I Said What?: A Collection of Columns, Articles, Blogs, and Speeches.

By Marcel G. Latouche

I said What? Is the fourth book by Marcel Latouche. It is a collection of columns, articles, blogs and speeches dealing with policies and politics at different levels of government.
All the material in the book is dated and provides an insight into the saying: “Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it”. Latouche’s background in economics and finance allows him to express his thoughts on matters concerning public sector finance and public policy. His style is oratory and his writing is simple and easy to follow. The material covered comprises challenges regarding local, provincial, and national governments in Canada. In addition he identifies the effect of international matters and issues concerning Canada’s largest trade partner and neighbor the United States of America,
There is no conclusion in this book. Agree with the author or not, his belief that past is prologue, makes a compelling case to read this book, because much of what is deliberated is about being proactive instead of being reactive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796033182

Marcel G. Latouche

About the Author Marcel G. Latouche, consultant, author and trainer is the President & CEO of MLG Associates - Management Consultants and Trainers who specialize in harnessing the power of change through Leadership, Economic and Marketing strategies. Commonly known as ‘The Master Change Agent’ he is a Fellow of The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and also holds an MBA in International Management. He draws from his experience of over 40 years of management in the public and private sectors. His experience spans the Banking, Publishing, Local Government and consulting industries. As a lecturer for Mount Royal University, Columbia College and SAIT Polytechnic he has lectured in International and Public Sector Finance, Marketing and Economics. A former Vice President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (Calgary), he is a frequent speaker at professional seminars and conferences. A strong believer in volunteerism Marcel has been the President of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants in Canada, The President of Tennis Alberta and a Director of Tennis Canada, and has also served as the Chair of the Budget Review Committee for the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. He is currently the President and CEO of The Institute for Public Sector Accountability. For his services as a volunteer he received the Alberta Achievement Award in 1990. He can be contacted at mlgassociates @ shaw.ca MLG Associates, 28, Chaparral Valley Terrace SE, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2X 0M2

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Municipal Affairs

I T IS SAID that local authorities are the closest government to the citizens, but in many instances there are many services which are used as a means to raise taxes. Utilities operated by municipalities are often used as means for vicarious taxation. The City of Calgary, my hometown, is touted to be one of the best managed cities in the country. However there is much cause for citizens to be wary of what happens with their taxes and how things could be different. Having spent seventeen years in the City of Calgary as a senior accountant, I have tried to make politicians and administration more accountable to their citizens who are taxpayers. Too often citizens are kept in the dark and as result they become complacent.

I am a long-time proponent of more public/private partnerships for the delivery services. Politicians and administrations are very reluctant to become the facilitators instead of the providers of services. As long as they are the sole providers of services they will continue to control the imposition of taxes. While politicians promise engagement with citizens, too often it is just promises and smoke and mirrors. In the City of Calgary, there are too many ‘closed door’ meetings and not enough transparency, and therefore less accountability. The debate about the bid for a 2026 Olympic Game was further proof that politicians were not prepared to consult the public. Fortunately a plebiscite determined that the citizens did not want to stage the Games at an enormous cost and without all the facts.

To illustrate how far the administration would go to obfuscate the issues I included a Calgary Herald article with a rebuttal by the City’s Finance Officer and my further comments about his disingenuous observations.

City hall hoarding excessive surpluses

January 10 1996

The City has $390 million of taxpayers’ money tucked into surplus accounts, Calgary has been ranked as one of the best cities in the world -- should we settle for being one of the best or aim to be the best?

To reach this goal, change must take place in city governance and economics.

Governance has suffered because city council has tried to micro-manage instead of macro-manage. Consider the recent debate over budget surpluses. Council was either ill-informed or uninformed on certain important issues. It passed legislation based on information that, at best, was presented in such a way as to provide no other alternatives but to approve administration’s recommendations.

Politicians rarely question the size and the reasons for a growing surplus; instead, council decided to simply start spending some of it.

When surpluses are achieved, council takes credit for good governance and credits administration for sound financial management. If this is the benchmark used to gauge the performance of city employees, Calgarians had better watch their wallets.

There is nothing wrong with surpluses, but their size and frequency should be scrutinized. Officially, surpluses are reported after reserves have been set aside, as though they did not result from an excess of revenue over expenditure. From 1990 to ‘94, city surpluses totalled $39 million.

In fact, over that period, total surpluses added up to $390 million before appropriation to reserves and debt payments.

