Masters of the land

Posted on January 24, 2008 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 24, 2008

Third world peasants have a history of clamouring for land reform. China’s peasants are rewriting history. They want China’s system of collective land ownership thrown out and replaced by privatization.

This news comes to me from my colleague at Probe International, Grainne Ryder, an impeccable source for grass roots stirrings from Asia. She relayed details of local uprising from farmer groups that could be a sign of things to come. Read one of the farmers’ declarations, claiming to represent 40,000 farmers in Heilongjiang: “Officials and powerful groups seized large amount of farmland taken over from farmers under the name of the central government and became the real ‘landlords’. Although farmers are supposedly masters of the land, they are forced to become serfs under the landlords . . . We decided collectively to change this kind of land occupation and protect farmers’ rights as the masters of the land by declaring household and individual ownership.”

The police, of course, will have none of it. In Dongnangang, following a village meeting that worked out out how farmers should divide land among themselves, a leader of the farm privatization movement was arrested, as were farm leaders in Sanmenxia,where farmers who were displaced by the Sanmenxia hydro power project in the 1980s received just half the compensation of land promised them – Chinese government officials kept the other half for themselves.

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Pigou’s positive side

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 16, 2008

Arthur Cecil Pigou, the celebrated 20th century economist who created a discipline over externalities, has developed a large following over the notion of taxing “bads” such as gasoline, and not just among economists. Environmentalists have taken up the theme over the last decade, and so, too, have many conservatives. Why tax meritorious activities such as earning an income, or purchasing a product, many argue, when taxing activities without merit can instead raise tax revenues?

Pigou provides an answer here, too. He didn’t just advocate taxing activity that creates harmful side effects, or negative externalities. He advocated subsidizing activities with beneficial side effects, or positive externalities. One such example, perfectly obvious to him in the early part of the last century, was farm subsidies to promote a sturdy labour force that could be conscripted for war. Another equally obvious example, in line with the Garden Suburb fashion of the day, was urban planning: It is as idle to expect a well-planned town to result from the independent activities of isolated speculators as it would be to expect a satisfactory picture to result if each separate square of inch were painted by an independent artist. No “invisible hand” can be relied on to produce a good arrangement of the whole from a combination of separate treatments of the parts. It is, therefore, necessary that an authority of wider reach should intervene and should tackle the collective problems of beauty, of air and of light, as those other collective problems of gas and water have been tackled.

The “bounties” that he advocated for the beautification of urban spaces – then the object of social reformers of all stripes – did come about, as well as the seizure of property rights that he espoused. These policies brought us slum clearances, abject public housing complexes, and the modern suburb, innovations that today’s urban planners generally revile. More profoundly, in hindsight most urban planners have come to value highest the old, unplanned parts of cities, a valuation that the public as a whole echoes, judging by the real estate prices in what we call Heritage Districts today.

Perhaps someone wiser than Pigou and the elites of his day would today know what future generations would value and what they would not. Perhaps government today are not subject to fads and ill-considered decisions. The problem remains, even for a prescient government, that activities some might write off as unmeritorious have enormous merit. In fact, this is precisely why activities with large negative externalities exist. The larger the negative externality, as a rule, the larger the positive externality.

Take the automobile, a common target of environmentalists, myself included. With proper policies, in my view, the auto would lose much of its market share, to the general benefit of society. The auto’s negative externalities are indisputable, I believe, but I also believe its positive externalities are indisputable. Without the auto, how could the sick be rushed to hospital, how could rural folk do their shopping, how could urbanites get to provincial parks on the weekends? The internal combustion engine is not without merit.

Other activities with large negative externalities – those coal plants that spew mercury, that pulp and paper mill that pollutes downstream residents, that boisterous neighbourhood bar – also keep our lights on, support rural communities, provide comradery and social cohesion. If it is fair to tax them for the bads they provide, it must be fair to reward them for the good they do.

But who would set those Pigouvian values by judging the rights and wrongs of each activity, and what confidence do we have that Pigouvian value setters would arrive at better results than those now on offer: the ballot box (which ultimately delivers polluting mill towns), the courts (which regulates nuisances and other common laws), and the marketplace (which drives efficiency improvements)? All three of these institutions need reform, by improving democracy, by strengthening the common law, by promoting freer markets. Pigou, undoubtedly, also has a role to play, one inversely proportional to the success in the reforms of these institutions.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.

