Think tanks need to show us the money – Yakabuski

2015/02/10 Leave a comment

Good column by Konrad Yakabuski on think tanks as charities or political actors (see also Miles Corak’s How to think about “think” tanks):

The Fraser Institute raised 15 per cent, or about $6.6-million, of its total revenue from foreign sources in the four fiscal years to 2012. Not to single out Fraser – whose research, like that of its peers, is rigorous but only half the story – but no one could argue that such money has gone toward charity.

“Fundamentally, think tanks on the left and right have been abusing the privilege of being a registered charity,” says Toronto lawyer Mark Blumberg, a leading expert in the field. Since charities are only allowed to devote 10 per cent of their revenue to political activities, “you could argue some of them haven’t been following the rules.”

The line between political advocacy and policy analysis has become increasingly blurred. Three years ago, the Harper government made a big to-do about anti-pipeline environmental groups taking foreign donations. And the CRA has started cracking down on organizations that confuse political advocacy with charity.

Perhaps it’s time we also focused on think tanks. They play a valuable role in democracies, but their research is only as credible as the amount of disclosure they provide. The pro-transparency blog Transparify recommends that journalists add the phrase “does not disclose its funders” when reporting on research produced by such think tanks. It’s advice worth following.

Think tanks need to show us the money – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Ottawa seeks job market clarity – Labour market survey

2015/02/10 Leave a comment

Good course correction:

The $8-million survey, which was announced several months ago and is just now under way, marks a return to more traditional methods after the Conservative government ran into criticism for relying heavily on a much less expensive private software program.

The Globe and Mail revealed that the government’s claims were the result of a problem with the data, which included jobs from the classified site Kijiji where the same job can be reposted many times, producing a false impression of a rising demand for labour.

When jobs from Kijiji were removed from the data set, the rise in job vacancies essentially disappeared.

Yet one year later, government officials and other labour market observers continue to struggle with the best way to measure the job market in an age when traditional job ads have been replaced with online job boards.

Two federal departments – Finance Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada – continue to pay for a database of online job ads from Wanted Analytics. The company runs software that scans online job boards as well as individual company websites to produce a database of jobs. The database it provides to government departments can be altered to include or remove various sources, including Kijiji.

Finance Canada renewed its contract with Wanted in December for another year at a cost of $18,250.

A Finance Canada spokesperson said the department uses the data along with other sources – such as Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada – as part of its analysis of the labour market.

Employment and Social Development Canada said it does not use the database for labour market projections.

“This data can still be useful to the department to better understand current labour market conditions as they pertain to online job postings,” ESDC spokesperson Simon Rivet wrote in an e-mail.

Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said his organization supports the new survey even though some employers complain that answering questionnaires is a form of red tape.

Mr. Kelly said he expects the new survey will support the view of employers that labour shortages are real and that measures such as the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, while controversial, are needed.

“Ultimately we need better sources that everyone can rely on and accept as a true state of affairs on the labour market,” he said.

Now all we need is to reinstate the Census.

Ottawa seeks job market clarity – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

One in five Canadian public servants claims harassment on the job

2015/02/07 Leave a comment

Seems familiar and little change from when I was in government a number of years ago:

Survey results, at a glance:

Employee Engagement:

– 93% say they will put in the extra effort to get the job done

– 79% like their job, a decrease from 84% in 2008

– 74% of employees report a sense of satisfaction from their work

Leadership:

– 75% of employees feel their supervisor keeps them informed about issues affecting their work

– 47% of employees say essential information flows effectively from senior management to staff

Performance Management:

– 79% say their work is assessed against identified goals and objectives

– 72% say they get useful feedback about their job performance

Training and Development:

– 63% say they get the training they need to do their job

– 52% feel their organization does a good job of supporting career development

Empowerment:

– 66% feel they have support to provide a high level of service

– 62% of employees believed that they have opportunities to provide input into decisions that affect their work, down from 68% in 2011

Work-life balance and workload:

