Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Cause and effect

In 2009, City of Toronto workers, including garbage collectors, went on strike because the employer was trying to take away their sick days and leave them with a much worse arrangement.
 
Media coverage at the time (including, bizarrely, the Toronto Star, whose stated principles explicitly include being pro-labour) villainized these workers, stoking public anger against them.

Rob Ford leveraged this anger to be elected as mayor.

Doug Ford leveraged Rob Ford's apparent popularity to be elected first as city councillor, then as MPP, and eventually as Premier of Ontario.

Where he took sick days away from workers in a pandemic, among many other disastrous policies.

Here in this third year of a pandemic that those in power have no desire to end, I wonder where we as a city and as a province would be if the City of Toronto hadn't tried to take away workers' sick days.

There wouldn't have been a strike. Rob Ford wouldn't have become mayor. Doug Ford would be running a label company (or would be city councillor at worst). Ontario would almost certainly have a government better suited to the task of getting us through a pandemic. (And also, Toronto municipal workers would have a better sick day regime and therefore be better able to avoid spreading COVID.) Toronto would likely have a different municipal government as well, since it was Rob Ford's mayorality that led to John Tory being considered even remotely palatable. (Remember in 2007 when Ontario rejected him for being too far right?)

***

On a personal note, there's one vital thing that would be different:

One change made under Rob Ford's mayorality was to contract out part of Toronto's garbage collection to Green For Life.

On February 17, 2018, at 2:30 in the morning, I was in bed fast asleep when I was frightened awake by a horrific noise.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window to see what the noise was . . . and woke up on the floor with an enormous lump on the back of my head.

Every aspect of life has been more difficult since.

The source of the noise that frightened me awake? A Green For Life contractor seemed to think 2:30 in the morning is a good time to empty a dumpster into a dump truck.

Butterfly wings.

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Grade 13

Recently in the news: a plan to bring back Grade 13.
 
We had Grade 13 (then called OAC, which stood for Ontario Academic Credit) when I was in high school, and what I found useful about it is it gave us an opportunity for greater independence within the high-school context.
 
About three quarters of Grade 13 students were 18 years old when the school year started in September, and everyone was 18 by the end of December. This is relevant because 18 is the age of majority, students over the age of 18 weren't subject to the same rules about care and custody (for lack of a better word - I think there's a specific term for this but it escapes me).

In practical terms, this meant that we could sign ourselves out of school rather than needing a note from our parents and we didn't need our parents to sign report cards or permission slips. In fact, our teachers were not legally allowed to meet with our parents without our permission!
 
OAC classes operated on the assumption that all their students were over 18. In practical terms, this meant that if the teacher was absent, class was cancelled rather than having a substitute teacher. There weren't any parent-teacher interviews. We were expected to manage our own education and our own time like adults.
 
At the same time, the societal expectation was that we were still high school students and our parents were still expected to care for and support us as such.
 
If a parent had kicked an 18-year-old high school student out of their home, other parents - even those who would have responded positively to kicking out an 18-year-old high-school graduate - would be just as appalled as if they had kicked out a 17-year-old
 
Young people who would have responded to a peer saying "I'm an 18-year-old first-year university student and I moved out of my parents' house!" with "Cool!" would have responded to "I'm an 18-year-old high-school student and I moved out of my parents' house!" with "Is everything okay?"

This meant that we were empowered like adults to manage our education and our time, without being expected to take on the full suite of adult responsibilities like paying bills and buying groceries and managing a household. It was a sort of training wheels for adulthood.

It also helped train our parents for our adulthood. Our educational structure moved away from parental permission or parental involvement even while we were living in our parents' homes, which prepared our parents for not having direct involvement in our post-secondary education - something that's even more important today when it's even more financially difficult for students and young adults to live independently from their parents!
 
I had an on-campus job in university when Ontario eliminated Grade 13, and I noticed an immediate difference in parental involvement when the first Grade 12 cohort arrived. Parents were contacting us directly or accompanying their kids in person even for mundane things like asking how to configure an email account, seemingly without any attempt by the student to do it independently. I was only a few years older, but that simply wasn't done in my cohort! 

So if they do end up re-introducing Grade 13, I hope they take into consideration that Grade 13 students are going to be legal adults, and create a system and structure that reflects that, rather than a system and structure that has young adults spending their first year as a legal adult being treated like a child.

***

Even though my own actual firsthand experience with Grade 13 is that it was positive and empowering (and even though my own actual firsthand experience is that I felt too young for university in my first year, even though I could handle it perfectly well), I think if I were a student who expected my high school only to go as far as Grade 12, I'd find it insulting that they want to keep me in high school and living with my parents for another year. 
 
Similarly, if I were an adult who had graduated high school after Grade 12, I'd feel insulted on behalf of the youth of today and tomorrow that they'd have their launch delayed another year. 

This is why it kind of surprises me that they'd put this in a platform with the presumed goal of winning votes for an election. I'd imagine there's a significant segment of the population who would see it as completely unnecessary and perhaps even verging on punitive - especially since it has always been possible for students to keep attending high school if they aren't able to graduate or get the courses they need in the allotted number of years (historically this has been called a "victory lap".)

***

A caveat: I've noticed in recent years that teens and young adults (or, at least, a big enough proportion of the teen and young adult voices that reach me for me to notice) seem to perceive being considered/thought of/treated like a child (as opposed to an adult) as more positive than I do. 
 
