Selling The CBC: Could It Happen?

I’ll just go on record in order to state the obvious: the CBC isn’t going anywhere. At least not now, it isn’t. But the big news today [or least it seems big to me] is that the federal Department of Finance has listed several large Crown corporations that lose money each year, including giants like the CBC, VIA Rail and the National Arts Centre. These corporations are listed as assets that the government could sell, and was initially mentioned back in November during the infamous “fiscal update” that nearly spawned a constitutional crisis.

The asset review includes enterprise Crown corporations not dependent on subsidies, but will consider selling corporations like the CBC that aren’t fiscally viable:

“The reviews will also examine other holdings in which the government competes directly with private enterprises, earn income from property or performs a commercial activity,” states a Finance briefing note dated Dec. 2, 2008. “It includes Crown corporations that are not self-sustaining even though they are of a commercial nature.”

The government will look at holdings in which it competes with private enterprises. You mean the way the CBC competes with CTV or Canwest? Crown corporations that are not self-sustaining as a commercial venture. Again, the CBC?

There are a few reasons that I don’t think the CBC would get sold off, however, the primary one being that it remains a powerful voice that advocates for it’s own behalf, and is seen by millions of Canadians as iconic. Nor have any Conservatives so much as hinted it would be sold, which pretty much nixes the idea outright. As for VIA Rail, the 2009-10 fiscal budget includes a $500 million “stimulus” expenditure for it, so I can hardly imagine the government would sell something that it’s already allocated funding for.

But what’s really interesting, and it was more caught by Macleans writer Paul Wells than myself, is that the review is based upon the January 27 budget that has taken the assumption that the government will be able to raise $4 billion through the sale of assets in this fiscal calender year. Which means two possibilities: the Conservative government will be forced to make the difficult decisions that conservative voters expected of them when they elected a conservative government to power; or the deficit will rise from a projected $50 billion to $54 billion.

Worse still for the minority government, even if they did want to enact fiscally conservative policies that sell off non-viable assets, under the Financial Administration Act, Parliament could vote down any attempts at privatizing these corporations. The Conservatives could put in a motion to sell the CBC tomorrow, and the opposition would vote it down outright.

The CBC have a revenue stream of $565.5 million, with a taxpayer subsidy of $1.1 billion, and an expenditure total of $1.7 billion. By subtracting the expenses from revenue you see a loss of over $1.1 billion, or exactly what the subsidy is from taxpayers. Essentially Canadians are subsidizing 100% of the financial losses of a corporation that loses money on a 3:1 ratio to income. As appalling as that is, Canadians will likely maintain the status quo, and the CBC will remain a public corporation. And when you think of the $10.5 billion going to General Motors of Canada in the famous bailout deal, consider that’s only 9 and a half years of what is the normal subsidization for the CBC.

This article is featured on the National Post Full Comment.

Heroin Is Illegal, Except When The Government Buys It For You

In a scientific study, more than 300 addicts in Montreal and Vancouver will be supplied with free heroin in order to see how effective the substitute painkiller Dilaudid is to treat addiction. I can only imagine that advertisement in the newspaper. In previous tests, even addicts have been unable to tell the difference between heroin and Dilaudid. But in order to properly test the effectiveness, the three-year project, called “Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness”, will have some addicts given Dilaudid and a control group heroin.

Does anyone see this as a potentially immoral study? Are these addicts expected to even survive to the completion of this project?

There is some good news:

Dr. Martin Schechter of the University of B.C. said the Canadian Institute of Health Research has agreed to fund the research costs for the study.

And some bad news:

He said the researchers are still waiting on Vancouver Coastal Health and the Quebec Ministry of Health to fund the clinical care costs of the study.

No matter how one tries to spin this, if one lives in British Columbia, ones tax dollars will be going toward the funding of shooting heroin into the arms of drug addicts. Free needles. Free crack pipes. Now free heroin. Welcome to Canada. How may we assist in your absconding of personal responsibility for poor life choices?

This article is featured on the National Post Full Comment.

