Urban Renaissance Institute

UNICEF: Same old tricks, no treats

Posted on October 28, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 28, 2006

UNICEF is changing the way it treats kids at home and abroad.

Abroad, UNICEF has learned from its embarrassment of recent years, when it was discovered to have funded summer camps in Palestine that inspired children to become terrorists. Martyrdom-themed camps such as Shahids of Chattin took kids on field trips to visit the families of suicide bombers and organized lectures and songfests that glorified suicide bombers, helping to create a culture of killing.

No longer. UNICEF doesn’t directly fund terrorist organizations, Omar Abdi, director of UNICEF-Pakistan, told Dateline, an Australian documentary program earlier this year. Instead UNICEF does so indirectly, by funnelling its contributions through local Pakistani NGOs, which then use the money to fund terrorist-run schools.

“[The children] have a right to be educated,” Abdi says. “So here is another [organization] that is providing that education to them. We cannot deny to give them supplies to give to those kids.”

In the case Dateline investigated, that other organization is Jamaat-ud Dawa, a Pakistani group on the U.S. government’s terrorism list, and whose notorious leader is thought to be behind some of the most spectacular terrorist attacks against neighbouring India. Dateline filmed the students at Jamaat-ud Dawa’s school:

Young boy (translation): I am a soldier of Khalif Farouq-e-Azam and Siddique-e-Akbar. Allah is great. Allah is great. Allah is great. Allah is great. We are the Suns of Truth, the Stars of Greatness. Our hearts are speaking the Koran. We are the awakening destiny of the world.

Teacher: Die … for … Allah.

Children repeat: Die … for … Allah.

The children are also schooled in English, as in this English poetry class taught by the school principal, Abdul Hadi:

Hadi: Do for Allah.

Children repeat: Do for Allah. Do for Allah. Do for Allah. Do for Allah. Do for Allah. Do … for … Allah. Do … for … Allah. Die … for … Allah. Die … for … Allah. Die for Allah. Die for Allah. Give for Allah. Die for Allah. Obey for Allah. Give for Allah. Pray for Allah.

Here in Canada, on the home front, we are also expected to Give for Allah, through our generosity to UNICEF-Canada. But UNICEF has been unhappy with the chump change collected by Canadian kids during Halloween – last Oct. 31, an estimated two million Canadian kids with their little orange boxes hauled in only $3-million by pounding the pavement.

Worse, these kids and their enablers – the 7,000 schools across Canada that organize UNICEF’s Halloween campaigns – foisted costs on UNICEF by refusing to count the change: Only 10 of the schools did UNICEF’s bidding.

To get more cash out of Canadian kids, UNICEF has replaced the one-night Halloween collection with a new month-long fundraising program. Each kid in Canada is now expected to raise $20 by hook or by crook – kids could organize fundraising events, for example, or simply pester their parents for the money. Kids who raise their $20 quota get to proudly place a paper brick with their name on it on a class UNICEF poster of a one-room schoolhouse, to symbolize their contribution to a Malawi school’s construction. Kids who don’t raise $20 get shamed.

Through peer pressure, UNICEF hopes to double its take from Canada (in the United States, the traditional “trick or treat” Halloween collection carries on as usual). To give itself an extra edge, UNICEF encourages parents to top up their kids’ $20 with an extra $5, by offering charitable tax receipts for donations of $25 or more. The extra $5 produces a tax credit of up to $8, courtesy of the taxpayer. Under the previous orange box system, taxpayers funded none of the kids’ collections.

The fundraising promises to do the trick – more money than ever should roll in, especially since UNICEF is steering away from controversy by promising to use half of the kid-raised money to send Malawi children to school. It doesn’t tell us how much of the other half is destined for Jihadi instruction.

Anyone who wants to help little kids this year, whether to get schooled in Malawi or to die for Allah, should send their tax-creditable donations to UNICEF-Canada, 2200 Yonge St. Suite 1100, Toronto, ON M4S 2C6. Charitable registration number 122 680 572 RR0001.

Posted in Civil Society | 2 Comments

Ontario must rescue Toronto from itself

Posted on October 20, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 20, 2006

Montreal was once Canada’s great financial centre. Then politics made Montreal unwelcoming to business and, over time, Toronto took over. Now Toronto has become hostile to business and companies are relocating outside the city and to more business-friendly Calgary. If Toronto remains hostile, Calgary will continue to outpace Toronto and could replace Toronto as the country’s business and financial capital.

