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Author Archives: CanucksBanter
Why Are The Rich Getting A Free Ride?
Why are the levels of income inequality continuing to rise when Canada is one of the wealthiest nations in the world?
Published on Nov 22, 2013 SUBSCRIBE and check out our other videos! http://www.operationmaple.com http://www.facebook.com/operationmaple http://twitter.com/#!/operationmaple
Vaughn Palmer: ‘Growth-sharing’ model eyed for public sector union deals
Finance minister’s plan would directly tie public sector compensation to provincial economic growth
By Vaughn Palmer, Vancouver Sun columnist November 27, 2013
Finance Minister Mike de Jong says the provincial government wants to ‘share the benefits of (economic) growth with the people that helped us get there.’Photograph by: Adrian Wyld , THE CANADIAN PRESS
VICTORIA — Finance Minister Mike de Jong was winding up a status report on a provincial budget that remains balanced on the edge of a razor Wednesday when he got to the news about the government’s mandate for the next round of public sector wage negotiations.
Gone are “net zero” and “cooperative gainsharing,” themes of the last two rounds. Enter “economic growth-sharing,” the government’s watchword for bargaining on contracts that expire next March 31.
The Liberals, taking their lead from expectations of modest growth in the years ahead, will offer correspondingly modest increases in wages and benefits to public sector workers. Wanting long-term stability as well, they are seeking settlements in the range of five per cent over five years.
But if the economy outperforms expectations, the government is prepared to translate the resulting revenue windfall into additional raises for public sector workers.
“I’m trying to be candid about the limited means at our disposal for locked-in general wage increases, “ de Jong told reporters. “This is a mechanism by which if collectively we can do better, the government is saying we want to share the benefits of that growth with the people that helped get us there.”
The starting point for de Jong’s proposed “mechanism” would be the annual growth projection from the independent forecasting council. The council is a defined-in-law panel of economists and other experts that meets every December to set the parameters for the following year’s provincial budget.
The finishing point would be the actual rate of growth, as determined after the fact by Statistics Canada in its annual calculations of “real gross domestic product at market prices” for the country’s provinces and territories. Real GDP growth, in shorthand.
In the event the latter performance exceeds the former projection, the government is proposing to split the difference in terms of an additional wage increase for public sector workers. A rate of growth that exceeded the forecast by one percentage point, would translate into a half-point wage increase.
One public sector union, the Health Sciences Association, has already tentatively accepted the formula, albeit subject to ratification. The union’s 17,000 members, including technologists, pharmacists, radiologists, dietitians, therapists and other health care professionals, are voting this month and into the next on a deal reached Nov. 8.
If ratified, it would provide them with a basic increase of 5.5 per cent spread over five years, plus what are called “economic stability dividends” if the economy outperforms expectations in the final four years of the agreement.
As a hypothetical example, derived from the union’s briefing for its members, suppose that in December 2014 the members of the economic forecasting council project the rate of economic growth for the year ahead at 2.1 per cent, on average. The number is duly recorded and published in the provincial budget presented to the legislature in February 2015.
Then in November 2016 Statistics Canada weighs in, right on schedule, with its calculation of how much the economy actually grew in the preceding year: 3.1 per cent.
Out come the calculators and out goes a directive from the Ministry of Finance to employers in the health care sector to begin paying out an additional half a percentage point to HSA members starting in 2017.
What if the economy went in the opposite direction and underperformed the forecast? There’d be no wage cut. The Liberals want public sector workers to go along with this experiment, not run for cover from it.
If approved, the HSA deal would be the first of its kind, here or in most other Canadian jurisdictions. Also a significant step toward the Liberal goal of tying public sector compensation to overall performance of the economy. Perhaps it might dispose public sector unions and their members to be more supportive of measures to encourage resource development, investment and private sector growth.
“It’s about the partnership,” de Jong explained. “The government is in partnership with the private sector in terms of generating that economic growth and the public sector is part of that partnership, a big part.
