$200 Million B.C. 2010 Olympic Bursary Program would be a Golden Opportunity for Gordon Campbell

The new $350 million Canada Student Grant Program announced in this week's federal budget is a far cry from the $2 billion shared cost program advocated on this blog site a couple of weeks ago. It is, however, a step in the right direction. It could also be just the springboard that Premier Campbell needs in order to rectify one of the more unfortunate legacies of his first six years in office, B.C.'s high student debt (on average, $27,000 over four years). And to do one better than both the NDP and the Federal Government when it comes to funding our universities. Here is how it would work:

*$200 million dollars would be distributed to the 100,000 neediest full-time students in the province, and a fraction of that $2,000 allotment per student would also be available on a sliding scale to less needy and part-time students. This would be a tied demand-side subsidy that could be applied either to pay down Canada Student Loans or to pay tuition fees

* A maximum of $50 million dollars, or one-quarter of the amount, could be allowed to flow through to the colleges and universities in the form of higher tuition fees--up to approximately $100 per 3-unit semester course. This would have the advantage of not robbing Peter to pay Paul as historically has often been the case when tuition freezes have occurred at the expense of university revenue-raising capacity, or when tuition increases have been allowed without compensating student aid. It would also have the further advantage of being a demand-side source of revenue rather than just a grant given by government to universities. This revenue would be controlled by student consumers, thereby serving as an additional incentive for universities to be sensitive to student needs, for example by providing more popular and effective teaching. It would also prove to be a more equitable allottment in its incidence than the typical supply side grant, for the reasons cited in the previous posting. If there is a concern about the cost to non-bursary students, a fraction of the bursary could be extended on a pro-rata basis to wealthier students and/or part-time students (as mentioned above), or the higher tuition fee per course could be limited to bursary-holders.

* When combined with the $800 or $2000 per student federal grant, such a program could make a significant dent in student debt loads--and a sizeable contribution to improving access to BC's post-secondary institutions without compromising their quality.

* What better way to commemorate the 2010 Olympics and herald BC's bright future than with a direct investment in our human capital infrastructure as significant as our governments' many comparable investments in physical infrastructure ---with the BC 2010 Olympic Bursary?

NDP deserves a B for their new post-secondary aid policy

Recent B.C. premiers have deserved failing grades on the issue of post-secondary funding. When premier and Minister for Youth Glen Clark obliged student demands for a tuition fee freeze, he helped accessibility but at the cost of compounding a revenue shortfall for our universities. When Gordon Campbell heard the universities' cry for financial help by relaxing the ceiling on tuition fees, plus making a few well-publicized funding announcements, he damaged student accessiblity to the point that British Columbia now leads the nation in student loan debt per capita, at $27,000 for a four-year program ($3,000 above the Canadian average).

The most basic lesson from both the Clark and the Campbell years is therefore fairly obvious.That is, a policy that focuses on regulating or deregulating the price of higher education is really only half a policy: any government that simply addresses accessiblity through price controls damages the quality of universities, just as any government that simply deregulates tuition without a concomitant policy for student incomes damages access and equality of opportunity.

As a university professor from a working-class family, I am particularly attuned to the latter point. I often think that the 1970s and 1980s represented a high point for equality of opportunity in our society, at least for white males. But besides the barriers posed by tuition fees and the cost of living is a more hidden source of inequity: the highly regressive character of the funding formulas that are typically used to allocated funds to recipient universities. Since public universities are typically funded out of consolidated revenues (on a per-student basis), and because children of higher socio-economic groups are disproportionately represented in universities, the system of flat-based funding represents a regressive transfer from poorer to more affluent families. As Nicolas Barr puts it, "the taxes of poor families contribute to the consumption by the rich of a university education which helps to keep them rich." (The Economics of the Welfare State, 3rd edn Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p.324)

There are also numerous efficiency and quality arguments against such a reliance upon supply-side funding. Public universities have difficulty competing with elite private institutions for the best faculty and the highest levels of research funding; lower tuition fees are linked with higher drop-out rates, perhaps explaining why Quebec has not realized great improvements in access despite having very low tuition fees. And, as no less an authority than Adam Smith once observed, "Beyond some point the higher level of endowment to any university, the lower its efficiency."

