the power of personality

I have wound down my blogging, in the short term because I have been on the road and don't expect to be back in Alberta for at least a month yet, and in the longer term because, at least with respect to Alberta politics, I had largely said what I wanted to say on the subject and didn't want to muddy the message (that Albertans need to turn more of their current incomes into assets, real or financial, that will grow into the future).

The new year's news from Canada's most fortunate province creates some interesting prospects for further shake-ups on the political and policy fronts, however.

The premier not running for re-election is the biggest news, although there is a limit to what the pundits can add to this headline. Albertans already know that Ed Stelmach (photo at right) was a charisma-challenged but nice guy. Whether it was his fault or not, it was on Ed's watch that a rival party emerged that, for the first time since at least 1993, seriously threatens the Progressive Conservative dynasty. It is nonetheless worth reflecting on the fact that Mr Stelmach's resignation announcement came less than 3 years after his winning an electoral landslide. What changed to compromise Steady Eddie's political security when he'd already proven that he can kick the Wildrose Alliance to the curb? Danielle Smith?

Which brings me to the main thesis of this post, which is that personality - and personalities - matter more, and ideology less, in politics than many observers appreciate. While it is generally recognized to matter with respect to the individual party leaders, consider the fact that the next tier of people below the leader are also, well, people, with personalities, and so on down.

Daveberta's blogpost on the resignation of Alberta Liberal David Swann (left) has attracted no less than 60 comments, and a comment by Calgary Grit, the most read (or perhaps just most readable) blogger on federal politics who (formerly) hails from Alberta is a representative example of the sort of punditry that gets a lot of thumbs up from those who have not been heavily involved in internal party politics and/or the machinery of government. CG contends that the Alberta Liberal Party and the fledgling Alberta Party occupy the same "centrist" ideological ground, while "[Wildrose leader Danielle] Smith and [PC leadership candidate Ted] Morton [are] splitting the right wing vote..." To a lot of people it makes perfect sense to look through an ideological prism like this and assume one is getting a reasonably complete view. While I have never really been a true political party "insider", based on what experience I do have, and especially upon my experience working within the machinery of government in a central agency, I would characterize this perspective as one that perhaps ought to be satisfactorily explanatory, but not one that is.

Consider how the cogs of government policy actually turn. Suppose you were to come into a position of real political power in a parliamentary democracy. This would generally involve being elected and then being assigned a cabinet position responsible for a ministry. The first thing one would be expected to look at after being sworn in would be the briefing books prepared by the civil servants in one's Department. A great many problems will be identified in these materials and solutions suggested, problems and solutions that never made it into the political campaign debates because 1) the issues are too dull to interest the electorate or 2) the solutions are generally unpopular with the electorate. When I first loaded up my 1982 Mazda RX-7 with my limited personal effects to drive from Edmonton to Ottawa nine years ago and begin work for what was then Paul Martin's Department of Finance, I was curious as to how the competing ideologies would play out in the policy discussions that occurred. Of course, at the end of day the elected Minister makes the final policy call, but what of the details? I was ultimately struck by how un-ideological the Department actually was and I came to appreciate how frequently "ideological differences" are just political campaign artifacts as opposed to seriously competing policy alternatives.

Having said that, I have to concede that the dominant culture is only non-ideological if one sees organizations like the IMF, OECD, World Bank, European Commission, etc as non-ideological. Some strong leftists would contend that there is an "anti-people" or "corporate" agenda dominating these entities and if that's true then this agenda dominates the culture in provincial finance ministries as well. But I don't believe it is, in fact, a left or right matter nearly so much as a matter of how populist one is in one's sensitivities. It's not the job of, say, an OECD economist to recommend what the "people" want. What the people want in the short term may be in full contradiction with what they want in the long term. Now, there are several "think tanks" that are clearly "ideological" in almost everyone's eyes and an organization like a Department of Finance or a Privy Council Office is somewhat analogous to a think tank, but neutralize the funding of these think tanks (e.g. take self-styled "progressive economist" Jim Stanford off the union payroll, or diversify the Frontier Centre's funding from former Alberta Report readers) and a remarkable consensus would emerge on most issues. As it is, I think the consensus is already there, one simply has people like Stanford trying to obscure the "expert" consensus on, say, the efficiency of corporate taxes at the one end while at the other end the Frontier Centre obscures it on, say, the efficiency of carbon taxes.

As a newly minted minister, one's first lesson would thus concern how one's ideas about what one is going to do in office have to be heavily modified based on the advice of one's ministry re what is feasible and just what the most pressing problems are. An example here would be how neither Jim Flaherty nor the federal Tories in general felt that income trust taxation was a problem in need of a solution before taking office. It was after being bombarded with memos from the civil service saying there was a problem that Flaherty eventually overruled his political staff to make a move on the file (as an aside, when I learned that Wildrose constituency operations manager Dave Shillington was part of Flaherty's political office at the time, although I suspected we would end up disagreeing on something significant in Wildrose it wasn't until Dave indicated to me that he was inclined to take a laissez-faire attitude towards how nominations were conducted that I saw a red flag for a disputed nomination at some point down the road and, more ominously, a party culture that sees loud self-promoters advance at the expense of quieter voices).

