IAM 764 Political Action

BY Am Johal JULY 23, 2010

In Vancouver, young families and seniors on fixed incomes put their groceries on their credit card.  Underemployed recent university graduates, overloaded with debt, are barely making ends meet.  You don’t have to look very far to know that there’s an affordability crisis in Vancouver.  This is one of the public policy challenges of our times.

The increasing social divide in the city is an outcome of inadequate public policies over three decades that have placed developers’ interests before those of citizens.  City policies have accelerated and amplified development paths and exacerbated social impacts on middle and lower income communities while senior levels of government have downloaded costs and hamstrung local governments with limited revenue streams.  The democratic deficit that functions at City Hall is also at the heart of the problem in articulating a workable solution.

Urban economics is not the work of magicians and alchemists. Economics is a shapeable, understandable social science – except when its regulation is left in the hands of the free market as the recent economic collapse has so vividly showcased.

As in other times in history, governments should intervene in the free market for the public good.  There is no other way to ensure affordability in the city – whether it is building affordable housing directly, implementing market incentives or setting policies that keep rents affordable.

They largely used to in contemporary times until the politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher became fashionable in the Western world.  The ‘third way’ post-politics of the following two decades blurred the lines between left and right and simply accelerated the neo-liberal project.  Political communications has been given a higher value than policy substance over that time frame.  In what was promised as a post-ideological politics, has, in effect, been extremely ideological in practice.

The lessons of the thirty year project are clear.  We now have stagnant incomes with rising living costs in an increasingly unaffordable city.  The unraveling of the social safety net has also led to innumerable social impacts.  The most recent social indicators report at the city shows that the divides are not just between west and east side – they exist within neighbourhoods across the city and are increasing across the board.  30% of children are considered ‘vulnerable’ by the time they reach kindergarten.  Over 35% of children in the inner-city have visible signs of tooth decay by age 5 in the inner-city.

From the late 19th century to the 1970’s, liberal societies around the world were becoming uniformly less unequal according to historian Tony Judt.  In his recent book, Ill Fares the Land, he writes about the social impacts of these trends, “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose…We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.”

Vancouver’s Am Johal is an independent writer whose work has appeared in Seven Oaks Magazine, Znet, Georgia Straight, Electronic Intifada, Arena Magazine, rabble.ca and many others Am Johal’s blog

by Marc Lee July 20, 2010

Based primarily on the creation of a carbon tax two years ago, the BC government has been propelled into the position of North American climate action leader. While there was much to applaud as first steps on climate action in BC’s 2008 “green” budget, two years later there remain some glaring contradictions between climate action and BC’s transportation and industrial policies.

In particular, British Columbians need to have a frank conversation about the province’s fossil fuel industries. We are all addicted to the energy provided by cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and so have reshaped our economy and society in fundamentally unsustainable ways.

But BC is more than just another addict; it is also a dealer. When it comes to law and order, we have learned not to crack down on the users of drugs, but instead focus our efforts on the dealers. So what if it turns out that beautiful BC is running the resource economics equivalent of a meth lab?

The extraction and processing of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) was responsible for one-fifth of BC’s emissions in 2007. But the footprint of BC’s fossil fuel production is actually much larger because official inventories only count emissions released within the borders of a jurisdiction. The combustion of coal, oil and gas outside BC in export markets is not counted. As a result, the emissions attributable to BC’s fossil fuel industries in the province’s official inventory are vastly understated.

In 2008, natural gas and coal together hit a record $8.5 billion in BC exports (with the recession, this fell to $6 billion in 2009). While BC has become a more diversified and service-oriented economy, resource extraction remains a major part of the provincial economy and a large source of export revenues, and as a result continues to dominate thinking in Victoria.

Converted to tonnes of carbon dioxide exported, BC natural gas and coal exports combined for 104 million tonnes of carbon dioxide elsewhere – more than double the emissions from fossil fuel combustion within BC, and 7.6 times BC’s own emissions from the extraction and processing of those fossil fuels.

More troubling are plans for expansion. The BC government is putting oil and gas at the top of its industrial policy priority list, highlighted by a recent $404 million auction of land for exploration of shale gas in the Northeast. BC has extensive stockpiles of CO₂awaiting release into the atmosphere – if extracted. In fact, BC’s fossil fuel reserves represent more than three years of global CO₂ emissions.

