Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Ottawa’s mayoral election

I have never had much interest in municipal politics. For one thing, the policy areas I am most concerned about aren’t ones over which municipalities have too much control. For another, I have generally not expected myself to live in one place for long. Finally, it just hasn’t seemed worth the effort to track municipal politicians, platforms, etc.

Ottawa is now in the midst of a mayoral race between (at least) incumbent mayor Larry O’Brien and challenger Jim Watson. I don’t know much about the platforms of either. That said, I do acutely remember the awful bus strike that happened on O’Brien’s watch. I think the union deserves to be punished for abusing their monopoly power over the general population, but O’Brien probably deserves to be punished too for not managing things better.

That said, I suppose I will have to investigate the candidates more comprehensibly before I decide how (and whether) to vote.

[Update: 25 October 2010] The Ottawa Citizen has a good website with information on this election. The general sense seems to be that Watson will win the mayoral race. Another thing I’ve discovered is that it is rather difficult to learn which school district zone you live in, much less find much information about the candidates online.

[Update: 28 October 2010] While the candidates on offer didn’t inspire much enthusiasm for me, I was pleased with the physical process of voting.

Greenland offshore oil

In a development that seems to reinforce a number of ongoing trends, it seems there may be oil to exploit off the coast of Greenland. As with other places in the Arctic, the combination of new technologies, higher oil prices, and retreating ice is making it plausible to access fossil fuels that would once have been out of reach. At least as reported by The Economist, residents seem moderately intrigued by the prospects for increased wealth, but largely disinterested in the ongoing climate change that could profoundly transform the massive island:

Most of Greenland’s 56,000 inhabitants seem persuaded [that the risk from oil spills is acceptable]. Despite the vulnerability of the country’s ice sheet to global warming, a recent Greenpeace meeting in Nuuk drew a paltry 45 people. Even this minimal interest in the environmentalists’ message could fall further as the implications of this week’s news start to sink in.

Cairn Energy, a British oil and gas firm, already has an area designated for exploration which is thought to include 4 billion barrels of oil. United States Geological Survey data suggests that a total of 17 billion barrels may lie in the waters between Canada and Greenland.

As with so many issues related to climate change, there is an important disjuncture here between different relevant timescales. Whereas it is plausible that the next few decades could see the deployment of offshore oil and gas platforms in the Arctic – and at least the beginning of significant revenues from them – the warming of the climate will largely occur over a more extended span of time. Nevertheless, we have good reasons to believe that the emissions trajectory humanity is investing in right now is incompatible with the continued existence of the Greenland icesheet, though the disappearance will probably take centuries. Of course, that change will profoundly alter life in the region. At the same time, the seven metres of sea level rise embedded in that ice would surely prove problematic for many of the cities and nations that may find themselves benefitting from the use of Greenland’s oil and gas in the interim.

Canada and Joint Strike Fighters

Responding to criticism about Canada’s decision to purchase 65 Lockheed-Martin Joint Strike Fighters (F-35), through a sole source contract for a total cost of about $16 billion, the government has twice highlighted interceptions of Russian bombers as justifications for the purchase.

Does this analysis make any sense?

Partly, it comes down to what the Russians are trying to do. If they just wanted to obliterate Canada, they would do so using ground- and submarine-based ballistic missiles, and perhaps cruise missiles. There would be no reason to send vulnerable bombers into Canadian airspace. On the other hand, just as NATO regularly tests Russian air defence systems, the Russians could be flying into Canadian territory to provoke us into pointing RADAR in their direction, so they can try to suss out what capabilities we have. Finally, the flights could be an attempt to assert sovereignty or de facto control over the Arctic.

In the foreseeable future, the only plausible path to a war with Russia would be an invasion of a central European country prompting an armed response from NATO. In such a circumstance, Canadian Joint Strike Fighters could conceivably be useful. They could also potentially be useful in conflicts like Afghanistan, where air superiority and close air support are clear advantages for Canada and its allies. Also, purchasing Joint Strike Fighters could help keep Canada in the good graces of the United States, especially given how politically savvy the big defence companies are, and how strategic they are about spreading big weapon contract jobs across the country.

