set of party strategies and goals.

In 2012, the Redford PCs veered left in order to paint themselves as a relatively moderate alternative to a perceived Wildrose government-in-waiting - so most of the province's seats were decided by the allocation of a two-way split among 78% of Alberta voters. Meanwhile, the NDP's primary focus was on holding onto beachheads rather than expanding its support throughout the province.

Today, we can say with some certainty that the situation has changed. Rather than fighting primarily in the few most friendly Edmonton ridings, the NDP is looking to sweep the city, while the PCs are turning to the right and chasing a larger share of right-wing voters to try to stop the orange wave. And the rest of the campaign will determine which seats actually are the swing ridings - with surprises likely to pop up along the way.

For all the news in the headline poll numbers, though, there's relatively little means for the public to figure out exactly how those will translate into seats. And that goes doubly in a three-way race where (for example) ThreeHundredEight's seat projection sees the PCs' seat count potentially ranging from 5 to 31 based on a swing of under four points in popular support.

In theory, it might be possible to try to use more sophisticated means to generate seat projections - for example, by also comparing regional and seat-based polling to the 2011 results to test the assumption of a uniform swing. But increased complexity is no guarantee of greater accuracy, especially when subtle shifts (particular in the last-minute choices of undecided voters) can swamp the effect of any further adjustment.

Meanwhile, it's also worth keeping on eye on the parties' plans, since they'll likely have the best information as to which seats are close. But the parties themselves face a range of goals which may include maximizing votes, maximizing seat totals, and maximizing the possibility of a plurality or majority government. And I'm particularly curious as to whether the PCAA will bet heavily on a high-variance strategy, preferring to exhaust every hope of maintaining hegemony over Alberta politics rather than making any substantial effort to rebuild from the opposition benches.

To summarize, we should be hesitant to draw overly precise conclusions from the poll results generated so far: while it seems safe to say the order in party support is currently NDP 1, Wildrose 2 and PC 3, the noise far outweighs the signal when it comes to projecting the seats which will ultimately determine who forms government. And so no party should be resting on its laurels as the campaign draws to a close.

Now we're just haggling over the price

Others have rightly wondered whether the Wildrose Party's new promise to make floor-crossing MPs pay a price to the party will be enforceable at all. But it's also worth examining how it might affect MLAs' decision-making - with the result potentially being the exact opposite of what Brian Jean intends.

Previously, the bar to Wildrose MLAs crossing the floor was a moral one: the promise, to constituents and party alike, that MLAs would resist the temptation to join another party. And while that bar may have failed to stop Danielle Smith and others from breaking their promise, it certainly seems to have had an impact on the political prospects of those who made the switch.

In contrast, Jean has made floor-crossing into a financial issue. The sticker price tag to buy a Wildrose MLA is now being advertised publicly - and it's hardly inconceivable that the benefits of a cabinet position or a more secure seat would outweigh the financial incentive to stay even if it's otherwise enforceable.

Indeed, Jean may be setting up a political example of a familiar experiment in behavioural economics: just as a price on anti-social behaviour in the case of late daycare pickups actually increased violations by causing parents to think in economic rather than moral terms, so too might it allow MLAs to claim they owe constituents nothing more than to buy out their party status.

And the problem is expanded since Wildrose is also changing the question as to who's entitled to raise concerns about a violation of expectations. The new contract makes it explicit that it's the party, not constituents, which holds a duty of loyalty and which has the power to enforce an MLA's obligations. And by implication, the party will also have the power to decide an MLA isn't worth pursuing - no matter what voters may think.

Of course, as long as the surface financial deterrent helps to convince voters that Jean is more serious about sticking it out with Wildrose than Smith was, it will serve a political purpose. But for anybody who would prefer that the relationship among parties, candidates and voters be based on principles rather than dollar signs, it shifts MLAs' incentives in exactly the wrong direction.

New column day

Here, on how the sudden disappearance of Danielle Smith and her fellow Wildrose Party defectors offers a case in point of the dangers of forgetting that politicians ultimately answer to the public.

For further reading...
- CBC reported on the actual deal between Smith and Jim Prentice here, while Darren Krause reported on Smith's nomination defeat. And CBC examines Wildrose's bounce back in the polls as it elected a new leader.
- Don Braid notes that Smith was warned about some of the dangers of crossing the floor at the time, while Andrew Coyne sees a bait and switch in the promises Smith got from the PCs. 
- And finally, Brian Topp explores some of the lessons we can draw from the Smith-Prentice deal, while recognizing that they shouldn't be taken as reason not to work across partisan lines.

On representative units

Does anybody remember which particularly prominent political pundit went far out his way to trumpet the idea that the basic unit of political legitimacy is the caucus - to the point of repeatedly advocating a legislated requirement that a caucus vote override the decisions made by the whole of a party's membership?

I ask only because he seems to have been replaced with a far more reasonable impostor.

By the majority-of-caucus standard set under Michael Chong's Reform Act (or the stronger forms suggested by Andrew Coyne among others), the decision of a majority of Wildrose Party MLAs to join up with Jim Prentice's PCs following a caucus vote should be seen as having been fully validated.

So why then is Coyne among the people rightly lambasting Danielle Smith and company for their move? Well, that has to do with the flaws in the original theory behind the Reform Act.

Elected representatives are (and should be) only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to determining the direction of any political party. And we're right to consider it illegitimate when those representatives make choices which run contrary to the underlying basis for their elected positions - even if a majority of their caucus-mates happen to agree.

What's more, an undue focus on a narrow set of representatives rather than the broader populations they represent can make it far too easy for politicians to bargain away their votes or seats, rationalizing the action on the theory that the trust reposed in a representative through the ballot box represents a mandate to use an elected position for personal gain. And that can happen just as easily on a group basis as an individual one.

Of course, the question of how to then check top-down power remains open. (Though it's worth noting that exactly one party has respected the ethical principle that a mandate to serve one party can't simply be passed to another in both law and practice.)

And it's doubtful that any legislated structure can do the job in the absence of a strong and active membership which can ensure that self-serving actions are met with an appropriate response in the next election cycle.

But at the very least, nobody should hold any illusion that handing special power to party caucuses will resolve the problem.

[Edit: fixed wording.]