But wait a minute--if supply-side funding out of general consolidated revenue is both inequitable and inefficient, doesn't that imply greater reliance on demand-side funding? And doesn't that mean--gulp--higher tuition fees? Yup. But that need not be a barrier to access, provided there is a generous income-contingent grant -and -loan program, or tied demand-side subsidy that is targetted to tuition fees. I suggest that at the federal level there be a $2 billion national tuition voucher scheme, giving a tuition voucher up to $5,000 annually to the 400,000 neediest students , as based on family income and/or existing debt load, that would both significantly reduce average student loan debt and simultaneously increase university revenues. It would differ from both existing policy and the NDP platform in that it would allow universities greater latitude to compete for students on the basis of quality (paid for by higher fees, up to a voucher-related limit) as well as on the basis of price.

It is good to see the BC NDP get away from its Clark-era fixation on simply controlling tuition fees, and it is great to see a leading political party proposing to do something about interest costs on student debt. But the NDP also needs to recognize that the purpose of increased university funding is not that it allows universities to reduce their reliance upon tuition income, in favour of even greater reliance on inequitable and inefficient supply side funding. A good balance between demand-side and supply side revenues will have benefits for efficiency, quality, and flexibility on the part of universities and choice as well as equitable access for students.

The Best Woman for the Job

This quote from columnist Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times Op-Ed entitled "Seeing Red over Hillary" hits the nail on the head:

'The New York State chapter of NOW issued an absurd statement on Monday calling Teddy Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama “the ultimate betrayal”: “He’s picked the new guy over us.”
But Obama is the more emotionally delicate candidate, and the one who has the more feminine consensus management style, and the not-blinded-by-testosterone ability to object to a phony war.

As first lady, Alpha Hillary’s abrasive and secretive management of health care doomed it. She voted to enable W. on Iraq so she could run as someone tough enough to command armies.'

--Amen.

The NDP has itself to blame for losing the high ground on climate change

About 14 months ago I attended a meeting of the local Climate Change Action Group in Williams Lake, convened by the MLA for Cariboo-North, NDP Forest Critic Bob Simpson. A sense of urgency had been emparted by the growing mountain of scientific evidence and consensus concerning the nature and magnitude of the problem: reports of polar ice caps melting three times as fast as earlier believed, the irreversible pine beetle epidemic, and the fact that the Campbell Liberals, who had abolished the Ministry of the Environment for a term, who had an overly cozy relationship with the open-net aquaculture industry, were a planning a series of coal-fired electricity plants to meet the province's growing energy needs. Like many people, I was prompted by the urgency of the situation to sign petitions and write letters of protest, like the one posted on this blog .

But it wasn't only Gordon Campbell who seemed unresponsive to the obvious. I seem to recall Mr. Simpson ruefully wondering whether he should continue on in politics, and adverting to certain NDP political operatives who lied awake at night worrying about what he (and perhaps others in the NDP caucus) might say about the need to take action on climate change that would scare off voters.

The rest, as they say, is history. Once enough people had seen An Inconvenient Truth and enough alarming stories about the symptoms of climate change had aired on the news, a tipping point in public opinion had been reached. Gordon Campbell woke up one morning, read the polls, and in a display of Mulroneyesque responsiveness (not necessarily a derogatory label these days)had one of his epiphanies. He bought a Prius, cancelled the coal-fiored generating plants, and set out to be the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Canada.

Of course, if an NDP Government had suddenly announced ambitious Greenhouse Gas targets, with little consultation and without any serious costing or thought-out plan of implementation, the media would be reflecting a sense of alarm and unease in the business community and the Vancouver Establishment. Life is unfair. But was that a good reason for the NDP, who had far deeper roots than the Liberals in the environmental movement, and who had undoubtedly had done far more thinking and feeling on this issue, to be caught flat-footed?

