Premier Jim Prentice says he needs a mandate from the public to implement the tough measures required to put Alberta back in the black due to plummeting oil prices.

“I intend to deal with it in a responsible way, and I intend to make sure that the public support what I am doing, and I intend to make sure I have a clear mandate from the people to do this,” the premier told reporters Friday in a conference call.

Good for Prentice. Albertans aren’t supposed to go to the polls until the spring of 2016, according to the province’s fixed election date legislation, but the premier would be justified in calling a vote sooner. He only assumed the mantle of premier, after all, by winning a majority of the votes cast by 23,000 Tory members in September.

Prentice had insisted he would obey the election date law, so his credibility would suffer a little if he decides to force the writ to be dropped sooner. When he was campaigning last summer, he had ample opportunity to express concerns about the need for a mandate. He could have stated the obvious — that Alison Redford’s resignation was unexpected, and that he required the approval of the electorate to govern the province. There was no such talk, of course; not until the official Opposition had been gutted and Alberta’s finances were in disarray.

Well, if the premier now believes he needs a mandate, what would it be for? You don’t need a mandate to acknowledge Alberta’s public finances are in a pickle; pretty much everyone understands that fact. He has said there are three levers the government can manipulate to address the $7-billion hole that falling oil prices have left in the budget: raise taxes, cut spending and increase borrowing. Pretty much everyone knows that too. It’s like a hockey coach saying his team needs to either score more goals or let fewer pucks in their net, or maybe a combination of the two. It’s pretty obvious, really.

Prentice appears to have no idea how to restore Alberta’s finances, which is worrisome, because he left federal politics to become a banker. Of all people, you’d expect Prentice to articulate a clear vision about how he thinks that big hole in Alberta’s ledger can be repaired. He’s floated the notion of introducing a sales tax, but shown no commitment to the initiative.

Here’s the extent of Prentice’s belief in a sales tax: “I don’t think Albertans generally advocate a sales tax, but I’m prepared to be educated and to hear from people.”

Which people: the well-off inhabitants of ivory towers, or ordinary Albertans, who consistently oppose a sale tax, and instead, call on the government to get its own house in order?

Such namby pamby talk certainly isn’t the sort of vision you’d hear expressed by a Ralph Klein or a Winston Churchill. Prentice needs to spell out precisely how he’s going to fix our budget before seeking a mandate. What we do know is that the Alberta government has traditionally collected revenue per capita that is the envy of the country, while spending more than most. Those who call for the return of health-care premiums, for instance, should remember we spend more than any other Canadian jurisdiction on medical care, other than Newfoundland-Labrador and the territories, the latter of which have tremendous geographical challenges.

Prentice has mused about cost savings in the public sector, but again, he’s been ineffectual on that file. The previous administration had identified the $7-billion unfunded liability of public worker pension plans as a concern, but rather than pass the bills, he let them die when the legislature was prorogued last fall. The bills may have been flawed, if you believe critics in the labour movement, but Prentice has come up with nothing to replace them.

If the premier is going to spend more than $14 million on an election charade, the very least Albertans deserve is a blueprint of his plans. We’re still waiting.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board.

It’s high time Calgary’s civic politicians stopped automatically adjusting their wages each January.

Granted, the mayor and councillors turned down a pay raise last year, but earlier this month, they quietly accepted a 3.8 per cent top-up in their generous remuneration . The increase makes Naheed Nenshi the highest-paid mayor in Canada at $216,380.44, and councillors are now receiving a whopping $115,297.92 a year, along with other benefits.

One of the problems with the ritual of increasing council’s wages each year is that the figure deservedly becomes part of the target for others who toil at city hall. A pay raise shared among 15 politicians helps set a worrisome precedent for thousands of unionized and non-unionized workers.

Council would be much wiser to forgo the annual increases and simply review their pay from time to time — say, every four years when elections are held. If the politicians were willing to put their names on the ballot, after all, why would they expect annual increases beyond what they signed up for?

It’s not as though our city politicians need the money. Nenshi, who was first elected in 2010, and some other council members regularly donate their raise or a large portion of their salary to charity instead of keeping the extra money. Druh Farrell has donated her raise every year since she was elected to council in 2001, while Jim Stevenson goes even further: he donates everything above his initial 2007 rate of pay, $90,000, says Herald city hall reporter Jason Markusoff.

It’s nice that our politicians are charitable, but given that the regular pay hikes just encourage other employees to set their sights ever higher, they should be stopped. Besides, the fact donors can receive a tax-deductible receipt that will improve their bottom line cheapens the gesture, and really, why should seniors and others living on limited incomes be paying higher taxes simply so councillors can give the money away?

There’s also the imperfect way in which the political pay hikes are determined. The city relies upon the change in Alberta’s average weekly earnings, as determined by Statistics Canada. But while the figure may have grown by 3.8 per cent, that doesn’t mean that most workers in the province have received a corresponding increase in their paycheques. In many cases, the statistic reflects people working more hours a week or logging more overtime. Or, an increase can be partially attributed to junior workers being laid off, and higher-paid employees pushing up the average earnings. It’s not fair to use the figure to justify unwarranted increases in the compensation of civic politicians. Besides, a 3.8 per cent raise for someone making $30,000 a year isn’t the same as swelling Nenshi’s king-sized salary by the same calculation.

Frankly, given that the formula has allowed council’s salaries to climb by about 22 per cent in the past five years, councillors should recognize that something is wrong-headed about their methods. Not this bunch, though.

“It’s a very large city, so I’d say he’s worth it. Seeing the amount of work (Nenshi) does, there’s no question,” Farrell said in support of the latest raise.

Calgary is indeed a big city, but there’s no proof that council has been successful. Holding long meetings and working many hours can sometimes be evidence of extraordinary dedication. Alternatively, it can be a sign of inefficiency and a failure to delegate and set priorities.

Perhaps the biggest indicators of council’s lacklustre performance are property tax increases that regularly exceed the rate of inflation. Over the past seven years, only once, in 2007, has council approved a tax increase below the inflation rate, according to the Fraser Institute’s Mark Milke. Meanwhile, utility rates for water, wastewater and drainage are also climbing steeply.

That compares with a city such as Windsor, Ont., which is about to begin deliberations on Monday on a budget that will freeze taxes for a seventh consecutive year. When Calgary councillors can brag of such a feat, maybe then we can talk about deserving a bump in pay.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board. dmarsden@calgaryherald.com

You can’t blame High River Mayor Craig Snodgrass for wanting the best for his flood-ravaged community, but his recent remarks are a sad testament to the nature of Alberta politics.

“I need access to the people with decision-making power and a chequebook, if I’m going to get High River fixed,” Snodgrass said after the town’s MLA, former Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, crossed the floor to join the Progressive Conservatives. “I won’t speak for other communities, but with what we have going on in High River now, I think this (Smith’s crossing) is going to serve us very well.”

That Snodgrass believes High River will receive more attention and more money with Smith sitting on Premier Jim Prentice’s benches, rather than leading the official Opposition, is troubling. Surely, governments should be making tough decisions on where to invest limited public funds based on clear priorities, not on the political stripe of the community’s representatives.

Snodgrass’s suspicions aren’t without merit, of course. In 2012, Conservative MLA Hector Goudreau warned a northern school division that it risked losing further financial support if it continued publicizing its school funding problems.

“In order for you and your community to have the opportunity to receive a new school, you and your school board will have to be very diplomatic from here on out,” Goudreau wrote in a letter to the superintendent of the Holy Family Catholic School Division.

“I advise you to be cautious as to how you approach future communications as your comments could be upsetting to some individuals. This could delay the decision on a new school.”

News of Goudreau’s letter was naturally met with outrage. It’s the job of a school division to draw attention to its plight, but it’s certainly not the role of a Tory MLA to be making not-so-subtle threats in hopes of putting a lid on negative publicity.

More recently, during the October byelection campaigns, Education Minister Gordon Dirks approved new portable classrooms for William Reid School, which is located in the Calgary-Elbow riding that he narrowly won. The Calgary Board of Education had ranked the school seventh on its priority list.

This week, the province’s ethics commissioner ruled that Dirks didn’t breach the existing conflict-of-interest rules, but Marguerite Trussler did say his actions may not have been appropriate.

“His actions, while not contrary to the legislation, created an unfortunate perception,” Trussler wrote in her 11-page report.

It’s fair to assume that we will no longer hear Smith rail against Tory privilege, not now that she’s joined the government ranks.

“Albertans will be hard-pressed to view the education minister’s actions with regard to these particular modulars as honourable, respectful and ethical,” Smith told the legislature in November when a furor erupted over Dirks’ decision. “The premier said that Albertans should judge his government by the integrity it has shown. Is this the kind of government he’s going to run, where projects only get built when there are elections to be won?”

Prentice has indeed promised to operate an ethical government, but remarks such as those made by Snodgrass suggest that the perception of preferential treatment is still associated with the provincial Tories. The hope of special consideration, after all, is why it was once fairly common for municipalities and public bodies such as universities and colleges to buy tickets to Tory MLAs’ fundraisers, despite a prohibition on such expenses. In 2013, Alberta’s chief electoral officer announced fines stemming from 45 cases of illegal donations from such groups to the Conservatives in 2010 and 2011, forcing the party to return $17,655.

Says Snodgrass: “I think it goes for any community. The more support you’ve got directly from the government that’s in power, the better off you are.”

There’s no questioning High River’s need of provincial support. Let’s just hope the help is commensurate to what’s required and that Prentice is able to keep politics out of decisions on how and where to spend public money. Sadly, based on the government’s defence of Dirks’ behaviour, that’s not likely.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board. dmarsden@calgaryherald.com

Alberta Environment Minister Kyle Fawcett seems to be warming to the idea of carbon offset markets — where greenhouse gas emitters buy credits from other sources to compensate for their own output — after returning from the recent United Nations-sponsored climate change conference in Peru.

It’s tempting to say that Fawcett should stay home in future, if this is the sort of nonsense he’s going to come back with. Why would an Alberta-based corporation entertain paying a company in some other part of the country money merely for the supposed sin of being profitable, or being engaged in an inherently carbon-intensive industry? You could sugar coat it and create some costly middleman to handle the transactions, but the result would be the same: more distribution of wealth from Alberta to less productive parts of the country.

Funny how you don’t hear about such trading methods for other controversial goods. No one ever talks about giving Albertans credit for the number of seals we don’t kill, or sending back some cash because we don’t export asbestos, like Quebec did, to Third World countries, despite incontrovertible proof the stuff causes cancer. People have died from exposure to asbestos, but no one, to my knowledge, has died from driving to work, receiving essential goods in the back of a truck or using a computer — activities all made possible by oil — unless abuse or misfortune is involved.

So why would Alberta consider being part of a so-called carbon trading system? Presumably a successful oilsands company would purchase credits from a manufacturer somewhere else in the country that had fallen on hard times and was therefore not emitting the same amount of greenhouses gases as it used to. How on earth does that improve the environment?

The British Columbia government, which has made a big deal about impeding construction of pipeline capacity to the West Coast, recently approved the Site C project, which will flood 5,557 hectares of land along 83 kilometres in the northeast part of the province. The Liberal government has approved the initiative despite the well-founded objections of aboriginals.

It’s odd how B.C. Premier Christy Clark insists on consultations with aboriginals when it comes to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, but appears ready to ride roughshod over their concerns when it entails flooding their lands for a hydroelectricity project. And I say First Nations’ concerns are well-founded because flooding would be a certainty if the project proceeds. In the case of a pipeline leak, it’s an improbability, given today’s technology.

Maybe we should start a dam trading network, and Alberta will promise not to spread water from here to Manitoba in exchange for B.C. sending us a cheque for its activities on the Peace River, where the Site C project will be located.

Canada is a single country, however, and we don’t need to create more means of harming our economic competitiveness. Alberta already contributes billions of dollars to other provinces through the existing equalization program, so instead of musing about carbon trading, Fawcett should heed the advice of Alberta’s Liberal leader.

“Alberta needs to be a leader in the environment … they’re expecting others to be leaders and we’ll just pay them money for their leadership,” says Raj Sherman.

He’s right, of course. Alberta has raised more than $500 million through its $15-a-tonne levy on big greenhouse gas emitters. The fund has done little to gain us the so-called social licence said to be needed to improve pipeline capacity, but the money is available for innovation and programs to reduce our emissions. Why not put some of the cash toward initiatives to expand the use of solar power, given that we’re blessed with an abundance of sunshine? There’s also an opportunity to generate more electricity using Alberta’s plentiful wind, even though it can’t always be counted on to blow on schedule.

