Chaos In The House

As much as I might like to, I find it hard to completely ignore the dysfunction that defines American society in general and, currently, in particular, the House of Representatives. The naked venality of a man like Kevin McCarthy, so desperate for the Speaker's chair that he will contort himself in ways that most gymnasts would find impossible, is a sad spectacle to behold.

Fortunately to shed some very clear light on the mess is Politics Girl (originally from Canada), whose striking eyes and incisive mind pierce and explain the miasma currently enveloping the House.

The High Cost Of Serving Developers

Doug Ford has a lot to be happy about these days. His debt to developers is being rapidly repaid via his Bill 23, which will not only remove key parts of the Greenbelt for development but also relieve many of his friends' financial burdens paying development charges. 

The only problem is the largesse bestowed on them by Premier Doug means high costs for the rest of us, as Kofi Hope writes:

Currently, municipalities put a charge on most new developments (with some exceptions) to help fund the cost of infrastructure needed to serve those developments, such as roads, sewers and transit. The charges apply to each new unit built, and in Toronto an increase passed in 2022 raises them up to $137,000 for a new detached home.

The development industry has argued that these charges are a barrier to building new homes and to making housing more affordable. And some advocates have called for reducing these charges on specific types of housing that help with affordability.

Professor Matti Semiatyki of the Infrastructure Institute says that reducing or eliminating the charges developers pay will have real consequences.

 “Cities are expensive,” Siematyiki says. “All the things the city is raising money for with development charges are things they have to pay for… if developers or new owners don’t pay, someone else will pay, whether through property taxes or other ways.”

And this is the part of Bill 23 that has Ontario municipalities up in arms. It’s estimated that our already cash-strapped cities will lose $5 billion in revenue, and Mayor John Tory says the city could lose $230 million annually. 

The ramifications of waived developments fees are extensive.

 If municipalities lose the revenue of development charges, they’ll raise property taxes or user fees for things like garbage collection. These carrying costs all make it less affordable to own a home, and it doesn’t just affect homeowners. If owners of rental properties find their monthly costs going up, they will raise the rent for tenants. So even if the cost to buy a property in a city is, say, 15 per cent less, if you are paying thousands more each year to keep that property, has housing really become more affordable?

As well,

If municipalities believe they can’t recover the costs that are required for new developments, that could push them to resist new development proposals, meaning Bill 23 may add more conflict and delays to a process everyone agrees needs to move quicker.

And we have to remember, as they say, there is ultimately only one taxpayer.

 Whether government is providing grants to developers to build the type of housing we need, or waiving fees to incentivize housing builds, it means new costs (and costs for the state not private developers).

So in the end, no matter how one parses this, serving the interests of developers is working against the interests of municipalities and ultimately, of course, the taxpayer. 

The last time I checked, developers hardly needed state welfare. 

 

The Rogers-Shaw Merger - An UpDate

 

For someone who is appalled by the pending approval of the Rogers-Shaw merger (see my previous post), I will take whatever good news there is, no matter how slight.

Here it is:

The Competition Bureau says a Federal Court has issued an emergency stay temporarily suspending the Competition Tribunal’s dismissal of its case against Rogers Communications Inc.’s $26-billion takeover of Shaw Communications Inc.

The federal agency says the suspension will remain in place until its application for a stay and an injunction is heard.

The injunction would block the deal from closing until the Bureau’s full appeal of the decision, rendered on Thursday, is heard.

The Tribunal said in its ruling that the merger was not likely to result in higher prices for wireless customers and that it was satisfied a plan to sell Shaw’s Freedom Mobile to Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron was adequate to ensure competition isn’t substantially reduced.

The Bureau had sought to block the merger and in its appeal argues that the Tribunal acted outside of its jurisdiction in a “rush to judgment.”

If the Tribunal’s decision stands, the merger will only require the approval of federal Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne to go ahead. Champagne said Saturday that he will wait until there is “clarity” in the ongoing legal process before issuing a decision.

The deal was originally scheduled to close by the end of the year, with a possible extension to Jan. 31.

While this is likely simply a small delay in the merger, some opposition is better than none, in my view.

UPDATED:A Love Affair That Hurts All Of Us

 

If you follow such things (i.e., the news) you will know that our current federal government, echoing the passions of previous ones, has an unmitigated and uninterrupted crush on the corporate sector. The only problem with that protracted affair is that the rest of us suffer the consequences.

