Let Kevin Page Do His Job

I know it feels like a decade since the Conservatives swept into power with bold new promises of responsible and accountable government. Transparent and responsive government. For a party that was labelled with a hidden agenda by the Liberals, their strongest selling point to mainstream Canadians turned out to be that they promised not to be the Liberals, riddled with rumours and scandals about possible corruption. The long and arrogant rule of Jean Chretien had weakened the party, and in the end it was as much their own undoing as it was the emergence of the united right in Canada. The Liberals had reached out to hold on to their power with backroom deals, stuffed brown envelopes, and misuse and misdirection of public funds intended for government advertising in Quebec.

One of the first orders of business for Canada’s new government was the Accountability Act. In it they outlined a four-point plan to reduce corruption, create ethical lobbying, provide protection for whistleblowers, and to let Canadians know how their money is spent. A key part of the Accountability Act was the creation of the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer:

The Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) is an independent officer of the Library of Parliament who reports to the Speakers of both chambers. The position was created through amendments to the Parliament of Canada Act contained in the Federal Accountability Act.

The Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (OPBO) provides authoritative, non-partisan financial and economic analysis to support Parliament and parliamentarians in exercising their oversight role over the government’s stewardship of public funds and in ensuring budget transparency.

The OPBO’s primary mandate is to support the work of parliamentary committees, including the Senate National Finance Committee and the House of Commons Committees on Finance, Public Accounts, and Government Operations and Estimates.

Based on feedback from parliamentarians and best practices of peer organizations, the OPBO will use an open and transparent operating model. Specifically, this means that its analysis and advice will be published and subject to stakeholder scrutiny to ensure rigour in the methodology and impartiality in the advice.

Kevin Page was appointed as the first budget officer in March of 2008. It was a move that intended to create more transparency in government in explaining to Canadians about fiscal planning and scrutiny of budget estimates. In government there is so much spending that goes unaccounted for, unexamined, and unexplained to Canadians, that I had high hopes for Mr.Page. Unfortunately, it appears his job has been hampered by a plague of budget cuts.

Mr.Page has said that a lack of consistent reporting and transparency from the government has made estimating difficult, but he has still projected far larger deficits than the government. From reworking the estimates, to revising corporate revenue projections, he has angered the Conservative government for informing the public of his findings. For essentially doing his job. For holding to account Mr.Flaherty when he makes predictions like this. Part of being “accountable” is having an authority which is able to hold the government to their projections.

Unfortunately, it would appear that the government finds transparency and accountability as frustratingly annoying as the Liberals did. Mr.Page was rebuked yesterday for “overstepping his bounds”. Although it is said that his position was created to “ensuring budget transparency”, the joint committee on the Library of Parliament said that he is “not independent” and has been directed to work within the confines of the Library of Parliament where, naturally, information is almost always kept secret. According to media reports, even the opposition parties sided with the government, demanding Mr.Page only release his reports to Parliamentarians.

It’s a disappointing move from a government that started with such high and noble hopes. Through systematic budget cuts they had marginalized and made difficult the office of Mr.Page, and now through outright censure, the government of Canada has shown that they don’t truly value the principles they preach, because it makes them look like they’re not doing their jobs properly. The truth, as the saying goes, hurts.

So Who Won The 2009 Election Crisis?

The results are in, and it was a landslide: Stephen Harpnatieff. I mean Michael Ignarper. I mean… hey, wait a minute. Who did win?

Joanne says it was the Conservatives, as Iggy grabbed for the first toothpick thrown at them:

So who won the stand-off?

Not Iggy. Except perhaps in the remotest sense that he was able to forestall his certain political demise if he had forced a summer election. However, Iggy is now going to have to endure the derision of Jack Layton and Gilles (’like a hole in the head’) Duceppe.

Stephen Harper – Big winner. He didn’t actually bend on anything, and he ends up looking Prime Ministerial and conciliatory as he finally forces the Liberals to come up with some practical ideas.