Fawcett, given his critical portfolio, should realize that embracing renewable sources of energy makes a lot more sense than simply sending a cheque across the border.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board. dmarsden@calgaryherald.com

A proposal by the president of the Alberta Medical Association to consider reimposing health-care premiums is certain to make some people feel better.

Who’s against health care, after all, especially in a growing province that struggles to keep pace with the demand for more and ever-more costly services?

“I’d step up and pay that,” said one person who posted a comment on the Herald’s online news story. “Lord knows we can’t depend on our government to manage funds properly.”

That’s the problem, of course. There’s no guarantee that an injection of more tax dollars to the provincial government’s coffers would result in better health care. The premiums were only scrubbed in 2009, so it’s impossible to connect their disappearance with the quality of hospital and medical services — especially since the revenue went straight into general revenue anyway, and not into a special envelope for fostering first-rate performance.

The other problem with the idea, broached by AMA president Dr. Richard Johnston in a year-end letter to physicians, is that health care is one of the cornerstones of government: it’s why we have politicians in the first place. We elect them to provide essential services for us, to the best extent possible. The suggestion that the more than $40 billion a year the province collects in revenue annually is being spent in less critical areas, or is insufficient to tend to our health care, and that therefore a surcharge is needed, is worrisome.

Alberta’s health-care spending is the second highest in the country per capita among the provinces, excluding the territories, so it’s not a case of a lack of money. Only Newfoundland-Labrador was expected to spend more in 2013, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, at $5,249, compared to Alberta at $4,662. Given our relatively young population, it seems odd that B.C. could provide coverage for $3,722 per person, and Quebec, the lowest-cost provider, for $3,651, according to the same set of figures.

Along with providing proper planning and management of the system, provincial politicians shouldn’t be shying away from fair-minded negotiations with public-sector workers to ensure they’re not being compensated beyond levels in the private sector — not if they successfully wish to present themselves as wise and responsible stewards of the billions of tax dollars they oversee each year.

The premiums, which were introduced in 1969, used to cost families about $1,056 a year, while single people paid about half that amount. It was common for many employers to include the bill in their benefit packages, but nonetheless, it increased the cost of conducting business in the province — by millions of dollars for some corporations. And for those whose bosses wouldn’t pick up the tab, or those who were self-employed, or worked for small businesses, $1,056 was a hardship. It seems unfair that we would choose to charge a person making, say, $35,000 a year, the same amount for their health care as someone making $350,000.

Johnston has the sense to go beyond raising the spectre of health-care premiums. He notes in his letter to doctors that it would help if Albertans got their flu shots, for starters, and recognized their primary care physician as the gatekeeper. It makes no sense for patients to show up at the emergency department or to go shopping for doctors when their needs could be dealt with more efficiently, and arguably more effectively, by dealing with one first-level practitioner.

The good doctor signals that his members themselves have a role to play. They, after all, control up to 85 per cent of the amount spent on health care, according to his own calculations.

“There is no way around it: getting the most out of scarce health care resources will ultimately require the engagement of physicians,” he says. “We need to be open to new ways of informing, incenting and making us more accountable for our decisions.”

Johnston deserves praise for setting out the challenges so clearly. Albertans are paying well above what the great majority of Canadians are contributing for health care. It’s up to the provincial government, which has demonstrated poor management of the system and an indifference to costs, to solve it. Without health-care premiums.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board. dmarsden@calgaryherald.com

Bureaucrats escape blame for problems

Canada’s three levels of government continue to demonstrate an incredible inability to perform many of the functions to which they aspire. Further, the functions that do not end up in failure, are conducted only “OK.”

While I am not a fan of the way our elected officials do things, most of the blame for these screw ups must fall on the bureaucracy.

There are many examples, from the Phoenix pay system debacle at the federal level, down to the failure to efficiently conduct a civic election, at the Calgary municipal level.

Heads should have rolled in these, and in many other cases. Yet steadfastly, our governments fail to make bureaucrats accountable.

Government employees receive above average compensation, fantastic benefits and pensions, and stainless-steel job security.

I suggest we are receiving nothing approaching equal value in return. Any move toward smaller government receives my heartfelt applause.

R.B. Rothwell, Calgary

Trudeau is soft on terrorists

Re: “‘Lost Canadians’ stuck in limbo,” Chris Selley, Opinion, Aug. 11.

I was taken aback by the start of the well-written column by Chris Selley.

It is terrible that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reversed the law that stripped dual citizens of their Canadian citizenship if convicted of terrorism.

So now the ringleader of the Toronto 18 terror plot has his Canadian citizenship reinstated by Trudeau. Maybe we should give him an AR-15 rifle and ammunition as well.

People wonder why Donald Trump got elected in the U.S.A. It’s things like this that have tilted the scale, and it is adding lead weights to the right hand side each and every day

Don Thorssen, Calgary

Olympic costs must be put into perspective

Re: “Why we should say yes to the Olympics,” Kyle Shewfelt , Opinion, Aug. 11.

Kyle Shewfelt thinks that taxpaying Calgarians should host the 2026 Olympics — that it really does not matter what debt load we will have to carry.

He feels that athletes want to obtain a gold medal and we should pay for it.

How selfish. Just what would happen if we all had that attitude?

The money our council is spending on just entertaining a bid is beyond reason.

Hilda W. Reiner, Calgary

Don’t overlook Macdonald’s attributes

Re: “Victoria to remove statue of Sir John A.,” Aug. 9.

It saddens me to hear that some people have decided that it is OK to banish statues of Sir John A. Macdonald.

If they knew their history, they would know that because of him, we live in a country called Canada, not in the United States.

Because of him we had a country connected from the East Coast to the West Coast by train, thus forming our beautiful great nation. Because of him we have the RCMP and so much more.

He worked very hard all his adult life to develop Canada and was well respected in many other countries for his knowledge and leadership. He tried to improve life for all Canadians.

Unfortunately, many of our First Nations, through policies of the day, were not treated fairly. But it would be very unjust to ignore what a great leader he was.

Anne Strilchuk, Carstairs

Re: “In his own words,” Steven Galloway, July 14.

Society seems hell bent on pointing the finger at someone else over an issue that may or may not have happened.

“He touched me inappropriately” or “he assaulted me” seem to be two of the most common accusations.

The piece by Steven Galloway should be required reading for everyone. Think before you accuse someone.

The article by the former professor and chair of the creative writing program at the University of British Columbia details his life since being accused of sexual assault.

Galloway not only proved his innocence, he was cleared of all wrongdoing by a judge and awarded $167,000 for damage to his reputation.

Even in light of his exoneration, he remains shunned by the university, his former friends and to some extent, his own family. He cannot find work in his chosen profession.

No one should be allowed to destroy another individual’s life and get away with absolutely no repercussions, as was done in Galloway’s case.

Stan Martin, Calgary

Deciphering what the president meant

Re: “ Trump ‘s boast called into question,” Letter, July 19.

If U.S. President Donald Trump is so Intelligent and sane, why is it that his press secretary has to continually explain what he meant by his statements?

This seems to be an everyday occurrence.

Platon Werbicky, Calgary

Coverage for drug is overdue

My 11-year-old niece Cassidy has cystic fibrosis and fights the disease every day.

Through a strict regiment of daily exercises and medicine, she works to stave off this disease, which threatens her lung functionality.

With the help of her parents, she has started raising money to find a cure for CF with her lemonade stand. Her efforts have resulted in $30,000 being raised to support CF research.

The good news is that the drug Orkambi has been approved by Health Canada. This drug has been proven to significantly improve lung functionality.

The bad news is that although this drug has been approved for two years, the government has not made a decision to fund this medication. The cost of this medicine for the average family is far beyond what can be afforded.

It’s time for the government to make the right decision and allow Orkambi to be available for all people in Canada who suffer from CF.

Donovan Letkeman, Calgary

Talking to Santa on a Greyhound bus

Re: “If we’re going to replace Greyhound , let’s think outside the bus,” Rob Breakenridge, Opinion, July 17.

Greyhound is a cheap form of transportation that’s clearly outlived its purpose for most of us.

I have a fond memory of a Greyhound trip many years ago.

My mother took my sister and I on holidays via Greyhound. One long trip, I caught a glimpse of an elderly, portly man with a large white beard sitting a couple of seats away.

I excitedly informed my mother that Santa was on the bus. She didn’t buy into my reasoning that he was travelling in disguise so that kids wouldn’t know he was on vacation, too.

Despite being a shy four year old, I was not deterred and took the opportunity to visit Santa while my mother took a bathroom break.

A kind Hutterite gentleman listened to me as I assured him I wouldn’t tell anyone else, and proceeded to give him my early Christmas list.

Bev Bell, Calgary

By Craig Coolahan

In May, the City of Calgary’s water resources department released the Confederation Park Regional Drainage Study.

The report recommends building several water storage sites, which would require a significant portion of the former Highland Park Golf Course.

The development proposal approved by city council in March 2017 should never have gotten this far.

I agree with Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s assertion that much of the work surrounding the drainage study should have been done prior to approving the land use plan. A thorough consideration of the landscape and the water that courses through it should’ve been the first step — not the last.

In a June 5 article about the proposed Highland Park Golf Course development, however, Nenshi is quoted as stating that “it’s a very real possibility” that the province could scrap the development plan.

This is not an accurate statement, and here’s why.

First, we live in a society that enshrines private property rights, and the laws and regulations surrounding property development largely reflect this.

In the case of the Highland Park Golf Course site, changes to the watercourse would require an application to Alberta Environment and Parks by the developer. The submission would be reviewed based on a number of factors, including, but not limited to, hydrological effects, effects on public safety, third-party impacts, and existing water management plans.

As of this time, Alberta Environment and Parks have not received any application for the site, and therefore, no decisions are pending.

Secondly, some have pointed to the province’s Crown jurisdiction over the vaulted creek on the site, as a possible means to jettison the entire development proposal. Again, this is not the case.

Any decisions in regards to the Crown claim-ability of the vaulted creek, or to invoke measures under the Water Act, require the landowner to submit an application to alter banks, shores or wetlands in some way.

These are considered on their planning merit. Again, Alberta Environment and Parks has not received any application for the site.

The City of Calgary does have a problem on its hands and the solution lies in working with the community and the developer, while also providing badly needed flood mitigation and green space.

I would personally like to see the vaulted creek daylighted, which would certainly be welcomed by the area residents.

Simply put, no solution lies with the province scrapping the redevelopment plan, because the province does not have the jurisdiction to do so.

And beyond the community being vindicated in its concerns, I hope the city will not put the cart before the horse on a development like this in the future.

Craig Coolahan is NDP MLA for Calgary-Klein.

By JP Gladu and Mark Little

June 21 is National Indigenous Peoples Day, and this year, it’s appropriate to recognize the remarkable accomplishments of Indigenous entrepreneurs. Their contributions to our economy and the well-being of their people are of tremendous importance to Canada’s future.

Indigenous participation in the economy is one of the great social and economic endeavours of our time. Action to raise incomes and living standards for First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples is central to mending our social fabric and achieving economic reconciliation.

Essential to this task are corporate and government procurement policies that spur the growth of Aboriginal businesses and create good, lasting jobs. Such policies provide a viable path to Indigenous self-sufficiency.

The growing size and capacity of the sector make this the right time for meaningful progress toward economic reconciliation.

There are now an estimated 43,000 Aboriginal-owned businesses in Canada. In 2016, Aboriginal businesses contributed an estimated $12 billion to Canada’s GDP, and the total combined income of Indigenous households, businesses and governments reached $32 billion. Although this is a significant improvement from the past, Aboriginal incomes lag average incomes in Canada by 25 per cent, resulting in a significant gap in their standard of living relative to the average Canadian.

Indigenous entrepreneurs have established businesses in every province and territory across a range of industries, including natural resources, construction, manufacturing, retail and service sectors.

The potential to grow the sector has never been stronger. Consider this: if small contributions to supporting Aboriginal businesses were made across the country, we could make great strides toward economic reconciliation.

Let’s look at the oilsands industry, for example. The Aboriginal business spend for the oilsands industry in 2015 and 2016 combined reached $3.3 billion, up significantly from the past.

Signs the sector is poised for impressive growth are everywhere. More and more companies are including Indigenous-owned suppliers in their procurement networks. This is happening because Aboriginal entrepreneurs provide valuable services and products and bring a unique perspective to the table. As well, Canadian businesses generally have come to understand everyone wins when supply chains are inclusive.

In partnership with Suncor and a fast-growing network of leading corporations, the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business has just launched a multi-year strategy to drive new procurement contracts for Aboriginal-owned companies.

