Urban Renaissance Institute

Without regard to race, colour, creed or breed

Posted on May 20, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 20, 2006

Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice will soon decide whether the province’s ban on pit bulls is constitutional. This high profile case unites legendary libertarians and lefties – specifically, National Post columnist George Jonas and jurist Clayton Ruby – in their attack on the provincial legislation.

To both, this is a matter of rights, a case involving discrimination against dogs. I fear that others may find them persuasive, and that our Bill of Rights may some day be amended to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, colour, creed or breed.

“Should any specific breed of dog be banned?” Jonas asked eminent veterinarian Mark Spiegle, past president of the Veterinarian College of Ontario. Dr. Spiegle replied no. “It was the kind of ‘no’ you’d expect in reply to the question: ‘Should any specific human race be banned?’ from a person who knows anything about human beings.”

Jonas concluded that “Banning ‘pit bulls’ to eliminate dog attacks makes about as much sense as banning Irishmen to eliminate bar-room fights. … There are bad breeders. There are bad masters. There are even bad dogs. There are no bad breeds.”

Ruby argues a similar line. Like Jonas, he doesn’t object to punishing bad dogs or their masters; he objects to punishing either a specific breed or cross-breeds such as pit bulls (mixes that might include the American pit bull terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier and the American Staffordshire terrier). Breed-specific legislation (BSL) does not focus on “dangerousness, but rather on breed and breed is not a sufficient enough marker of dangerousness to pass constitutional muster,” he stated.

Opposition to BSL is a growing movement. A large literature has by now developed around the evils of BSL, some of it reasoned, some of it not (in dog circles, many equate the extinguishing of a breed with ethnic cleansing or genocide). Courts in various U.S. states have ruled breed-specific laws to be unconstitutional (some make exceptions for pit bulls) for denying pet owners equal protection and due process. Legislators are proposing bans on breed-specific laws, just as they have objected to demeaning animals in circus use.

Pet owners once rated no such rights, and pets no such status. Pets and other animals were property, even if protected against cruelty. Now they are a new frontier in a relativist movement that has extended rights from humans to animals, and disturbingly equates wrongs perpetrated against one with the other. In 1993, only one law school in North America taught animal law. Today, more than 40 do so, including the University of Victoria, University of Alberta and McGill University.

The pit bull controversy, and especially breed specific legislation, has become the chief battleground in the movement to endow animals with inalienable rights. These advocates are barking up the wrong tree.

Laws should be breed specific because breeds, being man-made, vary wildly. We have bred dogs for size, for strength, for speed, for colour, for stature. We have bred them to chase animals into fox holes and up trees, to pull sleds and herd sheep. We have bred them to guard houses and to track criminals. And we have bred them to fight other dogs and to kill.

Pit bulls trace their ancestry to bulldogs and terriers bred by English butchers to fasten their jaws upon the noses of cattle destined for slaughter, and not let go. With the cattle thus immobilized, the butcher would smash its head with a mallet. The breed’s ferocity and exceptional jaws – rated at 1,800 pounds of pressure per square inch – led to its development as a fighting dog. Pit bulls fought each other in a pit, surrounded by frenzied spectators. After England outlawed the sport in 1835, it went underground, where it continues to this day. Underground garages now clandestinely host pit bull fights weekend nights in our suburbs; in rural settings, they might occur in a barn or the open air.

There are bad breeds, and bad breed combinations, such as the ones that produce pit bulls. The pit bull and other fighting dogs have been bred, and continue to be bred, as bloodthirsty animals. The wonderful disposition that the pit bull exhibits is also a matter a breeding: Because the risk of damage by a pit bull is so great, they have been bred to respond well to those they trust. “Never hit your dog,” warned a column in American Game Dog Times, one of many publications that promote dog fighting. ” You are going to be handling this dog in the pit someday. He must trust your hands, not fear them.”

Because of the pit bull’s threat to the public, and especially because of the disfigurement or death that can accompany an attack, some 30 jurisdictions in Canada, and hundreds around the world, have passed BSL legislation. Where the legislation requires dangerous dog owners to acquire breed-specific liability insurance, the insurance premium for a pit bull often exceeds $1,000 a year – the judgment of the marketplace of the risk that a pit bull poses.

