Convention wisdom has it that the public heavily subsidizes post-secondary education. The illusion of a subsidy comes from the fact that tuition fees, high as they are, don’t cover the entire cost of education. But this common misconception ignores a second way in which students pay for their education: through higher taxes after graduation. When these tax payments are added up over the course of graduates’ careers, it turns out that university students fully repay the cost of their degrees and then some.

The report’s main findings are captured in this infographic:

There’s a broad based agreement in this country that higher education is important for our long-term social and economic prosperity, and that it’s something that, as a society, we should promote and invest in. My report finds that we all come up ahead when more people have access to education. Then why is it that what we’ve seen the BC government increasingly withdrawing its financial support for advanced education and downloading the costs to students?

Thirty years ago, government funding covered 88% of BC university operating revenues, but in 2009, government only paid for 58% of the costs of educating students. Universities made up the shortfall by hiking tuition fees, which now account for 44% of all university operating revenues according to CAUT (see fig 1.2 and 1.3). Tuition fees in BC now run over $4,800 per year, and, along with the erosion in student grant programs, present a significant barrier to education.

There’s no better time than now to start reversing these trends. Expanding our society’s investment in higher education today will pay dividends in higher tax revenues, lower unemployment and better social mobility for decades to come.

You can also read my op-ed on this topic in the Vancouver Sun. Or check out the full report, which contains some really interesting — and little known — tidbits about just how big the gap between men’s and women’s earnings is when annual incomes are considered.

The idea of leveraging education, especially post-secondary education, to boost the economy is in itself a good one. Education is a policy area where strategic investment made today can produce large benefits down the road in the form of better educated, more innovative and adaptable citizens, who can be the engine of the economy of the future.

However, the BC post-secondary education system is stretched thin after a decade of mandated enrollment increases that were not accompanied by sufficient funding to properly educate and support these new students. As a result, many of our programs are underfunded and university leaders have started to acknowledge that:

The quality of undergraduate education at Canada’s universities is eroding, even as the price of earning a degree rises steadily, leaving students more anxious about their prospects after graduating.

The Ministry of Advanced education already has a service plan outlining goals and challenges for education policy in BC. It identifies several important challenges to be addressed, including the need to:

• provide high quality education choices that are affordable and accessible to address the fact that 77% of job openings over the 10-year period 2009 – 2019 are expected to require some form of post secondary education while only 60% of the BC population has this level of education.
• provide education & training opportunities in areas that address BC’s future workforce needs
• increase the participation of Aboriginal People & other under-represented groups

Focusing on these key challenges is what would strengthen the BC education system and provide jobs now and in the future.

The Premier’s announcement of regional workforce tables and bringing training closer to where British Columbians live and work makes some sense within this framework, though arguably is neither new nor very well funded.

But instead of focusing funding to remedy the declining quality and increasing lack of affordability & accessibility of education in BC, the Premier plans to increase the number of international students in post-secondary institutions by 50% over just four years.

It’s hard to see expanding international student enrollment as a top priority at this stage, before we have addressed the eroding affordability and quality of education (after years of underfunding teaching), and got a handle on how we can enable all British Columbians, particularly Aboriginal people and other underrepresented groups, to realize their full potential.

And what the Premier is proposing is a huge increase, close to 20,000 more students every year (it is estimated that there are 39,000 international students in the BC post-secondary system). That’s 10% of the total projected spaces in public post-secondary institutions in 2013/14 (202,114 according to the Ministry of Advanced Education Annual Service Plan).

It is not clear whether the Premier is proposing to increase enrollment by 10% over this year’s service plan or whether the international students would take spaces that would otherwise go to Canadian students.

Either way, it’s hard to read the government’s press release and not end up feeling like they’re treating international students as a revenue generator (aka cash cow). Yes, international students pay higher tuition fees and spend money in the local economy, but it is not reasonable to rely on international tuition to make up funding shortfalls in college/university budgets.

Bringing in international students will benefit BC and Canada in the long run. However, we need to make sure that we have the resources to offer them good quality education and that the international students that we do attract are prepared to learn.

Far too many international students are already enrolled in local colleges and universities without having the necessary English-language skills to learn well. Anybody who has recently been in college or university has seen that. Ask any post-secondary instructor, and they will readily share frustrating stories of otherwise intelligent students in their classes with such severe English language difficulties that they were having trouble understanding much of the material. Even if they manage to get a diploma, these students end up receiving a very poor education.

It hardly makes sense to focus on growing the number of our international students without providing proper educational supports for them. And I didn’t see anything in this announcement about that.

If this really happens it would be an important opportunity.  The current government has never allowed the public to have a say on these issues.  The TILMA agreement with Alberta was signed in secret.  The things BC gave away as part of the US procurement deal were equally hidden.  BC gave up more than any other province in that deal.

