The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Happy Tom

You're going to love him. At least when you get to know him:

The detailed poll of more than 4,500 voters, conducted for internal party purposes late last year, revealed Mr. Mulcair’s name-recognition level across Canada was dangerously low with less than one year to go to the general election, party sources acknowledged in recent interviews. The finding prompted a drastic change in Mr. Mulcair’s public appearances, bringing him increasingly out of his comfort zone in Parliament and into main-street Canada, such as a microbrewery in southern Ontario last week, to highlight his middle-class roots and hammer away at the highlights of the NDP’s platform.

But just in case you thought anything had really changed:

Mr. Mulcair is focusing his messaging on a few elements: subsidized daycare spaces across the country, a new $15 minimum wage for employees in federally regulated sectors, a reduced qualifying year for Old Age Security and help for small businesses.

Sour old wine in snazzy new bottles. 

Monday Night - Brideshead Revisited

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Because if Ottawa didn't do it:

Residents of Savona, along with representatives from the federal, provincial and municipal governments, today celebrated the grand opening of the community’s renewed park dock and boat launch.

The boat launch is one of a limited number of public boat accesses to Kamloops Lake. Tourism is a major economic driver in Savona and the new dock and boat launch are vital components in maintaining the community’s economy and links to the region.

Scenes From the Imperial Capital

How The Government Makes You Work Longer and Harder

The unintended consequences of America's social safety net:

One example of fringe benefit costs is Social Security, the U.S.’s public pension system. Almost all workers have some of their income taxed by the Social Security program. However, the employee actually pays only half of the Social Security tax; the other half is paid by the employer. If a company pays two people to each work 40 hours a week at $125,000 a year then the company owes the government slightly more than $7,300 for each person.

[...]

Moreover, companies experience other cost savings beyond Social Security by hiring one very highly paid person, compared to two people. For skilled workers almost all companies offer health care, dental plans and other benefits like life insurance. Top-of-the-line or Cadillac family medical care plans cost over $27,500 per employee. For every two jobs that are combined the company’s bottom line is boosted by the amount the company would have spent on health, dental, and life insurance plans.

While the above Fast Company article focuses on high-skill high-pay workers, it's basic logic applies through out the workforce. Raise the cost per worker and you reduce the demand for workers. Those who are lucky enough to have a job, especially those on salary, are worked harder because from the company's perspective they're fixed costs. The more you work the lower the per unit cost of whatever you happen to be producing. 

The usual suspect in these stories is capitalism. After all if businesses weren't so greedy they wouldn't make people work so hard. That's only part of the story. America is a long way from being a laissez-faire capitalist economy. Instead we have a mixed economy where the Big Government element is becoming dominant. It's been ninety years since Calvin Coolidge sat in the White House and boy does it show. 

Take Social Security, an entitlement so sacred that most Tea Party activists won't even criticize it. Because part of the cost is borne by the employer it acts as an employment tax. But how does this make sense? The employer derives no direct benefit from their employee's retirement earnings, earnings that often don't start being paid out until decades after that employee has jumped over to another firm. Social Security is a tax that simultaneously reduces employment AND reduces the quality of life for those who have jobs. 

Employer run health plans are another prime example of punishing American workers under the guise of helping them. During the Second World War the federal government allowed employers to deduct health care expenses from income, a privilege not accorded to ordinary private citizens. Over the decades this has created an incredibly lopsided system in which the vast majority of Americans cannot afford individual insurance.

At the time this pernicious quirk was added to the tax code the official rationale was that it allowed American firms, during a period of strict wage and price controls, to compete for workers. Both then and now many have suspected that the real reason was less benign. By herding workers into large private employer plans, and getting them used to third parties covering their health care expenses, it would become politically easier to create a single national plan down the road.

A national health care plan has never really emerged. Instead we've had a series of stop-gap partial socializations in the form of Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare and the byzantine system of mandates imposed on private insurance. For the 60% of American workers who still get coverage through their employer this seventy year old public policy disaster lowers earnings, increases their work hours and reduces their career mobility. All this is compounded by the double fear millions of Americans face everyday: Of losing both their job and their coverage. This is an unnecessary tragedy unheard of in the rest of the developed world. 

As Americans get older the twin dilemma of an unsustainable Social Security system, and a rapidly bankrupting health care system, are provoking calls for more government intervention. Among the favourite remedies of the Left are hiking Social Security contributions for both employees and employers, while at the same compelling private employers to offer more generous health plans. In essence these proposals are calling for a doubling down on the mistakes of the past. Having spent nearly four score years digging a hole for the American people the advocates of Big Government want to keep digging deeper and faster. 

 

Friday Night - Bullitt

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Wet Pork:

Ben Lobb, Member of Parliament for Huron-Bruce, on behalf of the Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, announced today that the Government of Canada will invest in a major improvement project at Port Elgin Harbour. This funding will provide a safer and more efficient working environment for harbour users.

This investment at Port Elgin Harbour will involve rehabilitation of the west pier by encapsulating the existing structure in steel sheet piling. The project will ensure safe berthage for harbour users as well as maintain the integrity of the fuelling wharf.

Preparation and planning for this project will take place over the next months, and construction is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2016.

Scenes From The Imperial Capital

An Imaginary Country

PKP has a day dream:

A day after Premier Philippe Couillard attacked the sovereignty option being proposed by Pierre Karl Peladeau as an imaginary solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, the new Parti Quebecois leader fired back.

