The Sixth Estate

This weekend, the Vancouver Sun printed an inexcusable op-ed by Dr. Brian Day, making the case for mandatory private health insurance in B.C. I say inexcusable because the gloss on Day (a Vancouver orthopedic surgeon and a former CMA president) somehow overlooks the fact that Mr. Day is the president of Cambie Surgery Centre, Canada’s (and B.C’s) only private hospital. Day would presumably stand to gain a great deal from an influx of new private money into the healthcare system. Incidentally, he doesn’t bother to point out his obvious interest in the issue in the body of the article, either.

Before discussing Day himself, let me point out that his argument is unadulterated bullshit. Day says that we should pass a law saying everyone has to have private health insurance — basically, the sort of thing the Obama administration was promoting in the U.S. — instead of the current patchwork of basic Medicare (public) and extended health (private or Pharmacare). For a half-million people who can’t afford to pay, he says the government will kick in $125 per month per family. Somehow he thinks this will be cheaper than keeping things in the public sector, but there’s no reason to believe that. The bottom line is that someone is going to have to pay for healthcare, or it’s not going to be delivered. Either that someone is a private individual, or it is the government. Either we pay for healthcare, or we go without. The contrived notion that who pays will somehow affect that fundamental reality is one which people only raise because they have an interest in the matter. If we can afford to do this, we should do it collectively, so that everyone benefits equally. Day’s system is just a way for people with more money to purchase better health. The one thing added private money will lead to is an influx of new clients for private-sector surgery centres like Brian Day’s own Cambie clinic in Vancouver.

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My last installment on the Project on Government Oversight’s new dump of Inspector-General reports on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) involves Bear Stearns. Once again, this is a report which the Inspector-General decided not to publish on its website, presumably because it contains embarrassing contents.

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The fact that the Fraser Institute solicited money from large tobacco corporations in exchange for peddling anti-scientific flimflam about the healthfulness of secondhand smoke is actually established knowledge now; that news broke in 2009. However, I’m returning to it for several reasons. First, as you read this, I’m out of town and my WordPress is merrily publishing a backlog of non-time-sensitive material on my behalf (I will try to check comments regularly). Second, the issue of the Fraser Institute’s funding remains a mystery that must be solved. It is Sixth Estate’s belief that all media organizations (including this one) should provide full disclosure of where they get their money from, especially ones that claim to be “independent.”

Finally, it’s worth bringing up because not all of the documents have been properly explored yet. The Fraser Institute continues to publish papers opposing tobacco taxes, something the tobacco industry may or may not still be paying them for. And we’d be naive to think that if they did this with tobacco companies, they wouldn’t do them with various other sectors that benefit from their work, including the oil and gas sector.

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One of the long-forgotten old WikiLeaks documents, which can no longer be easily found on the organization’s front page, is an unclassified promotional presentation prepared by Boeing for the government of Denmark in December 2008. As the F-35 controversy continues in Canada, the points raised in it seem worth considering. At the time, Boeing was plugging the F/A-18 Super Hornet, an older but still capable fighter. The Super Hornet costs $55 million, less than half the cost of the F-35 Lightning that the Canadian government is committing to. On the one hand, it lacks some of the more advanced features, including stealth. On the other hand, it’s proven technology, evolved from the current CF-18 fighter, and it’s worth asking why Canada actually needs the most expensive fighter jet on the market, something which has never been a priority before.

Of course, this is Boeing’s biased perspective. I imagine Lockheed Martin, which will produce the F-35, would have a somewhat different perspective. Still, Boeing claims that

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I have observed a disturbing trend in “independent” think tanks. They seldom disclose major funding sources, so that readers are unable to judge the relevance of potential conflicts of interest. But when we do know, interesting coincidences occur. A decade ago, the Fraser Institute took money from the tobacco industry, and produced studies arguing that regulation wouldn’t reduce cigarette smoking rates and that cigarette smoke doesn’t cause lung cancer. The trade group Ontario Waste Management Association gives $50,000 to the C.D. Howe Institute, and they produce a study arguing that private-sector trash collectors are better than municipal service provision. In this case, the C.D. Howe Institute expert on monetary policy, Christopher Ragan, is paid for by the banking sector, as I will show here.

The National Post has just finished a two-part series by Ragan (here and here) in which he argues that the government should “correct” the Consumer Price Index downwards 0.6% per year (no particular reason is given for why he thinks Statistics Canada can’t calculate price differences correctly), that the Bank of Canada should cut its annual inflation target in half from 2% to 1%, and that this will be better for everyone. There is also no analysis of who generally would benefit from this move. Ragan claims every Canadian will, because their money will retain value longer. Those Canadians with incomes tied to the CPI would lose, though (and lose a lot if Ragan is wrong on his 0.6% estimate). How the Bank of Canada will adjust inflation is not described. Despite being a member of a free-market think tank, Ragan does not seem to have a problem with this chummy relationship between a government bank and big business when it comes to managing the nation’s money supply.

