Quotulatiousness

September 24, 2011

Canadian military: “the bureaucratic tail is wagging the Parliamentary dog”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

Christie Blatchford looks at the amazing ability of the military bureaucracy to frustrate, delay, obfuscate, and disobey their parliamentary masters:

Written by distinguished military scholar and veteran Dr. Jack English, it shows how the bureaucracy in Ottawa — an incestuous nest of regular army bosses with turf to protect and intractable civil servants — has consistently ignored or thwarted government directives to increase the size of the reserves.

What’s more, either those defence ministers whose pledges came to nought had the collective attention span of gnats, or they failed to grow a set of nuts sufficient to demand their instructions be followed, or they were simply shifted within Cabinet and the new fellow came in.

Any way you look at it, Dr. English says, the bureaucracy is calling the shots.

In the result, despite pledges to grow the reserves, the militia part-time head count remains still at about 16,500, or, as Dr. English wryly notes, about the size of National Defence Headquarters, or NDHQ as it’s called.

By the way, just getting the damn numbers out of NDHQ is a trick.

[. . .]

Virtually everyone who has studied the Canadian army, and their number is legion, agrees on a couple of things: The bureaucracy is obscenely bloated, far out of proportion for the size of the army; the citizen soldier, who until called up to full-time service costs only about 20% of the regular one, is a bargain for the taxpayer; the militia is more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than the regular army.

September 22, 2011

This is why the Ontario election has been such a snooze-fest

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Scott Stinson explains that there is barely any difference between the warmed-over bowl of snot being offered by Premier Dalton McGuinty and the bucket of snot that Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives would like you to choose instead:

Mr. McGuinty himself put it this way: “He’s basically saying, ‘Whatever McGuinty’s doing on health care, I’ll do that. Whatever McGuinty’s doing on education, I’ll do that.’”

This is not entirely true, since there are certain differences in the way the governing Liberals and the opposition PCs would address each file — Mr. Hudak, to pick one example, vows to scrap the Local Health Integration Networks that were brought in under the McGuinty government. But on the whole, both men say they would govern Ontario, a province with a recently ballooned deficit and with a highly optimistic plan to return to balance, by spending the same amount on its most costly ministries.

This, however, does not make for a particularly compelling battle cry. “A Vote for Hudak Is A Vote For Incremental Change!” Or “Vote Liberal: We’re Pretty Much Like the Other Guy But Our Signs Are a More Pleasing Red.” And so, the leaders would much rather play up their differences.

This may be the first election since I became eligible to vote that I will not bother to go to the polls. I have the incumbent PC candidate, a Liberal, an NDP’er, and a Green. That is, centre-left, centre-left, left, and enviro-fascist. Such a choice!

Update: I’m clearly not alone in my distate for all the electoral options:

Hudak has forfeited a slam-dunk opportunity to ride that conservative tidal wave that made Rob Ford mayor and gave Stephen Harper a majority. He could’ve run on a simple “respect for taxpayers” platform, promising to axe the HST. That alone would’ve carried the day. Instead, he yammers on about chain gangs.

Come Oct. 6, I’m choosing option “D” on Ontario’s multiple-choice quiz: None of the Above.

I’m declining my ballot.

September 21, 2011

“Our existing income tax structure is nothing short of crazy”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:50

That’s Kevin Milligan in the Globe and Mail talking about the Canadian tax structure:

Here are five nuggets of information Canadians should keep in mind as the high income taxation discussion unfolds. [. . .]

Second, our existing income tax structure is nothing short of crazy. The graph shows the marginal tax rate (the tax owed on the last dollar earned) across different income levels for a two-child family in Manitoba in 2010, the clawback of both federal and provincial refundable tax credits. (Similar graphs for more provinces are here.) What redistributive goal is such a bizarre tax structure designed to achieve? A strong argument can be made that we should improve and reform our existing income tax structure before slapping more confusion on top of it.

Third, the threshold at which one reaches the highest tax bracket is exceedingly low in Canada compared to other countries. In the United Kingdom, one reaches the highest tax bracket of 50 per cent at the Canadian dollar equivalent of $234,000. In the United States, currently the highest federal rate of 35 per cent is reached at incomes of $379,150 (U.S.). In Canada, the highest federal rate is 29 per cent, reached only at $128,800. Just to reach the level of income tax progressivity observed in the United States under President George W. Bush, Canada would need to increase this high income threshold dramatically.

Tories drop “lawful access” provisions from omnibus crime bill

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

That’s a bit of good news on the civil liberties front:

A controversial Internet surveillance bill has been omitted from the federal Conservative party’s proposed crime legislation.

Today, Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Rob Nicholson held a press conference to introduce the Conservatives’ promised omnibus crime act, titled The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which focuses on crime and terrorism. However, an expected component of the act regarding Internet surveillance known as “Lawful Access” legislation was nowhere to be found.

