Fiscal Realities Are Usually Imaginary

Listened to Ontario Minister of Education Lauren Broten this morning.

I cringe whenever I hear a politician say something about "fiscal realities" in the tone of someone bravely facing up to an unpleasant but permanent and immutable Truth. It's rare that this is actually the case. Politicians are the ones who decide what the fiscal reality is, so it's almost always disingenuous of them to whine about it, or ask for a pass because of it, when they themselves decided on it.

In Ontario right now, we are facing a large imbalance in our finances which admittedly cannot continue indefinitely, but which is also not yet a true crisis (no one is threatening to stop lending the province money). The government however has decided to attack the imbalance aggressively, using its legislative muscle to overturn the contractual rights of public sector workers and roll back salaries and other benefits they enjoy, while curtailing their ability to bargain through their unions over the shape those roll-backs might take.

As a piece of public policy I think this is very heavy handed, and continues the bad precedent of using legislatures to force change that could well have been achieved through negotiation. But what I want to say here is that it's not "fiscal realities" that are forcing the government into making "hard decisions" but rather something almost completely the reverse. The government has decided to prioritize maintaining current (or slightly reduced) levels of revenue (taxes + borrowing) ahead of maintaining current (or slightly reduced) levels of public service, particularly in education, for what seem to be the craven and cowardly fear of the way a high budget deficit plays in the press.

In other words, it's the fear of making hard decisions that has forced the government into embracing the canard of fiscal realities; the political equivalent of "the devil made me do it".

The government wants you to think there are no choices in the face of what it calls: reality. What's actually real is its ranking of competing priorities.

Did you yawn and miss it?

Barack Obama mentioned global warming in his victory speech last night! Specifically he included a line on the destructive power of a warming planet. It went by pretty quickly, but it was there. May we start to hope the issue is taken up again? A carbon tax? Cap-and-trade? Other carbon abatement programs?

There's still that small matter of a hostile Congress, but: fingers crossed!

About last night...

Phew!

Pacificism and the Poppy

The old veteran stands, medals clinking quietly in the subway station selling poppies to mark Remembrance Day and raise money for vets less fortunate than he is. I buy one and stand attentively while it's pinned on my jacket, trying not to notice the discomfort.

I wear a poppy at this time of year to show some awareness of the sacrifice of so many in our nation's conflicts. Some of those conflicts had the patina of justice about them, many did not. Regardless, innocents became soldiers and fought, died, or were maimed or psychically scarred to the point they could never take back up the lives they might have lived. Willingly or not, they made a sacrifice, their families made a sacrifice, the posterity they might have built became a sacrifice. That should be remembered.

It is increasingly rare that those who bear real responsibility appear anywhere near the bloody fighting. So inevitably our innocents kill & wound their innocents. Innocent civilians are more and more often targets (a.k.a. 'collateral damage') in wars we fight far from home, ensuring an unconscionable asymmetry in the harm we suffer and the harm we inflict. That should be remembered also.

Some people might see my poppy and think I support war. I support an end to war. I wish I knew some way to signal that without disrespecting the service of that old veteran and his clinking medals.

What shall we call it?

I recently learned that the term climate change came into common usage through Frank Luntz, a man who specializes in helping right-wing politicians (and cartels) tune their language to the emotional response they want or need (he also came up with "death tax"). Luntz's focus groups thought that climate change was less threatening than global warming; although, I don't think he did any of his research in Canada, where the idea of warmer winters isn't nearly as unpopular as he might've found it was in, say, Florida. Long-story-short, the Dubya administration started using climate change and now it has all but replaced global warming in mainstream media usage. (Aside: politicians lead most effectively through careful use of language).

Extreme weather events are becoming ever more commonplace, and this year both "red" and "blue" states in the U.S. have experienced them, though nothing gets attention quite like subway flooding in Lower Manhattan. Hurricane Sandy may turn out to be a turning point in climate politics, so it might be a good time to rethink how we describe the phenomena we are experiencing. As I alluded earlier, I think global warming isn't as threatening to Canadians as it might be to sub-Saharan Africans, Fijians, or even Frank Luntz's focus groups, but climate change is itself too clinical and antiseptic (probably what Luntz was going for, of course). Different regions are going to experience the effects of global warming differently (Europe may well get colder) with a few "winners" and a great many losers. For most people the felt issue isn't going to be an abstract degree or two of higher average temperatures world-wide, it's going to be the increasing unreliability of the seasons, and the weather; it will be the freak storms, droughts, wild-fires, and wild-life (water moccasins in Toronto?). So I'm proposing we ditch technician's climate change for a term both more accurate to real experience, and yes, more threatening: climate instability. Or perhaps, Anthropogenic Climate Instability; maybe Human-Induced Climate Instability?

