california

In California, identity politics is a way of life.  Ask Pete Wilson, ex-Governor of California on how Latino politics can derail a career, as detailed in a LA Times magazine article from 2004.  The same article highlights Republican concerns with shifting demographics::

“Many Republicans view the mushrooming Latino voter rolls in the same way a person looks at a growing mole: One hopes it’s benign but fears for the worst.”

Unlike in California where immigration is resulting in dramatic demographic shifts, here in Canada, a hot-button issue is Québec separatism that stems from centuries-old disputes.  The province of Québec has a distinct francophone culture when compared to the rest of predominantly anglophone Canada and this cultural divide naturally affects politics at both the provincial and federal levels.

Currently, at the federal level, Canada {with a variation of the Westminster parliamentary system} has a minority government {plurality of parliamentary seats} with Conservative Stephen Harper as Prime Minister.  Minority governments tend to be unstable.  Indicative of this, the Conservatives had a scare last December when Stephen Harper angered the other parties, bringing the country to the brink of Constitutional crisis.  Recent polls in Canada showed that about half of the voters wanted a more stable majority government, where one party has a majority of the seats.  Moreover, recent polls indicated that support for the Conservatives is dwindling, likely leading to a situation where the Conservatives and Liberals have close to the same number of seats, further deadlocking Parliament.  An article a week and a half ago by the Montréal Gazette brought up a controversial argument::

The 2008 federal results in Québec saw BQ making a strong showing with 49 ridings {seats} of 75 in Québec and 308 in Canada. The map below shows Bloc in light blue, Conservatives (PC) in dark blue, Liberals (LP) in Red, and New Democrats (NDP) in orange. The Bloc is strong throughout the province, while the Conservatives have support in a few rural areas, and the Liberals and NDP have appeal in or near the cities of Montréal and Ottawa.

“It’s the same good old Liberal Party of Canada that wants to put Québec in its place.”

–Pierre Paquette, Bloc MP Joliette

“It shows that he’s not only been out of Canada for 35 years, he’s never known anything about Québec except what he learned at Upper Canada College and, frankly, I’m not afraid of him a bit.”

–Thomas Mulcair, NDP MP Outremont

Song:: Tricot Machine -L’Ours {Montréal, QC}

Notes from North of 49ºN

It’s not often I agree with Tom Friedman, but last fall when I was preoccupied with the US general election, teaching, and associate directing a center, he was advocating not just a bailout, but a green buildup.  He quoted Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy::

“It’s time to stop borrowing and start building. America’s No. 1 resource is not oil or mortgages. Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work — retrofitting and repowering America. … You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart biofuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America.”

Friedman was in favour of attaching green strings to bailouts, an idea I think warranted further study, at the very least.  Fast forward 9 months and focus on the province of Ontario, where at the federal level, the Conservatives {Stephen Harper}, and at the provincial level, the Liberals {Dalton McGuinty}, jumped on the US bailout bandwagon to a tune of $9.5B or $10.9B Canadian.  This is in addition to the Obama administration’s $49.8B.  The combined US and Canadian bailouts are worth 130 times the present value of GM.  Here’s what both Harper and McGuinty had to say about this::

“We had to save it all or have zero forever,”

–Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

“The alternative would have been a devastating blow to Ontario families and communities.”

–Dalton McGuinty, Ontario Premiere

The troubles in the industry are not new news and CBC has a chronology of layoffs.  I’ve alluded to this bailout before and the scant jobs it will save, but here are the specifics in terms of the Canadian GM assembly line::

“At present GM Canada has 12,000 hourly and salaried employees, but that number is expected to shrink to about 5,500 over the next couple of years. About 1,100 of the new total is expected to be salaried jobs, which are unrelated to assembly operations. That means Ottawa and the Ontario government are together spending an unprecedented $2.1 million for each assembly job at GM Canada they hope to save.”–Time, 1 June 2009

It’s likely that GM suppliers will also be affected, a $7.2B industry employing 45,000 workers, but it is unlikely that all these jobs are at risk.  While Canada accounts for about 19.4% of North American production, Canadian cost advantages have been eroded by a stronger Canadian dollar, a weakened US union in the UAW, and strong and strategic bargaining by the Canadian Auto Workers union.

While the situation looks gloomy for manufacturing in Ontario, quite a few are banking on green jobs.  So much so that St. Clair College has a 2-year green jobs programme and the province has a commitment to clean energy.  Currently, the province gets 25% of its electricity from coal, but wants to shut down all of its coal plants by 2014.  The province is hoping to convert some of the plants to carbon-neutral biomass, although the yields will be lower.  The slack will need to be picked up by alternatives, with greener options being wind and solar.  Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan calls for greenhouse gas emission reduction to 6% under 1990 levels and the new Green Energy Act is meant to protect the environment, regulate, and spur investment in green technologies.

Policy & Innovation:: The California Example

The PPIC has a report on the effects of California’s Zero-Emissions Vehicle {ZEV} mandate, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s.  During this time, the California government, through the Air Resources Board {CARB} initially set in 1990 requirements that by 1998 that 2% and by 2003 that 10% vehicles sold in California would be ZEV.  Suffice it to say, concessions were made over time, but the original mandate set the wheels in motion for innovation.  The effects of the program were::

• The policy spurred patents in near-term technologies
• CARB arguably responded to technological changes when revising the program
• Technological spillovers resulted in a greater number of indirect  innovations
• Increased market development for emerging technologies
• Broadened design parameters
• Lower emissions in California

The program, albeit complex and not without politics and controversy, shows how policy can help to shape market-based activity in ways that would not occur otherwise.

