A Conversation With James Gordon: Part One, Long Term Care Facilities

I've recently acquired the technology to make broadcast quality recordings and taught myself the rudiments of audio editing. As a result, I'm going to stop going through the tremendously tedious process of creating transcripts of interviews and simply include sound files in the body of the text of blog posts. Just click on the hypertext link in the question and you should be redirected to a Google Drive page where you can listen. (Please give me feedback if there is problem listening to the files---I'm on a learning curve. You can email me at thecloudwalkingowl@gmail.com .)

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In this post I'm having a conversation with Councilor James Gordon, from Ward Two. I have a pretty good rapport with Gordon, who I first met in 1988 when I ran for Parliament under the Green Party ticket. For those of you who don't know, his main claim to fame is that he's an accomplished musician. That's how I first met him. My campaign staff were making a video for community cable tv (remember when that was a thing?), and they wanted to use one of his songs in it.

James Gordon wearing cowboy garb.
Photo provided by him.

We had a good talk and raised what I think are a variety of pretty important issues that "hover in the background" of our community. I hope that you like what follows.

How has the pandemic affected your job as a city Councillor? 

I think that what James has to say raises some pretty important questions about how a democracy is supposed to act, both in and outside of public emergencies like a pandemic.

Handing over control of the city to an committee of senior staff members and public health officials seems like the right call because they need to make fast, informed decisions and can't wait until Council makes up it's mind. There's also an issue in that politicians often make decisions based up ideology instead of evidence, which can lead to catastrophic mistakes. (Look South of the boarder to see how well that works---.)

That leaves an elected official doing "constituency work", which James describes as "referring" people to the various local government agencies to deal with their problems. This transition from doing the job of directing the policies and long-term goals of the city to simply being the "middle-man" between citizens and the bureaucracy is an endemic issue on all three levels of government: federal, provincial, and, municipal. The democratic think tank "Samara" did a series of exit interviews with MPs in 2009 and 2010 and came up with a surprising result: many elected officials are extremely upset with the amount of time they spend "politicking" and finding "workarounds" for constituents having problems with the bureaucracy. Primarily this isn't because they don't like meeting with voters, but because it eats up so much of their time that they don't have time to put into what their primary job really should be: researching and creating good government policy.

1. Constituency work in its present form is too often weakly connected to MPs’ parliamentary work, and can hinder, rather than enhance, MPs’ focus on legislation and Government spending.
2. There are better ways of helping citizens, such as by systematically addressing problems in public services, rather than creating workarounds on the individual level.
3. There are better ways of representing citizens, such as by making innovative consultation founded on public learning the central focus of constituency work. (Beyond the Barbecue) 

More about this in the following conversations.

Why do governments always seem to wait until a terrible scandal happens before they will fix any problem brought to their attention?

I made a couple mistakes in this part of the conversation. First of all, I referred to the Wettlaufer murders as being "mercy killings". When I looked at the Public Inquiry into the Safety and Security of Residents in the Long-Term Care Homes System (commonly called "the Wettlaufer report"), it starts off making a very strong statement that they most specifically were not "mercy killings".

---Wettlaufer herself has not suggested that she killed out of a sense of mercy. By her own admission, she committed the Offences because she felt angry about her career, her responsibilities, and her life in general. There was no mention of feelings of pity or concern for the victims. She felt “euphoric” after killing. Wettlaufer committed these crimes for her gratification alone, and not out of some misguided sense of mercy. 

Secondly, I suggested that private senior care homes made $1.5 billion in profits last year according to a Toronto Star article. What the article says instead is that three of the largest privately-run nursing home operators in Ontario made $1.5 billion in profits over the last ten years. It also adds in "executive compensation", (which no doubt involves bonuses and stock options beyond basic salary), and share buy-backs (which is a way of artificially propping up share price, which translates into profits for executives who are given stock options---which means that they get payment as a capital gain---which I believe lowers the amount of income tax they have to pay). This adds up to $1.7 billion over ten years, or $170 million on average per year.

Unfortunately, this is a game that reporters and politicians routinely play where they don't give the yearly figure but rather compound it over a period of time so it looks larger. The really important number would be to come up with a figure per resident per year. 

Extendicare, Chartwell and Sienna are among the biggest players in Ontario’s long-term-care industry, operating 140 long-term-care homes with more than 19,000 beds in the province.

If we were to just divide that $170 million by 19,000 we'd come up with a almost $9,000/per patient/year. That's obviously wrong, as the money is clearly for the entire corporation. All three operate in other provinces and I suspect Extendicare also operates in the USA (language can be vague at certain websites.) Obviously, just throwing around large figures doesn't really do anything except get naive readers hot under the collar. (Unfortunately, in politics and much of the "legacy media" this "isn't a bug---it's a feature".)

I wasn't able to find enough info to break things down to the amount of profit/patient. What I could find, however, were graphs (c/o the TMX Group website) that show how well the stock of all three companies have done over the past ten years on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The year is on the bottom of each graph with the price of an individual share on the right. Please note the "dip" at the end of each chart as the Corona plague struck and revealed problems in this investor's paradise.

Chartwell

Extendicare

Sienna

Now let's see what the composite index of the Toronto Stock Exchange looks like over the last ten years.