The decisions of real consequence cannot, or at least should not, be taken unilaterally by a minister, however, even if the decision is well-informed by consultations with one's Department, external experts, and industry. One still has to convince one's cabinet colleagues. Suppose I was elected as the sole Wildrose MLA from within Edmonton city limits. I might have to be made finance minister simply because, given the political realities, an Edmontonian would have to get a post that at least appears to be among the most important. Now of course I would be encouraging my cabinet colleagues running line departments to support cuts to or at least caps on their budgets, and especially cuts to line items are only indirectly related (as in the case of wages and benefits for current provincial workers) or not related at all (as in the case of benefits for retired provincial workers) to the quality and quantity of services delivered to the general public. But how much power I would actually have in this situation, at the top level of internal party politics and of the government machinery, is only very approximately suggested by what an external pundit like Calgary Grit reckons the ideological positioning of my party to be. The personalities of those around the cabinet table matter far more, and it matters more the higher one gets.

When I blogged here last year saying I should no longer be described as a current Wildrose supporter, I noticed a couple people wanting to explain my defection in terms of ideology. As someone who joined the Wildrose Party even before it merged with the Alberta Alliance, I'm easily perceived as a fiscal conservative ideologue who cannot tolerate the ideological compromises that a mature brokerage party must inevitably make. But in fact I believe I would have more influence and work more effectively as part of an Alberta Party cabinet than a Wildrose one, despite the fact the Alberta Party is universally seen as significantly to the left of Wildrose. If I wasn't a member of a the cabinet but a backbencher or even just a local constituency figure, the situation would be same but at a lower intensity. Now it's true that in a parliamentary system, it is the first minister who drives cabinet dynamics. If the party leader wants to shoot down a spending proposal originating from a line department, for example, he or she will typically ask the finance minister for his or her thoughts at the cabinet table. In the case of Wildrose, although Danielle Smith would make a good premier, if I demanded that we go to war with the public service unions, or cut back on all the programs that amount to subsidies to farmers and accordingly distort the provincial economy, I doubt that she would be keen to back me in a dispute with, say, Rob Anderson who would warn darkly of the political consequences of picking a fight with the unions, or Link Byfield who would be sensitive to the political consequences of alienating rural Alberta. This isn't to say that I'm concerned the leader would tell me to sit down and shut up. I can't even imagine Danielle telling someone to sit down and shut up. It's rather that she wouldn't tell anyone to sit down and shut up and as a consequence the voice of the professional policy community would be left to fend for itself against the self-promoters, opportunists, demagogues, and assorted lobbyists. It's the power of personalities. If people think my problem is that I'm upset about having ended up on the losing side of an ideological showdown, I can only say, "if only!" There was about as much of an ideological showdown as the one in the federal Tory party that led it to going on a spending spree when in government (which is to say, effectively none).

Which brings me to Doug Griffiths. Not only does Doug (at left with wife Sue, photo from Facebook) make time to hear out the professional policy community, he understands how these sorts of people get drowned out and pushed aside in the jungle of politics. He's a fiscal conservative, which of course I find salutary, but more important to his appeal to pundits across the spectrum is that he does not try to push a particular agenda per se so much as call for a framework that ensures that sober, serious, evidence-based agendas win out. If Doug were first minister, I believe he would be less interested in getting his way, like so many politicians who have a pre-conceived and rigid idea about what's wrong with world and how they are going to fix it, than in ensuring that those who are following the advice they are getting from their Departments and non-partisan experts get a full hearing despite the political risks, and, more importantly for democracy, ensuring that that hearing occurs in front of Albertans as opposed to behind closed doors. I don't just endorse Doug Griffiths for leader of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta. Whether Alberta Party, PC Party, or Wildrose, if Griffiths were contending for the leadership I would be taking out a membership to support him. I admit that this seems to contradict my call for more ideology, or more precisely more ideas and consistency in those ideas, in what distinguishes and defines political parties, but that's because I think it generally needs to be made clear to campaign volunteers and donors that they are working for something larger, that they are a part of, than just a person who is not a part of their personal lives. I am not asking readers here to help advance someone's political career because he deserves it. I don't know Doug personally and I don't know what he deserves in terms of his personal fate. I support Doug Griffiths because what he stands for deserves support.

Liberal party? Whenever I think about joining the Alberta Liberals, which is never for more than an occasional nano-second, I ask myself how I would explain the move to friends and family. The politically active could potentially understand, but everyone else would think I've lost my compass completely. I could call attention to a selection of Kevin Taft speeches but Taft is no longer leader. Federally, besides the Liberals there is no other option to the Harper Conservatives that isn't fundamentally at odds with either the federation or the prosperity-creating business community. That's not the case in Alberta.

In any case, I'm not the only person who ran for election under the Wildrose Alliance banner in 2008 to now be mulling support (if not more) for the relatively legacy-free (dare I say, baggage-free) Alberta Party.

in the news

It's been a week and a half since my last post here and it is likely that blogging will drop off to once every two or three weeks for the next couple months since I will be on the road again after Christmas. I've been meaning to switch to musings of a more philosophical nature, such as a post on equality as a public policy objective, but a few remarks on recent headlines is much quicker:

• The Globe and Mail reported that according to a Nik Nanos poll, the federal Tories could potentially get a majority government despite weakness in Quebec. Nanos' belief that the Conservatives have mastered the art of "narrowcast[ing] messages to clusters of ridings on a diversity of issues such as crime, the long-gun registry and social issues" (while having nothing to substantive to say on fiscal matters) reminds me of my last post on "client politics."


• The New York Times recently published a story that notes that "the finances of some state and local governments are so distressed that some analysts say they are reminded of the run-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown or of the debt crisis hitting nations in Europe." A financier is quoted as saying "[i]t seems to me that crying wolf is probably a good thing to do at this point."
  Today the Wall Street Journal notes that California, which has often served as the poster child for budget dysfunction, is running a $6.1 billion budget gap, which represents 6.6% of its budget. Alberta's $5 billion deficit, in contrast, is more than double this fraction of its budget.


