Friday, July 01, 2011

Ontario voters get better democracy than we do

Premier Christy Clark is supposedly looking at a fall election. If this were Ontario, voters would be casting much more informed ballots.
And B.C. governments would be much less likely to present bogus pre-election budgets.
An Ontario election is already scheduled for Oct. 6; the province has fixed election dates. The parties are in the long unofficial campaign; the public is trying to sort out their claims and promises.
Voters just got big help with this task, thanks to an Ontario accountability law introduced eight years ago.
The Ontario government is required to present a report on the state of the province's finances and its plans for the next three years before the election. That includes economic assumptions and spending and revenue plans.
The auditor general must review the plans and report publicly on whether they are sound, highlighting any potential problem areas. (The review found the Liberal government's cost-cutting plans weren't realistic.)
If a similar law had been in place in B.C., the outcome might well have been different in two of the last four elections.
The Liberals, not the NDP, might have won the closely fought 1996 election. The New Democrats launched their campaign that year after tabling a pre-election budget projecting an $87 million surplus for the current year and a $16 million surplus for the year that had just ended.
After the election, the real numbers showed deficits of more than $350 million in each year. A subsequent auditor general's report damned the government's budget preparation and said it had unreasonably inflated revenue projections.
And the NDP might well have won the 2009 election. The Liberals' pre-election budget projected a $495 million deficit, a number Gordon Campbell insisted was accurate right through the campaign. The real deficit turned out to be $2.8 billion. Voters might have been much less keen on a government that had sunk the province so deeply into red ink.
The sad part is that B.C. should have just such a law. The 1996 budget scandal triggered a report by the auditor general and an independent review of the budget process. Neither went far enough to head off the wildly inaccurate - and politically advantageous - 2009 pre-election budget.
Which leaves voters in a bad spot.
Clark will decide on when to call an election based on political advantage. The fixed election date law was supposed to end that practice, but it's reasonable for a new premier, facing a two-year wait until the next election, to seek a mandate earlier.
So if Clark thinks the Liberals have greater chances of winning this fall than they would next year, then she'll call an an election. That assessment will be based on polling and the results of the HST referendum - if the tax is hammered, a vote would be less likely.
And the Clark strategists are watching to see if NDP leader Adrian Dix is gaining ground and if Conservative leader John Cummins is attracting enough support to split the traditional Liberal vote.
An election this fall would be fought on the basis of this year's February budget. But it's not credible, particularly in years two and three of the plan. Most ministries had their budgets cut this year; those impacts are just being felt. And the budgets, under the plan, are frozen for the next two years, despite growing population and increased demand. Without deep service cuts, the budget won't be balanced by 2013/14 as planned.
And a spring election, following another pre-election budget, would offer voters no greater certainty about budget credibility.
The best choice for voters? A commitment to match Ontario's commitment to openness and accountability by ensuring an indendent report on the credibility of pre-election budgets.
And a vote in the fall of 2012, when voters have had chance to see the performance of Dix and Clark in dealing with the issues.
Footnote: The federal government provides a similar, even broader independent review. The parliamentary budget officer reports to MPs - and the public - on the credibility of budget plans and the assumptions underlying major projects, like the purchase of fighter jets. The office has expressed concerns about the government's ability to meet its targets for spending cuts based on its current plans.

America’s Apple economy widens the winner-loser gap

That's the headline on an interesting piece in the Globe today.
The column by Chrystia Freeland looks at a study on the economic impact of the iPod. The study found that, in 2006, the dandy device produced 41,000 jobs.
But, despite Apple's California roots, 27,000 of them were outside the U.S. and 14,000 were inside.
The foreign jobs making the iPod paid an average $12,000 a year; the American jobs an average $53,000.
That's one issue. Though it's worth noting that $12,000 is pretty good pay in most of the countries where these people worked, and that if they were paid $53,000 — or if the jobs stayed in the states — an iPod would cost $950 and no one would buy them.
More striking was the winner and loser gap in America.
The study found about 6,100 of the jobs in the U.S. went to 'engineers and professionals,' paid an average $90,000.
The remaining 7,800 jobs were in retail, support services, shipping and the like — and the average wage was $28,000.
Thus the winner-loser gap.
This is a big change. A generation ago, engineers might have been earning the equivalent of $90,000. But non-engineers were working in auto plants, mines, the forest industry or officers, and making the equivalent of $40,000 to $60,000.
Those jobs have gone, or been devalued. A smaller group of workers has commanded much more of the wage pool.
There has been little discussion of whether this is desirable, or right, and what long-term effects it will have.
And an odd assumption that it represents some force of nature, rather than a series of policy choices.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Government failed girl found in home with her dead mother