This warning, the latest in a string of alarms over the diminishing standing of Toronto’s central business district, was delivered earlier this week to the Economic Club of Toronto by Juri Pill, the chairman of the Toronto Office Coalition. To address the decline, Pill asked for reforms, but not from the City of Toronto, the chief perpetrators of the damage. Pill – a man with a long and distinguished career with various arms of City of Toronto government – sensibly aimed his requests at jurisdictions elsewhere. The sad truth is that Toronto’s salvation is least likely to come from any action taken by the city government itself.

Pill’s organization is concerned about the sky-high property taxes levied on Toronto office towers, which pay two to three times more than businesses in the neighbouring 905 jurisdictions (so-named after their 905 telephone area code). Not surprisingly, Toronto businesses have been fleeing the city to avoid the tax grabs, taking jobs with them. As a result, the City of Toronto has 100,000 fewer jobs today than it did in 1990. The neighbouring 905 jurisdictions, in contrast, added 800,000 jobs.

Head office jobs, meanwhile, are moving to Calgary. Since 1999, although Toronto vastly expanded its reach by amalgamating with its immediate suburbs, Calgary has added more than twice as many new head office jobs as Toronto. Even Toronto’s suburban 905 area attracts 50% more new head office jobs than Toronto’s once-gleaming glass towers.

To arrest the property-tax-propelled job expulsions, Pill wants to level the playing field, starting close to home. He estimates Toronto businesses were overtaxed on their property by $935-million in 2005 compared with their neighbours, with city coffers receiving an excess $643-million and the provincial treasury $292-million. Pill, a pragmatist, makes no attempt to whittle away at the excesses grabbed by the apparatus of the city government he knows so well – the only level of government that he doesn’t expect to lift a finger to help. He focuses entirely on senior levels of government, and chiefly on the province of Ontario, which he hopes to convince to remove the inequity in the provincial property tax on businesses.

Far from expecting the city to take any constructive action to protect its downtown core, Pill fears the opposite: that the city will seize for itself any reductions in the provincial property tax. He thus also asks the province to strip the city of some of its powers, to limit the harm that it might otherwise inflict on itself.

It is a great fallacy to think that Toronto is ready to fully govern itself. The city is made up of a series of local fiefdoms, called wards, which local councillors rule without meaningful checks and balances. The mayor has few powers, other than the ability to place cronies in positions of power. In this unaccountable, dysfunctional environment, petty corruption thrives and rumours of major scandal circulate.

To make matters worse, taxation and fees are arbitrary, largely unrelated to the services they support. Property rights are all but non-existent. In this lawless, unprincipled governance structure, large corporations, and especially those in the financial district, become especially irresistible targets. With no one obvious to lobby, without a vote, these corporations become the geese whose golden eggs get plundered.

Worst of all, no mechanism exists through which the electorate can directly influence the direction of the city. Toronto’s electoral system is so divorced from the important issues facing the city, in fact, that election campaigns – and Toronto is in the midst of one right now – are generally uninspired and inconsequential. The current campaign is so irrelevant to the needs of Pill’ organization – and he represents property owners who together accommodate 278,000 office workers – that Pill didn’t even touch on the Toronto elections in his speech. The only election he referred to, and threatened to engage in, is the next provincial election. If Toronto is to be protected, a provincial police presence is required.

Lawrence Solomon, author of the forthcoming book Toronto Sprawls, is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Posted in City states, Regulation, Taxation | Leave a comment

For whom the road tolls

Posted on October 18, 2006 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 18, 2006

Traffic congestion costs Toronto an estimated $1.8-billion a year, and a poll of business leaders this month said fixing it should be the new city council’s first priority. Lawrence Solomon argues that toll roads are not part of the solution – they are the entire solution.

Three years ago, with urban road tolls working brilliantly in London, Toronto mayoralty candidate David Miller mused that tolling promised to be advantageous for Toronto, too. His rivals pounced on his statement and Miller meekly recanted. Road tolls held no promise after all, he decided, if they threatened his candidacy.

How does play-it-safe Mayor Miller feel about road tolls today? “I don’t believe they’re the right solution for Toronto,” he answers, adding that he has thought long and hard about toll roads over the past three years.

Does Miller pooh-pooh the successes that London and other cities have had – an end to gridlock, increased transit use, less pollution – all because of tolling?

Well, then, I ask, would he consider the more sophisticated system for Toronto? “[That’s] not on my agenda,” Miller says, ending the conversation. “You have my position.”

It’s hard to blame Miller for his caution. The last thing a politician wants, as he’s seeking re-election, is a political wrong turn that could give his election rivals an opening. Although public opinion polls show Miller comfortably in the lead, his lacklustre leadership also makes him vulnerable: According to a Toronto Star/Decima poll released last month, Miller has a modest 53% approval rating, including only 17% who are “very satisfied” with him.