• Yesterday, Environics revealed a poll that found that support for Alberta's governing party was 34%... for the fourth Environics poll in a roll. The Wildrose Alliance gained, however, with the test sample of 252 Edmonton voters indicating that a full quarter of them would support the upstart party, a stunning 9 point gain over the 16% showing in the spring. Since the PCs held steady, this gain had to come from someone else, and indeed the Alberta Liberals were down 7 points in Edmonton (and Calgary as well). Danielle Smith's party polling ahead of David Swann's in the capital city is certainly remarkable, but of particular interest to me is that just 3% felt that "fiscal/budget issues" represented the most important issue facing the province. Meanwhile 47% said health care was #1. This after a spike in health care spending in the last provincial budget that was well into the double digits in terms of year over year percentage increase. The immediate conclusion is that deficits could be run for many years before concern about them would approach concern about healthcare. One would think that taxes could raised, given that just 1% identified taxes as the most important issue, but one has to wonder about the political feasibility of such a move when even the Liberals are saying that revenue is already sufficient.

client politics

This weekend Globe and Mail Business columnist Derek DeCloet advised us that "it's not all doom and gloom" with respect to management of the US debt burden.

Looking just at the numbers, I have to agree. The numbers indicate that the federal government probably won't be "hitting the wall" until around 2030, when the older boomers will be in their 80s and even the youngest ones retired. Joshua Rauh's paper on state pension liabilities predicts that the day of reckoning on the state level may occur sooner ("many state systems will run out of money in 10-20 years") but it's true that the United States had the superior system 60 years ago and there hasn't been a revolution that has overturned a system that has stood the test of time.

The challenge for America today is that it the competitiveness that ensured an efficient economic allocation in the past has eroded and this erosion is being exposed by inevitable globalization. While US business culture continues to support innovation and competitiveness, it must work within the context of public policy and the US public sector is in need of significant reform.

A large obstacle to reform is the influence of public sector unions; a writer for the Prospect argues that, in fact, federal workers do not receive too much because the average annual compensation of $120 000 is not the wage number: "It's salary, plus the value of health insurance, plus the value of other benefits like pensions." That's purely a marketing argument, of course, because the liability of the taxpayer doesn't change just because that $120K includes a pension element. At the heart of the public sector problem is the fact that, as a public union boss has admitted, "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."

The fundamental obstacle to public policy change is nonetheless public opinion in the USA. A commentator to an Economist story titled "America's Deficit: Confronting the Monster" observed:

It is impossible to make [the public] understand that the optimum amount of tax to raise and the optimum way to raise that amount are separate questions. Hence the politician's adage that "the only good tax is an old tax."

The US tax system is so colossally fragmented, it was possible for the deficit commission co-chairs to cut tax brackets significantly and still generate a trillion dollars in revenue just by eliminating tax expenditures. Tax expenditures, as Greg Mankiw explains in this op-ed, are essentially the same thing as subsidies but can be marketed as tax cuts. It's a handout to a politically powerful interest group. Although Republicans are not shy about supporting direct subsidies when it suits them, they generally prefer that handouts be dressed up as (targeted) tax cuts. However one wants to describe it, the phenomenon that created the mess otherwise known as the US tax code is client politics.

The Conservative Party of Canada has imported several US political ideas into Canada, with a notable recent example being the idea that the national census constitutes a violation of privacy. Although the Republicans made an issue out of this just this summer, the real founder of the idea is Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), who went after the US census in the first half of 2009. Glenn Beck was left shaking his head but the Harper government seems to have thought the idea was brilliant. There has, however, been times when the federal Conservatives practiced conviction politics, albeit on very rare occasions. An example would be the taxation of income trusts. The move to tax trusts was accompanied with a move to lower taxes on corporations (hence the revenue neutrality of the decision). The tax cut for corporations, however, was much smaller on a per company basis because corporations constituted a far larger proportion of the economy. The stock market impact in a world of rational actors would have been net unchanged, because listed corporations would have risen as much in aggregate as income trusts fell. But the market is not entirely rational and the average voter even less so. The Tories were reminded of the value of client politics and the wisdom of fragmenting the Canadian income tax code (deductions for bus passes, deductions for fees associated with your kids' sports, etc etc).

One could look at the HST uproar in BC through the lens of client politics in two senses. One is that if BC reversed implementation of the tax, Ottawa would presumably get its $1.6 billion incentive back. Yet how many Canadians outside of BC are at all interested in having that $1.6 billion available for spending in their own jurisdictions? There is no meaningful constituency for reversing targeted spending. The other HST reality is that giving a break to corporations is generally giving a break that, by the sheer scale of the number of parties it benefits, is too shallow a benefit to any one of them in particular for any significant number of beneficiaries to lobby for it. It doesn't ultimately just benefit business, of course, since it is a general benefit for the economy, but that benefit is too diffuse to be politically valuable.