The answer is NO. Even when I put my cynical political operative's hat on, I am reminded of one of the disastrous legacies of the Clark Government, the alienation of progressive voters to the Green Party. Since the scientific case on Global Warming had been absolutely overwhelming since at least the late 1990s, and evidence of it was all around us, and the very raison d'etre of the NDP was the need to take collective action to deal with collective problems, this was a Golden Opportunity to put the coalition of labour and greens that had existed under the Harcourt government back together again, to bring environmental voters back into the fold.

It is called leadership. In the backdrop for these events that is the U.S. Presidential election, a perfect test of leadership appeared with respect to two defining issues of the early 21st Century: the so-called War on Terror and Global Warming. Plenty of analysis and information existed in 2002 and early 2003 and was freely available in such places as Foreign Affairs and The New Statesman and the New York Times indicating that even if Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" invasion and regime change was unnecessary, potentially destabilizing for the region, and simply not a good risk if the object was to fight Muslim extremists. But the prevailing political climate was one of deference to President Bush, who was sailing high in the polls. So who would stick their necks out and vote or speak against the war? Not Hillary Clinton, not John Kerry, and not John Edwards. Clinton and Edwards may have the most detailed and carefully weighed policies, but they failed that crucial test of their political courage.

The same with climate change. One sees Al Gore staking his reputation on his ability to point out the obvious but inconvenient truth about climate change, knowing full well that it could complicate any future Presidential bid to take on the oil companies---and the average consumer of gasoline.

It is fitting that Al Gore should receive the Nobel Prize and that Barack Obama should become the odds-on favourite to win the Democratic Presidential nomination. When the morally obvious is politically inconvenient, political risk-takers are needed, and they deserve to be rewarded for their risk. That is something Canadians instinctively understood when they voted Tommy Douglas the Greatest Canadian. It is also apparently something that the BC NDP forgot when it came to climate change.

Andrew Coyne is Wrong--and so are Stephen Harper and Gary Lunn

On January 17, 2008 as part of the The CBC National's At Issue Panel , Maclean's National Editor Andrew Coyne opined that a unanimous vote of Parliament to resume the operation of the Chalk River nuclear reactor represented such an enormous vote of non-confidence in Linda Keen's judgement that she had an obligation to resign her position as President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC). In the event of her failure to resign, the Government's decision to fire her was deemed by Coyne to be entirely appropriate, and the Opposition's complaints about her firing were deemed hypocritical.

The internationally accepted level of risk for risk of a nuclear accident is one in a million; Ms. Keen ascertained that the risk at Chalk River was actually one in a thousand. She therefore decided not to re-start the reactor after a routine shut-down. As Ms. Keen testified in Committee today, The CNSC did not have the authority to take the production of medical isotopes into account, at least beyond December 10, 2007. (Indeed, that is why the Government subsequently felt compelled to change the regulations in order to broaden the CNSC's mandate.) The Prime Minister's over hasty and unworthy accusation of Ms. Keen's partisan motivation revealed the ugly side of his own character--as a mean-spirited politico hell-bent on seizing any excuse to remove Liberal appointees, quite literally seeing red where no such judgement was evidently called for.

When the issue was raised in Question Period today, the Conservative spokesman Peter Van Loen childishly rattled off a list of mandarins that the Liberals had fired--again unwittingly confirming the attitude of the Government.

Mr. Coyne, usually a fairly astute commentator, points out how unusual it is for a senior public official to have her judgement overturned by a unanimous vote of Parliament. But what if it wasn't her judgement that the majority of Parliament (i.e. the non-Conservatives) were overturning? What if it was just a case of Parliament exercising its broader mandate by responding immediately to medical shortages of isotopes? In other words, what if Linda Keen was simply doing her job, and Parliament was simply doing theirs? Should that necessarily make her position "untenable"?

