Some pension suggestions

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

Further to Elly’s interesting post about pensions, some have been thinking about this for quite a while. Here’s what then Governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge suggested in a speech in Montreal in November 2005 needed to be done to address some of the concerns Elly quite correctly noted are even more important issues today.

“If defined-benefit plans are to survive, grow, and provide a source of funding for long-term, riskier assets, it is important that Canadian policy-makers consider taking steps to rebalance the incentives for sponsors to operate defined-benefit plans. Let me mention a few of the things that could be done.

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The looming politics of pensions

Posted by ealboim under Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Elly Alboim

Fixing the Canadian pension system is now emerging as one of the urgent public policy priorities arising from the financial meltdown. It is also becoming a significant political priority because not fixing it will likely have significant electoral consequences.

When Canada’s governments came together a decade ago to ensure the sustainability of the Canada Pension Plan, the result was a triumph of political will and good public policy. The CPP has become a hybrid somewhere in between a fully funded plan and the pay-as-you-go pyramid scheme that many other countries cling to because they are unwilling to set premiums high enough to sustain future benefits.

The CPP is now sound although its maximum annual pay out still falls below $10,000.

That achievement masked an earlier failure to come to terms with the future costs of the other part of the public pension system, Old Age Security and its low income companion program, the Guaranteed Income Supplement. The OAS is clawed back progressively as income grows but the claw back doesn’t fully recover all payments until fairly high (and politically sustainable) thresholds of income. It is also indexed against inflation. Further, eligibility is based on individual income not family income the way the GIS is. That means that a low income partner in a high income family still qualifies for OAS, sometimes at the full benefit level.

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Cable canoodling

Posted by padams under Media Commentary

Paul Adams

The CTV/Canwest Global campaign to get us to pay for their local stations through cable fees seems to be breaking new ground. Not only are the TV networks using their news programs to shill for their request to the CRTC individually, they have now teamed up to make the front pages of a Canwest newspaper part of their PR campaign.

Today’s Ottawa Citizen has a front page story celebrating the local CTV station’s “Save local television” event. 

A “huge crowd” turned out, and local anchor Max Keeping “appeared touched” by the crowd. 

There was no mention of the fact that CTV recently shut down the evening news at its “A Channel” affiliate here in Ottawa.

The fact that it is lobbying for an new cable fee is mentioned only near the end of the story and the likelihood that this would translate into an increase in cable rates for consumers is not mentioned at all.

Nor is there any indication that anyone at the Citizen phoned up the cable companies to hear their vociferous objections to the plan.

Luckily, Shaw Cable purchased a full-page add in the Citizen today making their case — the only place in the paper where it is acknowledged.

What a journalistic embarrassment.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton

PMs redux: Chretien and Mulroney still make news

Posted by jsallot under All, Media Commentary

Jeff Sallot

The private business affairs of two colourful  former prime ministers continue to play out publicly,  providing fresh material for journalists.

So, thank you Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien.

The Mulroney case, involving cash payments from a German lobbyist for arms dealers, has been unfolding at a commission of inquiry, making headlines for many days.

The next chapter in the Chretien story opens at the Supreme Court of Canada this month.
Mr. Mulroney threw The Globe and Mail, the paper that first broke the cash payments story,  a curve the other day when he testified editors had suppressed a related story that would have placed him in a better light.

That’s not what Globe editor Ed Greenspon remembers. He says Mr. Mulroney tried to barter his way out of trouble, promising to provide information for another explosive  story if the paper would spike the cash payments story.

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The negative cycle

Posted by ealboim under Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Elly Alboim

The Conservatives’ attack ads have unleashed a torrent of comment that splits along a traditional divide – those who find negative advertising morally repellent (particularly in the current economic context) and those who report on it dispassionately as a political tactic.

The latter group, almost exclusively journalists and political strategists, generally says that while negative ads are offensive to most, they “work” because they tend to move opinion among target audiences. That is indisputably correct in certain circumstances and at certain times. And because they work, it is hard to imagine political strategists foregoing their use.

