Choosing Your Benchmark

On Saturday my wife and I went to a play at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa entitled “Proud.” It is a rather clever and funny satire on the current Prime Minister with lots of topical references to recent federal politics.

For those who plan on seeing the play at some point I will try not to give away too much of the plot. One scene in the play, however, jarred the nerdy policy wonk side of me. The Prime Minister is explaining to one of his new MPs that his real ultimate goal is to “right size” the role of government in society. He then goes on to say that he will know he has achieved the goal when the ratio of the net federal debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has shrunk from 30% to around 22% and mechanisms have been put in place to ensure that it does not rise from that level in the future.

But reducing the ratio of the net debt to GDP would not necessarily require any shrinkage in the size of the federal government relative to the overall economy. It could be done by raising tax revenue as a share of GDP while maintaining or even increasing federal government spending as a share of GDP.  In fact the role of government regulation in the economy could be increased or decreased with only a small impact on either revenues or expenditures as a share of GDP, not to mention the net debt to GDP ratio.

The moral of all this is to match your statistical benchmark to your real goal. If your goal is to improve the health of Canadians don’t use as your benchmark an input such as how much you spend on health, use indicators of improvement in actual health outcomes such as health-adjusted life expectancy. If you want to improve the cognitive skills of Canadians don’t use as your measure of success the share of people who have graduated from high school or university which can be manipulated by lowering standards, use the level of achievement on tests which measure how well people read and use math in everyday life situations in the adult population. In accounting terms do a bottom-line analysis, not a middle-line analysis.

The Passing of Two Backroom Girls
Recent years have seen remarkable advances by women in Canadian elective politics. They account for five of the ten current provincial premiers including those in the four most populous provinces (Kathy Dunderdale in Newfoundland and Labrador; Paulene Marois in Quebec; Kathleen Wynne in Ontario; Alison Redford in Alberta and Christy Clark in British Columbia) as well as the Government Leader in Nunavut, Eva Aariak.
The path to success for these high profile women political leaders was blazed not just by an earlier generation of female elected politicians, but by a legion of politically savvy “backroom girls” who were never members of the House of Commons or of a provincial legislature, but carved out an influential role for women in the political process as fund raisers, policy makers, political organizers, speechwriters and campaign advisors for their respective parties.
This blog is a tribute to two members of that less visible group who passed away this month in their 80’s- Barbara Walker of Halifax and Jean Pearce of Toronto and Vancouver. I had the privilege of knowing both of them personally- Barbara through my uncle, the late Richard Hatfield and Jean through our joint involvement in Flora Macdonald’s campaign for the federal Progressive Conservative party leadership in 1976.
They were both happy political warriors. It was truly written of Barbara in her obituary that she was “fascinated by politics. She worked tirelessly for the Progressive Conservative Party…doing any job she was asked to undertake. She loved every minute of it.” Jean’s obituary cited her as an activist “in municipal, provincial and worldwide politics.” Both were prominent in their chosen careers- Jean as an executive with Bell Canada and Barbara as a teacher and education administrator. Both took politics and being an active citizen seriously, but also had the gift of enjoying it and making it fun for themselves and those around them.
I will always remember fondly Barbara’s kindness to me when I came to St. Mary’s University in Halifax in the fall of 1978 to replace a professor who was taking his sabbatical. She was then involved in her one and only foray into electoral politics as a candidate for the P.C. nomination in a Halifax constituency in that year’s provincial election when John Buchanan’s Tories upset Gerry Reagan’s Liberal government.
She lost the contest for that nomination by one vote which she later traced to the fact that one of her supporters, a “lady of the evening” who was one of her former students, did not get to the convention on time to vote for her because one of her clients kept her too long. The seat went P.C. by a comfortable margin in the election. Barbara was a true “people person” and would have done well as an elected politician and would have been a good bet for Minister of Education in Buchanan’s cabinet. However, that was not to be and her good sense and good humour were put to use through service on many local arts organizations, the boards of two universities, the Nova Scotia Power Corporation and the Immigration Advisory Council.
Jean was also interested in Immigration issues and served on the federal Immigration and Refugee Board as well as a Commonwealth Observer in the Independence Election in Rhodesia in 1980 and as a United Nations Observer on the mission to verify the Referendum in Eritrea in 1993. She instructed her family to hold no public memorial service, “but she always asked that anyone who was her friend would have fond memories and an interesting life.” As one who was a friend I certainly have fond memories of her and have had an interesting life, in no small part, because politics brought me into contact with so many outstanding women such as her and Barbara. With their passing two more of that pioneering generation of women, born around the Great Depression, who opened up every aspect of political life in Canada to women from the 1950’s to the 1990’s are no more. But their legacy, memory and example live on.

