Urban Renaissance Institute

China breathes freer

Posted on September 10, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 10, 2005

Globalization, and Chinese-style corporatism, are profoundly affecting China’s environment. China’s smokestack industries are booming like never before, China’s roads are clogged with private vehicles for the first time, China’s air is cleaner than it has been in decades and the Chinese people are better able to voice their preferences than at almost any other time in their 4,000-year history. Totalitarian rule can do good when turned to a good cause.

Twenty-one years ago, during a month of travelling in China, I was struck by the appalling state of its environment. The air was foul, the urban surroundings all but devoid of greenery, the health of the population compromised by almost comical conditions. To heat their city homes, for example, Chinese residents burned coal debris compressed to puck size, and then exhausted the soot through stovepipes that exited the front of their homes into the faces of passersby.

CREDIT: China Photos; Getty Images
Smog is still visible in China, but
conditions are immeasurably improved.

Twenty-one years ago, storms carrying dust from distant erosion, along with coal soot and other pollution, was so severe that hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Chinese routinely wore surgical masks when out in public. In that era, when the Chinese government touted forest conservation, it ordered that not one twig be left behind in a national drive to harvest merchantable wood. In that era, Chinese males were extraordinarily heavy cigarette smokers – indoor spaces reeked of tobacco.

This last summer, during another month in China, I saw an environment, and a people, transformed. Smoking in China’s major cities is in great decline, perhaps comparable to smoking in the cities of Europe today and those of North America five years ago. In local restaurants, for example, although smoking is not banned, only one table out of 10 might have smokers. Like North America, smoking is banned in buses, elevators and many other confined spaces.

The city air is far cleaner, too, thanks to growing bans on coal burning and the growing use of clean fuels such as natural gas and cleaner techniques such as district heating. Greenery abounds in many major cities, which now have budgets for landscaping. To arrest the erosion, the result of desertification following deforestation, the government has imposed logging bans and is investing in reforestation.

International trade is behind much of this improvement in the environment: China, as a signatory to the World Trade Organization, is required to comply with pollution-prevention regulations. Multinationals execute much of the improvements: Typically, a Western multinational will purchase a decrepit and polluting Chinese plant and upgrade it to Western standards, in the process slashing its emissions. In some cases, especially in the case of curbs on the automobile, the Chinese are ahead of the West. Shanghai runs a weekly auction in which owners of new private vehicles now bid some 45,000 yuan ($6,550) for the right to drive their car on Shanghai roads. After a public hearing next week, Shenzhen will decide whether parking fees should be higher during peak hours and in congested places.

China’s environmental performance still lags far behind the West’s – the surgical masks haven’t entirely disappeared and ruinous megaprojects still get built more often than not. But for the first time, the public has a right to bring complaints about a government project to public authorities, improving the chances that grievances will be addressed and compensation paid. That forces a project’s backers to incorporate these otherwise hidden costs into their cost-benefit analysis. The ability of developers to ignore hidden costs is among the chief reasons that uneconomic developments are commonplace throughout China.

For the first time, too, environmental groups are beginning to flex their muscle. Earlier this week, 61 of them signed a petition demanding the release of an environmental impact assessment for a proposed dam. “Dam builders should not externalize the huge costs of dam construction on affected people, the public, the nation’s finances and future generations,” they wrote. Had they dared do so in the past, they would have been quickly jailed.

China’s great advances in environmental protection are unlikely to continue for long, however. The government’s toleration of dissent is limited to the environmental sphere, narrowly defined, and then only to a point. Without dissent in all areas of society, the feedback required for informed environmental and economic decisions is distorted, leading to waste and environmental harm.

China’s environmental progress to date, in fact, is impressive only in comparison to China’s recent past. The country had hit rock bottom following Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a time of immense failures in agriculture and elsewhere that led to environmental ruin and widespread starvation. Almost any approach would have led to improvement.

