Lisa Raleigh for Florida Circuit Court Judge

I've been helping my dear friend, Lisa Raleigh, run for Florida circuit court judge this summer. Lisa is a special counsel in the Florida Attorney General's office. I've been volunteering some time to do data processing for Lisa. In Florida you can get information on who voted in recent elections (e.g. who bothers to vote in primaries), their address, age, gender, party affiliation, how they voted (early, absentee, or election day), and even race. So there's a lot of things you can do to choose which voters you'd like to target. Lisa doesn't have a lot of money so this sort of targeting is very important to her.

Well, the amazing thing about Lisa's campaign is not that she made it out of a three way primary race and will be on the November ballot (along with Barack Obama and John McCain) for the run-off, but that she did it while being outspent about 12 to 1 ($159,000 to $13,000) by her run-off opponent, Frank Sheffield (shown here on the campaign trail).

Now, Mr. Sheffield is probably a good guy, but I know that Lisa is smart, hard-working, honest, caring, and a very experienced public prosecutor. If there are any Americans reading this, please consider helping to make sure that we have one more high quality public servant in the world by having a look at Lisa's campaign website and donating to Lisa's campaign.


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My Suggestion to Her Excellency the Governor General of Canada

The amendment to the Canada Elections Act of 3 May 2007 (Bill C-16) sets a fixed federal election date of roughly four years after the preceding election. The purpose of this Act is to take away the power of the governing party to call an election when it is to its own advantage to do so. The amendment begins, however, with an affirmation of all of the powers of the Governor General, including the power to dissolve parliament at his or her discretion. By tradition the Governor General also acts on the advice of her prime minister.

What is expected to happen in Canada shortly is that the prime minister, Stephen Harper, will ask the Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, to dissolve parliament and call a new election before the next fixed election date of October 19, 2009. He will claim that the current parliament is "disfunctional", a matter of considerable dispute and, I would say, if true, then certainly caused by his own party who, for example, wrote a 200 page handbook for its members on how to disrupt parliamentary committees.

Mr. Harper will be at least circumventing the spirit of his own government's newly passed law, if not breaking it.

I don't know if Her Excellency the Governor General would consider this transgression sufficient to justify denying the prime minister's request, but I would suggest that she at least assert her long-standing role as the ultimate safeguard against abuses of the law and abuses of our democratic system by taking a few days to "consider" her prime minister's request before granting it.

Is the amount of resources devoted to the Olympic Games getting out of control?

Well, the summer Olympic Games are over. I enjoyed watching some of it on television, but now I feel a bit guilty!

The August 18th issue of Business Week contains an article which states that $6.5 billion was spent on security for the Games in China. It goes on to say that much of that has gone to foreign firms, which suggests to me that the $6.5 billion was real money as opposed to an internal accounting figure.

Wow, that's enough to finance a small war or make a dent in any of the world's pressing problems. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, $6.5 billion is more than Sweden's projected military spending in 2008. The United Nations Peacekeeping Operations budget in the current fiscal year is only slightly more: $7.1 billion.

The money spent on the Olympic Games sure seems out of control here.

Good news for the Green Shift from the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation

The Canadian Taxpayer's Federation (CTF) released yesterday a "Green Shift impact analysis for Ontario Businesses". They said that new costs of $1.5 billion per year would be paid by 111 power plants and that tax cuts of $811 million would be shared by 365,649 Ontario businesses.

Why is this good news for the Green Shift?

If you look a little more carefully than they did at their own figures, you'll see that about three quarters of the extra tax paid is accounted for by the four coal burning power plants of Ontario Pwer Generation, owned by the people of Ontario.

But the McGuinty government's plan is to phase out these coal plants! A lot of the slack will be taken up by conservation and renewable energy. The Green Shift contains business tax breaks for using green technologies (accelerated depreciation) and a 25% refundable science, research and experimental development credit.

Furthermore, Ontario Power Generation's take of the federal income tax cut would be insignificant (OPG's annual report for 2007 shows income before taxes of $477M and $576M for 2007 and 2006 respectively) compared to all the businesses operating in the province.

So, very roughly but not so much more rough than the Canadian Taxpayer Federation analysis I would say, after the coal plants are shut down (or stop burning coal - there are plans to use biomass to fuel them) the carbon tax paid by the companies than own Ontario power plants would be about $380M while the business tax cuts would still be about $800M (and this economic stimulus does not include the stimulus from developing the green energy sector).

It is interesting to note that while publically owned Ontario Power Generation's plants occupy positions 1,2,4,5,6 on CTF's top greenhouse gas producers list, position 3 is occupied by a plant owned by TransAlta Corp., an Alberta company; position 7 is occupied by Exxon Mobil, the US based corporation; and in position 8, ATCO, is an Alberta company. So some of the private businesses the CTF is shedding tears for aren't even Ontario based businesses.

BigCityLib Strikes Back: High Gas Prices As A Natural Carbon Tax, Part Whatever

Big City Lib asks the question (I'm paraphrasing), "Does the recent drop in gasoline prices (over the last 3 weeks) make the Green Shift an easier sell?" in this blog post:
BigCityLib Strikes Back: High Gas Prices As A Natural Carbon Tax, Part Whatever

I think the answer might be very slightly yes. There is a concept from behavioural finance called "anchoring". When gas prices went up over the last few years, people felt that prices were too high because they were used to lower prices in the past, and did not take into consideration how the supply and demand for oil has changed in the past decade.
Now that prices have fallen somewhat, people may feel that gasoline is relatively cheap. Gas prices may not make the news headlines until a new high is reached. A tax on non-gasoline fossil fuels may be more palatable (in combination with the Green Shift's tax cuts)
Of course gas prices are not the full story, especially as the Green Shift proposal does not increase the federal tax on gasoline, consumer electricity and natural gas prices are regulated (and so don't follow global energy prices in the short term), and there hasn't been a winter heating season since the spike in oil prices in the spring and early summer.
Nevertheless, the economic focus of the average consumer might now be on whether or not there is a recession coming, and not so much the price of energy. For that reason the tax cuts and credits of the Green Shift might be appealing to some voters. This is just a suspicion of mine, not a claim of fact.