What does Jane Pitfield, Miller’s chief opponent, think of roads tolls? “I’m fundamentally opposed,” she blurts, quickly re-blurting that she would consider letting the public decide the issue through a referendum, but (blurt #3) “not at this time.” Moreover, she says adamantly, Toronto should adopt the best practices from around the world, and if road tolls turned out to make sense for Toronto, she’d be all for them.

While Pitfield drives off in all directions, and Miller steers clear of controversy, Toronto’s traffic worsens, harming the economy and the environment. Cities with courageous leaders, in contrast, see solutions to traffic and their civic leaders see electoral success.

No civic leader has been more courageous than “Red” Ken Livingstone, London’s radical mayor, who ran for office in 2000 on what many considered a suicidal pledge to toll private vehicles entering downtown London. To the amazement of a press and political establishment that mocked his campaign, Londoners took his arguments to heart and voted him in. The concept then proved so successful – within a year trips by car declined 30% while those by bicycle rose by 20%, by taxi 20%, and by public transit 23% – that Livingstone ran for re-election four years later on a vow to extend the tolling system. Londoners re-elected him.

Stockholm and its mayor went down a more circuitous road. There, left- leaning Social Democrat Mayor Annika Billstrom ran for office in 2002 pledging to avoid road tolls, then overwhelmingly unpopular with the public. The national government, also led by Social Democrats, thought otherwise: Over her fierce opposition, it forced tolling on Stockholm in what became known as the Stockholm Trials, a seven-month test period from Jan. 1 of this year to July 31. After Stockholm residents had experienced the toll system first hand, they would deliver their verdict in a referendum on election day, Sept. 17.

As soon as the Trials began, and the benefits of tolling began to sink in, public opposition began to change. By June, a majority in the city had swung in favour of the tolling. By the end of the trials, only 40% of Stockholm residents opposed the toll and the merits of tolling had become so clear that even in Stockholm’s suburbs, where the opposition to road tolling had raged most, the public became evenly split – 46% for and 46% against. The public sentiment in favour of the trials was cemented on Aug. 1, one day after the Trials ended, when Stockholm’s streets once again become congested.

Needless to say, along the way Mayor Billstrom became a fierce advocate of the tolling system, and ran for re-election as its champion.

On Sept. 17, Stockholm residents voted to make the tolls permanent. They also voted Billstrom out of office.

The change in public attitudes towards tolls follows the facts on the ground. Facing a charge of 10 to 20 kronors ($1.50 to $3) to pass an electronic toll gate during weekdays between 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m., some 100,000 drivers per day decided to make lifestyle changes. Traffic declined by 22%, travelling speeds for buses and cars in the inner city increased between 30% and 50%, public transit use increased by 9%, and emissions decreased by 10% to 14%. A cross-city rush-hour trip that once took two hours, compared to 30 minutes in off-peak hours, took less than 45 minutes during the Stockholm Trials. As a side benefit, traffic injuries dropped by 10%.

In Stockholm, as in London, previous attempts at alleviating traffic congestion proved futile. The latest instance occurred several months before the trials began, when the city added 200 new buses to its fleet, boosted the number of rush-hour trains and express bus routes it operated, and installed 1,800 new park-and-ride places at stations. The expenditure – some $200-million – would have been largely wasted had the Trials not increased demand for public services: The additional transit facilities had next to no effect on the number of cars on the streets.

Other traffic-reduction measures, such as bicycle lanes and sky-high gasoline taxes, also accomplished little. Gasoline taxes were also counter-productive in fighting gridlock because they penalized vehicles that are part of the solution – including private automobiles that relieve congestion by operating on uncongested streets.

Once targetted tolls came into place, drivers had meaningful choices. Some shifted their commutes and shopping trips to different times of the day, when the streets were less congested and the tolls lower; others arrived before 6:30 a.m. or left after 6:30 p.m., to avoid the toll altogether. Others changed their routes to avoid areas subject to tolls, or put off trips that could just as easily wait. Some shared rides with others to also share the cost; still others switched to taxis or public transit or bicycles or walked. With the price signal directing traffic, almost everyone became savvier about where and when they would travel.

The savviness grows around the world. It is now the policy of the European Union government to electronically toll roads throughout the EU. In the U.K., where even rural roads are slated to be tolled by 2014, the next Queen’s Speech to Parliament is expected to discuss road tolling. In Milan, road tolling trials begin in 2007. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is soon expected to unveil a historic plan for modernizing the city, with tolling as a centrepiece. Around the world, more than 100 cities are studying how best to implement tolls.

