My Tyee column: Why the new health tax makes sense

Winners are always champions of the status quo. 

Like Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson. He was asked whether it was fair that employers had paid MSP premiums for 40 per cent of workers, while the rest had to pay the premiums out of their own pockets.

“Fairness is always a matter to be sorted out in the marketplace,” he said. “That’s what employers have to do is compete for good workers and pay them appropriately.”

So if you and your spouse are both working full-time at $15 an hour — about $29,000 each — it’s fair that you had to pay MSP premiums. And that the Liberals doubled them.

Just as Wilkinson, paid almost $159,000, thinks it’s fair that taxpayers take care of his MSP premiums as part of a lavish benefits/pension package.

It’s the market, you know.

Which is rubbish. MLAs’ pay and benefits weren’t set by the market. The government ordered a rigged review https://willcocks.blogspot.ca/2007/05/outrageous-mla-pay-plan-and-class-in-bc.html which delivered big raises and pensions the rest of us could only dream about. The review decided MLAs needed up to $19,000 a year for a second home in Victoria, while our elected representatives decided people on disability assistance should be able to find a place to live in Victoria for $4,500 a year. 

Free markets bring great benefits. But the free market mantra has become a justification for the powerful to protect their own interests at the expense of other citizens.

Which leads to the new government’s health care tax, replacing MSP premiums.

Broadly, the tax ends MSP payments for individuals and shifts the cost to employers. About 40 per cent of employees, generally unionized or management, often in the public sector, have had their MSP premiums paid by the employer in the past. Most of us paid $900 a year or more. (People with net household incomes under $42,000 could apply for an exemption.)

No one could argue that MSP premiums were sound public policy. They were a tax, and people earning $50,000 paid the same as people earning $500,000. 

The Liberals, recklessly https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/02/27/BC-Liberals-Time-Bomb-Budget/, promised to cut MSP premiums in half in 2017 without saying how they would cut services or raise other taxes to make up the lost revenue.

The New Democrats upped the ante by promising to eliminate MSP premiums — also without saying how they would make up the lost revenue. 

And please, read the rest of the column here at The Tyee. It's pretty good.

My Tyee column: How the Chinese government took control of BC seniors’ homes

Great. The lives of seniors in B.C. care homes, where they are already over-drugged and under-supported, now depend in part on the Chinese government.

On Friday, the government seized control of Anbang Insurance Group, a financial giant with investments around the world. It cited corruption, fraud and a risk the whole $390-billion company could go broke.

Last year, Anbang spent an estimated $1 billion to buy Residential Concepts, which operates 21 seniors homes in British Columbia. It’s the biggest private provider in the province, collecting $87 million from the provincial government in 2015/16.

Anbang has no experience in seniors care. Its finances were murky and ownership so tangled as to be incomprehensible. It offered no promises of additional investment in the company or increased employment. Concerns about its business practices were already widespread. 

But to promote its pro-China agenda, the Trudeau government turned a blind eye to the risks — and shifted them to seniors. Ottawa quickly approved the takeover, and the provincial government offered no objections and transferred operating licences to the Chinese company. 

You can read the rest at The Tyee here. It's pretty good.

NDP wins with bold BC budget

Give Finance Minister Carole James full marks for a bold budget approach and the skill to sell it.

The new government was in a tough spot. It had lots of campaign promises to deliver, and no money because of the BC Liberals’ reckless decision to halve MSP premiums without any plan to replace the revenue.

Conventional wisdom has been that tax increases of any kind would bring all kinds of abuse. So far, the budget reaction is proving conventional wisdom wrong.

The big tax item is a new payroll tax to replace MSP premiums entirely by 2020 and bring in $1.9 billion a year when fully implemented. Businesses with less than $500,000 in payroll — say a half-dozen employees — will be exempt. Those with $1.5 million or more will pay tax equal to 1.95 per cent of payroll.

It’s a big new tax; corporate income tax, for example, is only expected to bring in $4.1 billion this year. But while business groups aren’t happy, they haven’t taken to the barricades. The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade still gave the balanced budget a C-plus rating. 

You can read the rest of the column at The Tyee here.

Carole James’s Big Budget Problem

(Belatedly posting my recent Tyee column.)

Finance Minister Carole James put a good spin on this week’s quarterly update on the province’s finances.

But the update highlights big problems the NDP government faces in crafting its first budget, due in mid-February. Without tax increases, the government won’t be able to deliver on its election promises or provide the changes supporters expect.

The September budget update — a mini-budget — didn’t include funding for some campaign promises, like $10-a-day child care, the promised $400 a year for renters or thousands of new affordable housing units. There wasn’t enough time given the delay in forming government, James said.

But there also wasn’t enough money. And the challenge will be greater next year.

This September mini-budget set out a three-year forecast of revenue and expense.

For fiscal 2018, the government is forecasting $150 million in additional revenue — less than one-third of one per cent. (The budget numbers are easier to grasp if you knock six zeros off them. Imagine a family with an income of $52,407 and big expectations with an extra $150 to spend next year.)

