March Madness

Every year my spouse, Martha and I and several of her relatives living in the Ottawa area participate in a contest to most accurately predict the winners in the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Sixty-eight teams will be selected for the tournament on Sunday and each of us will fill out our brackets trying to pick the winners in each game. We get one point for each winner in the first round, two for each winner in the second round, three for each winner in the round of sixteen, four for each winner in the round of eight, five for each winner in the semi-finals and six for picking the champion team. If there is a tie in points, the persons coming closest to picking the number of points scored in the championship game is the winner.
The interesting thing about this competition is that those who follow USA college basketball the most closely are rarely the winners. Those, including pre-school and elementary school children who participate, who make their picks based on the names of the teams and their mascots are usually more successful. But it is all good fun, adds interest to watching the games, and we have a meal together after the tournament to hand out the trophy to the winner.
This year will be especially interesting for me since, having retired I can watch the afternoon games on the Thursday and Friday following Selection Sunday on St. Patrick’s day. Also, this year there are a higher than usual number of Canadian-born players on teams that have made the tournament (at least 12 and possibly up to 20) including two starters on Gonzaga which will probably be seeded as the number one team in the tournament.

Death of a Patriot: Stompin’ Tom Connors- 1936-2013

My first post on this blog was a meditation on George Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism.” At the beginning of that essay Orwell takes pains to distinguish between nationalism (which he abhorred) and patriotism which he valued highly. He described patriotism in the following terms:
“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.”
Today, over the noon hour, I was listening to Canadians from all walks of life and all parts of the country phone in to CBC’s Radio Noon show with their memories of Stompin’ Tom Connors. All agreed (as I do) that he was a great and proud Canadian. But no one described him as a Canadian nationalist, while several described him as a patriot.
Consciously or instinctively, all were using the right word to describe this unabashed lover and troubadour of Canada’s people, places and stories- a man whose love for Canada was entirely positive and unalloyed by hatred or contempt of other nations or even a desire to impose the Canadian way of life on others.
He simply felt fortunate to be a Canadian and he wanted to make other Canadians aware of what a great county they lived in and the texture of the lives of the diverse people who were their fellow citizens. He had “true patriot love” and he expressed it unforgettably. That is why his life and death touched us all so deeply.

Thoughts on Red Tory Thinking Stimulated by an Op-Ed Piece by Professor William Watson
A few days ago my wife, Martha, brought an op-ed piece in the February 27 Ottawa Citizen to my attention. Written by McGill economics professor, Dr. William Watson and headlined “The ‘Middle Class’ Is All Right”, it took the position that while all Canada’s federal political parties say their priority is to help the middle class, their real focus of attention should be on the poor, since Canadians in the middle of the income distribution have been doing reasonably well over the past several years.
Since much of my working life over the past 33 years has been spent trying to understand poverty in Canada and to promote effective policies to prevent, alleviate and shorten poverty spells, I was interested in and receptive to Dr. Watson’s argument. However, once I had read his article, my instinctive response was to investigate
1) Whether the data he had cited were the most relevant for assessing how the middle class had been doing; and
2) Whether his assertion that they had been doing reasonably well in recent years was, in fact, correct.
I found that more relevant and appropriate data are indeed available than the statistics Professor Watson selected to support his case. And they provide even stronger evidence of gains by the middle class over the past two decades.
The details of this evidence appear later in this piece. Before providing them, however, permit me to digress to some thoughts that occurred to me as I was poring over home ownership and income statistics to satisfy my curiosity about Professor Watson’s claims. Those thoughts went along the following lines. “Why am I doing this? I agree with his main point. Why do I have to satisfy myself that his argument is supported by the best and most relevant evidence available?”
The answer that came back was that my behaviour was confirming something I told my readers when I began this blog: that I am a Red Tory in my approach to politics. There are many aspects to being a Red Tory. However, the one I want to focus on in this context is a preference for experience and evidence over what Disraeli once described as “abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.” Red Tories are inductive rather than deductive thinkers; empiricists and skeptics, not ideologues. They prefer established institutions and policies which have met the tests of history and current experience to untried theories.
This preference, however, is tempered by a willingness to support changes, even radical changes, when two conditions are met:
1) Existing policies and institutions do not adequately respond to challenges to the public welfare posed by changing circumstances; and
2) A solid empirical case can be made for a different approach.
In short, a core Red Tory value is the necessity for evidence-based decision-making. The best policy is not the one which is most consistent with what we wish were true, but the one most likely to be effective given what we know about past experience and present circumstances.
When the Clark and Mulroney governments introduced Freedom of Information legislation and funded world-class longitudinal surveys and research on child development, the labour market and the incidence, depth and persistence of low income, they were expressing their belief in that approach. Sadly, the Harper government, rather than following in that tradition, has too often shown more interest in eroding Canada’s evidence base and stifling informed debate. Some examples which come immediately to mind are its decisions to abandon the long-form census, to withhold relevant fiscal information from the Parliamentary Budget Officer and to discourage government scientists from sharing the results of their research with their peers and the general public. Haunted by the fear that on many key issues the facts do not support the position they want to take, the current government has chosen to remain ignorant of the facts and to impose that ignorance on everybody else.
I now return to Professor Watson’s article. The text box explains why I chose different data than he did to assess what has been happening to the middle class. This material is somewhat technical and can safely be ignored by readers who, unlike me, are not statistical methodology geeks.
The data I have selected as being more appropriate and relevant than those in Professor Watson’s article appear in the following tables. As indicated earlier, they provide even stronger support for his central argument. The real income situation of the middle class improved markedly over the period from 1990 to 2010 and an increasing share of Canadians in all household types experienced home ownership between 1991 and 2006 (the last year for which such data are currently available)
Table One
Adjusted Average Household Post Income-Tax Income ($2010)
1990 2010 % Change
Middle 20% of Persons in Household $31,300 $38,500 +23.0
Source: Statistics Canada, Income in Canada 2010, CANSIM Table 202-0707

Table Two
% of Homeowners by Household Type
Household Type 1991 2006 Change
All households 62.6 68.4 +5.8
-Couples with Children 79.8 83.7 +3.9
-Couples without Children 71.0 79.6 +8.6
-Lone Parents 44.8 54.9 +10.1
-One-Person 36.9 47.8 +10.9
Source: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canadian Housing Observer 2012, Table 12.