Mr. Coyne is a smart guy and a fine journalist, and he should be forgiven for occasionally being mistaken. This is one of those times. But if the broader public and the media were to agree with him, the effect would be to let Prime Minister Harper and his trademark vindictiveness off the hook far too easily.

Kyoto: Hard Law Failure, Soft Law Success?

{Even if George W. Bush manages to save some face by pulling out a Middle East Peace Deal, he will deserve to be remembered as the world figure most responsible for undermining the Kyoto Accord as a binding international treaty, totally abdicating leadership on, and responsibility for, climate change--in effect denying the seriousness of the issue-- for more than 6 years. It should be remembered, however, that Kyoto has nonetheless provided the world with practicable, scientifically-based global standards on carbon and GHG emissions for a decade and that these have guided policies of many governments and non-state actors, particularly in the United States of America. While the Kyoto Accord has failed to bind most major industrial countries, it has affected most of them, and has provided a single universal yardstick for all of them-- a yardstick by which the U.S. has done considerably better than Canada has. The "bright side" of the American situation is well described by Patricia Pearson in her column "Good News" , reproduced below.--MC}

Green America

Friday, November 30, 2007 10:23 AM ET

The other day, a friend and I were nursing some drinks in a bar and feeling morose about the latest UN report on climate change. I don’t know if you caught the warning, about how, if the United States and other major carbon emitters didn’t swiftly subscribe to Kyoto-style regulations, the world would soon resemble something ‘out of science fiction.’
“Only scarier,” I believe is how Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri put it to the press.
His analogy is actually a bit unfair, inasmuch as sci-fi is often both highly imaginative and very hopeful. Humans exist in the future, for one thing, and have interesting vehicles and outfits.
But my friend was rendered terribly disconsolate.

“What are we supposed to do?” she lamented. “If the Americans won’t even budge on this we’re … well …” she threw up her hands, and began musing that she needed to move some place quiet and practise survivalism.

I reassured her by pointing to the good news: the United States is, by nature, irrepressibly entrepreneurial and inventive. It is also highly decentralized, and this fact sometimes escapes us. Hundreds of American jurisdictions at the state, county and city levels have ignored Washington’s spectacular indifference to environmental crisis, which is what we see in terms of the international treaties, and are moving ahead by leaps and bounds to curb greenhouse gas emissions and forge a profitable green economy regardless of what goes on in Washington.At last count, for example, more than 700 American cities had become signatories to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which is meant to bring them into line with the emissions cuts called for by Kyoto. Collectively, they govern more than a quarter of the U.S. population.

They don’t care what the Bush administration thinks. Not even some of the largest American corporations are in line with Washington at this point. A remarkable consortium of them officially begged Bush last summer to regulate greenhouse gases.

Meanwhile, the states of California, Washington and Oregon have entered into their own little pact called the West Coast Global Warming Initiative, which mandates a whole set of regulations and restrictions.

“Arguably,” notes Patrick Mazza, research director at Climate Solutions in Washington state, “Northwest states and cities are several years ahead of the American curve as a result,” and are “already beginning to level off global warming pollution.”

Indeed, California – under Republican ‘governator’ Arnold Schwarzenegger – has brought in the toughest emissions and energy efficiency standards in the country. (Has Stephen Harper been inspired by this fellow conservative’s example? No, he has not. Harper wouldn’t recognize a global opportunity if it stood up in his soup.)

California’s non-partisan think tank “Next 10” recently issued a study of the state’s efforts called “The Green Innovation Index,” which shows that California’s per capita energy consumption has now fallen below 1990 levels. Next 10 also reports that, when polled, 85 per cent of Californians have been persuaded that prosperity can go hand in hand with lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Eighty five per cent, that’s a huge number of people out of a population of 30 million, minus children and starlets.

Not surprisingly, Americans being Americans, the whole crisis has taken on an air of entrepreneurial optimism. At a speech in Seattle in early November, former president Bill Clinton told his audience that the challenge of climate change was “a godsend. It is,” he explained, “in my personal view, for the United States, the greatest economic opportunity since we mobilized for World War II.”