Population growth is forecast at 1.2 per cent, and inflation will be about two per cent. So the government would need to spend about 3.2 per cent more just to keep providing the current services. That would be about $1.7 billion, compared to the expected $150 million increase in revenue.

And that is before introducing things like the $10-a-day child care plan or addressing real problems the New Democrats identified in opposition — actions supporters are expecting.

The September update also forecast expenses for next year. The plan calls for nine of the 20 ministries to have their budgets frozen. Two — environment and labour — would see spending cuts. Five — including the ministries of children and families, housing and education — would have spending increases of one-half of one per cent or less.

I’d thought the numbers might be just placeholders, in part because BC Liberal budgets so often underestimated revenues by huge margins. Last year, for example, the Liberals budgeted for a $264-million surplus and ended up with $2.7 billion. (If they had budgeted more accurately/honestly and spent half that surplus addressing issues that rankled voters, the Liberals would probably still be in government.)

But the quarterly update killed that kind of optimism.

The numbers for the first six months of the fiscal year weren’t terrible but neither were they great. Revenue is now expected to fall short of the projections in the new government’s September budget update by $283 million, mostly because of lower income tax payments from the federal government and ICBC’s poor financial performance. Expenses are on track with the update’s projections despite a $152-million budget overrun in fighting forest fires.

Any hope that projections for this year and next were overly conservative and the new government would have more fiscal room was snuffed.

The biggest challenge is former premier Christy Clark’s reckless pre-election move to cut Medical Services Plan premiums in half for people with a household income under $120,000, announced in the Liberals’ February budget. But it doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1, so revenues are only reduced for the last three months of this fiscal year, which ends March 31.

But next year, the change will cost the government more than $1.2 billion in lost revenue.

Cutting MSP premiums is sound policy. The premiums, which the Liberals had more than doubled, were a regressive way to pay for health care. A family with $40,000 in income paid the same amount as the richest British Columbians. Covering the costs through income taxes — like most provinces — would be more equitable.

But the Liberal budget didn’t introduce any tax increases to cover the lost revenue. It just pushed the problem into the next year and hoped no one would notice the ticking time bomb.

All of which leaves the NDP government facing three choices.

It could try to cut expenses to fit the projected revenues. In her briefing on the quarterly update, James noted, “A number of our promises are longer term and implemented over a number of years.” That leaves room to make a small start on promised affordable housing and child care. Premier John Horgan has also talked about the importance of federal funding. But really, after 16 years talking about the Liberals’ failure to spend in critical areas, the new government can’t manage in the same way.

It could choose to run a deficit, spending more than it took in and leaving the debt for future taxpayers. But beyond political expediency, there is no justification for deficit budgets when the economy is performing this well.

Or the budget could increase taxes. The September update included an increase in the corporate tax rate from 11 to 12 per cent and a bump in income tax for people being paid more than $150,000 a year from 14.7 per cent to 16.8 per cent. But that’s not enough to make up for the $1.2 billion in lost revenue from the MSP change.

The government has appointed a three-person panel to provide advice on ways to replace MSP revenue and allow the full elimination of premiums within four years.

Pragmatically, tax increases make sense. If you’re cutting MSP premiums, you need to find revenue to pay for critical public services somewhere else.

And the NDP platform, which promised the eventual elimination of the health care premiums, said a “non-partisan MSP elimination panel will advise on how to protect health care funding, while phasing out this unfair flat tax.”

The anti-tax lobby has been successful in turning the idea of any tax increase into anathema.

There are no easy choices for the government, and lots of political risks.

But British Columbians voted — barely — for change. Which means tax increases and investments in a better society, despite the political risks.

Why I'd kill Site C

I have no idea what the government will do about Site C. (I do know that anyone who claims it’s an easy choice to kill the project or go ahead is not to be taken seriously.)

But if it was up to me, I’d opt for cancellation.

The people pushing for completion rely heavily on three flawed arguments.

First, that BC Hydro has already spent $2 billion, so despite the certainty of delays and cost overruns, the government might as well keep spending. 

That’s silly. Economists call it the sunk cost fallacy. The money already spent is gone. The question is whether the money still to be spent is a good investment. Anyone who has paid too much for a new clutch for an old car because they spent money on a brake job three months earlier understands the principle.

Second, they maintain that even if forecasts show the power isn’t needed, someone will probably show up to buy it. Maybe we’ll all start driving electric cars, the dam’s backers fantasize. That’s no way to justify spending billions of dollars.

And third, they talk about jobs. About 2,000 people are at work on the site. It will be rough for them if the project is shut down. But 2.5 million people are employed in the province, and the workers on the site have skills that are in demand. They don’t need a publicly funded make-work project\.

On the other side, the government has to consider the emergence of new technologies to produce green power at ever lower costs, the BCUC’s determination that the power from Site C won’t be needed for years and the risks of soaring costs.

The latter would be the deciding factor for me.

When then-premier Gordon Campbell announced the government would build the Site C dam in 2010, it was a $6.6-billion project. The price tag jumped to $7.9 billion, then $8.3 billion and now the BC Utilities Commission says the real cost will be more — perhaps much more — than $10 billion. 