Mao’s successors, for their next round of environmental miracles, plan to rely on exhortations to convince the citizenry to conserve energy. The exhortations, in energy and elsewhere, will count for naught if they don’t relax their grip on society and let people through free markets and the rule of law replace decisions by state fiat. The environmental miracle workers, in the end, can only be the public at large.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute; www.urban.probeinternational.org

Posted in Regulation | Leave a comment

Government gruel

Posted on June 4, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 4, 2005

Our federal government once ran a muscular military, packing great punch per capita in two world wars and making generations of Canadians proud. Then it merged our tradition-rich army, navy and air force, neutered the resulting “unified” force, converted it to peacekeeping and finally to a laughingstock that rivals tiny nations like Luxembourg. We no longer need a federal government to militarily protect Canada’s sovereignty because we have outsourced that responsibility to the Americans.

Our federal government once beckoned the peoples of the world to our shores. Our Minister of the Interior ran advertising campaigns in Europe to lure settlers for our west, and sent lecturers to U.S. fall fairs and to the British Isles to extol our virtues. We no longer have a federal government that opens up the country – our government is more intent on keeping foreigners out than welcoming them in to help build Canada.

Our federal government once dreamed big dreams, championed a railroad across the continent, brought the west into Confederation, and confidently sought economic union with the United States. “The new century is Canada’s,” said Sir Wilfrid Laurier a century ago; near mid-century, an outward-looking Stephen Leacock affirmed a Canadian view that Canada would become a world power, not least because of our proximity to the United States, which has not “overshadowed or endangered our institutions.” Who today is stirred by Canada, who today sees Canada as more than a sum of provincial grievances, and the federal government as more than a cringing and corrupt arbiter?

At the same time that the federal government has pulled back from the national and international arena, and let wither the constitutional powers that gave it relevance and legitimacy, it has pushed itself into provincial areas of responsibility. Through equalization grants, the federal government directly funds provincial treasuries. Through grants to social welfare programs, the federal government has become a dominant player in health care, an area that consumes some 40% of provincial budgets. Through federal government growth areas such as child-care programs and transfers to municipalities, the federal government will further fund provincial realms and further blur the respective roles of governments.

Through it all, the federal government is remaking itself into a kind of Provincial Regulator, a Superintendent of Spending in the provincial realm. Put another way, the federal government is becoming an adjunct of the provinces that also vies with them to control provincial policies and the delivery of provincial programs. The governmental gruel that comes of merging different levels of government also includes the municipalities. Where once the federal government pursued a scrupulous separation – after World War I, despite an arguable right to provide aid for returning servicemen, the federal government refrained from joint housing programs with municipalities – it now aggressively pursues municipal ties. Provinces, too, have lost inhibitions about inviting federal help. The Ontario government recently agreed to let the City of Toronto negotiate directly with the federal government.

The gruel thickens with new electoral rules to promote proportional representation that most Canadian jurisdictions are considering. A leading model for reform at the federal level involves giving control of federal seats to provincial wings of federal parties, a change thinkable by its many proponents only because it would be consistent with the federal abdication that has already occurred. This electoral reform would merely ratify the course we’re on and reinforce the federal government’s provincial character, as federal and provincial governments more formally serve common constituencies, and more explicitly acquire common interests.

The federal and provincial governments have been melding together in fact if not in name. At some point, they may meld together in name as well, particularly since some provinces set up trade missions abroad and already engage in foreign aid. To a troubling degree, the provinces also control the trade file, tolerating free trade deals with the U.S., Mexico, Chile, Israel and other countries around the world but not within the national boundaries of Canada. Whether we still have a viable federal government is debatable. That we’ll lose it if we don’t use it is not.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute; www.urban.probeinternational.org.

Posted in Public transit | Leave a comment

Tolls gather speed

Posted on May 28, 2005 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 28, 2005

In almost every country on earth, road networks have been bastions of government control, operating outside the rules of supply and demand, resistant to technological improvements that would lower cost and boost efficiency, and all but impervious to market forces.

CREDIT: Peter Redman, National Post
Toronto’s Highway 407 is one of Canada’s
few toll roads. Others have been cancelled.

No longer. Roads – once the stereotype of pork-barrel politics for favoured constituents – now lead the way in bringing market forces to bear on government waste and inefficiency. The change is occurring at breakneck speed, and almost everywhere.

Most of the market-oriented reforms involve user fees for the use of roads, designed to open road systems to the laws of supply and demand and ration roads by price, rather than by congestion. Such reforms came to Jakarta earlier this week, when the Indonesian capital’s city council endorsed a government plan to build 85 kilometres of inner city toll roads. The roads, modelled on Singapore’s successful electronic road-charging system, would relieve traffic congestion and encourage foreign investment, the Jakarta government explained, adding that taxpayers wouldn’t be at risk because the private sector would wholly finance the project.