More on Voter Turnout

One of this blog’s faithful readers suggests that the end of door-to-door enumeration and the centralization of the voters’ list at Elections Canada is a significant cause of declining voter turnout.

This is a persuasive explanation to me for three reasons:

1)      Door-to-door enumeration was a personal face-to-face reminder to many people that there was an election on, when it was going to be and where the person enumerated should vote. The practice was to post the voters’  list for each poll at a prominent location in that poll, allowing persons who had inadvertently been left off the list to become aware of the fact and get their names placed on the list at revision.

2)      Door-to-door enumeration has to produce a more up-to-date list than the central list maintained by Statistics Canada which is mainly updated by information provided once a year on people’s income tax returns. When people move after filing their tax return they are likely to be double counted at their new address (by applying to vote at an advance poll or on election day)and at their old address . People who die after filing their income tax return may also remain on the list.  These flaws in the national register of voters inflate the number of voters on the voters’ list, thus reducing measured voter turnout.  For example, Elections Canada  adjusted the turnout rate for the 2000 federal election campaign from the initially reported 61.2% to 64.1% after the National Voters’ register was purged to take account of deaths and duplications resulting from moves. Elections Canada has not reported doing similar adjustments for elections after 2000.

3)      In 1997, the last federal election with a door-to-door enumeration in most provinces, the voter turnout was 67.0%. It fell to 64.1% (post-revision) in 2000. It has not exceeded 65.0% since 1997. This does not prove that the end of door-to-door enumeration reduced voter turnout, but the correlation is consistent with that argument.

Why So Many Canadians Don't Vote and why they should.

Why So Many Canadians Don’t Vote and why they should

In the October 2008 federal general election voter turnout reached an all-time low of 58.8%. Just over half of Canadians on the voters’ list actually cast ballots. Forty-five to fifty years ago in the federal general elections of 1958, 1962 and 1963 over 79% of those registered to vote, almost four in five, turned up at the polls. What explains this sharp decline? When did it happen, and what can be done to reverse it?

The timing of the decline is relatively recent. As late as the elections of 1984 and 1988 voter turnout exceeded 75%, despite the lowering of the voting age in 1970 from 21 to 18 which added a low turnout group to the electorate. Only in the election of 2000 did turnout fall below 65%, a level it has not since exceeded.

The most widely accepted explanation for the sharp decline in voter turnout in Canada which began with the 1993 general election is that since 1988 younger eligible voters (those under age 45) became much less likely to vote compared to the same age group in previous elections.[1]  Fortunately, this trend does not appear to have continued in the four most recent federal elections. Since the June 2004 federal election, overall turnout rates and those for voters under age 45 have stabilized, although at historically low levels.

This decline in voter turnout, followed by stabilization at low levels, has coincided with developments which ought to have increased rather than reduced voter turnout. Today’s adult population is older and better-educated than it was in 1988 and voter turnout tends to increase with both age and the level of education. Demographic factors dampening voter turnout include the rising number of lone parents and persons living alone and the rising number of immigrants to Canada, particularly those from Eastern Asia and West Central Asia and the Middle East. Lone parents with children under age 5 and adults living alone are more than 10% less likely to vote than adults in couples with children older than age 5 or no children. Immigrants from Eastern and West Central Asia are more than 10% less likely to vote than adults born in Canada. [2]

Elections Canada and provincial election agencies have attempted to counter the decline in voter turnout by making it more convenient for eligible voters to get on the voters’ list and to cast their ballots. Canadians can now register to vote on their income tax forms and on voting day. The number of days when they can vote at advance polls or in the office of the Returning Officer have been increased and Special Polling Stations have been set up at nursing homes and prisons.

In Nova Scotia where voter turnout in provincial general elections has declined steadily from 75.8% in 1988 to an all-time low of 57.9% in 2009, Elections Nova Scotia has introduced several measures which will take effect at the next provincial election to encourage voter turnout. At that election it will be possible to cast a vote on all but four of the days in the four weeks leading up to Election Day. Polling stations will be set up in hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons and nursing homes to allow voting by disabled persons and others who find it difficult to travel to normal polling stations. Shut-in voters will be able to request that a ballot be brought to them by officials from the office of the local Returning Officer. Students attending universities and community colleges will be able to vote on campus, instead of having to return to their own constituencies. [3]

Some of these changes will address valid reasons why some eligible voters have been unable to cast ballots in past elections. For example, an article in the July 5, 2011 issue of the Statistics Canada Daily reported that in a survey following the May 2, 2011 federal election 44% of those over age 75 who had not voted cited illness or disability as the reason.