“Listen, I think the imaginary country that the premier is talking about: it’s Canada,” Peladeau told reporters in Quebec City.

The only imaginary country in this debate is the Republic of Quebec, a fantasy projected for over half a century by ethnic nationalist dead-enders. The odds are that in fifty years time Canada will be alive, kicking and richer than ever while the PQ will be nothing more than a sullen memory.

Pretending that Canada isn't a real country is old hat for Quebec nationalists. The implicit assumption being that real countries are ethno-cultural monoliths. Nations not based on blood and soil are abstractions ready to be blown away by the passionate advocates of La Patrie. It's terribly cute until it gets out of hand. 

Some of the most dynamic nation states in history have been polyglot enterprises. Britain was multicultural, in the better meaning of that word, long before the term ever passed PET's wrinkled old lips. The United States, the polyglot nation par excellent, has been dominating the world's affairs for a century. Yet by the narrow and forever provincial standards of Quebec nationalists neither of these are real countries. They just happen to win a lot of wars and an awful lot of Nobel prizes.

While ethnically diverse societies are not guaranteed dynamos (see Yugoslavia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) they have a basic do or die proposition at their heart: Find common ground or fall apart. America, Britain and Canada have survived by developing a civic nationalism rooted in values and a common history. Otherwise they would have ceased to exist decades ago or become larger versions of Belgium. 

Nations that rest on a sense of civic nationalism are, in essence, acts of national will. Millions of people choose to become or remain American or Canadian. This is especially true of a country like Canada that has spent a century and a half resisting continental pressure from the Yanks. Canada, on the plain facts, has never made very much sense. Too big, too cold and too sparsely populated. All the while situated right next door to the Greatest Show on Earth. The easy thing would have been for John A. and the gang to have shrugged their shoulders and petitioned to join the Union.

Lord knows they had plenty of opportunity. Yet they never did. 

Now compare the founders of Canada, those mutton chopped Victorian eminences, with Rene Levesque, Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard and now PKP. The former never made any bones about what they were doing: Here's a bunch of British colonies strung around the 49th parallel. We intend on making it a serious, rich and important nation. There were no weasel worded referenda or trial balloons about using some other country's currency. Nope. The Fathers of Confederation understood that if you want to found a real country you need to do it openly and proudly.

That also means paying the bill. For most of Canada's first half century we had our national defence subsidized by the British. But when the bill came due at the Somme, Flanders and Vimy we were there. When the bill came up again a generation later at Dieppe, Juno and the Netherlands we where there too. That's what serious countries do in a moment of crisis. The fate of western civilization hung in the balance and Canada, not even fully independent, stepped up where others failed. Can you imagine any member of the PQ, should the choice have been theirs, who would have dispatched the armies of New France to fight for Old France? 

That's the real difference between the very real country of Canada and the make believe of Quebec nationalism. Those who built this country behaved like adults and took responsibility for Canada's fate in the world. Nations larger and older than our own have shirked the call in war and peace. We did not. When the world looks at Quebec they see spoiled children expecting someone else to carry the load. With Canada they know we mean business, albeit in our usual unassuming way. That's why Canada is the real, real country and why the Republic of Quebec will forever remain the fever dream of fools.

Thursday Night - Kubrick

Government Monopoly Angers Customers

W.A.C. Bennett's gift to the people of British Columbia keeps on giving:

In a textbook example of online marketing gone wrong, BC Ferries launched a social media contest to name its newest ferries — only to be barraged with joke names mocking the corporation’s overpaid management, high fares and lack of competition.

“Coastal Extortion,” “HMS Cantafford” and “The Queen of Poor Management” joined the hundreds of names being suggested for a trio of new “Intermediate Class” car ferries.

As of Wednesday night, not a single person had posted a legitimate ferry name to Twitter. On Facebook, meanwhile, only a handful of souls resisted the urge to slam the marine monopoly, such as a Langley man who suggested “Island Paradise” or “Island Relaxation.”

In Ontario only the cable companies are this hated. 

Scenes From The Imperial Capital

The Benefits of a University Education?

In addition to debt and unemployment we can also add political foolishness:

The federal NDP is seeing a surge among university-educated voters – jumping over ten points in just one week, according to polling data from EKOS.

The breakdown of a national poll shows the NDP leading at 36.8 per cent of support among university-educated voters, up from 25.9 per cent just a week earlier. The Conservatives are trailing behind at 26.1 per cent and likewise the Liberals at 25.8 per cent.

As the article goes onto note holders of bachelors have historically leaned Liberal. The pollster's explanation for the aversion graduates have for the Tories is neatly smug:

“The government works on an anti-intellectual populist front,” he said.

“The environment is not seen as particularly important, it’s not clear they are on the same side as climate change, they shut down the long-form census, and as well is the tendency to parody the intellectual class as latte-sipping feeble people who don’t know what they are doing,” said Graves.

Well there is that tendency. 

Wednesday Night - Becket

The Business of Treason

A tycoon plans for the future:

“We don’t have 25 years ahead of us to achieve [sovereignty],” Pierre Karl Péladeau said in March, stating the obvious during the home stretch of an eight-month Parti Québécois leadership race he was destined to win. He later retracted this disconcerting subsequent statement under intense political pressure: “With demographics, with immigration, we’re definitely losing one riding each year.”

It's nice to have the other side admit that. As we pull away from the train wreck that was the 1960s, Quebec nationalism can be viewed with dispassion. The existential crisis now past it appears not as a dramatic fight but as a long petulant whine. A boomer tantrum that will fade with their passing.