That’s why I would bail, if I was the premier. (Pause for collective shudder.)

We know the costs of cancelling the project.

But continuing means signing a blank cheque. The dam could cost $10 billion, $12 billion or $15 billion. And the NDP government, having made the decision to go ahead, would own the consequences.

I’d say no.

Sadly, not the weirdest moment in my newspaper career (Spoiler alert: Charges were stayed)

Newspaper pleads not guilty

   RED DEER, Alta. (CP) — The Red Deer Advocate has pleaded not guilty to incitement to commit a criminal offence, a charge that resulted from a controversy over abstract metal sculptures one resident described as “piles of rusted out snowplow blades.”
   The Advocate was charged last month under a rarely used section of the Criminal Code as a result of a column June 30. The trial begins Feb. 5 in provincial court.
    The column, by freelance writer Ian Coleman, suggested someone load a 12-gauge shotgun with double-0 buckshot and shoot one of the sculptures.
   They were built for $75,000 as part of Alberta’s 75th anniversary celebrations four years ago and have long been a source of controversy and derision in Red Deer.
    In his column, Coleman said the sculptures “are an affront to the eye, an insult to common aesthetic sense” and “have been an embarrassment to the citizens of Red Deer since they arrived.”
   He said the only way to deal with the worst of the sculptures, a rusty, boxy “monstrosity” visible from the city’s main north-south thoroughfare, “is to alter its form.”
   “A civic-minded individual with courage, a car and a gun, could drive down 50th Avenue just before dawn, when the streets are empty, and shoot the sculpture; the shot would dent it just enough so the city would have to haul it away,” Coleman wrote.
   An RCMP spokesman said no shots were ever fired at the piece.
   Crown prosecutor Burt Skinner said the charge was laid after several complaints. The maximum penalty is six months in jail and/or a $500 fine.
   Skinner said the charge is rare because the public does not like to see freedom of the press infringed. But, he said, newspapers have a responsibility to monitor the opinion they print. 

   Publisher Paul Willcocks said the Advocate column was tongue-in-cheek. “It was meant to be funny.”

   He said the column was part “of a long tradition of making a point in an exaggerated way” and the charge will not change The Advocate’s policy on running columns.
   The best known similar case in Canadian law is the 1971 British Columbia conviction of Georgia Straight Publishing Ltd., which once encouraged people to grow marijuana.
   The Poundmaker, a now-defunct paper in Edmonton, was charged with a similar offence in 1974 when it ran several advertisements urging people to shoplift.
   Jim Robb, the defence lawyer in the Edmonton case, said The Poundmaker argued that the ads were a spoof and the argument ‘‘was accepted without ever having to call a defence.”
  While the pieces have not been shot at they have been physically and verbally abused since they were put up three years ago.
   Bill Bodnaruk, an unsuccessful aldermanic candidate last October, said the works are “piles of rusted out snow-plow blades, a terrible waste of money” and should be sold for scrap.

Six Things to Know about the BC Liberal Leadership Race

Here are six things you need to know about the race to replace Christy Clark, based on the rules the BC Liberal Party released Tuesday.

First, you better have money or some rich supporters if you even want to try for the job. It will cost you $50,000, payable to the party, to become a candidate. (Plus $10,000 that you’ll get back if the party doesn’t levy any fines for bad behaviour during the campaign.)

Second, it’s going to cost a lot more to win. The spending limit for candidates — on top of the entry fees — is $600,000. That’s a 33-per-cent increase from 2011 when Christy Clark won the leadership, and 71 per cent higher than the spending limit in the 2014 NDP leadership race. Candidates who jump into the race and raise enough money will be able to spend about $120,000 a month on their leadership campaigns. (Money, of course, does not guarantee success, as the BC Liberals proved in the May election. They spent $13.6 million compared to the NDP’s $7.9 million, and got just 1,566 more votes.)

Third, and further confirming the Liberals’ blindness to the public concern about its support for Wild West political fundraising, there are no limits on donations. If a developer or union or even foreign government wants to write a $500,000 cheque to try and get a friendly candidate elected, that’s OK with the Liberal party. The donation will eventually be disclosed — but not until 90 days after party members have voted to elect their new leader.

This free-for-all comes, remember, six months after the Liberals’ deathbed repentance Throne Speech pledged to ban corporate and union political donations and limit individual donations.

You can read the rest of the column at The Tyee.

Where are those Public Accounts? Delay should worry Liberals

The Liberals should be getting nervous about the long delay in releasing the Public Accounts and the Auditor General's review of government finances.

As part of the Liberals' self-destructive bid to hang on to power, then finance minister Mike de Jong broke precedent by releasing unofficial results for the fiscal year ending March 31. He claimed a $2.8 billion surplus, $1.3 billion higher than budgeted. (Showing the Liberals mean-spirited election platform was a matter of ideology, not economics.)

De Jong defended the unorthodox media event days before the government was set to lose a confidence vote, saying the real, certified numbers would be available in a matter of days. "The auditor general's office is advising they'll be in a position to issue the certificate next week," he said.