The only reserve consistently mentioned is the Mill Rate Stabilization Fund, which is used to protect Calgary from tax increases. Since 1979, this reserve has grown to $81 million. But there are also reserve funds in the utility, debt financing, land, and parking facilities budgets, for example. These reserves total $159 million.

It can be argued that the surpluses are only a small percentage of the entire city budget; however, in1994 alone, a total surplus of $102 million was siphoned out of the Calgary economy through excess surpluses.

These are a direct result of over-taxation.

Cowtown poised to become Nowtown

December 27, 2001

It is December 18, 2010, and I am on my way home from a trip to China. On the C-Train from the airport are a number of foreign travelers who marvel at the ease of access to downtown by train and the beautiful mountain scene to the west of the city.

I explain to my travelling companions that the C-Train services the far south and north of the city and also provide access to the east and west. This mode of transportation has become the main link between several self-contained towns within the larger metro Calgary since 2003.

Many of our freeways are truly free of traffic lights. Macleod Trail once a road with lights at every intersection has been blocked off at certain intersections to allow for freer flowing traffic; other main roads have been adapted in similar fashion. The city has been divided into four quadrants and privately owned bus companies service each area. All four companies feed into the C-Train network.

The extensive use of communications technology has made Calgary’s workplace more of a telecommuting community. Many business people operate from their homes or from business hubs located in the new self-contained communities around the city. Hence the downtown core is no longer the only business centre, but is rather part of a network of self-serviced towns. The city is serviced by a ring road which extends from Huntington Hills in the north to the Lougheed Trail south of Spruce meadows; Sarcee and Deerfoot Trails on the east and west of the city complete the ring.

In the west, the First Nation suspension bridge connects Sarcee Trail to the Lougheed Trail and provides access to Kleinville, a self-contained community which harbours many communication and high-tech businesses. Most houses are environmentally self-sufficient and their roofs are covered by solar panels which provide much of their required energy.

To the east we have major industrial parks, and to the north, closer to the airport, we have mega-warehouses which service most of Western Canada and the northwestern U.S. The city has become a hive of activity for small and medium sized enterprises that provide services to the high-tech and communication industries.

With an increased push for taxation that relates to quality of life and fair share, more businesses are moving into Calgary. The migration of large conglomerates, which started in the late 1990s, continues, and Calgary can boast of more corporate headquarters than ever before.

Education through the internet has taken a leap and many private institutions, as well as colleges and universities are now providing courses to students as far away as Angola and Zimbabwe. SAIT is one of the largest providers of long-distance programs with a network of clients around the world. It provides courses in many disciplines ranging from heavy industry to electronic maintenance and servicing.

Recreation facilities abound, but the City no longer operates them. In addition to existing facilities, four large multi-sport complexes were built in 2003 by private enterprises. They cater to a number of sports on a rotating time schedule.

Golf courses, as well as new facilities are accessible to any citizen at a price. A grant from the city provides special cards to lower income families to access all recreation facilities, and supplements the user pay system. The subsidy was part of an initial agreement for the sale and private ownership of recreation facilities.

Attached to these facilities are libraries, which no longer have printed materials but provide electronic access to virtually everything. There is one main library and four satellite branches that provide internet access to all citizens in other parts of the city. Clients can borrow books on DVD, CD-ROMs, E-books and access most large libraries of the world. Libraries work closely with high-tech corporations which make donations of cash and equipment to enhance and maintain the services with minimum of funding from governments.

The running of the City has also changed over the years. A further reorganization of the administration was done in 2002 to replace the one done in the, late 90s which produced nothing but acrimony for all parties concerned.

Today we have a city council with 15 members made up of elected aldermen from eight wards – two aldermen for each of the seven wards and one from downtown. They can only serve for two terms of four years each and they choose a mayor among the elected officials for the duration of each four-year term. Many of the non-core businesses of the city have been passed onto the private sector. The bureaucracy has been reduced and council now seeks advice from many committees made up of organizations and citizens.

The major change is that not only people who agree with council are appointed to these committees, but also representatives from various organizations and community associations.

Because Aldermen have limited terms and the administration has been cut to size, micro-management has vanished and council makes decisions and sets regulations to facilitate the provision of services instead of providing services and maintaining a large bureaucracy.

We no longer portray ourselves as being the best, but we strive to be the best. In the past we forgot that being the best meant that there was only one way to go –down, and in many cases we did.