In Alberta, besides some "inflation proofing" now and then there has not been any new additions to the Heritage Fund since 1986. The opposition parties have occasionally called for new additions, by having a proportion of energy revenues directed into the Fund. This is an easy demand, because it doesn't address the trade-off of spending foregone. One would think that the more obvious first step would be to just call for a stop to the raiding of the Heritage Fund, with investment returns being retained in the Fund so it could grow (this year alone Finance Minister Morton plans to move close to a half billion from the Heritage Fund to general revenues). But far from demanding that Heritage Fund returns not continue to be directed into general provincial spending, the Wildrose Alliance, which markets itself as "fiscally conservative," has been missing in action. At the annual public meeting last month, MLA Heather Forsyth, who sits on the Heritage Fund committee, had nothing to say. It was left to Liberal MLA Hugh MacDonald to challenge the government on its unwillingness to save. The previous year, Forsyth didn't even show up. The spending that MLA Rob Anderson has challenged concerns not the province's wage bill but the form of spending that is most analogous to savings, namely, infrastructure investment. And why not; - client politics holds that because infrastructure can generally be used a little bit by everyone, the political lobby in favour of it is too diffused to be anything worth worrying about if it's cut.

To return to the political situation in the US, it's apparent that the country is going to have a very hard time improving the competitiveness of its public policy. Amongst the countries with the most efficient tax systems one finds many of the former Warsaw Pact states. This reflects the fact that overthrowing an old system wholesale allowed for the introduction of a new system based on the latest research.

In a perfectly competitive market, there is no "economic profit," there is only "normal profit," because any economic profits are promptly squeezed by out by competitors who instantly appear. In reality, of course, there is a time delay, and the businesses that are truly successful have as their cornerstone an understanding of the temporary nature of economic profits. There is no more reason why the United States should be the dominant global player in 2050 that it was in 2000 or 1950 anymore than the 30 firms that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average should be the same as 50 or 100 years ago. While the "line workers" of America, Inc. may be as innovative as ever, its management is increasingly unable to adjust.

the business of America is business?

One of the things that struck me about the US deficit reduction plans offered by the co-chairs of the President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, the Domenici-Rivlin Bipartisan Commission, and Jan Schakowsky (a "progressive" Congresswoman) is that all three plans propose taxing capital gains and dividends as ordinary income. Although the Rivlin plan would allow a trifling $1000 capital gains exemption, it not only reverses George W. Bush's tax cut with respect to capital gains (which cut the rate from 20% to 15%), it, along with the other two plans, would increase the tax rate on capital gains to beyond what it was under Clinton by moving it well above 20%. All three plans would also tax dividends as ordinary income. These plans are supposedly from across the spectrum, with Paul Krugman, for example, dismissing the plan proposed by Obama's commission co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, as an "unserious" proposal that only the "centre right and the hard right [could] agree on."

That capital income should be targeted in the supposed stronghold of capitalism is both remarkable and it isn't. Having the world's highest tax rates on income from capital is superficially remarkable but further analysis reveals that the US has not been nearly as capital friendly a jurisdiction as popularly imagined for a while now.

In Canada, with the exception of Quebec, eligible dividends are actually taxed at negative rate for incomes below $41 000. In Alberta, even persons making over a million a year have been taxed at less than 15% on eligible dividends (this is increasing to almost 16% for 2010 on incomes over $127 000). One must keep in mind here that dividends are double-taxed, once in the hands of the corporation and then again in the hands of the individual receiving the dividend. But this just makes the difference with the USA more remarkable. The economists in the Finance Department in Ottawa are alive to the fact that corporate taxation is amongst the most economy-unfriendly forms of taxation and that dynamic scoring indicates that cutting the corporate rate is relatively inexpensive. There has been an ongoing effort dating back to when Paul Martin was Finance Minister to cut the corporate rate when possible and effective January 1, 2011 the rate will be 16.5% (with current plans calling for 15% a year later, meaning a combined rate of just 25% in British Columbia). Like most policies that are well founded in terms of evidence, this reduction is consistent with the international trend identified by the OECD. The US corporate tax rate is 35%, for a combined state/federal rate over 39%, the highest rate in the world after (economically stagnant) Japan.

To tax corporate income at this level and then whack it again when dividended out by taxing it as ordinary income under a highly "progressive" income tax regime raises the question, why wouldn't American investors take their money offshore (and themselves along with it) instead. If a company on a listed stock exchange were to announce that it would never pay a dividend, it's intrinsic value would drop to zero overnight: you can't eat a share certificate, and accordingly the only value it has is the present value of its future dividends. Investment decisions around the world utilize a NPV (net present value) analysis; the corporate tax rate reduces the numerator of that analysis, and what's left over is still stuck in the corporate form and not available to investors apart from a dividend.

In response to those doubting my claim that the US income system is highly progressive, note this quote from a paper by the Luxembourg Income Study:

For the 13 countries for which it was possible to calculate income, payroll, and property tax progressivity, the U.S. has the most progressive tax structure; Sweden and Denmark are the most regressive.

Ah, yes, those Scandinavian scoundrels. That best case scenario for Canada that I noted above whereby the corporate tax rate in BC would be 25% in 2012? Denmark is already there, today. And Norway's dividend tax rate is... zero:

dividends from Norwegian companies were in practice tax free on the hands of the shareholder

- Norwegian Ministry of Finance

Meanwhile, Norway has been rated #1 by the United Nations' Human Development Index for years now (remember how the top spot used to be a pride of point for Canada? We're now down to 8th).

I've lived in Scandinavia for more than a year and have noted that while the "welfare state" there remains strong (the tuition for my academic degree there was zero), one does not encounter the anti-corporate hysteria that is so common in North America. When the OECD points out, for example, that

Corporate income taxes appear to have a particularly negative impact on GDP per capita. This is consistent with the previously reviewed evidence and empirical findings that lowering corporate taxes raises TFP (total factor productivity) growth and investment. Reducing the corporate tax rate also appears to be particularly beneficial for TFP growth of the most dynamic and innovative firms.