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Embassy magazine has what in most respects is a half-decent discussion of a key problem in the ongoing F-35 fighter saga: the Department of National Defence’s failure to disclose a summary of national needs which the F-35 (or any other fighter, for that matter) would have to meet. Instead, Canadians have been subjected to a relentless marketing campaign by the civilian government and by the military generals, who are, oddly, unencumbered by the usual restrictions on political advocacy by public servants. Even without holding a public competition for Canada’s largest military purchase ever, you’d think DND could at least identify what needs the F-35 is filling, and Embassy is right to rap them on the knuckles for it.

Where I have a problem with this article (yet again), though, is Embassy‘s failure to be genuinely inclusive. The “back and forth” method is cheap journalism, which is why it’s increasingly popular on everything from CBC to Fox News: introduce a topic, quote one person on one “side” of the issue, then someone from the other “side.” Seldom is the media so obvious in playing the role, as Noam Chomsky puts it, of defining the outer limits of “acceptable” or legitimate thought on an issue. The problem, in this case, is that both “experts” — Adam Chapnick and David J. Bercuson — are actually being paid by the military that wants to buy the jets in the first place. Chapnick actually says the military shouldn’t need to make public any need for fighter jets — every party should accept it in private and then present a done deal to the public. Embassy does not identify the potential for conflicts of interest here, or explain why it couldn’t find someone with an opinion who was independent from the military.

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In the Globe & Mail, an adviser for a group which bills itself as the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform has come out in favour of the new security perimeter agreement with the United States. As usual, the Globe is very sparing in its gloss on author James Bissett, who is said only to be “a former Canadian ambassador” and a member of the group in question.  “Fear not, Canada,” says Bissett: we are at a “historic moment” and the ceding of sovereignty will turn out just fine. He is surprisingly unable to articulate a single strong reason why this is actually a good agreement, aside from vague suggestions that it is only “natural” to pursue integration and that we must calm American fears about Canada being an easy port of entry for terrorists.

Like most think tanks, the Centre for Immigration Policy Reform claims to be both independent and non-partisan. It’s certainly not non-partisan. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s independent because it doesn’t disclose potential conflicts of interest.

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The Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB), the country’s small business lobby, has just released a report arguing against further increases in the minimum wage. This isn’t terribly surprising, since it represents its members and its members include a large number of corporations who employ people at minimum wage. CBC, for one, does a horrific job of covering it, blandly parroting CFIB’s talking points without any consideration of why CFIB might be taking this position.

Since the CFIB doesn’t even pretend to be independent, I almost didn’t bother picking this one up. However, some of the claims were made were dubious enough that I succumbed to temptation. If you want a more detailed (and more incompetent) criticism of the neoclassical economists’ position on minimum wages, you can find it at Relentlessly Progressive Economics. My own opinion is quite simple. Contrary to popular opinion, the current minimum wage obviously is not a serious impediment to employers. If employees produced less revenue than minimum wage, they would already be out of work — and they’re not. The argument that a 10% increase in minimum wage would result in massive unemployment assumes that employee productivity is only slightly above the minimum wage rate. This seems inherently unlikely, since minimum wages go up only occasionally, do not keep pace with either inflation or increases in productivity, and differ significantly in many provinces (from $8 in BC to $10.25 in Ontario) without serious economic repercussions. To even begin answering this question, what we really need to know is the average productivity of minimum wage workers. The CFIB, because of its membership, is in a unique position to assemble data for that sort of analysis. They didn’t bother.

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This is a good news-bad news thing, but I thought I’d get the good news out of the way first: it seems that our government is actually cooperating on something. Unfortunately, the media completely missed the story.

Canada’s security intelligence service (CSIS) is overseen by a review agency known as the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). SIRC is charged with monitoring CSIS and investigating complaints, generally ensuring that CSIS doesn’t wander off the reservation and start criminally burning down barns in Quebec like its predecessor, the RCMP Security Service, did. SIRC has generally failed in its job, as can be seen in the general illegal expansion of CSIS into foreign intelligence abroad, and as I will discuss in my next post.

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In the past year, Canadians have variously been informed that there would be a public competition for our next-generation jet fighter, that there was a competition (the American one which resulted in the F-35 in the first place), and that there couldn’t be a competition because there was only one competitor. The last of these is now the standard line from the military but, of course, is patent nonsense: if there is only one competitor, then presumably Lockheed Martin would have no trouble going through the formality of a competition. It’s only the largest military acquisition in Canadian history — why make it an exception to the rules on this?

It’s that last myth I’m going to take on here. Now, the F-35 is an election issue. But I have some bad news for people who are hoping that means we’ll back out of the deal. You heard it here first: we won’t. I don’t want the thing, either, but the WikiLeaks cables make clear what I think most people already knew: public competitions for large-scale purchases in the defence sector, even when they are held, are usually shams and pretences. Several of the major WikiLeaks cables make that clear, and they also make clear that the sort of PR blitz we’ve seen recently, with generals and military-funded lobby groups like the Conference of Defence Associations taking to the op-ed pages, is a common strategy which the American government supports as a means of subverting the democratic process in allied countries. Again and again, it is stressed that purchasing countries will make much money from contracts related to construction. Of course, it can’t be true that every country will get out of the F-35 more than it puts in.

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