They seem to feel that if you're treated like a child, you're being protected and cared for. Meanwhile, my experience - even in retrospect - was that being treated like a child meant my agency being disregarded, with no increase in care or protection. (And often, in my experience, "care and protection" was the label given to disregarding my agency.)
 
So, because of this, it's possible that today's young people might not feel liberated by being treated like an adult as opposed to like a child.

However, I am also aware that adults all too often will read or hear something about Young People Today and use that to treat young people with less agency than they should. I can't tell whether I myself am falling into that trap.

So, as with all aspects of life, the important thing is to listen to the people actually involved - today's high school students and recent high school graduates.

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Building a better Sunshine List

1. Remove all names.  
 
Lately, I've been seeing people talk about expanding the Sunshine List to include all public servants at all pay levels, or even all jobs in all sectors of the economy, arguing that this would be good for equity.
 
One major problem with this plan is privacy. You can google a person - not even looking for their salary! - and you'll find their sunshine list entry. I googled the couple who bought my parents' house, and the first thing that came up was the husband's salary. Surely there's no reason for the daughter of the people you're buying your house from to know how much money you make! More importantly, your abuser or your stalker can also find your pay information!
 
Listing position titles without names will help keep private personal information private and, at the same time, remove much of the arguments and incentives against expanding the Sunshine List to include all jobs. 
 
I'd also be okay with including equity information if equity-seeking groups think this would be helpful.
 
2. List all information that goes into determining compensation
 
What is the position title and classification? How much education and experience does this person have? How much overtime did they work? How many people do they supervise? How consequential is their work? Do lives depend on them? Maybe also provide a link to their job description (what even is a "systems analyst"??)

In addition to making it clear that the jobs actually involve, this would also help with the Sunshine List's actual stated intent of determining whether good use is being made of public funds. For example, if a particular department is paying the equivalent of five full-time jobs in overtime, maybe that's a sign they need to hire more people? If everyone in a particular department has over 30 years of experience, maybe it's time to start recruiting some new trainees before everyone retires?

It would also be useful to include temporary and contract workers working for or on behalf of the government. How much do the outsourced office cleaners make? How much do substitute teachers make? How much do the extra nurses brought in to staff the ER during the pandemic make?
 
3. Include thresholds for how much housing each salary can buy.
 
Many people (including me in an old blog post that I now can't find) have pointed out that the Sunshine List threshold hasn't changed since its inception in 1996, and it really should be indexed.
 
But I have a bolder option in mind: include multiple thresholds on the list corresponding with how much housing that salary would buy in the current market, local to the location of the job.
 
For example, "This job makes $X per year in a location where you can buy an average 1 bedroom if you earn $0.8X and an average 2 bedroom if you earn $1.2X." 

If a job doesn't pay enough for a home big enough to raise a family in, or even for a 1 bedroom apartment, that information needs to be front and centre.

As an example of why this is important, a 1-bedroom in my decent but unremarkable condo building in my decent but unremarkable Toronto neighbourhood recently sold for 150% of the mortgage amount you could get for $100K in the current market. So someone could be on the Sunshine List and, at the same time, not be able to afford a 1-bedroom condo just like mine! (If you're just tuning in, I'm not on the Sunshine List - I bought preconstruction a decade ago when prices were drastically lower.) 
 
Conversely, if the job pays so much you can afford, like, multiple detached houses, that would also be highly informative - far more informative than just a big number!

Friday, November 19, 2021

Homebuying incentives need to come before the home is bought

From time to time, you hear politicians talking about improving housing affordability by providing tax incentives or tax credits or rebates to first-time homebuyers.

From my point of view as a first-time homebuyer who received a number of different tax incentives/credits/rebates, I can tell you with confidence that this will do nothing to improve affordability.

First, let's look at what goes into affordability. To buy a home, you have to not just actually be able to afford it, but also be considered on-paper to be able to afford it. 

To be considered on-paper to be able to afford a home, you need a combination of down-payment and mortgage that will add up to the price of the home, and you need to have this at the moment you seek approval for a mortgage, which comes before the purchase. 

Your mortgage eligibility is calculated based on your current salary and debt load. The amount of downpayment you have is determined either by having to show proof of your bank balance or having to literally write a cheque, depending on whether you're buying pre-owned or pre-construction.

And, at no point in the process, do they look at any tax incentives or other incentives that might be forthcoming in the next year.

I bought pre-construction in 2012, and the sale closed in 2017. I had about $5000 coming to me in rebates from my realtor and my developer (which I received when the sale closed), and further $5000 in tax credits/rebates/incentives (I forget exactly how they were classifed), which I received in spring 2018 after doing my 2017 taxes.

But affordability was calculated at the moment I committed to the purchase in 2012. I had to get a mortgage commitment letter from a bank, which looked at how much money I had immediately on hand to use as a downpayment, and then plugged my income (and, possibly, my debt - I didn't have debt at the time so I'm not certain) into a mortage calculator to determine how much I could afford on paper.

They didn't look at and didn't care about these rebates that were coming to me. If the bank's total of what they thought I could afford had been $10,000 short of the condo's sale price, they wouldn't have cared if I pointed to the rebates that were coming to me. They had no mechanism to plug the rebates into the spreadsheet they used to determine affordability, which, ultimately, meant that these rebates did nothing to make a home more affordable to me. If that $10,000 had been make-or-break, it would have come too late in the process to make the difference between not being able to buy a home and being able to buy a home.