The set of Lawful Access bills would have warranted Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies the power to acquire the personal information and activity of web users from internet service providers (ISPs). ISPs would also be required by an additional provision to install surveillance equipment on their networks.

The legislation would essentially give law enforcement the ability to track people online without having to obtain a warrant. The federal NDP and Green parties, and civil liberties groups among others decried the bill as overly-invasive, dangerous and potentially costly for internet users.

That’s the good news. The rest of the bill, as Grace Scott points out, is awash with “tough on crime” noises:

The Safe Streets and Communities Act will increase penalties for sex offenders, those caught with possession or producing illicit drugs for the purposes of trafficking, and intends to implement tougher sentencing on violent and repeat youth crime. It also plans to eliminate the use of conditional sentences, or house arrest, for serious and violent crimes.

Report shows military bureaucracy defied government orders

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:34

It’s not really a surprise that the bureaucrats don’t want to increase the size of the militia, but it is surprising that they’ve been willing to ignore direct government orders on the subject:

Canada’s bloated military bureaucracy has consistently defied explicit orders from government ministers and failed to increase the size of the army militia as directed.

The accusation is made in a scorching but carefully documented report done by pre-eminent military scholar Jack English for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and obtained in advance of its release Wednesday by only a few media outlets, including Postmedia.

It is a “wretched saga” that Mr. English describes as marked by “sandbagging, obstruction, futile wheel-spinning, and endlessly wasted staff effort.”

Using statements made by a series of defence ministers and recommendations either from special commissions or in government “White Papers” — all of them pledging or urging that the part-time militia or reserves, whose members most proudly call themselves citizen-soldiers, would grow — Mr. English shows how bureaucrats and leaders within the regular army, who saw any move to increase the militia as a threat, stubbornly stymied the wishes of their political masters.

In the numbers game, NDHQ has drawn level with the entire militia force, and like all bureaucracies, wants to continue to grow.

September 16, 2011

No free speech, please, we’re Canadian

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Ken at Popehat has a lovely summary of the “all Jews should be sterilized” fracas at York University:

Pity poor Professor Cameron Johnson at York University. He was just trying to make this fundamentally Canadian concept clear to the students in the class he was teaching by giving examples of unacceptable opinions. Really, reminding them that some opinions are unacceptable was, in the Canadian context, an act of great patriotism, akin to starting an American lecture with the Pledge of Allegiance and possibly a barbecue. In the course of being so very Canadian, Prof. Johnson mentioned that the sentiment “all Jews should be sterilized” was “unacceptable.”

[. . .]

By uttering the words, Prof. Johnson committed speechcrime. That’s a strict liability crime; intent is irrelevant. Moreover, in thinking that he could utter a series of offensive words by putting them into a specific disapproving and pedagogical context, Prof. Johnson committed a hate crime against the Moron-Canadian community, which is too stupid to grasp context, and the Entitled-Canadian community, which believes that it is un-Canadian to require them to pay close enough attention to follow context. Prof. Johnson knew or should have known that his class of 450 people would include members of the Moron-Canadian and Entitled-Canadian community.

And indeed it did — in the form of Sarah Grunfeld, a member of the Moron-Insipid-Entitled-Canadian community. Sarah Grunfeld was outraged to hear, sort of, that her professor thought that all Jews should be sterilized, and started quite a stir, complaining to York University officials and various community members. Tumult and inquisition ensued. The Canadian media acted in an appallingly un-Canadian manner, focusing on the so-called “context” of Professor Johnson’s words and the utterly irrelevant detail that he was Jewish. Grunfeld, raised by her actions into a position of leadership in the Entitled-, Insipid-, and Moron-Canadian communities, did her best to set them back on the path of right thinking

How not to run an election campaign

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

I’ve been referring to Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak as “McGuinty Lite” for a few months now. Christina Blizzard has the same nickname for him:

He wants all-day kindergarten, has no problem with Muslim prayer in schools — and won’t talk about a greater role for the private sector in health care.

Dalton McGuinty?

Nope. It’s Dalton Light — aka Tim Hudak.

The beleaguered PC leader seems stuck.

The wheels on his campaign bus just don’t have any traction.

He went into the campaign 12 points ahead in the polls. Now, nine days into the campaign, he’s fighting to stay even with McGuinty.

Yet even this, “me-too,” campaign, has been branded as “Tea Party North,” by the Liberals.

Hudak has failed Politics 101.

I have two theories to account for this (neither of which is particularly convincing). First theory: there is some really nasty surprise waiting to be sprung on the premier soon after the election, and Hudak wants to avoid being the patsy. Second theory: Hudak has become really comfortable as leader of the opposition and doesn’t want to risk becoming premier.