– 78% say immediate supervisors supports the use of flexible work arrangements

–70% say they can complete their assigned workload during their regular working hours

–71% of employees say they have support for work-life balance

Respectful and ethical workplace:

– 94% say they have positive working relationships with colleagues

– 80% feel their colleagues behave in a respectful manner

– 79% feel that their organization respects them

–82% believe that employees in their organization carry out their duties in the public’s interest

Harassment:

– 19% say they were harassed in the past two years

Discrimination:

– Eight per cent of employees said they faced discrimination in the past two years. (The most common types were: Sex at 24 per cent; age at 23 per cent; and race at 20 per cent.)

One in five public servants claims harassment on the job | Ottawa Citizen.

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

PM’s charity audits look for ‘bias, one-sidedness’

2015/02/06 Leave a comment

The more information that comes out, the more it smells of bias in the choice of charities it audits:

The CRA says it will do 60 audits, and there are 86,000 charities in Canada. So that’s a one-in-1,400 chance of being audited by random selection. Only it’s not random. The CRA admits it’s looking for red flags, including “bias.”

“Audit selection occurs after a substantial screening process,” the CRA said in an email. “This may include considering issues such as ‘point of view,’ ‘bias,’ or ‘one-sidedness.'”

In Dying With Dignity’s case, its offending activities apparently included attempts to change public opinion.

“It is not legally charitable to engage in pressure tactics on governments such as swaying public opinion, promoting an attitude of mind, creating a climate of opinion,” the CRA’s auditor wrote to Dying With Dignity.

Still, there is a whole class of charities, known as think tanks whose major purpose is creating a climate of opinion or promoting an attitude of mind, activities that fall under the general category of “research as a charitable activity.”

“Think tanks make it very clear from the beginning that their objective is to shape public opinion, and public policy,” says Western University political science professor Donald Abelson. He has spent two decades studying think tanks in Canada and the U.S. and he’s currently writing a book about them.

Just read the annual reports from some of Canada’s leading think tanks to find proud claims of “shaping the national discourse”, “prodding governments, opinion leaders and the general public,” “changing the minds of decision makers,” yet none of that activity apparently trips the wire between political and charitable activity.

“We’re in kind of a grey area, particularly over the last several years, where the lines between policy research and political advocacy have become increasingly blurred,” Abelson said.

Which circles back to the prickly question of how to define “political activities.”

Why the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and not the Fraser Institute? Why Dying with Dignity and not the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms or the Canadian Constitution Foundation?

PM’s charity audits look for ‘bias, one-sidedness’ – Health – CBC News.

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Cities to weigh loss of long-form census for community planning

2015/02/05 Leave a comment

Yet another group weighing in on the ongoing implications and costs associated with replacing the Census with the National Household Survey:

Across the country, cities are feeling the impact of the census changes, said Brad Woodside, president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and mayor of Fredericton.

“We’ve heard from our members that the change to the new National Household Survey is impacting their ability to effectively plan and monitor the changing needs of their communities,” he said in an e-mailed statement to The Globe. “We support all efforts to increase the reliability of the data from the census.”

Local governments rely on this information to understand the changing needs of communities, and make a range of decisions, “from where to establish new bus routes, build affordable housing and provide programs for new Canadians, he said. “We continue to call on Statistics Canada to work with municipalities to provide communities of all sizes the most reliable information from the available data.”

Mr. Tory said he will raise the issue with the mayors of the country’s largest cities when they meet in Toronto later this week. The topic is not on the agenda for the gathering, which begins Wednesday evening, but he said he can bring it up in informal discussions.

“I believe you really should try to have the best possible evidence in front of you when you are making important decisions,” he said Tuesday. “I can ask if this is a problem they are facing.”

Cities to weigh loss of long-form census for community planning – The Globe and Mail.

Globe editorial makes the same point but equally unlikely to have much effect:

There is now incontrovertible evidence the Conservative government’s 2010 decision to scrap the mandatory census questionnaire, which quantified everything from family income to ethnicity to regional demographics, was an unalloyed catastrophe.

