Somewhere in central western Alberta.

I went ice climbing for the first time ever on these water falls. This photo was taken at the end of the day as we were walking away. My guide would kill me if I said exactly where this spot is, but I don’t think one anonymous photo is so bad.

On October 7, 1989, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. It killed 63 people. The earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince in Haiti also had a magnitude of 7.0. The Red Cross estimated that between 45,000 to 50,000 people have died. The Haitian government estimates the total could be over 200,000.

The story of Haiti’s tragedy is not one of natural disaster. It’s a story of man-made poverty. Poorly constructed homes, terrible infrastructure and awful public services are the main reason why so many died.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that ten years of aid will be needed to help Haiti rise from the rubble. This is pie-in-the-sky talk. No one knows how long it will take to rebuild Haiti. The reason why is that the world still doesn’t know how to successfully spend the majority of foreign aid money.

The poorest countries that have grown the most over the past 20 years — China, India — received very little aid. Those, like Haiti, that received trillions in aid, have not grown nearly as much.

There is simply no time-tested government policy that can be pulled in any situation to make growth increase. Circumstances change. What worked one decade won’t work in the next. In the anthology “What Works in Development?” economist Abhijit Banerjee writes, “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

So what’s the answer? What makes a country work?

Culture can play a big role. Right next door to Haiti is the Dominican Republic, where people lead longer, more comfortable lives. The D.R. endured corrupt dictatorships, corruption and foreign invasion, just like Haiti. The geography is the same, yet somehow, the D.R. works better.

Some believe that Haiti suffers from a legacy of progress-resistant cultural influences. Voodoo spreads the message that life is capricious and that planning is futile. Studies show high levels of mistrust in Haiti. Some of what makes Haitians Haitian might be the reason why people are so poor there.

But understanding why Haiti does not work might not even be key to making it work.

In many ghettos around the U.S., there are new schools that demand high standards from students there, even if their mom is a prostitute or their father a drug dealer. The people who run it don’t care why the kids are poor. They just expect them to work their butts off and achieve the same as anyone else. Any program that seeks to improve Haiti might have to follow the same idea, cultural sensitivity be damned. It’s called a culture of no excuses.

Cultural change is hard. Cultures form over long periods of time and are deeply ingrained in a national mindset. How difficult would it be to do away with the notion that Canadians are polite and Americans are entrepreneurial? It would require a massive, traumatic event. Like say, perhaps, an earthquake felt at the national level. Haiti’s chance is now.

The sudden, highly localized (Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Vancouver, etc.) hyperventilation about the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue parliament has reached its current state of major national debate through one key ingredient: hot air and lots of it.

Yes, the decision was pure Stephen Harper: partisan, sneaky, somewhat draconian and totally with the aim of seizing more power, no matter how small the filaments. It didn’t tell us anything we did not already know about the man.

All of this talk that the decision is the “tipping point” that will alert Canadians that, “Hey, this man is not nice and should not be my leader” is nonsense. Harper has already used prorogation to save his political skin and if Canadians weren’t paying attention when the stakes were higher, then they’re unlikely to pay attention now when the stakes are much more meagre.

We Canadians are a cynical lot when it comes to politicians. We expect them to play games and jig the system in their favour. There’s nothing new there. Yes, people are upset, but they would never vote for the Conservatives anyway. Harper couldn’t give a damn about them.

Angus Reid, the polling firm, found that 53 per cent of respondents disagree with prorogation, but who cares? The Conservatives haven’t taken a serious dip in the support polls because of this. Canadians disagree with Harper and this government all of the time, but still seem to stand behind it.

Polls are mere snapshots in time anyways and are given way more importance by pundits than they deserve. Polls don’t reveal what could happen once an election is in full swing and the candidates are out performing in the full glare of the public eye. To say that now is the time that the Liberals should strike is fantasy. Their leader, Michael Ignatieff, has still made no case to Canadians about why he should lead this country. He still looks like he’s visiting a infectious tropical disease hospital ward whenever he ventures out into the plebes to shake hands. Most Canadians would probably love to see him hit in the face with a snowball.

All Stephen Harper needs is 40 per cent of the electorate and he has his majority. He does not govern with the majority in mind because he doesn’t have to. He slices and dices the electorate up into segments and focus groups. He targets specific groups. There’s no national, uniting vision, no higher purpose. Just statistics and polling date. He is one of the most calibrated politicians this country has ever seen. He’s called a cyborg not just because he has dead, soulless eyes but because his whole operation runs like machinery.