With a major change in the structure and organization of City Hall more collaboration between the private and public sectors exists. Growth is better managed and taxation is at its lowest in years.

Wherever a new development comes into place, it is the builders of new houses, and eventually the homeowners and the businesses in the area which pay for the extra costs of infrastructure ; no longer is the burden of growth passed to all the citizens in the form of taxes which are cumulative and never revised downward. A base tax, which can only be increased through a plebiscite due to a taxpayers’ protection act is used to pay for maintenance and servicing of existing infrastructure. There are fewer and fewer mill-rate supported services and more user fees.

When asked how this change came about, I respond that it all started in 2004 with a new council. In October of that year the citizens decided that they could no longer be taken for granted and that it was time to ‘take back city hall’.

Voters changed the faces on council and elected right’ thinking people instead. Today aldermen listen instead of preach to citizens and the city is better off for it. The Council chamber has been returned to the rightful owners – the citizens. Meetings are more open and accountability has been restored at all levels.

That is why Calgary is viewed and thought of as one of the best cities in the world.

A tax by any other name is still a tax

August 15 2005

In January 2004, Council decreed that all city capital projects over $1 million, including upgrades and growth, will bear a 1% levy to fund the arts. So far $8m has been collected and with financing from other levels of government upcoming, this fund may balloon up to $18m, equivalent to a 3.3% tax increase. The money is going to be funded by debt and reduces the availability of much needed capital for infrastructure; $18million could get us a new intersection or 3 LRT cars.

Art has much to offer to the community and we should be grateful that Calgary is well served by a growing arts community. Funding is required but not in the way it is being done. From a pure economic sense the arts is not a ‘public good’ to be financed heavily by the public sector, there are other means of achieving the same goals without taxing the citizens. Too often taxes are becoming the main source for every perceived problem in this city. Council continuously ignores the fact that they must cut spending instead of raising taxes.

Council’s surreptitious tax is wrong. The most insidious result of this levy is that it will also apply to projects for the utilities, which will result in an increase in future rates. Water, sewer and transit are necessities, which many fixed income citizens can barely afford. For example, if the City builds a new sewage plant costing $400 million, an additional $4 million will be added, and that cost will be borrowed as part of the total construction cost. Ratepayers will go on paying year after year just as if it was part of a sewage treatment plant. Just like the appropriation of dividends from Enmax to build parks, this new tax is hidden and equally wrong, and clearly shows Council’s lack of fiscal responsibility.

This issue, another one lacking transparency, is only the tip of the iceberg. Thirty years or so ago, Council set up The Calgary Regional Arts Foundation (CRAF) to take the arts out of the political arena, and allow artists to get help through the foundation. It seems that what work well for a number of years is being supplanted by a new Public Art Policy which allows Council to interfere in the funding of the arts. The Institute for Public Sector Accountability (IPSA) released a study entitled Municipal Electoral Reform in April 2005; it showed that some councillors may have benefited from donations from charitable organizations within the art community. In our opinion a clear infringement of the Income Tax Act which clearly states in rules CSP-P02: A registered charity cannot be involved in partisan political activities. A political activity is considered partisan if it involves direct or indirect support of, or opposition to, a political party or candidate for public office. This rule should not be able to be circumvented by the use of ‘non-restricted, non-receipted (under $20) donations’ for political donations. A coalition of Calgary’s Arts organization, who will clearly benefit from this levy, did endorse candidates at the last elections. Do Calgarians see any possibility of influence peddling?

While we do want to help the arts community, we do not support that it be done through a levy on badly needed capital projects. We propose a better alternative. Patrons have always been the source for arts funding and since Alberta is awash with increasing revenues from oil, instead of taxing citizens who can ill afford to pay their utilities we should instead increase the tax deductibility of donations to the arts by both corporations and individuals. Funding for the arts should continue to be funded through existing programs, devoid of any political interference. Recognized organizations should facilitate the arts not Council. Let’s make it easier for those who can afford it to contribute without pushing seniors out of their homes to pay for things they cannot afford to enjoy. Any additional funding to the arts should be voluntary not arbitrary.

Treat or Trick

December 01 2006

Coincidence or not Mayor Bronconnier staged a number of meetings during Halloween to pull his latest trick to tell Calgarians and the province that he needs more money otherwise we are going to have to make do with fewer services, and his favourite treat – increased taxes. Now the 2007 budget has been approved, all our fears have come to fruition.