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Coal enters rehab

Posted on December 7, 2007 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
December 7, 2007

Coal, chock-full of substances of known toxicity, epitomizes dirty fuel. The perils in coal burning – and this is an abbreviated list – include fly ash and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, sulphur, vanadium, beryllium, cadmium, barium, chromium, molybdenum, zinc, selenium, radium, uranium and thorium. If these substances and their byproducts are not controlled in coal burning, to keep emissions within safe levels, human health and the environment can suffer.

Coal burning also produces one substance that may be entirely benign or even positively beneficial. That substance is carbon dioxide, a highly stable gas that is indispensable to all plant and animal life.

Ironically, it is this one emission from coal that many in the Western environmental movement now attack, while the other emissions receive relatively little attention. Ironically, but not illogically.

From the Garden of Eden to Plato’s Republic to More’s Utopia, man has dreamed of an idyllic society. The early 19th-century utopians campaigned to depopulate cities, which they saw as wicked and dehumanizing, and to create vast conservation areas that would be off-limits to industrial activity and conducive to man’s communion with nature.

In the last half of the century, in reaction to the excesses of the Consumer Society, utopians espoused that we go Back to the Land, practice Voluntary Simplicity, recognize that Small Is Beautiful, and accept the teachings of the Club of Rome, whose computers reported that the world was about to run out of resources. These were moral movements above all – by exhausting the world’s store of non-renewable resources instead of living within the budget provided by renewable resources, these utopians argued, we were living beyond our means, selfishly making merry at the expense of future generations through a one-time plunder of nature’s stores.

To end the plunder and see the dawn of a righteous society, requires, above all, an end to the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. For this reason, prospects of an end to oil are in perpetual vogue – “peak oil” theories being the most recent manifestation. Such utopians are also warmed at the prospect of running out of natural gas. In both cases, official estimates of remaining reserves, and the high prices that these fuels command in the marketplace, signal that the end could be near.

Coal provides no such signal. Its price is low and its supply effectively inexhaustible – utopians face the bleak prospect of centuries of coal burning, with only the most utopian among them believing predictions that peak coal is also upon us. To eschew non-renewable resources and live within our means – today we call it “sustainable development” – coal must be outlawed.

Soot, or solid fly ash, once represented excellent grounds for curbing coal. Horrendous breathing conditions in centuries past claimed countless lives, and even in the last half of the 20th century coal was capable of blackening our skies. The exhaust from today’s smokestacks is altogether different. Soot has been negligible for decades and has been becoming more so with every passing decade – the current U.S. standard, now being phased in, bans particles larger than 2.5 microns in diameter, about 1/30th the width of a human hair. Soot remains a problem for society, but not one that can be laid at the foot of a coal bed.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.

Feedback to this article

Dear friends,

I have read Lawrence Solomon’s above noted article in the news clippings at my work and I support his thesis of Coal Enters Rehab in that there is such a thing as “clean coal” and that moreover there are scrubbers that can diminish the nitric and nitrous and sulfurous acids that come out the chimney too close to zero.

Michael Abramowitz

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Tories deny Ontario democracy

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 30, 2007

Canada needs electoral reform to bring in proportional representation. It is unconscionable that in a modern democracy such as ours, vast swathes of the electorate should be effectively disenfranchised by a voting system that is essentially corrupt, disproportionately weighted to favour some segments of the electorate to the misfortune of others.

A principled national movement for electoral reform is especially needed now, given moves afoot in the federal Parliament that would deny almost 40% of the Canadian electorate a fair vote. Yet the very organizations at the federal, provincial and local levels that ostensibly exist to bring us a fair voting system – they have names like Fair Vote Canada, Fair Vote BC, and Fair Vote Ontario – are eerily silent. None have anything to say on the largest electoral decision facing parliamentarians today.