The recent prorogation follows suite: parliament is messy, full of awkward questions like what did the government know about Afghan prisoner torture in 2007 and 2008? And who knows what other questions would’ve cropped up in those 36 bills that died when Harper shut down the government. The machine does not like messy questions and will pretty much do whatever it takes to blast them out of existence.

But we already knew that about this government. The prorogation “controversy” shows us nothing new and if Canadians haven’t cared for the past four years, why they would care now is a mystery.

The reasons for the 2008 Wall Street banking crisis and the subsequent global recession can probably be best summed up by one word: greed. But, if you’re looking for a blow-by-blow account of what the United States had to do to stop Wall Street greed from tipping the world into a new Great Depression last September, you can’t do any better than Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, Too Big To Fail. It’s the best explanation we have for why the economy sucks right now.

He has scenes involving the longtime CEO of Lehman Brothers sitting on his bed with his wife, crying, the night his firm tanked. There’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson literally throwing up due to fear about the collapsing banking sector and getting down on bended knee to beg congressional leaders to approve his bailout plan.

There’s former New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner using extremely colourful languge to force Wall Street tycoons and firms into slapdash deals with each other. That Washington had no problem forcing mergers and buyouts upon Wall Street firms is just one of the book’s many revelations.

Mainly what the book highlights is just how unprepared world leaders were for the collapse of the banking sector in the US. The $700 billion figure for the TARP bailout fund was literally plucked out of the air by leaders who had little idea just how bad the problems were. The global economy was saved in a series of white-knuckle, sleep-deprived, seat-of-the-pants moments made by people who didn’t fully understand what they were doing.

While the book has its share of heroes, they mostly exist in government. The villains in this book are those who worked and still work on Wall Street.

The head of Lehman Brothers destroyed one of the firm’s final chances for redemption when he burst into a meeting with some possible South Korean partners and totally changed the terms of a deal that had been in the works for weeks.

The heads of the major US banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.) rail against the practice of short selling (borrowing a stock, selling it, spreading false rumours about that stock and then buying it back at a lower price before returning it — the difference, of course, is kept) at numerous points in the book because it was destroying their balance sheets. Never mind that each of these firms had used short selling to make money on just about every other industry in the world.

It’s details like this that end up painting the book’s most distressing message. Ross Sorkin writes that in all of his interviews with the wheelers and dealers on Wall Street (he interviewed hundreds), none ever expressed any sort of humility, solace or sense of apology about their actions. Some leveraged their banks at rates around 50:1 but still don’t see how reckless that was.
Instead, the bankers are far more ready to point fingers. They blame each other instead of themselves and that single fact may be the genesis for the next banking crisis.

So the Premiers communications manager is stepping down and he says (and Calgary Herld columnist Don Braid agrees) that he wasn’t pushed. He is stepping down because he wants too.

“It’s very demanding all the time and I think three years of it was enough for me. I just couldn’t see staying through another election, but that’s what the premier and Ron wanted. The premier did ask me to stay.”

Then Stanways adds that he knows Stelmach wants some changes and this will make it easier

Now, while I don’t think that the Premier actually went out of his way to ask Stanway to leave and while I believe Stanway when he says the Premier asked him to stay, it seems pretty logical to think that given that the Premier has already said that the media is the biggest problem his government faces, it seems pretty logical to think that Stanway could read the writing on the wall. The media is not being managed properly (someone’s not doing their job) and that needs to be rectified (there’s going to be A LOT of work coming up).

As Stelmach said in the above article, “We’ve got to get the clear, correct message out.”

That’s a lot of pressure on the communications team. Stelmach was sending the message that his communications staff wasn’t pulling it’s weight. He may not have had the gumption to say it to Stanway’s face, but it’s certainly logical to think that’s what he was running through his mind.

Even with the overflow of testimony and media coverage in recent days, key questions remain about what the federal Conservative government did to answer back to potential warnings about torture in mid-2006 and early 2007.

But vague outlines can be gleaned and they are not looking good for our government and military.
The most detailed testimony in recent days came from former Afghanistan task-force leader David Mulroney, who took over his Afghan position in 2007. He has testified that by May of 2007, there were new safeguards in place to make sure transferred Afghan prisoners would be safe from torture from the Afghan government. This is good work.