But this same article found that by far the two most common explanations people gave for why they had not voted were lack of interest (28%); including a belief that their vote would not have made a difference in the outcome of the election, and being too busy (23%); including having family obligations or a schedule conflict at work or school. Interestingly, recent immigrants were far less likely than native-born Canadians to give lack of interest as their reason for not voting but far more likely to cite being “too busy.”

This suggests that making voting more convenient alone will not reverse the decline in voter turnout since the late 1980’s. Steps must also be taken to persuade eligible voters, particularly those under age 45, to conclude that casting an informed vote is something that is in their interest.

Voting, after all, is one of the few areas of life where we are truly equal. The votes of new citizens and single mothers have just as much weight as those of our Prime Minister or of the wealthiest Canadians. Exercising the right to vote is worth a little inconvenience to make sure we are registered and get to the polls before they close. It is worth that inconvenience even if no party in our constituency offers an attractive platform or candidate. As George Orwell pointed out in the 1940’s, “Even when the choice is between the lesser of two evils, it is still worth making that choice.” Having no attractive party or candidate to vote for should stimulate non-voters to become more involved in the local political process so that they have a more attractive alternative next time.

Unfortunately, in recent elections much political advertising is designed to discourage potential supporters of opposing candidates from voting, rather than persuading them to support a party or candidate. Recall the high volume of negative advertising the federal Conservative Party mounted against the Opposition leaders, Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, in the months leading up to the elections of 2008 and 2011.

In the 1960’s advertising encouraged adults in the USA to register and vote under the slogan: “Vote and the choice is yours. Don’t vote and the choice is theirs. Register or you have no choice.” If the decline in voter turnout in Canada is to be reversed and not just arrested, more non-voters in Canada will have to take that message to heart, resist the arguments of politicians who want to suppress rather than encourage voting and overcome their own laziness. The facts that it takes an effort to vote and that the choices presented are often less than ideal are convenient excuses, not valid reasons for not voting. They can be overcome with an effort on the part of current non-voters much smaller than the effort their ancestors made to obtain and preserve the right they foolishly hold to be of such little value.

Eliminating Poverty with a Guaranteed Annual Income:

Right Goal, Wrong Approach

Canada is a rich country by anyone’s definition. Yet, while the number of Canadians living in poverty has declined almost one in ten Canadians lives in a household struggling to make ends meet. According to the most commonly-used measure of poverty in Canada, Statistics Canada’s post-income tax Low Income Cut-offs (LICOs-IAT)[1] , there has been a significant reduction in the poverty rate in Canada over the past 15 years. Between 1996 and 2011 (the last year for which data are available) the poverty rate fell from 15.2% to 8.8%. Despite this progress, in 2011 almost three million Canadians were living in poor households and half of them had incomes at least 26% below their LICO-IAT low income thresholds.

Many Canadians, deeply concerned about social justice, including Senator Hugh Segal, advocate a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) as the best way to eliminate poverty in Canada.

An adequate GAI is not a new idea. Between 1969 and 1974 almost a dozen highly developed countries seriously considered implementing such a program. However, none of these schemes was ever adopted.

There is a reason for this widespread failure to adopt an adequate GAI as an instrument for eliminating poverty. No one has ever been able to design a program which simultaneously provides adequate incentives to earn, makes a major dent in the incidence and depth of poverty and is not ruinously expensive. That is to say, despite the attractiveness of a GAI as a concept, social policy designers in a range of countries have so far been unable to develop a specific GAI that would be both politically and fiscally feasible while still effectively eliminating or, at least markedly reducing, poverty. The devil has truly been in the details.

In 1994 I was assigned with two other officials of the then Department of Human Resources Development[2] to develop GAI options to address poverty in Canada. We came up with two distinct proposals. One was designed to be reasonably adequate. At the same time it provided the no disincentive to earn because the income guarantee was not taxed back as other income rose. The second was designed to require no additional government spending and to provide good incentives to earn by taxing back the guarantee at low rates as income from other sources rose.