Toronto Stock Exchange Composite Index

As you can see, it appears that Sienna and Chartwell seem to have beat the average in stock gains, whereas Extendicare seems to have done worse. The difference doesn't seem huge, however, which would seem to me to indicate that running seniors and long-care homes isn't a lot more profitable than anything else. And in turn that would suggest that not a huge amount of money is being siphoned off by investors. Of course, it's important to understand that a lot of different factors can influence the value of a stock, so it's best to consider the above as being indicative of a possible path for further study rather than definitive evidence.

There are numbers that don't seem to be as ambiguous, namely the disturbing reports about the difference in infection and death rates of private versus public and non-profit facilities. According to a May 6th press release by the Ontario Health Coalition, 

the rate of death, as measured by the proportion of deaths over the total number of beds in homes with COVID-19 outbreaks resulting in death, is:

• 9 per cent in for-profit homes
• 5.25 per cent in non-profit homes, and
• 3.62 per cent in publicly-owned (municipal) homes

Another relevant set of figures is the proportion of deaths per beds broken down by ownership model. 

From April 28 to May 5 the proportion of deaths over total number of beds in these homes increased or declined as follows:

• In for-profit homes the increase in the death rate has been 28.52 per cent.
• In non-profit homes the increase in the death rate has been 14.15 per cent.
• In public (municipal) homes the increase has been negative, thus, a decline of (-)18.46 per cent.

(In case readers are wondering about why the death rate would go down during a pandemic, I'm only speculating but social distancing has a side benefit of preventing the spread of other communicable diseases such as seasonal influenza, the common cold, and, Norwalk which commonly create localized disease epidemics in seniors centres. If people aren't getting the Corona virus, they probably aren't getting those things either---and they kill people too.)

The Canadian Armed Forces were asked by the premier to come to help in five Ontario Long Term Care Facilities (LTCF). They recently gave a report to both the Premier and the Prime Minister that briefly catalogues various deficiencies that they found. I won't go into the specific problems other than to cite some of the issues that "jumped out and bit me on the nose":

• lack of proper use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
• use of medications past their expiry date
• general fear of management firing staff for using too many supplies and spending too much time on individual patients

What is of interest to this part of my post are the five LTCFs that the military report deals with:

• Eatonville Care Centre
• Hawthorne Place Care Centre
• Orchard Villa
• Altamont
• Holland Christian-Grace Manor

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out who owns these different homes---and it is difficult to find out. 

The Eatonville Care Centre is in Etobicoke, but it isn't on the list of Toronto municipal LTCFs. There is nothing on the website that would identify it as being a privately owned business---either single proprietor, partnership, or, publicly traded incorporated company. But there isn't anything that would suggest that it is a non-profit charity, either. (I didn't see a "donations" link on the page---which would suggest that it isn't a charity---but "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence".)

The Hawthorne Place Care Centre is on Finch Avenue, but again it isn't on the Toronto list.  Again, it doesn't list who owns what and there are no links for donations.

After a bit of searching, I found out that there are two "Orchard Villa"s in Pickering. One is a "retirement home", the other is a "long term care" facility, so I assume that the Armed Forces report is referring to the latter instead of the former. Moreover, after even more tedious searching, I found out that is part of a business called "Southbridge Care Homes". Like many large business websites, Southbridge Care Homes has an "investor relations" link to draw in potential investors. The URL comes up with an "Error 404" label, which Wikipedia says generally means that a specific page has been deleted, although it sometimes comes up for other reasons. Fortunately I was able to dig up a screenshot that the Internet Archives' "Wayback Machine" recorded on October 17th of 2018. According to it Southbridge Care Homes are owned by "The Yorkville Long Term Health Care Fund":

The Yorkville Long Term Health Care Fund is the investment vehicle that allows investors to invest in Southbridge Health Care LP. It is designed as a stable, yield based investment with opportunities for capital appreciation.

Through its investment in Southbridge Health Care LP, the Yorkville Long Term Health Care Fund’s stable yield is derived from a government funded long term care business that is growing as a result of positive demographic shifts and chronic shortages in health care beds. The Yorkville Long Term Health Care Fund provides investors access to an extremely successful management team and a business with significant barriers to entry.

It would appear that the "extremely successful management team" might be very good at making money, it didn't appear to have been very good at protecting the people entrusted to their company---at least at the Orchard Villa Long Term Care Facility.

The Altamont Care Community is in Scarborough and it's owned by Sienna. 

Holland Christian's Grace Manor has another one of those frustratingly vague websites. There's nothing on it to suggest that what sort of organization it is, other than a thick layering of "God speak".  (That doesn't mean something isn't a private business, though, as some businesses do this sort of thing.) Having said that, there was a guest on the CBC's The Current, who said that Holland Christian is a nonprofit. Moreover, the Toronto Star's "Daily Update" for May 27th at 2:30 pm had a story that said that of the five LTCF in the Armed Forces report, four were businesses and only one a non-profit---which clears up a bit of the mystery.    

Another mysterious thing about the Holland Christian website is the fact that if you bring up the home page it lists all the different facilities that they currently run or are building---except the one listed in the report: Grace Manor. But if you look at other pages, such as the one titled "Living at the Manors", you will see Grace Manor prominently displayed. Again, "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", but a casual observer might be excused for thinking that Holland Christian is trying to erase an embarrassment from the World Wide Web. 

