The Sixth Estate

Recently I took a Globe & Mail columnist to task for arguing that Ontario’s public school teachers are overpaid. As a humble blogger I hardly expect a response from such a great luminary as Margaret Wente, but I do want to return to the topic anyways, because a couple of people raised some important points. In particular, one of my correspondents suggested that if a public-sector employee earns more than an equivalent worker in the private sector, then the public-sector is overpaid. Seems straightforward. Right?

Well, maybe. One of the most disturbing developments in recent Canadian history is how mean we’ve become — let’s make this point #1. Cheerfully guided by right-wing politicians, including the current Prime Minister, we’ve become an unhappy, resentful mob, easily whipped into a foaming rage because we feel that no one deserves to get more government largesse than we do. I want to emphasize that point. As much as people groan about civil servants being overpaid, I doubt many have ever or would ever tell their employer, when offered a raise, “I think you’re paying me too much for my job. I think it would be better for all concerned if you docked my pay by 15%.” It’s a lot easier to make these judgements when someone else’s paycheque is on the line, isn’t it?

Now, then. Here are some widely held proposals on how to ensure that public-sector employees are earning a fair wage. But I think very few people are actually firmly committed to any of them. I believe that many people just want public-sector employees to be paid as little as possible, certainly no more than they get paid themselves, and people are willing to grab at whatever intellectual argument seems to support that position in any given case, no matter how inconsistent with their other beliefs it might be. Quite frankly, I have no idea whether a public-sector wage is fair, just as I have no idea whether a private-sector one is fair. But people who do have such ideas ought to make sure they’re at least being consistent and ethical.

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A good newspaper retains columnists that you strongly disagree with. Even when it seems like the incessant blather they produce ought to be embarrassing. That’s how democracy works. I get it. So does the Globe & Mail.

For as long as anyone can remember, the teachers’ unions and progressive politicians have been a match made in heaven… But now, the money has run out. The relationship has hit the rocks, and things will never be the same again.

First of all, Margaret Wente, welcome to the 21st century. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but teachers’ unions and provincial governments have been “on the rocks” for years and years now. All unions, in fact. I dare you to list all the meaningful, lasting, and life-changing reforms that unions have pushed into legislation, in any province in this country, since let’s say 1990. Go on. I dare you. And then come back to me and tell me that the union movement is too powerful.

Wente’s main complaint is that teachers are overpaid (where have I heard this before?). Specifically, she says that Ontario’s teachers are overpaid and, even more specifically, that someone doesn’t deserve to get paid $92,000 a year “for teaching Grade 3 in Thunder Bay.” Ontario’s teachers are “among the best paid in the world,” and “we can’t afford it.” There goes socialist McGuinty with his heavy tax-and-spend socialism again, yes?

Let’s start from square one. According to the Lakehead school district’s collective agreement with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, this is what grade 3 teachers (amongst others) in Thunder Bay got paid during the past school year:

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I have avoided weighing in on the Quebec student strike until now, mostly because I don’t live in that province and I didn’t really feel I had anything substantial to contribute to the discussion. So this is my mea culpa: I stood idly by. I apologize for that. And with Lisa Corbella of the Calgary Herald (who is apparently an Alliance Christian, just like His Grace, Stephen Harper) now upping the ante by claiming that God opposes student tuition protests, I’ve had enough.

So here’s my actual opinion. If you’re attending a government university and paying a tuition fee, then by definition, you are paying a tax to the government. When the government discusses raising tuition fees, what they are actually describing is raising taxes on students. And the vast majority of national pundits not only support this tax increase, they think that the students who oppose it are spoiled brats who are just throwing a childish tantrum. Well. At least we found a tax increase that the national media support, for a change.

Which, you have to admit, is hypocrisy of the highest order. Watch these greedy, self-interested, short-sighted pricks scream and stamp their feet like spoiled children if the government ever proposes a similar tax hike on them. The moment that happens, they’ll start screeching endlessly about how if you raise their taxes, their fragile will to work hard and be productive will go up in a puff of self-interested smoke, the good people will all flee to sanctuary in countries that still respect free wallets, and Canada will follow Greece and Italy into socialist hell. Greece and Italy, those well-known bastions of the Scandinavian tax-and-spend welfare state.

