Sunday 26 April 2015

Dog ownership suitibility test #1

If you're contemplating getting a dog, there are a number of steps you can take to see if you are suitable to be a dog owner. You can borrow a friend's dog and take it to the park. You can volunteer at a shelter. You can dog sit for a weekend.

These activities are a good start, but to truly know if you are compatible, you need to know what having a dog in your own living space will be like. I have devised a number of suitability tests. This first one is called Dog Dirt.

1. Ask your hairdresser to collect a full grocery bag of hair clippings.

2. Dump the hair clippings in a garbage bag.

3. Add a couple shovel fulls of dirt from your backyard to the garbage bag. For added realism, take it from your flower beds. Especially if they've been freshly planted. Overturn the rest of the bed for good measure.

4. If it is spring, add a few cups of water to the bag.

5. If you want a short haired dog, throw in a handful of lawn clippings and leaves. If you want a long haired dog, add a shovel full.

6. Mix well. If you have any black clothes or clothes that collect lint badly, you may wish to add them to the bag now, because you can forget about wearing them again if you do get a dog.

7. Take the bag inside your house and lightly sprinkle the mixture over the floor, the furniture, and everything else you own. Throw extra under the furniture.

8. If you have forced-hot-air heating, throw a little down the air ducts to make sure the dust and fur billows around properly when the heat comes on.

9. Sweep, vacuum, and mop up the mess. While you're cleaning, have a friend or spouse trail behind you sprinkling dirt and hair over all the areas you just cleaned. Have them lay in any dirt piles you accumulated and haven't swept into the dustpan yet.

10. If your spouse or friend is willing, ask them to eat some grass clippings or anything else found outside on the ground and throw it up on the floor. Ideally this should occur when you have company. Clean it up.

11. Make a sandwich. Put a some strands of hair in it. Pick the hair back out and eat the sandwich.

If you can live with this, congratulations! You've passed suitability test #1 of dog ownership.

Stay tuned next week's suitability test when we use a chisel and a hammer to hack random gouges in baseboards and moldings and then un-stuff a couch.  

Thursday 23 April 2015

The election promise I want to hear



With the release of the federal budget a couple days ago Canadian politics fully kicked into election mode, despite being months from dropping the writ. Cue the platforms. Cue the promises. Cater to the base!

I've been doing some serious reflection on my own political beliefs. Who is my base? I know it's not the Conservatives, both from using poli-sci survey tools and my deep and abiding disgust with their ideology and governance. I've always been a Liberal since I came of age, but if the last nine years of Conservative rule has taught me anything it's that blind party loyalty is a flaming pile of dog shit on every political house and by extension, all of our houses.

The poli-sci tools tell me I am totally onside with Greens, Liberals, and NDP with a narrow enough margin to make each of them first choice.

I decided to write my own election promises with the hopes that they may find their way into a platform.

I want every Canadian to have
  1.  enough food to eat and a warm and safe place to sleep;
  2.  equitable treatment;
  3.  accessible and affordable healthcare and education;
  4.  evidence-based policy and lawmaking;
  5.  a government that recognizes that #1 is the minimum benchmark of governance.
The World Happiness Report was released today. The top four countries are all cold climates like ours. 1. Switzerland. 2. Iceland. 3. Denmark. 4 Norway. They do all five things.

Canada came in at #5. We need a government that, at a minimum, can keep us there. Despite achieving #5, the incumbent government is not going keep us there. They're not going to keep us there, because budget 2015, or fudget 2015 as I like to call it, is the furthest away from 1-5 of any budget in the last nine years.

Friday 10 April 2015

I am not afraid: not winning on mortgages



President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1933 inaugural address "...the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." He was speaking to a nation in the despair of the great depression. He went on to lay blame squarely on the financial industry, address his nation's staggering unemployment, announce the adoption of a good neighbour foreign policy, and the very next day declared a four-day banking holiday to implement immediate financial reform.

On the eve of an election in the economic meltdown of 2008, when $15 trillion vanished from the global economy, when millions of people lost their jobs and their homes, our incumbent PM Stephen Harper offered these words of comfort and hope to his citizens:

"We always know when stock markets go up, people end up buying a lot of things that are overpriced, and when stock markets go down, people end up passing on a lot of things that are under priced. I think there are probably some gains to be made in the stock market. That's my own view."