This unprecedented initiative is called Supply Change. Its aim is to connect corporations and small and medium sized enterprises with qualified Aboriginal-owned businesses. The council is creating a digital Aboriginal procurement marketplace where Indigenous and non-Indigenous companies can more easily exchange information about procurement opportunities.

Companies joining this national enterprise to propel the Indigenous economy serve as Aboriginal procurement champions and commit themselves to increasing opportunities for Indigenous businesses to participate in their supply chains. They also pledge to actively encourage companies within their respective business networks to do the same.

Many of these champions also provide Indigenous entrepreneurs and their teams with skills training and mentoring, as well as the business know-how and technical resources required for success.

Corporations and small and medium sized enterprises who join have access to an exclusive directory of certified Aboriginal businesses, which are independently certified as at least 51 per cent Aboriginal owned and controlled.

Since its launch on May 10, 28 corporations have already joined the Supply Change movement. We invite all businesses with the potential to include Indigenous suppliers in their procurement networks to join us.

These companies and others who elect to become Aboriginal procurement champions are on the right side of public opinion. A recent survey conducted by Leger for the council and Sodexo Canada found there is deep support for private sector action to help Indigenous businesses succeed.

The survey found 81 per cent of Canadians agree corporations should include Aboriginal businesses in their supplier networks whenever possible. As well, 73 per cent want the private sector to help Indigenous entrepreneurs take their businesses to the next level.

As we celebrate National Indigenous Peoples Day, we see an opportunity for Canada’s business leaders to embrace the changing times by encouraging and delivering the decisive action needed to achieve meaningful economic reconciliation.

JP Gladu is president and CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. Mark Little is chief operating officer of Suncor and co-chair of the council’s Aboriginal procurement initiative.

Re: “DND to spend more than $1B on new Ottawa HQ,” May 16.

This article describes how the Department of Defence requires a new headquarters. It states that there are “more than 20,500 workers at the various DND headquarters buildings in Ottawa and Gatineau.”

There are only 60,000 members in the DND as a whole. That means that fully one-third of them are in the headquarters.

What do these people do? They are not training for war. They are working in air-conditioned offices. They are not infantrymen, or pilots and aircrew, or sailors.

They are not buying new aircraft, or ships or tanks or trucks or other weapons. What do they do? They pretend to do something, but really do nothing.

Currently, there are 11 officers with the rank of lieutenant-general or equivalent. This compares to the Canadian Army in Europe in 1940-1945, which managed to get by with only two lieutenant-generals.

Does this spell top heavy?

G. Philip Fisher, Calgary

B.C. is being treated differently than Quebec

Re: “Feds propose lifeline to keep project afloat,” May 17.

The federal government is going to back the pipeline that is going through B.C., but wouldn’t back Alberta’s eastern pipeline through Quebec.

Hmm, I wonder why? Quebec is called the bullying, spoiled child for good reason. It calls the shots in Ottawa.

No party in power as the federal government can afford the loss of votes, so they give in to Quebec’s demands over and over again.

Meanwhile, the western provinces’ money subsidizes Quebec’s economy through transfer payments the federal government uses to appease the province.

We need both pipelines, if not three pipelines. Alberta and Saskatchewan need to push the eastern pipeline again and consider stopping the transfer payments to Quebec like we are considering stopping oil to B.C.

Phillip Bass, Calgary

It is my home and native land

The Alberta College of Art and Design’s official designation as a university is most welcome and overdue. ACAD has been granting four-year bachelor degrees for several years, after all.

The problem is the provincial government seems half-hearted in its acknowledgment of ACAD’s role in not only helping artists reach their own creative potential, but contribute to our culture and the economy through their talents.

“Alberta is made richer by the many exceptionally talented artists and creators that call our province home,” Advanced Education Minister Marlin Schmidt told a crowd of students and faculty last week.

Those are encouraging words, and it’s expected the school will get a new name and logo, but without a commensurate increase in funding, it’s a hollow gesture. In fact, Schmidt couldn’t resist a presumed attack on the former Progressive Conservative government when he delivered his announcement.

“Do we go back to the boom and bust policies of the past, the same policies that left regular people overexposed to oil price crashes? Or do we make sure this economic recovery is different? Do we make sure this recovery is built for regular people and it’s built to last?”

What prattle the minister spoke. Changing the name of ACAD does nothing to address the well-regarded school’s financial struggles. The facility was constructed in the early 1970s and needs major upgrades, according to its president, Daniel Doz.

“Our building is very outdated, it isn’t as functional as it could be, so we are working on how we can modernize it,” said Doz, who adds that efficient use of the space could allow the school to admit more students.

David Swann, the ever-observant Liberal MLA for Calgary Mountain View, knows what’s up.

“ACAD has been struggling for years,” said Swann, who attended the announcement. “Students here only receive 65 per cent in per capita funding that other students in Alberta receive.”

The NDP’s attention to ACAD is encouraging, but it’s an effort half done. The school is unquestionably an asset to Western Canada. Having recognized that, the government should ensure it is properly funded. To do otherwise is a disservice to not only our artists, but to the NDP itself. Surely, it doesn’t deal in empty gestures.

It’s no secret the provincial government is in dire financial straits, but if Schmidt really does believe Alberta is enriched by the contributions of artists, he has an obligation to ACAD’s students to study his $5.9-billion budget and find the money to adequately fund the school.

We should be proud Canadians every day of the year

Re: “Well played Canada,” Feb. 26.

Have we noticed how we all pull together and cheer our amazing Olympic athletes every two years without any thought about which province they hail from?

Is it not possible to keep that national pride going continually, and work together to make this country the best it can be all year, every year?

Berna Moss, Okotoks

I don’t understand. If the International Olympic Committee can award gold medals to two equally paired bobsleigh teams, why can’t they award gold medals to two equally paired women’s hockey teams?

Hockey is a team sport; shootouts are not.

K. Ann Hambridge, Calgary

Pipeline dithering leaves me feeling embarrassed

Re: “Alberta, not B.C., ‘folded’ in pipeline fight: Kenney,” Feb. 24.

According to the leader of the Green party, Elizabeth May, this application started 5 1/2 years ago, which is far more time than needed to get any and all reviews done.

I find it childish that B.C. Premier John Horgan is holding up the construction of a mode of necessary transport that is as safe, more convenient and less costly than any other mode of oil transport.

The Canadian economy hangs in the balance, as well many thousands of jobs.

Frankly, I am embarrassed to introduce myself as a Canadian to any international person these days, when we lack such badly needed leadership in Ottawa.

Allen Thiessen, Calgary

PM’s trip to India did not go well

Re: “Five things that have gone wrong on Trudeau ‘s trip to India,” Feb. 23.

Re: “Notley creates task force to fight for pipeline construction,” Feb. 10.

Do we need this type of task force? No.

Where is Premier Rachel Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in all of this? It is not up to the task force to do the work for them.

Trudeau and his government should be the ones responsible to put down their foot on all of this, along with Notley.

Trudeau should be defending his decision, considering he was the one who made the decision in the first place.

Former premier Peter Lougheed was more into defending Alberta’s interests during the National Energy Program crisis than Notley will ever be.

Joyce Conley, Calgary

Construction of pipeline should get underway

I think Kinder Morgan should call B.C.’s bluff and spend a few more dollars in a token attempt to physically start building the Trans Mountain pipeline and see what happens. That seems to be the only way to test B.C.’s position and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s claim the project has the full backing of federal law and the Constitution.

I heard that Trudeau claims he can’t intervene because B.C. has not done anything wrong; “It is only words.” Will Trudeau step in only if B.C. does something wrong?

A token physical start on building the pipeline could result in protests, but it should also result in a wake-up call for the federal government.

Also, I wonder how many foreign investors are following this situation, and not investing in Canada.

John Wansleeben, Calgary

In a development that feels at once outrageous and sadly inevitable, the #MeToo movement now sweeping through show business, media and other workplaces has breached Parliament Hill.

It took a Canadian Press survey of female MPs to shine a spotlight on the bitter irony that what should be Canada’s most august workplace is apparently as riven with sexually predatory behaviour as Hollywood has turned out to be.

Thirty-eight of Canada’s 89 women elected to the House of Commons took part in the survey that measured the extent to which they had been targeted for sexual harassment, assault or misconduct of all kinds.

Nearly 60 per cent reported that they had been subjected to one or more forms of sexual misconduct while in office, including improper comments, inappropriate gestures or sexually charged text messages.

Even worse, three MPs disclosed that they were victims of sexual assault, while four more said they were targeted for insistent and repeated sexual advances. The alleged perpetrators included fellow MPs from the same party, MPs from other parties, lobbyists or constituents.

The victims, remember, are members of Parliament from all political stripes. What must the situation be for women working in jobs that are less prestigious and powerful? According to Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, these often younger, less-experienced women are at even greater risk of becoming targets of sexual misconduct.

The damage caused by these allegations of sexual misconduct will unfortunately do much to scuttle efforts to encourage women to run for office or to choose a career in a political system still dominated by men.

The House of Commons, mind you, is ironically the same political institution that unveiled legislation in November to crack down on harassment in federally regulated workplaces such as banks, telecommunication companies and transport providers.

If passed, the rules would also apply to politicians, their staff and other employees on Parliament Hill. But new rules could take a year or more to come into effect if the bill is passed.

It’s shameful that such a mechanism to effectively deal with complaints of sexual harassment and mete out dire punishments for the guilty parties isn’t already in place on the Hill. Targeting sexual misconduct among our elected officials and those who work around and for them is especially imperative, considering the longstanding problem of gender inequality in government.

What’s even more shameful, especially in this day and age, is that men elected to high office, who make our laws and lead our country, would need such rules in the first place.

— Edmonton Journal

Transportation boss was a keeper

Re: “Logan resigns as transportation boss,” Dec. 19.

The City of Calgary and the people here should be grateful to Mac Logan and his staff for all the quality work done for the city, especially during the past eight years.

All of the positive things done to correct the errors of the warring politicians are thanks to people like Mac Logan and staff at city hall, who are career civil servants who put the city before their egos and do valuable work.

So the loss of Mac Logan is a big loss.

He did a lot for the city. More years of Mayor Naheed Nenshi and we will see who steps in to do the heavy lifting.

Olympics and art and facetious issues are more important than transportation and essential services – even fire and police services — that are not essential to the cosmetics at city hall.

Without people like Mac Logan, this city will be in big trouble.

Maureen Olivia Hay, Calgary

In too much of a rush to legalize pot

Re: “There are risks to consuming pot,” Letter, Dec. 21.

Enjoying winter so far? If you think the plunging temperatures, snow drifts and a wind-whipped face make it the most challenging season, you may be surprised to know some people prefer it to the non-chilly months.

For Eliot, it was all about expectations, apparently. That might explain why he praised winter as the season that “kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.”

Eliot, born in St. Louis, but who later moved to England, could afford to be romantic about earth’s coldest offering. The British may lack central heating in many homes, but they rarely see the bone-chilling, -30 C winters experienced on this side of the pond.

Thus, I imagine Eliot in a reading chair by a roaring fire, smoking, and gazing at snowflakes gently floating down the cobblestone streets, illuminated by opaque street lamps.

Winter has a bit more of an edge in Canada, even if we enjoy it. It also forces practical choices that inform our habits year long. Most Canadians take their shoes off upon entering a home, both in January and July. It must seem odd to those who live in climates where such hardwood- and carpet-saving measures are unnecessary.

D.H. Lawrence had a view opposite that of Eliot’s. The novelist, playwright, painter and critic apparently disliked fall, never mind the icier season that followed.

“I want to go south,” he wrote in a 1924 letter to a friend, “where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce.”

No fan of northern regions, Eliot painted the north with unflattering words: “The heart of the North is dead and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.”

The dead-man image might seem like rhetorical overkill, but to anyone who has endured -30 C weather for weeks without respite, it is almost as if Lawrence spent a winter in chinook-free Edmonton.

Perhaps it is an English poet “thing,” but others from history’s London literary set also disdained fall. There is Matthew Arnold’s 1857 Rugby Chapel: “Coldly, sadly descends, the autumn evening.”

One century later, this anti-autumn theme continued in Doris Lessing’s irritation with the shoulder season. From her 1952 novel, Martha Quest: “What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?”

The Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin had a short but productive writing life; he arrived in this world in 1799 and left it in 1837. While around, Pushkin placed autumn in a more proper context, as the precursor to the inevitable harsh winter that rolls in, in Russia’s case, from Siberia.

“A tedious season they await, who hear November at the gate,” wrote the liberal poet. Pushkin was once exiled from Moscow to (warmer) Crimea by an autocratic czar; he was lucky it wasn’t Siberia, the usual end point for Russian dissidents in every century.