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The fact that pages can be altered in order to remove embarrassing information from a website means that it's even more important to support journalism. I'd really suggest to you that if the people of Guelph won't support people who work hard to get the news out to you, you probably don't deserve to know what's going on in your community. What's holding you back? Only a dollar a month helps, and it's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Gordon goes on to talk about The Elliot as being an "oasis" in the midst of the current pandemic. He says that this is because it is a non-profit instead of a private corporation. I looked up the numbers at the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health Unit and here are the relevant numbers current as of May 28. These include only resolved cases, as there don't appear to be any on-going cases in institutions as I write this post. 

• Guelph General Hospital, 22 cases---non-profit
• Guelph Lake Commons, 1 case---private, Hawthorn Senior Living
• Homewood, 4 cases---private, Homewood Health
• Norfolk Manor, 21 cases, 7 deaths---private, "family operated"
• St. Joseph's Health Centre, 1 case, 1 death---non-profit
• Stone Lodge, 1 case---private, owned by "Oxford Living", a large business that owns many properties in both Canada and the USA
• Village of Riverside Glen, 1 case---private company, "Schlegel Villages"

As you can see, being a non-profit doesn't immediately give an institution a "get out of jail free" card. But without drilling down into the specifics, I think it's important to realize that there is plenty of opportunity for comparing "apples to oranges" in the above list. Guelph General Hospital has a different mandate than a Long Term Care Facility, as does the Homewood, and, a dedicated seniors centre. But it is true that there doesn't seem to have been a single case in the Elliot---which might be evidence of "dumb luck" as much as showing that they do a better job protecting against infectious diseases.

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One last point about my conversation with James Gordon. Being a bit of an egomaniac instead of a good interviewer, I went on a bit of a rant instead of really listening to what my guest had to say. I originally asked James about why it is that governments always seem to wait until a horrendous scandal breaks instead of proactively dealing with a problem when someone brings it to their attention. His response was to talk a bit about being "nimble" and how government just inherently takes far too long to deal with any problem. But after that he transitions to talking about the "culture" of a specific issue. In the case of Long Term Care Facilities, he suggests that there is a "culture" that suggests that the private sector can do a better job than a public facility.

At this point our talk ceases to be a conversation and breaks into two monologues, mainly because of my failing as an interviewer. James is talking about the problem of public versus private ownership, whereas I was talking about how many scandals there are in our society if people were just willing to look for them. What links us together is a word that neither one of us uses: "ideology". 

The "culture" that Councillor Gordon is referring to is the ideological assumption that the private sector is always more efficient than the public. And it is true, that depending on how you define "efficient" it can be said to be so. For example, the private sector seems to be much better at forcing people with limited power to work for less money under nastier conditions. It also seems to be able to take care of patients at a facility for less money---but at the price of lowering the ability of the home to protect people from infectious diseases. But having said that, as I have pointed out in the bullet points above, there are non-profits in Guelph that have had outbreaks too. 

The reason why we went on our different tangents is because I think that James was indulging in a little ideological thinking too. He thinks that the dividing line is whether or not Long Term Care Facilities should be publicly or privately owned. In contrast, I think that the real issue is that governments---of all stripes---have a real problem responding to problems before they blow up in their faces. That's not an ideological issue, instead it's a systems question. Why is it that governments aren't---to use Gordon's term---"nimble" or to use mine "proactive"? We'll get more into that issue in the next part of our conversation.

Councillor Gordon looking towards a brighter,
publicly-owned future!  Image provided by him.

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Moreover, I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

More About Freedom Poisoning---

In my last post I put in the "throw-out" phrase "freedom poisoning" to describe people who are so fixated on the idea of freedom that they ignore any other consideration. I've had a bit of "push back" from people upset about that language, so I thought I'd write a little more on the subject.

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The important issue that I'm trying to raise is that most important values have to be balanced against others. The problem with people who are "poisoned" with freedom is that they have totally forgotten this point and push relentlessly for one particular value, freedom, and refuse to consider any other.

Let's start out with one particular example. One of the things that people get very upset about is the idea that the government should restrict people from doing various thing---like eating in restaurants, going to bars, etc. The argument is "I am an adult, I can be trusted to make my own decisions". The problem with this notion is that in a situation like the one we are currently facing all it takes is one person or a very small fraction of the population to aren't "with the program" in order to infect a lot of others who are exercising some sort of restraint.

Let me illustrate with a recent examples from the present pandemic.

• After some pretty aggressive contact tracing the Korean government recently found out that many new infections in that country's second spike after re-opening the economy could be traced to one single individual who had the disease and went to several nightclubs in one night---instead of just staying at one place. 
• The original outbreak in Korea came from the decision of a religious cult to not help authorities to track down members who had been exposed to the virus.
• A ski tourism town in Austria that fought against shutting down seems to have been key to the spread of the virus to many parts of Northern Europe---initially, it appears, from one particular bar tender .

A moment's reflection should remind anyone that there are many different situations where people make compromises with their freedom in order to promote the good of all. For example, people in free countries are willing to be conscripted and live under military discipline when their nation is threatened by invasion, and, people who drive cars accept that there are certain rules of the road that we all have to follow if we are going to keep the carnage on the roads down to a dull roar. 

There is a principle that states that a one person's freedom to swing their fist ends at another person's face. That's because there are very few purely personal decisions, instead, most of what we do has some sort of impact on other people. That's one of the problems with people who are poisoned with the ideology of freedom---they've forgotten that their actions create consequences for other people. During a pandemic just getting too close to someone can be the same thing as smashing your fist into their face---or even drawing out a pistol and shooting their elderly parents or an at risk spouse between the eyes. 

