Our civic duty is done, essay and SoR

SoR means side of rant. This is mostly an essay, with a bit of rant.

Yesterday was a big day for us. 

Let's start with the easy one, or what should be the easy one. Voting. We went to the Elections Canada office on Southport road after picking up some stuff at Avenida mall. There was no line up. None. The two nice ladies were eager to help us, and walked us through the process of doing a special ballot, since the official ones were still being printed. No big deal. If we understand them correctly, just over 1100 people had voted in their office that day, or maybe it's from when their office opened for voting. 

A few seconds on line will find your nearby Elections Canada office. They're open 7 days a week up till April 22. The regular advance polls are April 18 to 21. Just go do it. Avoid the last minute line up.

Be the difference. The turnout in Canadian federal elections sucks slough water. Turnout for a federal election has never exceeded 80%, and seldom exceeds 75%. Mostly it seems to bump along between 65% and 75%. (Data here.) 

As an aside, I hate the Apple Numbers app. I don't much care for XL either, but at least I could make it mostly do what I want. This mostly gives the trend, sort of, if you squint and use your imagination a bit. The values range between 40% and 80% if you can't read the labels. At least one of my readers is a whiz at graphs and data presentation. Please don't laugh at my feeble efforts.

I get that some people think that all politicians are rascals at best, and don't want to vote for any of them. Or that they're pissed at all the parties, or that none of them line up with their particular beliefs. Or they think their vote won't matter, except that elections have been decided by just a few votes. 

Suck it up and accept this is the system we've got just now, and to paraphrase Churchill, it's the worst one except for all the others. 

Regular readers of this blog know that I'd love to see some form of proportional representation.  Going to a PR system in Canada would almost certainly be the end of majority governments as we know them. To see that work properly we'd need to see both politicians and the electorate step up their game, and understand that politics is not a zero sum game. 

I'm torn between making voting mandatory (somehow) but knowing that would lead to more spoiled ballots and voting for the worst candidate out of spite. We have one of those candidates in our riding, who reliably as a bad penny shows up on every ballot at every election. He never gets more a tiny fraction of the vote, and I'd like to see it stay that way. He is only looking for a pulpit to spew his rancid viewpoint.

On the other hand, I'd like to see people being required to demonstrate some competency at the political process, such as summarizing the policy platform of one of the parties. I'd almost want to see the question, 'the elephant, a provincial or federal responsibility?' just to see how people react. Of course I realize this would enormously slow down the voting process.

I'm mostly serious in saying I'd like to see "none of the above" as a ballot choice, and if it gets the most votes all the others are struck off and the parties have to nominate new candidates. Maybe a person voting that way has to declare exactly what they have against each of the candidates. A response of "His name is Trudeau" wouldn't be allowed. I think this would boil down to whichever party is most willing to put up with the nomination process the longest, in the seats they most think they can win.

Anyways. The message today is to look up the candidates in your riding. Pick one, by whatever means seems good to you, and go vote for them. Maybe it's the one you hate least, or is the least worst candidate. Maybe you want to strategically vote for a candidate to vote out (or keep in) the party currently in power. Maybe you want to vote for that worst candidate since none of the above is not on the ballot. Maybe one of the candidates has nice hair, or is your brother in law. Whatever. Make a decision and go do it.

And somewhat related, taxes. Yes, I know you hate them. All of them, and the carbon tax most of all. Even if you don't understand them, especially the carbon tax. Don't get me started on equalization payments.

Taxes are the price of a civilized society. Taxes are how most of us get safe drinking water from the tap, our poop treated when we flush the toilet, and safe roads to drive on. It's how we pay police, fire fighters, teachers, and most medical people. It's how we know the scale at the grocery store is accurate, and the gas pump actually delivers a litre of fuel. It's how we pay for free elections, and no, Canadian elections are not rigged. 

Taxes are how we've created one of the safest societies in human history, with people living some of the longest and healthiest lives ever. Canada reliably lands in the top ten in global rankings for quality of life.

Does some tax money get wasted? Of course! There is some waste and inefficiency in every process in every part of our lives. It's unavoidable. Yes, of course there are checks to be sure that people applying for a particular benefit are entitled to it by whatever rules govern the process. It does take time, and sometimes delivers an unintended result, and mistakes can be made. 