The first design provided for an income guarantee of $20,000 for a family of four and $7000 for a single adult. For Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) with a population of 500,000 or more, this was still well below the 1994 LICOs-IAT thresholds of $26,092 for a family of four and $13,800 for a single adult. Part of the costs of this option were to be paid by eliminating personal income tax exemptions for the non-elderly and eliminating or sharply reducing all other income support programs for this age group such as welfare , child benefits and Employment Insurance. However, even at these less than adequate levels, this design would have cost governments an additional $93.1 billion annually based on 1993 data. Moreover, while it would have cut the total dollar amount by which the income of all poor households fell short of their low-income thresholds by 45%, it would have reduced the percentage of Canadians living in poverty by only 3.1 percentage points from 12.8% to 9.7%.

The second design provided for much smaller income guarantees: $15,000 for a family of four and $4,500 for a single adult. This option would have reduced the total dollar amount by which the income of all poor households fell short of their low-income thresholds by one-third, but would have reduced the percentage of Canadians in poverty by only 1.4 percentage points to 11 .4%.[3] Even more troubling, it would have left 51% of households worse off than under the existing income support system including 20% of households with incomes under $20,000.

For such small reductions in the poverty rate, the majority of Canadians would probably find unacceptable the cost of first option and the distributional outcomes of the second. We therefore reluctantly concluded at the time, and I continue to believe now that a comprehensive GAI for the non-elderly is not a viable approach to the significant reduction, much less the elimination, of poverty in Canada. It costs too much and just doesn’t fix the problem.

So how do we pull more Canadians out of poverty and improve the situation of those who remain poor? There is no single answer, but I will be discussing this question in future blogs.

[For readers interested in a more detailed technical explanation of the concept of a GAI and why I believe it is not a viable approach to significant poverty reduction in Canada, I have written a seven-page article on this theme which I will send on request. My e-mail address is: michaelfrederickhatfield@hotmail.com]

One of the readers of this blog has suggested that I tackle the question, “Why do smart people do stupid things?” as a topic.

It is certainly a question worth exploring.  First, however, some terms of the question need to be more precisely defined. To start with, who are smart people? We all know individuals who consider themselves smart and are even thought by many others to be smart, but whose superficial “smartness” does not equate with genuine intelligence. When such people do stupid things what needs to be explained is not the gap between their actions and their intelligence, but how they got the reputation of being smart in the first place. 

Second, what is a stupid thing? Some actions which are judged to be stupid in hindsight are taken after careful thought and with the best available knowledge of the relevant facts. These actions seem stupid, not because they were reckless or in disregard of something obvious, but because a factor which could not be reasonably foreseen occurred to make events turn out badly. Lack of success retrospectively turns decisions which were merely unfortunate into something stupid. That being said, however, there are many examples of people who have a long record of intelligent decisions doing something which the average person would identify as being obviously dangerous, excessively risky or just plain dumb. What were they thinking? How could they have done something so foolish?

Leaving aside instances  where such people were drunk, under the influence of other mind-altering drugs or suffering from a mental illness and were thus not in a position to make a rational decision,  why do truly smart people do truly stupid things?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is arrogance and an accompanying sense of entitlement. Conrad Black, Eliot Spitzer and Lance Armstrong had commendable achievements in business, politics and professional sports respectively, and are generally recognized as having above average intelligence. However, their intelligence seems to have led them to believe that they were entitled to act outside accepted moral codes and get away with theft of documents, adultery and use of performance-enhancing drugs respectively.

A variation of this is the situation where a person is genuinely smart in a given field, but is called on to make a crucial decision in another field where they lack the knowledge or experience to make the appropriate choice. Ashamed to admit they are out of their depth, they hastily choose a course of action without seeking counsel from persons wiser and/or more experienced in the field. This may be part of the explanation of the cheque written to Senator Mike Duffy by the Prime Minister’s then Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright.

Another explanation is hubris. People who have made intelligent decisions in the past in their area of expertise, whether it is political strategy, or making investments or identifying economic or social trends can easily become convinced that their knowledge is so complete and their thought processes so sound that they overlook or undervalue factors which contradict what they wish to be true. Unable to distinguish their emotional loves and hates from their rational conclusions, they do things that fly in the face of facts and logic which predictably turn out badly for themselves and those who depend on them.

In some cases, smart people are the victims of their own intelligence. One characteristic of smart people is that they have more imagination than people of more ordinary intelligence. They can conceive of and thus entertain ideas and strategies which would not have occurred to other people. Often, those ideas and strategies turn out brilliantly. On other occasions they lead people to take risks which appear to be and turn out to be reckless.