What a hero to the people. Canada weathered the economic crisis very well, but that credit goes to our heavily regulated banking system. America's banking system was also heavily regulated, starting with Roosevelt to ensure Black Friday never happened again, but those laws were eroded over time.

The siren call of the free market took hold in the early 1980s and with each subsequent administration the old laws were defanged or outright repealed. When the Clintons took office, their national strategy to increase home ownership laid the track for the mortgage meltdown. Bush Jr. picked up their home ownership torch and the race continued. By 2008, the American financial and mortgage industries were free market and full Caligula.

Then new Rome fell.

At home in Canada there were definite losses, but what saved us that the bulk of the greed-driven insanity that occurred in the U.S. markets simply wasn't allowed under Canadian banking regulation.

We were on our way there, though. When the Conservatives took power in 2006 one of their first acts was to double available funds for government-backed mortgage insurance and raise insurable mortgage limits from 25 years to 40*. This doubled the buyers market, which subsequently spiked the housing market.

Then the meltdown happened and the Conservatives slowly brought mortgages back to what they were before they took office. They did so under the guise of being responsible fiscal managers. Really all they did was fix what they broke.

In 2012, the Conservatives cried victory with their keen financial management when within five years the average Canadian net worth exceeded that of the average American for the first time. If there was ever a time when the phrase "undeserved sense of self worth" applied, this was it.

America was still digging its way out of a financial pit of despair and its housing markets were still depressed. In Canada, the data showed the bulk of our net worth lay in real estate, the value of which received a hearty jolt from the Conservatives when they doubled the mortgage pool in 2006, and a booster with each mortgage correction that followed. At the same time, we started carrying more household debt than ever before, largely due to the high cost of real estate. In the six years between 2006 to 2012, the price of houses rose by 50 per cent.

Making changes to the market that inflate the price of real estate so that Canadians incur the highest household debt ever is not something to celebrate.  It is especially not something to celebrate when the country we're using as a benchmark is still working its way out of the recovery position.

This is engineered winning. This is manipulated statistics winning.

This is not winning at all. 

*Correction. An earlier version stated 35 years.

Wednesday 8 April 2015

Canadian Taxpayer Federation: Trickle on this

 

A few days ago I wrote a blog post about ignorantly or intentionally using statistics to support a false conclusion. It was mathy, apologies, but it was a billion dollars a year of wrongness.

An article in the Chronicle Herald today, courtesy of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, with the typical CTF headline drama: "Kill sick days, track employees". According to the CTF, paid government employee sick days are destroying Nova Scotia's economy and they've got the cherry picked data to prove it. Except that they don't prove it. The whole article is just a selection of convenient data points from the public sector with exactly one piece of corresponding data from private sector.

It's written solely for the purpose of generating anger towards public servants. Implementing their plan would fix absolutely nothing. Even if every public servant had perfect attendance, we'd still be buried under our massive provincial debt. We'd still have declining and aging population. And until September at the earliest, we'd still be viewed by the federal government as an unfortunate and embarrassing poor relation from whom we can expect a few drips and drabs of federal money in Conservative ridings and a healthy side of contempt.

The CTF sounds good in theory, no one likes paying taxes, but that's not what the CTF is about. The CTF is comprised of folks so far to the right Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are on the Christmas card list. Deep statistical analysis from CTF about Canadian economics and society is rereading Atlas Shrugged while audio recordings of Thatcher and Regan play in the background.

It's not about taxes, it's about ideology. It's Reaganomics, it's trickle-down theory, it's horse and sparrow theory. It's the theory of I've got mine, you get yours.

It's bullshit.

It's certainly not about saving Canadians from taxes they shouldn't have to pay. In response to the National Post on the 86 per cent increase in incarceration costs in Canada as a direct result of changes to sentencing laws in the preceding five years, Canadian Taxpayers Federation director Gregory Thomas said he had no issue with the costs of prisons increasing, as long as it keeps criminals away from Canadians and their property.

The CTF is just fine with the federal government blowing a billion dollars a year in taxpayer money to lock more people up, even though everybody told the government they were wrong. But they're not okay with paying people to stay home when they're sick.

Well, that's just sick.