A reality check comes from estimates of the world’s carbon budget – the total stock of emissions that can be emitted between now and 2050 by everyone worldwide, consistent with a reasonable probability of keeping global temperature increase under 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Above 2 degrees Celsius, it is widely believed that humans lose the ability to stop climate change, and runaway global warming could be the result. This global carbon budget is estimated to be just over 1 trillion tonnes of CO₂.

BC’s fossil fuel reserves are equivalent to nearly one-tenth of the world’s remaining carbon budget. It seems clear that the status quo of extracting and exporting fossil fuels cannot continue. BC’s fossil fuel resources are not going anywhere, and will only be worth more as time goes on. Given the sheer urgency of getting over our addiction to fossil fuels, this inevitably means a moratorium on new oil and gas development is needed – unless 100% of the emissions can be captured and stored underground. Forever.

An important social justice concern in taking an aggressive approach to fossil fuel extraction is the negative impact on many workers in those industries, and the communities they live in. While there is a strong case to be made for new green jobs in renewable energy, the promise of green jobs in the future is not the same as a good job today. The BC should therefore make serious commitments to a “green social contract” for affected workers, including income supports, retraining provisions and mobility allowances.

Confronting GHG emissions from the oil and gas sector, and emissions from fossil fuel exports that are combusted in other jurisdictions, is perhaps the biggest challenge BC faces, and the most glaring contradiction when it comes to climate policy. This challenge, and its social justice transitional issues, must be acknowledged if BC is to be a real climate action leader.

Marc Lee is Senior Economist with the BC Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Co-Director of the Climate Justice Project, a five-year partnership with the University of British Columbia looking at the social justice aspects of climate action policies. His recently released brief, Peddling GHGs: What is the Carbon Footprint of BC’s Fossil Fuel Exports? is available for download at www.policyalternatives.ca.

by Marvin Shaffer

June 22, 2010

While the HST has captured all the attention, the province’s passage of the Clean Energy Act in the recent legislative session is a far more serious matter.

The Act will impose billions of dollars of unnecessary costs on British Columbians. It is, simply put, bad legislation.

The Clean Energy Act imposes a legal requirement for energy “self-sufficiency” for BC Hydro. Self-sufficiency sounds positive. But in fact “self-sufficiency,” as defined by the BC government, will simply force BC Hydro to buy a large amount of high cost power from private producers that is not needed to ensure a reliable supply of electricity.

In a hydroelectric system like BC Hydro’s, the main reliability question is how to guard against the impact of drought, when low water conditions limit electricity production.

With “self-sufficiency,” BC Hydro will have to manage this low water risk by entering into long term contracts with private power producers for new supply — supply that in most years will be surplus to BC Hydro’s requirements.

The Act does not put any limits on the price BC Hydro has to pay for electricity. Nor is there any room to consider the alternatives that BC Hydro could have pursued to ensure a reliable supply. The legislation dictates that BC Hydro must ignore the back-up capability of the Burrard Thermal plant, even in drought years. It must assume that the province will not let BC Hydro use any of the Columbia River treaty power it receives each year. It must pretend there is no “spot market” (one-off sales or purchases) for power, even though such markets exist in the US and Alberta, and BC Hydro in fact regularly buys and sells electricity in those markets for trading purposes.

BC Hydro itself has estimated that “self-sufficiency” will add in excess of a billion dollars to its costs. Environmentalists are concerned that the generation and transmission line development it will cause will have significant adverse environmental effects. Despite all these concerns, the government has yet to release any analysis in support of this measure. There is no evidence that it is in the broader public interest.

In addition to “self-sufficiency,” the Clean Energy Act accelerates a requirement for “insurance,” increasing the amount of surplus BC Hydro is being forced to buy. It is not at all clear what contingency this insurance is intended to address or what benefit it will offer. All that is clear is that it will add hundreds of millions of dollars more in costs that ratepayers will ultimately have to pay. BC Hydro’s own forecasts suggest that all of this surplus will be sold at a loss.

Then there are the export provisions. In addition to buying privately-produced power for dubious self-sufficiency and insurance reasons, BC Hydro will have to buy even more privately produced power, in this case explicitly for export. The Act requires BC Hydro to pursue export opportunities that private power producers will not pursue on their own.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the export of power — after all, we export pretty well everything else. The issue here is forcing BC Hydro to be the export agent for private developers.