“They are a key part of the equation and a key mechanism by which we work with the private sector to create the circumstances in which the investment occurs and the economy grows. This is a means by which we can formalize that partnership and share some of the benefits.”
Nor is the prospect purely hypothetical. The finance ministry has produced a chart showing that if the growth-sharing mechanism were in place for all public sector workers since the Liberals took office, the cumulative result would have been an additional three-per-cent increase in wages over the 12 years and a payout from the provincial treasury of almost half a billion dollars.
Still, as de Jong noted, the HSA deal is but a first step and a tentative one at that. “I’m going to be careful about prejudging the outcome of discussions,” he told reporters, not disguising that he and his colleagues hope that growth-sharing becomes the standard for this round of public sector bargaining.
A one-per-cent increase in provincial economic growth translates into an estimated $200 million to $350 million in extra government revenues. A one-per-cent wage hike for all unionized public sector workers equates to about $200 million.
Andrew Coyne: There’s no spinning it — the Conservatives were spanked in Monday’s byelections
Adrian Wyld/The Canadian PressDoes Stephen Harper realize that he needs to turn things around to win in 2015?
If you were determined to be obtuse about it, you could look at the results of Monday’s byelections and say: nothing changed. The Tories held onto their two seats in the West, the Liberals held onto theirs in Ontario and Quebec. Move along folks, no story here.
Justin Trudeau would have come under less flak if he’d drawn a caricature depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Mr. Trudeau had the temerity to quote fallen NDP leader Jack Layton in his victory address, after the Liberals retained the Bourassa and Toronto Centre seats in Monday’s byelections.
Mr. Trudeau said that the NDP is “no longer the hopeful, optimistic party of Jack Layton … it is the Liberal Party that proved that hope is stronger than fear, that positive politics can, and should win out over negative.”
The invocation of Mr. Layton’s words, penned in a note to Canadians just before he died two years ago – “love is better than anger, hope is better than fear” – has incensed New Democrats, who have all but accused Mr. Trudeau of defaming the memory of their former leader.
You could do this, as I say, only if you took extravagant care to ignore everything else that happened that night: If you focused myopically on the top-line result in each riding, and paid no attention to the popular vote — the trend, the swing, across the nation and over time.
In private, I can assure you, no one in any of the parties does this. Only in the public realm do they say things like “a win’s a win” — which is what you say when a win looks a lot like a loss — and only the most programmed partisans actually mean it.
Only in the most literal sense is the Tories’ 391-vote margin in Brandon-Souris, one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, a “win.” Even the partisans found this hard to say with a straight face. Rather, they were obliged first to pretend that a Forum Research poll showing the Liberals ahead by 29 points the weekend before the election had some basis in reality, the better to conjure up a fantasy “comeback.”
To be sure, every party comes well-stocked with rationalizations on occasions like these, usually introduced by “when you consider” or some such phrase. As in: The Conservatives did pretty well, when you consider we’re in the throes of a massive national scandal. Or: the NDP collapse in Manitoba is understandable, when you consider the unpopularity of the province’s NDP government. It’s not cold, when you consider it’s February.
We would have done better, in other words, but for the fact that we did worse. Figures don’t lie, but losers can consider.
Related
- Trudeau unrepentant after NDP fumes at his use of Jack Layton’s dying words in victory speech
- ‘The system is broken’: Spectacularly inaccurate byelection polls spark fears of survey ban during elections
- Kelly McParland: Byelection games — Trudeau wins without winning anything
- John Ivison: Conservatives feeling they can win next election, if the NDP holds strong
But there’s just no spinning this one. The trends are too pronounced. Across all four ridings, the Tory vote was down 11 points versus the 2011 election, from 39% to 28%, almost exactly mirroring the national polls. The NDP, which might have been expected to gain the most from the Tories’ disfavour — when you consider how well Tom Mulcair has been performing in Parliament — instead dropped five points overall, while the Liberals surged 18 points.