To get some sense of the dynamism at play here, it’s worth paying a visit to a handful of websites. Check out, for instance, worldchanging.com and treehugger.com, two sites out of Seattle and New York, respectively, that have become must-reads for people captivated by possibility rather than gloom.

Worldchanging.com is a wonderful compendium of news from around the world about innovations and trends in building a sustainable future. This month’s topics include “Green building in small-town America,” “Costa Rica and New Zealand on Path to Carbon Neutrality,” “Eating Local During the Dark Days of Winter,” and “the Eco-Friendly, Net Zero Energy Potato Chip.” (You’ve probably never thought of the energy expenditure of a potato chip. I have. Last summer, out of idle curiosity, I placed a Pringles on the edge of my marshmallow toasting fork and lowered it into a bonfire. To my perturbed amazement, it proceeded to flame for a good three minutes like an oil-soaked torch. I think Worldchanging was referring to the production process, not the hitherto unrecognized potential for reading by chip lamp. But I’ve been meaning to tell someone about the Pringle.)

The self-mockingly titled Treehugger, meanwhile, is a site founded by ex-patriate Canadian Graham Hill, who says he was inspired after reading David Suzuki. Here you can find a slew of practical guides about how to lighten your carbon footprint. Treehugger also highlights news and innovations, (the booming American market in biofuel; how the Chinese are going nuts for solar panels; a newly unveiled edible shoe cream.) But its strength lies in its how-to guides. You can learn – if you must – “how to green your baby” or “how to green your wedding.”

Obviously, Americans are gaily learning how to green their wallets, and that, for all the foibles and missteps that are bound to happen along the way, is welcome news indeed

Big-Box Day Care Comes to Alberta

{ British Columbians, take heed: this is the land where Gordon Campbell gets many of his ideas. The following is a letter written in response to today's article in the Edmonton Journal ,which reported the announced bid of the Australian multinational, ABC Learning Centres, to buy nine day care centres in Edmonton and even more in Calgary, along with the response of Alberta Childrens' Services declaring neutrality with respect to foreign and chain ownership of day care delivery.}



Dear Editor:

Your article on the purchase of day care centres in Alberta by an Australian Multinational, ABC Learning Centres (“Day-care giant seeks foothold in Alberta”, Monday October 29, 2007) quotes a government spokeswoman as saying that foreign and chain ownership are not concerns of the government: "We look past who is in the boardroom and look at whether they are meeting our standards,"(p. A3).
This may represent an enlightened attitude toward investment in a world of globalized capital markets where Canadians have as strong an interest in investing abroad as foreigners do in investing in Canada. But does it represent sound social policy? There is no indication in the article that Alberta Childrens’ Services considered the trade law implications of foreign corporate investment in the child care sector. Foreign private provision to private consumers, even on a subsidized basis and to parents utilizing federal tax rebates, would almost certainly fall outside of the WTO’s so called “exclusion clause”, Article I:3, which defines services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority as those which are supplied “neither on a commercial basis nor in competition with one or more service suppliers”.
Furthermore, if the Alberta government is explicitly unconcerned with foreign and chain ownership, it must be amenable to U.S. and Mexican entry into the market as well. That would mean not only additional WTO obligations to these countries, but NAFTA ones: it is by no means clear that child care delivered by foreign corporations would fall within the NAFTA Annex II Social Services Reservation, and it is quite likely that a U.S. or Mexican corporation could avail itself of its Chapter 11 investor rights.
While it is not necessarily true that standards must suffer as a result, our ability to change course and substitute public provision in the future could be fatally compromised if the total cost of potential WTO and NAFTA claims made such a move prohibitively expensive. In the absence of any evidence that such a risk analysis has been undertaken, I would suggest that the Alberta government is wrong to express indifference toward foreign and chain ownership in the area of child care.

Mark Crawford

Assistant Professor, Political Science
Athabasca UniversityTel. (780) 423-6020