BC Hydro will be responsible for providing all of the transmission, backup and other services needed to create a reliable, marketable product. However, it is not at all clear that BC Hydro will be able to earn an appropriate return on the services it provides and risks it assumes. Under the Act, Cabinet can order BC Hydro to buy power for export even if its management and Board do not consider the market prices sufficient to justify the costs it must incur. There is the obvious potential for political interference and abuse, particularly with the legislation’s elimination of any independent oversight and transparency of the implications of these export (and other BC Hydro) activities.

The Clean Energy Act is not really about clean energy. Requiring an unnecessary amount of generation and transmission development, with all of the environmental impacts that causes, is not particularly clean or green. Nor is it about developing BC’s hydroelectric resources in the general public interest. The Act is designed, first and foremost, to expand private power development throughout the province by forcing BC Hydro to buy power it does not need for its own purposes, and to buy power for export regardless of the adequacy of the return.

The power development the Act is designed to encourage is hugely expensive in economic and environmental terms. The Act does not in any way recognize these costs, and the government has not provided any analysis or made any effort to demonstrate that the benefits justify the costs. Worst in many ways, the Act does not provide for any judgment by the BC Hydro management and Board of the trade-offs these measures entail, nor is there to be any independent oversight by the BC Utilities Commission or anyone else.

The Clean Energy Act is bad legislation. It’s far worse than the HST. This is the legislation that British Columbians should be fighting to repeal.

It’s static and under control. So why do so many, like The Globe’s Jeffrey Simpson, spout the opposite? By Will McMartin, 7 Jun 2010, TheTyee.ca

COMBINED REVENUE FUND SPENDING

Is it possible to explain B.C.’s health-care spending in a way that any one — even, say, a political columnist in distant Ontario — would understand? Let’s try to do so with a simple allegory.

A father sits at the dinner table with his family. He looks around the table with pride at his wife, teenage son and teenage daughter. He loves his family, but there is this one nagging thought… Until recently, the evening repast had five participants. But a few weeks ago the eldest daughter left to attend university in another city. Rather than five people seated at the dinner table, there now are just four. The meal starts to get underway when the father suddenly puts down his knife and fork, and exclaims: “Stop! We’re all eating too much!” His wife and progeny coolly look at him and keep eating. The daughter manages a one word reply between bites: “Explain.” “Well,” says the father, “when there were five of us, each of us ate one-fifth of the total. But now, with just four, our individual consumption has soared to one-fourth, or one-quarter, apiece.” He continued, excitedly: “We’ve gone from each of us eating 20 per cent of the total food budget, to each consuming 25 per cent. This clearly is an unsustainable increase. We must be eating too much!”

Okay, the above scenario is farfetched and silly. But it also is the argument made by those — such as B.C. Liberal politicians, certain members of the legislative press gallery and a prominent eastern journalist — who argue that B.C.’s health-care spending is out of control.

Most Tyee readers — sensible folk, that is — would calculate that the family’s food consumption, based on four people rather than five, probably has declined in total. Fewer people consuming less food at a lower total cost. That there has been a percentage increase in one individual’s consumption is an irrelevant consideration in comparison to that of the total meal size; that is, everybody’s consumption, combined, and the total cost.

Debt, pass the potatoes to Transportation

Let us try the family dinner table again, but with a slight variation: the names of the family members correspond to those of provincial-government expenditures.

The father’s name is Finance, and his wife is Social Services. Their eldest daughter (who actually hasn’t gone to university, but is attending a nearby college and wants to become a mechanic) is called Interest on the Debt and their son is Transportation. The youngest daughter is Health.
Finance is convinced that all five family members are eating too much and ought to go on a diet. (In fact, he needs to cut the food budget because he wants to divert a sizeable part of the family income to an uncle, called Business. But that’s a different story.) After much discussion, he convinces Social Services, Interest on the Debt and Transportation to join him in reducing their caloric intake by one-quarter apiece. So, where each used to eat 20 per cent of the total dinner — one-fifth for each of five people — they now consume just 15 per cent per person. Health, however, has refused Finance’s entreaties — she’s playing girls’ rugby at school and wants to keep her weight up (and, besides, she’s a teenager and pretty much refuses to do anything her parents ask her to do) — and continues to eat her typical, average dinner: no more, and no less. This angers Finance. According to his calculations, the four family members who have cut back their consumption now eat just 60 per cent of the total dinner (four people multiplied by 15 per cent each), whereas previously it was 80 per cent (four times 20 per cent). But Health, who used to consume 20 per cent — one-fifth — of the total (the same as her parents and siblings), now, because of their dieting, has seen her portion of the family meal climb to 40 per cent.