Opposition has come from think-tanks of every political persuasion, business leaders, charities, public administrators and basically anyone with a PhD. Thanks to a deliberately sabotaged census, we know less about Canada in 2011 than we did about Canada in 2006. Who thinks that’s a good idea?

What’s more, conducting a halfwitted census turned out to be more expensive. The 2011 voluntary household survey increased errors, reduced accuracy, chopped the response rate by 30 per cent – and cost an extra $22-million. Congratulations: The Harper government figured out how to spend more for less.

The decision to kneecap the census was transparently ideological, a rash exercise in partisan narrow-casting, and was quickly exposed as such.

Dozens of experts predicted the damage that would be wrought. It’s time for the Conservative government to finally acknowledge how right they were.

The next opportunity for the House to revisit the Census Act will come next month via another private member’s bill – this one tabled by Conservative backbencher Joe Preston.

It would remove two aspects that are problematic to some Conservatives: jail for refusal to complete the form, and automatic public disclosure after 92 years.

There is still resistance in Mr. Preston’s party to bringing back the mandatory long form. We hope that removing the central justifications for killing it represents an evolving mindset.

Some mistakes are easy to reverse. It may be too late to restore a proper census in 2016, but a return in 2021 should be inevitable.

The census: Little knowledge is a dangerous thing – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Is Harper’s terror bill terrifying — or just redundant? – Kheiriddin

2015/02/04 Leave a comment

On the remarkable political cynicism of the Government with respect to security according to Tasha Kheiriddin:

So why have the Tories chosen to create new offences instead? Three words: the 2015 election. Enforcing existing legislation isn’t sexy. You can’t take ownership of Section 46 of the Criminal Code — it’s been there for years. But you can talk ad nauseum about the new tough anti-terror laws you’ve created. It’s perfect fodder for the doorstep and a great distraction from the dismal economy — and the Conservatives know it.

And public opinion polls suggest enough Canadians are on board to make this a winning issue. A recent Nanos survey found that 66 per cent of Canadians agree with the PM that we are at war with terrorists. Sixty-five per cent of respondents agreed that the “government should have the power to remove websites or posts on the Internet that it believes support the proliferation of terrorism in Canada.” Forty-eight per cent of Canadians feel the system is not up to the task at the moment, vs. 44 per cent who believe the situation is satisfactory.

Bill C-51 neatly taps into all these concerns, while leaving a major issue unadressed: Who will be watching the watchers? According to Ottawa, there’s enough oversight already. On CTV`s Question Period, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety Roxanne James said, “We are not interested in creating needless red tape.”

That’s a slap in the face to our Five Eyes allies, all of whom have more extensive oversight mechanisms in place. Creating such measures in Canada would not be a waste of money or admission of weakness. It would be a nod to common sense — especially since C-51 does not have a sunset clause, as previous anti-terror legislation did.

Bottom line: The new bill represents electioneering at its finest. While it improves intelligence-sharing and gives authorities more powers to detain suspected terrorists, it presents privacy concerns, curbs freedom of speech, and duplicates existing offences, while foregoing any increase in oversight.

Canada’s existing treason law — the one the Crown used to hang Louis Riel

Filed under Government, Security Tagged with ,

The lesson of Charlie Hebdo? We need more free speech, not less – Globe Editorial

2015/02/04 Leave a comment

Globe editorial nails it:

In Canada, it appears a growing list of objectionable ideas and beliefs are to be hunted down and subjected to the full weight of the state. And so it was that, on Monday, the borough council presided over by Mr. Ménard amended its definition of a community centre to specifically forbid religious teaching, effectively shutting down Mr. Chaoui’s aspirations.

More rule-tightening will presumably follow; Mr. Coderre has gone so far as to say, “I oppose radicalism in all its forms.”

Otherwise sane provincial lawmakers in Quebec have been involved in a multi-partisan argument, now in its second year, around how to legislate against religious fundamentalism. There hasn’t been much of an argument over whether that’s a good thing to do; it seems to be a given.