If governments want to provide incentives to make homes more affordable to first-time buyers, any measures they implement need to come into effect before the point at which affordability is calculated. That might mean delivering the incentive payments earlier. That might mean making mortgage lenders change how they calculate affordability. That might mean fixing the economy so that ordinary people with ordinary jobs can afford ordinary homes with no drama. 

But, in any case, a tax rebate over a year after the sale has closed isn't going to improve actual in-real-life affordability. Incentives to improve affordability need to be in the buyer's hands a the moment affordability is calculated.

Saturday, September 18, 2021

My voting by mail experience

Elections Canada posted the final candidates list for each riding on September 1. Based on this information, I figured I don't expect anything to change before election day, so I decided to vote by mail.

To vote by mail, you need to include a picture of your ID. A scan of my Ontario Photo Card worked, even though the card had expired during the pandemic. (Ontario decreed that ID expiring during the pandemic is still valid.) I'm not able to independently assess any better than you are how safe sending a photo of your ID over the Elections Canada website may or may not be. 

(Weirdly, gender is also a required field on the application for a mail-in ballot)
.
I sent in my application late at night on September 1, and by noon September 2 my status on the Elections Canada was "Registration status: Accepted. Voting kit sent".
 
The voting kit was waiting for me in my mailbox on September 7, alongside my voter registration card.

The voting kit doesn't contain a ballot with the names of all the candidates in your riding. Instead, it contains a blank card for you to write the name of the candidate you're voting for, meaning you're responsible for looking up the candidates' names yourself.

(Journalism Wanted: how much leeway do the people counting the ballots have regarding misspellings, etc.?)

You put the card with the name in one of the envelopes provided, then put that in a second envelope bearing identification numbers, which you sign and date. Then you put that in a third envelope bearing the address of the local Elections Canada office and prepaid postage. 

I put my ballot in the mailbox at some point on the weekend of September 11-12, and the status on the Election Canada site changed to "Complete ballot received" on September 15.
 

Then, just minutes after I got that update, one of the candidates on my riding resigned. So much for "I don't expect anything to change before election day"!

Tuesday, March 02, 2021

Things They Should Study: would replacing property tax with a municipal income tax meet our needs better?

The pandemic is adding to the cost of delivering Toronto's city services, while some residents and businesses find their incomes drastically reduced as a result of pandemic-related shutdowns. (And a small number of other businesses find their revenues increasing!)

So our property tax rates are being debated, and city council finds themselves in a catch-22.

It's time to very seriously and thoroughly study an alternative: replacing property tax with a municipal income tax, which would make a point of including  (but not being limited to) rental income, business income, and revenues from selling real estate.

 
The primary concern expressed about property tax is that the value of your home can go up while you're just quietly living in it, even though your income and budget are unchanged - even if your income decreases!
 
Replacing property tax with income tax would address this. If your income suddenly decreases, your tax would decrease commensurately, regardless of what's going on with local property speculation. 
 
 
At this point, some people point out that if a home has appreciated significantly, the owner is sitting on a high-value asset and should be taxed on this.
 
Replacing property tax with income tax would address this. It would totally tax property owners on the money they make from their high-value asset, it would just take the more user-friendly approach of levying that tax at the moment they actually have that money in hand.

 
People also point out that real estate can be a revenue generator, because you can rent it out.
Replacing property tax with income tax would address this by taxing landlords on their rental income. But, at the same time, landlords wouldn't be incentivized to raise rent to cover taxes, because they'd be taxed a percentage of whatever rent their charge, rather than being taxed a specific number.

These two factors converge to address the the so-called "condo tax", where commercial property owners are taxed on "highest and best use" - i.e. what their property would be worth if redeveloped - and then that tax is passed on to the business that rents the property as a rent increase. 
 
Replacing property tax with income tax would address this by taxing property owners on any money they make selling their property to developers, but would take the more user-friendly approach of taxing them at the moment they actually have the money in hand, and the taxation burden would not be passed on to small businesses because a building that's being sold for redevelopment wouldn't be occupied by tenants.
 
 
Another argument in favour of property tax is that it's intended as a wealth tax, but property ownership provides an incomplete picture of wealth. Jeff Bezos could buy the condo next to me, which is absolutely identical to mine, and would owe the City of Toronto exactly the same amount of taxes as I do. Meanwhile, I'm fully leveraged whereas he could buy the condo outright with the money he made in the time it took me to compose this paragraph.
 
Replacing property tax with income tax would address this inequity, by taxing this hypothetical Jeff Bezos on the billions that he makes, while taxing me on the tens of thousands that I make.
 
 
Speaking of rich people buying condos, another problem that exists in the Toronto real estate market is absentee owners buying up condos as investments or a place to park assets, sometimes not even living in them or renting them out! (This has often been covered in the media as a "foreign buyers" problem, but the real problem is that they aren't living in the home, not that they are from another country.) 
 
Replacing property tax with income tax might address this issue. Perhaps people rich enough to casually buy real estate that they aren't even using would be disincentivized if they had to pay income tax in a whole nother jurisdiction? (It doesn't seem like enough of a disincentive to me, but the way money people tend to talk about taxes makes me think they find taxes more of a disincentive than I do.) And if they don't find it a disincentive, it's more money for city coffers.
 
 
Q: But don't you know that municipalities aren't legally permitted to levy income tax?
 
A: Yes! That's why we need to very thoroughly study it, so that if it does turn out that income tax is more appropriate, we have a compelling case for the levels of government with the power to change those laws.
 