Christina Rosetti, she of Italian and English lineage, and who in the 19th century wrote religious, romantic and children’s works, offered up clarity about the frostiest season’s effect upon the natural world. From a 1875 poem: “In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

William Shakespeare also wrote of winter’s weighing on our homes, goods and even our moods. In Love’s Labour Lost, the bard remarked of how “icicles hang by the wall,” where “milk comes frozen home in pail” and how our “ways (manners) be foul.”

Back to the winter romantics: Everyone knows Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1942 song. The famous line: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.”

A memo to Berlin, who died in 1989: In Western Canada at least, Mother Nature just granted your wish.

Mark Milke is a Calgary author and columnist.

Isn’t it ironic that our city has to dig into our pockets (taxes) to attract business into our city that our provincial government has made so unattractive (not profitable) to be here.

Perhaps they should go after all the dollars that the new carbon taxes are supposed to generate, and use those funds to lower the cost of doing business here. Business, would come back on its own.

Gerhard Bender, Calgary

While support for cannabis legalization has grown tremendously in recent years, it’s also true that there isn’t unanimous consensus that it’s the right thing to do.

However, it’s also the case that legalization is for all intents and purposes a done deal, and so arguments against it are rather moot at this point. Moreover, bizarre and irrational arguments against legalization are not only moot, but really only serve to embarrass and discredit those making them.

For Alberta’s new United Conservative Party, dabbling in such foolishness would represent a totally avoidable self-inflicted wound. Obviously, the Rachel Notley government did not legalize cannabis, but rather – as is the case with every other province – is designing and implementing regulations around legalization.

So to that end, the comments last week from UCP MLA Ron Orr are truly baffling. What’s worse, because his party has been so mum on the proposed regulations, Orr’s remarks have become, by extension, the de facto UCP position on cannabis. That’s not helpful.

Last week in the legislature, Orr rose to speak to what he believes are the “historical parallels” between Canada legalizing cannabis and the opium problems in early 20th-century China. Those problems, he maintains, “contributed to the Chinese cultural revolution under the communists.”

He took the comparison even further, describing how China eradicated “the opium trade, the opium business, the opium tax revenue and all of these wonderful things that are supposed to be generated from recreational use of drugs.”

The most charitable reaction to all of this was one of bewilderment. Others were a little more taken aback. What exactly did Orr believe his remarks were going to accomplish, or what specific NDP regulation was he arguing against?

Whatever point he was trying to make – if indeed, there was one – was lost in the ensuing backlash. Even his own party struggled to defend him. It was a whole cycle of unflattering coverage for the new party that was completely unnecessary.

If the UCP doesn’t object in any serious way to the government’s regulations, then why say anything at all? If Orr has some concerns about the impacts of opium use, then perhaps his bizarre rant might have been more logically inserted into the conversation about Alberta’s ongoing opioid emergency.

Yet, oddly, he made no mention of that.

Cannabis, of course, is not an opioid, and is really not in any way comparable. In fact, there are recent studies that indicate that the availability of medicinal marijuana might have a positive impact when it comes to reducing opioid use.

Nor is cannabis a gateway to harder drugs, if that’s what Orr was getting at. If any drug could be seen as a gateway, it would be alcohol, but that’s not a justification for an interventionist, nanny-state approach.

Additionally, if it needs to be pointed out, a cannabis-driven communist revolution is not in the offing.

UCP Leader Jason Kenney has gone to great lengths to invoke the legacy of Ralph Klein, and painting himself as a leader cut from a similar cloth.
Perhaps the least contentious aspect of the Klein revolution – certainly with a quarter of a century in hindsight – was the end of the government monopoly on alcohol retail.

Even though the NDP has wisely avoided the government monopoly when it comes to cannabis retail, the government will still be in control of online sales, and it’s still unclear how heavily the NDP plans on taxing cannabis.

Instead of pushing discredited fear mongering in pursuit of a prohibitionist approach, wouldn’t it be nice to have a pro-free market party in Alberta actually standing up for the free market?

If there’s no political pressure from the opposition steering the government away from an interventionist approach, then we run the risk of inching down that path.

The legalization ship has sailed, and it was never a provincial decision to begin with. The UCP would do well to come to grips with these facts.

Afternoons with Rob Breakenridge airs weekdays on NewsTalk 770. rob.breakenridge@corusent.com

Gravel dust should be investigated

Re: “Dust levels seven times beyond standard at provincial gravel pit,” Nov. 29.

This simple test begins by telling the truth

In my time (more than 80 years), I cannot perceive a greater need for the entire population to take a step back and try to make sense of what is happening.

The ascension of the so-called social media is being used as a means to disseminate half-truths, outright lies and to gossip and fuel rumours that have no basis in fact.

I am a member of the Calgary West Rotary Club. One of the obligations all Rotarians must undertake when they join is to accept and follow the Rotary 4 Way Test in their dealings with others.

First, Is it the truth?

Second, Is it fair to all concerned?

Third, will it build goodwill and better friendships?

Fourth, Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

Is it the truth is No. 1 for a good reason. Everything else follows from that principle. Once a lie is told, it can never be untold, but, a lie told often enough to a large enough audience can gain credibility, then believability, until the lie, to some minds, becomes the truth.

There is a serious need for everyone to critically analyze, and when necessary, do the research to put the stop on erroneous material.

Rotarians will gladly share its 4 Way Test with any interested organizations, schools or corporations. A copy, suitable for framing, can be obtained by accessing the Calgary West Rotary Club website and making a request.

Stefan Bildfell, Calgary

Twain always shines

Re: “Lady Luck shines through the snow,” Steve Simmons, Opinion, Nov. 27.

What a sexist and arrogant thing to say: “Shania Twain, probably after the best-before date.”

How about you, Steve Simmons? Are you after your best-before date, too?

That a journalist, in this day and age, would find it permissable to write this in a supposedly reputable publication is mind-boggling to me.

Have we not evolved beyond judging one another in this way, particularly in our newspapers?
Sadly, apparently not.

A. Hermann, Calgary

Eagerly awaiting next year’s Grey Cup

Congratulations to the Calgary Stampeders for making the Grey Cup 2017 such a classic.

I enjoyed every moment of the game and am looking forward to the 2018 CFL season.

Next time, all our players who come from the sunny parts of the U.S.A. will be ready for the deep-freezer type of game,
and in 2018, boys, we will give them hell.

Thanks for the great game. Looking forward to next season.

Roman Hrytsak, Calgary

Pipeline debacle too close for comfort

Premier Rachel Notley says the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion now sits on the one-yard line.

The thought gives me shivers, knowing from the Grey Cup game what can happen near the goal line. Please, Premier Notley, let’s not have another crucial fumble or I may be forced to take up cannabis.

Peter Mannistu, Calgary

Dental rules aren’t serving anyone

Re: “Brush up on value,” Editorial, Nov. 24.

The Alberta Dental Association & College was so intimidated by Minister Sarah Hoffman’s threat to divide the association from the disciplinary college that it forgot to negotiate for matching the reduced guide for social services treatment (raising the fees) and dropping general dentists from the hospital grade sterilization protocols that do not burden neighbouring dentists in B.C. and Saskatchewan.

The association and college administration is bloated with lawyers and consultants with ties to the former CEO, and they want to increase dentist membership costs by 21 per cent, while asking dentists to drop fees.

A recent study proves Alberta dentists are being disciplined at two times the rate of B.C. and Ontario dental professionals (and twice the rate of Alberta physicians), and the cost of discipline is eight times that experienced in Ontario.

The advertising rules are ridiculous — posting a thank you card on Facebook is professional misconduct.

Alberta dentists are backed into a corner with costs and disciplinary risks that exist because of the current organization. When things get bad for everyone involved — patients and the dental professionals — it is time to look at the causes.

Michael Zuk, DDS, Red Deer

By Naomi Lakritz

I used to live in a rural community where my property taxes were just $50 a year.

It was picturesque, but there was no sewer, no water, and the nearest RCMP detachment and ambulance service were 10 kilometres away in another town. You get what you pay for.

What we need to remember during this week’s budget debate at city hall is that there is no property tax utopia in which we get all the services we want at the level we expect, without paying a penny more in taxes. And there is no reason why essential services like the police should go begging.

The Calgary Police Service wants $14.3 million more added to its budget. That figure alone would result in a 0.8 per cent tax increase. The standard equation is that a one per cent rise in property tax rates means an extra $1.50 a month for the typical homeowner. So $14.3 million for the police amounts to less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

In making his plea for the extra funding, Chief Roger Chaffin cited a nearly 50 per cent increase year over year in shootings, more cases of sex assaults and domestic violence, and the fentanyl crisis that has caused 68 deaths in Calgary just between June and September of this year.

Add to that Calgary’s unwelcome status of being the Canadian city with the highest number of stolen vehicles. Then, there are the new threats posed by the kind of terrorism that has hit major European cities and which was replicated in Edmonton not long ago. Some of that $14.3 million would go to hiring 55 more officers and civilian employees for the police force.

Coun. Sean Chu, who unfortunately thinks the police should come under cost-saving scrutiny, has a separate idea for saving money that is a common-sense one. He thinks green carts should be picked up only once every two weeks instead of weekly, as they are now. Smart thinking – and it doesn’t compromise any Calgarian’s safety.

Does anyone really fill their green cart to the brim each week? You’d have to throw away a colossal amount of food to do that. By picking up the green carts only once every two weeks, the city would be saving money and would also be reducing the carbon footprint of the trucks used for the pickups.

Switching green cart pickup from every week to every two weeks endangers no one. Belt-tightening in an essential service like the police potentially endangers everyone. We citizens need to decide what matters to us and what kind of city we want to live in.

Would we rather see no tax increase, but also see no police car arrive in time when we need help? Or would we willingly pay a bit more in property taxes so the police can be properly funded and our city can be a safer place?

From January to October of this year, Chaffin says there were 91 shooting incidents in Calgary – 30 more than there were during the same months the year before. Do we really want to start resembling an American city, with the rising gun violence?

The green carts are just one of many ingenious places where the city could find cost savings that don’t impinge on essential services.

The minuscule amount of tax increase caused by a $14.3 million allotment to the police may or may not be accompanied by a further 2.9 per cent hike due to last year’s rebate, which delayed the effects of the 2017 hike in taxes. A 2.9 per cent increase would be only an extra $4.35 a month – the approximate cost of a couple of cups of coffee.

Any way you look at it, another $14.3 million for the police so they can do their jobs well is a good investment. Let’s keep this basic service properly funded.

Naomi Lakritz is a Calgary journalist.

Knox United Church has been sustaining its parishioners for more than a century. When a three-year so-called reimagining is completed, the historic downtown church will be tending to its congregation’s nutritional and social needs, as well as their spiritual longings.

Frankly, like everyone else who has heard about the church’s vision, we’re exciting about the project’s tremendous ability to create a more compelling and useful space. It has the real potential to revitalize the church, which has seating space for 800 worshippers, but rarely has need of all the pews.

Knox United Church is drawing on the expertise of Father Andrew Foreshew-Cain, who oversaw a similar transformation at St. James Church in West Hampstead, London, England, where The Sanctuary Cafe was created.

Knox United Church has similar inspirations. It too will install a cafe in its sanctuary and add co-working space and a community kitchen and bakery. Churches serve many purposes, of course, in particular, fulfilling the needs of the faithful by sharing the important message of Jesus Christ’s salvation.

Churches are also inspiring places to gather and to gain insight and strengthen our faith. The presence of a cafe where people can pause for a spell, and a community kitchen and bakery can be situated to nourish more basic needs is highly desirable. It’s not a case of watering down the important traditions of the church; it’s about making them more evident, relevant and sincere.

Knox United Church Minister Greg Glatz can talk with ease on many topics, but he’s the first to admit he knows little about operating a cafe. That’s why he’s recruited individuals who have experience in the field, determined they can not only provide a restful respite in the heart of the city, at 4th Street S.W. and 6th Avenue, but do so in a financially sustainable fashion. All while bathed in the inspiring glow of stained-glass windows.

Glatz says the changes are an attempt to make the church more user-friendly for the diverse community of Calgarians who live in the core.

“I do think we’ll bring more people into the church community, but only because we’re caring about the people around us,” he said.

“If we make this church about the people around us, they’ll join us.”

What a wonderful, caring aspiration. Best of luck with the transformation.

One more opportunity for sleepwalking

Put police boots to better use

This news article got me thinking, Robert Varley’s charter of rights were protected today, but what about the rights of Farida Abdurahman and her family?