Spending one cent (or fraction thereof) to ensure that the other 99 cents are spent correctly is a good deal and a sound operating practice. You could fix some of the problems by spending two cents to deliver 98 cents of benefit. But there will always be some errors, at the least because people are ingenious and can concoct elaborate frauds to circumvent even the most careful checks. Would you spend 99 cents to deliver one cent of benefit correctly? Of course not.

It's funny how populist politicians campaign on cutting the fat, and eliminating waste. Two points. There has been a lot of effort along the way to balance the money spent on internal checks vs what is spent on a benefit, and to find benefits that go to the right places. After all, politicians know they're going to be yelled at for raising taxes. It turns out that the fat they want to cut is areas they don't use, and they're willing to spend the money 'saved' on plums for their buddies in private industry. Private industry only looks like it delivers social services better faster cheaper because they cherry pick the best and easiest parts.

One of the places I hate to see tax money spent is inter-jurisdictional squabbling between levels of government. Federal Provincial relationships are bad for that. One recent example that really gets my goat is the federal government increasing the amount going to AISH recipients, and the provincial government clawing it back. 

Conservative Alberta governments have a thing about AISH; those people seem to be the favourite target for cost cutting. Yet those 77000 people take up less than .2% of the Alberta budget. Not to denigrate people on AISH, but that amount is essentially a rounding error. We could double the payment, make their lives way better, and not even notice it on the bottom line. Politicians spent time talking about it. It costs more in political salary to discuss anything to do with AISH, than the actual benefits. They don't seem to mind spending dollars to save pennies, provided they or their buddies get the dollars.

More locally, the city has been trying to remove a playground from our community. They have a metric that says we have too many playgrounds for the number of children. They proposed "reimagining" a particular playground, which naturally infuriated the local parents. They rightly realized this was a weasel word for remove, and this was a popular, well used playground. So they shifted their sights to another, less used, and now it's a different group of parents that are upset. (How is that a surprise to anyone?) 

The whole premise of the removal to save money because playgrounds are expensive to maintain. Naturally, we don't want to see children injured because a swing chain failed, or a slide collapsed. But really, saving money by cutting back on playgrounds? I've been in discussion with our local councillor's office about this. As near as we can tell, this seems to be the administration trying to cut costs anywhere they can. I would easily believe they've spent more money thrashing around on the issue, than would be spent maintaining the playground.

Our personal taxes are pretty simple these days, especially since I've shut down my consulting company. Income from retirement savings, CPP, and OAS. We still hire an accountant to do it; that $500 is just about the best money we spent in terms of reducing rage and anxiety. Tax forms are complicated and an honest mistake can have expensive consequences. There's medical and pension splitting, and I don't have a clue how they figure out the optimal numbers, but doing that saved us about the cost of getting it down. I call that a win.

But one thing was a surprise. I went to the CRA website to download my T slips and sent them off. The accountant said it wasn't the right form and CRA wouldn't accept it. Except they're the ones that provided the form in the first place, and they know what the CPP and OAS numbers are because they're the ones paying it. Dealing with that was a bad moment for my blood pressure. I went back in and changed my preferences to get the proper paper slip mailed, which I'll take a photo of and send to the accountant next year. Why can't they provide the proper slip electronically, rather than the list of box numbers and amounts? Grrr.

Still, it all got done. We spent a bit of time reviewing the forms and approving. They are off to CRA. We both ended up paying a bit of tax, which we had expected. Thanks to our clever financial advisor for planning that all. I'd far rather pay a bit of tax at the end of the year, than have wait to get my own money back.

So to sum up, where am I on all this? Go vote, even though the system isn't perfect. Hold your nose if you must. At the least it tells the politicians we are paying attention. As for taxes, you're allowed to organize your affairs to minimize the tax paid, but don't get stupid in trying to avoid tax. CRA has the data to track down tax cheats. Accept that some tax money is going to go to programs you don't support, but almost certainly some flows to areas you do support. One is the price of the other. But even better, get involved with the political process and influence how tax money is spent.