If the drop in the Tory vote was the night’s main story, the rise in the Liberals’ was the other. In Provencher and Brandon-Souris, the Grits blew past the NDP to become the Tories’ main rivals, taking as many votes from the left as they did from the right. In Toronto Centre and Bourassa, they increased their margins of victory, even in the face of spirited challenges from the NDP. Conservative candidates in the East both lost their deposits, as NDP candidates did in the West. Only the Liberals were up across the board.
But the true significance of the result is captured, not by comparison to the last election, but set against the broad sweep of history. The 8.7% of the vote the Conservatives managed to hold onto in Toronto Centre — the riding of David Crombie and David MacDonald — is the party’s worst showing in any election in that riding since Confederation.
The Conservative candidate in Bourassa, likewise, took less than 5% of the vote. That is the second-worst showing for the Conservatives in that riding since 1968, when it was created. (Only 2000, when they split the vote with the Canadian Alliance, was worse.) By contrast, the Liberals’ 43% showing in Brandon-Souris was not only a 37% increase over 2011, it was their best ever.
NP GraphicsClick to Enlarge
Nothing changed? Come on. We can argue about the reasons, we can debate what it portends, but on the night, there’s no getting away from it: The Conservatives were spanked. No doubt it would have been even worse for the Tories had they actually lost Brandon-Souris (“not unexpected, when you consider the Liberal candidate was the son of the riding’s long-time former Conservative MP”), but the results ought to prompt some deep reflection among the party’s leadership.
No, the Senate scandal is not likely to be at the top of most voters’ minds two years from now. But I rather doubt the Senate scandal, on its own, is what has driven one in four Tory voters to abandon the party: As I say, the polls have been showing the same thing for some time. It’s everything that went before it, and everything that’s happened since.
It’s the general impression that we are being governed by a gang of thugs — secretive, high-handed, unprincipled gusting to unethical, and openly contemptuous of such quaint notions as democratic accountability — an impression that grows more baked in each time the Prime Minister dodges a question in Parliament, or worse, sends in the clownish Paul Calandra to answer in his place.
At the same time, it’s clear the NDP have a lot of work to do to convince voters, not just of the Conservatives’ faults, but of their own virtues as their putative replacements. It must gall Mr. Mulcair, after all his weight and substance, to see the voters flock instead to the lighter-than-air Justin Trudeau. But he still has lots of time to turn things around.
For that matter, so does Stephen Harper. The difference is, Mr. Mulcair seems to realize he needs to.
Postmedia News
Andrew Coyne: There’s no spinning it — the Conservatives were spanked in Monday’s byelections
Adrian Wyld/The Canadian PressDoes Stephen Harper realize that he needs to turn things around to win in 2015?
If you were determined to be obtuse about it, you could look at the results of Monday’s byelections and say: nothing changed. The Tories held onto their two seats in the West, the Liberals held onto theirs in Ontario and Quebec. Move along folks, no story here.
Justin Trudeau would have come under less flak if he’d drawn a caricature depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Mr. Trudeau had the temerity to quote fallen NDP leader Jack Layton in his victory address, after the Liberals retained the Bourassa and Toronto Centre seats in Monday’s byelections.
Mr. Trudeau said that the NDP is “no longer the hopeful, optimistic party of Jack Layton … it is the Liberal Party that proved that hope is stronger than fear, that positive politics can, and should win out over negative.”
The invocation of Mr. Layton’s words, penned in a note to Canadians just before he died two years ago – “love is better than anger, hope is better than fear” – has incensed New Democrats, who have all but accused Mr. Trudeau of defaming the memory of their former leader.
You could do this, as I say, only if you took extravagant care to ignore everything else that happened that night: If you focused myopically on the top-line result in each riding, and paid no attention to the popular vote — the trend, the swing, across the nation and over time.
In private, I can assure you, no one in any of the parties does this. Only in the public realm do they say things like “a win’s a win” — which is what you say when a win looks a lot like a loss — and only the most programmed partisans actually mean it.