Abdurahman lost her life, and her family lost their daughter. Varley hid behind his charter of rights and showed no remorse for what he has done. This is happening too often and every year, people are losing their lives due to careless driving, driving under the influence, or driving with a licence obtained under false pertinence.

Due to relaxed driving and road rules in Alberta, police are helpless when it comes to finding justice for the victims and holding the guilty drivers accountable for their actions. Something needs to change — driving is privilege, not a right and people need to understand this.

The government needs to do something to stop irresponsible drivers from destroying more lives.

Arijit Lodha, Calgary

We can put a stop to gender-based violence

It doesn’t seem like much of a “cross-country tour,” when you get down to it.

Premier Rachel Notley’s pro-pipeline expedition took her to Toronto and Ottawa on Monday and Tuesday, and is now taking her all the way to, um, Calgary on Friday. She’ll be speaking to the city’s chamber of commerce.

Next week, she’ll travel to Vancouver to speak to the city’s board of trade before delivering her final pro-pipeline speech Dec. 7 to a group not noted for its anti-pipeline stance: the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce.

But there is method to her “cross-country” madness.

This is not a shotgun approach to promote any old pipeline to as many people as possible. Notley is targeting national business leaders on Bay Street and federal politicians in Ottawa, as well as B.C.’s business elites in Vancouver.

This is a tour to highlight the expansion of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline designed to pump more of Alberta’s oil and bitumen to the West Coast for shipment to Asia.

Notley needs construction of the project to begin in 2018 to have a fighting chance in the 2019 provincial election. She wants to point to her government’s work, specifically its climate leadership plan and carbon tax, as having won “social licence” to get the pipeline done.

At the same time, the Official opposition is happily predicting her cross-country tour will fall flat.

Heading up the anti-cheerleading squad is United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney, who has already said Notley’s social licence policy is a “total failure.”

That’s a premature conclusion, to say the least.

The federal government gave conditional approval to the Kinder Morgan expansion a year ago precisely because of Notley’s climate change policy.

The project, which seems to have stalled for now, could still get underway in 2018.

If so, Notley’s policy could then be deemed a success.

Not that Kenney or the UCP would ever admit that.

They’re already in election mode 16 months out. Just look at the overheated rhetoric, specifically on pipelines.

Kenney is accusing Notley of hypocrisy, of campaigning against pipelines while in opposition, but reluctantly supporting them now.

As proof, Kenney offered up an old quote from Notley on Tuesday about her apparent opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline: “In May of 2015, Premier Notley made it clear that, ‘We’re against it. She was against the Keystone XL pipeline.”

But here is the whole quote from Notley in a CBC interview on May 2, 2015: “We’re against it the way it’s currently proposed because the way it’s currently proposed is to ship unprocessed bitumen and that is not good for Albertans and that’s not good for the Alberta economy in the long run.”

Notley and the NDP didn’t oppose pipelines in general; they opposed specific pipelines that shipped jobs to the U.S.

This is not a one-off exaggeration from Kenney. When it comes to painting the truth, he regularly colours outside the lines.

He claims, for example, the NDP “lied” about the carbon tax in the 2015 election. Well, you could say the NDP didn’t mention a carbon tax, but that’s not the same.

He says Trudeau “killed” the Northern Gateway project. Well, Trudeau gave up on the project in 2016 after the Federal Court of Appeal overturned approval of the proposed pipeline. The court ruled the former federal Conservative government (the one in which Kenney was a cabinet minister) had failed to properly consult First Nations affected by the project.

All politicians exaggerate and demonize their opponents. Alberta’s NDP, for example, accuses opposition politicians of supporting the firing of teachers and nurses to cut costs. It’s true the UCP wants to cut costs and that could conceivably lead to job losses, but that’s not the same as campaigning for layoffs.

Kenney, though, seems to be making exaggeration and rhetorical overreach an art form. There is hardly a speech or even a comment from Kenney that doesn’t include a fact that has been given a deep-muscle massage.

The Washington Post uses a “Pinocchio rating” to chart U.S. President Donald Trump’s inaccuracies on a scale of one to four.

Perhaps we should do the same with Kenney using a stretchy-nose icon, one where the nose could stretch nice and long — maybe as long as a pipeline to tidewater.

gthomson@postmedia.com

Alberta Health Services should cover more devices and procedures, but to blame the NDP for the problem is myopic. Such lack of funding has been going on for decades.

Also, if Mike Bellis thinks a $61 sling is a hardship for some, imagine going to the dentist for people like me who are unemployed and do not have a dental plan. A basic exam and cleaning can mean a few hundred dollars.

Fillings, extractions, root canals, etc., can easily add up to thousands of dollars. Many Albertans have no hope of ever receiving the level of care dentists recommend.

Absolutely inhumane, my bursitis/infected elbow was taken care of for free, but an abscessed tooth costs a small fortune. Personally, I strongly believe dental care should be covered like the rest of the body and every dentist who truly cares about the health of Albertans should be advocating for such a change.

Perhaps, a sugar tax devoted to such a plan can be enacted to pay for it.

Bruce A. McFaul, Calgary

Time for city council pension reform has long since past

Re: “City council deserves a pension – but one that’s not so lucrative,” Colin Craig, Opinion, Nov. 22.

City council and his worship claim they did not design the lucrative pension plan, but they continue at the trough like pigs in muck. All except Coun. Jeromy Farkas, who has refused to accept this plan.

Farkas gets it. How can the city ever hope to reduce costs for all city workers when they accept this over-the-top pension? The same can be said about their salaries, but that is for a different rant.

Industry standards these days provide a matching defined contribution plan (where the employer matches payments made by employees to their RRSP, up to the maximum), as opposed to defined benefit plans which are provided to most government employees. Is it any wonder no level of government these days seems to be able to control costs?

If council has the guts, they will do the right thing and change to a defined contribution plan like the rest of us. Don’t hold your breath, because Farkas is only one vote, for now.

Greg Urton, Calgary

Governments have no money for Olympic extras

Re: “Olympic proposal includes plan for $272M field house,” Nov. 22.

It has become increasingly clear to this reader that our city council is using a very expensive and potentially risky Olympic bid as subterfuge to finally find the public good they have been looking for to build a new arena for the Flames, an LRT to the airport and a field house that none of us knew we needed.

I would like this Olympic bid exercise to end. I cannot understand the economics of asking for money from a municipal government that cannot fund its latest budget, and provincial and federal governments that are both mired in debt and deficits.

Brian Findlay, Calgary

Midfield Park residents still awaiting fairness

Re: “Where is the justice for Midfield Park?,” Letter, Nov. 21.

Not only are we wasting money on dubious public art, but now we are throwing another $1 million after the five already spent on an Olympic study.

The Olympic dream is not going to happen without a new hockey arena, and where is that proposal? Mayor Naheed Nenshi says he is against bullying, but is he? Floodlights into homes, locked gates, nighttime patrols?

In a medical emergency, could EMT get into the park? Ten cents on the dollar for their homes? I’m sure the houses along Glenmore expansion and West LRT route were offered significantly more than that.

The city says it is offering comparative housing, but when you live in a one-level home, a three-storey townhouse is not comparative when you have difficulty with stairs. The city promised an alternative site, but when the cost escalated, it was dropped.

The Midfield Park residents deserve justice.

Dianne Kynaston, Calgary

Secondary suite rules are an embarrassment

Re: “Calgary secondary suite rules are laughably second-rate,” Paula Simons, Opinion, Nov. 7.

The response of some councillors to the criticism of the existing secondary suite policy is to ask bureaucrats to find a way of taking “personal details” out of the applications, instead of just stopping this time-wasting, demeaning exercise and delegating it to the planning department, where it belongs.

One suspects that their interest in this little bit of censorship has more to do with trying to avoid the negative press those details help generate than it does with any sympathy for the applicants.

Christopher R. Ford, Calgary

Perhaps the voters are getting wiser

Re: Editorial cartoon, Nov. 6.

If it can be assumed that cartoonists fairly accurately capture the zeitgeist of the times, can it be that, in the cartoon wherein Premier Rachel Notley in her thoughts refers to the prime minister as a clown, the polity may be finally catching on to this dilettante PM who prances around on the world stage?

Jim Gehl, Calgary

Morality is best taught in church

Re: “Alberta bishops urge Catholics to defend schools,” Nov. 7.

I can’t believe how much debate is going on in the Herald about sex education in Catholic schools.

The church has no right to interfere with the government’s guidelines on education. An article in today’s Herald states that the government did not ask the Catholics for input into the curriculum. Why should they? Are they to also ask the Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and all other religious sects for their input?

If that were the case, then agreement would never take place.

The Catholics can teach their morality side of sex education in religious studies or in church.

Platon Werbicky, Calgary

Condo restrictions don’t need to be changed

Re: “Don’t abolish no-kids condos,” Letter, Nov. 6.

The NDP’s ban on adults-only apartments is a draconian solution to a non-problem. I live in an over-21 condo close to that child friendly amenity, the Killarney pool.

This is the quietest apartment I have had the pleasure of owning. The age restriction was approved by all owners after some really horrible experiences with families in the 1990s. The Canadian Condominium Institute has estimated that less than 10 per cent of Alberta condos are age restricted.

Surely, an availability of 90 per cent is not a hardship for families. The Calgary Residential Rental Association says that only 25 per cent of its members will be negatively affected by the change, so 75 per cent are already available to families.

Valerie Gower’s letter to the editor describes the “pure hell” of living below a young family and also mentions the wear and tear on the building. My building is clean and quiet and well maintained.

Fifteen years from now, the attractive advantage of an age restriction that I paid for will be gone, thanks to our provincial government, which could easily have exempted condos with age restrictions in place. Where is the burning need for anti-discrimination, if we can wait 15 years? This is obviously political grandstanding.

Janice LeDuc, Calgary

Christians must speak out

According to Al Jazeera, there are 40 Christians on death row or serving life sentences in Pakistan for the crime of blasphemy against Islam.

Asia Bibi has been awaiting execution since 2010, yet the Christian world is virtually silent on the matter. The voices of two billion people would be hard to ignore, but apart from a few human rights groups, Christians have yet to speak up in defence of their coreligionists.

This egregious infringement of human rights gets so little press, that I suspect most Christians don’t even know about it. Ignorance may be an excuse, but apathy is not.

I urge Christians to bring it up to their church councils and to start making some noise.

If you remain silent, just image how you will feel the day you hear a fellow Christian has been executed for the crime of defending the religion you both share.

Steve Harris, Calgary

By Roger More

An enduring feature of Canada’s democratic and free society has been majority rule.

It is simple in concept: in political decisions and situations that affect a majority of Canadian citizens, the choice will be the decision the majority supports. It is far from perfect or clear in many situations.

Sadly, majority rule has collapsed in some recent critical political choices. In many cases, these decisions, with huge economic impacts on the vast majority of Canadians, have degenerated into the rule of small, powerful, activist and ideologically driven minorities with wildly disproportionate power in the situation, combined with no real political majority checks and balances.

The most egregious current example is the Canadian oil and gas situation, at both the federal and provincial government levels. In British Columbia, in the recent provincial election, a tiny minority of Green party MLAs (three seats) held the balance of power in the legislature. The NDP cynically embraced a Green coalition government to seize power over the Liberals.

Prior to this, the majority provincial Liberals had supported both the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion and major LNG projects. Both these energy projects represented multibillion-dollar investments and huge job creation that would financially benefit not just B.C., but the majority of Canadians.

The federal government, which by definition represents the majority of Canadians, supported both projects.

The minute the socialist NDP took power in B.C., they abruptly stopped or stalled both projects. Why? Clearly, it was implicitly the price of Green party support.

The Green party represents a narrow, single-issue (environment), ideology-driven anti-oil-and-gas political perspective. As a result, we have the worst example of a tiny minority of three activist Greens in one province literally defeating a majority project decision that would hugely benefit millions of Canadians.

To make matters more difficult, they have the support of another powerful minority group, the Indigenous community. In response, the federal government has caved in, and apparently will allow them to get away with it.

Moving to Quebec, we have a parallel example of minority power. The mayor of Montreal, with the implicit support of the Quebec government, is blocking the cross-Canada Energy East pipeline project, again involving billions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs.

In total, all of these politicians represent a small minority of Canadian taxpayers.

We need to challenge the fundamental political processes and locus of power for major oil and gas and other major projects that cut across provincial boundaries and profoundly affect the financial welfare of all Canadians. The Canadian political majority, as represented by the federal government, must have the ultimate decision on these projects.

This raises the thorny issue of provincial powers and federal-provincial relationships. In this critical national resources area, we have ceded far too much power to the provincial governments, which clearly empowers and sustains the power of activist minorities to overwhelm majority rule.