Scandinavians, and Europeans in general, are prepared to pay attention. In Canada, most people would rather listen to Bill Vander Zalm, and it isn't much different in the States. Consider who has advocated the following:

We must be firmly committed to free trade... opposing all forms of protectionism and removing existing trade protectionist measures... We should substantially reduce trade and investment barriers... and establish an open and free global trading system.

Recognize the words of the leader of "communist" China there? Meanwhile, the "leader of the free world" has assiduously avoided ever calling for free trade. Obama's recent trip to Asia was instead billed as a "jobs mission." Needless to say, the President came back empty-ended from his mission to get something for nothing. At the same time, the war of words between Germany and the US over the US government's spending spree continues. Germany's chancellor recently made the supposedly illiberal claim that "we have too little Christianity. We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind." With respect to immigration, Europe is significantly further to the right than North America.

For years the policy mess in the US was masked by the country's ample natural resources and its openness. "The business of America is business," said one President. But that was before FDR. America is now turning inward. As the WSJ reported last month, less than 10% of Americans say free trade agreements have helped the United States, and Tea Party supporters are even more likely to say the US has been hurt by free trade than the general public. The incoming Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Republican Frank Lucas, wrote Obama last year to demand that farm subsidies not be cut. Besides direct payments, the US tax code is additionally chock full of subsidies that economists would call tax expenditures, but in Republican rhetoric they are tax cuts.

a sign-off of sorts for Alberta readers

I'll probably be blogging less about Alberta affairs going forward, not least because the ground is fairly well covered by others. Capital Notebook is back, although the most trenchant Leg watching commentary is likely to be found at former Liberal MLA Maurice Tougas' blog. One of the things I found remarkable about Maurice's 2004 run in Edmonton-Meadowlark is that his winning campaign spent less than $5400. I remember a Wildrose conference in 2007 when an experienced PC Alberta organizer advised us that running an urban campaign would require $8000 and a rural campaign $12 000. With Wildrose Alliance operations now dominated by big spending federal Tories, constituencies are probably being told they need to spend $25 000.

The fact of the matter is that the debate of interest to me is the government of Alberta's fiscal situation, and it is a debate that the average Albertan is not particularly interested in. A chasm in perspective between the "wonks" and the general electorate is not unusual of course. I agree with the Fraser Institute that Gordon Campbell is the best fiscal manager of the 10 provincial premiers, but Campbell's approval ratings are in the single digits, a level so low that the BC premier could not continue to govern (he announced his resignation earlier this month). But there isn't much wonk interest in Alberta's finances either. Why? Because the province has simply not been compelled to face the issues that most other North American jurisdictions have begun to wrestle with. A review of the cash on hand held by US states indicates that a large chunk is held by just two: Alaska and Texas. These two states having something in common with Alberta, of course: significant oil and gas royalties.

With a full third of its budget historically being funded by natural resource-related revenues, Alberta can afford to maintain inefficient policy and carry on with an air of self-satisfaction, taking in the spectacle of others grappling with their emerging financial problems with an air of bemusement. The typical Albertan has accepted the convenient explanation that his province's prosperity is due to hard work, a pioneering spirit, and "conservative" values in general.

This "character" myth, is of course, exactly that, a myth, but it would get rather tiring for me to point this out again and again. Over the past couple of years I've essentially said what I have to say: save and invest more, spend less, and consider how budgeting decisions are made as opposed to just the decisions, which is to say wake up to the influence of unions, especially public sector unions, on the public policy process. One can only write so many jeremiads before one has pigeon-holed oneself as, well, a Jeremiah. The more interesting observation I wish to make here is that avoiding a calamitous future would involve a shift in public perception and attitudes that would extend far beyond Alberta.

Consider, for example, trends in healthcare spending. Below is a graph of the annual growth rates in health expenditures in constant 1997 dollars:

Alberta readers might look at the 1993 to 1996 anomaly and reckon that they see the handiwork of the early Klein. But in fact this is a national graph produced by the Canadian Institute on Health Information. The following three graphs from the same source illustrate health expenditure per person in constant 1997 dollars, with the upper line in each representing public expenditure and the lower line representing private expenditure:

One can make a couple of observations about these graphs. One is that the target of limiting healthcare cost growth to GDP growth+1%, as targeted by a draft proposal released by the co-chairs of President Obama's deficit commission, is not unreasonable. Even GDP+0% would not be a flat line in the above charts, because a flat line would result from holding spending growth to inflation and population growth and GDP growth will exceed that (if it didn't, real GDP per capita would not rise over time). The other observation, more germane to this blogpost, is that while the 90s dip is more pronounced in Alberta's case, for all three provinces we see an acceleration in constant dollar expenditure per person from about 1996, creating a notable inflection point given the declining or steady level trend of the previous four years. 2009 and 2010 suggest that public spending may decelerate for Saskatchewan and Ontario relative to Alberta, but these data points are forecasts (and so represented by white dots).

Here's one more chart, which displays spending in the United States by all levels of government as a proportion of GDP:

Note the decline from 1991 to 1999. While there is variation between states and provinces, the overall story is that fiscal conservatism was a North America-wide phenomenon in the 90s. One can draw two conclusions from this. One is that fiscal debates in any given state or provincial legislature do not occur in isolation from the larger "culture." The other is that if most of North America is overspending, any given sub-national jurisdiction has likely succumbed to the same trend to at least some degree.

further to the last

One regrettable consequence of my last blogpost is that a P"C" party activist or two seems inclined to think my dissatisfaction with the Wildrose Alliance somehow makes the government party a more attractive option. Let's be clear here: if there is a problem with Wildrose people making getting elected an end-in-itself instead of a means to an end, it remains a bigger problem yet with most P"C" party people. As longtime Leg watcher Marc Lisac observed in 2004:

[W]hy would anyone with a solid position in the community want to run for the opposition? The prize for election is putting up with casual insults in question period, being largely ignored by the media, watching government backbenchers earn much more money by virtue of being appointed to this agency or that board, and knowing that one's future employability outside politics is likely being impaired. The most attractive choice is to fight for a nomination in the governing party.