Health, of course, hasn’t changed her dietary consumption at all; she’s consuming no more, and no less, of the evening dinner than before. Yet, as the others’ share of the meal decreased, Health’s portion of the meal doubled. It’s simple. Because Finance, Social Services, Interest on the Debt and Transportation are consuming less, Health’s consumption — which is unchanged — appears to have skyrocketed out of control, when really it hasn’t changed at all.

Cutting indiscriminately

What does any of this have to do with B.C. politics and government spending on Health?

Well, consider that way back in 2002, Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberals found themselves facing a gargantuan deficit. (Something to do with massive tax cuts, perhaps?) In response (or, perhaps it was their plan all along), the Campbell Liberals decided to cut government spending in all departments — save Health and Education. Here is what the Campbell government said in its Throne Speech on Feb. 12, 2002: “Over the next three years all ministries, not including Health and Education, will experience an average reduction of 25 per cent in their budgets.”
And, this is what Gary Collins, then-finance minister, said one week later in his 2002/03 budget speech: “Total spending in ministries, except for health and education, is being reduced by an average of 25 per cent. That’s a total of $1.9 billion over three years.”

In other words, Health and Education were allowed to keep on consuming — tax dollars, in this case — at a similar rate as previously, but all other departments were to see their eating trimmed by one-quarter. Golly, do you think that the portion of the budget allocated to Health and Education might have increased as a result of that policy decision? Of course you do. If you’ve got as far as Grade 10 in math and don’t work in the news media, that is.

As a consequence of the Campbell Liberals’ deliberate decision to cut or freeze spending in all government departments save Health and Education, the portion of the budget allocated to those two specific areas increased as a percentage of the total! Moreover, the Campbell Liberals have continued since 2002 to dampen spending in all areas of government, including Health and Education. As the chart at the top of this column illustrates, the proportion of B.C.’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) allocated to the provincial government’s Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF), actually has been in free-fall for the past two decades. In 1991/92, CRF spending peaked at 20.9 per cent of GDP, and in 2001/02 (when Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberals were elected to government) CRF expenditures were down to 18.3 per cent. In 2008/09, the comparable figure was a mere 15.7 per cent. (See Table A3.6 on p. 107 here.) Over the last two decades, in other words, Victoria’s spending as a proportion of the provincial economy has fallen by about one quarter.

Rising inflation, more people

The issue of Health’s proportion of provincial expenditures is somewhat complicated by a pair of factors: inflation and population growth.

From 2002 to 2008, for example, the B.C. Consumer Price Index rose by an annual average of about two per cent. That is, with B.C.’s base CPI calculated at 100 for 2002, it was at 112.3 by 2008. (See p. 11, here.)
Also consider that in 2001, when Gordon Campbell became premier, British Columbia’s population was 4,076,264. Last year, according to BC Stats, it was 4,455,207. That’s an increase of nearly 379,000 — or 9.3 per cent. Is it surprising that government expenditures also have grown over time? So, where CRF spending was $22.4 billion in 2001/02 (the year before the BC Liberals won power), this year’s budget saw CRF outlays hit $33.8 billion. But, again, as a proportion of the provincial economy, CRF spending actually has declined over that same time period.

Health expenditures, too, have increased in concert with inflation and population growth. In 2001/02, Health outlays from the consolidated revenue fund totaled $9.7 billion; in the latest budget, the comparable number is about $14.8 billion. As a proportion of GDP, however, they’re virtually static.

Back to the table, everyone

Let’s look briefly at the table above, which shows provincial-government expenditures (CRF) as a proportion of B.C.’s GDP over the last quarter-century. (The data are from Table A3.5 on p. 106 here.) The top line represents CRF expenditures. As mentioned earlier, they’ve been falling for the better part of the last two decades. (In fact, Victoria’s spending as a proportion of the provincial economy today is almost as low as it was when W.A.C. Bennett left office in 1972.) The second or middle line is Health spending from the CRF. It is amazing — even more so given the near-hysterical proclamations by B.C. Liberal politicians and various members of the news media — how static it has been over the last quarter-century.

When Gordon Campbell became premier in 2001/02, Health outlays were 7.3 per cent of GDP. They had fallen by 2006/07 to just 6.7 per cent — even as the Campbell government vowed to protect Health — and in 2008/09 were recorded at an even 7.0 per cent of GDP.
The third line combines three areas of spending from the CRF: Social Services, Transportation and Interest on the province’s debt.
In 1984/85, when Bill Bennett’s Social Credit party was in government, Social Services expenditures totaled 2.5 per cent of GDP, Transportation also was 2.5 per cent, and Interest, 0.9 per cent. Combined, these outlays represented 5.9 per cent of GDP. Interestingly, that is exactly the proportion of GDP that Health spending represented that same year. Indeed, the chart above shows that Health outlays in 1984/85 were identical to the combined expenditures on Social Sevices, Transportation and Interest.