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Here's my begging bowl. Won't you put something in it? I work hard trying to push back on the avalanche of nonsense that gets spewed across the Internet each and every day. Just a dollar a month through Patreon or Pay Pal will show that you really care about keeping local, independent media afloat. 

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Another issue revolves around the issue of freedom of speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was then an Associate Justice of the American Supreme Court, famously stated that 

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Oliver Wendell Holmes. Public domain photo of unknown provenance.
Image c/o Wikimedia Commons. 

I suppose I should have written "infamously", because he was making a solid argument that really didn't apply to that particular dispute. He was speaking in support of a truly terrible law titled The Espionage Act of 1917. At risk of over-simplification, Holmes was suggesting that freedom of speech didn't extend to anyone suggesting that people conscripted in an unjust war should resist being conscripted into the armed forces. As such, the situation was nothing at all like shouting "fire" falsely in a crowded theater. America was under no threat of being invaded by Germany, Austria, or, the Ottoman Empire and resisting conscription was actually about saving the lives of young men, not risking their being killed. 

But let's look at the phrase that Holmes relied upon "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." What if someone really is promoting a false statement and it actually does cause a panic that leads to people getting killed? We actually have a couple very good examples of that right now.

• Facebook created a "Free Basics" system that allowed 100 million people in the Third World to access the web by 2018. Unfortunately, in Myanmar the military junta exploited it  to whip the population into a genocidal fury directed against their Muslim neighbours. 
• Stories are being circulated that say that 5G cell phone systems are the cause of the pandemic---some of which seem to be promoted by Russian bot armies---which has led to a great many cell towers (50 last month in Britain alone) across Europe and even in Quebec (7 as of May 7th---when two people were arrested) being destroyed.
• Anti-vaxxers are already spreading the idea that Bill Gates had prior knowledge about Covid-19 and has created a vaccine for it that includes a special "micro-chip" that will allow either his corporation, the government, or, the evil reptilian over-lords to track us all. This means that if and when a vaccine is developed that protects people against this illness, there will be people prepared to fight against a vaccination campaign.  

What this means to me is that spreading fake news isn't harmless. It can cause objective harm to the community. It does so just as much as if someone plants a bomb, poisons a water supply, drives their car down a crowded sidewalk, shoots people, etc. This puts the lie to the idea that free speech absolutists have that all they are talking about is the right to speak your mind---and that's a perfectly harmless thing to do.  

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This isn't anything new. As long as I've lived in Guelph I've seen idiots bang the drum about stupid things. Years ago I can remember Fascists putting photocopied anti-immigrant broadsides under the wiper blades of cars out back of the University library. In the same era I can remember people in uniforms going door-to-door in the Ward to distribute antisemitic newspapers. At roughly the same time there were people spray painting the slogan "Paki Go Home" across buildings in the K/W area.

The difference between then and now is that back then these people didn't have access to the mass media. News editors simply wouldn't publish their stuff. Even if they sent in a letter-to-the-editor there was a human being with some sort of standards who would refuse to publish their racist nonsense. That's why they had to resort to putting photocopied screeds under the wiper blades of cars, hand-delivering their stuff to people's homes, and, spray-painting stupid slogans on walls. 

The World Wide Web has changed all of that. The people who run the social media systems that allow your friendly peddler of nonsense to spread vile stories will tell you that Face Book, You Tube, and, Twitter aren't anything like a newspaper or television station. Instead, they are like a telephone company---they have no control over the content.

The problem with this narrative is that it is total and absolute nonsense. That's because companies like You Tube, Face Book, and, Twitter control their content all the time. That's what they do when their artificial intelligence (AI) programs decide to send you mattress ads when you foolishly looked at the Ikea page last week. That's also why you don't see propaganda by Isis and Al-Qaeda, or, hard-core pornography coming to your feed from Face Book or You Tube. They also have human editors who step in and deal with the odd thing that makes it past the AI programs. The difference is that they are called "moderators" and they only deal with stuff like violence and sex---merely lying to people in order to get them to do violent stuff doesn't count. In fact, Face Book recently lost a class action lawsuit and has to pay $52 million to moderators who are suffering from various psychological problems---such as PTSD---because of all the horrendously violent things they've seen (and removed) from Face Book feeds. It appears that there is an avalanche of really horrific stuff---child rapes, murders, etc, that people routinely try to post on Face Book. Who knew? Well, you didn't know because it appears that you actually can edit crap out of social media---if you try.

Part of the real reason why these companies don't even try to control fake news is because they have had a hard time doing it without also purging mainstream politicians who "dog whistle" to racists and other people holding repulsive points of view. An article in the April 25th, 2019 edition of the New York Daily News said:

“On a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material,” Vice reported a Twitter executive as explaining to another employee. “Banning politicians wouldn’t be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda.”

And if you can't use the AI to get the fake news off the Web, you would have to do it using people (ie: the "moderators") and to be able to do that, you'd have to hire a lot more people. That might dramatically lower the profitability of the system. Face Book moderators are subcontracted and only average $28,800/year in income. The average for everyone else at Face Book is $240,000. Their work experience is as controlled as any assembly-line operator---minimal breaks, bathroom or otherwise---even though the work is tremendously stressful. (Watching child rape and actual murders on line is kinda stressful---who knew?)