Examples abound, including the government's failure to achieve any results from the revelations found in both the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers. But today's post will examine only two recent and egregious demonstrations of our leaders' fealty to their business overlords.

The first is the the holiday disaster widely reported at airports. While undoubtedly much of the chaos is attributable to the weather vagaries imposed by climate change, the corporate contempt for passengers is also there for all to see. And it cannot be more obvious than in the debacle that Sunwing Airlines finds itself in the midst of.

The Canadian government is criticising leisure specialist Sunwing Vacations after an operational meltdown left hundreds of passengers stuck when winter weather disrupted the carrier’s operations earlier this week.

The Toronto-based company, like its US peer Southwest Airlines, has been scrambling to sort through the mess, leaving customers frustrated and angry. Canadian media reports that some of the carrier’s passengers have been waiting to be repatriated from Latin American holiday destinations including Cancun for up to five days.

Hmm, about that government 'criticism'. While I have seen U.S Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg at least go on national television to discuss Southwest Airlines' thousands of cancellations, it was only three days ago that our Minister of Transport, Omar Alghabra (or his office) managed these anemic tweets:

Canadians are patient when it comes to weather disruptions but they rightly expect their airlines to keep them informed and to manage these disruptions smoothly. I am very concerned with the current situation with Sunwing Airlines.

 This ongoing situation is unacceptable. Canadians must receive the information they need to return home safely. We expect all airlines to keep their passengers informed when it comes to delivering a service that they were paid to do.

Passengers have rights under the Air Passenger Protection Regulations to ensure robust passenger protection in situations like these, and our government will continue to ensure these rights are protected.

Surely, that will put the fear of God into Sunwing, eh? If you click on the above link, you will see the contempt with which this toothless tweet was met by those who responded to it. 

My second example is the pending merger between Rogers and Shaw, a merger that will obviously result in less competition and higher prices for telecommunication services. At least our Competition Bureau tried to block that merger as against the best interests of Canadians, but that veto was overturned by the Competition Tribunal. As well, it has met the approval of Industry Minister Francois-Phillipe Champagne.

Those opposing it are groups seeking to represent the interests of ordinary Canadians.

Commissioner of Competition, Matthew Boswell, head of the Competition Bureau, said he was “very disappointed” in the decision and is “carefully considering” next steps.

That could include an appeal of the Tribunal’s decision to the Federal Court of Appeal.

 Critics say the Tribunal’s decision was hastily made and follows a troubling pattern in Canada’s failure to foster healthy competition in one the country’s most powerful sectors.

 “Though the decision is disappointing, it is ultimately a product of Canada’s permissive and outdated merger laws,” said Keldon Bester, co-founder of The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. “It is … disheartening to see the Tribunal rush such a critical decision for Canadians at the request of the merging parties.”

Matt Hatfield, campaigns director of OpenMedia, said the decision was “the last nail in the coffin of telecom affordability in a dismal 2022.”

The buyout results in higher prices and fewer choices, in an already tight telecom market, he added.

Official 'cover' for the merger is the provisional sale made to Quebecor of Freedom Mobile, an arm of the Shaw empire. It comes with the 'expectation' that it will provide sufficient competition to keep Rogers-Shaw on its toes. We'll soon see how that one works out, but the auguries are not good, especially given that Globealive, a telecommunication entity with many companies, had wanted to buy Freedom Mobile for $3.75 billion, substantially more than the $2.85 billion Quebecor has paid for it. Speculation is that that deal wasn't accepted because it would have meant real competition for the Rogers-Shaw behemoth.

So there you have it. As usual, Canadians are being sacrificed on the altar of big business, the only true god worshipped by our government. One can only hope that Canadians ruefully remember their place in the pews the next time they go to the polls.

UPDATE: Oh, perhaps we can all rest easy now that Industry Minister Francois-Phillipe Champagne has articulated his expectations for Quebecor for its purchase of Freedom Mobile to be allowed:

Videotron would have to agree to keep Freedom’s wireless licences for at least 10 years and the minister would “expect to see’’ wireless prices in Ontario and Western Canada lowered in line with the company’s Quebec offerings.