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Ghosts of prime ministers past

Posted by padams under All

Paul Adams

As I was watching Brian Mulroney’s testimony on TV this morning I received an email drawing my attention to this recent letter to the Globe and Mail from Doug Gibson, who edited the memoirs of both Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin:

Toronto — Lysiane Gagnon (An Atypical Politician With A Pen – April 27) is unfair to Brian Mulroney when she includes him among Canadian politicians whose books were “written by professionals hired for the job.”

There is nothing wrong with using a ghostwriter; some of my best friends are ghostwriters. But credit must go to those who, like Mr. Mulroney, spend years working hard to write their own book. What he did was so remarkable that, as his editor, I decided to illustrate the hardcover edition’s endpapers with pages from his handwritten manuscript.

It would appear that Ms. Gagnon missed that edition of his Memoirs.

Publisher emeritus, Douglas Gibson Books

Paul Adams just learned this morning that he is one of Doug Gibson’s best friends. He is also a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty.

What I missed

Posted by cwaddell under All, Media Commentary, Political Strategy

Christopher Waddell

Having been out of the country for a week where news about all the important political things happening in Canada is hard to find, here are a couple of observations.

Is there so little for the House of Commons to do that a committee really spent its time investigating the employer-employee relationship between an MP and caregivers hired to work for her family, including having the caregivers testify? I had thought Parliament couldn’t be more irrelevant than a committee investigating who should be the captain of Team Canada at the world hockey championships but I guess I was wrong.  I’d hold off though for a while though on those stories about more and more people don’t vote and why it is so hard to persuade good people to give up interesting careers to enter politics to help improve public policy. The answer is a little too self-evident at the moment.

With the media staggered by a collapse in advertising due to the recession, why is so much media attention being devoted to the Conservatives launching an advertising campaign against Michael Ignatieff, including all the details of the campaign and the ads? Wouldn’t it be smarter and certainly more financially rewarding to force the Conservatives to buy ads?

Finally there is a very good review by Ron Graham of Ignatieff’s book True Patriot Love in the latest Literary Review of Canada. Although he has written widely on a range of subjects, to those in politics Graham is best known as the writer of Jean Chretien’s two books, Straight from the Heart and My Years as Prime Minister.

Liberal convention post-script

Posted by padams under All

Paul Adams

Something that occurred to me only after the Liberal convention ended was how there had been absolutely no discussion — at least within my earshot — of the realities of the five-party system that we have in Canada today.

Between 1993 and 2000, the Liberals were able to win majorities on the cheap because one of the main features of the fractured party system was a division on the right between the Progressive Conservatives and Reform/Alliance. In 1997, the Liberal majority was achieved with just 38.5% of the popular vote. Stephen Harper fell less than one percentage point short of that mark in 2008, but came more than 20 seats short of a majority.

After the two parties of the right united as the current Conservative Party, and the Greens appeared as a significant force (in terms of votes if not seats), the party arithmetic shifted. With the Conservatives now being able to claim something in the order of 30% of Canadians as their “core” support and the Bloc Québécois likely being able to claim a large share of Quebec seats for the foreseeable future, it is exceptionally difficult for the Liberal Party to win a majority, given that it must share the “progressive” vote with the NDP and the Greens.

Put another way, while the Liberals can reasonably hope to be competitive to form the next government, based on recent polls, they would have to catch an unusual wave to sweep them back to a majority. A mere swing of the political pendulum will not do. It would likely require a re-energization of our politics, bringing a significant number of the current mass of non-voters off the bench.

This could happen, of course, if the economy continues to sour, or if somehow Michael Ignatieff breaks through to a Trudeau-like or Obama-like level of popularity. 

It is much more likely that it does not. If the Liberals win the next election — still a big if — it will probably be as a minority.

There certainly was no sign at the Liberal convention that this reality has sunk in.

There are some people who are hopeful that the Liberals will recognize their precarious situation, and that this will lead them to greater cooperation with the left — in particular the NDP. Former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy has argued for this. Former NDP apparatchik Robin Sears, who supported the coalition, is now arguing in Policy Options for electoral as well as parliamentary cooperation between the two parties.

This is by no means the only available avenue for Liberals in their current situation. Before the coalition was even on the radar, and when Stéphane Dion was still Liberal leader, I argued in the Globe and Mail that the from the point of view of their own self-interest, Liberals would be unwise to ignore soft-Conservative supporters who might be wooed their way, especially since NDP and Green supporters might be more attracted to their party if this made them a more genuine threat to topple the Conservatives. A little bit of that seems to be happening now.