In Ottawa, meanwhile, the expansion of the police state continues apace, fuelled by the irrational Islamic State fears ginned up by the Conservative government.

What if the solution to all of this were as simple as more free speech?

In the marketplace of ideas, hateful, offensive and small-minded beliefs can and should be vigorously confronted. But instead of using the law to shut them down, fight back with speech that shows them up. Incitement to violence is a crime, and always has been. But some of the speech politicians are talking about shutting down falls well short of that long-standing legal line.

Opinions can be changed. Bad ideas can be shunted aside. People can stop listening to nonsense, or they can never start in the first place. That is essentially what happened to Mr. Chaoui’s reactionary spiel in Anjou.

The process was working swimmingly. And then the politicians got involved.

The lesson of Charlie Hebdo? We need more free speech, not less – The Globe and Mail.

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Long form census: Duelling backbencher bills revive House debate

2015/02/04 Leave a comment

Continued triumph of ideology over reason, the Government’s refusal to reinstate the mandatory census:

The response rate for the 2006 long-form census was 93.5 per cent, compared with 68.6 per cent for the voluntary National Household Survey that replaced it in 2011.

Statistics Canada withheld information on thousands of smaller Canadian communities because the information was unreliable.

The census tract of Elgin, in Preston’s southwestern Ontario riding, had a non-response rate of 26.1 per cent for the National Household Survey.

Critics say the problems with the data are compounded by the fact that the survey results cannot be compared with the results from the mandatory censuses going back many decades.

Hsu said filling out the census forms is a civic duty, just as Canadians have a duty to pay their income taxes.

“The fight over this bill is a fight over the soul of this country,” Hsu told MPs last week.

“It is a fight over whether Canadians should collect information about ourselves so that we may have solid evidence with which to govern ourselves wisely.”

Long form census: Duelling backbencher bills revive House debate – Politics – CBC News.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Canadian Public servants have 15 million days in banked sick leave

2015/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting evidence that suggests less abuse of sick leave than previous government messaging justifying ending the banking of sick leave (i.e., many were keeping banked sick leave as insurance in case of catastrophic illnesses like cancer):

Canada’s public servants have socked away nearly 15 million days of unused sick leave, which would disappear under the Conservative government’s plan to introduce a new short-term disability plan.

That means the 195,330 people who are working today in the core public service — those for whom Treasury Board is the employer — have banked an average of 75 days, or 15 weeks, of sick leave to fall back on in the event of a prolonged illness.

The size of the sick leave bank was released by Treasury Board in response to an order paper question from Ottawa South Liberal MP David McGuinty. The statistics show a stockpile of 14.7 million days is what remains after nearly 63,000 people left the core public service over the past six years because they had retired, resigned, were laid off, fired or died.

… Public servants can’t cash out their sick leave when they leave government, so those credits disappear and are wiped off the books. With those departures, the amount of banked sick leave sick fell from 16 million days in 2008-09 to about 14.7 million days in 2013-14. There are about 261 working days in a year.

With the drop in the overall size of the sick leave bank, the average number of sick leave credits per employee also shifted. The average employee had a bank of 76 days in 2008-09, falling to 72 days when the 2012 budget cuts began but increasing to an average 75 days per worker for the past two years.

The large number of retirements and resignations over the past six years is probably older workers who had a stockpile of sick leave credits that would have been cancelled when they left the public service. Any new hires to replace them haven’t started to build their banks.

Many predicted there would be a run on the sick leave bank over the past couple of years from disgruntled employees deciding to use some of their sick leave credits before they lost them under the government’s new plan. But nothing in the data suggests that is happening in a significant way.

McGuinty said he was hoping the questions would shed some light on the state of the health of the public service and “what’s going on here” as the government negotiates with the 17 public service unions to reform the way sick leave and disability are managed.

Public servants have 15 million days in banked sick leave | Ottawa Citizen.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →