The end of “parental rights” in Alberta?
More good news out of Alberta, premier-elect Alison Redford is hinting that she may reverse the most controversial bits of Bill 44.
The bill was an overdue amendment to Alberta’s Human Rights Act, which added sexual orientation to the list of protections. However, sensing there might be a social conservative revolt to the idea that gays are people too, the government conceded a section that enshrined a parent’s right to opt their children out of topics including sexuality, sexual orientation, or religion, in schools.
That such rights already existed within the School Act was apparently insufficient for some parents, and some confused comments by then-premier Ed Stelmach had suggested evolution may be considered a religious topic. They quickly recanted that gaffe; however, the damage was easily done and teachers and the media were left scratching their heads as to the need for such legislation.
But the government held the line and pushed through valiant filibuster attempts by the Liberal and NDP opposition.
Redford’s reversal is welcome news to those of us who support comprehensive education, free from dogmatic influences.
She does go farther though and states she would repeal the entire Section 3 from the Human Rights Act. Section 3 is the hate speech section, long decried by conservatives like Ezra Levant and Christian fundamentalists who want the freedom to slander their favourite targets – typically Muslims and gays. Critics of the section argue that the current laws allow innocent columnists to be dragged before Human Rights Tribunals at their own expense by censors. Defenders argue that hate speech is a form of discrimination and needs to be curbed to protect those who may be victimized it.
While I would generally describe myself as a civil libertarian (among many things), I am conflicted on this issue and I think we need to see it as a balance of rights. People have the right not to be persecuted for their identity or beliefs, but they are also allowed to speak without fear of censorship.
It’s not clear to me that those indicted by the Tribunals have been unjustly punished, and given the tendency for those in the majority to use their privilege to demonize minorities, I think some level of laws against hate speech are justified.
Basically, I am not convinced that Alberta’s hate speech laws are broken, so I’m not convinced we should be trying to fix them. I am open to being proven wrong though.
Alison Redford pulls a Christy Clark
In a huge upset win last night, Alison Redford pulled ahead of favourite Gary Mar to win the Progressive Conservative leadership and became the next premier of Alberta.
Mar was a powerful minister in Ralph Klein’s cabinet and had hoped to used that connection to his advantage. Nearly the entire PC caucus had endorsed Mar.
But similar to how Christy Clark won the leadership of the BC Liberals earlier this year, Redford became the anti-establishment candidate, rallying the votes needed to win.
Mar’s concession speech subtly highlights the issues Redford may now face as leader
"I know that I am leaving this province in very good hands. We have a very good team and a strong group of Progressive Conservative supporters," [Mar] said. "And I say 'progressive' conservative supporters, that's very important."
Redford was seen as the more moderate candidate, one who would keep hospitals and schools open, while Mar had openly mused about more health care privatization – a cause he championed for Klein as health minister. By electing Redford as leader, the PCs now risk losing a few more right-wing members to the extremist Wildrose – a party that had been stalled in the polls recently.
This move also threatens newly-minted Alberta Liberal leader Raj Sherman’s ability to offer a stark alternative to the PC dynasty that has ruled Alberta for more than four decades. Sherman had joined the Liberals after being kicked out of the PC caucus. It may also put the brakes on the Alberta Party, created as a grassroots centrist option.
Redford’s come-from-behind win is likely to make some PCs recall Ed Stelmach’s unlikely win in the last leadership convention. As the compromise candidate between the more right-wing Ted Morton and more progressive Jim Dinning, Stelmach offered little offensive to party members, and correspondingly offered little of substance as premier. Perhaps we’ll see a revolt against preferential ballots in the party.
In my personal opinion, Redford was the best choice for the PCs, her win symbolically ends the “old boys club” that has dominated Alberta’s political scene for decades and sets up for an election pitting her against the media darling Danielle Smith.
Participatory democracy
I had originally written this article for Canadian Atheist as a way to start branching out beyond atheism, but given that I’ve already scheduled two posts for tomorrow and already have one up today, I’m going to post this here.
I want to comment today on a political movement that I watched start to emerge in Alberta just before I left, which has since begun to really take off, but also put it in perspective with a post that I read at POGGE.
The latter frames it as “participatory democracy,” and outlines a system where traditional top-down political parties and decision making is replaced with a bottom-up approach that calls for individuals to contribute ideas to the system and to suggest multiple alternatives, and shuns simple yes-no dichotomous voting.
I’m not sure if a subscription is required, but this paper in the European Political Science journal looks like it also tackles a portion of the problem.