But it may have taken too long.

Colvin says that he sent six emails between May, 2006 and February 2007 dealing with detainees. The office of Peter MacKay, then minister of foreign affairs, received at least one of those emails. The full content of those six emails has yet to be fully released to the public.

However, pieces have leaked and while they are not as striking as the claims in Colvin’s testimony that almost all of the people captured by Canada were tortured, they are still very worrisome.

One of those emails quotes a Red Cross official stating “when things get difficult, some authorities in Afghanistan get tougher and tougher,” and that “all kinds of things are going on.” The Red Cross is a demure organization which uses language very, very carefully. The government and military should have known this and these words should have tipped them off that something was amiss and worth probing deeper immediately.

They didn’t.

Other Colvin 2006 emails use words like “unsatisfactory conditions” and “unsavory.” And this is before the full contents of those emails has been released to the public.

Judging by the testimony that Ret-Gen. Rick Hillier gave, it didn’t matter what Colvin wrote. Ret-Gen. Hillier was right to defend his people with conviction (good leaders always do), but to simply dismiss the claim by Colvin that all detainees were tortured with the word “ludicrous,” with out seriously engaging the evidence, was a shame.

Ret-Gen. Michel Gauthier’s claim that the first he even heard about torture was an April 2007 story in The Globe and Mail was also amiss, given that Mulroney had already stated that he knew something was up in 2006, before he took on his leadership role. Ret-Gen Gauthier was also on Colvin’s 2006 mailing list. He should have noticed that something was up and acted on it before May of 2007.

Even more shameful has been the Conservative party’s decision to attack the messenger and not the message and to defer to some patriotic, unpeachable notion of military heroism, instead of actually dealing with the substance of the claims. The government has been focused far too much on posturing and too little on fact throughout this entire incident and has been so since former Minister of Defence Gordon O’Connor wrongly stated in 2006 that the Red Cross was overseeing detainee treatment. Canadians want debate, not name calling.

But even if this were to stop, much of this entire debate will remain, unfortunately, hyperbole. We are essentially arguing about who said what to whom in late 2006 and 2007 and did they listen? It’s a little like high school. The core question remains: were prisoners turned over to the Afghans by Canadians tortured in mid-2006 and early 2007? Likely, but we still don’t know. Given the Conservative government’s refusal to hold a full public inquiry into this matter, it’s not likely we’ll know any time soon.

The eight-year (and counting) Afghanistan war was never supposed to take this long. The Taliban were toppled from government easily. Victory and a radical change in the Afghan people’s standard of life seemed imminent. But the term “forever war” now seems the best way to describe what is happening in Afghanistan.

The stumbling blocks are stacked to the roof: mounting casualties, the tainted election of president Hamid Karzai, dwindling troop numbers and coherence from the UN and NATO, and a populace that is slowly losing all trust in Western forces. During these dark days in Afghanistan, Canadian forces are preparing to draw down from combat operations and U.S. president Barack Obama is being asked by the leading U.S. Army general in Afghanistan to make a decision that may define his presidency: increase the troops significantly or begin to pull out. It’s a decision that may define Obama’s presidency in the same way that Vietnam defined Lyndon Bayne Johnson’s.

Despite all of the hardships, Obama should give the military what it needs and Canada should re-up its commitment to Afghanistan.

The arguments in favour are strong.

The West has serious security interests in preventing the area from slipping into anarchy and more conflict. Government and military elements in Pakistan, with it’s large Pashto population, many of whom are sympathetic to Islamic extremism, could be swayed by a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. A Pakistani nuke in the hands of a Taliban techno-holy-warrior is one of the world’s most dire nightmares.

Second, defeat in Afghanistan would embolden our enemies around the planet, just as the victory of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the late 80’s emboldened Osama bin Laden to attack in Tanzania, Kenya, Yemen, New York and Virginia.

And third, withdrawal would be a terrible betrayal of the Afghan people who are helping and have been helped in Afghanistan by the West’s forces. The Taliban and the many warlords who dot the country frequently torture and murder people simply on the suspicion that they have had contact with “foreigners.” This would increase exponentially were our forces not there to try and halt it.

But winning in Afghanistan is not an easy task.

To do it, the West will need a credible, legitimate government to work with, the resources to do the job and the knowledge that the wars largest backer, the United States, firmly supports the mission.
Changes to the Afghan constitution will be needed. Most Afghans have little contact with the central government and deal more with local and provincial government officers when their lives intersect with government. Mountainous and multicultural, Afghanistan is not a centralized state.