Beyond the financial incentives and the problems of dealing with a society where some pretty unsavoury ideas are mainstream, there seems to be evidence that at least some of the push-back against exerting editorial control seems to be ideological. A lot of the "elite" of Silicon Valley seem to be free speech absolutists. Consider the following statement that Mark Zuckerberg made at last year's Aspen Ideas Festival (as quoted by Wired)

Zuckerberg decided to defend his company’s decision and tie it to broader principles. “We exist in a society where people value and cherish free expression, and the ability to say things including satire,” he said. He then doubled down, saying he did not think anyone should want “a private company to prevent you from saying something that it thinks is factually incorrect.” He added, “That to me just feels like it's too far and goes away from the tradition of free expression and being able to say what your experience is through satire and other means.”

The problem with this statement is that it reads like someone who took an intro course in ethics, read a few things online, and, arrogantly believes that he totally understands a very complex subject. (Zuckerberg is a university drop out.)

I say that because his statement that no one would want “a private company to prevent you from saying something that it thinks is factually incorrect” is totally ridiculous. That's because the issue at hand isn't preventing someone from saying something, but rather not publishing something that someone else writes or records. Companies do that sort of thing all the time. When I was still writing columns or free lancing Op-Eds for newspapers and magazines there were editors who decided whether or not what I wrote got published---every single time I submitted something to them.  

Moreover, it isn't just a question of whether or not the business decides to publish something. It also involves a legal system that imposed dire consequences on that business if it made the wrong call and published something that was either libelous or hate speech. Consider the case of Your Ward News. This disgusting antisemitic and misogynistic bird cage liner has been banned by Canada Post. The editor has been sentenced to one year in jail. And the publisher to one year of strict house arrest. There are rules that every newspaper, magazine, television show, and, radio broadcast has had to follow in order to limit the spread of fake news and hate speech. Why in heaven's name did the political class let social media simply ignore these regulations? And why would anyone in their right mind think that they only apply to "old media" and would be a grotesque infringement of free speech if they applied to the "new media"???

These two dweebs published and edited an openly antisemitic and
misogynist newspaper, Your Ward News. The courts told Canada Post not to mail it,
and they both ended up being incarcerated for one year under hate
speech laws. Why can't we order social media companies to ban them too?
Image c/o the CBC news website and used under the "Fair Dealing"
provision of the copyright ad. 

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I could go on and on about this. I could talk about the people's "right" to own guns, for example. But the point I'm trying to make is that the people complain the most about their loss of freedom are generally people who at best have never really thought about how their behaviour impacts others, or, at worst want to use their "freedom" to deny it to others. I suspect that these folks are pretty hard to reach, so I'm not writing this blog post for them. But they are only a tiny fraction of the population. The real problem is when naive bystanders stand up for them and suggest that we need to protect their rights---or else soon no one will have any.

This is what is known as a "slippery slope argument", and it's a very common informal logic fallacy. It basically says that society is totally incapable to moderation---once you take the first step on a road you will be committed to a final destination, no matter how much people might not want to get there. It's like believing no one can take a first drink without becoming an alcoholic or go on a diet without becoming anorexic. It's a very common argument that people use to avoid any attempt to reign in the chaos being spread by social media---but it's fundamentally silly. There probably will always be people who suffer from freedom poisoning, but they would have a lot less impact on society if people of good will would just learn to tune them out and get on with creating a more sane world.

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Moreover, I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

How Are the Liberals Going to Pay for It All?

I had a conversation with a dear friend the other day where she expressed deep concern about the level of debt that the country is running up to support people who've been unable to work because of the pandemic. I'm not an economist, but over the years I've come to some conclusions about this sort of thing. I thought readers might want to read them. Make of them what you will.

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Ayn Rand from
Wikimedia Commons

The first thing we have to remember is that there are very well-entrenched ideologies in our society that are based on the notion that people should be "free" to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" to "be their own people", etc.   Ayn Rand built her strange little pseudo-philosophical system around this idea, to the point where she said that there is a "virtue" in being selfish. This is an extreme version of the "free market capitalism" religion that infests our society. Sadly, it is tremendously popular with a great many elected officials in both the USA and Canada---to the point where some have clearly decided that protecting this particular ideal is more important than saving people's lives.

Lest you question the above assertion, consider two examples.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said that "there are more important things than living". He thinks that the safety of seniors---like himself---is less important than preserving the existing businesses of Texas.

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.
Original photo by Gage Skidmore,
Image c/o Wikimedia Commons.

"---we’re crushing the average worker, we’re crushing small business, we’re crushing the markets, we’re crushing this country. And what I said when I was with you that night, there are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children, and my grandchildren, and saving this country for all of us."

A similar message came out of the mouth of the Mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada. Carolyn Goodman is so concerned about the shut down of the gambling industry in her city that she's publicly "offered up" the citizenry to be the "control group" to see how bad things will get if a city decides to just ignore the whole "social distancing" thing.

Carolyn Goodman.
Public Domain image.
C/o Wikimedia Commons.

 “Assume everybody is a carrier,” the mayor said Tuesday on MSNBC. “And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”

The perspective left MSNBC host Katy Tur visibly dumbfounded. The next day, Goodman went on to shock another host, Anderson Cooper of CNN, telling him that she’s previously asked the city statistician if they could be a control group for the virus but the statistician told her people commute into the city and it wouldn’t work.