Q: But don't you know that rich people rarely pay taxes?
 
A: Yes! That's why we need to very thoroughly study this, so it can be executed in a way that doesn't leave any loopholes to wiggle out of.
 
Q: What about sales tax?
 
A: I have no objection to studying sales tax too, and it may even have already been studied because I do hear people talking about it from time to time. But it seems to me that income tax is more likely to address the flaws in the property tax model, while also being closer to its original intention as a wealth tax.
 
 
Property tax is the oldest surviving form of taxation, dating back thousands of years. It's quite possible that, like many things dating back thousands of years, it isn't the very best way to meet 21st-century needs. 

The pandemic only magnifies the flaws of the property tax model. As we plan our pandemic recovery, it's time to seriously study an alternative to property tax.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Toronto needs to remove snow not just from sidewalks, but from the areas around sidewalks

I was particularly disappointed to see that the City of Toronto isn't extending sidewalk snow clearing to areas of the city that don't yet receive this service, because that's a giant step in exactly the wrong direction. In a pandemic year we need even more than sidewalk snow clearing. To maintain physical distancing, we need areas around the sidewalk, like curb lanes and boulevards and the edges of lawns, to be cleared as well.

Pedestrian physical distancing isn't just a question of two "lanes" that need to be six feet apart. Faster walkers also need to pass slower walkers. Some people are walking dogs or herding children. Some people insist on walking two or three abreast. Some people are carrying bulky grocery bags. People with wheelchairs or walkers or fragile ankles need to be able to avoid walking on the curb cut.

To physically distance through all these variables - especially on older residential streets with narrow sidewalks - we need to use not just the sidewalk, but also lawns and curb lanes. The sidewalk on my own street is just barely six feet wide, so I'm always stepping off the sidewalk onto the street, or onto a lawn or driveway, so I can stay six feet away from other people. I probably step off into a curb lane or onto a lawn about three to five times in a typical block of walking.

And in snowy weather, curb lanes and lawns aren't available because they're covered in snow. The curb lanes are full of snow plow windrows, and lawns are, at a minimum, unshovelled, and, more often, covered in snow banks from sidewalk snow clearing.

What the City of Toronto needs to do is clear not just sidewalks, but also curb lanes and at least 3 feet of lawns that are adjacent to narrow sidewalks. (Q: Won't that damage the lawns? A: The City can replant the lawns in the spring. Lives are more important than lawns.) They need to truck away windrows that end up in the curb lane, and go around making sure sewer grates are clear so gutters don't fill up with water.

In the Old City of Toronto - the portion of the amalgamated city where sidewalks aren't cleared - all these sidewalk-related needs and pandemic-related needs are exacerbated. There is higher population density, more people walking as a primary form of transportation, and more people who don't have cars. Older sidewalks tend to be narrower, buildings tend to be closer to the sidewalk, and the curb lane tends to be right next to the sidewalk (rather than there being a boulevard between the sidewalk and the curb lane). Grocery stores and other necessities are more likely to be within walking distance, so more people are carrying bulky packages and rolling bundle buggies. More streets have businesses with patios and lineups and those signs that they put out on the sidewalk. 

In short, there are more people trying to physically distance in less space as the second wave of COVID balloons around us. The City needs to help its residents stay safe by extending snow clearing not just to all sidewalks, but to the areas around the sidewalks.

Friday, May 03, 2019

How to calculate a personal cost-benefit analysis for the Ontario Library Service

Short version:


To calculate how much actual money you pay to support the Ontario Library Service, multiply line 428 of your tax return * 0.00003181673.


Full version:



Last year, I calculated a personal cost-benefit analysis of the tax dollars that I, personally, pay in support of my local public library.

In the wake of recent cuts, I was going to write up a personal cost-benefit analysis for the Ontario Library Service, but before I could do so, the Toronto Public Library announced that these cuts wouldn't affect their services.

However, there is much more to Ontario than just Toronto, and the differences in population and population density mean libraries in many other parts of Ontario have smaller collections (and therefore need more interlibrary loans) and smaller municipal tax bases (and therefore are more dependent on provincial funding.)

So, for everyone else in Ontario, here's how to calculate your own cost-benefit analysis of the Ontario Library Service.

Ontario's total revenue for the 2017-2018 fiscal year was $150.6 billion.

The Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport's 2017-2018 funding for Ontario Library Service North was $1,645,800, and for the Southern Ontario Library Service was $3,145,800.

$1,645,800 + $3,145,800 =  $4,791,600 in total funding for the Ontario Library Service.

$4,791,600 / $150.6 billion = 0.00003181673.  This is the portion of your provincial taxes that support the Ontario Library Service. (If you prefer percentages, that's approximately 0.003%)  

The amount you paid in provincial taxes can be found on line 428 of your tax return.

Therefore:

To calculate how much actual money you pay to support the Ontario Library Service, multiply line 428 of your tax return * 0.00003181673

To calculate the amount saved by the recent cuts, divide this number by 2.

Then you can look at the resulting dollar amount and see how it compares with the library services you use over a year.

You can also look at how this will add up over your lifetime, and how that will compare with the library services you use over your lifetime.


If you don't want to do the math yourself:


I, personally, pay $0.15 per year towards the Ontario Library Service, so the announced cuts would save me $0.075 per year.