In our view an increase in taxation to match the inflation rate was all that was needed, because last year the tax was equivalent to 10%. We should find alternative ways to finance some of these proposed projects or we should either abandon or postpone them. Furthermore we do not need any additional studies and reports.

Some examples of the Mayor are worthless spending:

• Imagine Calgary- A grandiose plan to see what Calgary should look like in the future. Meetings with various groups have resulted in a plan to see more spending in future years. Do we need to spend all that money to tell us to increase citizens’ involvement through elected community association and other blue-sky ideas which will cost us more tax money in the future? It is great to imagine and create wish lists and then when you cannot afford them you can call it an infrastructure deficit. Costs $2.7 million.

• A polar Bear Exhibit- To increase Calgary’s tourism attraction we need a polar bear, and dolphin exhibit. Although there is little support among most experts and humane groups, the mayor proceeds with plans to spend more tax payers dollars on the project. Estimated costs $ 27 million.

• A Hockey Rink Study – We don’t need a study to tell us that a growing city needs more recreation facilities. If there is such a shortage why not let the private sector provide the facilities? Result: the city is just planning to spend more money to build rinks under the old system; study costs $150,000

• East Village TIF Committee - One of the worse decisions made by the Klein government was to allow Tax Increment Financing for the East Village. In a city where real estate is booming there is no need for the city to spend $100m to benefit developers. The worse trick was that the Mayor, despite the consultants’ advice, has created a committee to oversee the development at a cost of $3 million.

• A Study on City State – To increase his powers to be able to raise more tax dollars the Mayor proposes that Calgary becomes a city-state. In reality it means that Council will have all the powers to raise more taxes and conduct its affairs without much scrutiny from the province. Yet we shall also seek more money from the province; result more taxes. Projected costs $400,000

• You’re City/Your Money – The latest is a series of 5 meetings with the citizens to explain and justify why the province should hand over the equivalent of school taxes for the Mayor to spend, and justify why he should be the one who decides where to build schools and spend the money on behalf of the School Boards. The meetings have been held and attended by an average of approximately 1,000 people including kids. Costs $500,000.

• Righting the Balance – Last year the Mayor issued a glossy report to Calgarians, explaining why he needs more money for his spending plans. While explaining that Calgary needs to keep up with growth, not once does he say that alternatives to current service delivery will be used. Instead, the report claims that we need more tax dollars. In addition the report is full of unsubstantiated statements to support his claim. Reported costs $75,000, but real costs when accounting for staff and production costs, approximately $100,000

The above list is only the tip of the iceberg, and these expenditures are nothing more than campaign propaganda for the Mayor’s re-election. Calgarians are too busy with their lives and all these initiatives are designed to spend your future tax dollars and then be able to justify the costs by stating that we were consulted and approved the expenditures. The biggest trick was to establish a three year budget that would give Calgarians a better feel for their future taxes. The trick is less transparency, and the treat, is less accountability and more taxes without public deliberations and additional moneys received from other governments diverted to favoured political legacy programs. Wake up Calgarians, the 2006 Halloween could become a real nightmare which will affect you for a long time.

When Mayors cry wolf, we all pay more taxes

May 30 2007

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities meets in Calgary on June 1st, with some 2,000 delegates attending, Mayors will be crying wolf again; as they seek more money without accountability.

There are two words, in the municipal lexicon, used to correct everything that is wrong with municipal priorities – they are sustainability and infrastructure. By FCM’s own definition sustainable development means pursuing economic prosperity, fiscal responsibility, environmental quality, cultural enrichment and social equity all at once. Municipal governments support quality of life. They are the stewards of our civic resources, investing billions of dollars in physical and social infrastructure. By their own admission they have assumed many new –and unfunded responsibilities without new revenue-raising tools.

IPSA believes that while many of the issues to be discussed are important to the delegates, the general public is clueless about their consequences. We speculate that most of the discussions will be for one purpose alone – raise taxes.

As municipalities ratchet their demands for more taxing powers, they often ignore that several concessions have already been made by both federal and provincial governments, but it seems that it is not enough and that now they require specific powers to raise new taxes to sustain their appetite for increasing expenditures.

In recent past municipalities have seen the GST rebate increased to 100%. In 2007 the Federal budget provided for a gas tax transfer to municipalities until 2014. Closer to home Calgary has received $330m from the province and Ottawa, including $127m from the province. Meanwhile over the past three years Calgary taxes have increased by nearly 20%, and reserves have grown by 43%. Reserves are only possible through grants and over taxation.