Toronto, David Miller would have us believe, is a special case not suited to tolling. Trust me, he says, “I’ve thought about this for three years.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, a division of Energy Probe Research Foundation. He is also a director of PEMA, a non-profit with patents on electronic toll road technology.

A reader responds

Mr. Solomon‘s advocacy for tolling in Toronto makes many assumptions and fails to look at the big picture. Although he is probably right in assuming that there would be less traffic if tolls were in place on expressways, he does not describe the detrimental effects it would have on the city. I believe that tolling would further undermine efforts to stop business from relocating to the surrounding 905 area. If ending gridlock in Toronto means driving business out of the core, I guess the mission would be accomplished.

Also, residents in outlying Toronto neighbourhoods rely on expressways to get to work. If they cannot afford this tolling scheme, they would be forced to take already slow-moving roads and arterials. I call this a “two-tier” transportation system; Mr. Solomon calls it “choice.”

As a Toronto city councillor from Etobicoke, residents tell me that tolls are unacceptable. As chairwoman of the Economic Development committee, business has told me that high taxes and other costs are making them consider a move out of Toronto. Combatting gridlock through tolling schemes is not what Toronto is looking for, so no wonder mayoral candidates have backed away from it.

Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby, Toronto

The toll on business
The take from tolls
Don’t tax, toll: Presentation to the Canadian Home Builders’ Association
London unjammed
Don’t tax, toll
Toll today’s roads, don’t build more
How the free road lobby led us astray

Toll road commentary
Road safety
How to cut highways’ human toll

Posted in Toll roads, Transportation | Leave a comment

Revolution on the road

Posted on October 14, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 14, 2006

Governments in Canada and the United States sympathize with the plight of reckless automobile drivers: To save them from the exorbitant automobile insurance rates needed to provide them and other risky drivers with coverage, our government regulators order insurance companies to artificially lower the premiums that they and otherwise risky drivers, such as teens and the very old, would otherwise face. To pay for these subsidies for bad drivers, the government forces insurance companies to overcharge good drivers. All this occurs below the radar of automobile owners, who are kept in the dark about what drives auto insurance increases.

The government regulations accomplish their goal: Rates for risky drivers, though still high, are depressed enough to make sure bad drivers remain on the road. And despite the higher fatalities and higher premiums, good drivers complain little and know less.

Soon all this will change, thanks to a revolution that just began on the roads of Great Britain. Premiums for drivers liable to do harm will soar while those for good drivers will decline. Rates for responsible young drivers will especially decline. Accident rates will plummet. And all drivers will no longer be blind as to what drives insurance premium rates.

The revolutionary is Norwich Union, one of the U.K.’s largest auto insurers, who last week provided the British driving public with the option of switching to a pay-per-mile (and pay-your-own-way) system in which satellites track the movements of their vehicles. After a two-year test-drive of the scheme involving 5,000 auto owners, and a smaller trial of 18 to 23-year-olds that began in 2005, the company is convinced that at least half of Britain’s drivers will be switching to a pay-per-mile policy. That estimate may be conservative: Norwich Union’s market survey of the British public found more than two-thirds would consider switching.

The British system of auto insurance is already the world’s most efficient, charging on the basis of a host of market factors – not just the driver’s age and accident record but also where he lives and where he parks his car. As a result, British insurers determine risks accurately and the British public benefits from low insurance rates for good drivers and low accident rates for all.

To determine risks more accurately still, and thus further lower premiums and accident rates, Norwich Union now adds three other factors for those willing to place a tracking device in their vehicles: the distance a car travels, the types of road it travels on and the times at which the traveling occurs. A low-risk 40-year-old could pay as little as 1 pence per mile to drive on a divided highway at 2 p.m., and 1.5 pence on the same highway at 8 a.m. during the morning rush hour, when driving is more likely to lead to an accident. That same driver would pay seven times as much to drive at 2 p.m. on a slow city street, which is surprisingly more accident-prone, and eight times as much on that same street in the morning rush hour. Other types of roads fetch other rates: A two-lane highway, for example, would cost this driver 1.5 pence at off-peak and 2.5 pence at peak times.

Norfolk’s actuarially based system sends price signals to those who use the road, registering for them in their pocketbook what’s safe and what’s not.

The pocketbooks of young drivers get the sharpest signal.

To drive at a peak time, which for 18- to 23-year-olds falls between 11 pm and 6 am, costs a whopping (ps)1 per mile. These rates reflect government data, which shows that young drivers are 10 times more likely to have an accident, and 56% more likely to suffer an injury, during the wee hours of the morning. At any other time, young drivers – less likely to have been partying or among others who are careless – pay 5 pence per mile.