The federal legislation – Bill C-22 – is designed to address current injustice, whereby citizens in some provinces are woefully underrepresented in the federal House of Commons. Using Quebec’s ratio of one MP for every 100,000 residents or so as a standard, the federal government plan would top up the number of MPs in fast-growing provinces. Alberta would likely get five additional MPs, for example, and British Columbia seven. After the 2011 census, the vote of an Albertan or a British Columbian would have equal weight with that of a Quebecer, eliminating an inequity that has justifiably rankled Westerners.

But another fast-growing province – Ontario – would be denied the same proportional representation as the others. Instead of getting an additional 21 MPs, the number needed to obtain the same ratio of about 100,000 residents per MP, Ontario would get but 10, less than half the number required.

Ontario Premier McGuinty, in standing up for fair-minded Canadians everywhere, clearly explained what is at stake:

“When important national decisions are made, Ontarians will not have the same right to have their voices heard, or their views count compared to Canadians living in B.C., Alberta or Quebec. In fact, Ontarians will have weaker representation in the federal Parliament than Canadians living anywhere else in Canada.

“Given Ontario’s growing population, the proposed legislation makes little sense. Under these changes, both Alberta and B.C. will get a new seat in the readjustment following the 2011 Census for every increase of approximately 100,000 people. However, Ontario will get only one new seat for roughly every 200,000 people. As time goes by, Ontarians would become increasingly under-represented with each new readjustment following a census.”

The unfairness, affecting almost 12.7 million Ontarians, could not be plainer. Yet rather than take on this dismissal of the principle of one person-one vote – surely a prerequisite for any voting system that pretends to democratic fair play – Fair Vote Canada has other priorities. It wants a system that gives political parties with insignificant public support the ability to veto legislation supported by the majority; that gives one-issue parties the clout to force their will on the majority; that gives political parties the right to install insiders as parliamentarians, even if the insiders are unpopular with the electorate – in short, Fair Vote Canada wants a system that gives more say to political parties and less to voters.

Had parties instead of people ruled, its Web site contends, the number of seats that the Saskatchewan Party won in its resounding victory earlier this month would have been fairer. It likewise faults the Manitoba election earlier this year. And the rejection of Fair Vote’s electoral approach by the Ontario electorate in a referendum last month.

“When the legislature does not reflect the electorate, both accountability to the electorate and the quality of legislation are compromised,” Fair Vote states. Yet it issues nary a peep at the prospect that the federal legislature will not reflect the Ontario electorate.

The Fair Vote lobbies, it’s fair to say, are not about fair voting at all. They are not even about proportional representation, the term they have appropriated to describe their electoral preferences. The Fair Vote lobbies are about delivering power to the parties, rather than power to the people.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.

Feedback to this article

Rep by pop, National Post, December 8, 2007

Re: Tories Deny Ontario Democracy, Lawrence Solomon, Nov. 30

Lawrence Solomon confuses two definitions of “proportional representation.” The term is usually used to mean that a political party elects Members of Parliament in proportion to the votes they receive – a party that gets 42% of the votes wins 42% of the seats, and not 60%. This would seem an obvious and commonsense condition for a fair voting system, but it is far, far from the way our current voting system operates, much to the delight of Dalton McGuinty.

But Mr. Solomon uses the term to mean the equal weighting of votes from riding to riding, more properly referred to as “representation by population.” As he points out, Fair Vote Canada, of which I am a national director, has no position on rep by pop, for a couple of good reasons.

First of all, although not without significance, the problem is relatively trivial compared with the need for a fair voting system. Is the P.E.I. tail wagging the Canadian dog? Under the current system, most of us (and by “most” I mean more than half ) vote for losing candidates, so our votes have absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. If the effective weight of your vote is zero and you are not meaningfully represented at all, what does it matter how large your riding is?

But in any case, the rep by pop problem is itself caused by our current voting system, and the simple and immediate solution is to adopt a proportional voting system. If every vote counts equally, then the size of your riding doesn’t matter much. In fact, a proportional voting system would give us much greater flexibility in varying the size of ridings to ensure effective and practical representation for rural and remote voters and smaller provinces. We could have smaller northern ridings, and more of them, without compromising the value of urban votes.

Oh, and the notion that Fair Vote Canada wants to give more power to political parties is just silly. Political parties already hold all the power, and have held it for a hundred years. The point of a proportional voting system is to give voters the power to hold political parties accountable.