Other municipalities may have received less over the years but they still are seeking the same solutions to the so called fiscal imbalance - that is more money from other levels of government and/or more powers of taxation. Meanwhile despite grant increases from other levels of government not once has any municipal taxes been reduced.

In the proposed resolutions to be discussed there is nowhere to be found any policies for the privatization of municipal services or the alternative delivery of services through open competition. But they are prepared to pass a motion to restrict the use of P3s by other levels of government. There is this constant complaint of services being downloaded but very rarely do municipalities recognize that they in fact take on new services voluntarily to gain access to new funds and further political gains. They also propose to enter areas which are not within their jurisdictions- like child care, and foreign affairs for example. They have used a new definition of infrastructure to include social programs and create new sources of required funding and then complain because they cannot provide citizens with the level of service required.

Municipalities seek more powers of taxation but do not want any strings attached to grants from other levels of government. In fact what they would like is absolute spending and taxation powers.

The Institute recognizes that problems exist, but we also require new solutions which generally are ignored by most municipalities with some rare exceptions. User fees are a better way of providing services and controlling costs, while privatization provides more competition and lower costs in the form of non-unionized wages. We also agree that property taxes are not the best way to fund education, but cannot agree that the vacated room should be given to municipalities to tax citizens.

The fiscal imbalance discussion ignores the most important factor - which any funding comes from only one taxpayer. If municipalities want more powers, citizens must also be given more powers of veto such as California’s proposition 13 that requires citizens’ approval of new and increased taxes before they are implemented. All three levels of government are guilty of fleecing Canadians. There should be only one collector of taxes for a specific service delivery. We must clearly define the boundaries of service provision and taxing jurisdiction. Any transfer of taxation powers must be accompanied by an equivalent reduction of taxes from the current collector. Politicians at all levels use taxpayers’ money to get re-elected. Canadians should take back city hall and increase accountability.

Corporate Welfare or Expropriation?

March 04 2008

The state of the environment is a serious issue. Alas Calgary is one of the last cities to have a comprehensive recycling program, something the Institute has supported for years.

Last year the City decided that it would finally put into place a program through a managed competition program that would allow private businesses to bid for the service delivery. At the time the Institute was very critical about the process which was fast tracked to increase the existing fees through Council. Since then the CFIB has uncovered a series of problems with the RFP process, including the fact that a participant in the bidding process was allowed to formulate the parameters in the RFP. Despite their own consultants’ advice the City has decided that they should be the only provider of services with large capital expenditures, this at a time when they cannot even find enough workers for other services.

The whole process seems to be filled with problems. For a start the proposal does not include the recycling of organics, which is the worse type of waste. It does not contain a process for the recycling of building material. It also seems that many of the recycling companies were not invited to submit bids. While I agreed with Alderman Lowe that the City has a right to place rules and regulations, I was not granted the time to explain their extent and implications, because we found that rules and regulations within the proposal are so stringent that most if not all bidders found it virtually impossible to meet all the required criteria. Unknown to Calgarians there are conditions which do not only deal with the recycling process but include such things as a ‘living wage’, meaning that the City will now dictate how businesses should compensate their employees.

At last week’s committee meeting the Institute put forward the following solutions:

• Create a program with the participation of the private sector, based on an open RFP process which allows the private sector to put forward their contribution.

• Allow any existing contracts between existing clients and private firms to continue for at least 5 years

• Allow multi-residential complex to choose their service deliverer

• Divide the City into smaller zones, and allow private operators to bid where they can provide the service

• If no alternative can be worked out, the City should compensate the existing operators through a transparent buy-out package.

While we believe that these recommendations are of an equitable nature, it seems that some members of Council believe it is time to put legitimate enterprises out of business without compensation. To quote Alderman Farrell: Maybe we should just pick the recycling up for these companies and send them a dividend cheque, she said. This isn’t free enterprise, this is corporate welfare. I think we need to give our heads a shake here.

Obviously these businesses are not asking for a hand out, they are asking for a transparent process which allows them to continue operating their businesses. To think that expropriation, because that’s what it is, could be compared to corporate welfare shows a lack understanding of basic economics. Even Hugo Chavez pays compensation, albeit at a lesser price that the value of the assets expropriated.

There is a dangerous trend where the ‘neo-coms’ have decided that they can circumvent the operation of the free market through regulations and expropriations, all under the guise of their version of managed competition, and environmental correctness. Some of them would like to jail those who disagree with them, while others would expropriate without compensation. The Institute is a proponent of recycling, but we cannot support a less than transparent process and a system designed to fleece the taxpayer a little bit at a time.