Critics of BSL claim a pit-bull ban will be futile – the taste for dangerous dogs will merely shift to Rottweilers or Akitas. Perhaps, but why would that matter? Other inherently dangerous breeds can likewise be regulated. More importantly, we would be distinguishing between good and bad, and rights and wrongs..

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.probeinternational.org

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Get Ontario off the property-tax roller coaster

Posted on May 6, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 6, 2006

Mike Harris was one of the greatest redistributionists in Ontario history. He left behind a self-perpetuating property-tax mess, and also the highest property-tax regime in the Western world. Now property owners have had enough and Harris’s Liberal successor, Dalton McGuinty, vows to clean it up.

Harris’s perpetual redistribution came via his Current Value Assessment, a property-tax system whose levies bounce around with the booms and busts in real estate markets, but with one big difference. Taxes don’t just depend on the change in your property’s value; they also depend on the relative change in your property’s value relative to those in neighbouring districts. When property values boom, such quirks in the Current Value Assessment system will cause property taxes to actually drop in neighbourhoods that experienced below-average increases, while property taxes in areas that see above-average increases can go through the roof. Likewise, when property values collapse, wiping away much of the net worth of people and businesses, Current Value Assessments have a piling-on effect: They can mercilessly jack up property taxes when people can least afford it.

Current Value Assessment is perpetually redistributing, and in unpredictable ways. This is random tax redistribution, dumber than a doorknob, and far, far worse than the darling of most redistributionists, the progressive income tax.

The progressive income tax, for all its faults, has a compelling logic in taxing people in proportion to their ability to pay: In lean years, when incomes shrink, the taxman takes less than in abundant times, when higher taxes can be drawn from higher earnings. But where’s the logic in varying taxes on illiquid real estate assets, whose appreciation or depreciation from one year to the next says nothing about the owner’s ability to pay?

Those especially gouged by this system include pensioners whose modest inner-city homes happen to be situated in an area that’s suddenly gone trendy. Or small businessmen, who happen to have a down year in an up neighbourhood, and see the property tax finish them off. As the Canadian Federation of Independent Business put it to the McGuinty government earlier this year: “These profit-insensitive taxes accelerate business failures in rough times. Every year, thousands of money-losing small businesses draw down capital to pay these taxes. A disincentive to business formation, property taxes also prevent home-based businesses from growing into commercial or industrial properties.”

Even aside from the many horror stories, Current Value Assessment destabilizes businesses by creating uncertainty. Companies will naturally hedge against the possibility of outsized tax increases, making these taxes an unseen sink on the economy.

Because the Mike Harris property-tax system is so senseless, the movement against it is growing. The Coalition After Property Tax Reform, a province-wide alliance of 700 ratepayers’ groups representing 500,000 voters, demands that the Ontario government cap property-tax assessment increases. Its approach is understandable: In this taxation year, more than half of Ontario property owners received assessments that increased by 10% or more, one-fifth saw assessments increase more than 20%, and some saw their assessments increase by 50%.

Their demands for change received a boost from Ontario’s ombudsman, who, acting on numerous complaints from homeowners bitter about the provincial assessment system, decided in 2005 to investigate. In a report released a month ago, ombudsman Andre Marin confirmed that the system is broken, highlighting the arbitrariness and illogicality of the bureaucracy that annually assesses 4.4 million Ontario properties valued at $1.1-trillion. He proposed almost two dozen reforms. Numerous politicians, from MPPs to mayors to rural reeves, also clamour for change.

Most want a cap of some kind on assessments, a repeat of the “hard cap” solution that Mike Harris was forced into after the enormity of his error became apparent. Ottawa Mayor Bob Chiarelli now argues for an absolute freeze; the ratepayers’ coalition would settle for annual increases limited to 5%. McGuinty, who came to office promising that “Ontario Liberals will uphold the ‘hard cap’ and will work with small business to fix the property-tax mess,” now opposes a cap, possibly because he, himself, had removed the cap in one of his many broken promises.

Instead, McGuinty proposes improving on the cap, and going further than the ombudsman’s recommendations. “What we intend to do is to take our time, to approach this in a way that is both thoughtful and responsible and to ensure that we get this right,” he said.