The worry is just how the Premier defines consultation.  If the current sales job on the HST is any indication, consultation won’t mean much.

Canada has now completed the sixth round of negotiations on CETA and the Europeans are pressing hard for trade rights on issues that fall under provincial jurisdiction.  For that reason provinces are playing a role in the discussions.

The Federal Government has asked provinces for a list of items they want to see left out of the deal.

During the Estimates debate last week NDP leader Adrian Dix and House Leader John Horgan pressed the Premier on issues such as the possible inclusion of drinking water in the agreement, a subject that has been exempted from previous trade deals.  Dix also asked the Premier whether she supported the request from the Union of BC Municipalities and the B.C. School Trustees Association that they be left out of the deal.  The Premier declined to answer those questions.

Dix asked the Premier if she would make public what BC was offering up in the discussions.  The Premier once again refused saying “negotiations aren’t typically conducted in public.”  She did commit however that:

There will be, I’m told, consultation on this agreement…There will be many avenues for the public’s input.

Earlier during Estimates debates in May another trade related issue surfaced.  MLAs Guy Gentner and Vicki Huntington asked what the government was thinking of when they hired a company to study possible development of Foreign Trade Zones in British Columbia.

In the United States there are many Foreign Trade Zones that frequently see materials being shipped in for processing and then re-exported without any duties or tariffs being applied.  In Canada the Federal government says existing programs already offer the benefits of Foreign Trade Zones without the need for specific geographic sites being designated.

Jobs, Tourism and Innovation Minister Pat Bell denied that the Province had any plans at all and said they were only looking for information when they hired the InterVISTAS Consulting Group on a $77,000 contract to look at how FTZ programs could be improved.

Gentner and Huntington expressed concerns about possible problems with labour rights in such zones and the possibility that such a site might be located on agricultural land in Delta.  At least one economist has suggested that FTZ’s are simply one more way to give money to corporations.

Both of these issues could be tremendously important to the people of British Columbia.  The Europeans want water as part of the trade deal because of their enormous private water corporations.  Polling has shown that Canadians everywhere do not want private corporations managing their water systems.  The Europeans also want complete access to local government procurement.  In a legal opinion prepared for the Centre for Civic Governance trade lawyer Stephen Shrybman says:

under CETA, municipalities would no longer be able to restrict tendering to Canadian companies, or stipulate that foreign companies bidding on public contracts accord some preference for local or Canadian goods, services, or workers. As a result, municipalities would lose one of the few, and perhaps the most important tool they now have for stimulating innovation, fostering community economic development, creating local employment and achieving other public policy goals, from food security to social equity.

The Premier has promised the public will be consulted on these critical issues.  She needs to go further and make those consultation meaningful.  That means consulting before the decisions are made and actually listening to what people say.

For a party that is campaigning on fiscal responsibility, income splitting for families with children under 18 is a rather irresponsible way of spending $2.5 billion.

Let’s be clear — this is not a policy that helps young families. This is a policy that helps a small minority of families — about 13% or 1 in 8 of all Canadian families with children. The Conservatives themselves estimated that income splitting would benefit 1.8 million families, which sounds like a lot until you look at the total number of families in Canada, which at last count was 14.1 million.

The kicker is that income splitting does not help the 1.8 million Canadian families that need it most — those who live in poverty or barely make ends meet slightly above the poverty line.

Income-splitting works by allowing families to allocate more of their earned income to a lower tax bracket by sharing the earned income between the spouses when filing taxes. Automatically, this means that the 2 million single-parent families in Canada will get no benefit from income splitting, as there’s no spouse to split the income with. Dual-earner families with spouses who earn equal incomes will also get nothing. Single-earner families with an earner whose taxable income falls in the bottom tax bracket (currently under $41,544) get nothing. And among families with a stay-at-home parent or a parent working part-time only, the higher the salary of the working parent, the higher the benefit.

The highest possible benefit — $6,408 — goes to the few families with a single earner whose taxable income falls at least $50,000 above the cut off of the top tax bracket (at the 2011 tax brackets, you’ll need taxable income of at least $178,800 to get the maximum benefit). Calculation details are here.

What we have here is a reverse Robin Hood situation, where the government would be giving more money to the people with the higher incomes. This is hardly a fiscally responsible way to spend taxpayers money.

While I’m sure that every single family with children, no matter what their income, can easily find a way to spend another $1,000 or even $6,408, we need to get smarter with our government spending and make sure that our limited resources go to the families which need the most support.

There are better ways to spend $2.5 billion to support young families. Increasing the per-child benefit amount of the Canada Child Tax Benefit would be my first choice, as this is an effective income-tested tax benefit for families with children that most Canadian families receive (currently up to family income of about $110,000).