You have to be a saint to run for the ragged, perpetually debt-ridden shells that pass for opposition parties in Alberta. A saint, or someone with the character of a stubborn, defiant buffalo facing directly into a stiff wind coming off the mountains. Most people in public life here are neither. Contrary to the stereotype of the defiant individual, the province is full of people who take the easier path and join the party (literally and figuratively).

There is accordingly a context to my issues with Wildrose. That context includes that fact that the governing party has to take a lot more responsibility for the spending spree of the last decade than the opposition. Also, even if the Wildrose caucus successfully led an effort to kill off the restriction on teachers' right to strike, for some other planks like the right to not associate with a union and the secret ballot, it was "close but no cigar" in terms of getting them eliminated from the policy book. With the P"C" party, in contrast, you have a party that, as a government, introduced legislation that had clauses like section 29 of the Labour Code: "[e]mployees to be union members."

I have regularly returned to the issue of unions because I think how a politician is inclined to deal with this interest group is a far more revealing indicator of fiscal conservatism than nebulous talk about cutting back on spending. Remember how the unions howled at the Klein cutbacks in the mid-90s? What has changed such that spending restraint today wouldn't involve a confrontation with the unions? Premier Stelmach called the limiting of teachers' right to strike which Wildrose used to stand for "draconian," but in New York State ALL public employees are banned from striking ALL the time by section 210 of the Public Employees Fair Employment Act, more commonly known as the Taylor Law. Yet New York unions are still in the saddle. An expert panel hosted by the New York Times titled "Can California and New York be saved?" returns repeatedly to the idea that New York's new governor "has to steel himself for the long run and be prepared for the wave of ads from unions claiming the sky is falling." In Illinois where union muggings of the taxpayer are, if anything, even more egregious than in Albany or Sacramento, the Republican candidate for governor collected more than 1.7 million votes last week, losing by a thread, yet challenged the unions directly. The point being here that "draconian" is relative. As I noted in my last post, although Alberta supposedly has much in common with Rocky Mountain states like Idaho, the province allows closed shops when even the chair of the Swedish Building Workers' Union has said "closed-shop clauses [are] old-fashioned and [are] being removed" in Sweden. (As an aside, I have lived in Sweden more than a year and am a fan of much of the Scandinavian system, which in many respects is not as "left wing" as North Americans presume, e.g. a lower corporate tax rate than the UK and the USA, and perhaps the world's most radically free market in schools, schools that, by the way, privilege Christianity in the curriculum).

As I said before, the key problem is "not how much will be going to the unionized public sector per se" but how Alberta (and North America in general) decides how much is too much. Imagine an audience with some politicians on a stage in front of them. Now randomly pluck one "ordinary person" from the audience and sit them on a stool on the stage. Now invite the politicians to talk about how much that person should be paid and then vote, as an audience, for the politician who has said the most convincing thing and, by this mechanism, determine the pay. That the politicians will engage in a bidding war to pay the most should be as obvious as the fact that studio audiences invariably root for a game show contestant to win spectacular amounts of money. As much of a circus as this hypothetical scenario would be, reality is considerably worse because it isn't nearly as transparent: collective bargaining agreements are not conducted on public television.

Now having said this, if anyone should ask why I quit the Wildrose Alliance, it is not over a policy difference. Nobody gets all the policy they want out of a political party that represents a significant proportion of society. It is rather the way the party made a move that wasn't anti-any particular policy I favoured, but anti-policy period.

For whatever reason, an elected provincial politician, Doug Griffiths, wanted to talk policy, not politics, and Wildrose Executive Director Vitor Marciano (with the possible agreement of others) decided to try and make money for his party off of the uninformed grassroots using that very fact. Talking policy instead of politics is what my whole motivation has been since I left Ottawa's policy shops. Politics is a means to an end. If the end is to try scare politicians like Griffiths out of saying what he has been saying, I'm working for the wrong team. It's as simple as that, really.

Former minister Allan Warrack's comments about bringing an HST to Alberta on Alberta Primetime last Monday hit almost all the bases in terms of a concise defence of the idea. The segment quite likely would have never occurred, and Professor Warrack thus not have been given a soapbox, had Griffiths not made the effort to push the debate into the general culture. Wildrose not only failed to play enabler with respect to bringing a conversation to Albertans that I've made it something of my personal mission to bring, Wildrose actively contributed to trying to marginalize the conversation as unacceptable.

British Columbia doesn't have anything like Alberta's royalty revenues yet, as of this coming January, the corporate tax rate is no higher (10%) than in Alberta and a person earning $45 000 would pay almost $1000 less in income tax in BC than in Alberta. BC's tax on carbon does not bother me at all since I haven't owned a car for more than 8 years and the policy makes it that much less likely that BC would be targeted by a hostile foreign public relations campaign. This while BC, population 4.5 million, spends $40.6 billion and Alberta, population 3.7 million, spends $39.3 billion. The BC deficit is furthermore far more manageable. Calgary-based George Koch, writing in Alberta Venture in October, noted that "we Albertans seem a complacent lot, addicted to our government entitlements," and lamented the lack of leadership, observing that "[f]or the wilful leader, public support is a bank to draw on rather than just a wave to ride." With the exception of people like Doug Griffiths, Alberta's politicians all seem to be out surfing.