Does that justify a price tag of around $500 per Canadian? Does it justify whatever ‘collateral damage’ will result from the purchase of the jets?

Three hung Parliaments

I had a busy weekend, so I don’t have posts prepared.

Here’s a question for readers, though. After the recent Australian election, there are now three Westminster style democracies that lack majority governments. Two went from longstanding left-wing administrations to lacklustre leaders (Paul Martin and Gordon Brown), while the other briefly went from Liberal to Labour before entering the current predicament.

Is there any reason why this happened in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom at overlapping times? Is there some demographic or ideological cause? Have party loyalties weakened, creating a muddle? Or has politics become more polarized, reducing the extent to which parties seek the middle ground?

[Correction] The post above originally claimed that Australia had a Tory government. In fact, the centre-right Liberal party was in power from 1996 to 2007.

[Aside] My A570 IS point and shoot digicam certainly is easier to carry around than the 5D Mk II, but look how much noise there is at 400 ISO!

Google and net neutrality

At Google headquarters recently about 100 people showed up to protest Google’s apparently eroding support for ‘net neutrality.’ Net neutrality is the idea that the internet should not restrict the modes of communication that can be used across it, nor the sorts of devices that can be connected to it.

Lots of companies oppose net neutrality because it means they should not discriminate between traffic from different sources. Data traversing the internet – broken up into pieces called packets – includes everything from pirated DVDs being passed around using peer-to-peer filesharing systems to corporate phone calls being routed though voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephone systems to songs being downloaded for money from the iTunes store. Lots of companies would like to slow down or block file sharing, restrict services like VoIP, and allow people to pay more for faster paid downloads.

One big reason why this is worrisome is that it could prevent the emergence of new technologies. VoIP seems like a good example. Routing telephone calls through the internet challenges the monopoly of fixed-line telephone companies. Low cost VoIP calls have been a source of competition for them, and have probably produced improved services at lower prices for consumers. A future version of the web where companies can slow down or block traffic of undesirable types could be a version where new such technologies get strangled at birth.

That said, abandoning net neutrality could have some advantages, by improving network performance for those who use relatively low-bandwidth services like email and text websites. It could also facilitate the emergence of interesting new technologies, which are not viable on the internet as it exists now. For instance, the sometimes slow and clunky load times were one of the reasons why Google Wave proved to be a failure.

Given their enormous influence on the content and structure of the internet, the position of Google on net neutrality is of considerable public importance. The full details of their deal with Verizon – which is rumoured to allow special treatment of certain sorts of traffic – have not yet been publicly announced. When they are, there will surely be a lot of scrutiny and interest from the geekier components of the general public, as well as those with a particular interest on how technology policies affect societal change.

In Canada, Bell is probably the most vocal opponent of net neutrality, while Michael Geist may be the most prominent defender. I wrote a bit about net neutrality earlier, as well as about the related technology of deep packet inspection.

Open thread: the future of Russia

After the collapse of communism, many in the West assumed that democracy and free market capitalism would triumph in the former Soviet Union. Instead, it seems the chaos in the post-communist period permitted the emergence of economically powerful oligarchs, as well as massive growth in the wealth and power of organized crime groups. Now, former members of the security services, led by Vladamir Putin, are continuing to cement their own control.

There is much about Russia that is worrisome: the suppression of the free press and murder of journalists; continued appalling conduct in Chechnya; ongoing attempts to dominate neighbouring states, including through war; the exploitation of Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels; and more.

What do readers think might happen to Russia in the next 25 or 50 years? What are the most desirable and undesirable plausible outcomes, from the perspective of the Russian people, the world as a whole, central European states, the European Union, and the United States? What effect would different potential outcomes in Russia have on Canada?