More than five weeks later, the Public Accounts still haven't been released; most years, they're public by mid-July. (Last year it was July 21.)

The province's auditor general has issued "qualified" approvals for the Liberal government's financial statements repeatedly, finding that they was not following proper Canadian accounting practices.

The delay could indicate that the Auditor General has found a more sympathetic ear in the new government or that the NDP has its own questions about Liberal financial practices and the claimed surplus.

Which would not be good news for a Liberal party that lost its way with a throne speech that abandoned any claimed principles and now may face questions about its financial competence.

Postmedia hits the wall

Last week's quarterly report from Postmedia was predictably grim.

Canada's largest newspaper company reported revenues had fallen 13.4 per cent from a year earlier. Plunging revenues have been a hallmark of Postmedia's six-year existence.

The corporation has slashed costs, but not enough to keep up with revenue losses. Postmedia took in $181 million in the quarter, $28 million less than the previous year. It cut operating costs by $21 million.

Operating income - the actual performance of the business - fell from $13 million to $6 million.

There are two key lessons from these numbers.

First, expect deeper cuts. What's happened so far hasn't been enough to keep up with falling revenues. And, or course, the cuts will lead to further revenue losses.

And second, note that for the first time - even after last year's debt restructuring - Postmedia's operating income of $6 million was less than its interest payments of $8 million.

In the short term, Postmedia can free up some cash to pay the interest. But the fundamentals, as they say, are dismal.

And the end, according to one-time newspaper baron Conrad Black, is clear.

"The bond holders control the company and are content to bleed it dry with the complicity of management. Bankruptcy is next," he said on Twitter.

Which Christy Clark response on the health firings is to be believed?

“I did ask a lot of questions at the time. The assurances that we all received was that these were absolutely justified and the right thing to do.”

- Premier Christy Clark, responding Friday to reporters' questions on the health firings.

"Premier Clark did not recall ever being briefed about the decision to terminate the employees."

- Ombudsperson Jay Chalke on Clark's evidence, under oath, taken as part of his inquiry.

So when, exactly, did Clark ask all these questions on firings she can't recall ever being briefed on? Who did she ask, and who provided these assurances?

And what should voters make of the conflict between her public claims and testimony under oath?

Is Vancouver the Jalisco Cartel's 'drug portal to the Pacific'?

Vancouver is making its mark as a major export centre in at least one area — international drug trafficking.

‘Drug Portal to the Pacific,’ an InSight Crime report on the rise of the Jalisco Cartel called the city. 

Cartel's 2015 ambush that killed 15 police officers

“The key to their rapid expansion has been the strategic presence of operations on the southeast border of the United States, next to Tijuana, and the northeast border, next to Vancouver, Canada,” the report said.

The role of Mexican Cartels in Canada isn’t new. In 2015 the Vancouver Sun’s Kim Bolan wrote  about the cartels’ increasing shift to having their own people on the ground in Canada, rather than dealing with Canadian intermediaries.

But the new report by Luis Alonso Pérez (originally done for Animal Politico a Mexican online publication) sets out how important Vancouver has been allowing the once-small Jalisco Cartel become “one of the most prolific and violent drug trafficking organizations in the world.”

It’s not just that Vancouver is a good place to land drugs destined for the U.S. and Canada. It’s become the transshipment point for drugs bound for the Pacific Rim, the article says.

The Jalisco ‘New Generation’ Cartel is a formidable player — combining business smarts, bribery and intimidation - it shot down a military helicopter -  and over-the-top violence, including mass murders. Last month, police blamed the cartel for 12 murders in Manzanillo, including seven people found decapitated in a taxi.

I started following InSight Crime after we moved to Honduras. It was almost the equivalent of a newspaper’s business pages in shedding light on the economy and politics of that country and its neighbours. I’ve found it consistently credible and useful over the last five years.

It’s also a journalistic success story. In 2010, two journalists launched the project with foundation funding. The focus was on crime in Latin America, from drugs to urban gangs to corruption and impunity. It’s going strong, in English and Spanish, with a broad funding base — including the Canadian government.

Donald Trump's stupid wall and Central America

There is no wall tall enough.

Even if you can leave aside the racism and the attempt to exploit and worsen fears and prejudices, Donald Trump's plan to build a wall along the Mexican border is remarkably stupid.

Early in our stay in in Honduras, I started hearing about the huge number of people who went to the United States. It was an incredibly difficult, dangerous and expensive effort. People set out with almost no money to make a 3,100-kilometre journey through Guatemala and Mexico and across the already difficult U.S. border. They risked robbery, kidnapping, rape, extortion and a lonely death in the desert. Many travelled on La Bestia, a Mexican freight train that carried hundreds of migrants.

I wrote about the journey here and here. The idea that a wall would deter people willing to risk death and sacrifice everything they had for a chance to spend a few years in the U.S. is idiotic.

As is Trump's failure to recognize the risk to U.S. interests created by his $15-billion wall plan.