UPDATE:

Apparently I'm not alone in terms of general frustration. Mike Moffat from Western, Stephen Gordon from Laval ,and Andrew Coyne have been referring to each other's work for a while now and they are all unimpressed with the direction of Canadian politics.

why I'm not a Wildrose member

My last post wasn't the first time I've talked about unions and what I thought was an accommodation of union interests by the Wildrose caucus members who joined the party back in January. Support for unions is an understandable stance for the NDP caucus but not, in my view, for a party that I had joined some three years ago on the understanding that its philosophy would be roughly consistent with that of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, namely, "free markets and free people."

When President Truman accused the WSJ of being the "Republican's Bible," the paper’s then editorial page editor responded that "our loyalties are to the economic and governmental principles in which we believe and not to any political party." In an editorial titled, "A Newspaper's Philosophy," William H. Grimes, who won the WSJ's first Pulitzer Prize for his editorial commentary on business, the economy and labour, wrote:

On our editorial page, we make no pretense of walking down the middle of the road. Our comments and interpretations are made from a definite point of view. We believe in the individual, his wisdom and his decency. We oppose all infringements on individual rights, whether they stem from attempts at private monopoly, labor union monopoly or from an overgrowing government.

I've returned to the issue of labour union monopoly on a regular basis this year in part because in the future it will be a critical driver of another problem Mr Grimes identifies, "overgrowing government." A growth in government is not necessarily objectionable in-and-of-itself: if starting from a sufficiently low base such that additional investment would not be subject to significantly diminishing returns, government investment in roads, schools, bridges, university laboratories, and other factors that generate positive externalities and may be bequeathed to the next generation may well be a net good. But with an aging and "what's-in-it-for-me" society, most government expenditures will be used to support non-workers' private consumption and a politically powerful non-business-owning middle class. In the case of private sector retirees, the promised entitlements may be appropriate. But for the public sector, there is a growing problem of sustainability and the biggest problem in my view is not how much will be going to the unionized public sector per se but the anti-competitive, unaccountable way the allocation decisions have been and apparently will continue to be made. This is not to say that corporate lobbyists don't also work the halls of legislatures in shadowy ways but rather to make an issue out of the fact that union lobbyists, unlike corporate ones, want to extend the reach of this tax-and-spend allocation system.

Each time I return to the issue, however, there is the tendency to make the point a little louder, such that there is increasing danger that I may be "crying wolf." And on the point, there is the possibility that I have mischaracterized the views of Wildrose caucus.

Rob Anderson has advised me that when Wildrose party leader Danielle Smith said in Red Deer in June that the passing of an AGM resolution suggested a maturation and "sophistication" of the membership's views, the Tweeter who associated that comment with the passing of a particular resolution that the teachers' union wanted passed was mistaken. When I stood as a candidate myself in 2008, amongst the lessons I learned is that, while the general public may be overestimating the magnitude of media bias, the public likely underestimates the frequency with which the media can get minor facts wrong. In this case, I don't recall the twitterer's view being confirmed by another source, hence I'll take at face value Rob's view that Danielle was referring to the gun rights resolutions(s) (there were two, an uncompromising one which failed to pass and a milder affirmation of gun rights which did) and stand corrected.

That doesn't mean I'm satisfied with what the party leader has said elsewhere, of course. While Education Minister Dave Hancock has defended the Provincial Achievement Tests against union interests that want them eliminated, Danielle has agreed with union interests that the PATs should go. She does say that the PATs should be replaced with "something", but apparently that something has to be "better for teachers" than the status quo and would be developed by "[w]ork[ing] with teachers" (who, if the unions are any guide, generally oppose all standardized testing). At the last Wildrose AGM, MLA Heather Forsyth used most of her microphone time on the floor to either speak out in favour of the P"C" government's free speech limiting legislation or against Wildrose policy planks opposed by the teachers' union. I might add that

• a motion that proposed eliminating the "School Choice" section from the Wildrose party platform in favour of language that made no reference to choice,
• a motion calling for replacing "[a] Wildrose Government will institute methods to hold educators accountable for performance" with "[a] Wildrose Government will promote innovation..." and
• a motion that wanted to delete the plank prohibiting closed shops and the plank preserving the right to a secret ballot

were all "PROPOSED BY CAUCUS" and that, as a caucus member, the MLA for Calgary Fish-Creek supported all these motions. I accordingly do not believe that I have been misleading readers in my characterization of Ms Forsyth.

With respect to the right to a secret ballot, Mr Anderson currently says,

I clearly support “right to a secret ballot.” In fact, that topic never even came up at the convention - there was never a resolution vote on it.

On May 5 Vitor Marciano issued "Executive Director's Memo #3" to the membership which included as an attachment some 85 policy resolutions that Vitor wanted whittled down to a more manageable 40. One of the resolutions concerned section II "Economy" Part G "Labour" and "Moved that II G 1 and 3 be deleted and replaced..." This motion was "PROPOSED BY CAUCUS".

What were the two planks that the "caucus" wanted "deleted"?

II G 1 read:

A Wildrose Government will allow individual workers the choice to determine their membership in labour organizations.

II G 3 read:

A Wildrose Government will extend to workers the democratic right to a secret ballot vote on labour organization certification under the Labour Code and ensure that the same rule apply for decertification as for certification.

