Thinking about: Education

We bloggers are usually quite good at identifying the problems, myself included. That’s easy enough to do. I’ve long kvetched about the Liberal Party’s focus on the tactical and the scandal while ignoring the strategic, the policy, the vision thing. Over the next little while, in the lead-up to the much hyped Thinker’s Thingamajig, I’m going to try offering some suggestions on that front.

First up in this series, I’d like to mention education. Long-time readers will know education is an issue I’ve long been concerned about and have long been writing about. And I continue to believe education is a fundamentally core issue that is critical to the success and future health and prosperity of our country, and is of great importance to Canadians. It’s an issue area in which the Liberal Party must absolutely claim a visionary, forward-thinking leadership role.

Perhaps uniquely, education plays across so many other issue areas. Want a strong, competitive economy? You need an educated workforce. Want to fight child poverty? Education goes a long way to lifting families out of poverty. Improved health care? You need more trained doctors, nurses, technicians. Improved standard of living? Compete internationally? New jobs and industries? Going green? Education underpins it all.

And education is only becoming more important in the 21st century. We can’t compete with emerging economies on the price of our labour. We have to compete with our brains, and yet we’re falling behind the world. Companies such as Cisco Systems are opening facilities and moving jobs to place such as India not for labour cost, but for skilled workers. China and India and other emerging economic powerhouses are investing in their education systems, and it is paying results. Jobs will go where the brains are, and with the jobs go economic prosperity.

We need to make it easier for Canadians to attend post-secondary education, be it university, college or skilled trades. Not harder. And we should ensure that we no longer burden them with crippling, life-long debt loads in the process. We need to increase government investment in post-secondary education, and we need to begin to look at it not as a cost centre, but as an investment.

Because that’s what it is. A more educated Canadian will find a better job, earn a better salary, and pay higher taxes to the government. They may even create their own business, paying business taxes and creating jobs for other taxpaying Canadians. They’re also less likely to be a drain on government services. In short, our investment in the education of our citizens will pay great dividends. We get back our investment many times.

Let’s be bold. Why can’t we explore free undergrad or college tuition for every Canadian? Or a lifetime entitlement for XX hours of skill training for every Canadian? If not, we should at least consider it for certain targeted professions and skills that are highly in demand.

At the very least, we need to throw out a student loan system that is fundamentally flawed and build something that works. It's become a commercial money-making venture for banks. That's wrong. Far better would be interest-free loans or, better yet, do away with loans all together for a system of bursaries.

We need to work with the provinces, who have constitutional responsibility for education, to rethink the system and ensure that national standards are maintained and that any funding increases do filter down to the universities students and aren’t eaten up by the provinces. And colleges and trades training must absolutely be a critical part of the discussion.

It goes wider than just this though. Too many immigrants come to Canada with skills we need but aren’t able to get work in their fields. Foreign credential recognition has long been a swampy topic. The Conservative government recently made some progress on this topic. We need to build and expand on that.

And education also needs to begin, well, at the beginning, with early learning and childcare. Studies show children that set out on the right path early develop a life-long love of learning, and will go on to greater success and prosperity in their lives.

After many years, the previous Liberal government under Paul Martin, thanks to the hard work of Ken Dryden, had finally made a good start on this front, negotiating long-term agreements with many of the provinces. Unfortunately, that work has been abandoned by the current government in favour of a flawed tax-credit system. With the Liberal funding agreements now ending we’re seeing just how flawed: precious child care spaces are disappearing.

We need to pick up that squandered momentum and make early childhood learning and childcare a priority once again. But we can’t stop there. We need to acknowledge that what we had proposed earlier was incomplete. Flexibility, and options for those who wish to stay at home to care for their children, or have a family member do so, must be built into the system. Choice is crucial.

Finally, it’s all well and good to have high-minded discussion about the importance of education in broad strokes. We also need to bring it down to the ground and make it understandable and saleable. We’ve always been good at the idealism in the past, but the Conservatives have kicked our asses on the realism, on the distilling it into something people can relate to.

We need a package of proposals and initiatives that will not only make the systemic reforms we need, but will have an impact in the daily lives of Canadians: such as XX lifetime hours of free skill training, or free tuition, and so on. Make it relatable and understandable if it’s going to be successful.

Otherwise, it really will just be an academic gabfest, and we don’t need one of those.

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NDP puts politics ahead of poverty, and the facts

I met Peggy Nash, the NDP MP for Parkdale-High Park (and Gerard Kennedy’s opponent in the next federal election) at the Progressive Bloggers BBQ this summer. We only spoke briefly but she seemed nice enough, and I give her credit for wading into the lion’s den and attending a blogger get-together.

So, I’d like to hope that she’d have an innocent explanation, or be willing to apologize and correct the record, because the following statement she made to the National Post, in a story on Dion’s very well received anti-poverty plan:

The New Democratic Party's critic, Peggy Nash, also questioned the Liberal record on eradicating poverty when in office.

"Child poverty has increased in this country while we had Liberal majority governments and surplus budgets so I think Mr. Dion has a credibility gap on this," she said.