It will be difficult to change, but will be critical for Canada to move back to true majority rule, real democracy and a strong economy for all taxpayers in the future.

Roger More is professor emeritus at the Ivey Business School at Western University.

By Naomi Lakritz

Coun. Ward Sutherland woke up one morning last week to discover that he is a racist.

The night before, at a pre-election forum, he’d been talking about how the city needs to commission its public art from local artists. He says he made a mixed-up reference to “Johnny Choo,” because at the moment, thoughts of the TV show Sex and the City, New York, shoes and a designer whose name started with J got jumbled up in his head as he reached for a phrase to describe his opposition to commissioning foreign artists.

Some people — though not the ones at the forum — thought he said “Johnny Jew.”

“Nobody at the forum said anything. No one reacted,” Sutherland said in a weekend phone conversation. “The forum was over. I went home. It’s 10 o’clock. I go to bed. At 4 a.m., I’m a racist on social media.”

As a Jewish constituent of Sutherland’s, I have to say I’ve never heard of that particular slur. A quick Google search turns up Urban Dictionary’s definition of Johnny Jew as the usual stereotypical insinuation of Jews being cheap.

Apart from that, the only other reference is a 1992 New York Magazine article about a police officer named John Silverman, who lived on a New York City block where there were several other kids named John; with an Italian mother and a Jewish father, he was known in the neighbourhood as Johnny the Jew.

As a Metis who has experienced his own share of racism over the years, Sutherland said he was “devastated” by the accusations, and not because he feared losing the election. “I don’t care about the votes,” he said. “This is about my integrity.”

He phoned some friends in Calgary’s Jewish community and asked them to watch the video. They didn’t think he’d said “Johnny Jew.” In fact, Sutherland said, “Some of them thought I’d said ‘dew’.”

There were dissenters on social media who also didn’t think he had said “Jew.”

With no consensus on what people thought they heard, Sutherland deserves to be taken at his word. When Wildrose leader Brian Jean talked of how he wasn’t allowed to beat Premier Rachel Notley, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what he had said. Everyone clearly heard it. But there are plenty of doubts about what Sutherland said at the forum.

The rise of Trumpism in the U.S. has brought the issues of hate and racism to the fore, resulting in a hypervigilance among those who pride themselves on their progressive thinking, but the way Sutherland has been tarred and feathered shows how hypervigilance can run amok. And when it does, those who cry “J’accuse!” show themselves to be equally intolerant and narrow.

Also hurtful for Sutherland was the alacrity with which the University of Calgary’s Graduate Students’ Association moved to revoke the Political Leadership Award they gave him six months ago. There was no due process and no opportunity for him to be heard; the revocation was instantaneous. Sutherland said he asked for a chance to tell his side of the matter.

“But they said no, they had already voted and the decision was made,” he said.

A court won’t convict someone if there is reasonable doubt the accused committed a crime, but the kangaroo court of public opinion, which convenes daily on social media, doesn’t have any such scruples. I confess that I too immediately believed Sutherland had made an anti-Semitic remark. And I don’t want to be guilty of jumping to such hasty conclusions again.

I believe he is telling the truth. Who among us hasn’t experienced our thoughts getting jumbled and our words spilling out before we could organize them? Sutherland absolutely deserves the benefit of the doubt and the civilized thing to do is accord it to him.

Naomi Lakritz is a Calgary journalist.

Schools have been called upon to teach more than the Three Rs for many decades now, but they should add one more assignment to their long list of lessons: warning students about drug use, especially deadly opioids.

There’ll be some Albertans who’ll say such a message will fall on deaf ears, but we have a duty to try. Indeed, today’s young people deserve credit for their sensible approach to hazards such as cigarette smoking and impaired driving — they certainly exhibit more common sense than many of their predecessors, it would seem.

Two groups, the Get Prescription Drugs Off the Street Society and Moms Stop the Harm, have written letters to Alberta’s health and education ministers urging them to improve education around drug use. If the government, which is redesigning Alberta’s school curriculum, is smart, it will follow the groups’ advice.

Amy Graves, president of Get Prescription Drugs Off the Street Society, says revisiting the curriculum is a chance to introduce lessons on ways to reduce overdose risk, explain how to access support for drug use and addiction, and educate students on important legislation, such as the Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act, which gives people immunity from possession charges if they call 911 in the event of overdose.

“This is a matter of life or death that I feel cannot wait,” says Graves, whose own life experience shows how important such messages can be.

She lost her brother, Joshua, 21, to an opioid overdose after he tried a drug at a party.

“My brother was the most happy, successful person,” says Graves. “He didn’t have a substance use problem, there were no warning signs or a lead-up where you thought, ‘Tomorrow, he’s not going to come home.’

“The night he died, he was buying new furniture for his apartment.”

Joshua, who had moved to Nova Scotia, isn’t alone. The Canadian Institute for Health Information says there were an average of 11 emergency department visits per day attributed to opioid overdoses in Alberta in 2016-17.

Proof of the need to impart a life-saving message to students is the fact the most affected group was youth aged 15 to 24, with the fastest-growing rate of such visits, tripling in five years.

The NDP appears ready to address this important file, with Education Minister David Eggen reporting school superintendents were provided with an Alberta Health fact sheet about fentanyl to share with teachers and parents in 2016.

That’s a start, but talking to students would be more effective. The curriculum should reflect the seriousness of this health risk.

The city is making a mistake in putting its three-decade-old adopt-a-park program — which boasted 130 volunteers caring for the same number of green spaces — on the compost heap.

The decision flies in the face of Calgary’s extraordinary spirit of volunteerism, evidenced by everything from classroom helpers to the legendary white-hatted ambassadors who help travellers navigate Calgary International Airport and promptly get on their way.

The root of the city’s concern is overwatering. It seems there was significant waste at about 25 per cent of the sites nurtured by volunteers.

“The volunteers were very passionate, and for the first 20 years, it worked wonderfully … it was only a few that didn’t follow best practises,” said Don Patrician, supervisor of environmental education for the parks department. “But in recent years, you’d be surprised with some of the monthly water bills.”

There’s no doubt Calgarians have to limit their water use, but let’s be realistic: to a large extent, the price that’s put on water is to encourage conservation. If water isn’t metered, which it isn’t in many smaller cities in Canada, there’s no financial incentive to limit how much is used.

But remember, the city manages the water system, so claiming some of the parks’ bills were too steep is a bit of an exaggeration. It would be like a restaurateur referring to her menu when estimating the cost of wasted food, rather than tallying up the price of the groceries and labour.

What Patrician and others at the city ignore is that volunteers at 75 per cent of the parks were conducting themselves appropriately. The fact so many unpaid volunteers were mindful of only watering when necessary is testimony to the program’s success.

The city should have taken greater steps to educate wasteful waterers. If such measures weren’t successful, the individual volunteers should have been instructed to stand aside. The cancellation of the program, and instead allowing volunteers to tend to six larger sites, is a regrettable overreaction.

After all, if volunteers aren’t caring for the parks’ needs, it can be assumed the sites will be neglected or that paid workers will be handed the chores.

The real sadness, of course, is that well-meaning, long-term volunteers have been told their efforts aren’t welcome.

In a city such as Calgary, which prides itself on its sense of community despite its growing size, that’s not right. The volunteers have been thrown out with the grass water.

By Jeromy Farkas

What would you do with an extra three days of your life back every year?

Calgarians spend an estimated 68 hours in traffic gridlock each year, according to the TomTom Traffic Index. While Calgary was rated last week as the “least congested” of Canada’s seven major cities, a closer look at the numbers should give you more than one kind of pause.

Canadian cities are not leading the way when it comes to effective traffic flow, so there’s no reason to applaud Calgary being the best of a bad bunch. Data shows that Calgary is twice as congested as Kansas City, and well behind U.S. leaders such as Phoenix and Indianapolis.

The numbers become even more troubling when you consider Calgary’s future growth. Between 2001 and 2011, the cars travelling daily on Deerfoot Trail south of Anderson Road doubled to 120,000. Conservative estimates by the Alberta government project that Calgary’s population will more than double to 2.4 million people within 25 years.

As tempting as it may be, the answer is not always more and bigger roads to try and combat the problem. Nor is it to give large but well-intentioned transit projects a free pass. Infrastructure investment is important, but we have to think and build smarter as we grow.

Better technology means faster, cheaper and safer travel for all Calgarians, regardless of how they need to get around.

For example, tweaking a single turning light on Macleod Trail resulted in a two-minute reduction in traffic delays to downtown. Improvements like these cost little, reduce noise and air pollution, and make transit more reliable.

Data from TomTom Traffic Index, which uses GPS data from millions of users to rank cities worldwide, can also be used to measure Calgary’s road network and pinpoint other areas where traffic flow can be improved. More objective criteria should be used to judge if we’re getting the best return on all projects — from the shortest bike lane to the biggest interchange.

Calgarian Dustin Jones made headlines when he obtained past police data and made a map demonstrating the most dangerous intersections for pedestrians. Such data should be public for free, and used to design safer intersections that also allow for better traffic flow. The city must stop acting like gatekeepers of information, and work harder to get it to whom it belongs: the people.

While getting better, the city’s lack of good data has unfortunately undermined support for cycling — a good transportation option for many, but not all, of us. Questionable practices, such as sending staff to street corners to count bikes with a clipboard, have needlessly set businesses and cyclists against each other.

Solid information can reveal opportunities for both. For example, better enforcement and crash reports could help pick better locations for infrastructure, save cyclists, and lead to safer vehicles and streets.

In fairness, transportation planning is challenging because there is no one way of moving people that accommodates all needs perfectly. But competing directions from council have counterproductively led city hall to restrict the mobility choices of Calgarians, rather than expand them. That means our time and money costs have gone up, while our overall competitiveness and affordability have gone down.

Mayor and council like to trumpet data-driven decisions, yet consistently work against competition and tech-savvy firms such as Uber and Car2Go. While they can help Calgarians get from A to B more efficiently, mayor and council have made it difficult or impossible to innovate. Taxi passengers face a type of restriction that is almost unique in the First World: artificial shortages caused by an archaic government-regulated taxi system that limits the number of cabs on the road.

When council tries to pick winners in private business, we all lose. Its main focus should be competitiveness. Let’s consider Calgary’s ranking as a warning, and think smarter about mobility.

Jeromy Farkas is a research fellow at the Manning Foundation and the creator of CouncilTracker.ca

The Jim Prentice Tories were having a tough time selling Albertans on the advantage of a sales tax, so it appears they’ve latched onto another partial remedy for the province’s budget troubles — an income tax masquerading as health-care premiums.

And get this — in a rich bit of political theatre, Finance Minister Robin Campbell says the idea of reintroducing health-care premiums comes from Albertans themselves. The clear inference is that the government can’t be blamed if the unpopular fees make a return in the new budget; it’s Albertans’ idea.

“I’m keen on it because Albertans have said they want to do it,” Campbell said this week, suggesting the premiums could form part of the income tax system. “Albertans have been very clear as I’ve gone across the province that they understand they should be paying something for health care.”

These Albertans must be the same mysterious souls that Alison Redford used to channel to justify dubious decisions during her ill-fated stint as premier. Chat with your colleagues and friends, and you’re hard-pressed to find support for health-care premiums, but here Campbell is touring the province, bumping into all sorts of characters clamouring to pay more in taxes.

The problem, of course, is that the estimated $1 billion that would be raised by so-called premiums wouldn’t be dedicated to improving health care; it would just flow into general revenue, to be used as the government wishes. Perhaps if the Tories committed to using the new revenue to reduce treatment wait times, build more long-term care spaces or proceed more quickly with a replacement for the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, there might be more buy-in.

These are initiatives, of course, that the Tories have been promising to accomplish for years, with little result. Instead, the extra money is likely to be squandered, perhaps in part to ensure Alberta Health Services staff can continue to demonstrate indifference for taxpayers by racking up hefty cellphone bills well into the future.

The fact is Albertans do pay for health care already, despite Campbell’s ill-informed musings. Creating a warm and fuzzy so-called health-care premium is just one more way for the Tories to pluck the wallets of taxpayers. Alberta’s health-care spending is the second highest in the country per capita, excluding the territories, so it’s not a case of a lack of money.

Only Newfoundland-Labrador was expected to spend more in 2013, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, at $5,249, compared to Alberta at $4,662. Given our relatively young population, it seems odd that B.C. could provide coverage for $3,722 per person, and Quebec, the lowest-cost provider, for $3,651, according to the same set of figures. It is fair to say that Albertans are already paying a premium for health care — more than $1,000 a year for every man, woman and child, compared with Quebec.