But it won’t be your first choice if you wanted to subsidize families with a stay-at-home parent. In fact, if you asked tax experts to design tax policy to give women incentives to stay home with the kids, income splitting is what they’d come up with. This is family tax policy based on the outdated notion of the 1950s family where women stay home to take care of the kids while men go to work to support the family.

Conservatives claim that our tax system is unfair to stay-at-home parents, but we already provide plenty of incentives to keep women home. The high costs of child care make work pay a lot less for women, especially those with more than one child under 12. Add to this the extra transportation costs and other work expenses, and you have a significant barrier for women who want to go back to work after maternity leave.

A friend of mine, Mary, is a smart and well-educated software engineer with 7 years on the job before she decided to start a family. She went back to work for a year after her first child was born, then had a second one. Going back to work after her second mat leave, she calculated that her well-paid, full-time software engineering job is only netting her family about $470 extra per month after childcare and work-related expenses are paid. Needless to say, she quit. And that’s before any income splitting. Add income splitting to the mix, and her family would be netting another $200 per month more with her off work than if she was working (given her and her husband’s tax brackets).

While Mary can afford to stay home because her husband’s salary is high enough, and she enjoys taking care of the children, what do you think is happening with her software engineering skills? If she takes 5 or 10 years off work while her children are young and need childcare, do you think she’d just be able to walk into the same job when the kids grow up? That’s highly unlikely.

What expensive child care and tax incentives for stay-at-home moms (all the way to children’s 18th birthday) lead to is a tremendous erosion of job skills among women. With an aging labour force and looming skill shortages, the Canadian government should be looking for ways to tap women’s skills and potential in the workforce, not providing incentives for them to drop out of the workforce.

But Mary is not representative of the average Canadian family, because most Canadian families cannot live on one parent’s salary alone. Half of all two-parent Canadian families with children earn a combined income of $80,000. And that’s largely with both parents working.

For most families, there is no choice between earning $40,000 each or having one parent bring home $80,000 while the other one takes care of the kids. The choice is between earning $40,000 each or having one parent quit their job while the other continues to earn $40,000.

Statistics tell us that people with higher education and higher earning potential tend to find spouses with similarly high education levels and earning potential. So we really are talking about significant skill erosion here if income splitting is successful because the only families who can afford to take advantage of this tax subsidy offer are families of software engineers or other professionals.

In summary, the Conservatives are proposing a $2.5 billion subsidy to stay-at-home mothers, where the higher your husband’s income is, the more you get. A tax subsidy, which, if successful at incentivizing more mothers to quit their jobs will lead to a large-scale erosion of women’s labour force skills at a time when we need all hands on deck to keep our economy running.

Though clearly fiscally irresponsible and aimed at subsidizing an outdated notion of the family, I don’t think we should get too excited about this spending announcement, given that it’s not likely to come into effect during the 4-year term of the next elected government. This is clearly a non-commitment to support families as the earliest it could possibly be implemented is 2015/16 and that’s if deficit-reduction goes as planned. But in politics — and economic forecasting — 4 years is an awfully long time. Who knows what our top priorities would be then?

Canadians know what the Conservatives’ real priorities are — these are the ones that have actual dollars attached to them now. The list includes a new round of corporate income tax cuts that’s costing us $2.8 billion this year alone, fighter jets estimated to cost $29.6 billion, more prisons at who knows what cost. These were all deemed priority initiatives that are worth borrowing for.  Support for families, on the other hand? According to the Conservative Party, that’s not worth borrowing for.

Each ministry and agency is required to prepare a Service Plan that is published with the Budget.  These were initiated originally to provide more transparency in government work.  Over the years they have become increasingly opaque.  Reshuffling ministries and changing the format in which information is presented makes it almost impossible to compare things over time.  The Service Plans have largely become extended press releases.

But this year the Legal Services Society service plan broke the mold.  The Society offers legal representation for financially eligible people with serious family, child protection, criminal, or immigration problems, as well as information and advice services designed to help people resolve legal problems on their own.

In the report outgoing Chair D. Maryland McKimm QC makes the following point:

As I depart, the Legal Services Society is on a stable, albeit significantly reduced, footing. In the board’s assessment, however, the society is now providing services far below what the board believes is needed to properly assist British Columbians with low incomes and to effectively support the efficient operation of the justice system.

Would that we could see this kind of candor in other ministry service plans.  Health care funding in BC is the second lowest in Canada.  The Finance Minister took great pride in this during the Budget lockup before reporters.  In fact, the Budget documents show the government plans to actually reduce health spending as a portion of the GDP in coming years.

School Boards are in the same position.  Yes, funding per student is up in dollar terms (though not up as much as inflation).  But education spending as a percent of our GDP is falling.  In 2009 education spending equaled 5.8% of BC’s GDP.  By 2013 it is predicted to fall to 4.9%.  From 2009 to 2011 education funding will actually fall by $27 per capita.

