Citizens left out of Campbell Citizens’ Assembly and Carr Initiative

Posted on July 1, 2002 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Stuart Parker

July 1, 2002

The Democrat – Vol. 42, No. 2

With a system which under-represents minorities and ensures that the right-wing vote will never split again, right-wing ideologues could continue running this province as a private feifdom.

 

In less than a year, the BC Liberal government will unveil a Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. This assembly has been part of the party’s plan since 1997 when Gordon Campbell pulled his party out of the BC Electoral Change Coalition, a broad-based multi-partisan voting reform group.

Since then, Campbell has advocated and assembly to look at possible changes to BC’s voting system. His New Era document included it and it was announced again when he swore-in his new cabinet after winning the 2001 election and put Attorney-General Geoff Plant in charge of it. The Assembly has survived the government’s core review process and will be, according to the most recent announcements, set up for the spring of 2003.

It is against this backdrop that the Green Party’s Free Your Vote campaign is taking place, though you will hear little from FYV activists about the assembly or about Joy MacPhail’s letter to Campbell asking for its timeline to be accelerated so that the next provincial election could be fought under new rules.

Unfortunately, the timeline for the assembly is just one of the many concerns New Democrats should have about the Citizens’ Assembly. A key concern, so far unaddressed by anyone except our leader, is who will comprise the Assembly.

Campbell has some ideas which are not likely to sit well with anyone who understands the vast diversity of our province or the complexity of voting systems. The New Era document proposes to select the members of the assembly randomly — the same way a jury is selected. This means that there will be no guarantee that aboriginal people, visible minorities, northerners, islanders or any other identifiable groups in BC will be part of this body. There is also no guarantee that there will be any experts who have actual information about or experience with voting systems and their functioning.

Consistent with his policies on healthcare and other services, Campbell doesn’t seem to think that we need any special mechanisms to ensure that remote communities, aboriginal people and other oft-forgotten groups are not left behind.

And unfortunately, the Free Your Vote initiative is strengthening the premier’s position. Thousands of voters are signing on to support a process for electoral reform in which minorities and remote communities have been completely shut-out. It is hard to challenge the Campbell’s vision of the Citizens’ Assembly when purportedly progressive activists are signing their names to support a law that proposes to end all citizen consultation on how our electoral boundaries and voting systems are designed.

FYV is also serving the BC Liberal agenda in another way. By promoting a form of proportional representation offensive to rural British Columbians, it is effectively raising the popularity of other alternatives to the current system.

According to the New Era, the Assembly will not only be charged with looking at proportional representation, it will also look at Alternative Vote. New Democrats may recall that the CCF would have formed government in 1952 were it not for AV. AV is the only voting system which produces even less proportional results than our current First-Past-the-Post system; it is a true winner take all model.

Under AV, voters rank candidates in order of preference; candidates with fewer votes are eliminated and their votes transferred to the voters’ next choice. It is essentially the same as a leadership convention in which the bottom candidates are eliminated until the top-scoring candidate has a clear majority. Applied province-wide, such a system would perpetuate the current situation of a massive majority government and a tiny opposition, even in relatively close elections.

Amongst Liberal MLAs, AV is much more popular than proportional representation. And for good reason. With a system which under-represents minorities and ensures that the right-wing vote will never split again, right-wing ideologues could continue running this province as a private feifdom. Especially because, unlike pro-rep, AV does not increase voter turnout amongst low income people and minorities.

Along with AV, the Liberals will likely soon resurrect their 1996 plan to slash the number of provincial ridings drastically. After trashing rural communities, the government would benefit by downsizing rural representation and creating huge, unweildy districts in which grassroots campaigning would be much more difficult. Fortunately for the Liberals, Adriane Carr is hard at work creating a mandate for massive downsizing of rural representation, too.

Instead of being distracted by the simplistic boosterism of the Free Your Vote campaign, New Democrats need to stay focused on fighting the Liberal agenda. And addressing the real approaching threat to our democracy. We need to work with the groups and individuals the government is planning to shut out of the Citizens’ Assembly to strengthen their voices and prevent that exclusion. We need to educate people about the dangers of Alternative Vote and legislative downsizing. And we need to fight for a process of electoral reform that reflects our values of equity, diversity and inclusiveness.