This reform also came to Stockholm this week, where the government decided to test a road congestion charge for six months, starting in January, 2006, followed by a referendum to decide if the charge should be made permanent. Modelled on London’s popular congestion charge system, which charges drivers a (ps)5 ($11.45) fee to enter or leave downtown during business hours, the Stockholm plan would charge drivers between 10 and 20 kronor each time they passed a toll portal, depending on the time of day, to a maximum of 60 kronor ($10.30) per day.

The London approach also has recent converts in Tel Aviv, where the Israeli government decided to put out tenders to charge vehicles entering the city, and in dozens of other cities around the globe, which are likewise planning to use markets and technology to end the waste that comes of free roads.

Metropolitan regions, too, are adopting market reforms. The State of Virginia signed a $900-million deal with two private companies a month ago to build, maintain and operate two toll lanes for the Washington, D.C., area’s chronically congested Capital Beltway. Taxpayers won’t have to put up a dime – the companies will recover the costs of the project from the toll fees, which will be negligible during off-peak hours and hefty at peak times. Regional planners in Virginia – and in neighbouring Maryland, too – see this as the first of several new toll roads in the region. Denver-area motorists, meanwhile, will begin paying peak-time tolls of up to $3.25 later this year to travel the I-25.

The Greater London area is also preparing to toll highways. Under satellite-driven schemes proposed by the government’s Commission for Integrated Transport, drivers will be paying up to (ps)1.30 per mile at peak times on the busiest roads, with revenues used to finance roads and public transit, and to lower tax bills. The U.K.’s opposition Tories have a counter-proposal that would see private companies build roads in order to relieve congestion and increase driving speeds to 80 miles per hour, from the current 70 mph. It, too, would vary tolls by time of day and congestion. Earlier this month, commuters in the greater Minneapolis area began paying fares that range from 25 cents in off-peak periods to $8 at the peak.

Some U.S. states are moving to state-wide tolling. In Oregon, road tests begin this fall for a system that would have satellites track the distances that vehicles travel, charging them by the mile to add discipline to automobile driving. If the tests go according to plan, all Oregon drivers will be paying by the mile by 2007. In California, legislation was tabled this month to allow public or private entities to build toll roads. Californians need roads because they “can’t get from place to place on little fairy wings,” stated Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The drive for toll roads has also reached national governments. The United Kingdom is the most advanced, with plans to toll all roads – urban and rural – by time of day, type of road, and level of congestion. Satellites will not only track vehicles, they will offer alternate routes and other services, both to eliminate traffic congestion and to improve the environment.

European Union countries aren’t far behind, with plans to toll private passenger automobiles. These countries are state of the art in tolling commercial vehicles – European trucks are now tolled by the mile and soon they will also be tolled by environmental criteria and the type of road they use.

In one place, however, toll roads have stalled: Canada. Although our Highway 407 just north of Toronto is touted around the world as a financial and technological success – it’s the world’s first all-electronic open-access toll highway – Canada is now on a detour. Planned toll roads have been cancelled; new ones are nowhere to be seen. The world, meanwhile, speeds by.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute.

A reader responds

Toll roads

Re: Tolls Gather Speed, Lawrence Solomon, May 28, 2005

Mr. Solomon may be right about toll roads generally but I can’t imagine how London’s congestion charge can be “popular.”

I spent most of last winter in Bournemouth, 72 miles from London, and on three occasions drove into central London on late weekday mornings and then out either before or after the evening rush hour. On my first trip movement was not too bad and I found myself thinking that perhaps “Red Ken” Livingstone, the Mayor of London who instigated the charge, might have had a point.

But the next two journeys were as maddeningly slow as London traffic could ever get. Parking cost me between £25 and £34 – still a lot cheaper than two or three rail fares and taxis – so the £5 daily congestion charge was just a nuisance.

When I lived in suburban London and worked in the City, I usually took the train but occasionally drove in because I needed to travel out in another direction for an evening engagement. I never lacked for parking because our accountancy/management consultancy leased 10 parking slots in the basement of our building for two dozen partners and there were rarely more than three or four used, so the attendant kindly let me use one of the empty slots. This was in the early 1970s. If well-paid professionals found it more convenient to use public transport even when they had free parking, what possible good could the imposition of a congestion charge do 30 years later?