All that having been said, all the parties need to start reckoning with the implications of the multi-party reality in which we now live. Liberals should be having a vigorous debate on this subject, just as New Democrats are. They should be considering how their parliamentary  and electoral tactics should be adjusted to accomodate this new reality.

What has happened instead is that the Liberals learned a simple lesson from the failed coalition last fall and the huge fillip it gave the Tories in the polls: Don’t go there.

The truth is that the idea of Dion as prime minister was probably more poisonous to the coalition than the idea of parliamentary cooperation between parties, along with the Conservatives’ strenuous efforts to taint the idea with its association with separatism because of the support of the BQ.

But for now the Liberals are not doing any hard thinking about how to thrive in this 21st century environment. Mostly they hope that with a new leader, refilled coffers and a reinvigorated organization, they can resume their role as Canada’s “natural governing party” — the natural governing majority party, that is.

Not likely.

Paul Adams teaches journalism at Carleton and is researching a book on the Liberal Party of Canada.

The endless wheel of EI reform

Posted by ealboim under Political Strategy

Elly Alboim

What goes around comes around. 

It was 14 years ago that the Liberals walked away from an ambitious Social Security Review and focused solely on reforming the unemployment insurance program. Beyond changing its name, the government moved the program along the continuum from an income support social program to a rules-based insurance program. The impetus was the substantial deficits the program had run during the recession of the ‘90s. They were driven, in part, by the crazy quilt of regulations for qualification based on weeks of work, leading to the infamous definitions of Short Weeks and Long Weeks and the absurd paper burden that was generated as employers filled out and filed Records of Employment.

Key to the reforms was the introduction of the hours-based qualification criterion which was designed to ensure that people had a strong tie to the work force before they got access to EI. It weeded out many part timers, newcomers to the work force and cut into the pattern of people working just enough to qualify for EI. The hours required varied according to regional unemployment rates and seasonal work patterns. The numbers of people qualifying drifted downwards and the EI surplus grew – in part as it was designed to do because of the automatic stabilizer EI is supposed to be during the ups and downs of the economic cycle.

As the surpluses grew, successive Liberal governments began to weaken the reforms, rolling back reform measure after reform measure largely because of pressure from its Quebec and Atlantic caucuses.  But the surpluses rolled on, despite reductions in premiums, and the Conservative opposition savaged EI as a disguised tax grab. They, along with the other opposition parties, created the fiction of a “cumulative EI surplus”, knowing full well that the annual surpluses and deficits were rolled into the government’s bottom line annually. There was never a separate account – it was simply a notional accounting device.

Now, the pressure’s on again to move the dial further back towards undisguised income support. The  device? Further reduce the hours of qualification and make them uniform across the country. The argument? It is fairer regionally and individually because so many people have been disenfranchised despite paying premiums. Unremarked upon is that a significant uptake on EI will further weaken the already loose  tie between premiums and benefits and result in ever growing deficits despite the Conservatives earnest but meaningless efforts to have EI be a stand-alone, self financing operation.   

So the Liberals who first tightened the rules because of the fiscal implications are now ready to virtually complete the roll back and turn back the clock.  The Conservatives hold to the notion that it is OK to have forced premium payments with no access to benefits. They also continue to hold to the view that even at its current low levels of benefits, EI can be a disincentive to work – a view that seems to ignore current economic realities.

But mostly, they have learned – as all governments have learned before them – that EI is another one of those “third rails” of Canadian politics. There are two fundamental truths.  Systemic and comprehensive reform is impossible politically and once you start changing the rules, the demands for further change are endless. 

And since it is unlikely that the Conservatives will permit an election on this issue – we will enter yet another process of tinkering. The result of which will last only until the next cycle when the old imperatives reassert themselves and it all comes around again.

Elly Alboim is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communications and a principal in the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, specializing in strategic communications and public opinion.

Don Newman’s retirement

Posted by padams under All, Media Commentary

Some reaction:

Tim Powers

Carly Weeks

John Doyle

Susan Delacourt