Perhaps having read the political winds, weather vane extraordinaire Jim Prentice is now downplaying the likelihood of health-care premiums after near universal rejection from both sides of the political spectrum. That’s as it should be. This is the same government, after all, that announced watered down schools as a panacea for classroom shortages in newer communities in September. Today, we’re told that building proper-sized schools will save $20 million. It’s evident the government has no credibility when it comes to financial matters — whether it’s health care or education.

The government faces a dilemma: health-care spending has increased by an average of 8.7 per cent per year since 2001, U of C economists Ron Kneebone and Herb Emery noted during a recent meeting with the Herald editorial board.

Is the government going to increase taxes, or so-called health-care premiums, by an unsustainable amount each year, or is it going to take steps to ensure Alberta can deliver health-care at costs comparable to other provinces? Taxes are just a short-term fix for a problem that has been allowed to fester.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board. dmarsden@calgaryherald.com

Premier Jim Prentice has an impressive resume, when you consider his work in federal cabinet, where he helmed the Indian affairs, industry and environment portfolios — to say nothing of his stint as vice-chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

He’s just fortunate he never tried to improve delivery of health care during his charmed life of public service.

Less than two years ago, Alberta Health Services chairman Stephen Lockwood and his colleagues were fired for not stomping on the contracts of superboard executives, and instead, preparing to give them the $3.2 million they were entitled to in bonuses. The health minister at the time, Fred Horne, called the payments “absolutely unacceptable.”

“At a time when we’ve asked our front-line providers, including doctors, teachers and support workers, to take freezes in pay, the unwillingness of the Alberta Health Services board to reconsider its decision on at-risk pay is completely out of step with the government’s priorities and, more importantly, the priorities of Albertans,” said Horne.

It was the last year the bonuses were to be paid, and of course, they were paid, after Horne had taken the unprecedented step of dismantling the board. Only one of the 99 executives declined to take the cash.

“If AHS were to withhold the payment of this component of their compensation, AHS could be considered in breach of contract as pay at risk made up a part of these employment agreements,” Janet Davidson, who was appointed as a one-person replacement to the board, later wrote in a letter to her boss.

Prentice finds himself in similar circumstances today, with retiring MLAs collecting more than $5 million in transition allowances during what he’s called the biggest financial challenge in a generation because of slumping oil prices. And just like Lockwood, the premier is presiding at a time when public-sector workers are being softened up for wage concessions. MLAs have agreed to cut their own pay by five per cent and Prentice says he wants to have “respectful discussions” with provincial employees.

“I don’t know if much can be done at this point,” Prentice said of the $5 million in payments. “This arrangement was put in place by previous governments. It relates to prior years of service and I don’t think much can be done to change it.”

The premier calls the transition allowance “a legal entitlement,” but so were the AHS bonuses that cost Lockwood and the other board members their positions.

Colin Craig, Prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said Prentice could kill the payments retroactively if he wanted to. As proof, he noted that former premier Ralph Klein, whose administration brought in the transition allowance, eliminated the “golden parachute” pension plan that preceded it.

“The public would certainly want to see him take action on this,” said Craig. “I don’t think anyone can relate to getting a half-million-dollar payout when they decide to quit.”

The biggest irony of all is that Horne, who puffed up with indignation about the AHS bonuses two years ago, will receive $148,000 of taxpayers’ money for leaving his job.

Frankly, though, as horrible as the optics are, the retiring MLAs should receive their money, which ranges from $131,000 to $873,000, based on pay and years of service. As premier, Alison Redford cancelled the MLA severance pay program in 2012 and replaced it with higher base pay and annual RRSP payments of up to $27,000.

The departing MLAs were promised the money and the government should live up to the commitment, just as Lockwood and his colleagues tried to live up to their obligations to AHS executives.

“At the end of the day, it’s a word called integrity,’’ said Lockwood at the time. ‘‘And while I’m leader or chair of this board, we’ll continue to operate with integrity.”

Lockwood did conduct himself with integrity and it cost him his job, largely voluntary though it was. Prentice is also demonstrating integrity; he’s just lucky he isn’t answerable to a government that puts politics ahead of doing the right thing.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board.

It’s a sight I have never forgotten, despite the passage of many years. The towering tree, about the width of a car, had fallen on their tent, killing the campers instantly. A portion of the tree had been chewed away by a chainsaw, but the massive trunk was still in one piece, with bits of colourful nylon, mesh and rope from the tent extending into the spot that had been cleared for the removal of the bodies.

I was in my early teens and camping with my parents on Vancouver Island when I made the grim observation a day or two after the tragedy. I have thought about the accident from time to time over the ensuing four decades, and did so again this week, when the story of a Calgary couple who narrowly escaped a similar fate appeared in the newspaper. They didn’t just thank their maker for their lucky survival — they sued the federal government for $116,000 after a tree fell on their tent in 2012 during a camping trip in Jasper National Park.

The woman suffered cracked ribs and a broken arm in the incident at Whistlers Campground. Her partner ended up with a concussion, cuts and bruises — all because of “the failure of the defendants to properly maintain the campground in such a manner as would provide a reasonably safe location for the plaintiffs to enjoy the camping experience for which they had paid,” according to their statement of claim, which has not been proven in court.

The couple are entitled to pursue legal action after the harrowing ordeal; that’s their right. But I must confess to being puzzled about the merits of the suit. In its statement of defence, the government says employees “took all prudent and reasonable steps to ensure that visitors to the park, and to Whistlers campground in particular, would be reasonably safe from the falling of hazardous trees.”

Workers “specially trained in hazardous tree assessment” monitored the campground and removed those that posed a danger.

What more could the government have done to prevent such an act of God — “high winds and stormy weather” — which caused the tree to fall? Authorities could have cut down all the trees to further reduce the hazard, but most campers are drawn to the great outdoors by the natural beauty of their surroundings. We talk about the call of the wild, not the call of the mild.

The Calgary couple might want to consider staying on a boat if they hope to avoid any further brushes with death from falling trees, but even then, there’d be the risk of capsizing or being struck by another vessel in the darkness.

I wish the complainants good luck with their case. They’re certainly not the only ones to advance questionable lawsuits, after all. Michel and Lynda Thibodeau have been relentless in ensuring Air Canada lives up to its duty to provide service in French for passengers who demand it. In 2012, the airline was ordered to pay compensation because when Lynda asked an English-speaking flight attendant for 7Up, she was handed Sprite.

Then there are the poor people in Scenic Acres who took court action in hopes of blocking construction of a francophone school in their community. A nice swath of green space had been dedicated for school use, but when decades went by without construction, they assumed it would be their private playground forever.

The judge was having none of it and rejected the residents’ legal challenge.

“Our arguments were heard and education won out in this case,” board chairwoman Anne-Marie Boucher of the Conseil Scolaire Francosud said in a statement.

That’s the great thing about the legal system. It might hear some odd arguments, but generally, it reaches the right conclusion. In the Thidodeaus’ case, the Supreme Court subsequently denied them financial compensation, saying that while their French-language rights were violated, they did not qualify for monetary damages. Seems fair, and certainly much better than a tree landing on your tent.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board.

You have to wonder if the ragtag bunch of Wildrose MLAs are any more credible than those who picked up their paycheques and decided to join Premier Jim Prentice.

When informed that Speaker Gene Zwozdesky had ruled that the party’s rump will continue to serve as official Opposition — rather than the Liberals, who now hold the same number of seats in the legislature — Wildrose House Leader Shayne Saskiw seemed giddy.

“Given prior precedent, it is our belief this ruling strengthens our democracy,” he said. “In the last election, over 440,000 Albertans overwhelmingly voted for the Wildrose to be their voice in the legislature, a strong mandate neither the third nor the fourth parties received.”

Saskiw misses the point. It’s true that more than 440,000 Albertans voted for Wildrose in the 2012 election, the second highest number of votes cast for any party. It’s also a fact that nine of the party’s MLAs, including their leader, crossed the floor to join the ranks of the government. This on the heels of two others joining the Tories and another choosing to sit as an independent. On what basis does that now qualify the Wildrose to hold the hefty position of official Opposition, given that the Liberals also hold five seats in the legislature?

That would be like someone bragging that he had more than three times as much money in the bank as you had three years ago — essentially the date of the last general election — and arguing that even though you both have the same amount of resources today, he is somehow wealthier, or more entitled than you are.

People might shed a tear for those who squander a fortune, but they don’t accord them much respect. The fact most of the party’s representatives have betrayed their members, and more importantly, their voters, should be a source of shame, not faux pride. The Wildrose’s pedigree is shallow, rising from four seats to 17 in the last election. That compares to the Liberals and the New Democrats, who have been fixtures of provincial politics for decades.

The Speaker has relied upon incumbency in his ruling, meaning that since the Wildrose were the Opposition before the defections, they should be the Opposition tomorrow, barring another party emerging with more seats. He even discounts the idea of others joining the Liberals, suggesting that wouldn’t be a proper party caucus, just a convenient political alignment meant to wrest away the position of official Opposition.

What Zwozdesky’s ruling overlooks, in relying upon incumbency for its goalposts, is the smell test. Here’s what we have: Much of the official Opposition plays footsie with the Tories, neglecting its parliamentary responsibilities in the process, it could be argued, and then decides to cross the floor to join them. The Speaker, selected by the Tory-dominated legislature, decides that the Wildrose is still the official Opposition, even though it has broken the trust of thousands of voters and now has the same number of seats as the Liberals. He has chosen interim Wildrose leader Heather Forsyth and a quartet of little-known politicians to be the Opposition, instead of Liberal Leader Raj Sherman, Laurie Blakeman, David Swann, Kent Hehr and Darshan Kang — all of them household names and possessing strong public records. It was Blakeman, remember, who proposed a common-sense bill to guarantee access to gay-straight alliances in schools — an initiative the Prentice government botched.

The Speaker can selectively cite precedent from here and there, but it doesn’t square with the betrayal of voters. It doesn’t pass the smell test. The Liberals should be the official Opposition.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board. dmarsden@calgaryherald.com

The people who like to make a career out of bogging down proposed pipelines have a friend in the Assembly of First Nations’ new national chief.

“Canada will no longer develop pipelines, no longer develop transmission lines, or any infrastructure on our lands as business as usual. That is not on,” insisted Perry Bellegarde during his acceptance speech Wednesday.

“If our lands and resources are to be developed, it will be done only with our fair share of the royalties, with our ownership of the resources and jobs for our people. It will be done on our terms and our timeline. Canada is Indian land.”

Well, for starters, I guess we can dispense with referring to aboriginals as First Nations, now that their own national chief calls his people Indians. But you have to wonder where Bellegarde thinks the $10 billion a year Ottawa spends on his constituents comes from. It comes from income tax, corporate tax and other fees — much of it derived from the energy industry and those who enjoy good incomes working in the sector. His bluster, if permitted to be carried out, would kill the Canadian economy, and perhaps allow Bellegarde to return to simpler times, ones that don’t require aboriginals to apply for jobs like the rest of us.

And who is Bellegarde, elected by just 291 chiefs, to be the final arbiter of which infrastructure projects should be allowed to proceed? By his reasoning, Canada should close the National Energy Board and other regulatory bodies and turn everything over to him and his insular cadre of chiefs who can seldom agree on anything. It’s a worrisome prospect, given the conditions that prevail on most reserves, despite hefty increases in government support for our First Nations people.

Bellegarde has signalled what he’ll do if he becomes frustrated with negotiations over new pipelines and other critical infrastructure: “Then you do the legal, political, activist strategy. All three have to work concertedly to bring people to the table.”

Once again, it’s Bellegarde’s way or the highway. He suggests that First Nations would take legal action to further their interests, but if they lose in court, say, because other people have rights too, and many bands have signed treaties with the Crown, they’d engage in an activist strategy, which is code for protests.

Thankfully, a private member’s bill has been introduced by Conservative MP Wai Young that would impose tougher penalties on those who damage or interfere with critical infrastructure.

Young said she crafted the bill at the urging of industry, especially the Canadian Electricity Association and railway companies who’ve had a problem with thieves stealing railway spikes. Bill C-639 would create a new Criminal Code offence for anyone who damages, destroys, incapacitates, obstructs, interrupts or interferes with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of any critical infrastructure.

Toronto lawyer Ed Prutschi told the National Post that when he read the bill, his first reaction was: “Is this about pipeline protection?”