Hondurans, for the most part, didn't want to move to the U.S. They wanted to spend three or four years working at the jobs no one wanted and sending money home, to pay for a better education for their children, a plot of land to farm or to start a small business. (In countries where employment is scarce and precarious, even a tiny business offers some security.)

Remittances - money sent back by Hondurans working in other countries - equals about 18 per cent of the GDP of Honduras, according to the World Bank. It's about 17 per cent for El Salvador, 10 per cent for Guatemala and nine per cent for Nicaragua (although much of that country's remittances come from people working in Costa Rica).

For comparison, the natural resource and sectors combined contribute 16 per cent of British Columbia's GDP.

The U.S. has fretted about security risks in Central America since the 1890s. And now Trump proposes a wall that, to the extent that it works, will destabilize economies and governments in the northern triangle — an already troubled region.

An unlikely buyer's arsenal of restricted weapons, and their journey to criminals' hands

My piece from The Tyee

Canada is supposed to have tough gun laws. So how did a struggling Courtenay man with affiliations to organized crime legally accumulate 49 restricted firearms?

And how did some of his weapons end up in the hands of criminals?

Bryce McDonald was sent to jail for three years and four months in November. The sentencing decisionwas posted on the BC Supreme Court website this month.

And Justice Robin Baird was puzzled by McDonald’s ability to get permits to buy so many weapons that are supposedly tightly controlled.

Especially as McDonald had first applied for a permit to buy a restricted weapon in 2006 and the federal firearms officer repeatedly rejected his applications over the next three years.

Not too surprisingly. McDonald was 24 then. He had been hit by a car when he was 19, and badly injured — fractured skull, broken bones. When he came to in hospital he remembered nothing about his life. He had to learn everything again — how to walk, talk, eat, care for himself. He suffered from chronic pain and the effects of his head injury, and lived on a “modest disability pension.” He had a dated conviction for uttering threats. And the firearms officer was troubled that McDonald had a medical marijuana grow licence. Restricted weapons and a grow op, even a legal one, were a bad combination, he thought.

But “for reasons which I have yet to grasp,” Baird said, in late 2009 the firearms officer changed his mind. He accepted McDonald’s argument that he was keen on the challenge of learning how to shoot a variety of guns on a range. McDonald got permission to buy restricted weapons, but was required to store them somewhere other than his home.

Restricted weapons are supposed to be hard to get. But McDonald, an unlikely candidate, seemed to have no problem building a formidable arsenal.

Canada has three classes of firearms. Non-restricted are the basic rifles and shotguns used for hunting or target practice or killing sick livestock on a farm. They are easy to get — a little safety training, a background check and four-week waiting period and you’re good to go.

Prohibited are automatic weapons, sawed off shotguns and easily concealed handguns, the kind of weapons criminals want. You can’t legally acquire them, though many owners were allowed to keep them under “grandfathering” provisions that covered existing weapons when gun laws were tightened in 1998.

And restricted weapons — most handguns, semi-automatic rifles, short-barrel shotguns, assault-style weapons — fall in between. You need a special permit to own them, and a reason — target shooting, gun collecting, your job or, rarely, protection. You have to take a course and undergo a more detailed background check, and there are rules about where you can store the weapons. McDonald was barred from keeping them in his home; he had to store them at a separate location.

But McDonald somehow passed all those hurdles. In 2009, according to evidence at his trial, he bought his first restricted weapon, a Springfield Armory XD45 Tactical Semi-Auto Pistol described in ads as “meant for law enforcement, home defence, field carry and tactical deployments.”

In 2010, he added three new guns to his collection, including a , described as “ideal for law enforcement, home defence or concealed carry.” It comes with a laser sight; just tag your target with the red dot and squeeze the trigger.

He bought nine more restricted weapons in 2011 and five in 2012. And in 2013, he bought 31 — 19 in three months, five handguns in one day on Sept. 9, 2013. No one checked to see why he was stockpiling so many guns, or if he still had them. (McDonald had said he wanted the restricted weapons because he liked the challenge of mastering different guns on the shooting range. The judge noted that the purchase of 10 Glock handguns — many the same or similar — hardly seemed consistent with that claim.)

Eight days after the five-gun purchase, things started to unravel. A Lower Mainland homicide squad got a tip about a bag of guns dumped in Surrey. A rifle turned out to be one of McDonald’s restricted weapons; he had never reported it missing, as required under the law.

Three months later — a period in which McDonald bought 13 more restricted weapons — police finally arrested him. They searched the designated storage location, and there were no guns. In his house, police found seven weapons. The other 42 weapons were missing — a “curious and sobering thing,” Justice Baird said. (In fact, the Canadian Firearms Centre had concerns about McDonald as early as March; their only response was to call him and accept his assurances that he was following the rules.)

McDonald suggested police must have taken them, or didn’t see them when they searched and left the doors of his house open and someone else stole them.

Then the guns started turning up at crime scenes — “more or less inevitably,” Baird noted.

On June 16, 2014, RCMP responded to a Burnaby home invasion. The suspects fled, but police found their vehicle — and a loaded Sturm Ruger semi-automatic handgun registered to McDonald. On June 21, the RCMP responded to shooting at Brentwood Mall in Burnaby. Weeks later a suspect turned himself in and handed over the gun he had used, another handgun from McDonald’s armoury.