 

WHAT SIGNING THE FREE YOUR VOTE PETITION REALLY MEANS

 

When you sign the Free Your Vote petition, you are signing in favour of:

  • reducing the number of seats guaranteed to voters outside Greater Vancouver from 47% to 24% of the legislature
  • reducing the number of MLAs by 15%
  • reducing the number of provincial ridings from 79 to 34
  • giving up provincial control over our riding boundaries and putting the federal government in charge of them.
  • making it impossible to recall 50% of MLAsFor more information, check out the web site of Bernard Von Schulmann at www.bcprorep.com.

     

    IS OUR LEGISLATURE TOO BIG?

     

    The Liberals and Green Party think BC has too many MLAs but a comparison to other western provinces suggests the opposite…

  • Saskatchewan has 1 riding per 17,000 people;
  • Manitoba has 1 riding per 20,000 people;
  • Alberta has 1 riding per 36,000 people;
  • BC currently has 1 riding per 50,000 people.
  • BC under Gordon Campbell’s 1996 proposal would have 1 riding per 80,000 people.
  • BC under Adriane Carr’s proposal would have 1 riding per 115,000 people (or 1 MLA per 57,000 people)

 

Posted in Cities, Regulation | Leave a comment

Farm subsidy drain is tilted east, Toronto report suggests

Posted on June 27, 2002 by Other News Sources

Barry Wilson
Western Producer
June 27, 2002

When the debate over the need for farm supports is raging, prairie provinces quickly develop the reputation of being most aggressively in favour of aid, the most deeply in need and the most heavily subsidized.

But a Toronto research institute opposed to farm subsidies says that is a myth.

As of 2001, Ontario had the most subsidized farm sector, according to a report from the Toronto-based Urban Renaissance Institute. Saskatchewan and Manitoba are in the middle of the pack while Newfoundland has bumped into second place.

Larry Solomon, executive director of the institute, said in a June 21 interview that subsidies to support agriculture in 2001 were worth $3.53 for every market dollar earned by farmers.

The subsidy calculation included the consumer costs of supply management-regulated commodities such as milk and eggs.

By that calculation, subsidies and regulated revenues provided Ontario farmers $6 for every $1 of market revenue last year.

“This is an enormous transfer of wealth to the farm sector,” said Solomon. He argued it is a sign of farm economy inefficiency.

“No province operated a profitable farm economy over the past decade,” said the institute report.

The Urban Renaissance Institute says it is an independent research centre that advocates policies supporting the growth of cities and surrounding rural areas.

It insists that high subsidies help big farmers, not smaller ones.

Its Web site asks if viewers support elimination of farm subsidies that help big farmers but hurt small farmers. Of the 96 who had responded by June 21, 55 percent said yes.

Solomon said the answer is to stop subsidies for new farmers and to phase them out for existing farmers by using subsidy savings to “buy out” the benefits of subsidies.

“I think it we could phase out subsidies, it would result in a stronger small farm sector around cities and that would be good both for farmers and for the cities.”

Solomon said consumers would benefit since they pay higher food prices or higher taxes to support the present regime of regulation and subsidy.

“The subsidy system does not help consumers or family farmers. It hurts smaller farmers and helps mainly bigger farmers and it is perverse,” he said.

“The only consumers it helps are foreign consumers who get to buy our cheap food.”

Posted in Agriculture (Rural) | Leave a comment

The real facts about farm income

Posted on June 26, 2002 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 26, 2002

The George Morris Centre, Canada’s only agricultural think-tank, can’t stomach the analyses performed by the Urban Renaissance Institute: It finds the data we use exaggerated and manipulated, and the conclusions we draw based on this data patently false, if not laughable. These are serious charges, if true. Fortunately, readers will have little difficulty deciding for themselves. As George Morris must know, we have not assembled the data that it finds exaggerated. Agriculture Canada assembled it, using data from Statistics Canada. After Agriculture Canada assembles the data, Agriculture Canada sums it, and presents the sum and its component numbers in its annual report, Farm Income, Financial Conditions and Government Assistance Data Book. We do not report one penny of subsidy that does not have Agriculture Canada’s blessing.