Recent events offer an illustration. According to Corbella, McGill’s current tuition is $2168; for McGill students, therefore, a $325 tuition boost therefore amounts to a 15% tax hike. Now, when the Ontario Liberals were brokering the survival of their government by agreeing with the NDP to introduce a temporary 17% increase in the highest tax rate in that province (from 11% to 13%), one offended Bay Street banker promptly denounced their scheming as “ethnic cleansing.” Pressed for an apology, he instead offered a new comparison: this catastrophe was like the sacking of ancient Rome by the Visigoths, and the NDP were like the ancient barbarians, “wandering down the Via Aurelia into Rome.”

I must tell you, it appears that Mr. Banker has earned his degree from the Harper School of History. So far as I am aware, the Visigoths actually entered Rome not by the Aurelian road to the west, but by the Via Salaria, to the north. Moreover, I’m not totally convinced that he helps his case by comparing his own situation as an affluent Canadian facing a modest tax increase to a brutal totalitarian dictatorship finally facing the music after centuries of rape, plunder, and slavery. Although on behalf of the 99%, let me just say that it is an entirely appropriate analogy.

It would be a small start — a very small start — but I think our country would move one noticeable step towards a better future if our financial community didn’t think Roman slave-owners were good role models, and if our Albertan newspaper columnists (and Prime Ministers) stopped attending churches which preach that we must respect as the “inerrant” word of a supernatural overlord a motley collection of ancient superstitions, bundled up together as a “Bible,” which claims that the Earth is flat, that gay people should be summarily executed, and that God made women inferior to men.

I offer this post not to distract people from the robocall crimes, but to remind everyone that there are other scandals going on as well. Readers in BC probably already know, and readers everywhere else should know, that there is yet another conflict between the government and the teachers union. Now, even with anti-union sentiment being what it is, you might think that anyone with a single drop of libertarian or small-government blood in their veins would start getting deeply concerned when the government starts passing laws making it a crime not to show up for work. Apparently, you would be wrong.

But the real story I want to bring your attention to is that the Globe & Mail has again risen to the challenge by printing a superb  column which, at least to me, neatly and easily solves the entire problem of class sizes. Class size has been creeping up in the public school system for years, and I know that many people have been concerned about that. But the Globe‘s Gary Mason helpfully and convincingly explains that we’ve been wrong. And I’m sold. After all, if I want advice on how a highly difficult and stressful profession should do its job, I know the first source I turn to is an inexperienced and intellectually defective pundit.

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Because as a historian I don’t get many chances (har har) to read books by paranoid manipulative megalomaniacs, I’ve been on the edge of my seat for months now as Stephen Harper’s long-awaited hockey history book wends its way through the final steps to publication. Apparently, publishers are now bidding on it competitively. Anansi and Douglas & McIntyre, both well-know members of the liberal conspiracy, are not bidding on it. We will soon be sending their executives to Nunavut for re-education.

You’ll forgive my over-the-top sarcasm, of course, but you must admit there’s something vaguely appalling about this whole escapade. This sort of “the leader is the expert at everything” nonsense smacks of a personality cult more than a responsible democracy. The idea that Stephen Harper is really an expert on the early history of professional hockey, has something worth saying about it in a book, and, more importantly, conceived of this idea just after he reformed the Conservative Party and has been diligently working away on it ever since is ridiculous. Prime Ministers do not write carefully researched historical texts.

Sixth Estate will be reviewing the new book, of course, because I am quite certain it will earn fawning praise from every newspaper in the country that has ever published a book review before. But I won’t be buying this book, so it will take some time for me to get around to it. I’m not padding the Dear Leader’s pockets any more than the tax laws legally require me to.

In the meantime:

• How much public money went into the writing of this book?
• How much research, writing, and editing work was paid for out of the public purse through the work of the Prime Minister’s Office, civil servants, and archivists?
• How many people outside government assisted in writing this book?
• What proportion of the labour hours involved in its production were actually Stephen’s?

Unfortunately I was buried in research over the past week, which not only slowed down my usual production of posts but, worse yet, means I missed the fact that the Fraser Institute had released its long-awaited B.C. Elementary School Report Card. Interestingly, press coverage wasn’t nearly as positive as it usually is (or as negative as it should have been). Maybe it’s because of the fact that they work for the tobacco industry, pad their editorial board with dead people, or think that polygamist communities have the brightest students.

In any case, since I’ve weighed in on the Report Cards before, and they don’t seem to have changed any, I see no reason to go into much detail explaining my belief that they are idiotic. I stand by my advice to parents: tell your grade 7 children to try and answer as many questions wrong as possible. Holding them back from writing the test counts as an absentee black mark in the Fraser Institute’s rankings. The best thing to do is to try and sabotage the process as much as possible, making the statistical results meaningless.