In January 2015, Vancouver police arrested a man for shoplifting and found he was packing three Glocks, two from McDonald’s arsenal. In June a man was arrested driving a stolen vehicle in Vancouver. The suspect had two Glocks in a bag. They weren’t McDonald’s, but a search of the suspect’s home found a Beretta 96A1 handgun — offering “Ultimate Tactical Power,”according to the company — that he had purchased.

And in February this year, Calgary police investigating a violent home invasion found the suspects had another Glock from McDonald’s Courtenay collection.

All of which raises the question of just how restricted these weapons are if someone like McDonald can buy several dozens of them, ignore his permit requirements and come up with no explanation when they started showing up at crime scenes.

There are a lot of them out there. There were 796,000 restricted weapons in Canadian communities in 2015, according to the RCMP, 145,000 in British Columbia. (Plus 183,000 prohibited weapons.)

And the number of restricted weapons has increased dramatically — doubling from 399,000 in 2005. (There were 7.7 million legal guns in Canada in 2010.)

People who think it’s a bad thing to have twice as many restricted weapons in their neighbourhoods — whether in the hands of McDonald or some more responsible gun buff — tend to blame Stephen Harper. And the Conservative government did make it easier to own guns, including restricted weapons. It killed the long gun registry in 2012, and Bill C-42, passed in 2015, reduced the regulations on owning and transporting restricted weapons and reduced the ability of provincial firearms officers to control access.

And the Liberals so far have failed to deliver on their 2015 campaign promise to “take action to get handguns and assault weapons off our streets.” They pledged to repeal sections of C-42 that reduced regulations around transporting restricted and prohibited weapons, require enhanced background checks for people buying restricted weapons and implement regulations requiring dealers to mark guns so they were easier to trace.

So far, none of that has happened.

McDonald was sentenced to 40 months in penitentiary for failing to store his weapons properly. (He also was convicted for possessing brass knuckles and cocaine possession.)

But his guns are still out there. And so, presumably, are other people stockpiling arsenals of weapons that are supposed to be hard to get.

OK everybody, that sucked. Now, back to work

I confess to despair watching the U.S. election results last night. I turned off the television before 9:30 p.m., knowing Donald Trump would win but thinking I'd sleep better if there was the faint hope of a different outcome. (I didn't.) My partner refused to watch any of the coverage, choosing to work and play accordion while instructing me not to share any information.

I'm not usually deeply invested in election results, beyond a desire to see governments punished for bad, corrupt or insulting behaviour. There are important differences between parties but, broadly, the country or province won't generally be dramatically transformed in four years no matter who governs.

The U.S. election was different. And the results were profoundly troubling. Especially as I've spent a long time working as a journalist based on the belief that people, given good information, would make good decisions. That didn't happen.

I reflect on all that in my Tyee piece here.

Sorry, have we met? Adventures in face blindness

Have we met? You look familiar

The New Yorker ran a fascinating story about “super-recognizers,” focusing on a small Scotland Yard team whose skills let them identify suspects among hundreds of faces in the murkiest surveillance videos.

And it included a link to the Cambridge Face Memory Test, one of the tools used to assess officers’ ability to recognize faces. 

The test is about 20 minutes. At the end, you get your result, and this message. “The average score on this test is around 80 per cent correct responses for adult participants. A score of 60 per cent or below may indicate face blindness."

I scored 57 per cent. 

That’s hardly a surprise. I once spotted an acquaintance, a movie reviewer, at a repertory cinema. “Surprising to find you here in the evening, when it’s so similar to your work.” I said. “At least you won’t have to write about it.” I asked about the movie, him being an expert and all, and the entire conversation was based on his work and knowledge of film.

Except he wasn’t the movie critic, but one of his co-workers who looked vaguely like him and and must have struggled tremendously to follow my misdirected comments.

Bumping into another acquaintance at an art opening, I exchanged pleasantries while wondering why he seemed to be cowering in fear. My partner reminded me that I had berated him — with uncharacteristic venom — for an ethical failing a few months earlier. 

And too many times, in my corporate days, I introduced myself to someone at a schmoozing event, only to have him say “yes, I know, you introduced yourself to me 10 minutes ago.”

And those ignore the countless social blunders I never even recognized, and the ones too embarrassing to share.

I was relieved to learn six years ago that I wasn’t just inattentive or indifferent to others when Oliver Sacks wrote about his much more extreme case of prosopagnosia, as it is called, also in the New Yorker.

And it was useful to know that my earlier efforts to learn how to become better at remembering people’s names were doomed. If you don’t remember faces, you certainly can’t put names to them.

I can recognize people if they are part of my life, of course. Context helps tremendously, and so does distinctive appearance or clues like clothing or voices.

And name tags. I wish everyone had to wear name tags, or even better have their names tattooed on their foreheads. That would be a double win, as I could pretend to make eye contact while figuring out who they are.