George Morris describes our methodology in a convoluted manner that can only confuse readers. Here is the methodology, without George Morris’s embellishment: We divided the total subsidy, as reported by Agriculture Canada, by the amount that farmers earned from their farming activity. Nothing complicated or outlandish here. Over the last 10 years, the subsidies totalled $45,883,078; the farmers earned $13,007,567. Dividing one number by the other shows that for every dollar that a farmer earned, Canadians provided $3.53 cents in subsidies to the agriculture sector. That’s how much, under our current farm subsidy programs, Canadians as a whole spent to keep farmers in business.

George Morris implies that most of the subsidies my institute deals with are not really subsidies but payments for civil servants or for food and safety inspections. And that the bulk of the subsidies benefit Canadian consumers. Who provides the subsidies and who receives them is easily understood.

Agriculture Canada reports three types of subsidies. The largest type – which in the most recent year accounts for 48% of the total – involves monies that go from taxpayers to farmers. These direct payments chiefly fund export crops, thus lowering the cost of food for foreign consumers – mostly rich-country consumers in the United States, Japan, and the EU – but not for Canadian consumers.

The next largest type – which accounts for 33% of agricultural subsidies – involves subsidies from Canadian consumers to farmers. Through marketing boards and other mechanisms, governments set high prices by limiting the supply of basic commodities such as milk, eggs, chickens and wheat. In the case of milk, Canadians pay twice the market price due to this subsidy, in the case of eggs, 22% extra. On average, Canadians pay 20% more for commodities produced by Canadian farmers. Affluent Canadians, who spend relatively little on basic foods, are not hit hard by these inflated food prices. Not so in the case of poor Canadians, for whom food often represents their largest expenditure after shelter.

The third type of subsidy – 19% of the total – is paid by taxpayers to third parties who support the efforts of farmers. These subsidies, which Agriculture Canada calls “indirect subsidies,” pay for research and development and extension services (consulting services provided by agents sent to farmers’ fields) and provide grants to producer organizations, such as farm lobby groups. Out of this 19% also comes the cost of quality control, which represents 5% of total subsidies. The cost of buying grain or other food aid is not considered a subsidy to farmers, as George Morris seems to believe, and does not show up in the subsidy figures that either we or Agriculture Canada report.

Despite appearances, George Morris does not object to Agriculture Canada’s subsidy numbers. These numbers are internationally accepted and commonly used by agricultural economists, in Canada and other countries. But normally, the subsidies are compared to the gross revenue that farmers receive, a large number that makes the level of subsidy seem relatively small.

In contrast, we compare the subsidies to actual profits – a much more meaningful indicator of an industry’s value to society. The harsh, unadulterated truth – that agriculture is a net drain on the Canadian economy, and a terrible investment for the taxpayer – seems more than George Morris can accept. Particularly since George Morris takes the wrong lesson from the facts. It assumes that we think “the public should turn its back on agriculture and rural areas, and focus on cities as the sole source of development.” And that we’d like rural subsidies to be diverted to cities.

Not so. Initially, we want to divert subsidies that now support uneconomical rural industries to generous buyout packages for uneconomic farmers, loggers and miners, to leave them and the environment whole. After the buyouts are complete, we’d like to see an end to all rural industrial subsidies. City subsidies, in the relatively few instances where they occur, should end immediately.

The result of eliminating farm subsidies would be a much smaller farm commodity export business, since we would no longer be exporting at a loss, and a much larger number of farmers producing for the domestic market, since food prices would drop, in both supermarkets and restaurants, making food more affordable. Canadian farmers would compete less on price against subsidized Western farmers and Third World farmers, where Canadian farmers have no competitive advantage, and more on quality for high-value urban markets, where local farmers have a decided advantage. Canadians would eat better and for less, and farmers would be profitable for society as well as for themselves.
TOTAL SUBSIDIES:Year 2001: $4.86-billionSubsidies from taxpayers to farmers: 47.9%Subsidies from consumers to farmers: 33.4%

Subsidies from taxpayers to the agricultural sector: 18.8%

Source: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

To read “Food Fight,” the George Morris Centre’s response to Lawrence Solomon‘s article, click here.

To read the Lawrence Solomon article that sparked this debate, “Record Harvest of Profits All Came From Subsidies, click here.