Any other ideas?

Can we do more Halloween, please?

Barring a last-minute change of heart, this will  be the first year in almost 2 decades that neither of my children will be donning costumes and doing the trick-or-treat thing on our street. They really do grow up fast! But I'm surprised to find myself no less excited for the coming candy-mageddon even without one or more costumed kids to shepherd around!

Since we moved into our house some 17 years ago I've really come to love Halloween. There's no other occasion in the calendar year that gets you out and meeting your neighbours like Halloween. Our street must be particularly high on the Trick-Or-Treat Index, which helps, no doubt. Our childless (and many childful) neighbours import nieces & nephews, grand-kids, cousins once-or-twice-removed, even their friends' brats to partake of the sugary generosity on offer, and I don't mind at all (small caveat: they better be shelling-out too). It makes it a bigger party! The adults too get into, ehem, some candy of their own, strolling down the streets toting illicit libations in thermos bottles. Despite the fact our neighbours also variously host parties & gatherings at Victoria Day, Christmas, & Labour Day, I never meet or talk with more neighbours than on October 31.

Now, if only Hurricane Sandy will please lay off the rain for a few hours.

Trikkertreet!

UPDATE: Although it rained lightly throughout the night, the only noticable effect on the party was some compression. Trick-or-treatering started promptly at 6 and ended earlier than normal, but the volume was about the same as ever. Also, congrats to ghostly Enid's host for the best new installation award! Kept making me think of this song though.

And you wonder why they can't get rid of fighting.

News comes today that the NHL has revoked its latest offer to the players. Time to call a spade a spade: the National Hockey League is a bully.

More specifically, they are a cartel.

A cartel is an organization of otherwise independent entities, formed expressly to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service. Cartels attempt to gain for their members most of the benefits of a monopoly, including monopoly power over terms of trade. The lockout is an example of the cartel exercising this power. This is important to remember next time someone tries to make it out that the NHL lockout is somehow analogous to industrial action in some other sector. Unless they're talking about the OPEC oil embargoes of the 1970s they're talking out of an orifice other than their mouth.

Many people take a "plague on both their houses" attitude to the whole thing, and fair enough, you don't have to like the players' or the NHLPA, their union --an argument can probably be made that the cartel benefits at least some of the players. But if you find yourself more explicitly on the owners' side, I hope you're clear about what it is you're supporting. It certainly isn't capitalism or the operation of the 'free market' more generally, rather it's the naked exercise of power to restrain wages and claim windfall profits.

For myself, I can't seem to help it, I hope they players can hold together and "win" this fight. Why? These are guys who are the absolute best at what they do. What they do is play a "kid's game" but people pay to watch, and it's not crazy to think that the guys playing it should get a pretty significant chunk of what's paid. There are about 750 players on NHL rosters each year, and maybe another 400 who are "on the bubble" so call it around 1200 people in the world who are able to play at that level, out of who knows how many hundreds of thousands who played at least semi-seriously at some point in their lives. Of people in the appropriate age range who ever played with some idea of maybe making it a career, NHL players are the cream, the 0.01% at least.

Before we consider how much they should make, consider how much someone in the top hundredth of the top percentile makes in other professions. Think about the elite in law, medicine, business, finance! Yikes! Now consider how many of those elite professionals have as high a probability that their next case, surgery, deal, meeting, might be their last as an elite professional?

"Oops, he really mangled his signature there, Bob! I hate to say it right now after what we've just witnessed, but you just gotta wonder if he'll ever be able to come back from that!"

Finally consider the lack of control players have over where they play. Each year the very best young players are pretty much forced to go to work for the very worst teams. Perhaps they're lucky, like Sidney Crosby who got drafted to a team in a cyclical downturn. Perhaps though they go to a team that has a long and illustrious history of turning great prospects into pumpkins. Mentioning no teams by name.

So what's the appropriate compensation?

I'll try and address that soon.