Beware as Peter Foster wrote ‘Socialist dreams always turn totalitarian’. Private enterprise has delivered recycling services successfully in Calgary as well as other cities, but it seems that they will not be allowed to continue do so in Calgary.

The City–state Agenda: Concealed empire building

April 16 2008

In Canada there seems to be a growing consensus that cities are in trouble. More often than not, the problems of municipalities are attributed to a lack of funding and the increase in demand for services. The most popular solutions to these problems seem to be higher taxes and funding from higher levels of government. Unfortunately everybody seems to have bought into the notion that municipal woes can only be fixed by throwing huge amounts of taxpayers’ money at the problems.

We support the transfer of a portion of the GST and the fuel tax to municipalities to help the improvement of infrastructure, because after all they come from the same taxpayers’ pocket, it is quite something else to support any further municipal taxation.

Despite all the political claims of underfunding and downloading of services by provincial governments the true municipal problems are:

• Taxation has become the only means of financing growing expenditures. Property, and where it exists, business taxes are increasing at an alarming rate. The use of inter-city tax rate comparison is only an excuse used by politicians to raise your taxes. Just because a city has higher taxes than yours, it does not mean that your taxes should rise to the same level.

• Increasingly municipalities who control their utilities, water, sewer, electricity, etc. are using the utilities rates as means of vicarious taxation. Fixed income citizens should not have to pay for political legacies through rates charged for a necessity.

• One, if not the highest cost of municipalities is labour. In some cases the cost of labour is close to 70% of total operating expenditure. Since this cost is subject to collective bargaining it is fast becoming uncontrollable. In addition some municipalities accumulate large reserves to provide for future pension funds.

• Most municipalities have not embraced new alternatives for the management of growth. They operate in the twenty first century and yet manage their cities with early 20th century concepts. More often than not the styles of management used are autocratic, arrogant and archaic. They still believe that they should be the sole provider of services to their citizens.

Solutions exist and alternatives must be explored, and they include:

• The use of alternative budgeting techniques such as Zero Base Budgeting (ZBB), at least every three years. The concept forces organizations to examine each of their activities from scratch in order to identify, and eliminate redundancy in the system. Too often costs that are no longer required are left in the budget and contribute to the ever rising levels of taxation.

• Municipalities no longer need to be the sole provider and deliverer of all services. While privatization may be an alternative it is not the only solution. It is time for new approaches to the delivery of services and introduces managed competition as one alternative.

• We all know that our roads and streets across Canada are badly in need of upgrading and maintenance. However we must not continue on the same means of planning and construction. A freeway is not one built with traffic lights at every block. We must design road construction for safety and high mobility, and like other industrial countries we must explore the greater use of toll highways.

• Instead of continuously financing infrastructure through debt and therefore higher taxes, governments must introduce the use of tax free municipal bonds. Tax free means that we can borrow money at a cheaper rate and citizens can participate in the financing of infrastructure.

• We must allow more participation by the private sector in the development of inner cities instead of using schemes such as Tax Increment Financing, which is nothing more than corporate welfare for developers.

So far, politicians have portrayed the difficulties of cities as a revenue problem, this is not entirely true. We must first address the problems and the existing deficiencies of transparency, accountability and organization structures within the municipal system. Otherwise we run the risk to continuously fuel the spending appetite of politicians and their grandiose schemes for building political legacies. Instead of giving further credence and powers for municipalities to raise new taxes, through city-state status, we should approach the delivery of municipal services in new alternative ways.

Canadians are on the verge of paying dearly for the follies of municipal politicians who seek only to get more powers to raise taxes, and we do not need new super mayors or small state emperors.

Calatrava Contract

January 21 2009

Despite the ire of most Calgarians about the possible expenditure of $50 million on new pedestrian bridges, it seems City Administration decided to contract Santiago Calatrava to design the bridges. No matter how good Calatrava is, we believe that there are Calgarians, and Canadians who could have done the job. In fact it would have been a showcase for a Canadian architect, and Calgary would have been no worse.

When the province allocated funds for infrastructure to municipalities, The Institute for Public Sector Accountability (IPSA) was against ‘funds with no strings attached’. IPSA believes that there should be strict control placed on moneys transferred between levels of government. After all, the funds come from only one source – the taxpayer. Allocated funds should only be used