I'd suggest that this is all about people who've absolutely committed their heart and soul to the abstract ideal of "freedom", but only insofar as it is associated with the economic principle of "free enterprise". I have a label for this sort of worldview, I call it freedom poisoning. People who put the abstract principle of being "free" ahead of any other consideration---such as equality, compassion, justice, etc, are poisoned by a dysfunctional ideology.

I suppose you could argue that this weird blather about the need to put the economy ahead of the pandemic is all based on a concern for the well-being of the individuals who have been pushed out of work by the physical distancing rules. But I think it only seems this way to someone who's been so badly poisoned by their ideology of freedom that they are incapable of seeing the world that is right in front of them.

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Here's one part of it. Modern technology has dramatically increased the output of individual human beings when it comes to the basic essentials of life.

Here's some bar charts from an old government publication that I found on line that illustrate this point with regard to some agricultural commodities.

Sorry about both the time and quality of reproduction, I was surprised
how little I could find on line about this sort of thing. But old as the
data is, it is still pretty amazing.

Think about these numbers for a while. It took 5% as much human labour to work an acre of wheat in 1963 as it did in 1800, 8% to for corn, and, 26% cotton. It's also important to understand that yield has also dramatically increased in this time frame. According to Our World in Data, American yields for corn have increased five fold since 1940. Similar trends exist for other crops. For example, in Great Britain wheat yields have increased four fold in the same time frame.

Multiply together these two different sets of figures and you find that one farmer in America now produces 62.5 times the corn that his grandfather did in 1940. Similarly, a modern British farmer produces 80 times as much wheat as his grandfather. (Please remember that crop production is extremely variable based on climate, land, agricultural imputs---heavily subsidized in Europe---, etc.) 

What this means is that the old labour pyramid that has dominated human society since the dawn of agriculture has been inverted. That is, a lot of peasants used to have to work hard to create enough of an agriculture surplus to create a very small number of aristocrats. Now a small number of farmers can produce food for a very large number of other people.

Exactly the same process is happening in every other "essential" sector of the economy. For example, check out this short video from Wired that shows how a new Tesla factory builds electric cars.

Similar efficiencies exist in the rest of the primary economy. It takes a lot less people to build houses, make our clothes, etc.

(It might be argued that the "efficiencies" I'm referring to above are actually all based on the profligate and unsustainable use of fossil fuels. I have some sympathy for this argument---especially with regard to modern industrial agriculture. But I'm just talking about short-term, government action to deal with the present corona virus crisis. Once that has been dealt with we can talk about these other issues.)

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According to the CIA World Fact Book as quoted in the Wikipedia, in the United States 80% of the economy is part of the service sector: agriculture contributes only 0.9% and manufacturing 19.1%. Canada has similar numbers, 70.2% service, 1.6% agricultural, and, 28.2% manufacturing.

Of course, many people in the service sector do essential work---doctors, nurses, truck drivers, etc. But a great many do things that are really not all that important to people's survival: tourism, dog walking, hair-styling, bartenders, waiters, etc. What makes these institutions key to many people's lives is the fact that our society has decided to make these sorts of service jobs society's wealth distribution mechanism. That is to say, as increased mechanization did away with a great many jobs in agriculture and manufacturing, the "powers that be" decided that instead of just distributing the surplus wealth among the general public and letting them decide what they want to do with their time, government programs were created that fostered artificial, expanded "wants" among people. That meant that they'd hire others to service them on cruise ships with a built-in roller-coaster, pedicures, fine restaurant dining, etc.

Yup, Carnival Cruise Lines wants (or did want) to build a cruise ship with a roller coaster.
Image c/o the Orlando Weekly  Used under the "Fair Dealing" Copyright Provision.

There is absolutely no objective reason why our economy had to go down this rabbit hole. Instead, it came about because of freedom poisoning in the governing class and gullibility among the voting public. The proof is that we've been able to put huge swathes of the service sector into deep freeze during the pandemic lock down with no appreciable problem---other than the problem with wealth distribution being frozen too.  

This is especially clear when we consider Mayor Goodman's statements. Her city's primary industry is devoted to having people fly in from other places so they can get pack together in casinos to gamble away their money. I can't think of a better example of the sheer stupidity of forcing people to do worthless jobs just for a pay cheque than the gambling industry in Las Vegas. The fact that she cannot see how tremendously dangerous tourism is during the outbreak of an infectious disease just shows how badly she is suffering from freedom poisoning.

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If people can afford to fly to another country to throw away their money on stupid things like gambling and ocean cruises, they should be able to pay for local news sources. To that end, let me put out my begging bowl for you to contemplate. I'm quite happy for a dollar a month, which is easy to contribute through Patreon and PayPal. 

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Another dangerous aspect of freedom poisoning is the way it damages the part of the brain that is involved with taxation. Take a look at this article, Canada’s income tax started small but grew much larger over 100 years, from the Fraser Institute. The author, Livio Di Matteo, talks about the growth of income taxes since their introduction in WWI.

What I'm particularly interested in was the tax rates that Canada used during and immediately after WWII.

The Second World War dramatically expanded the federal personal income tax with the most notable change being the introduction of high marginal tax rates. For example, the pre-Second World War marginal tax rate on taxable income between $1,000 and $2,000 in the dollars of the day was 4 per cent. By 1942, it had increased to 44 per cent. For taxable income between $10,000 and $15,000 it was 13.7 per cent before the war, but 69 per cent by 1942.