Posted in Agriculture (Rural) | Leave a comment

Food fight

Posted on June 26, 2002 by Other News Sources

Al Mussell, Holly Mayer and Larry Martin
National Post
June 26, 2002

A recent Financial Post column questioning the economic benefits of sustaining a Canadian farm industry has stirred a debate between an agri-food think-tank and writer Lawrence Solomon. Their arguments are outlined below.

Among certain academics and urban activists, a school of thought has emerged that argues cities are getting a raw deal out of the Canadian union. The spin of some urban activists is that this has occurred because public funds are misallocated away from cities to rural regions and the resource-based economic activities that occur in them. The leader of this school of thought is Lawrence Solomon of the Urban Renaissance Institute in Toronto (he also has followers – oddly enough – on staff at the Toronto Star). In one of Solomon’s latest contributions to this ill-conceived argument (Re: “Record Harvest of Profits All Came From Subsidies,” June 13), he describes the problem as being “transfers of wealth from the cities to the countryside to prop up marginal farms, logging towns and other unsustainable settlements.”

This school of thought (and Mr. Solomon, in particular) has advanced two arguments to support this position: (1) Net farm income in Canada is less than the subsidies paid to farmers, therefore supporting agriculture is an overall loss to society, and (2) Development of cities has been unequivocally hampered by misallocation of public spending in rural areas rather than cities. Both arguments, if correct, would suggest that the public should turn its back on agriculture and rural areas, and focus on cities as the sole source of development. These arguments are patently false.

With respect to the first argument, Mr. Solomon has made an annual rite of passage out of manipulating and exaggerating farm subsidy numbers to make it appear as though agriculture is a net drain on the Canadian economy. Here’s what he does:

– He assembles data on total government transfers to agriculture, that include expenditures on food inspection, research and development and food aid, most of which goes to pay civil servants, not farmers, and most of which is for programs that confer consumer benefits. Just over 50% of this amount is actually cash paid to farmers.

– He then takes this (inflated) data on government transfers and divides it by farm income not received from government transfers to obtain the “farm subsidy ratio.” He finds this ratio to be $3.53 per dollar of farm income.

But think about this ratio for a moment. It measures subsidies relative to income not received from subsidies. Most people would ask: What portion of a farmer’s income comes from subsidies? Mr. Solomon asks: What portion of a farmer’s income not from subsidies comes from subsidies?, which is absurd. His methodology is not only meaningless; it is incredibly misleading. We have corrected his errors before and demonstrated that, while very large, government cash payments to farmers are significantly less than net farm income, and that net farm income is positive, not negative as he claims. But Mr. Solomon has apparently elected to ignore this. This is a classic case of the statistician using statistics to find what he wants to find. Because of this manipulation, he concludes that agriculture has been losing money for the past decade and, therefore, is a terrible investment for the taxpayer. Behind this one, there is a whole host of equally incredible conclusions (for example, that there should be no farms in the Prairies, where land is inexpensive and that farms should only exist around cities, where land is extremely expensive. We know that the Post has an editorial point of view, but we do not understand why it continues to print material that is simply wrong.)

Development in rural and urban areas exists in an equilibrium with one another. A portion of public spending (or economic growth in general) in rural areas will necessarily flow to urban areas, just as a portion of urban spending flows to the rural area. Rural areas supply products and services that are consumed (or further processed) in urban areas, and receive payment, some of which is spent on products and services from the urban centre. Similarly, some of the returns in urban areas are spent in rural areas. This mechanism is fundamental to the process of regional development, and it argues for a balanced policy approach.

To suggest that rural areas are not worthy of public spending is simply incorrect. Cities are a crucial part, perhaps the most important part, of regional development. Some have erroneously convinced themselves that cities are the only source of growth, and that the rural hinterlands that cities service are actually a barrier to urban growth. This kind of local thinking ignores the bigger picture of regional development that gives rise to cities in the first place, along with the continuing economic importance of agriculture and other primary resource industries to economic growth – both urban and rural. In any event, the case for investment in cities should be made on its merits, not on the basis of data manipulated to achieve a desired outcome.