Lionel Albert, Knowlton, Que., published by the National Post, June 6, 2005.

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

Fading family

Posted on April 30, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 30, 2005

By accident and design, modern governments act to subvert traditional family institutions. Much of what was once normal in our societies is punished by the tax system, if not outlawed altogether. Much of what undermines the organization of the traditional family, meanwhile, is now subsidized.

A century ago, a growing family would build an addition on its house, and a second addition when that proved necessary. Parents and grandparents often lived in the same household, or sometimes in an adjoining house. The living arrangements were sometimes idyllic, sometimes not, but for those who couldn’t afford servants the economics were undeniable. Granny could look after the children and otherwise help with chores when the parents both worked, which was common. When Granny was sick, the older children might tend her. Despite the difficulties, and often because of them, families became tight-knit.

Today, the ability to build an addition on a house is greatly restrained by municipal bylaws designed to discourage traditional uses of land, and as for a granny flat – well, in much of the country, forget it. In any case, why go out of your way to put up with an ageing parent when you can institutionalize her in a nursing home, and your children in a day care, all at state expense?

At one time, family unification went without saying; to bring over a relative from abroad was seen as an unqualified virtue. Today, immigration authorities – not family members – decide whether families belong together or apart and their criteria have nothing to do with what is in the interest of the family and everything to do with what is in the interest of government-administered social programs. The rich and the young – those expected to provide the government with the financing it needs – are generally welcome. The rest are generally not.

At one time, household economics encouraged procreation. Children might help in the family business when they were young, and could be counted on to support their parents when they became adults. Today, children are an expense, not an investment, and parents weigh how many they can afford. In any case, with state pension and health plans to help sustain you in your old age, why err on the side of having a larger, rather than a smaller, family?

Social conservatives are often criticized for trying to manipulate the tax system to encourage more children. To the dismay of socialists and free-market libertarians alike, organizations such as Real Women support Quebec-style baby bonuses, which boosted Quebec’s birth rate and demonstrated that families do indeed procreate more when the economics become fecund. Social conservatives also favour benefits for stay-at-home moms and chaff at the “marriage penalty” in Canada, which tends to tax a family with two equal-earner spouses much less than a single-earner family with the same overall income.

Socialists and libertarians often argue that taxation should be based on the individual rather than the family unit, and in this they have a point: Government should not be biased in favour of marriage or childbirth. But if the rights of the individual are paramount, why stop individuals from “income splitting,” a tax-avoidance technique that would negate the marriage penalty.

Tax authorities frown on income splitting – the transference of income from a taxpayer in a high tax bracket to a spouse or a child in a lower one, to lower the overall tax rate that the family members must pay. A high-income spouse can’t easily hire a low-income spouse, or a child, to reduce his taxable income without attracting scrutiny. Parents can’t even provide their children with gifts of cash and have the interest income from that cash be subsequently taxable in their children’s hands.

In a free society, why shouldn’t such income splitting occur? Without the artifice of income-splitting rules, for example, every new child would represent a natural-born tax break, a greater middle-class benefit than any government baby bonus or maternity benefit. Even better, those with the most income to split – the well educated, the healthy – would have the greatest incentive to reproduce, countering a long-held criticism of pro-natal government policies: that they tend to attract welfare moms.

The government bias against the traditional family has grown in recent decades, partly because fear of population explosions has led government to a small-family ethic, partly because gays and other historically disenfranchised groups want in, partly because many associate the traditional family with church teachings that they reject. But to a large extent, the government bias comes not of explicit policies designed to undermine the family but from the growth of government itself. The more we rely on government to look after us, rather than our family and its intimate relationships within our communities, the more the family will shrink in relevance.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute; www.urban.probeinternational.org.

Posted in Culture, Municipal, Regulation | Leave a comment

When rabble rule

Posted on April 23, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 23, 2005

‘She wanted to say something but she was afraid her house might get torched,” one neighbour told me, referring to a friend who was afraid to speak up at a neighborhood meeting over a proposed addition to a local private school.