Contrast these rates with what we have right now.

Changes occurred in tax rates and brackets over time. By 2015 there were four brackets with rates of 15, 22, 26 and 29 per cent. However, the brackets increased to five in 2016 with rates ranging from 15 per cent to 33 per cent. And there are concerns further changes may be on the way given the ramping up of spending.

So that's the first thing to consider, the highest income tax bracket in Canada is set at only 33%---even though historically, it has been much higher, 69% in WWII.  

What has been the effect of these relatively low income tax rates?

As you might imagine, it has meant that people who have relatively large incomes have gotten wealthier and as a result, have grabbed onto a larger percentage of the nation's collective wealth.

According to a Stats Canada report that compared the situation in 1999 with 2012, family income for the top 20% (a quintile) has increased on the median by 20.7%, and this has translated into an 106.9% median increase in their net worth. 

This really shouldn't come as a huge surprise to anyone. If you make more money, you can save more. And if you save more, you can invest it to make even more money for you. The result is a snow-balling effect.

It also means that that the government has significant "leeway" to raise taxes in order to get more revenue---just like it did in WWII. And if there was ever a good reason to increase taxes to fund government expenditure, surely a pandemic and lock down of the economy in order to enforce an quarantine should be it.

Moreover, these numbers should suggest to objective readers that the whole idea that the only way that a society can legitimately redistribute wealth is through creating poorly-paid, precarious, and, non-essential service jobs is a very bad idea. It simply isn't working. More and more money is collecting in the hands of the top 20% of the population. We are already facing significant problems in our society because of wealth stratification and if the trend is allowed to continue it will increasingly destabilize both the economy and our democracy. 

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One argument that the people with freedom poisoning often make is that if taxes are raised too high people will simply move their money to offshore tax havens. I heard an economist neatly rebuff this argument by asking the simple question "How many aircraft carriers do the Cayman Islands own?"

The Cayman Island strike force out defending their right to let the rich avoid
paying their fair share in other countries. US government public domain photo. 

This was a "tongue-in-cheek" way of saying that tax havens only really exist because the major nations of the world have let them exist. It isn't even as if that we would have to create a consensus among all the nations of the world in order to shut them down. The G20 nations of the world represent 90% of the economy and an agreement between most of the nations (I suspect that at least part of the people who run Russia would not be interested in closing the tax havens that they use themselves) would be enough to put all the world's tax havens out of business. 

Lest the cynics among us suggest that the governments are all corrupt and that they would never pass this sort of regulation, I'll say that In My Humble Opinion (IMHO) that this smells like left-wing cynicism poisoning. While it's no doubt true that there are armies of lobbyists bending the ears of elected officials to argue that governments should allow the continued existence of tax havens, my experience tells me that most politicians are decent folks trying to do the right thing. What I have found, however, is that most successful politicians are tremendously risk averse, never think "outside of the box", have a very hard time thinking beyond the next election, and, feel tremendously constrained by the needs of the bureaucratic and political infrastructure that they are trapped within. Trying to build an international treaty system to stop wealthy people from evading taxes would be like negotiating a new free trade agreement with armies of business people fighting against it instead of for it. 

Rahm Emanuel.
Public Domain photo
c/o Wikimedia Commons

I would suggest, therefore, that the only time we are going to get real movement towards changing something as difficult as the international tax avoidance system is during a crisis like the present pandemic. As Rahm Emanuel once said “never allow a crisis to go to waste”. Now might be a good time to bend the ears of our politicians and get them working on developing a treaty. It might be a really good project to see if some NGO could do the preliminary work so world leaders could then swoop in and get all the credit. (They really like it when someone else does all the work and they then get the credit for doing it!)

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I've tossed out the above issues to consider because I think voters often lose track of the big picture. They become fixated on ideology and their own personal experiences without understanding much these are often at odds with the reality facing our nation. My hope is that the big disruption caused by the pandemic will allow both citizens and leaders the opportunity to rethink their assumptions about how the world operates and break the "logjam" that has stifled reform for most of my life.

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Living With Ambiguity and Being Dependent on Others

I had a meltdown last weekend. I'm not proud of the fact, but I want to acknowledge it. I've been trying to work my way through a government website to get something done that is profoundly important to me. I won't go into details because they aren't really important for this blog post. Probably thousands, if not millions, of people all over Canada are going through something similar. The "triggering" details were an insistence that I should apply on line, plus the fact that there is a software bug on the website that has made this impossible for me to do. I spent hours and hours over weeks trying to do something that was impossible because no one was willing to admit to me that it is impossible. I'd still probably be trying if a person on the government computer help desk hadn't taken pity on me and admitted that they know about the bug, have told the relevant people in the bureaucracy a year ago, and yet nothing has been fixed.

I lost my temper with the poor woman on the telephone. She was the only person in this sorry experience (other than a staffer in Lloyd Longfield's constituency office) that actually talked to me like a real human being instead of just repeating talking points and throwing things like FAQ lists at me. I'm not proud of this fact but I vented all over her simply because she was the first person who was open and honest enough to talk to me as a real human being. I am stating that this happened because I have to as part of trying to get a handle on my vicious, violent temper.