Dan Arnold says it was the Liberals, who have pushed the next standoff to the fall:

Score this one as a major win for Ignatieff. Not only did he avert an election he likely would have won, but Harper agreed to take Ignatieff’s only real issue (EI) off the table for the foreseeable future by appointing a blue ribbon panel to examine it. Because, after all, this issue certainly requires the sort of immediate action and attention that only appointing a commission to study it further can deliver!

Dan’s only joking, of course, since if we’re scoring this contest we’d certainly be giving the edge to the Conservatives. They avoided an election, they removed the only platform off the table that the Liberals were fighting for, and the Liberals continue their perfect record in supporting the government.

Having said that, do the Conservatives have to gloat so openly?

An internal memo circulated amongst Conservatives declared victory over Ignatieff.

“The Liberals have reversed themselves on EI reform (their 360-hour demand has been abandoned) and withdrawn the threat to force an unnecessary summer election,” the memo said, referring to Ignatieff’s push for a 360-hour EI eligibility threshold across the country.

“Instead, the Liberals will vote for the next round of stimulus in our Economic Action Plan.”

But gloating or not, Iggy perhaps said it best when he asked a reporter rhetorically: “Do I look like I’ve been steamrolled?” Somewhere at that very moment in Canada, NDP leader Jack Layton coincidentally uttered the word “Yes”.

U R Bn Ripd Off

I send a lot of text messages during the day. Firstly because it’s easy to simply text somebody than to actually go through the trouble of calling someone, and second because it’s convenient to avoid the obligatory irrelevant small talk that is involved in a phone conversation. I know that my messages cost $0.15 per text, but I guess I don’t think much about it. It’s the industry standard, and you wind up paying it. 15 cents really doesn’t sound like a lot, but in actuality it is. The actual cost to the industry has been found to be practically negligible, meaning that your text message markup is significant:

The consumer markup on some text messages is an estimated 4,900 per cent, according to a leading Canadian computer scientist who testified before U.S. senators on Tuesday.

Srinivasan Keshav, Canada Research Chair in tetherless computing at the University of Waterloo, told lawmakers probing text messaging rates and the state of competition in the wireless telecommunications industry that the maximum cost of a single text message “very unlikely” exceeds 0.3 cents.

In Canada, the large cellphone companies charge pay-per-use texters 15 cents to send a text message and, beginning next month, Rogers will join Bell and Telus with an additional charge of 15 cents to receive a text message.

In the United States, carriers recently increased their per-message rate to 20 cents for those without a text plan.

“I’m not here to judge whether the market is competitive or fair, I’m just telling you this is the price and this is the cost. Let people who are experiencing these plans decide whether it’s correct or not,” Keshav said in an interview before testifying.

I don’t think most people really care whether the markup is 4,900%, or 490,000%. People will pay what they think a service is worth, or they won’t pay for it. The retailer cost is really insignificant in the equation, particularly when you’re talking about such a low price for a service. Of course, now that people know they are being hosed by industry collusion, there may be ripples in the marketplace. Until now, when the companies say that the price of a text message is 15 cents, I think most people either nod, or don’t care.

Still, it’s becoming a lucrative market, as cellphones are set to eclipse personal computers as the number one technology for accessing the internet. Although the cost of text messages has been relatively stable in past years, the number of text messages has risen from 174.4 million in 2002, to 20.8 billion last year in Canada. That’s a massive increase in profits for cell phone companies. If the cost is generously estimated at 0.3 cents per message, it would cost the cell companies $23.4 million to handle the 7.8 billion text messages sent in the first quarter of 2009. But the revenue from that is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.17 billion. There’s almost no markup anywhere else in the world that high.

But what I’m really interested in is what the markup on those $1.50 banking transaction fees are for when you take money from an ATM that doesn’t belong to your bank. I’m guessing it costs about the same amount for the banks to handle an electronic transaction as it does a text message, which means the banks are making an astronomical profit on that venture.

Beauty And The Freak

Let me get this straight. You trusted this guy with sharp pointy things around your face?

And who falls asleep during a tattoo job? That’s like falling asleep during a colonoscopy.

The kicker is the belt that reads “sexy” in bling. And the tattoos don’t look all that bad. It could certainly be worse.