These rates will not only save young lives – during Norwich Union’s trial, accidents fell by 20% among the 1,500 young drivers who took part – but money, too. Norwich estimates that 18- to 23-year-olds who sign up for the pay-per-mile policies could pay 30% to 50% less for their insurance than they do now. Moreover, because insurance will have suddenly become much more affordable for the young, responsible young drivers will now find choices opening up for them: Some will be able to travel to a job inaccessible by public transit; others might choose a better school that has suddenly come into range.

More generally, we’ll all be receiving an education into what drives insurance rates, and what needs to be done to reduce carnage on the road. Once Norwich Union has some operating experience, it will refine rates further – older drivers may have rates tailored for them, for example, to encourage safe and discourage unsafe driving, and lower the cost of driving in the process.

Because price signals haven’t been showing the way, we have been driving on needlessly unsafe streets, and in the process paying prohibitive rates, without realizing why. As put by Simon Machell, chief executive of Norwich Union: “People will start to understand exactly what they’re paying for.”

Posted in Automobile | Leave a comment

Small-scale plants run rings around nuclear

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 29, 2006

‘If we don’t go nuclear, what type of energy will meet our future energy needs,” I’m often asked. “Do you think fringe fuels such as solar energy can take the place of nuclear? Or windmills? Bio fuels? Small dams? Tidal power? Burning garbage?”

My answer is “all of the above.” It rarely satisfies my questioner, who thinks I’m evading the question; neither does the question, which reflects a historical one-size fits-all bias, sit well with me.

For the last century, in most of the developed world, the only providers of power have been government-backed monopolies, both public and private. Being monopolies, they didn’t need to worry unduly about pleasing either their customers or their suppliers. Their primary concern was pleasing themselves.

Convenience ruled. When Ontario Hydro tired of managing its small hydro dams around the province, it dynamited or otherwise decommissioned hundreds of them. The far-flung dams were a hassle to run from afar, and also administratively expensive to manage from its Toronto head office. Hydro favoured big, centralized coal plants then, just as it would later favour big, centralized nuclear plants.

Likewise, other utilities in other parts of the continent closed down the windmills that once were common, and squelched independent power producers small and large who wanted to bring power to market. Among the larger concerns that they squelched was Fiat, the automotive giant, which in the 1980s manufactured home power plants able to run on any liquid or gaseous fuel.

The central planners at the state monopolies favoured a few large central generating plants over countless small ones, for administrative ease. Yet electricity production is inherently decentralized; different regions have different fuels at the ready, different industries have different power wants and, often, power-producing abilities of their own. The monopolies have had great success in suppressing decentralized power systems. But despite the restraints, small-scale power plants remained so attractive that they not only survived, they thrived, gaining market share against their heavily subsidized nuclear competitor.

Add up all the output from the world’s small-scale power plants and you find that they now total more than the world’s output from nuclear reactors. You also find that they are growing faster than nuclear plants – in 2004, they added about three times as much output, and six times as much generating capacity, as nuclear power added to the world’s electricity systems.

The gap will only increase in future. According to estimates from official bodies such as the International Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association, compiled by Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, within five years new nuclear additions will be dwarfed by any number of small-scale power technologies, including solar photovoltaics (the same technology that powers calculators). Small-scale cogeneration and wind power, which are becoming large players in the world electricity market, will each provide 20 to 30 times as much new capacity as nuclear plants.

In many countries, small-scale power plants have already made their presence felt big time. They now provide half of the electricity generated in Denmark, almost 40% of the generation in the Netherlands and Finland, 30% of Russia’s and between 15% and 20% of the electricity generated in Germany, Japan, Poland and China. Most remarkably, these large market shares came about despite resistance from the power monopolies: Some of them are token projects, built by the monopoly to preempt private competitors who were seeking permission to enter the electricity business, or in response to public pressure; some are public-private partnerships that had to surmount monopoly opposition; and some of them aren’t utility projects at all, but free-market power plants developed by businesses capitalizing on cost-saving opportunities to provide power for their own needs.

While many of the monopoly-built plants required subsidies, many more were economical yet rejected by the monopoly. Without the monopoly utility deciding who can produce power and who can’t, small-scale private producers would dominate the marketplace. Large buildings and shopping centres would routinely be generating their own power, just as they now produce their own heat. Just about the only technology that wouldn’t have a future in a de-monopolized, de-subsidized power system would be nuclear power.

Lawrence Solomon, author of the forthcoming book Toronto Sprawls, is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.; www.urban-renaissance.org.

Posted in Energy | Leave a comment