Only in the most literal sense is the Tories’ 391-vote margin in Brandon-Souris, one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, a “win.” Even the partisans found this hard to say with a straight face. Rather, they were obliged first to pretend that a Forum Research poll showing the Liberals ahead by 29 points the weekend before the election had some basis in reality, the better to conjure up a fantasy “comeback.”
To be sure, every party comes well-stocked with rationalizations on occasions like these, usually introduced by “when you consider” or some such phrase. As in: The Conservatives did pretty well, when you consider we’re in the throes of a massive national scandal. Or: the NDP collapse in Manitoba is understandable, when you consider the unpopularity of the province’s NDP government. It’s not cold, when you consider it’s February.
We would have done better, in other words, but for the fact that we did worse. Figures don’t lie, but losers can consider.
Related
- Trudeau unrepentant after NDP fumes at his use of Jack Layton’s dying words in victory speech
- ‘The system is broken’: Spectacularly inaccurate byelection polls spark fears of survey ban during elections
- Kelly McParland: Byelection games — Trudeau wins without winning anything
- John Ivison: Conservatives feeling they can win next election, if the NDP holds strong
But there’s just no spinning this one. The trends are too pronounced. Across all four ridings, the Tory vote was down 11 points versus the 2011 election, from 39% to 28%, almost exactly mirroring the national polls. The NDP, which might have been expected to gain the most from the Tories’ disfavour — when you consider how well Tom Mulcair has been performing in Parliament — instead dropped five points overall, while the Liberals surged 18 points.
If the drop in the Tory vote was the night’s main story, the rise in the Liberals’ was the other. In Provencher and Brandon-Souris, the Grits blew past the NDP to become the Tories’ main rivals, taking as many votes from the left as they did from the right. In Toronto Centre and Bourassa, they increased their margins of victory, even in the face of spirited challenges from the NDP. Conservative candidates in the East both lost their deposits, as NDP candidates did in the West. Only the Liberals were up across the board.
But the true significance of the result is captured, not by comparison to the last election, but set against the broad sweep of history. The 8.7% of the vote the Conservatives managed to hold onto in Toronto Centre — the riding of David Crombie and David MacDonald — is the party’s worst showing in any election in that riding since Confederation.
The Conservative candidate in Bourassa, likewise, took less than 5% of the vote. That is the second-worst showing for the Conservatives in that riding since 1968, when it was created. (Only 2000, when they split the vote with the Canadian Alliance, was worse.) By contrast, the Liberals’ 43% showing in Brandon-Souris was not only a 37% increase over 2011, it was their best ever.
NP GraphicsClick to Enlarge
Nothing changed? Come on. We can argue about the reasons, we can debate what it portends, but on the night, there’s no getting away from it: The Conservatives were spanked. No doubt it would have been even worse for the Tories had they actually lost Brandon-Souris (“not unexpected, when you consider the Liberal candidate was the son of the riding’s long-time former Conservative MP”), but the results ought to prompt some deep reflection among the party’s leadership.
No, the Senate scandal is not likely to be at the top of most voters’ minds two years from now. But I rather doubt the Senate scandal, on its own, is what has driven one in four Tory voters to abandon the party: As I say, the polls have been showing the same thing for some time. It’s everything that went before it, and everything that’s happened since.
It’s the general impression that we are being governed by a gang of thugs — secretive, high-handed, unprincipled gusting to unethical, and openly contemptuous of such quaint notions as democratic accountability — an impression that grows more baked in each time the Prime Minister dodges a question in Parliament, or worse, sends in the clownish Paul Calandra to answer in his place.
At the same time, it’s clear the NDP have a lot of work to do to convince voters, not just of the Conservatives’ faults, but of their own virtues as their putative replacements. It must gall Mr. Mulcair, after all his weight and substance, to see the voters flock instead to the lighter-than-air Justin Trudeau. But he still has lots of time to turn things around.
For that matter, so does Stephen Harper. The difference is, Mr. Mulcair seems to realize he needs to.
Postmedia News
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 