“What remains before me is the separate request to transfer spectrum licences from Shaw to Quebecor. Promoting competition and affordability in the telecom sector is one of my top priorities. That position has not changed,” Champagne said.

However, there is no word as to why he has not investigated the refusal to sell Freedom Mobile to  Globealive, despite the company offering almost $1 billion more than did Quebecor. (See above discussion.)

But Champagne's statement makes for nice window dressing, doesn't it?

Would I Lie To You?

If your name is George Santos, the answer is a definite yes.

While TizzEnt sees Santos as an indictment of the Republican Party, Congressional-elect also seems to be an indicator of the sad state of politics in general in the U.S., given that many in his district feel he did nothing very wrong, and would vote for him again.

 

A Moral Failing

 

It has been said that a society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. By that metric, we are all coming up far short.

Although I have seen a recent uptick in people wearing masks in stores, the sad fact is that the majority shun such practices, despite the fact that masking is one of the layers of protection we have to help shield both ourselves and others from illness. Another fact is that 2022 saw the most deaths from Covid-19, both in Ontario and across the country.

Nationwide, 19,035 people died of the disease in 2022 — up from 14,606 deaths in 2021 and 15,307 in 2020.

How can this be, given the great strides made in combatting the disease through vaccinations, treatments and prevention methods? In addition to the spread of Omicron, there are other reasons for this year's lethality.

Ethicists and medical professionals point out that, as 2022 wore on, COVID seemed to join a long list of illnesses, such as influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and rhinovirus, that society has learned to live with as long as the worst effects are confined to specific populations.

In COVID’s case, that’s the medically frail and the elderly.

“I think unless it’s in your house or your social circle, you kind of forget that these people need — deserve — our attention and care,” said Dr. Miriam Mottiar, an Ottawa anesthesiologist and palliative care physician, noting that in her practice she still takes care of people who are dying of COVID.

“It’s very sad for me and my colleagues, but it’s doubly sad, because it feels like if our society managed to mask, a lot of these deaths would be preventable, because we would have lower levels of COVID in the community. So I think there’s sadness, but there’s regret as well.”

The elderly and the frail are two groups we seem as a society willing to sacrifice.

It’s not often we see a lot of medically frail, elderly people standing in line at our local hardware store or grocer. So perhaps it’s understandable why, no matter where you go these days, masking seems to be a rare thing, as does social distancing.

Maxwell Smith, a bioethicist and assistant professor at Western University, says part of society’s increasingly tepid response to COVID comes down to the adage: what is out of sight is out of mind.

Because we apparently exist to serve the economy, governments now issue only weekly updates of hospitalizations and deaths, meaning that Covid is now in the background, joining the other viruses we have learned to live with.  And because it is less likely to now victimize the privileged, its threat-level has been downgraded.

[Maxwell says] that a common pattern in the history of infectious disease is for severe outcomes to shift to marginalized or disadvantaged sectors of society, while those privileged enough to not experience the worst outcomes move on.

“Now that (COVID) is sitting in those populations and the most privileged among us don’t feel threatened anymore, there’s very little tolerance to have collective measures put in place,” Smith noted. “We sort of just say, ‘Well if those people are vulnerable, let them take care of themselves,’ knowing full well that this will continue to disadvantage those groups. I think that is at play here.”

No one enjoys wearing a mask. Indeed, as one who has a beard, I find a certain itchiness creeps in after wearing one for long durations. That, however, is of minor consequence when one considers the protective effects both for the wearer and the general public. And I claim no special virtue here, given that I am largely, but not totally, motivated by an instinct for self-protection. 

Sadly, however, in the name of freedom, far too many are willing to risk their health and that of others. This, clearly, is not a good way to conduct our lives. It can only be seen for what it is: a moral failing.

 

 

 

The Soul Of Wit

As Hamlet character Polonius famously (and ironically) said, Brevity is the soul of wit. And I can think of few wittier than editorial cartoonists, whose illustrations, when they hit the mark, are succinctly brilliant.

My favourite is Theo Moudakis, whose work appears regularly in the Toronto Star. Today's edition sees some highlights of 2022 from the master. Here are three of them:

Undoubtedly, there will be more than enough political antics and betrayals to power Moudakis and his cadre of fellow pundits through 2023.