Either of those, or perhaps Hudak is really a sleeper agent of the Liberal Party. That might account for it . . . he’s being called a “Tea Party” candidate, but it must be homeopathic tea, as there’s no strength to it at all. It’s been diluted down to nothingness.

Ontario’s clean energy Potemkin village

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

John Ivison reports on a recent photo op by Premier Dalton McGuinty:

The solar energy company touted this week by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty as a flagship of the province’s clean energy economy has halted production because of slow demand.

Mr. McGuinty was flanked by Eclipsall Energy Corp.’s workforce when he visited its Scarborough solar panel plant Tuesday, but there was no mention that the production line is temporarily shut down. When my colleague Tamsin McMahon visited the plant she found the reception desk was empty, the cafeteria was closed and only a handful of employees milling around inside the sparsely furnished building.

Leo Mednik, Eclipsall’s chief financial officer, said the production line halt is because the company has already completed its current order book. “It’s no secret that the market is slow and there have been delays. That’s part of it — part of it is logistics. Our production team went through our purchased inventory a lot quicker than expected,” he said.

Not only is the plant not working to capacity: it’s only working at all because of government subsidies:

The Liberal government’s efforts have created jobs — though the 20,000 number touted by Mr. McGuinty seems highly questionable, far less the 50,000 he says will be created by the end of next year. In addition, they are hardly high wage, high skilled jobs the Premier claims (Eclipsall pays 20% over minimum wage to its workers, who assemble glass and solar cells imported from Asia, thereby qualifying for the Liberal Green Energy Act’s 60% domestic content rule).

The question is: how sustainable are these jobs? Mr. Mednik admitted that if the domestic content rule was removed, Eclipsall and other Ontario manufacturers would not be able to survive. “Frankly, it would be very difficult for any start-up to compete” against cheaper Chinese producers, he said.

He said it is a question of when, rather than if, the 60% threshold is removed. Both the European Union and Japan have taken the FIT program to the World Trade Organization and want the local content requirements removed. They claim this Buy Ontario provision is a prohibited subsidy. The FIT program might also soon become subject to a NAFTA dispute case, after American renewable company Mesa Power Group said it would file a complaint.

September 15, 2011

Why first-gen electric vehicles will be a hard sell for Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

It’s not just that (at least in Ontario) we’re facing potentially huge electricity price hikes to pay for our new alternative energy strategy, it’s also that electric cars don’t handle winter weather very well:

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

This illustrates the biggest drawback of BEVs, which is not range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.

No doubt some conventional cars ran out of gas while trapped in the massive traffic jams that occurred in and around the nation’s capital the night of January 26. However, a two-gallon can of gasoline can get a stalled conventional car moving again in a few minutes. In contrast, every dead BEV would have had to be loaded on flatbed tow truck and taken somewhere for many hours of recharging before it could be driven again.

Nissan claims that the range of a Leaf is about 100 miles. However, in their three-month extended road test, Car and Driver magazine obtained an average range from a full charge of 58 miles. Cold weather and fast driving can shorten this to as little as 30 miles.

National Post headline funnies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

The article discusses a day planner that was distributed to students at a Toronto primary school. The planner included a printed version of an online “Days of Significance” calendar that had references to sex workers, female genital mutilation and Palestinian solidarity. The board agreed with the complaint that this material was not appropriate for a kindergarten-through-grade 5 audience (although they did not say whether the planners were being withdrawn). The National Post headline, however conveys a slightly different message:

Sex workers, genital mutilation not suitable for children: TDSB

I should hope that sex work and FGM would be considered unsuitable!

September 13, 2011

TV ads in Canada required to tone down the volume

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

I don’t watch a lot of TV (except during football season), but I used to find TV ads in the evening seemed a lot louder than the programs they ran with. This will change:

The number of submissions was unusually numerous for a CRTC notice of comment, and 10 times higher than the complaints it received the previous three years combined.

“Broadcasters have allowed ear-splitting ads to disturb viewers and have left us little choice but to set out clear rules that will put an end to excessively loud ads,” the CRTC chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein, said in a release on Tuesday.

“The technology exists, let’s use it.”

The commission says 2009’s international standard for measuring and controlling television signals will apply to minimize fluctuations in loudness between programming and commercials.

Under the standard, broadcasters will have to ensure that both programs and ads are transmitted at the same volume.

September 11, 2011

The Canada Pension Plan and moral hazard

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

An interesting post at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative looks at the overlooked failure in pension markets. I found this bit of information to be quite interesting, as it addresses a conversation I had with Dark Water Muse a few months ago:

Governments provide pensions in one of two ways. Pay As You Go (PAYG) plans use current contributions to fund current benefits. The Canada and Quebec Pension Plan were, when they were first introduced, PAYG plans. The moral hazard risk a worker faces with these plans is political: a politician will design the plan so as to maximize his or her chances of re-election.

