This week in AB
School “choice” is, and always has been, about privilege
While the ABNDP was leading Alberta, conservatives started a number of little advocacy groups. Parents for Education was one. It was a zippier title than “we deserve more publicly-funded distance from the public”.
In 2022, after a year of pandemic schooling, I tried to re-register my youngest child in the school he started kindergarten at; the separate school in our rural town. I was told they did not have space and that was the end of that.
Alternately, public schools, even if their classes are actually bursting at the seams — wouldn’t be able to refuse my child access to education.
I suppose they only helped prove the point that the benefit of being outside of the public system is that they can use their privileged position to refuse students. And why not? They know parents still have the other “option” — public schools must accept all students.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m very thankful that not every school in my town could just tell me to pound sand and deny my kid an education, but I wanted him to receive a Catholic education because half of his family tree is Catholic (not mine). The Catholic school system was created, ostensibly, so that Catholics would not be denied that religious education. Yet, my youngest now attends public school because the choice, apparently, isn’t really mine.
It’s because of this experience that I don’t quite understand how school “choice” actually works in practice.
It’s like offering me the “choice” to buy a home in a gated community where the board can reject my application, or in the common space that allows everyone to just move in. The ability to do the latter was always available to me — the “choice” was in having an alternative option that, somehow, isn’t actually available to me in the first place.
The advocacy for choice in education started with that little group in Calgary where there is a large enough base of potential payors to make the “choice”. No one really expects to have that in rural anyway. Though, I’d love it if they stopped acting like “choice” is something that should be available to all when they really mean that it should be available to a select few, because the crap we’re smelling out here isn’t just from the feedlots.
And that has to be the most rural-inspired thing I have ever said in my life.
Calgary Mayor unhappy with new equalization requirements
It’s difficult to watch Calgary become the Alberta of, well, I suppose the only real comparison is Alberta.
And I get it; you’re stuck with trying to keep taxes low but the next level of government is all “yeah, but these other places just don’t have the capacity to pay more so you’re going to have to do it instead”. It sucks.
Especially when you consider that it would help out immensely if everyone just agreed to share the burden equally, but then you might have to ask oil and gas companies to pay the $250 million they owe to rural municipalities and let’s face it — the bill has been growing for at least five years despite provincial tax break after provincial tax break — that is just not happening.
While I’m certain many municipal leaders are on board with the province’s overall goals of downloading responsibilities onto the next person, they’re less likely to be so thrilled when that person is them. In case they haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on federally, it takes a united front to put pressure on the next level of government; after all, it’s their jobs on the line this time.
Maybe.
I know some people who would like to see “parties” at the municipal level in Alberta. They weren’t talking about “political parties”, but instead a slate of candidates which includes one person for mayor and enough people to be in council chairs. These are a group of candidates that run under one banner with names like “Surrey Forward” or “One City Vancouver” in B.C..
Premier Danielle Smith, however, is talking about something much different; “partisan” affiliation.
"We've got 355 municipalities,” Smith said on the February 25 episode of “Your Province. Your Premier", the government-paid programming available on Corus radio stations every other Saturday. “The smaller the municipality, I don't know that they're as partisan, but when you get into a city the size of Calgary or Edmonton, you better believe it's partisan.”
On the off chance that this isn’t widely known, political organizers and strategists are few and far between, and good ones are even fewer and further. Many will only work with candidates with whom they feel share like-minded goals for their community.
To be clear — this is already happening.
Conservatives help those they believe will be a conservative force in municipal politics, liberals help those they believe will be liberal forces — that’s how it works.
The difference is that at the municipal level, voters have to make a judgement on whether the person themselves have given enough reason for the voter to believe the candidate aligns with their priorities. It’s why more people who vote municipally can name their representative but a sad number of those who vote at other levels have no idea who their provincial or federal representative is — because at the other levels of government they vote for a party rather than an individual.
Innisfail’s Mayor, Jean Barclay, perhaps put it best when she said: “I would put the question back that maybe the question we should be looking at is taking party politics out of the provincial and federal levels. Maybe the system would function a lot better.”
Shots fired.
Party politics work at more distant levels of government because they help to show that each individual essentially agrees with certain goals that are more overarching than specific. “Jobs, economy, pipelines” may be an issue at a municipal level but it’s not within a municipal government’s control. I’d argue that it’s not in a provincial government’s control either but, hey, it’s further removed from the voter and they like to think someone (who isn’t Saudi Arabia) is in control.
I’ve made the same suggestion as Barclay before; I think it would be fabulous if people had to decide whether they wanted a specific person to represent them at a provincial or federal level. I remember being at a meeting in Medicine Hat just after the by-election in 2016 and one of the other attendees was grumbling about how people really liked the Liberal candidate, who was also well-respected in the community, personally, but they were voting for “a tool”, they “couldn’t vote liberal”.
Unfortunately, I think the only reason the province would force political affiliation on municipal candidates is simply so they can set up more mediocre candidates (read: party stooges) with a guaranteed income by hiding them behind a party name.
Canada
Elected officials and the public service are not the same
The public service is not the elected officials. The public service is not the elected officials. The public service is not the elected officials.
Elected officials perform a public service (supposedly), but they are not “the public service”. And while I realize that theatre is part and parcel of the elected official, I also pay enough attention to know that there are legitimate criticisms to be levied on those they oppose without desperately trying to connect dots that aren’t there.
Three public service scandals making headlines: ArriveCAN (though I am partial to the conservatives’ “ArriveScam”), the Winnipeg lab firing, and a Veteran’s Affairs coverup.
First, ArriveScam; this is just a massive procurement scandal that reminds me it’s cheaper to have public servants on hand to actually do the work. Kudos to the entrepreneurial spirit that made it easier for people who couldn’t do the work to bid for millions in contracts and pay someone less to do the work that came up. That is the capitalist manifesto right there… though, it’s also ripe for fraud, apparently.
This is a failure within the public service.
Second, the Winnipeg lab firing. Too Long Didn’t Read (TLDR) version: the lab worker and her husband were fired in 2019, an investigation has been ongoing, and just because more information is being made public now doesn’t mean we didn’t know it was coming in 2022, 2021, 2021, a committee hearing in 2021, etc. We knew this was coming but like most responsible actors, some are required to wait for factual information before speaking.
This is a failure within the public service.
To be fair, it the public doesn’t find out about the fraud for years, you can probably blame an elected official — otherwise, in my opinion, it’s hard to blame elected officials who are figureheads of the public service, and are not generally privy to every email they send.
Which leads us to the third… the Veteran’s Affairs debacle. This one had to have been put forward to the Minister and then would have been brought up in Cabinet, which means that this public service error was likely known to the government of the day. This was different because the error, which they traced back to 2002, was discovered in 2010. A decision was made at that time to fix the error but not compensate for the error which was eight years old by that time. The Liberals settled with the complainants in 2019, details of which are just being released now. Essentially, an error that cost veterans $165 million in back pay will now cost the federal government (us, really) $971 million because it’s never cheaper to pretend you’re not responsible for a problem.
If you don’t believe me, recall the Ford Pinto case (on which the 1991 Gene Hackman movie Class Action was “loosely” based). Great movie. Sometimes, the everyday person really does win.