This is where the Afghan constitution after the fall of the Taliban went wrong. Governors are
appointed by the central government, which has little idea of the needs of the country outside of Kabul. Afghanistan needs a constitution that disperses power. Imagine if Ottawa appointed the premier of Alberta. Afghanistan is operating under the wrong political framework today.

As for resources, remember that in Iraq, the prospects of success were much bleaker than they are in Afghanistan today. But they were turned around by more troops, a distinct change in tactics as well as strategy and the firm support of the U.S. president. There’s no reason the same can’t be achieved in Afghanistan.

Finally, the West needs to fight this war with conviction. Obama is wobbling, Canada is leaving before the job is done. These things do comfort to our enemies. Only if we convince Afghanistan that we are there for the long haul of this worthy cause, do we have a chance of winning.

Despite our much ballyhooed public health care system, we Canadians don’t really think very much about health care. We go to the doctor’s office, we hand over our health cards, we tell the doctor what ails us and we take our medicine. We don’t think about costs of the service that we’re getting and if we’ve got a prescription drug plan, we rarely think about the costs of pharmaceuticals.

Instead, we think more about the United State’s state of health care and how bad they have it. We’re Canada, we’re superior. “Those poor Americans who have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to deal with a severed finger, like in that Michael Moore movie. We’ve got it so much better,” we say.
But the fundamental reasons why health care doesn’t work in the United States share similarities with the way we operate our system.

In the same way that the government funds many health related services in Canada, health insurance companies in the US funds nearly all health-care expenses. Insurance, whether provided by a government or a company, is probably the most complex, costly and distortional method of funding anything, but America and Canada cover pretty much all their health care costs with it.

Imagine sending your grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer be reimbursed for that bill. The costs of the services of the clerks, lawyers and other administration to handle your bill is suddenly tacked onto the cost of your veggies, eggs and meat.

Why would you bother?

Right now, for every two doctors in the US, there is a person employed in the health insurance business, whether as a assessor, a lawyer or some other bureaucratic function. Much of the costs associated with paying for the services of these people would disappear if people just paid for things the way we normally pay for things — by ourselves.

What’s worse is the way this relationship between insured, assessor and service provider is distorted. There’s a fundamental disconnect going on there. If you don’t know how much things costs directly, you’re much less likely to care about paying for them. The insurance company of the government will take care of it.

What if we paid for gasoline with auto-insurance? Or electricity with home-owners insurance? You wouldn’t bother to check the prices at the pumps or on your electricity bill. “Insurance will cover it,” you’d say, just like we say when we get into a wreck. Health care is different than a car crash.
Canadian and American patient waiting rooms are filled with people who shouldn’t be there, but because they don’t pay for the services directly. If you buy vegetables you don’t eat, you don’t buy them again because having money is better than having gross vegetables. But with health care, the relationship between service, quality of service and money is invisible. Why not go see the doctor for whatever ails you if it seems like you don’t have to pay for it?

The United States exacerbates this problem with a system that pays doctors more for the amount of services they offer. Doctors essentially create demand at will, a recipe for a clogged system of bloat and inflated costs. This doesn’t happen in Canada.

However, just like the United States, we have a limited understanding of the cost of the service that we get and we pay for those services with a complicated system, prone to bloat and red tape. We would do well to think about that the next time we criticize out neighbours to the south.

The lands we hike, hunt, live and enjoy ourselves on are disputed. There are people who believe that significant portions of the West Country were never formally handed over to the Canadian government by the First Nation groups who first lived on them.

“The federal government has never properly addressed the fact that the Kootenay Plains, the Bighorn Wildland, the half of Banff National Park north of the headwaters of the Red Deer River, and a broad, profitable strip of Jasper National Park, including the Columbia Icefield, were never the subject of treaty negotiations at all,” writes Gary Botting, in Chief Smallboy: In Pursuit of Freedom.

He believes that those lands still rightfully belong to First Nations groups as the treaty negotiations ceding away their ownership were nothing more than a government backed fraud.

Why does he think this?

In Treaty Six, the 1876 treaty that deals with the central parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan given up by local Albertan Native leaders, much of central western Alberta is pointedly left out. The strip of mountainous lands between the Continental Divide and the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains were seemingly left for the Natives there.