The design of Canada and Quebec Pension Plan has created large benefits for the first generation of recipients (current voters) and a much lower rate of return for future recipients (future voters). Now those gainers were the generation that entered the labour market in the Great Depression and fought in World War II, so one could argue that the windfall gain they experienced was merited on equity grounds. The point here is merely that the design of PAYG pension plans reflects the interests of the designers (for re-election) as well as the interests of the contributors and recipients.

The Canada and Quebec Pension Plans are now transitioning into fully-funded plans. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board was, as of June 30th 2011, managing $153 billion in assets. Some is managed directly by the board, the rest is managed by “partners” ranging from Istanbul-based Actera Group to New York-based Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. I suspect that the CPP, roaming the world with billions to invest, is able to negotiate low management fees, and there must be savings associated with economies of scale in investing. But the possibility of moral hazard — someone getting rich by diverting away a tiny percentage of the return on $153 billion, or a politician exerting pressure on the CPP investment board to make electorally-sound investments — remains.

In sum, while private pension markets suffer from moral hazard, it’s not clear that governments can solve the problem.

In my discussion with DWM, I claimed that the CPP was a PAYG system (in extreme examples, like the US social security system, this can be compared to a Ponzi Scheme), while DWM — claimed that the system was fully funded from investments. As the quoted section above shows, we each had part of the answer.

It’s hard to believe that the CPPIB (the organization that handles the investments of the CPP) can remain immune to government meddling — buy this company’s stock, invest in that company’s risky-but-located-in-a-marginal-riding new venture, etc. As long at the CPPIB can remain independent of political pressure, the system might work.

September 10, 2011

How much damage to personal liberty will the new US/Canadian security deal inflict?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

An article in the Globe and Mail discusses — in very general terms — the new security deal negotiated between the US and Canadian governments:

U.S. and Canadian negotiators have successfully concluded talks on a new deal to integrate continental security and erase obstacles to cross-border trade.

Negotiators have reached agreement on almost all of the three dozen separate initiatives in the Beyond the Border action plan, said sources who cannot be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The few remaining items mostly involve questions of wording and should be settled in time for an announcement in late September.

[. . .]

Opponents have raised alarms that an agreement would cost Canadians both sovereignty and personal privacy. But failure to implement the agreements could further impair the world’s most extensive trading relationship, and put manufacturing jobs across the country at risk.

Details of the agreement are closely held. But goals outlined earlier include specific proposals to co-ordinate and align such things as biometrics on passports, watch lists, inspection of containers at overseas ports and other security measures.

[. . .]

Canadians who believe that the United States has sold its liberty because of fears for its security, or who resist any further economic integration with the troubled economic giant, are likely to oppose the Beyond the Border proposals.

I don’t oppose trade with the US — far from it — but I do feel very strongly that the US has reduced the liberties of its citizens in pursuit of security (check the topic SecurityTheatre for lots of examples). I don’t want to see that trend exported to Canada in exchange for better economic access to their markets.

September 7, 2011

If they take away your freedom of speech, you can’t defend any of your rights

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Europe, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Mark Steyn on the rapidly constricting “right” to free speech in most of the western world:

To be honest, I didn’t really think much about “freedom of speech” until I found myself the subject of three “hate speech” complaints in Canada in 2007. I mean I was philosophically in favor of it, and I’d been consistently opposed to the Dominion’s ghastly “human rights” commissions and their equivalents elsewhere my entire adult life, and from time to time when an especially choice example of politically correct enforcement came up I’d whack it around for a column or two.

But I don’t think I really understood how advanced the Left’s assault on this core Western liberty actually was. In 2008, shortly before my writing was put on trial for “flagrant Islamophobia” in British Columbia, several National Review readers e-mailed from the U.S. to query what the big deal was. C’mon, lighten up, what could some “human rights” pseudo-court do? And I replied that the statutory penalty under the British Columbia “Human Rights” Code was that Maclean’s, Canada’s biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth. [. . .]

And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse—and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of “racism” for some remarks about Islam’s treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world.

September 6, 2011

Stephen Gordon: no case for stimulus in Canada (yet)

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

As he points out in the article, Canadians who are calling for the federal government to indulge in US-style stimulus spending are not paying attention to the Canadian economy:

Employment in the U.S. is far below its pre-recession levels, and employment in the construction sector has been hit particularly hard. So there is a strong case to be made for a U.S. program of infrastructure spending — and many U.S. observers are making that case.

Neither of these conditions holds in Canada. Although unemployment rates have yet to return to pre-recession levels [. . .], the number of jobs lost during the recession has been recovered, and July employment levels were 1 per cent above their pre-recession peak.

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