What he should do, if he truly wants to get this right, is abolish or, at a minimum, vastly scale back this regressive tax that gets nothing right. It is neither progressive nor does it relate to the actual cost of delivering services. Thanks to Harris’s reforms, Ontario jurisdictions – both the province and municipalities – now milk the property tax much more than any other jurisdictions in the Western world. Property taxes account for 3.7% of Ontario’s GDP, 25% higher than the rest of Canada or the United States, about twice as much as Japan or New Zealand, four times as much as Scandinavian countries and 10 times as much as Germany or Switzerland. Rather than depending on this outdated tax, the rest of the developed world prefers income taxes, sales taxes and user fees, alone or in some combination. Any are preferable to a system based on property tax.

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 Other, Taxation | Leave a comment

1 billion Americans

Posted on April 21, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 21, 2006

“Living next to you,” Pierre Elliot Trudeau famously said in a speech to the National Press Club in the United States, “is like sleeping with an elephant; no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

The elephant is getting a lot bigger. And we can’t help but be affected.

The official population of the United States – 275 million as of the last census in 2000 and 299 million according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s population clock today – is increasing faster than that of any other Western country – by about 1.2% per year, or 3.5 million people. U.S. immigration is at its highest level since 1900 and foreign-born Americans, at 10% of the population, are at their highest level since 1930.

With each new census, the rate of growth edges up. In 1989, the census projected 300 million Americans by mid-century, with its population dropping. In 1992, the census bureau revised its projection to 393 million, in 1996 to 394 million, in 2000 census to 404 million Americans and in the interim 2004 census to 420 million Americans. That’s a 40% increase in a mere 15 years.

The U.S. census doesn’t ordinarily project to the end of the century, but in its 2000 census it projected a U.S. population approaching 600 million in a middle-growth scenario and, in its high-growth scenario, a U.S. population of 1.2 billion – as populous as China today.

That middle-growth scenario, which assumes that immigrants will come to the U.S. in much smaller numbers than they have in the past, is wildly implausible. The U.S. is, has been, and will continue to be the destination of choice for the world’s migrants. A 2005 Pew survey of Mexicans found that 46% of the country’s adults – about 32 million people – would move to the U.S. if they had the means and the opportunity, half of them illegally if necessary. The same survey found that 35% of Mexican college graduates would move, even for work at a job below their qualifications; many of them also said they’d be willing to come illegally. That makes the high-growth scenario, which has the number of annual immigrants rising as the U.S. population rises, not only look more realistic but maybe even on the low side.

Despite intense U.S. concern over border security following 9/11, under a new bipartisan immigration bill that is now before the U.S. Congress, immigration would become easier still. Some estimate that the new law would result in some 30 million additional immigrants in the next decade. The numbers grow further if the U.S. also grants an amnesty to its current illegal immigrants, generally estimated by most at 11 million to 12 million. Others claim the country’s current illegals could number 30 million or more. When president Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants in 1986, three times the expected number came forward.

The U.S. is on a roll, following its historical tried-and-true formula for economic prosperity through rapid immigration growth. Abraham Lincoln’s unassailable logic: “time alone relieves a debtor nation, so long as its population increases faster than unpaid interest accumulates on its debt.” In 1862, Lincoln assured the country in his annual message to Congress that the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves could easily be financed through immigration: “At [the turn of the century] we shall probably have a hundred millions of people to share the burden, rather than 31 millions, as now. And not only so, but the increase of our population may be expected to continue for a long time after that period, as rapidly as before; because our territory will not have become full. . . . Our abundant room – our broad national homestead – is our ample resource. Were our territory as limited as are the British Isles, very certainly our population could not expand as stated. Instead of receiving the foreign born, as now, we should be compelled to send part of the native-born away. But such is not our condition.”

Neither is that the condition today. As put by the Census Bureau’s principal author, Frederick Hollmann, “Our projections in 2100 will give us a population density one-quarter that of the United Kingdom. We’ll still be a sparsely populated country among the industrialized countries of the world.”

Canada should take heed. We, too, are sparsely populated and underperforming as a result. Our native-born population has a low fertility rate and we are consistently failing to reach our immigration targets. If we don’t open our borders, and make of our country a land of opportunity, with each passing year we will command a diminishing share of the North American population, enjoy an ever-diminishing importance and be ever more susceptible when the elephant rolls over.