A single TTC fare is currently $3.25, which is 43 years of OLS cuts. In 43 years I will be 85, and 3 of my 4 grandparents died by that age. So if I ever, even once, have to leave my neighbourhood to fetch a book because it is not available by interlibrary loan (for example, if it can only be sourced from a library that's affected by these cuts), I will not have gotten my money's worth.

Mailing a book would cost even more than that.  And buying a book would cost even more than that. 

So basically, if I am ever, even once in my life, inconvenienced by these cuts, I will not have gotten my money's worth.

Considerations:


The Ontario fiscal year runs from April to March, so the 2017-2018 numbers are from April 2017 to March 2018. I've used these because I couldn't find the 2018-2019 public accounts. The tax return numbers I've suggested using for your own salary and taxes paid are from January 2018 to December 2018 (assuming you used your 2018 return).  If anyone can provide a source for more current numbers, or for numbers that cover the exact same time period, please post in the comments.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Things I Don't Understand: objecting to assisted dying when you don't mind if people die

This post was inspired by, but is not directly related to, this op-ed outlining how the new provincial government's policies could kill people.

Policy can kill people.  Politicians who enact such policies and other proponents of these policies either don't care if people die, or see people's deaths as acceptable collateral damage.

What's weird is the intersection between not caring if one's policies kill people, but being opposed to medically-assisted death. If you don't care if people die, why would you object to people dying?

Some people hold the idea that people should contribute to society rather than being a burden to society.  Others refute argue against this idea, saying that your value comes from who you are as a person rather than what you can contribute.  (I actually don't hold either of these ideas - I don't feel it's my - or anyone's - jurisdiction to go around insisting others contribute to my satisfaction or accusing others of being a burden, but I also don't feel that every human being has intrinsic value for the simple reason that I can't perceive any intrinsic value in my own essential humanity.)

So I also find it weird when people who hold the "contribute to society or you're a burden" idea are opposed to assisted death. In a paradigm where it is possible for a person to be a burden, why would you be opposed to someone saying "I'm too much of a burden, so I'm going to get out of the way now.

One reason I have heard for objecting to medically-assisted death while not objecting to death itself is that if you can do it yourself, you don't need medical assistance.

But the benefit of medically-assisted death rather than suicide is it doesn't leave a mess for other people to clean up.  Currently, we don't have any non-medical method of suicide that doesn't leave a carcass in a place where it's inconvenient to others for there to be a carcass.

In contrast, in medical settings where people die, they're fully trained and prepared to move a dead body and hygienically clean up afterwards. (In my grandmother's long-term care home, they have whole procedures in place for this eventuality!) Until we have Suicide Place, medical contexts are our only option for people to die without being an undue burden upon others.

So it's really strange to me that people who don't mind that their policies might kill people are opposed to people choosing to die.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Voted

The polling place was in my building, so no doggies.


The physical environment was distressing because of halloween decorations that trigger my panic attacks. I find myself wondering if that's allowed. But the decorations were put up by fellow residents (as opposed to by property management) and I has already politely asked property management to remove the ones that distress me (when I thought property management had put them up), so I don't want to pursue this too aggressively when the resident committee who put them up now know where I live and know my greatest weakness.

This year, I got one flyer from each incumbent councillor candidate, and one from one of the challenger trustee candidates.  I got multiple emails from the incumbent candidate of my old ward because I was subscribed to his newsletter in my capacity as a constituent. Weirdly, I also got one email from the other incumbent candidate, even though I don't think I've ever emailed him.

I saw signs for the incumbent councillor candidates, the incumbent school board trustee candidate and both frontrunner mayoral candidates.

Despite the fact that my head injury still hinders my reading, I feel like I was able to make an informed decision. I do have some ideas about how the media could have helped me do that better, which will be the subject of future blog posts.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Another tool to figure out how to vote: anti-endorsements

One strategy if you're struggling to figure out how to vote for is to see if any organizations that align with your values are endorsing candidates in your ward, and why they are endorsing the candidates they choose.

I recently figured out another strategy: see who organizations that don't align with your values are endorsing.

While googling some candidates in my ward, I discovered a website I find politically abhorrent was rating various municipal candidates.

It included ratings and comments on some candidates about whom I had, until that point, been unable to find enough useful information.  And I found that knowing what politically abhorrent people think of these candidates and why is a useful information to have.

So if you're not finding enough information about particular candidates or about a particular race in your ward and can tolerate some exposure to abhorrent politics, check out who the politically abhorrent are endorsing and why. After all, just because they call it "endorsements"  doesn't mean you have to do what they say - you can systematically do the opposite, or otherwise use the reasoning behind their opinions to inform your own.

Saturday, October 06, 2018

How to compare the voting records of incumbent Toronto city councillor candidates

The sudden reorganization of Toronto City Council from 47 wards into only 25 creates a situation where there are multiple incumbents running in some wards.

We are accustomed to the situation of one incumbent running in a ward. We keep an eye on the world of our incumbent councillor over their term and get a sense of their work and their voting patterns, especially on issues that are important to us.  We keep in mind what works and where there's room for improvement and compare all this with the platforms of the challengers running in our ward, as well as using it to evaluate the incumbent's re-election platform.

Having two incumbent candidates in a ward complicates things. Now two of the candidates have a voting patterns and a record of constituency work, but one of them we haven't been paying nearly as much attention to, since, up until now, they were irrelevant to our everyday issues and our voting decisions.

It would be foolish to disregard the record of the incumbent with whom we're less familiar, but it also takes a lot of work to familiarize ourselves with their years and years of council votes.