Wayne Smith, National Council, Fair Vote Canada, Toronto

 

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A force for division

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 4, 2007

Ontario is full of alienated minorities, demographic and geographic groups who lack a voice and for whom the political system offers little of relevance. The new system of proportional representation proposed for Ontario, Myriad Minority Parties, or MMP for short, will empower any group garnering 3% or more of the vote.

Take youth, for example. This disenfranchised group, which votes worldwide in exceedingly small numbers, is uninspired by political promises aimed at the older population, such as better health care, which our youth is too young to need, or lower taxes, which it doesn’t yet pay. Thanks to proportional representation, youths around the world are turning to a political movement and a political party that can speak to their needs and aspirations: the Pirate Party.

Now the fastest growing political party in the world, the Pirate Party offers youth the right to download pirated music and movies – a basic human right, it argues. The Pirate Party – which says it will support any ideology in a coalition government, as long as it gets its way on free downloads – is credited with influencing the Swedish election last year. This year it surpassed the Swedish Green Party in members, and in 2009 it is expected to be the Hot New Thing in European Union-wide elections.

The Pirate Party now has affiliates around the world, including in Canada. An Ontario Pirate Party won’t be running in the next election because Myriad Minority Parties is not yet law. But if Ontarians vote for MMP in the referendum Oct. 10, look for MSM messaging, Face-Book and political chat-rooms to hum, exhorting our youth to join the political process to make free downloads a reality.

Pirates are only one constituency likely to be heard. With just 3% of the vote guaranteeing representation in Parliament, parliamentary debate will give voice to many who have been marginalized. We may well have an anti-gay party, although it won’t call itself that, fighting for a Moral Ontario, and promising to support any coalition government doing the moral thing.

In fact, with a mere 3% the bar to entry, several parties of the religious right may find voice. Born-again Christians, to be sure, possibly balanced by the traditional Christian churches, or by fundamentalist Jews and Muslims. The divisions may not be divine.

How divided can an electorate become? Belgians on June 10 went to the polls with 30-odd parties to choose from. Almost four months later, the myriad minority parties – none of which mustered even 20% of the vote – are still trying to cobble together a coalition. Not only do Belgians not have a government, they may soon not even have a country –proportional representation so successfully stresses what divides Belgians rather than unites them that the press debates daily whether the country should split up, and many consider separation inevitable.

Ontario, like many parts of Canada, is not devoid of balkanizing tendencies. For decades, some have agitated for Toronto to become a province on its own, so that its riches are no longer plundered by others. Northen Ontarian separatists, similarly aggrieved at their treatment by southern Ontario, may likewise decide to form their own province.

Ontario need not split along regional lines for the provincial fabric to tear. Name any hot-button issue that can inflame the passions of 3% of the public – abortion, gun rights, same sex marriage, welfare, immigration – and you’ll have the next Party du Jour, elevated to Parliament with the mandate to cast its vote in coalitions that will give it its way. Desperate to stay in power, coalition governments have a history of going to great lengths. In Israel, public transportation is banned on the Sabbath to accommodate the ultra-orthodox religious parties – a small price to pay to remain in power, political leaders all too often believe.

In New Zealand, an orgy of crass political deal-making so offended the electorate after it switched to MMP in 1996 that three years later, in a citizen-initiated referendum, more than 80% voted to roll back MMP reforms to restore accountability in government. True to form, the newly entrenched politicians ignored the non-binding referendum, and continue to this day to resist calls for reform. Italians and Israelis are likewise trying to reform their dysfunctional systems of proportional representation.

In the worst cases, proportional representation gives voice – and vent -– to the vileness in humanity. In France, a cynical socialist, President Francois Mitterrand, brought in proportional representation in 1986 to split the right-wing vote by allowing the election of the bigot, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his National Front Party. Le Pen won 32 seats, making him a major political force until public revulsion at proportional representation led to its repeal in favour of a system more like ours. Without proportional representation, Le Pen lost all 32 seats and his party became a spent political force.

Ontario has its Le Pens, striving to divide us, as it has regionalists and pirates and others with grievances to nurse. These will all have the chance to express themselves Oct. 10. So will those who want a united province and country.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute.

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