In Alberta, as with most of Canada, citizens are becoming increasingly disenfranchised with existing political parties, and especially the young are eschewing the entire process. Even the upstart Wildrose Alliance is only appealing more to the rich and elderly-curmudgeon crowd. Voter turnouts are drastically down.
But some smart people started getting together in Alberta a couple years ago, first for Reboot Alberta unconferences, and soon for Renew Alberta unconferences. At the same time, an unconference called ChangeCamp was held in Calgary, which began the path to the mayor’s office in Calgary for Naheed Nenshi.
For those who don’t know, an “unconference” is a participant-driven conference where the barrier to admission is set extremely low (the events are typically free), and average attendees provide most of the content in short, interactive presentations.
Each of these events focussed on slightly different areas, but they all had in common a commitment to bringing progressive values back to politics in Alberta. Of course definitions on progressivism range from socialism to soft-conservativism (i.e. fiscal, not social conservativism), but nearly all participants agreed that the present model in Alberta wasn’t working.
Renew Alberta moved quickly after its first couple events and merged with the remaining shell of the Alberta Party (which was a right-wing fringe party) and gutted the existing infrastructure. The rebuilt Alberta Party ejected all its policy and set out on a quest to do something revolutionary in politics – listen to the public.
With their “Big Listen” project they held small meetings in kitchens, community centres, or wherever was comfortable and simply listened to what mattered to Albertans and what they thought should be done about it. The party took no positions and simply compiled notes.
They then compiled all these notes and presented them at their policy conference a few months ago, which resulted in a policy document that they are using not as a final say, but more as a first step toward further consultation and idea generation.
And I must admit, I was quite skeptical initially that the wisdom of crowds wouldn’t be all that much and that what they generated would be a vague and vacuous document. Instead, I’m quite impressed that what exists is a relatively forward thinking position that balances many competing interests.
Add to this, the electoral win of Naheed Nenshi who is actually given credit for running “the campaign in full sentences,” and I think there may actually be a chance for this sort of system to succeed.
I think that’s enough for today, but I do also want to explore the concept of non-partisan politics (and why I’m warming to the concept but hate that phrase) and how these systems can be incorporated into an evidenced-based party like Reason Vancouver.
Progressive sweeps in Alberta!
Municipal elections are being tallied in my home province today, and to some surprise all the progressive candidates are winning!
Stephen Mandel has been re-elected as mayor of Edmonton with over 50% of the vote. Don Iveson has also been sent back to council with a large share in his new riding (Edmonton has just switched from 2 councillors per ward to 1).
Also in Edmonton, my friend and former Lister Hall and UofA Students’ Union president Michael Janz has been elected as a Public School Trustee. Sarah Hoffman, with the support of the Alberta NDP has also won as trustee.
Calgary is the more exciting race as underdog Naheed Nenshi pulls far ahead of former alderman Ric McIver and former (maybe soon again) TV anchor Barb Higgins. Nenshi was a long-shot going in but put a lot of legwork in, made massive uses of social networking and has earned the nickname the “Obama of Calgary” for drawing out the younger vote.
Official results for Calgary are here and Edmonton here.
Red mayors are nothing new in Alberta, but perhaps the young movements behind Nenshi, Janz and Iveson will translate to the next provincial and federal elections if any party can inspire them (and so far the Alberta Party is the only one that looks like it’s doing it right).
Perhaps there’s interest for a Reason Alberta? 
Leading by example
A huge kudos out to Alberta Liberal leader David Swann for this gem that all federal MPs should pay attention to:
As a commitment to the issue of financial accountability I will be posting the monthly statement of expenses for my constituency – Calgary Mountainview – in the coming weeks. This information will be available directly on my website for constituents and all Albertans to review.
The provincial Auditor General in Alberta has the ability to see MP expense reports, so I’m not sure if this is already a little better than the federal situation, but nevertheless, honest politicians are hard to come by these days.
Constructive solutions
I’ve taken two extended posts now to heavily criticize the University of Alberta’s current move to tax students to make up for their growing deficit, but rather than merely oppose, how would I fix the problem?
While I’m no economist (likely a good thing in this case), and don’t have access to the entire financial records, a few methods strike me as immediately effective at easing the deficit crunch that they’re facing.
First off, change has to start at the top. While the combined $2.6 million salaries and benefits of 4 of the executive are not enough to cover the deficit, the leadership must take ownership of not just the success of the university, but also it’s failures.