EKOS Shows Liberals With Lead In Polls

Further to my previous post about the posturing on Employment Insurance, no doubt some will begin to pay more attention to how the federal parties are currently stacking up in the polls. Of note, a new CBC-EKOS poll of a rather large sample, 10,896 respondents, has shown a slight lead for the Liberal party:

It’s rather strange that the headline is so dramatic, particularly announcing that a “Minority government possible for Liberals” when the lead shown in the polling is not only 33.5 to 32.3, but well within the statistical margin of error. The CBC suggests that news of the federal deficit reaching as high as $50 billion is the reason that the Liberals have pulled ahead, but that news wasn’t released until almost the very end of the polling. Jim Flaherty announced the massive figure last Tuesday, May 26, or just 2 days before polling ended. EKOS does show an upward trend since May 26:

Personally, I think that the pollsters are reading a little too much into the tea leaves based upon minor undercurrents in the political stream. Obviously people are going to connect the Ruby Dhalla story with a decline in the EKOS poll, and the deficit increase with the Liberal surge, but more than that I think what this shows us is that political polling is a very fickle game. The current numbers aren’t all that far out of sync with what we’ve been seeing for what seems like forever, or at least for the past two years. It’s true that the Liberals are far higher than what they polled under Stephane Dion, but 32.3 isn’t a significant loss in polling for the Conservatives. In fact when I ran my 2008 election poll tracker, the Conservatives were floundering at 32.8 on October 6, and went on to win the election and a near-majority government.

I think it’s a little premature for the CBC to begin trumpeting the success of the Liberal party just yet. Let’s also not forget how close Nanos was polling the Liberals in the previous election before becoming the least accurate pollster on that account. What I actually find most interesting in the battle for the “cult of personality”, Stephen Harper continues to lead the anointed Michael Ignatieff in popularity, with 30% choosing him as the best Prime Minister and 26% wanting Ignatieff. The simple math, then, shows that despite 33.5% of people self-identifying as Liberal voters, 7.5% don’t want Michael Ignatieff as Prime Minister.

Related

The full EKOS report.

Angus Reid also shows lead for Liberals.

Dan Arnold has analysis on the polls [Liberal-supportive blog]

Employment Insurance Reform More Politics Than Economics

It’s the policy that the Liberals say they’re willing to fight an election on, and the one that the Conservatives say is “socialism”. The fight to lower eligibility to 360 hours, or nine weeks of full-time work, has been championed by the vocal members of the Liberal Party, even if it is something that the NDP and Bloc Quebecois have been advocating for years. The Liberals could probably be able to find support from the other parties in government, though they might just find it difficult to stipulate that the change would be temporary, something the Prime Minister scoffed at. That will be the contentious part of any changes to eligibility for the unemployment program, particularly since the Liberal plan is contingent upon being an emergency measure for the recession in order to fend off the Conservative attacks that it will add payroll taxes on a permanent basis.

Every opposition leader tries to find a policy he thinks he can rally support behind, an issue that unifies the base and attracts new voters. Stephane Dion thought that he had found it by making the carbon tax the central plank of his candidacy. It failed. Now Michael Ignatieff believes that he can rally behind a new objective:

“I just know in my guts as I go across the country, that we have an EI system that is not purpose-built for the most serious economic crisis since 1945. And we have to fix it and we have to fix it now. We’re in a crisis situation.”

Lowering the eligibility of Employment Insurance to 360 hours in a single national EI eligibility rule is being proposed by the NDP [unenforceable because it's a private member's bill] in order to change the current system that has 58 economic regions that are determined by the unemployment rate. The cost of offering up easier access is certainly no trifle: $1.5 billion. Currently the baseline for qualification is only 420 hours, but a person would have to live in an area with unemployment greater than 12.9%, which doesn’t exist west of Atlantic Canada. Even then the weeks of eligible benefits are limited to 31, or just shy of eight months. A person in an economic region with 6% and under wouldn’t qualify until 700 hours [17.5 weeks] to receive a mere 19 weeks of benefits in return. The Liberals want to scrap it all, and simply make the baseline 360 hours without economic regional assessments.

The problem with the political wrangling in this case is that while it might sound appealing on paper, it doesn’t actually help the currently unemployed very much. As Macleans magazine reports, a 2007 study by the Ministry of Human Resources and Skills Development found that almost one in five workers in Canada wouldn’t have enough hours to qualify for E.I., regardless of lowering the eligibility rules, particularly those Canadians who have been laid off in this recession long ago. Some people losing their jobs at the time the rules are changed might help them, but the people the NDP and Liberals claim they want to help, the currently unemployed, would still be up the creek without a paddle.

Each political party has taken their own stand on Employment Insurance reform, but without an election to force the issue, it’s unlikely that we’ll see any changes beyond what the Conservatives have already offered in job training and extended benefits. Even if the Conservatives would like to be more generous on their position, they can’t. It’s a political issue now, and as such they’re prepared to fight the Liberals on it, even if it means flirting with a fourth election since 2004.