Except it is really Peggy and the NDP that lack credibility on this issue, because she’s just plain wrong.

According to Statistics Canada, the child poverty rate in 1993, the year Jean Chretien took office, was 16.7 per cent. In 2005, the last year of Liberal minority government under Paul Martin, the rate was 11.7 per cent. That’s a decline of some five percentage points. If measured in real numbers, the number of children living in poverty, according to Statistics Canada, dropped from 1,157,000 in 1993 to 788,000 in 2003.

Those are the after tax low income cutoff (LICO) numbers. The before tax figures (which aren’t as good a measure, as there are tax measures designed to help here) show higher raw numbers, but still show a decline. From 1,541,000 or 22.3 per cent in 1993, this measure dropped to 1,132,000 or 16.8 per cent in 2005. A drop of some 5.5 percentage points over the Liberal term in government.

While child poverty is still unacceptably high, the statistics show child poverty actually declined over the Liberal term in government, both in real numbers and in per cent, and did not increase, as the NDP’s Peggy Nash falsely claimed.

If Peggy’s intention was not to intentionally mislead Canadians, and to ignore the facts and just fling more mud at the Liberals, then I hope she’ll apologize to Stephane Dion and correct the record here. It would be the right thing to do.

It may just be a knee-jerk NDP reaction, to reflexively attack anything and everything the Liberals do, facts be dammed, while ignoring the real, common enemy. I’d like to hope though that, on an issue as important as child poverty, we can have a real debate, not just glib partisan mudslinging like these comments from Peggy and the NDP.

The ball is in her court.

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Governing is about choices...let’s give them choice

If you polled 1000 Canadians, I bet you, say, 80 per cent of them would say they like cake, and they’d love it if the government enrolled them gratis in the cake of the month club. Starting with angel food in January, all the way through to ice cream cake (my fave, the one from DQ with the chocolate fudge crackle) in December. Because, except for those that perhaps can’t eat sugar, everyone loves cake. And, even better, what tastes sweeter than free cake?

That’s why the results of this particular poll are wholly unsurprising to me (h/t Steve):

The Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll – conducted in the three days after the Halloween economic update – found that 83 per cent of Canadians surveyed said they supported the income tax cuts.

Seventy-six per cent approved of reducing the GST by one percentage point.

So, Canadians would, by and large, not say no to a tax cut. And they’d like a free cake too.

What would happen, however, if you introduced choice? Because our free cake program would cost money. We’d need to buy the cakes, for one, although by buying in bulk we could probably get a deal, maybe from some super bakery in China. We’d need some bureaucrats to run the program, a department of baked goods if you will. Maybe even a cake registry so we can track the cakes to make sure no one gets extra cakes, and ensure everyone gets their just deserts. The lessons learned on the gun registry will come in handy – don’t worry, we’ll get it right this time, no billion-dollar flans.

So, to pay for our cakes for the masses program we’re going to need to trim somewhere else in the budget. Luckily though, we have a surplus at the moment, so no budget cuts needed. We could do something else with the surplus though than buying everyone cake. Like, say, universal daycare, and a cupcake per month for every child under six.

Ask Canadians if they’d like free cake they’re going to say yes. Give them a choice between free cake and universal daycare and a cupcake for their kid (with the option of two cupcakes and a juice box if the parent chooses to stay at home or enlists grandma to babysit) and the result will be very different.

The key, though, is to give people that choice, and that’s what we Liberals have been doing a bad job of. Harper is out there offering everyone free cake, and we’re just saying cake bad, no cake for you! Of course people are going to respond poorly to that. I would too. Tocuhe pas my cake Stephane!

We need to offer Canadians a choice. Cake looks good in isolation. But, when brought into context and contrasted with, say, a major push to eliminate child poverty, cake, or tax cuts, cake is viewed in a whole other light. When contrasted against such a choice, be it a real, flexible (meaning some kind of consideration for parents to opt-out and home care) daycare, or fighting child poverty, Harper’s GST cut is more easily seen for what it is: a cynical, selfish vote buying measure that 101 economists agree makes piss poor economic sense.

That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic to read this (again H/T to Steve):

Stephane Dion is poised to unveil a central plank in the Liberal election platform — a "bold" plan to reduce poverty in Canada.

An insider close to Dion said the Liberal leader will set ``aggressive but realistic" multi-year targets for reducing poverty in general and child poverty in particular.

He will also outline the policy tools a Liberal government would use – bolstering existing income support programs and new investments in things like child care and education – to meet those targets.

If this is true, if we are going to come out with some real, comprehensive and bold policy then it’s about bloody time, says I. Because it’s time we started defining ourselves as something other than merely just opposed to the Harper agenda. And it’s time we started illustrating the stark contrasts between Liberal and Conservative philosophies. And it’s time we started offering Canadians choice.

An income tax cut and a per cent off the GST, or an income tax cut and a major initiative to tackle child poverty? I know the side of that debate I’d like to be on. I’ll bring my own cake to the party.

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