A 30% paycut to each of the administrators would bring their salaries and benefits down from the mid $600,000s to roughly the level of University of Toronto president’s reported $430,000. Clearly a large, successful school does not need to pad the pockets of its administrators as lushly as the UofA does, especially in these tough economic times. This represents a savings of $780,000 among the top four, and similar cuts across the rest of the administration would likely add up to a million dollars. It may also be higher once all faculty deans and related administrators are taken into account. This move is in part punishment for mismanagement, but also symbolic of the fact that if students must shoulder some increase, than the administrators must also.
Obviously, there will be resistance to a large pay cut and the UofA will lose some of its administrators. To them I say, good riddance. This new higher wave will allow the university to analyze which administrative positions are positively contributing to the university, and which are superfluous positions. Further, fresh ideas from a new crowd could actually help turn the school around. Poach administrators from small to mid-size schools that are not having as much difficultly succeeding in these tough economic times and use their ideas to restructure the UofA so this doesn’t happen again.
Similar to cutting the budgets of the administrators, the university needs to re-examine its role as a contractor. I’ve seen no evidence that contracting out labour tends to save costs, and if anything, tends to exacerbate disparity as contractors tend not to have the protections afforded to university unions.
Next, cancel the Physical Activities & Wellness Centre and other proposed new buildings and halt construction on several others. When I left the university last year there was over $1 billion in construction projects occurring. A lot of that money was coming straight out of the university’s budget, so until they can afford to, no more massive construction projects.
Finally, the hardest suggestion I have is to cap or even decrease enrolment levels for the next few years. While there will be a small loss in revenue by having fewer students enrolled, it will offer a chance to ensure those who are there get a good education, and that the university can afford to teach them. This will also negatively affect high school students who are just at the edge of academically acceptable for the university, however, we ought to be basing university enrolment on academic and not economic merit. I’d rather a poor student with a 95% average got in then a rich one with 75%.
By capping enrolment the university can scale back its absurd vision of its future expansion and focus on the present. This will also ease the pain of freezing capital projects until they are absolutely necessary.
It doesn’t seem like it’s that hard to me to get this deficit under control. Unfortunately the university administration has convinced many students that more money is necessary for a steady-as-she-goes approach. Meanwhile, no one has questioned the actual causes for the current situation, and as the saying goes, “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Even more disappointing, however, is that the current hierarchical structure of the university will prevent almost any of these changes from being implemented by the current administration who only stand to lose in this scenario, but win under any other (even the university going under and them taking home giant severance packages). So to affect these changes, students need to get vocal and resist every tax and fee increase.
Tacit acceptance in not an option if you care about the future of the University of Alberta.
Where did the UofA’s money go?
Further to my comments yesterday about the University of Alberta’s Engineering Student Society endorsing plans to tax students, Brendan Taylor, with the Student Worker Action Group of APIRG has linked me to his complete financial analysis of the operating budgets of the UofA (plus many other institutions) over the past decade. To complement his analysis, I thought I’d highlight some striking differences between the UofA and Simon Fraser University (my current school).
First, If we look just at surplus, until 2008, the UofA had a steadily increasing budget surplus while SFU has actually been running a deficit for the past 8 years, only getting the deficit under control in the past year. So while this current deficit may seem radical for the UofA, it seems peculiar and more likely to be in part due to a one-off lost in investments as opposed to evidence that they aren’t ripping students off enough.
Next, we can see that SFUs funding has been mainly attacked by a 12% reduction in provincial funding over 10 years, while the UofA has maintained a constant proportion of provincial funding. That last data point for the UofA getting 15% more funding in 2007-08 represents a large sum of money going only to capital projects. SFU clearly made its budget losses from the provincial government up by raising tuition while the UofA shows a small drop in percentage funding from tuition. However, non-tuition fees at the UofA have nearly doubled in the past decade, and with the proposed COSSS fee and “Market Modifiers” tuition will increase by roughly 20% or more in the next five years.
The UofA has also shifted its budget from the academic ranks and increased benefits and non-academic salaries. The largest increase is the doubling of expenses on external contractors. Meanwhile, SFU slashed academic funding from its budget in roughly 2003-05 and cut other salaries equally. We do notice with SFU a steady increase in student support that is absent from the UofA. This funding likely explains SFUs consistent top-notch performance in comprehensive university rankings.
As I mentioned, the UofA got 15% more provincial funding in 2007-08 than average, but similarly capital costs were up 15% as well, so that more likely represents singular grants for construction costs. This does help confirm the scenario where the UofA tried too hard to expand too fast under the “Top 20 by 2020” mandate that the administration has now disowned.