On the positive side, I’m friendly. When introduced to someone with the common “Do you two know each other?,” I always nod enthusiastically, just in case. I smile at strangers, because they generally look vaguely familiar and might be someone I know. (And because I do believe greeting everyone cheerfully - common in Central America - is preferable to Victorians’ fierce determination to avoid all contact with anyone they encounter. My cheery greetings while walking just seem to alarm people here.)

Some cases of prosopagnosia, following a brain injury or stroke, are fairly easily understood. But the much more common developmental form continues to be mostly a mystery.

It’s hardly a giant disability, especially if you can develop skills to cope.

But our world does value social relationships, those networks of acquaintances and business associates and friends that ease the way through life. And people who can’t recognize people have a much harder time maintaining those loose relationships. And their - our - inability to recognize an acquaintance can seem rude or arrogant.

Sacks notes that up to 10 per cent of people are affected to some degree by face blindness, a rate similar to dyslexia. But, he adds, while we’re aware of the challenges facing dyslexic children, and their strengths, and providing supports, the problems of people with prosopagnosia are ignored.  

It’s not that a big deal for me. (Though, as the researchers note, I have no idea how other people see faces, so maybe it is and I just don't know it.) 

But I’m pretty smart and educated. I had the chance to develop all sorts of coping skills. I’ve figured out how to pretend I recognize people who seem entirely unfamiliar, and decipher identity clues. 

What about people without those advantages? Are they just bewildered and weirdly awkward, with all of the consequences that brings?

Maybe we can talk about this when next we meet. If I recognize you.

Postmedia's strange $50-million bet on Mogo

I wrote about information inequality for The Tyee this week, looking at what's happening as traditional news media fade to black and new business models emerge based on providing high-value information to people and organizations that can pay high prices.

You can read it here.

As part of the research I went through Postmedia's financial report on the last fiscal year, released last week.

It was grim, which is unsurprising given Postmedia's five years of failure to find a solution to the collapse of its business. Revenue down, no positive news and a strategy based on "aggressive and accelerated cost-cutting" and transforming the business model from "selling audience to selling performance marketing solutions and outcomes."

Which could apply to thousands of businesses, from one-person marketing firms to giant media companies, in all sorts of fields.

Postmedia's deal this year with Mogo Finance Technology represents an early attempt to sell "outcomes." In January, Postmedia announced it would provide $50 million worth of "media value" to Mogo over three years — $15 million this year. That's a big boost for a company that spent less than $11 million on marketing last year, but has dreams of becoming the Uber of consumer loans and personal finance.

If the ads and marketing works, Postmedia hopes to benefit from a revenue-sharing deal and a chance to buy Mogo shares at a fixed price.

But the revenue sharing, based on the information available, is likely to provide about $3.5 million to Postmedia this year — less than one-quarter of the value of the services it's providing to Mogo.

And any chance to cash in on an increase in the value of Mogo shares looks remote. Postmedia negotiated a deal that gave it the right to purchase 1.2 million Mogo shares at a price of $2.96, their value at the time of the deal.

Since then, Mogo's share price has fallen by more than 50 per cent, to $1.36. Postmedia's share options are worthless.

On one hand, at least Postmedia is trying something new.

But it is a little puzzling that a company that couldn't figure out its own business has decided it has the expertise to pick winners in entirely unrelated fields.

And while there is no cash at risk, Postmedia's commitment of $50 million in ads and services does involve both real costs and its reputation.

Combine Mogo's ad budget and the contribution from Postmedia and the small company has a marketing budget equal to BC Lotteries, which spent $26 million on advertising and marketing last year. That was enough to encourage British Columbians to lose $2.4 billion - $6.6 million a day - gambling.

If Postmedia's giant marketing contribution doesn't produce results — if you haven't heard of Mogo by now, for example — that undermines the corporation's claims of effectiveness.

Postmedia has already been slashing print advertising rates, down 16 per cent in the last two years, reflecting both its falling circulation and fierce competition from giants like Facebook and Google. If the $50-million boost for Mogo doesn't produce real results, it will be even harder to convince other companies Postmedia should be part of their marketing budget.

But what do I know? Postmedia's board extended CEO Paul Godfrey's contract Tuesday. It was to expire in 2018; now he's to stay on to the end of 2020. Despite five years of decline, an inability to deliver on plans to revitalize the business and massive losses in shareholder value, somebody thinks Godfrey remains the person to lead Postmedia into what is likely its brief future.