However, a more efficient way to do so is to compare the voting records of the two incumbent candidates and see where they differ. After all,  there's no point in focusing your time and energy on areas where they're in agreement - your existing assessment of whether your incumbent should be voted for or against will do the job there.

Here's a quick and easy way to make this comparison*:

Go to Matt Elliott's City Council Scorecard. This spreadsheet has one row for each councillor, and as your scroll rightwards you can see how they've voted on every vote, colour-coded for your convenience.

When you find a column where your two incumbents voted differently, simply look at the top row to see what the issue was.

This way you can quickly and easily scroll through years of votes to see where there are areas of difference requiring further examination.

(Here is a link to primary source data about councillor's voting records, which is far less user-friendly, but can be downloaded in .csv format if you prefer to do your own data manipulations.)

*Credit for this idea goes to the author of this comparison of Ward 12 candidates Josh Matlow and Joe Mihevic, which reached me via a tweet from Adam Chaleff. I'm under the impression that the author of this comparison wishes to remain anonymous, but if you are the author and you want credit, let me know in the comments.  And, of course, Matt Elliott gets credit for the mindblowingly helpful scorecard spreadsheet.

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Things They Should Invent: notwithstanding clause penalty box

The notwithstanding clause enables provincial and territorial legislatures to override Canadians' Charter rights and freedoms.

This is a big deal, so there should be some kind of dissuasive measure to counterbalance it. Improper use of the notwithstanding clause can be an abuse of power - placing the rights and freedoms of Canadians at the mercy of the whims of those in power - so the dissuasive measure should require those who invoke the clause to place their power at the mercy of the whims of the people whose rights and freedoms they are overriding.

A couple of preliminary ideas, to inspire further brainstorming:

- When the notwithstanding clause is used, an election must be called within a fairly brief period of time.  (Three months? Six months? One year?)
-MPPs who vote to use the notwithstanding clause are not permitted to run in the next election (at any level of government). They can run in the one after that.

The flaw of both these ideas is they suggest rights are subject to majority rule - they only incentivize politicians to make sure the majority agrees with them, which could still create a situation where the majority cheers for infringing upon the rights of the minority.

So feel free to use this as a starting point and improve upon this, to come up with something that disincentivizes use of the notwithstanding clause when it's not in the people's best interest, while incentivizing its use when it is in the people's best interest.

Monday, September 03, 2018

Things They Should Study: what would it actually cost to improve public services?

As I sat in the ER waiting room for six hours, I found myself thinking "What would it take to completely eliminate the wait times?"

And the thing is, we don't know.  Because, as I blogged about at the time of the Drummond report, governments are reluctant to do anything that could even remotely be interpreted as even thinking about giving the slightest consideration to something that could possibly lead to taxes being raised.

But, for all we know, optimal cost-effectiveness could be right there on the other side of an expenditure increase. And we'll never know if we don't study it.

They should study the cost of all kinds of different service increases, ranging from tiny incremental increases to levels of service beyond our wildest dreams.

To use the emergency room example, what would it cost to decrease wait times by 10%? 20%? 50%? 80%?  What would it cost to get the median wait time down to an hour? What would it cost to get every patient's wait time under an hour?  What would it cost to get the median wait time down to zero?  What would it cost to have hospitals so well-staffed that employees spend an average of 20% of their time with literally nothing to do, so there's extra leeway in case they get an unanticipated rush of patients?

That last example would make some people think "That would be a ridiculous waste of money - to deliberately plan for staff to be doing nothing!" And that's why it's included in the range of scenarios being studied - we need to study everything ranging from incremental improvements to drastic improvements to the point where the improvements are clearly no longer going to be adding value, to make sure we don't miss the point of optimal value.

Sometimes the optimal value for money involves spending money.  For example, adding data plan to your cell phone account costs money, and a data plan adds value. To make the decision about whether to get one, you have to look at the information about how much value it adds and how much money it costs - which includes looking at the cost of an unlimited plan, even if cheaper plans do exist.


Sometimes the optimal value for money involves deficit financing.  For example, there are situations where buying a home is better value in the long run than renting, even though you have to go into debt to do it.  To make the decision about which is best value, you have to look at all the data and run numbers for various scenarios - which includes looking at the cost of your dream house, even if cheaper housing options do exist.

Politicians like to talk about value for money, but they only ever seem to look at ways to save money.  They should also systematically study ways to add value, in order to find the point of optimal value for money.

Saturday, August 04, 2018

Things They Should Study (or publicize, if they've already studied it): to what extent do social programs make life easier for employers?

I am truly terrible at washing my windows.  Every time I wash them, they end up covered in streaks - basically I'm just rearranging the streaks a couple of times a year.

I've considered on and off hiring someone to wash my windows, but I have no idea how to hire someone good. I'd be happy to pay well for completely streak-free windows, but if they're just going to rearrange the streaks, that isn't worth anything to me - I can do that myself.

The problem, of course, is that all window-washers and any number of random odd-job people are incentivized to say "Of course I can give you streak-free windows!"  They need money.  They need to hustle.  Conventional wisdom is that you should apply for jobs even if you aren't confident you can do them.

But this makes it much harder to find someone who actually is good - especially if, like me, you're unaccustomed to hiring people - so I end up hiring no one.

I have heard small business owners make similar complaints - they're often in the market for skilled, competent help before they're in a position to put resources into long-term development, but, because they don't have much experience with hiring, they have trouble finding/identifying people who actually are skilled and competent in and among all the gumption/desperation applicants, so they often end up not hiring at all.