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New policies bring more Toronto sprawl

Posted on March 26, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
March 26, 2006

A Toronto megalopolis, 150 kilometres in girth, will be born of the Ontario provincial budget announced this week. The budget’s big-ticket transportation projects will drive this outcome through measures that will undermine public transit in the city while accelerating suburban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.

The Toronto subway system, rather than being expanded in the city’s highly populated and underserved downtown areas, will instead be revamped to serve as a commuter rail line, extending to a rural highway in a regional municipality north of Toronto. The province expects as many as 100,000 extra suburban trips will be made daily on the new subsidized service, giving a big boost to suburban development.

In the sprawling suburban city of Mississauga, the province will subsidize the new Mississauga Transitway, a $259-million commuter project projected to carry up to 10,000 people per hour during peak periods.

In neighbouring Brampton, the province will subsidize the $280-million Brampton Acceleride commuter project, while in York Region, whose fast-growing population is up 50% in the last decade, the province will subsidize VIVA, the new express bus service connecting communities in York Region with each other and with the city of Toronto.

All told, the province estimates it will subsidize an additional 42 million transit trips, mostly involving suburban traffic, mostly enabling the suburbs to spread more quickly.

The province claims that many suburbanites will abandon their cars for transit – and undoubtedly some will. But there’s no fear that suburban highways will become underutilized. Suburban vehicles will soon materialize to clog any temporarily freed-up road space that becomes available and, to make doubly sure that automobiles don’t lose ground in the suburbs, the province has been aggressively expanding the highway system outside Toronto. This is the best suburb-boosting budget since 1953, when the province created Metropolitan Toronto to develop the city’s rural reaches, also by subsidizing roads and transit services that weren’t viable in low-density communities.

The budget’s biggest boost to the suburbs, although it isn’t a big-ticket budgetary item, is the announcement of the new Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, a monopoly body that will control buses, commuter trains, streetcars, RT, subways and regional roads throughout the Greater Toronto Area and beyond. The goal seems laudable: to reduce gridlock and encourage public transit use from Oshawa in the east to Burlington in the west. As a convenience to customers who now must transfer from one public transit company to another, and deal with a different fare system whenever they do, the new GTTA plans to use “smart card” technology that would seamlessly service commuters from Oshawa in the east to Burlington in the west.

Smart-card technology is long overdue and a sensible move. In the United Kingdom, where it became most advanced after public transit was deregulated and then privatized two decades ago, smart-card technology has proved a convenience that helps London’s many transit companies compete effectively with the car. The GTTA, which will rely upon U.K. smart-card technology, will inevitably use it to overcharge urbanites to subsidize suburbanites. We’ve gone this route before.

Before the province created Metropolitan Toronto, the Toronto Transportation Commission was the most successful public transit company on the continent, providing excellent service and running its bus, streetcar and trolley routes on a money-making basis. With the creation of Metro and the conversion of an independent TTC into a politician-run agency, business discipline gave way to political manipulation. Politicians began to redraw TTC routes based on where their voting constituents resided, rather than where paying customers could be found. The result was ruin.

To please politicians intent on pleasing their constituents, the TTC compromised in maintenance and cut back service on profitable city routes in order to service unprofitable suburban ones. Urban customers balked at the rough ride they were now subjected to and deserted the system. In the end, virtually all TTC routes became money losers and the TTC became the welfare case that we see today.

As bad as the TTC has become, it is still the giant in the region. The TTC’s ridership of 430 million passengers a year is several times all other GTA transit systems combined and its 2,500-vehicle fleet and other resources are prime prospects for plunder by regional politicians. With the TTC under the sway of a regional authority, rather than Toronto politicians, it will necessarily be made to serve regional interests. TTC resources will increasingly be put at the service of suburbanites, degrading its performance in the city and causing city dwellers to abandon it. To make up for lost revenue, the city will raise taxes, forcing businesses to flee. To get those taxes back into city coffers, politicians will then turn to amalgamations.

This is how the city of Toronto came to absorb the suburbs that were once part of Metropolitan Toronto. This us how a Toronto of the future will come to absorb the suburbs of the GTTA.