Ontario:: Good Money After Bad

While not surprising, Canada and Ontario should have considered asserting themselves more, rather than caving to bailout pressure.  Why not move forward to develop policies that help transition away from declining industries and in-line with over provincial objectives?, e.g., environmental and energy.  How I see it is that the US and Canada are bailing out a company the capital markets have little faith in and now face the daunting task of rebuilding with a new CEO, “Big Ed,” who has a reputation for being an empire-builder.  I question having an empire-builder in charge of a company needing to be leaner, a company needing to reinvent itself overnight.  Let’s hope he indeed  “learns something about cars,” and doesn’t make mistakes like this one, the old CEO Rick Wagoner copped to:: “axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids. It didn’t affect profitability, but it did affect image.”

While there have been debates on whether or not the US needs an auto industry {NY Times} and criticisms abound, such as this one on how GM betrayed our trust, Canada is nevertheless a 12% equity shareholder.  This creation of a capitalist-state joint venture opens up a huge can of worms, as which interests will prevail and how to balance autonomous management and control versus paternalism?  I think the answers are in economic sociology, a topic for a future post.

Song:: “Canada” – Low

Video::

Twitterversion:: #Canada #bailout of #GMfail =more #fail ? Can #Ontario still dvel #greeneconomy & innov.w/enviro&energy policy objctves? http://url.ie/1wdt  @Prof_K

March 13th was Pink Friday in California. According to the official site, hundreds of thousands of teachers protested the issuance of 26,000 pink slips as a results of the state’s fiscal crisis. The state’s teachers hope California voters will support a pair of initiatives of the state ballot in late May designed to restore 8 billion dollars in budget cuts passed by the legislature last month.

meanwhile….

8,000 people attended a rally in Fullerton hosted by John and Ken, radio personalities at KFI. The hosts have been at the forefront a resurgent anti-tax movement in California and has been instrumental in pressuring legislators on the right to stand firm against taxes. The rally was intended to garner support for the defeat of California proposition 1A, a series of tax increases designed to fill the hole in the state’s budget.

Which rally would you have attended?

Here in California, we’ve seemingly survived another “meltdown” over the state budget.  What that means is that we get a temporary reprieve until the next budget cycle where the “crisis” will resume.  What’s unique about California is that we repeat this budget dance every year with a new batch of dancers.

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 140, a measure that restricted terms of service in the State Assembly to six years and service in the state senate to eight years.  The measure was crafted in large part by Republicans seeking to weaken the power of the powerful, charismatic then Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.  But the measure also captured the imagination of California voters.  The lore of the citizen legislator has been with us since the founding.  it harkens back to the story of Cincinattus who was summoned to leave his plow and help Rome defeat the Aequians.  Once Rome’s foes had been vanquished, he returned to the plow.

In California, it is fashionable to beat up on the term limits idea.  Indeed it has led to less experienced members, weaker committee structures, a “permanent campaign” mode and more lobbying influence, among other things.   This led California voters to approve a reform of legislative term limits in 2008 (Proposition 93) that limited members to 12 total years of service in the California legislature.

Despite term limits many problems, I’m concerned that we in California focus so much on rules because we don’t want to address the deeper issue of our state political culture.  We can tinker all we want with the rules of the game in Sacramento, but the underlying problem is a belief that “they” in Sacramento are corrupt and that California’s renewal is contingent on throwing this particular set of “bums” out.  Californians need to begin “owning” problems rather than passing them off as the result of politicians who are either “in the pocket of lobbyists” or “hate poor people.”  My political scientist brethren might argue that partisan conflict is an inevitable and healthy part of a democratic system.  But underlying that healthy conflict must be a fundamental sense of efficacy and investment in the system.  The perception that the California citizen is somehow detached from the work of government is more corrosive than any term limit or proposition.

The “citizen legislator” as a concept can work if the citizens see themselves as full members of the state rather than as victims of “corrupt politicians.”  Now back to my plow.

The California State Supreme court has decided to take up a set of cases challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8. Among the issues that will be decided by the court is whether a ban on gay marriage constitutes a minor change (which can be done by public initiative) or a “revision” to the state constitution (which requires two-thirds vote by the state legislature or a constitutional convention to place on the ballot). This narrow questions begs a larger discussion of the rules for governing in California.

Many observers say that California makes it way too easy to amend the state constitution. In this Los Angeles Times op-ed by Ed Lascher and Tim Hodson, political scientists at Sacramento State University, and Floyd Feeny a law professor at UC-Davis, they make a compelling case for significantly revising the Constitutional amendment process in California:

the California Constitution is a bloated mishmash by comparison with the hard-to-amend federal document. Instead of a transparent constitution that citizens can understand and use, California has obfuscation, clutter and dysfunction. Eight times the length of the U.S. Constitution, it is more about legal technicalities than principles; an embarrassment for an otherwise cutting-edge state.

While I share my colleagues predilection for short, elegant constitutions, is a bloated governing document the cost of true citizen engagement? It’s not fashionable to defend California state government, but could it be that California easy initiative process is not the problem? The initiative process in California produces both horrible and inspired public policy, that is part of what makes California the wonderfully messy, incoherent, unpredictable place that it is.

But I’d suggest that the problem is the voter, not the system. Rather than focus on whether citizens should have so much ownership over the state’s governance, our time might be better spent thinking about how their decision-making about ballot initiatives could be improved. Comprehensive voter guides are not enough. If a state is going to be serious about providing its citizens with direct policy making power, then we need to think more reflectively about how we train citizens to use that power responsibly. How could we go about doing that?