“It was a lynching,” another neighbour explained when I asked him why he didn’t ask the question he had gone to the meeting to ask. “Who wants to subject himself to that?”

“It was a mob,” said a third neighbour: A fourth expressed guilt for not having the courage to speak up in defence of the school, a boys’ choir school called Royal St. George’s College. A fifth characterized the private school’s venomous beraters as “a rabble of fools.” A sixth, after seeing the column I wrote (Schoolyard Bullies, April 2) criticizing the behaviour of the school’s opponents, feared that my young daughters would be bullied.

Welcome to neighbourhood democracy in Toronto’s Annex, one of Canada’s most “progressive” communities, home to academics and professionals, hotbed of grassroots activism, and exemplar of the evil of misplaced “public participation.” As the saga surrounding this school’s quest to upgrade its property shows, public participation all too often is neither about participation nor for the public. Instead, public participation can be code for stripping the majority in a neighbourhood of say in favour of giving it to those who are most shrill.

Toronto City Council runs a political jurisdiction with a GDP larger than most provinces. One of the jobs that this city council performs is to micro-manage the uses to which hundreds of thousands of property owners put their property: in this case, whether a relatively small non-profit neighbourhood school should be allowed to use part of its parking lot to build a gymnasium for its 425 students.

Because it would be absurd for big city legislators with big city responsibilities to spend any time at all on so trivial and local a decision, they don’t. Instead city council effectively delegates such decisions to local councillors and generally rubber stamps their decisions – under an informal arrangement, councillors have carved up the city into personal fiefdoms, with a quiet understanding that they won’t interfere in each other’s turf.

But the local elected councillors generally don’t want any part of trivial disputes either, particularly those with potential to cost them votes, so they hand off the problem to unelected “community working groups,” typically those most vociferous. In the case of Royal St. George’s, the vociferous group is called Neighbours of St. Alban’s Park, or NOSAP, which became the quasi-official representatives of a neighbourhood by fiat. Neighbourhood democracy, in effect, amounts to giving an unelected minority outsized rights to shape a local development process.

To further “public participation” on this subject, the city then told Royal St. George’s to refrain from communicating with the public on its expansion plans, except through the unelected working group. One result: The school could not present its various plans to the larger public for its feedback. Another result: NOSAP was free to distort the plans that the school did have with wild abandon, and did. In a remarkable display of disingenuousness, NOSAP – not liking the school’s designs – asked the school to produce a different design, inconsistent with the neighbourhood’s character, to see how it might look. The school accommodated the request. NOSAP then circulated the design it had requested throughout the neighbourhood, as evidence of what the school had planned. For good measure, NOSAP digitally doctored the design that it circulated, making it less palatable still. The school, meanwhile, felt honour-bound to follow the city’s gag request throughout, a period of nine months, all in the name of promoting public participation.

After I wrote my expose of NOSAP’s tactics three weeks ago, a NOSAP leader wrote me a belligerent note accusing me of making grave accusations and of acting dishonestly. I agreed to provide the lengthy answers she demanded on condition that I make her letter public, along with my response. True to form, this champion of public participation refused my request, and threatened to take me to the Ontario Press Council. Not that she will. My accusations are indeed grave, and they are verifiable.

If public participation is needed, those chosen to represent a neighbourhood should not be the extremists, merely because their adrenalin-flow exceeds that of others. That guarantees results unrepresentative of the neighbourhood as a whole. Better to select a jury from the neighbourhood at random, or by neighbourhood plebiscites – mechanisms less likely to lead to a lynching.

No property owner – whether a school, business, or individual – should be able to harm a neighbour’s property or to interfere with his use or enjoyment of it. Likewise, no property owner should be able to exceed noise restrictions or otherwise flout the traditional common law that societies have developed over time in regulating themselves. But, barring such harms to neighbours, why should either the city or the neighbourhood as a whole be involved in details deciding (as is the case here) how much of a parking lot can be built on? Why should a school in the public system get preference over a non-profit private school (the city gives fewer rights to private academic institutions)? Why should anyone but the school decide on the size of its proposed student drama studio or the colour of brick that its architect selects? We meddle too much and we tolerate too little. And, as a result, we get too many bullies who do too much violence to the neighbourhood.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute; www.urban.probeinternational.org

Posted in Cities, Culture, Regulation | Leave a comment