Monday 6 April 2015

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

https://criticalsocialjustice.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/harper_prisons.jpeg

With the Duffy trial starting tomorrow, I took a #cndpoli stroll through Twitter this morning to see what folks had to say.

Predictably, there were lots and lots Duffy tweets. Everyone loves a public hanging, especially when the noose is around the neck of a disgraced and appointed for life politician with a 30 year history of nasty to vicious journalism. Though, that's not what drew the ire that caused this post. Regardless of verdict, the Duff's duff is cooked. What is also cooked, is this tweet:
  The source of these figures is sound*, but the conclusion is either drawn in ignorance or with intent. 

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 20061* 20082* 20113* 20124*
United States 682 699 700 701 714 723 738 756 743b 730a
New Zealand 149 149 145 155 168 168 186 185 199 194
England & Wales 125 124 125 141 142 141 148 153 155 154
Scotland 118 115 120 129 132 136 139 152 155 151
Australia 108 108 110 115 117 120 126 129 133a 129z
Canada 118 116 116 116 108 107 107 116 117c 114b

Yes, in 1999, the incarceration rate was 118 per 100,000 people. Yes, in 2012, the incarceration rate was 114 per 100,000 people. Yes, the first figure is definitely higher than the second figure. But declaring a conclusion based on a single data set is like declaring a plague over because the infection rate is decreasing. On one hand, the plague could be abating. On the other, most of the population could be already dead.

So let's take a look at a complementary data set, crime rates:

1999200020012002200320042005
7,694.337,606.797,586.737,512.117,770.257,599.627,325.04









2006200720082009201020112012








7,243.986,899.266,616.556,442.366,136.985,755.695,588.11


In 1999, there were 7,694 Criminal Code incidents per 100,000 people. In 2012, there were 5,588 Criminal Code incidents per 100,000 people. That's a drop of 2,106 per 100,000, or 2.1 per 100.

According to StatsCan and the federal government, "with only 5,588 incidents per 100,000 people in 2012, Canada's national crime rate reached its lowest level since 1972. The rate of violent crime in Canada was 1,190 incidents per 100,000 people, its lowest level since 1998. The rate of property crime, for its part, was 3,414 incidents per 100,000 people, the lowest since 1998."

Crime is down and down significantly. Got it. Let's go back to those incarceration rates.

In 1999, the incarceration rate was 118/100,000 and the crime rate was 7,694/100,000 or 0.118/100 to 7.7/100. In 2006, the crime rate dropped to 7,244/100,000 or 7.244. If we were to use 1999 incarceration rates and 2006 crime rates to predict the 2006 incarceration rate, we'd get a value of 0.1056342066 per hundred or 106 per 100,000. It's a difference of 1/100,000 from the actual incarceration rate of 107/100,000 or 0.001/100. It's damn close.

If incarceration rates remained reflective of crime rates, a crime rate of 5.6/100 in 2012 predicts a 2012 incarceration rate of 0.088/100. The actual incarceration rate for 2012 is 0.114/100. Based on 2012 crime rates, we incarcerated an extra 26 people per 100,000.

So while it is true that incarceration rates are technically lower under Harper than they were under Chretien, factoring for crime rates means incarceration is up an additional 9,189 people in 2012. Each male inmate costs an average of $111,042 per year, each female inmate $214,614. Just using male inmate costs, this cost Canadians an extra $1,020,364,938 in 2012. In contrast, it costs $31,148 per year to maintain an offender in the community.  

Mark Twain popularized the saying "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." The nice thing about statistical lies is that they are easily refuted with more data.

The tough-on-crime agenda that began in 2006 and continues to be the Conservative fundraising battle cry is a different kind of lie. Unfortunately statistics have no place in this lie, because statistics require analysis and reason and there is no reason, no analysis to be found in ideology.  There is certainly no reason or analysis to be found in locking up an extra 9,000 people at when crime rates are at historic lows.

*Looking at the readily available (and actual not predicted) statistics for 2013, the crime rate has fallen to 5,191 per 100,000 or 5.2/100. The 2006 incarceration/crime rate stats predicts an incarceration rate of 0.07667545555 or 0.077 per 100 people. The actual incarceration rate for 2013 is 0.118. Exactly what it was in 1999 with a crime rate that's 2,503 lower per 100,000 or 2.5 per 100.