I do have a bad temper. I always have. It's just one part of a whole suite of symptoms that come with my PTSD. Incidentally, I suppose that what has happened with me in this incident is what you would call a "triggering" situation:  when I feel I or anyone else is being treated unfairly, I have a tendency to lose my marbles and explode. I've tried to "work around" my "issues" most of my life and generally keep it under control. For example, I've always tried to work at jobs where I could avoid interacting with other people. But sometimes I get stuck in a situation that I cannot avoid and the stress builds up beyond the point where I can control it, and then something in me snaps, like it did the other day.

via GIPHY

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I'm always humbled when people toss some money my way. But right now, it's even more so because there are so many other places to put spare cash. (Thanks Charles for being so awesome!) But if you can, think about subscribing or sending me a tip. It's easy to do with Patreon or PayPal. 

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One of the things I've learned over the years is the importance of trying to understand something instead of ignoring it. My outburst is an example. I've come to the conclusion that part of what sent me "over the top" was my inability to "fix" the problem. This is a major problem for men especially. Men of a certain age with a blue collar background have tended to be been socialized to "get the job done", and if we don't, we are often told in no uncertain terms that we are failures if we don't. If we try to explain why we couldn't get it done, we are "whiners".

I don't think that most young people have had the same message pounded into their heads that I did, so hopefully they aren't stuck in the same bind of feeling like losers if they can't "get the job done". But I still see a lot of evidence in our society that people are desperate to be "in control" of their lives.

To a certain extent, I think that the "do it yourself" and "prepper" movements are symptoms of the illusion of control. When I figured out how to change the battery on my wife's I-Phone for a fraction of how much it would have cost to hire an Apple rep to do it, I did felt incrementally more in control of my life. I suspect people that have stockpiled army rations, guns and ammo, first aid equipment, built fallout shelters, etc, may also feel somewhat insulated from catastrophes that they have no control over.

When you pull on the thread a little more, you can see how deep this impulse goes. For example, how much of the anti-vaxxer movement comes from people's anxieties about being at the mercy of a science they know nothing about, and, government agencies that they feel that they have no control over?

How about our privacy concerns? Most people---including me---have only the shakiest grasp of how much corporations like Google and FaceBook know about us. Indeed, when I wrote my article about the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the Brexit campaign, I was horrified how fine-grained it really is. Again, there's the whole issue of how much the government is spying on us too---after the Edward Snowden revelations. How about that for creating a sense of powerlessness?

Another example. People fight tooth and nail against any attempt to intensify their neighbourhoods. How much of this comes from a feeling---rooted in people's past experience---that once you let the city move a new business or development into your neighbourhood you lose any future influence on how it affects everyone who lives near it? Again, that fear of losing control.

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Recently a non-entity Conservative MP by the name of Derek Sloan decided to "power up" his flagging leadership bid by impugning Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam. Specifically, he suggested that the World Health Organization is totally dominated by China, and that when Tam followed its recommendations she was being more loyal to China than Canada.

In addition to the above video, he sent out a letter to supporters that said things like the following:

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, has prioritized the World Health Organization over the health of Canadians. 

and

The truth is that the WHO serves the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China (PPC). 

and

Our Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, has continually cited the WHO as an authority.  

Dr. Tam said face masks don't work, not true.

She said closing the boarders to travelers arriving from virus hotspots wouldn't work. Not true.

and

Canada's Chief Public Health Officer needs to work for Canada. Not the WHO or any other foreign entity. 

I'm under no illusions about what Sloan really thinks. He's either profoundly stupid or quite cynical. I suspect that he realized that his campaign is going nowhere and he wants to rally the "yahoo vote" in the Conservative party---which I suspect is quite large. And, my read is that people swim in that sea really want to be in control and are driven absolutely crazy by the feeling that they are dependent on others or that there is very little certainty in life.

(Just in case you don't know where the word "yahoo" comes from, it was a term coined by
Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver's Travels. They were a degenerate race of dirty, disgusting
humans who were enslaved by the race of intelligent horses, the "Houyhnhnms" that Gulliver met in the last of his travels. Woodcut is so old that it's public domain, c/o Wikimedia Commons. It's odd that they all appear to be Vulcans---.)

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The problem with a thing like an emerging pandemic is that it is absolutely rife with ambiguity. We literally don't know what is going on, and people in authority---like Theresa Tam and Justin Trudeau---have to make important decisions based on the "best guess" at one particular moment in time. Sloan and his followers think that Tam could easily have known about and followed a better course of action---yet didn't because the Politbureau in Beijing picked up the phone and told her to do something else.

That's absurd.

I found the WHO website where doctors, local health officers, etc, can see any information that others may have had about infectious diseases.  All you have to do is click on the hypertext link to see what is going on at any given time around the world.

Here's a screen shot of the first two weeks of January. 

The problem is that people like Dr. Tam really don't have the benefit from Mr. Sloan's 20/20 hind-sight. She has to just do the best she can based on her education and experience with what evidence she has been given.

Dr. Theresa Tam, not a Communist stooge, just a doctor who only knows
what the science finds out, when it finds it out.  Photo c/o her Twitter account.

This is the thing. We all labour under the illusion that we have some control over our lives. But the fact of the matter is that we are all dependent on other people using technology that we don't even begin to understand. And some of these people don't look like us and don't see the world the way we do. But that's just the way it is. Every important thing about science and the current pandemic is a question of percentages, grey instead of black and white, and, ambiguity. It's not easy to live in ambiguity land---but it's a whole lot better than the world of anger and prejudice. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!