Anyone paying attention - especially people being paid to do just that - could have seen things were going to end badly for the 15-year-old girl with Down's syndrome and her mom.
And things did end badly. The girl spent days alone in a dirty trailer with her mother's decomposing body last fall. She was filthy, emaciated and covered in an angry rash when found - and frightened.
When neighbours came to her rescue, she couldn't hear them. Her hearing aids had stopped working at some point in the past. No one had noticed. She had lived in needless silence.
B.C. Representative for Children and Youth Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond reported on the case this week. It is grim reading.
The desperate family's downward spiral occurred over years. There was ample evidence of deteriorating conditions for both mother and daughter. For almost four years, the Ministry of Children and Families had been warned the child was being abused and neglected. Investigations were incomplete and inadequate, failing to take the modest steps needed to get at the truth of the family's collapse.
As all this happened, the government was supposed to be providing children with special needs and their families help with assessment, planning and services. That didn't happen either.
Lord knows the child needed support. She was sickly and weak, needed leg braces and hearing aids and glasses. At 15, she had the intellectual functioning of a pre-schooler.
She was also a warm and loving child, lo9ved in turn by her mother.
In a family with money and savvy, she might have fared well.
But her mother was poor. When her car broke down, she had to give up the two jobs she was working. She was on income assistance – a life of poverty - and sometimes collected cans and bottles to get by. She couldn't afford a phone.
And she battled her own issues with illness, physical and mental, and, apparently, with alcohol.
Families of children with special needs are supposed to be getting support to make sure services are there. But the government shuffled responsibility to Community Living BC from the children's ministry in 2005, then decided that was a bad idea and shuffled them back in 2009. Supports were inadequate, caseloads overwhelming and children fell through gaping cracks.
And all children are supposed to be protected from harm by the ministry of children and families. That's impossible, of course. But in this case, the report found, there were complaints about the home and warning signs of obvious risk. At the least, this family needed support; it's likely the child should have been apprehended.
Instead, things got worse and worse.
Turpel-Lafond also found this case was not just an aberration, or the result of individual failures. "Is this a unique circumstance, a cruel anomaly?" she said. "Tragically, it is not."
One of the government workers responsible for supporting the child had a caseload of 200 families. There is simply no way to do the work properly under those conditions.
The government cut off the mother's income assistance in the month of her death, although it knew she was supporting a disabled child, without visiting the home or warning the children's ministry.
In short, the systems that were supposed to protect children and support those with special needs were structured to fail.
Children's Minister Mary McNeil promised action on the report's recommendations. But the public has heard that before. Only three years ago, Turpel-Lafond outlined the problems with supports for children with special needs. Nothing happened.
There's one simple test of the government's commitment. The report called on the government to assess the services, resources and support required for children with special needs, the province's current commitment and the actions that would be taken to close the gap.
Until that's done and released, it would be foolish to accept yet more promises of improvement.
Footnote: The ministry's initial position was that the case did not involve a "serious injury" so it did not have to report it to the representative. An internal ministry review found "all of the required standards were complied with" in its dealings with the family.
Which confirms that the problems are built into the current system.

Money to fight for BC Rail-scandal secrecy, not for Oppal inquiry

So Attorney General Barry Penner has money in his budget to pay lawyers to go to court and fight the release of documents in the B.C. Rail scandal to NDP MLA Leonard Krog. (They failed, not surprisingly since the documents had already been released to reporters during the trial.)

But he doesn't have money to provide the legal support Wally Oppal says is needed to get answers at the missing and murdered women inquiry.

(For why Penner is wrong on the inquiry funding, read this. For more on the B.C. Rail scandal secrecy, read this.