Costing legislation

In the United States, the Congressional Budget Office has a mandate to provide non-partisan advice on the economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs covered by the federal budget. They have a staff of 235, and a budget of $44 million per year.

By contrast, Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) has a staff of 11, and can only undertake analyses on a selected subset of bills. This is problematic for a few reasons. For one, it gives the impression of some level of partisanship, when the PBO can choose which bills to study and when to release results. For another, it leaves Members of Parliament ill informed about what the costs associated with legislation will be. They really ought to have an accurate non-partisan analysis before the second reading vote.

Perhaps it would make sense if Canada enlarged the role of the PBO, to include a mandatory analysis on any piece of legislation likely to cost over a certain amount, such as $500 million. By making the selection of projects for analysis largely automatic, the PBO would be made to seem non-partisan. The quality of the data that drives Parliamentary decisions would also likely be improved.

Carbon pricing and competitiveness

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Roger Martin and Alexander Wood argue that carbon pricing could make Canada more economically competitive:

The logic underlying such an argument is fairly straightforward. Carbon pricing can help drive innovation in technologies and business models that promote resource efficiency, particularly in relation to energy. For a country such as Canada, which annually ranks among the most energy-inefficient economies in the world, this presents a huge opportunity. That is because there is an increasingly strong case for how improving resource efficiency translates into improvements in productivity, which is the Holy Grail of competitiveness for economies such as Canada’s.

Every new argument in favour of carbon pricing is potentially useful, given the key role such policies seem likely to play in encouraging the transition to zero carbon forms of energy. Quite possibly, it is especially useful to develop strong economic arguments, so as to be able to respond to the frequent assertion from those who don’t want to take action on climate change that carbon pricing would cause serious economic harm.

Health care and Canadian provincial budgets

Earlier, I wrote about Peter Singer’s highly defensible view that how rationing medical care is both inevitable and desirable, when done properly. The demand for medical services will always exceed the share of society’s wealth we are willing to devote to keeping people healthy and alive. As such, the important thing is to make sure we get good value for our spending, and that the way in which health services are assigned to individuals is fair and ethical.

Because of economic and demographic trends, Canadian provinces are going to have to make some tough choices when it comes to health spending. A recent article in The Economist described the scope of the challenge:

Health spending, which is administered by the provinces, has increased from nearly 35% of their budgets in 1999 to 46% today. In Ontario, the most populous province, it is set to reach 80% by 2030, leaving pennies for everything else the government does, not counting tax increases or new federal transfers. The biggest culprit is prescription drugs, which have seen their share of public-health spending triple since 1980.

Clearly, provinces need to spend money on things aside from prescription drugs. Admitting that, however, leaves the problem of determining how health spending should be allocated.

Certainly, part of that needs to involve cost-benefit analyses that compare different courses of treatment. In situations where a superior treatment exists, but which is far more costly, it may be necessary to make only the cheaper treatment generally available, so as to more effectively serve overall health outcomes. Of course, such choices are unlikely to be popular. Other likely measures will include restricting which treatments are covered, increasing the co-payments that patients make, and continuing to employ measures like bulk purchasing to reduce costs. More controversial measures could include things like taxes on unhealthy foods and further efforts to discourage smoking and drinking, while encouraging exercise.

Medical technology will almost certainly continue to advance in the decades ahead (though issues like emerging antibiotic resistant pathogens could actually set us back in some areas). At the same time, an aging population will almost certainly increase the quantity of medical services demanded, while decreasing provincial tax revenues. Hopefully, the combination of technical improvements and necessary budget constraints will produce outcomes that at least remain consistent with those that exist today, and which hopefully improve over time.

The least ethical choice is probably to fund the medical expenses associated with the demographic transition by heaping yet-more debt on future generations. Between climate change, nuclear proliferation, and all the other frightening legacies we are passing on to them, I think they have been given quite enough to deal with already.

What else can be done to constrain the total cost of medical services, while ensuring that those that are purchased are deployed both fairly and effectively?