I will, in the meantime, highlight a couple things that amused me this year:

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Predictably, the Fraser Institute is not happy that the Albertan government is moving to abolish elementary school provincial achievement tests (PATs), which it uses as fodder for its dubious and worthless “Report Cards” — studies which are almost invariably used to cast doubt on public schools, promote “independent” private schools, and downplay the obvious fact that the most important factors in student success in our schools are the stability and socioeconomic status of their family. Last year, in its infinite wisdom, the Institute proclaimed Bountiful’s school one of the best in the province. It was a rare meeting of the free-market libertarians and the ultra-conservative polygamists, which impressed nobody.

Of course, this decision by the Albertan government will save a great deal of time for students and teachers, and eliminate a serious ethical problem (should students be subjected to what amounts to an extended social research exercise, without compensation and without consent?). But it will also deprive the Fraser Institute of its precious data, and so they’re throwing a temper tantrum.

It’s interesting, I think, that an institute supposedly so dedicated to free market principles gets into such a snit when a government threatens to withhold its supply of “free” data paid for out of the public purse. I’m sure if the Institute offered to compensate the government for collecting their data, something could be arranged.

Some while ago, I documented the Harper regime’s attempt to privatize the leading research granting institutions in Canada to private-sector control: namely, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Today I regret to observe that, according to the Canada Gazette, Jack Mintz has been named to the Council governing SSHRC.

Mintz’s antics have been reported on this blog for some time. He is a renegade economist who gained favour with the government by promoting the absurd fiction that tax cuts will pay for themselves by spurring economic growth. He opposes a broad swath of public-sector spending, despite being a professor at a publicly funded university and, now, despite taking a position at Canada’s leading academic welfare centre. We can expect Mintz to promote the position SSHRC seemed destined to head for several years ago, in which new scholarship was to be funded based on its usefulness for business rather than its contributions to basic human knowledge.

Incidentally, I can already tell you one other thing that Mintz will almost certainly not be doing as a SSHRC council member. Despite being an economist and therefore (presumably) more aware than most about the mathematical consequences of inflation, Mintz will almost certainly make no attempt to reform SSHRC’s policy of cutting student scholarships by an effective 2-3% per year, indefinitely, and despite the fact that tuition fees and living costs are going in the other direction.

Full Disclosure: The author of this post has received SSHRC research funding, and would like his fellow citizen-students to continue receiving similar opportunities in the future.

This week a tobacco industry-funded think tank in Vancouver, the well-known Fraser Institute, published its annual B.C. & Yukon secondary school report card, a ranking of schools in that region based on their performance on provincial exams. This means it’s time for me to publish my usual list of objections to these bogus statistical compilations, updated to the new material. As usual, I recommend that you peruse this report and then send it to its well-deserved location in the recycling bin (or the Trash can, for Mac users).

As usual, five of the reviewers of this report are actually dead, some others are in their 90s, and one of them is also the author, a conflict of interest if ever there was one. None of the authors are school teachers, although Michael Thomas used to be an education bureaucrat. (Now he runs a private school scholarship fund.) This year, it appears that the report card for BC has been paid for by the Hecht Foundation, which donates to a variety of right-wing causes, including a climate change denial group on the Prairies, the Frontier Centre. Such organizations usually fund the Fraser Institute’s work. Other report cards have been funded by the right-wing Donner Foundation, which created the Frontier Centre as well as the Montreal Economic Institute and the Atlantic Institute. Together with the Fraser Institute, these think tanks are responsible for promoting a consistent message of lower taxes, deregulation, and privatization of virtually all social services, including schools. Remember that when you read a Fraser Institute “report card” on schools.

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I decided last week that the main purpose of this blog during the election period would be a review of the Harper Government™, which in my opinion has seriously endangered the future of Canadian democracy. But before going forward on that, I want to be clear on another point: Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, in its present form, is very unlikely to advance a fundamentally different alternative if they form a government. I wish I could say otherwise, because the course we are on is a very unhealthy one. But this was made clear Tuesday with the first major announcement by the Ignatieff campaign, the Canadian Learning Passport.

This was the first major announcement of the election campaign, and the start of the election campaign was not a surprise. So it is safe to assume that this announcement — and other “first planks” from the NDP and the Conservatives — were carefully planned out in advance as the right start to the campaign: impressive enough to draw attention, but not so huge that there is nothing to follow up with next week as voter attention starts to wander. Unfortunately, the Liberals have completely blown it with this one. It might have been okay, if Ignatieff hadn’t chosen to call it “revolutionary.” It isn’t. He is lying, plain and simple.

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