In the shower the other day, it occurred to me that basic income might improve this situation.  An effective basic income program would eliminate the desperation factor, so employer and prospective employee could have a straightforward conversation about their needs and abilities.

So I could say "What I really want is completely streakless windows. A cleaning job that results in streaks has no value to me. Are you able to guarantee streaklessness?"

And my prospective window cleaner would have the leeway to say "You know, I don't think I can do a job that could make you happy." Or to quote me a ridiculously high price since I'm so needy and demanding, which I can then accept or reject depending on what it's worth to me.

And my prospective window cleaner would be far less likely to be a person who's bad at cleaning windows, because people who are bad at cleaning windows aren't going to be going around looking for window cleaning jobs.

I did one brief, cursory google and couldn't find much on how basic income interacts with the hiring experience from an employer's point of view.  So I started looking into the logistics of Ontario's basic income pilot, to see whether it could produce relevant results . . . and, that very day, the government cancelled the basic income pilot.

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In recent discussions of introducing pharmacare, I was surprised to see the idea raised of pharmacare covering people who don't already have a drug plan through work.

That seems like an administrative nightmare. (How will the government know who does and doesn't have drug coverage through work?  Will pharmacare cover my the large co-pay in my workplace plan? Do we have to worry about coverage gaps if we lose our job?)

But it also seems like it would be a lot more convenient for employers if pharmacare were universal.  Employers wouldn't have to administer or pay for drug plans any more. Employers who don't provide drug plans wouldn't lose quality employees who can pick and choose to other employers with better benefits. And employers who already provide good benefits would immediately realize significant savings by not having to do so any more.

***

When they were talking about creating an Ontario pension plan, they were also talking about having it apply only to people who don't have pensions through work.

Again, it seems like it would be far more convenient for employers if the public pension plan covered everyone, for exactly the same reasons. It would save employers the trouble of administering a pension plan, employers who are unable to provide a pension plan wouldn't lose out on quality talent, and employers who already provide a pension plan would immediately realize significant savings by not having to do so any more.

***

Discourse about social programs tends to focus on what it can do for regular people, which is, of course, where the focus in planning and delivering social programs should be. 

However, I've noticed a strong correlation between people who are opposed to social programs and people whose roles involve hiring.  I also remember seeing things from time to time where organizations representing small businesses object to the fact that government employees receive benefits, presumably because their tax dollars are supporting providing benefits that they can't offer their own employees.

It would be useful to have the data to quantify how social programs can make life easier for employers, in addition to making life easier for ordinary people.

Monday, July 16, 2018

Let's talk about sex (in 1998), baby!

In the wake of the Ontario government's shameful decision to revert to the 1998 sex ed curriculum, many people have already commented on the deficiencies in that 20-year-old curriculum. It doesn't reflect the existence or needs of gender and sexual minorities, it doesn't talk about consent, it was written when many people had only dial-up internet (if they had home internet at all).

But even if you didn't care about all those things, the fact of the matter is that medical knowledge has evolved. For example:
  • The HPV vaccine did not yet exist.  (I myself either hadn't heard of or had forgotten about HPV, despite my sex education having covered every other STD that my adult self has heard of. I can't tell you whether this is a result of the state of medical science or the state of the curriculum.)
  • PrEP did not yet exist. (I don't know any more details about how HIV treatment has evolved since then, but I'm sure there's lots of other relevant and important stuff in there.)
  • Essure did not yet exist. The only available method of female sterilization was tubal ligation, which is an abdominal surgery and therefore far more drastic.
  • Nuvaring and contraceptive patches had not yet been invented. 
  • Norplant existed, but many of the issues that led to its subsequent reduced availability/withdrawal from the market had not yet come to light.
  • The morning after pill had not yet been approved for use in Canada
  • Medical abortion was not yet available in Canada (I don't know whether or not it existed.)
  • I don't know if home ovulation tests existed, but I didn't hear about them until well into the 21st century.
  • I don't know if puberty blockers existed, but I only heard of them in the past few years.
  • We were nearly a decade away from the first male pregnancy.
And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head, in my capacity as someone who isn't a medical professional and whose sexual health needs would have been served perfectly well with 1998 medical knowledge.  I'm sure there's tons more!

Everyone would be appalled if 20-year-old Geography or Physics or Computer Science were being taught in schools, because the subject matter has evolved.

Everyone would be appalled if they were given cancer treatment or antibiotics or a weight-loss regime that didn't take into account the last 20 years of medical developments.

If nothing else, everyone should be appalled that they're deliberately reverting to a curriculum in which some technical information is obsolete.

Thursday, June 07, 2018

Voted

Beautiful, fresh, breezy weather.

Black, white and purple outfit, with my late grandmother's jewellery (she always emphasized how important voting is, so I bring her with me), and enormous sunglasses to hide the fact that my still-recovering eyes are puffy from overdoing it on work over the last couple of days and I didn't have time (or, frankly, inclination) to do a serious camouflaging eye makeup job.

Encountered a mindblowingly adorable Shiba Inu puppy on my way out of my building and got a good petting in, but that was the only dog I saw before I voted. (Got some sniffs and smiles from various good dogs on my way back home - not sure if those count.)

No line at the polling station. Three people in front of me at the table for my specific poll (howdy, neighbours!). Eccentric surprisingly-young old woman (looked younger than my parents but acted senile) loudly trying to engage an Elections Ontario worker in a political debate over whom she should vote for, while the election worker remained scrupulously nonpartisan.