Coca in Peru and Colombia, and the stupidity of the war on drugs

"Why are Peru, Colombia Coca Numbers Going in Opposite Directions?"
That was the headline on a recent Insight Crime report. I am a fan of the site, which focuses on organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, offering valuable reporting and analysis.
But the answer to the question posed in that headline seems obvious.
Cocaine demand isn't going down. Market forces mean suppliers will find ways to meet the demand.
So if Peru is producing less coca, the leaves that end up as cocaine, Colombia or some other country will be producing more.
And Peru is producing less, thanks to government eradication campaigns. "Peru has reduced coca cultivation by almost one-third in the last five years, according to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and in 2015 the country registered the lowest amount of coca sown in the last 15 years," the website reports.
But across the border in Colombia, things are different. Colombia went through its own eradication campaigns, cutting coca cultivation in half between 2007 and 2012.
The graph with the article shows the result. As Peru's cultivation went down, Colombia's increased to help meet the global demand for cocaine.
In 2011, the two countries had about the same number of hectares under coca cultivation, for a combined total of 126,200.
Last year, Peru's cultivation had been reduced by about 22,000 hectares and Colombia's had increased by 32,000 hectares. The combined total was 136,300.
The article offers some explanations for the trends, including community resistance to eradication efforts in Colombia and the involvement of FARC's left-wing guerrillas in production.
But the underlying reality has been established through almost a century of failed, wildly expensive efforts to deal with drug issues by limiting supply.
Cut production in one area, and another country will increase production to fill the gap. Make it harder to get heroin, and users will turn to prescription opiates. Crack down on the availability of those drugs, and fentanyl emerges as a more deadly alternative.
Attacking the supply side of the drug equation didn't work when the U.S. introduced Prohibition to end alcohol sales in 1920. It hasn't worked in the 45 years since U.S. president Richard Nixon announced a war on drugs.
Yet governments, including Canada, continue the costly, futile and ultimately destructive efforts, ignoring the obvious evidence of their failure, and the terrible damage that has been done.

The sad story of the little railway that couldn't

I wrote about the Island Corridor Foundation and the E&N rail line for The Tyee.
You can read the piece here.

Letter from Managua: The working life

Our house has a room for a servant.

Well, not a room really. More like a cell. Nine feet long, less than six feet wide. There’s a single bed and sink, toilet and shower. A small window high up on one wall, three hooks to hang clothes.

We don’t have a ‘chica,’ the term generally used for the woman - usually young - who cleans the house, cooks meals and looks after the children.

Better a bad job than no job

In Honduras, Rosa came once a week to clean. Often, she brought her children. On cleaning days, I tidied the house before they got there and then went to buy soft drinks for her and any children who showed up. (I’m not using her real name.)

We didn’t need anyone to clean our small house. But Rosa was a single mom. Her husband, her charming nine-year-old daughter told me soon after we met, drank too many beers, dove into the river near their tiny house, hit his head on a rock and died. We visited their house just before we left - two rooms, dirt floor, concrete block walls, wood cooking fire, water from a tap just down the hill, broken treadle sewing machine out the back. Rosa had taken a sewing course and invited us to her graduation, where she wore a pale blue satin dress she had made. 

Here in Nicaragua, house cleaners are entitled to a minimum wage of $235 a month Canadian. That’s for a six-day work week, 12 hours a day. About 75 cents an hour. And employers can deduct up to 50 per cent for room and board.

We don’t need, or want a cleaner. I’d feel guilty about paying too little, foolish paying too much for a service I didn’t even want and hate the idea of sharing our house. But I know the job, poorly paid or not, would have been welcomed by someone.

A Cuso International placement plunks you into the middle of life in another country. You move beyond the statistics about GDP per capita ($42,000 in Canada and $4,500 here) and begin to understand what it means to live in a poor country. 

The Nicaraguan government sets minimum wages for different types of jobs. They increased eight or nine per cent this year, a jump that met the business community’s desire to avoid double-digit raises, but reflected the need to increase incomes, a six-per-cent inflation rate and the fact this is an election year.

The highest paid category - people who work in construction or financial institutions - has a minimum salary of $335 a month. Agricultural workers have a minimum wage of $150, government workers about $190. 

Some people are paid above the minimum wage, of course. But most are paid less. About 70 per cent of Nicaraguans work in the informal economy and minimum wages and other labour rules don’t apply. 

It’s a poor country. Second poorest in the hemisphere, according to the World Bank, ahead of perpetually lowest-ranked Haiti. And I have seen really poor people, living in houses of sticks and mud, sometimes worse.

But there are people with money here. We can walk to a mall and see a movie in a theatre nicer than any in Victoria. People line up for $4 lattes, and restaurants with prices in American dollars do well. Another mall has just completed a $36 million expansion with some flashy clothes stores. I’m going to buy a few shirts from Pull and Bear before we head to Canada. 

Partly, the issue is inequality. In Canada, the people in the top 20 per cent have an average income about six times as great as the people in the bottom 20 per cent. In Nicaragua, they have an average income 11 times higher. 

All of which makes development work interesting. A focus on getting people into the labour market isn’t necessarily productive, given low wages and limited opportunity. CATIE, my organization, is working on increasing incomes and food security for rural agricultural families. That makes sense.

More than one-third of Nicaraguans have a different solution in mind. A survey last month found 36 per cent of Nicaraguans were interested in emigrating. (Down from 52 per cent a year ago.) But they don’t want to stay away - more than 60 per cent of those interested in emigrating saw it as a way to make enough money to come home and start a business (38 per cent), pay debts or buy a house, or as an opportunity to study and improve their skills before returning to Nicaragua.

Which suggests Canada’s biggest development contribution could be opening the door a bit wider for people just looking for a chance to get ahead.