Some years ago the golfer Phil Mickelson was leading the United States Open golf championship when he came to the last hole. His tee shot went into the woods. Most ordinary golfers, upon finding the ball would have instantly concluded that it was in an unplayable position and would have taken a penalty stroke which would still have left Mickelson in a position to win. However, Mickelson saw an opening in the trees which he believed he could hit the ball through to the fairway, clinching the championship.   In the event he hit the ball off a tree; it ricocheted back deeper into the woods and he wound up making a score which cost him the championship. Afterwards, he berated himself saying “What an idiot I am.”  In one sense he was an idiot for taking an unnecessary risk. But the reason he took the risk was because he was smart enough to see a possibility which most other golfers would not even have noticed and talented enough to believe he had a reasonable chance of pulling it off.

Yet another explanation is that stupid things appear more stupid when they are done by smart people.  During the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower the Republican leader in the United States Senate was William Knowland of California. He was not known as a brilliant political strategist. Eisenhower said privately of him, “that in his case there seems to be no final answer to the question, ‘How stupid can you get?’ Even when Knowland made a stupid political decision few people pointed out its stupidity because no one expected anything different. His Senate colleague from California between 1948 and 1952 was Richard Nixon. Many people disliked Nixon, but most people considered him a smart politician. Therefore when he began his 1960 presidential campaign with a promise to campaign personally in all 50 states, many people raised the “How could a smart person be so stupid?” question about a promise that so drastically limited the flexibility of his campaign strategy and which no one had expected or asked him to make.

Nobody is perfect. Even the smartest people do stupid things from time to time, even and sometimes especially in the areas where they have the best expertise and insight. From that perspective the answer to the question “Why do smart people do stupid things?” seems obvious. However, smart people avoid having the stupidity of their bad decisions exposed often enough (through good luck, or because the decision involved was about something minor) that we become convinced of their infallibility. Thus, when a stupid decision leads to demonstrably bad results we are genuinely surprised and ask the question suggested by my reader.  

Beyond the Pollsters’ Embarrassment:

 Observations of the British Columbia Election

Understandably, most of the attention following the May 14^th British Columbia election was focused on  why the pollsters failed to correctly predict the re-election of the Liberal government. But a close examination of the final results released at the end of May reveals some other interesting features of the election which are also worthy of comment.

Good News for the Greens

While the Green Party share of the overall vote was down 0.1 percentage points from 2009, they

1)      Elected their first member in Oak Bay-Gordon Head on Vancouver Island;

2)      Came within 1.2 percentage points of winning the adjoining constituency of Saanich North and the Islands;

3)      Increased the number of constituencies where they won 15% or more of the vote from 5 to 9; and

4)      Doubled their share of the vote in the 11 constituencies on Vancouver Island where they ran candidates in both 2009 and 2013 from 10.9% to 21.8%.

 The explanation for their lower share of the overall vote was that they ran candidates in only 61 of the 85 constituencies in 2013 compared to a full slate of candidates in 2009. The conventional wisdom was that the absence of a Green candidate would help the NDP in the other 24 constituencies. However, the NDP share of the vote fell in 17 of these 24 constituencies and the Liberals gained a seat from the NDP in one of them (Cariboo North).

Good News for Women

The number of female candidates elected rose from 25 in 2009 to 30 in 2013 and will rise to 31 if Christy Clark wins her by-election in Westside-Kelowna. Women now account for 35.3% of the members of the British Columbia legislature- the highest share in any province. Quebec held the top position previously.

Good News for Citizen Engagement

Election night coverage indicated another fall in voter turnout from the dismal 54.8% of eligible voters who cast ballots in 2009. However, the final official results indicate that turnout in fact rose to 57.9% in 2013 (based on the estimated number of eligible voters as of April 23, 2013.)

Interestingly the only constituencies where voter turnout exceeded 70% were Oak Bay-Gordon Head (70.8%) and Saanich North and the Islands (70.3%) where the Green Party had their two best results. The constituency with the third highest turnout was Delta South (69.0%) where Independent MLA, Vicki Huntingdon won re-election with a substantially increased margin.  

The turnout increase suggests that the prospect of a majority NDP government brought out some soft Liberal voters to the polls who might otherwise have stayed home. There was a similar phenomenon in the recent Alberta provincial election where the prospect of a Wild Rose majority government brought enough soft PC voters to the polls outside rural southern Alberta to win a majority mandate for Allison Redford and her party.