To read Lawrence Solomon‘s response to this article, please see “The Real Facts About Farm Income”

To read the Lawrence Solomon article that sparked this debate, please see “Record Harvest of Profits All Came From Subsidies“:

Posted in Agriculture (Rural) | Leave a comment

Opinions struck a cord

Posted on June 24, 2002 by Other News Sources

National Post
June 24, 2002

Lawrence Solomon‘s opinions struck a perfect cord with my own views about farming subsidies (Record Harvest of Profits All Came From Subsidies, June 13). This is an excellent piece, and I hope the electorate wakes up to these socio-economic facts. It is high time we accept reality: Subsidies will not end in this world, and a smart Canada would save its billions to develop other, more productive industry and infrastructure, while it sucks those same billions from the other loser countries who would destroy their own productive industry in the process.

I suggest that Saskatchewan would make a better tourist attraction with big game roving the range than a swaying wheat field. At least a park contributes to the tourist economy. Grasslands National Park is a case in point (and it probably should be bigger, too).

Lionel Berry, Oshawa, Ont.

Lawrence Solomon does a breathtaking job of writing off Canada’s farmers and Canada’s agriculture as burdens around the neck of every taxpayer. And he identifies Prairie farmers as the worst of all, seems to suggest they should be abolished, the land turned back to the buffalo and the gophers. But is he missing something?

Every grain grower and everyone living in rural communities knows deep in his heart the burning challenge facing the Prairies, and perhaps even Canada itself, is: How do we build this great Prairie treasure house? How do we get back to creating jobs and wealth? How do we rebuild our rural communities?

Yes, grain prices are now at disaster levels and huge foreign crop subsidies threaten to keep them there. We educate the kids and they leave because the good jobs are elsewhere. Too many farm communities are failing. And it’s getting worse. Statistics Canada found Saskatchewan lost over 6,000 farms in the five years between 1996-2001. This deepening crisis is beyond the control of individual farmers and rural communities. And it may be the most controversial political issue in Ottawa.

The reason the Prairies are failing to live up to their potential is no mystery. A century ago, a few U.S. preachers decided they had discovered a blinding truth – capitalism was the problem! Abolish capitalism, they cried, and turn the economy over to honest politicians. The idea was called the social gospel. Most Americans thought it was a dumb idea. So those preachers crossed the border into Canada’s Prairies. And we swallowed their social gospel message and set out to put the politicians in control.

But this plan had a fatal weakness. Ottawa proceeded to create a wheat monopoly which denied growers the freedom to manage their farms and to sell their own crops. Grain growing/selling became an exercise in politics, not business. Ottawa had seized control of the prairie economy, and it has maintained that stranglehold to this day. If Ottawa had opened the door to the entrepreneurial spirit in the West, the Prairies would have turned massively to processing its enormous grain crops, increasing dramatically the value of the raw crops grown.

But Ottawa’s policies forbade that. The Crow Rates subsidized raw grain shipments out of the Prairies, but not processed products. This forced Prairie flour mills to shut down, robbing the West of jobs and wealth creation, preventing a full-scale move into food processing and value-added.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s grain monopoly seizes every grower’s wheat and barley as it comes out of the combine, denies him the freedom to sell it to waiting markets. Now, the West doesn’t process its grain into flour and breakfast cereal and bread and cakes any longer. Ottawa transfers the jobs and the wealth to central Canada. It robs growers of the freedom to manage their own operations and their own industry. The time is long overdue to end that and, as a start, to return grain to a business operation.

When will Ottawa finally move to end its grain monopoly, and free up Western growers to sell their own grain and manage their own farms? And to process their wheat and barley right at home, creating jobs in their own communities? And keep the kids at home. Because only this kind of freedom will allow the West to return to wealth creation.

The time is overdue for Ottawa to clear the way for farmers to go all out in building their own farms and their communities. They must be free to build sizable cattle and hog enterprises and set the stage for new meatpacking and grain-processing plants. Or will Ottawa continue to shamelessly impose its smothering political grain monopoly over the West? If it intends to do this, then Mr. Solomon is right – close down Prairie agriculture.

Don Baron, Regina

To read Larry Solomon‘s article, “Record Harvest of Profits All Came From Subsidies,” please click here.

Posted in Agriculture (Rural) | Leave a comment