Throne Speech on Environmental Assessment

From today's throne speech in BC

The government will work with other provinces and the federal government to establish one process for one project. There is no time to waste and Canadian taxpayers cannot afford the extra costs, the uncertainties and the lost jobs that are the products of the current system.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act must be amended to create a unified federal‑provincial review process that does away with redundancy and unnecessary costs.

Multiple governmental reviews replicate work, add cost, increase uncertainty, delay decisions, reduce investment and ultimately cost jobs.

We will redouble our efforts to conclude equivalency agreements with Ottawa to ensure environmental reviews are cost effective, timely and thorough.

Currently, over $3 billion in provincially‑approved projects are stranded in the mire of federal process and delay.

This is unacceptable.

Time is money. Duplication is waste. Tax dollars are limited.

We cannot afford to hold investment and jobs hostage. Byzantine bureaucratic practices have no place in the 21st Century.

The government will fully respect and adhere to First Nations' rights to consultation and accommodation.

That essential ingredient will be complemented with a new unified process for environmental assessment and permitting in British Columbia.

The "One Project, One Process" approach will create a single framework that is timely, diligent and science-based.

This is an issue that has concerned me for years, it is not rational to have a federal and provincial environmental assessment process. All that having two processes is to ensure that a lot more money is wasted. Delays in projects that are going go ahead is a loss in government revenues. Doing the process twice means governments are spending money needed for social services and protecting the environment on redundant reviews.

The federal government needs to get out of the environmental assessment process. The environment with respect to lands and resources is the responsibility of the provincial government. If federal issues are impacted, they can offer input on those through the BC process.

Having seen the federal and provincial processes in action, the big advantage one gets from the provincial process is that it sets out parameters under which a project might go ahead and then sets up a long term monitoring process. The federal process does not offer this.

The environmental assessment processes have been used as tools by people opposed to any development as a way to delay projects. As a society we have not had any buy in to the idea that resource development should not occur. It is unreasonable to use the environmental assessment process as a way to cause roadblocks for projects just for the sake of creating roadblocks.

Rural BC has natural resources, without their development the majority of small rural towns will become ghost towns.

Four Years of the Harper Government

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Conservatives taking power in Canada. I am not sure anyone was expecting Harper to continue on this long with a minority. Most people assumed that he would either lose power or have a majority.

Four years in and the Conservatives have been governing as if they are Martin Liberals. They have done nothing radical at all. They have not pushed for any real substantive changes to Canada. I find this a shame as it is time for Canada to be shaken up federally.

Governing the same way for close to two generations is not really in our benefit. What was the right way to do things in 1969 is not the best option in 2010. We need a shake up of the federal government.

Facebook as a Tool for Political Action

As someone that has tried to use Facebook groups for political action, I find they are amazingly ineffective. But even given that they are ineffective, I am shocked to hear from Bill Tieleman that two of his Facebook groups have disappeared. One has to suspect that they were taken down because they were political and had some content that Facebook used as a reason to delete the groups.

He managed to get some decent membership in No BC HST and Axe the BC Gas Tax (I can not link to them as they are not available on Facebook). But how much difference have they made? Have they really pushed the protests further forward?

Clicking join for a Facebook Group is easy to do, easier than signing a petition, but my experience has been that the vast majority of people that join a group are not only not unwilling to take real action, they get annoyed if you send them messages asking them to get involved. As a tool it is by far much weaker than almost any other available.

I used Facebook a lot in the STV campaign in BC and I am not certain it really had much of an impact on the outcome - we were badly defeated, though still the second best results for electoral reform in Canada.

On Facebook a group works reasonably well as a communication tool for the administrators as long as the group stays belong 5000 members. Once you breach that number you are no longer allowed to send messages to the members.

Much has been made of the fact that the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group has a membership of 221,368 people, but this is only 1.75% of the voting age Canadians on Facebook. Given the scale of the protests were no larger than one could expect by basic word of mouth and were hardly larger than the usual suspects at protests, I can see very little evidence that the Facebook group has made any difference on the ground.

Facebook gives us the illusion of connecting with large numbers of people that are supposedly on our side with respect to a political action, but in reality it wastes our energies from building real in person political connections. Knocking on your neighbours door is more effective than Facebook in my opinion.

5 more Senators

With the addition of five more Senators, the Conservatives are the largest group in the Senate with 50 Senators, one the Senators, Rose-May Poirier will not be a Senator till February 28th.

The Conservatives lead the Liberals by 2. The other six Senators include one that is barred from the Senate, 2 Progressive Conservatives, and three independents. So the actual total number of Senators right now is 103 (shortly to 104), they split Liberal and allied 49 - Conservatives and right wing 53 - one truly independent.