Posted in Causes | Leave a comment

Immigration carrots and sticks

Posted on March 23, 2006 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
March 23, 2006

Immigrant criminals and immigrant terrorists are giving immigration a bad name. Stephen Harper should live up to his law-and-order image and throw these miscreants out of the country. They do not aspire to the Canadian dream. They do not contribute to society. Canadians owe them nothing.

At the same time, Harper should live up to his family-values work-ethic image and open the door wide to immigration. “New Canadians represent the essence of the Canadian experience and the Canadian dream,” he said prior to the election. “New Canadians bring deeply held values to our shared country. Things like the importance of honesty and hard work, a commitment to children and to family life, and a respect for law and order. These are Canadian values, and these are the core values that I will bring to a new Conservative government.”

Here is how Harper should bring the immigration carrots and the immigration sticks to bear.

First the carrots.

To attract family-oriented immigrants, Harper should end policies that discriminate against immigrants who want to come with their families, or reunite with their families. Through arbitrary restrictions that discourage relatives, the Canadian government’s immigration policy discriminates precisely against those for whom family is foremost, even immigrants who have bona-fide sponsors in Canada, able and willing to assume financial responsibility for them.

The federal government discriminates against family members for one reason above all others: the cost of providing them with health care. Harper can end this poison pill in our health-care system, and make good on his election vow to see that Canadian licensing bodies recognize the foreign credentials of qualified practitioners, by negotiating programs with provincial licensing bodies to fast-track licensing of immigrant doctors who run immigrant practices. The licensing bodies have been foot-dragging on providing full accreditation, in part because immigrant doctors lack the bedside manner and communication skills needed to serve the native-born Canadian population. While such factors may justify going slow on giving newcomers responsibility for the care of the native born, they also argue for making haste in the case of foreign physicians serving familiar immigrant populations, pending their full accreditation.

As other carrots, the federal government should drop its attempts to tell immigrants where to live within Canada. Coercing immigrants to settle outside the major cities, which have the sizeable ethnic communities required to support local ethnic economies, as well as provide friends and marriage partners, is condescending and counterproductive in increasing immigration. Likewise, the government should drop requirements that immigrants land on our shores, their fortunes already made, with money to invest. The typical millionaire in North America is an immigrant who came to our shores with little or no money, and no fear of hard work.

The sticks should be clubs. While immigrants on average have crime rates far lower than those of the native born, immigrants from some Latin American and Caribbean countries far exceed the Canadian average. But regardless of country of birth, deportations of criminals should be the rule, not the exception, and they should be carried out quickly, not dragged out over a matter of years.

To discourage criminals and terrorists from gaining the protections of citizenship, and to make Canadian citizenship a prize worthy of effort, Canada should require immigrants to reside here for 10 exemplary years before becoming eligible for citizenship. Criminal or terrorist conduct should not only lead to deportation, it should also cause harm to a sponsor through loss of a bond, to give pause to anyone who would lightly sponsor a friend or relative about whom he harboured doubt. As a corollary, sponsors with good track records, and upright reputations, should have their friends and relatives fast-tracked. Rewarding those with good judgment, and holding accountable those who have served Canada poorly, will create a virtuous selection process, leading Canada to be increasingly populated by those with good values and depopulated of those who would do us harm.

Sticks would help would-be immigrants by reducing blanket opposition to immigration based on fear of crime. Three in four Canadian city dwellers are now afraid to walk in their neighbourhoods at night, and one in three is “very concerned” that a member of his household will be the victim of a crime. A “good-riddance-to-bad-rubbish” policy will reduce valid concerns that now keep immigrants out.

Such a policy would also serve Canada’s existing citizenry well. Because we now don’t offer immigrants the opportunities they desire, too few come and of those who do, too many leave. Without improving our record, the consequences would be dire: Economic growth will slow and, as the population ages, the diminishing number of young will balk at paying benefits for the elderly. Most of all, the work force will become rapidly depleted, pushing up the cost of labour and thus the cost of living. Harper understands better than most: “All evidence suggests that Canada will only be able to meet its current and future work-force needs by recruiting and taking full advantage of the skills of foreign-trained professionals and trades-people,” he stated. “This is the most important challenge we must overcome in the area of immigration.”

Job No. 1 in attracting the immigrants we need is repelling those we don’t want.