“It would have application for pipeline protests,” Prutschi said, adding that the legislation doesn’t require damage to be done — to be guilty, offenders would just need to be in the way of critical infrastructure. He said the bill could be applied to the protests on Burnaby Mountain, where demonstrators in British Columbia have been thwarting Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Young’s bill makes a great deal of sense. Canadians have a right to protest and to make their views known, but they don’t have the right to cause damage to a business — either by impeding its legitimate work, or worse, by engaging in mischief or violence.

We’ve seen how ineffective existing laws are at preventing protests from dragging on far longer than necessary to make a point. First Nations deserve a fair hearing over their grievances and to be consulted over pipelines (which they have been), but it’s essential that Canadians do all they can to prevent vital infrastructure from being targeted by radical protesters — both aboriginal and non-aboriginal. Young’s bill is a key part of the safeguards that are necessary. Laws are what keep Canada peaceful, not something people can disregard at their convenience.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board.

Protests are all about making a point, but that doesn’t mean they should be a free-for-all, trampling on the rights of others and flouting the law. If there were no expectations of civil behaviour, after all, there would be anarchy, with any hothead with an axe to grind given free rein to cause chaos.

Some of the protesters on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia have done just that, spitting on police officers while ignoring a court injunction that allowed Kinder Morgan to carry out studies for its expanded Trans Mountain pipeline. Const. Jim Ingram was one of the police officers who were spat on and had garbage thrown at them.

“The reality is we’re human too and it’s a frustration that we have to control,” he said. “I don’t like having garbage thrown over me, I don’t like somebody spitting at me. To some degree I have to protect myself.”

Officers arrested more than 100 protesters for crossing the perimeter set up by police, but civil contempt charges were tossed out on Nov. 27 because Kinder Morgan admitted the GPS co-ordinates it provided to the Supreme Court to gain the injunction didn’t correspond to where crews were conducting their work.

“The concern is that people have been arrested and subjected to restraints on their liberty,” said Judge Austin Cullen in his decision, although a small number of protesters still face criminal charges for assault or obstruction of justice.

Earlier in the day, protesters locked themselves to the front doors of the courthouse in an effort to deny Kinder Morgan access to the building. The demonstrators revealed a glaring lack of principle: hooligans disobey police and are called to answer for their behaviour, but rather than peacefully address the matter, they try to bar Kinder Morgan’s lawyers and the public from the courthouse in a nasty perversion of justice.

There’s certainly been a willingness to break the law on the West Coast over the proposed pipeline expansion. Eleven-year-old Kate Fink-Jensen was taken to the Burnaby Mountain protest and was allowed to cross the police line — along with her friend — on Nov. 23 by her parents.

“They’re 11 years old, for heaven’s sakes,” B.C. Premier Christy Clark told The Province newspaper. “Teaching your kids that it’s OK for them to break the law when they’re 11 years old isn’t OK. I don’t think it’s OK for parents to support that for their own children.”

Clark is right, of course. Professor Robert Huish teaches a course at Halifax’s Dalhousie University that requires students to organize a protest as part of their course work.

“Universities have been very central in organizing protest and dissent for hundreds of years. From Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr., university-educated individuals have always had a role in that,” he told the National Post.

I asked Huish if it was acceptable for parents to take their 11-year-old children to protests, and he noted that peaceful, legal assemblies can be positive experiences.

“But allowing and encouraging children to engage in illegal acts, even misdemeanours, brings up a real ethical challenge,” Huish, a professor in the department of international development studies, said in an e-mail.

“In civil disobedience tactics, the idea is that breaking the law makes your message stronger, but encouraging minors to be at risk of arrest or in violation of the law is a far departure from the original message, and one that the protesting parent no longer has control of. It’s hardly acceptable to put minors at risk in this way.”

And spitting at police officers?

“Non-violent protest does not involve any sort of aggression against law enforcement, so when protesters take to spitting and chucking garbage at police, their core message of protest gets trounced by the act of aggression, and with it, public support tends to wane. Even if it was one rogue demonstrator, it challenges the entire message of the group.”

It’s obvious the Burnaby Mountain protesters could use a lesson in civility. It’s too bad Huish is at the opposite side of the country.

David Marsden is a member of the Herald editorial board.

Re: “A skills shortage, or a communications problem?” Nov. 5.

I read the latest instalment of the Work in Progress series with interest. The article offered a number of interesting perspectives on meeting labour requirements, but I would like to offer a counterpoint to the argument that post-secondary institutions neither should nor do prepare learners for careers, and offer an additional explanation as to why the national unemployment rate is stubbornly high.

In the article, Joel Westheimer asserted that the purpose of education should not be for outfitting individuals for the working world, and he provided the reasoning that education institutions cannot possibly predict the labour force needs of jobs five or 10 years into the future. As a long-serving leader within the community college system, I maintain that the primary purpose of applied education is to prepare learners for the workforce, and I would add that when we reason that education only prepares learners for today or tomorrow, but not both, we fail to account for the broader learning outcomes graduates attain.

At Bow Valley College (BVC), we provide applied education that blends both theory and practice with soft skills, including teamwork, communication skills, intercultural competence and active citizenship. Indeed, colleges work closely with industry leaders and community stakeholders to ensure our curriculum and learning resources are responsive to changing workforce needs as well as demographic and economic trends. This model delivers work-ready graduates to the labour force who are productive on Day 1 and who have the skills and disposition to be resilient as industries evolve or new ones are created.

On the matter of a labour shortage and a high unemployment rate, I’d like to offer an additional perspective that was overlooked in the article. Many new Canadians face significant barriers when trying to obtain employment that is matched to their skills and potential. Even though many of Canada’s immigrants are highly skilled and educated in their home countries, they experience difficulty finding viable employment due to lack of foreign credential recognition and Canadian workplace experience, or perceived language barriers.

As a responsive community college, BVC addresses those challenges through services like our Corporate Readiness Training Program. The program blends enhanced language training, employment preparation and workplace culture, and a work placement, through which clients gain Canadian workforce experience and a Canadian reference. Additionally, our Directions for Immigrants centre supports internationally educated professionals with challenging accreditation exams for regulated professions in Canada. Clients are able to leverage their success to resume careers in their field here in Alberta.

We still have a lot of work to do to address the skills shortage issue, and the task should not be up to graduates alone to face. Higher education, industry and government must work together to support more people with securing viable employment, provide job training that equips workers with their next competency, and ensure newcomers to Canada participate in the economy in roles suited to their skills and potential. Only then will the skills gap narrow.

Sharon Carry is president and CEO of Bow Valley College.

Just seven months after rejecting a motion on gay-straight alliances, the Alberta legislature gets another crack at getting this right.

Much like Liberal MLA Kent Hehr’s previous motion, his colleague Laurie Blakeman’s Bill 202 would ensure that schools are unable to block students from establishing such alliances.

There’s been much said and written over the last week or so as to whether Danielle Smith and her Wildrose MLAs will support it. Clearly, the Wildrose is very vulnerable at the moment around issues pertaining to gay rights.

The bigger question, however, is not whether Smith and her caucus will support the bill, but rather, whether the governing PCs will support it. To that end, the views of Smith on Bill 202 are somewhat less relevant than the views of Premier Jim Prentice and Education Minister Gordon Dirks.

Blakeman’s bill would amend the section of the Education Act which deals with “welcoming, caring, respectful and safe” environments. It would add the provision that students be allowed to establish gay-straight alliances and refer to them as such – essentially taking away a school’s right to veto those students who themselves which to create more welcoming environments.

The bill would also delete Section 11.1 from the Human Rights Act, which currently mandates that schools provide written notice to parents when issues of sexual orientation are discussed. The vagueness of the clause, combined with the threat of a human rights complaint, have made it safer to simply avoid discussing such issues.

In both cases, the status quo runs counter to the education minister’s own stated goal of having Alberta schools be welcoming environments for gay students. Coincidentally, his department is in the process of gathering statistics on the number of gay-straight alliances in each school district, although it’s not clear to what end.

Dirks has paid lip service to the value of gay-straight alliances, but has not stated whether he will support Bill 202. But what the education minister really needs to explain is whether he feels students who wish to establish a club promoting tolerance and inclusion should be overruled by the school. What is accomplished by sending the message that such a club is unwelcome at the school — public, Catholic, or otherwise?

The Wildrose, at least, have staked out a position of sorts on Bill 202. Monday, they released amendments to the bill, which on the surface make it appear as though they’re prepared to support it. Unfortunately, the amendment would essentially render the bill moot, leaving the Wildrose in the position of defending the very status quo this bill is trying to change.

The Wildrose has proposed creating an exemption for Catholic and other religious schools, which would allow them to continue to reject the alliances. Instead, the Wildrose amendment proposes to find other ways of supporting gay students. Still, it empowers these schools to reject gay-straight alliances on the very basis of them being explicitly to support gay students.

No school would be forced to establish a gay-straight alliance and no student would be forced to join one, so it’s hard to see where any competing interest of religious freedom exists. Given the mounting problems for the Wildrose, it’s understandable they’d want to be seen as supporting Bill 202, but if anything, these amendments undermine what Blakeman is trying to achieve.

There is a danger here for both the Wildrose and the PCs. Albertans are not necessarily clamouring for gay-straight alliances in schools, but there is little tolerance for anti-gay politicians. The Wildrose learned that the hard way in 2012, and presumably the Tories understand that, too.

There are far more important issues that Alberta politicians need to tackle. That, however, does not constitute an argument against Bill 202. If MLAs wish to demonstrate that they are not hung up on issues of sexuality, then they should swiftly pass Bill 202, and move on to other matters.

Rob Breakenridge is the co-host of Kingkade & Breakenridge on NewsTalk 770. rob.breakenridge@corusent.com

The chairwoman of Vancouver’s school board declared it “bizarre” last week that a group of parents is taking legal action to overturn policy allowing self-identified transgender students to use the washroom of their choice.

Leave aside the mysterious speed with which self-styled “transgender issues” have transformed society in ways that would have left us slack-jawed a decade ago. What’s “bizarre” is that an elected official can be so overconfident in her correctness that she can be so utterly dismissive of parents who are also voters.
Yet a new report being released today argues such anti-parental attitudes are much more than politically risky. They defy solid social science research.
“Parents are their child’s primary sex educator,” writes Peter Jon Mitchell in the study issued by the Ottawa-based Institute for Marriage and Family Canada. “They know the sensitivities of their children and are perfectly placed to parent their children through critical stages of development.”
Mitchell isn’t just stating a personal sensitivity. The American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, he notes, holds that parents are uniquely able to “respond to the needs and curiosity level of their individual child, offering no more or less information that their child is able to ask and understand.”
And debunking the myth of the red-faced mom or dad being tight-lipped or stuttering about discussing the birds and the bees with their children, he cites a New Brunswick survey showing 96 per cent of parents were comfortable communicating to their own children about sex. That doesn’t mean there’s no place in the classroom for education about sexuality. An opinion poll for the Ontario Physical Health Education Association found 87 per cent of parents feel there should be a sex-ed component in health curriculum.
But Mitchell makes the case extremely effectively in Making Sex Education Work that parents must maintain a full and respected leadership role in educating their children about sexual matters. That’s not a moral matter. It’s a matter of safeguarding optimal sexual health through the stages of a child’s development, he shows.
The New Brunswick study, for example, found parental support to be strongly correlated with the very success of that province’s sexual health education programs. The same has been found on a much wider scale below the Canada-U.S. border.
“An ongoing survey by the American-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has consistently found that teens rate parents as the most influential source in their sexual decision making. Only four to five per cent of teens reported that school and educators are most influential.”
The finding flatly contradicts the claims relied on by the Ontario government, for example, that the current sexual education curriculum is “taking a toll on the health” of today’s students, Mitchell writes. On the basis of that claim, Ontario sought to introduce a revamped sexuality curriculum that would have treated children in Grade 7 to instruction on anal and oral sex, and promoted “self-discovery through masturbation” to 11-year-olds. Parental outrage forced a reset. A revamped version is scheduled for use in schools next September.
Whether it will be an improvement or not, Mitchell cites the previous backlash as a vivid example of what happens when professional educators and the politicians who curry their favour ignore the indissoluble and inviolable bond between parents and children. There’s a pretty simple reason for that. Parents give their children life, and so have a natural, biological interest in forming the attitudes and approaches those kids will take to the human means for passing on that life.
“Sexuality education cannot be divorced from values,” Mitchell writes. “This is true whether one is liberal or conservative, religious or non-religious. Sexuality involves human interaction at the most intimate level and facilitates the creation of human life.”
Most of us understand that intuitively. Bizarrely, our political and pedantic class apparently needs to be reminded of it over and over again.

Peter Stockland is publisher of Convivium magazine and a senior fellow with Cardus think-tank.