Harper has a working majority in the Senate now, though not a totally loyal one.

Local Government Elections Task Force

The Local Government Elections Task Force has a website up and is looking for input from the public.

The core issues they are looking for input on are:

• Campaign finance, including contribution/spending disclosure and limits, and tax credits
• Enforcement processes and outcomes
• Role of the chief electoral officer (B.C.) in local government elections
• Election cycle (term of office)
• Corporate vote

The members of the task force are:

• Harry Nyce, Nisga'a - President of UBCM (co-chair)
• Bill Bennett, Minister of Community and Rural Development (co-chair)
• Barbara Steele, Councillor City of Surrey and First Vice-President of UBCM
• Mary Sjostrom, Mayor of Quesnel and Third Vice-President of UBCM
• Donna Barnett, MLA, Cariboo-Chilcotin
• Douglas Horne, MLA, Coquitlam-Burke Mountain

They will be taking written submissions until April 15th at localelectionstaskforce@gov.bc.ca

The task force will be making recommendations to the Province and the Union of BC Municipalities by May 30th.

I will be writing a detailed submission including the need for the task force to look at how we elect our local councilors, the committee members can add other areas to make recommendations on.

Feds Shoud Save our Money and Scrap Western Economic Diversification

Bernard von Schulmann's 24 hours column

Thursday, January 27th, 2010

In 1987 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney created Western Economic Diversification to shift the economy of the West away from natural resources. 23 years later this agency has spent close to $6 billion trying to improve the economy in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

The mission statement of WED:

to promote the development and diversification of the economy of Western Canada and advance the interests of the West in national economic policy, program and project development and implementation.

The economy of the West has not significantly diversified in the last 23 years, natural resources are still the core of the economy. Clearly WED is failing on their core mandate. They try to justify the spending with a list of success stories, but it is very thin list for $6 billion. The evidence on the ground indicates they have failed to diversify the economy.

They are supposed to advance the interests of the West in national economic policy. They must be very quiet because I have never heard of any stand they have taken for the West. The GM bailout is a good example of this. Why did WED not fight against the GM bail out when this harms the economy of the West? Why has WED not pushed to have GM or their suppliers to move factories to western Canada?

WED is supposed to reduce boom bust cycle of natural resources through diversifying the economy. Since the mid 1990s a crisis has been coming to the BC forestry from the pine beetle. Communities like Quesnel, Vanderhoof, and Williams Lake are headed towards a big drop in forestry after the pine beetle wood has been harvested. Where has WED been? Why have they not focused their energy on bringing in blue collar manufacturing jobs to these towns? This is a crisis with enough lead time even for a federal bureaucracy to react with a plan of action. This sort of crisis was the point of WED and they have failed completely to make a difference.

One new mine in the private sector, the Prosperity mine in the Chilcotin, will create more jobs than anything WED has done in the Central Interior.

The reality is that government economic development agencies do not work. They spend a lot tax dollars to accomplish very little. WED spends about 25% of their money administering what they invest. In total each year the federal government spends close to $1.2 billion on regional economic development agencies with no measurable success.

If WED did not exist and the money was given directly to the western provinces it would have more of an impact. For BC this would be $140,000,000.

The economy in West is doing well, but there are problems in rural communities. I see no evidence that WED is any way responsible for western success or is doing anything to help rural communities. The time has come for the Federal government to admit that WED is failure and shut it down.

RRSPs versus TSFAs

The CD Howe Institute has released an interesting review of RRSPs versus TSFAs. Alexandre Laurin and Finn Poschmann have written Saver’s Choice: Comparing the Marginal Effective Tax Burdens on RRSPs and TFSAs.

Everyone in Canada gets sold on the idea of putting money into an RRSP, but is that really the best option for people? A Registered Retirement Savings Plan is really a tax deferral system, the assumption is that your income taxes on the money now is more than what you would pay when you withdraw your money. The tax savings when you are young or in a low income year is not that much.

A Tax Free Savings Account is funded with income you have paid tax on but the savings are then never taxed again. You can access the money whenever you want and not have to pay any taxes on it.

If you have a split between RRSPs and TSFAs, when you get to retirement age only the income coming from the RRSP is taxable. You could use the TSFA to effectively reduce your taxable income in retirement dramatically.

All in all I am very happy that the government created the TSFAs because it gives people more cost effective options for saving money. It is in the interests of the country to have a much higher savings rates but savings have been penalized through taxation when the money was earned and then any interest or capital gains from the savings, the money was taxed twice.