Global warming allows Lyme disease to invade Canada

The Kingston Whig Standard carried an article today by reporter Jennifer Pritchett about the spread of Lyme disease across Canada. An aunt of mine in the U.S. has suffered from it for many years. It wasn't treated soon enough or aggressively enough and got into her heart. This nasty disease is carried by the blacklegged, or 'deer' tick. Ticks are bad enough - seeing a creature with its head burrowed into your flesh is a bit distrubing - but those deer ticks are tiny little buggers and really hard to check for. Believe me, I have had to do it for friends.

(Image from the Public Health Agency of Canada website)

Canadians are especially susceptible because they are relatively ignorant about Lyme disease.

The Whig Standard article concludes with a warning from one scientist:

Jim Sutcliffe, a medical entomologist at Trent University, said bird migration has been the source of the ticks moving north into Canada. Global warming is enabling those ticks to survive and reproduce in more northern latitudes.
"The thing that's different is that the climate is changing - it's warming gradually so our summers are getting warmer and our falls are becoming warmer," he said. "The temperatures stay higher for longer throughout the year and that's making southern Canada receptive for the blacklegged tick."

We have to worry about not only greenhouse gas mitigation (reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases) but global warming mitigation. Global warming has already started and we'll have to deal with (pay for) the consequences.

Do you want to pay for a government program to deal with Lyme disease? If so, where would you divert resources from? Would you cut spending elsewhere ? Raise taxes? Borrow from the future?

Explaining the Green Shift from another vantage point

This is based on a piece I wrote recently for a local newsletter:

The Liberal Party of Canada just put out a major policy initiative called the Green Shift. I’d like to explain how the Green Shift will help make taxes fairer and position Canada to succeed in the 21^st century.

Have you ever thought about why the government chooses to collect revenue in certain places but not others? Let's ask the question, “What taxes should be collected to pay for government programs?” I think you’d agree that taxes are a drag. Whenever you tax something you discourage that activity. But you’ve got to raise money somewhere. One place where governments raise money is excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol. Taxes on consumption of those products are not as harmful to society as taxes on other activities. So it’s “safer” to tax those things.

Well then what about income taxes? If you think about it, income taxes discourage people from hiring workers and from earning incomes. Workers are more expensive to hire, and they take home less pay.

Are there things we don’t mind discouraging, that we could tax instead of income? Why not pollution? If we taxed pollution we would only be discouraging something which we don’t want anyways. So let’s lighten, a bit, the taxes on our income and shift the burden over to one kind of pollution: greenhouse gases! Greenhouse gases are emitted when we burn fossil fuels. There’s already a federal excise tax on gasoline, so we can leave that alone. But there is no such tax on, for example, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of all. Let’s phase in the shift over four years to let people adjust. That’s the idea behind the Green Shift. The tax on greenhouse gases is called a carbon tax because when you burn a fossil fuel, like coal, you emit carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change. Climate change is threatening the welfare of our children, grandchildren, and many generations to come.

We are shifting taxes in the Green Shift, not raising them. So income taxes will be lowered using the money raised from the carbon tax. There are also a number of protections built into the Green Shift plan for those who are especially vulnerable to energy price increases. Seniors, children, middle and lower income earners, rural and northern residents all get extra money back. A $1 billion contingency fund will be set aside to help out municipalities, schools, hospitals and other non-profit institutions. Everybody, including individuals and businesses, will get a tax break. A 50 year old with an income of $30,000 would get $350 a year. Make it a rural resident and they would get $500 a year. Add a child and that goes up to $1078.

More importantly, everybody will be working together. Everybody will pay for the greenhouse gas pollution for which he or she is responsible. Everybody will earn a reward if they consume less. The Green Shift is just one step. We have to develop technology, build infrastructure, and change our habits. But with the Green Shift, everybody will have a financial incentive to do his or her part to change how we use energy, to energy-proof our economy by reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and to position Canada for success in the 21^st century.

You want to avoid having Climate Cops?

There was an article in this past weekend's National Post entitled, "Children enlisted as 'Climate Cops', U. K. utility ad campaign raises Orwellian fears". I won't comment here on whether or not the reaction to a U.K. utility's climate change and energy conservation campaign has been blown out of proportion. But I will say this to readers of the National Post (especially to those who are principled conservatives): if you don't want the government telling you how to live, if you don't want your friends and neighbours looking over your shoulder and checking your energy consumption habits, if you don't want the problems of climate change and fossil fuel dependence being turned over to the 'Climate Police', then support the implementation of a carbon tax. For conservatives who like less government, the best way to deal with climate change is to tilt the playing field, and eliminate the current, unfair advantage that burning fossil fuels enjoys, that of being able to pollute for free. People will then be 'free to choose' (C'mon C's! Put a smile on Milton Friedman's face. Join your economists who support a carbon tax!) how to respond to this tilt - change driving habits, use less hot water, conserve electricity, heat with wood, insulate, or whatever.