Item: The Trudeau government's new gun control law is a master class in how not to create legislation.
Governing is hard, but that's not enough of an excuse for the mess that's been made out of Bill C-21. The bill started out as an attempt to impose more controls on handguns - which made sense, since almost 60 percent of gun crimes involve handguns. How then to explain that under the current wording of the law owning a handgun in Canada is still legal while many types of hunting rifles are banned? The Prime Minister himself seemed unclear about what was in his own legislation. He first denied that it would ban hunting rifles but later admitted it would. After seeing the backlash from hunters, First Nations and his NDP coalition partners, Trudeau said that he was open to changing the list of prohibited weapons, but gave no indication of what that would look like.
To generalize, the problem with gun control in Canada is most of the shootings are in the big cities while most of the gun owners live in smaller places. The push to ban certain semi-automatic hunting rifles clearly came from anti-gun interest groups, and they represent likely Liberal voters. According to polls, stricter gun control is popular in urban centres such as southern Ontario. For both the Liberals and Conservatives, there is no path to electoral victory without doing well in southern Ontario. While Bill C-21 began in an all-party parliamentary committee, the hunting rifle ban has forced the Conservatives to come out against it, and this rejection is unlikely to play well with urban voters, especially women. Call me cynical, but it seems likely Trudeau is playing politics with an issue where there had been widespread agreement before Bill C-21.
Whether deliberate or incompetent, the Liberals have turned this into a wedge issue, and while that may be good politics, it almost never results in good policy.
Item: It really seems like government and law enforcement have given up on the opioid/fentanyl crisis.
Right now, 20 people a day in Canada are dying from opioid overdoses. Since 2016, total deaths are around 35,000 people. These numbers are horrific and should be troubling to all of us. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid manufactured mostly in China, is extremely deadly. A look at the government’s website shows them bragging about spending a pittance- $800 million over 5 years – on trying to stop fentanyl from coming into the country. A lot of the stuff is just shipped here through Canada Post, which is absolutely asinine.
The war on drugs has been an abject failure. Rates of addiction have never significantly come down during the 40 years we’ve had this policy. Isn’t it time to try something new? I’m leery of full legalization. Portugal has tried a sort of hybrid model and has had some positive results. Twenty years ago the country decriminalized (not the same as legalization) the possession of small amounts of drugs (trafficking is still illegal). Portugal treats addiction more like a health problem rather than a crime, but it still employs a system of penalties to discourage drug use and to force addicts into treatment centres rather than into jails. Portugal has seen overdoses drop dramatically and their prisons are no longer overcrowded. But it doesn’t look like the level of drug use has decreased materially, and one study found an increase in the number of people experimenting with drugs. There was also an initial spike in drug-related violence, which has since come back down.
While these results might not seem all that great, they are better than what we are doing, which is talking big and achieving nothing. The Right demands longer sentences and more cops, while the Left wants full legalization. At the very least, Portugal shows that maybe there’s another way.
Item: Professional sports teams are yet another asset bubble that is causing the misallocation of scarce resources.
The Dallas Cowboys, probably the most recognizable name in North American pro sports, were bought in 1989 for $150 million. If you use inflation-adjusted dollars, the Cowboys should be worth about $360 million. The owner, to his credit, did build his own state of the art stadium in 2009, which in today’s dollars would cost about $1.8 billion. So let’s put the total value at $2.2 billion. Based on recent transactions, if the Cowboys were sold now they would probably fetch around $10 billion. This would make them more valuable than 50 of the companies that are in the SP 500. It's not just the team valuations that are insane; good players (not hall of famers) in football, baseball and basketball are routinely earning $30-$40 million a year. The New York Mets are going to have a total payroll of around $500 million in the upcoming baseball season.
Of course, this is all mostly due to the ballooning of revenues from TV, which continues to shell out absurd amounts of cash to televise the games and get big advertising revenues. But I’m not sure the networks and the advertisers have really been paying attention; while ratings might be good for the games, we have these things called PVRs now, which allows us fans to skip the commercials entirely. Who really has time to watch a three and a half hour football game which only features 11 minutes (!) of live action? The stadiums teams play in are hugely expensive, and the owners usually blackmail governments into paying for them. To cite just one example, Cincinnati is nearly broke from paying for its baseball and football stadiums and can’t fund needed infrastructure repairs and upgrades. Meanwhile, in Canada and the US, there are lots of kids who can’t afford sports at all and adults who can’t find ice time or available courts – with obesity a growing problem, shouldn’t we put more dollars into people playing sports rather than just watching them?
Resources- people, time, money, energy – are finite. One of these days advertisers, governments and maybe even some fans will wake up and realize that the money being sucked away by pro sports is completely out of hand.
Item: The next Alberta election will be a sort of referendum on Alberta's relationship with the rest of Canada.
Danielle Smith's Sovereignty Act, which claims that the Alberta government can ignore federal laws, dramatically ups the ante on the usual anti-Ottawa rhetoric that every Conservative premier has used for the last 50 years. Smith talks pretty much like the Quebec separatists used to; she recently said that Ottawa "is not a national government," which takes me back to the time Lucien Bouchard said "Canada is not a real country." Playing the victim card was always the Quebec separatists ace in the hole, and Smith is showing she is just as willing to manufacture anger and hurt feelings for her own political benefit.
But if you care to live in reality, most of this anger is misplaced, ill-informed and just plain stupid. In the spirit of Festivus, let’s have an airing of grievances, shall we? The Liberals are deliberately killing the oil industry! No, the world is getting off carbon because it’s ruining the planet. The Trudeau government is trying to balance the benefits our energy industry provides while also living up to international agreements on fighting climate change. The Liberals blocked all our pipelines! Actually, they bought the best project - the others had no chance of happening - and are spending billions building it, which has angered a lot of their own supporters. What about transfer payments and Alberta subsidizing Quebec? You obviously don’t understand how the equalization system works; in a nutshell, it’s a federal program using only federal tax dollars that tries to equalize services for poorer people wherever they happen to live. But they made us wear masks and get the vaccine! Actually, that was your own provincial government under Jason Kenney and it was the right thing to do if you cared at all about people not dying. The Feds have been screwing us for years, look at that goddamn NEP! Sigh. You know that ended 40 years ago, right?
Here's the simple truth: Alberta has the highest per capita income of all the provinces and Albertans pay the lowest taxes. What exactly are we mad about? And based on these facts, who is really to blame if our schools are failing, or our health care system is in disarray? It’s not a hard question to answer.
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