These deleted planks were to be replaced with "[a] Wildrose Government will review labour laws to ensure fairness for all Alberta workers whether employed in union or non-union settings," a plank that is, of course, so vague as to be entirely equivalent to nothing for a MLA who does not want to be held to a policy resolution.

This motion, and all of the other union-related motions proposed by caucus, made their way into the green sheets that constituted the resolutions for debate at the AGM and I accordingly stand by my last blogpost. I was at the AGM and do not recall Mr Anderson saying that he wished to retract the part of the motion that called for deletion of II G 1 and/or II G 3. I might add that if it were necessary to do further "research and consultation" in this area, the results of the research and consultation could have been presented to the membership for the membership's review. As I recall the membership was instead advised at one point to "trust" the caucus with the party's policy platform.

As it was, the vote was very close, going to a count, and II G 1 and II G 3 survived, but I think this should be of limited comfort when the caucus has revealed its hand as not wanting to be held to the provisions. Relevant here is the history of Wildrose Executive Director Vitor Marciano. When controversial Calgary West MP and former professional heckler Rob When in doubt, pull the trigger" Anders told the Canadian Press, "I would fight shoulder to shoulder with [Marciano] in any battle," this apparently included a battle between himself as a caucus member against his own Conservative constituency membership. When the board of Calgary West EDA voted in favour of asking riding members if they wanted to hold a new nomination meeting, Marciano, who represented Alberta on the National Council, approved a top-down takeover of the local board. 19 members resigned from the disempowered board, leaving behind 7 a number of whom had not been elected at the board's previous AGM. This recent incident came after the candidacy of Walter Wakula for the Calgary West nomination was rejected in 2006 and Rob Anders acclaimed, an acclamation that was ultimately overturned via the intervention of a Court of Queen's Bench Justice, despite the objections of Andrew Constantinidis, Wildrose's recently nominated candidate for the provincial riding of Calgary West.

Wakula isn't the only Wildrose member to have a run in with the federal Tory machine. John Baloun, Wildrose Alliance candidate for Edmonton-Rutherford in 2008, found out how MP James Rajotte's board plays ball when he tried to challenge Rajotte for the Edmonton-Leduc nomination. I had my own encounter with Rajotte's people a year ago, when myself and someone who had served on David Kilgour's board were attempting to organize Wildrose members in Edmonton Whitemud. We both ended up resigning from the newly formed constituency board, realizing that Rajotte's people, who were backed by Eleanor Maroes who was in turn backed by a member of the provincial executive, didn't much want us (and I was going to be out of the country for a few months). It will be interesting to see how the nomination in the new Edmonton South West constituency will be managed given that, with popular incumbent Dave Hancock almost certain to run for re-election in the old Edmonton Whitemud, this very suburban open seat is likely the only riding within Edmonton city limits that Wildrose HQ would consider a realistic pick-up for the party.

Looking forward, there will likely be a great deal of pandering to the rural vote over the coming year that would not be to my taste and looking back I'm not interested in supporting a party that imports the Conservative Party of Canada's hardball culture into its operations or caucus members who want to delete a party plank allowing "individual workers the choice to determine their membership in labour organizations." Stop maneuvering and finessing and stand and fight for the plainly stated principle.

I don't mean military courage or civil courage, or any special kind of courage. I mean just that inborn ability to look temptation straight in the face - a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without pose - a power of resistance, don't you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless - an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature, and the seductive corruption of men - ...

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Having said all this I would consider returning to involvement with the party if changes occurred and I should make it clear that I do not know Rob Anderson, Heather Forsyth, or Vitor Marciano personally. I met Rob for perhaps a minute at the Wildrose AGM but of course I was already rather prejudiced at that point based on my dissatisfaction with the "terms," or absence thereof, surrounding the floor crossing the January and the policy that the new caucus was proposing in May, policy I couldn't imagine Paul Hinman supporting. Anderson should be congratulated for the way he puts unmanipulated videos of himself speaking as an opposition member in the Legislature online and further makes his views on various matters available on his website. Our elected officials are generally well-meaning people trying to reconcile the contradictory policy wishes of the electorate and far too many people want to blame politicians for everything they see as wrong with society when, really, the enemy is us. Democracies generally get the government they deserve. At the PC AGM this past weekend, the results of a survey of Albertans were passed around. It found that "65% say the province should base spending decisions on the public’s need for services, not on the government’s ability to pay." No business or household could make spending decisions without reference to ability to pay but popular opinion, here in supposedly "conservative" Alberta, is what it is.

I just happen to think that politicians could deal with this in the way PC MLA Doug Griffiths has tried to deal with this. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Finance Minister, he has access to some information that the man in the street does not. Griffiths has been trying to communicate with the electorate, asking people to re-examine their assumptions. As I said on Sunday, it was the fact that Marciano reckoned Griffiths' party should be attacked for Griffiths' independent effort to start an adult conversation that was the last straw for me.

The fact is that no one party has a monopoly on the sort of politicians we need more of. During the 2008 provincial campaign there wasn't an all-candidates forum in my riding and when I tried to contact the other candidates to try and arrange one there wasn't any interest. So I did the next best thing and kept a look-out for any sort of city-wide forum that came up. I then ended up speaking at a forum hosted by a local Ukrainian group. A young Liberal candidate sparred with me on several issues and afterwards we agreed we should go for coffee sometime. In the audience were a few other Edmonton area candidates. John Baloun gave me some tips on public speaking. A distinguished older gentleman came up to me and quite impressed me although it might partly have been because he flattered me suggesting that I should consider joining his party. He was the PC candidate in Edmonton Gold Bar and during the recent mayoralty race I realized that he must have been David Dorward.