Put an X in a box with a sharpie, and then it was scanned by a machine. Not a fan of that system. I like hand-counted paper ballots, and putting my folded ballot in the box with a jaunty tap.

Walked out of the polling station 10 minutes after I walked out of my apartment door. Smooth and effortless.

Let's hope for a government that lets everything equally be smooth and effortless for the next four years.

Voters' Resources (Ontario 2018 edition)

This is a postdated post and will be at the top of my blog until Election Day. If Election Day has not yet passed, there might be new posts underneath.

Getting Started

Election Day is June 7!

First, go to the Elections Ontario Voter Information Service to find your voting locations and candidates. Elections Ontario e-Registration can apparently check if you're on the voters' list. (It says I'm on the list but I haven't gotten a Voter Information Card yet, so I can't yet vouch for its efficacity.

Here is the ID you need to vote.

On Election Day, your employer is legally required to ensure that you have three consecutive hours during polling hours during which you are not schedule to work. (Election Act, subsection 6.(3)). This means that if your voting hours are 9 am - 9 pm and you work 11 am - 7 pm, you employer is required to allow to you either come in at noon or leave at 6 pm.  However, if you work 9 am - 6 pm, there are still three free polling hours after the end of your workday.

Issues

The platforms:

Conservative
Green
Liberal
Libertarian
Moderate
NDP

There's also the CBC Vote Compass, which asks you about your positions on various issues and shows you which parties' positions are closest to yours. I wouldn't trust it blindly, since it said one party's platform was closer to my positions but put me physically closer to another party on the chart, but it's useful as a starting point, for identifying which parties' positions on which issues might not be what you expected and therefore merit a closer look.

Strategy and Predictions

My "How to Vote"
My "Where to Vote
My "How to Vote Strategically"

Riding-by-riding predictions:

- The Election Prediction Project is crowdsourced riding-by-riding predictions
- LISPOP has poll-based riding-by-riding winner predictions, but doesn't give a breakdown by party
- Too Close to Call regularly updates their blog with their latest riding-by-riding projections (including the breakdown by party) and has a simulator into which you can input your own (real or hypothetical) poll data.
- Calculated Politics also has riding-by-riding projections with a breakdown by party.


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This post was last updated on June 3, and will be updated as needed throughout the election campaign, right up until voting day.  If there's anything you think belongs in here but hasn't be posted yet, let me know in the comments.

Why this election surprises me

1. I'm surprised how strong the "there are no good choices" narrative seems to be this election. The available choices seem to be within the same range as previous elections, but the "there are no good choices" narrative seems to be way louder.

2. I'm also surprised by the strength of the "obviously the Liberals need to be voted out" narrative.  When you think about the public reaction compared with the outgoing party's record in other elections where a party has been in power for over a decade and the voters have decided it was time for a change, it seems quite disproportionate this time around.

Basically, given the political context going in, this seemed like it should be a routine election, but we're suddenly getting this narrative that it's an Unprecedentedly Big Thing.

This kind of remind me of when Stéphane Dion was leader of the federal Liberal party.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the media started reporting that people (regular people, not party insiders) found
Stéphane Dion unlikeable. This seemed completely out of the blue to me, so I started asking around - regular people, not politics people - and the worst thing anyone had to say about him was that he was a member of the Liberal party. (Which, call me old-fashioned, but I think that's an occupational hazard of being leader of the Liberal party.)  But somehow the generally accepted narrative became that no one likes him, and ultimately leadership of the federal Liberal party went to Michael Ignatieff.

I feel like the same thing has happened here.  A Big Dramatic Narrative has suddenly been imposed out of nowhere.  And if you had asked around before the Big Dramatic Narrative took over, responses to the same situation would have been far more measured.  "Yeah, Policy A is helpful but could have gone further, Policy Z is pretty bad, I could really go either way depending on what the other parties are doing."

In any case, good luck, Ontario! I hope we win!

Saturday, May 19, 2018

How to Vote Strategically

This post is part Voters' Resources post. It, and the rest of the series, will be updated as appropriate between now and election day.

Some people vote for the party whose platform they find most suitable (the Best Party). Other people try to prevent the party whose platform they find most harmful (the Worst Party) from being elected, by voting for the party that's most likely to defeat the Worst Party (the Compromise Party). This is called strategic voting.

The most important thing about strategic voting is that your strategy has to apply to the reality in your riding. The media feeds us provincial polls for breakfast every day, but they're not directly relevant. Regardless of what the rest of the country is doing, your vote will only be used to elect your own MP. If your riding is already disinclined to elect the Worst Party, there's no point in a strategic vote - you'd just end up making the Compromise Party look more popular than they really are.

So here's what to do if your priority is stopping the Worst Party from winning:

1. Figure out: "If I don't vote, who's going to win in this particular riding?"

If the answer is a party other than the Worst Party, vote for the Best Party. If the answer is "the Worst Party" or "it's too close to tell," go on to step 2.

2. Figure out: "If I don't vote, who's most likely to defeat the Worst Party in this particular riding?"

This is your Compromise Party. Read their platform. If it's acceptable, vote for the Compromise Party. If it's not acceptable, vote for the Best Party.

Remember: ignore the provincial polls; think only about the situation in your riding!

Tools to help you figure out likely outcomes in your riding can be found in in my Voters' Resources post, under "Riding-by-riding predictions"