Brendan’s best graph for the UofA compares the runaway costs to students to cover the runaway costs of the university executive:
Tuition is legislated to rise no faster than CPI, hence the nearly perfect correlation, meanwhile, we can see that before the market modifier tax is applied (which will raise engineering student’s tuition by an additional 10-15% per year) students are already being forced to pay almost exponentially increasing amounts to cover salaries that are fast outgrowing inflation.
Education may cost money, but it’s clear that education is no more expensive then it was a decade ago, the only change has become this competitive drive to “be the best” school which has brought on overpaid bureaucracy and unaffordable expansion.
The free market model of competition between universities does not seem to make them any more efficient, in a story almost identical to Wall Street, we see corporate execs earn top dollar while those on the bottom continue to suffer.
Ashamed of my peers
That’s my naked right pinky finger. On most engineers (who are right-handed) you will typically find a piece of iron (actually stainless steel) that represents their obligation to engineering. I didn’t get mine because I refused, and still do, to sign the Obligation that would have required me to hypocritically betray my conscience while pledging to be honest. While I would still appreciate being offered the olive branch to be included in that ceremony, I’m growing even more ashamed of the people who were once my peers.
Today’s Facebook check brought an invite to the page “Engineers in favour of improving our faculty and supporting the ESS" which lists a statement by the University of Alberta’s Engineering Student Society’s Board of Directors, a body made of up of the democratically-elected presidents of each discipline plus the executive of the ESS.
The statement outlines how the Board has consulted with the faculty administrators and decided that the best when to ensure that the “world class facilities and faculty” are kept in place is to tax students.
Oh wait, they don’t use the word tax, they call it a “Market Modifier.”
Market modifier my ass, the ESS has just sold the average engineering student up shit creek without a paddle.
I’m glad my finger is naked, because I’m ashamed of these tools.
Currently the UofA administrators are pushing forward, almost without protest, a mandatory tax, sorry “Common Student Space, Sustainability and Security Fee,” of $570 per student per semester to recoup some of it’s $57 million deficit. This fee is on top of the market modifiers, so the ESS is proposing that engineering students ought to pay even more than the average student.
But don’t worry says the University and the ESS, some of these fees will go straight back into scholarships!
So to help the un-affordability that extra student taxes are creating, they offer to throw a few bucks back, at only a few students. But don’t worry, titles like “ESS President” look really good on scholarship applications, so our wonderful Board members may be able to get their funds back, plus a little of their peers.
But why is the UofA in such dire straights?
Having the highest paid administrators in Canada can’t have anything to do with it, I mean, combined they only take in $2.57 million. That’s not even counting how much the deans and their staff are bringing in. Their vision of making the UofA “top 20 by 2020” (whatever the fuck that means, remember how they never explained it) has come at the financial stability of the school and now they’re pinning the exorbitant costs on students.
Where’s the lobbying to Stelmach? Where’s the lobbying to Ottawa? These people are also in part to blame.
But instead, you have students being manipulated by these people trying to protect their overpaid jobs.
I thought it was bad enough that far too many engineers are creationists or anti-science climate change denialists. But this takes the stereotypical right-wing engineer to a far new level.
Notice how they even tilt the language, using the word “market” as though a degree is a mere product to be traded, not earned. Entitled shits. Universities used to be about higher learning and expanding your mind. If this is the future of engineering, move it back to technical school and leave university for the actual academic pursuits.
Market modifiers my ass. A tax is a tax, and this is only going to hurt the University of Alberta. Tuition only goes up, and letting them raise it will only screw students in the long run.
I’m glad I got out. I feel sorry for those who will no longer be able to get in.
SkyShuttle Refund
Guess what came in the mail today (besides the notification that my tax refund will be at least $850 and my giant welcome package to Coast Capital Savings):
That’s my $30 refund from Edmonton SkyShuttle. They also offered “apologies for the lack of service.”
While I still have no plans to use the SkyShuttle in the future (with three trips through the Edmonton Airport before May planned), it’s good to see that a Better Business Bureau complaint can still get resolved after some patience.
I’m still holding out hope that Edmonton Transit will get their shit together, work with the region, and get any kind of bus service to the airport.
Edmonton Transit Fail
ETS: The everyday way to save money – shiver and get fair increases.
Note: at $2.75 per ride, Edmonton Transit is now more expensive than a 1-zone pass in Vancouver.
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