All in relation to GDP

But look at what has happened over the last quarter-century. While Health has shown little change as a proportion of GDP — the lowest level was 5.7 per cent in 1988/89, and the highest 7.4 per cent in 2002/03 — the other three areas of government spending have fallen dramatically. Social Services outlays were 2.5 per cent in both 1984/85 and 2001/02. Under the BC Liberals, however, Social Services expenditures dropped to just 1.6 per cent of GDP in 2008/09. The provincial government, of course, does not directly control the interest rate that it pays on its debt. But governments around the world have benefited over the last three decades from declining low interest rates — see here for a look at the yield on U.S. treasuries — and the B.C. government is no different. In 1984/85, CRF spending on the provincial debt represented 0.9 per cent of GDP. It peaked in the mid-1990s at 1.6 per cent, but by 2008/09 was down to 0.6 per cent. Combined, these three areas of expenditure have fallen from 5.9 per cent of GDP a quarter-century ago, to an even 5.0 per cent when Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberals won election to government in 2001/02. Since then, they’ve collapsed even further to just 2.6 per cent in 2008/09.

Remember, Health and these three combined areas of expenditures were an identical 5.9 per cent of GDP a quarter-century ago. Today, however, Health outlays are about two-and-a-half times as great as the other three. Is that because Health spending has exploded, or because expenditures on the other three have swooned?

The big cutback

Two points to note in the chart above. First, it is evident that the dramatic decline in outlays in Social Services, Transportation and Interest on the Debt mirrors the on-going drop in overall government expenditures.

It’s simple: as Victoria has cut back its total spending (as a percentage of GDP), certain areas of expenditure, perforce, have experienced significant declines. Second, because every other area of government spending has fallen in recent years, Health — where spending has been virtually unchanged over the past several decades — has increased in comparison. Between 1984/85 and 2001/02, Health’s share of CRF spending grew from 30.2 to 39.5 per cent. By 2008/09, it was up to 44.8 per cent.

Think again of our fictitious family eating dinner: all of the people seated around the table have gone on a diet, and the family’s food bill has declined as a proportion of their total income. But one family member, Health, continues to consume an amount not dissimilar to that which she ate before the diet was adopted. Compared to the others her consumption has grown as a proportion of the total, when, in fact, it is virtually unchanged.

It should be obvious — even to an eastern journalist — that Health spending in B.C. is not out of control.

Did Jeffrey Simpson miss math class?

Okay, let’s name names. Jeffrey Simpson, political columnist with Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, seems in recent years to have been on a personal crusade against health-care spending. That’s okay, except when he manufactures a false picture of British Columbia’s fiscal situation and disseminates that nonsense to the rest of Canada.

Here’s what Simpson wrote three months ago, on March 13. “B.C., like other provinces, is desperately raiding every piggy bank to pour revenue into health care.” He went on to call Gordon Campbell “brave” for attempting to slash health outlays, but also admitted that “even he [Campbell] can’t rein in the costs inherent in the existing system.”
Simpson continued in a similar, nonsensical vein two weeks ago, on May 29. “While B.C.’s health-care budget jumps by over $2-billion over three years, what about other spending?” He then listed other areas of government expenditure that are in decline — because, he says, Health spending, in real terms, is rising. In Simpson’s world, Health is a voracious monster that eats the budgets of every other area of government administration.

In fact, in B.C. reductions in spending on non-Health areas are the result of deliberate policy decisions made by the government in power. It wasn’t Health that made Victoria cut CRF spending from 20.9 per cent of GDP to just 15.7 per cent; it was successive administrations that wanted a smaller government. As a proportion of B.C.’s economy, health-care expenditures in the last several decades have been virtually static. Only in comparison to the falling budgets of other areas of spending do Health costs appear to be rising.

So, far from being out of control, Health in B.C. merely has refused to go on the same diet imposed on the rest of Victoria’s annual outlays. It is a concept that a teenage, rugby-playing girl could understand, but one that evidently eludes an Eastern political columnist.

Tyee contributing editor Will McMartin is a veteran political advisor and analyst. Read his previous columns here.