David Thompson and Alexander Henry both wrote of the aboriginals who waged fierce battles in those areas and both men knew to steer clear of them. Thompson wrote of people there with something approaching fear, strange considering the good relations he established with other natives around Alberta.

Aboriginals there seemed highly possessive, frequently at war and in no way related to the Plain and Wood Cree Indians and the other tribes of Indians at Fort Carlton, Fort Pitt and Battle River, who signed onto Treaty Six. Those natives did not represent the Natives in the west and as such, the government did not ask them to sign away the rights of a group they did represent.

This way of thinking did not last.

With Treaty Eight of the late 1800s, the Canadian government, acting with less than the aboriginals best interests at heart, sought to remedy the central-western Albertan lands left out.
Treaty Eight primarily deals with lands in northern Canada, but the areas around the Kootenay Plains, the Bighorn Wildland and Banff and Jasper National Parks, the areas left out of Treaty Six, are also included.

“It is unlikely that any of the chiefs [from Chippewyan, Slave, Beaver and the northernly bands of the Woodland Cree tribes] present at the signing of Treaty Eight in 1899 had ever visited what is now Jasper National Park, the Kootenay Plains, the Columbia Icefield, [etc.],” writes Botting. Still, they were asked to sign away the rights of a people they had never met.

Botting believes the Chiefs at the treaty signing had little idea that they were even signing away their own property rights, let alone the rights of another group. In short, goes the argument, the government tricked one group of people into signing away the rights to land of a people they had no business representing in an act of state sanctioned fraud.

One day, writes Botting, the First Nation groups will mount a legal claim to the lands of the Kootenay Plains, one that will end up before the Supreme Court of Canada. Parks Canada could owe the Natives over a century of back rent.

Canadians and Albertans of all colours would be wise to recognize that this bill will one day be set down. Whether we pay it or not, or even whether we should or not, remains to be seen, but until that day, we would all be wise to understand the arguments made in its favour and against it.

So you’ve decided to take on the Clearwater County taxman. You’re a home owner and you feel that your property has been assessed too highly. You want to go to the mattresses and fight for a lower property value and in turn, lower your property taxes. Nothing wrong with that. Everyone makes mistakes and it’s entirely possible that the county has assessed your property wrong.

However, as with any battle, fortune favours the well prepared. If you can’t work out differences with the county in private meetings, you will have to go before an arbitration board, the Assessment Review Board (ARB). There, a three person panel will arbitrate and decide on your case against the county’s assessors. It’s intense and a lot like being in court, something many first timers are baffled by.

So, to help, here are some tips on handling the ARB.

The first thing to remember is that you can never ask to many questions of the ARB clerk, your primary contact at the county in the months leading up to your hearing. Part of his job is to help you navigate through the somewhat confusing legal miasma that is the review process.

Ask the clerk as many questions as you can think of in the months leading up to your trial date.

Better yet, have your appraiser ask him.

You are basically required to hire an assessor in this process. You will have to supply the county with professional documents from a realtor or an accredited appraiser valuing your property. It would be wise to also hire this person to speak on your behalf at the hearing. They are the experts and can handle the rebuttals of the county’s assessor.

The county’s assessors, your antagonists in this process, are experienced, rigorous people who have been through the hearings before, unlike you. They know the ins and outs. They will rebut your claims. They will pour over your assessment documents, searching for sentences they can use against you. It’s intense.

“I can’t answer those questions. I’m not a professional assessor,” probably will not cut the mustard with the assessment review board. So bring in an expert to speak on your behalf. This will probably cost your thousands of dollars.

Before your hearing, be sure to tell the clerk at the earliest possible time (no less than 21 days beforehand) that you are planning on having your assessor speak at the hearing.

This is incredibly important.

The ARB regards any new testimony outside of the property owners as new evidence. New evidence means giving notice. This might seem like a moot point. If your assessor wrote your assessment report, than surely they will be allowed to present it, no questions asked. This is not true. The board needs notice. Tell them your expert will be there at least 21 days in advance. Otherwise, you will be forced to defend the report on your own. Again, you will likely lose.

These review processes are like double edged swords. If your appeal is unsuccessful, you are opening yourself up to the possibility that the assessment of your property may increase. In losing, you could take a greater hit than expected beforehand. But the opposite is also true; in winning, the spoils could be greater than expected. The choice of risking it all is yours.