Post secondary education is probably the most important investment a government can make.  Spending is virtually frozen and tuition fees continue to go up.

Environment funding is falling as are supports for the disabled and the arts. 

This is the price we have paid for over a decade of tax cuts that largely benefited corporations and the well off. 

So hats off to D. Maryland McKimm for penning the one service plan that had the courage to talk about providing services far below what British Columbians need.

That’s the take-home message from a recent talk by UC Berkley economist and public policy professor Jesse Rothstein who came to SFU to present his latest research on using standardized test scores to measure teacher effectiveness in the US. 

Prof. Rothstein was involved in a 3-year pilot project in Tennessee designed as an experiment to check whether offering teachers bonus pay would improve students’ test score performance. Teachers were randomly assigned to two groups, one was offered bonus pay if their students did well on standardized tests (experimental group) and the other one wasn’t (control group).

After 3 years, there weren’t significant differences in student achievement on standardized tests between the two groups, clearly showing that offering teachers bonus pay did not improve student achievement. Yet, the Obama administration (for which Professor Rothstein worked recently) is continuing to explore incentive pay as a way to improve the education system.

Come to think of it, the idea of incentive pay has become the holy grail in governments’ quest for improving the performance of complex social systems like health care and education. On the surface, there’s a certain intuitive appeal to the idea of paying more to those doing a better job. The “economic theory” behind it is that offering to pay people more for doing a good job will lead to increased work effort as rational individuals choose to maximize their pay.

That’s what’s driving US policy makers to test schemes of offering teachers incentive pay to improve school achievement. That’s what’s driving BC Health Minister Kevin Falcon to offer hospitals funding based on the number of surgeries they do (what he calls patient-focused funding).

But when used mechanically — by tying incentives to some quantitative measure of performance, like test scores or number of surgeries done — such schemes are likely to fail.

The devil — as usual — is in the details. And the details here are that before policy-makers can give somebody a bonus for doing a good job, they need to be able to measure what a good job looks like. This is where standardized tests come in along with other quantitative measures such as the number of medical procedures performed, or the length of hospital stay.

But it turns out — surprise! — that it’s really hard to measure quality in complex social systems and employing simplistic quantitative measures can backfire. In fact, Prof Rothstein quoted an obscure scholar of methodology by the name of Donald Campbell, who coined a rather pessimistic “Campbell’s law” in the late 1970s:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

In other words, the perverse incentives that pay-for-performance schemes create in complex social systems may well outweigh any positive incentives for real improvement.

Campbell looked at education in particular (see his working paper here), and argued that

“achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.

What does this tell us about BC’s new incentive-based funding model in health care?

—

Kudos to the SFU Centre for Education Research and Policy for organizing the public event.

The supplement plays on parents’ fears that their child is not going to get a decent enough education for success in this cut-throat world of ours. God forbid that your grandchildren might have to bear the shame of going to public school. Only in a private school can those parental fears be assuaged.

Of course, the truth is that once you are in a private school, that is just the first rung on the ladder of class distinction. Among those with the financial means, there is always another, even better, clique to aspire to. So it goes with private schools. Once in, you may realize that your child’s private school is weaker than other private schools in terms of its ability to provide status and lifelong connections in the business world. Sad as that is, more and more parents feel the need to play this silly game.

And as an Old Boy of Upper Canada College, I will let you in on a little secret: attending any old private school carries no weight because all those other private schools, um, suck. Interestingly, UCC did not even bother to advertise in the Globe’s supplement on private schools; I bet the headmaster was laughing over his coffee at this feeble attempt on the part of other schools to place an ad, the benefits of which trickle up to UCC as top dog, anyway. Besides, the wait list for UCC is a long one, even if you can afford $25K per year (books, sports and school trips not included).

In all seriousness, I do wonder that, given school has already started, what is this “report” playing at. I think it is probably a way of making parents of public school children feel less worthy … and cultivating the sentiment that maybe next year, perhaps with a big enough tax cut, that could change.

Here’s a better change: cut the funding (in BC, private schools get half the per capita funding as public schools) and privileged treatment that goes to private schools, or better yet, put a tax on private school enrolment, and put that revenue in the public system. Or just raise taxes on the richest, and use that to double the public education budget. All children deserve the best education we can provide them, and we’d all benefit from that investment. It is nothing magical; it has nothing to do with a uniform. It is all about providing the funding so that kids can learn in small classes with the right infrastructure of books, play, sports, art and nature. And in the meantime, make the Globe call its bogus report a “special advertising section”.

There is certainly lots of anecdotal evidence that young graduates are finding it harder and harder to get jobs in their fields these days. I have several friends with degrees who are now serving in restaurants or working in grocery stores. Those lucky enough to get jobs that use their skills often have to contend with short contracts that provide few benefits and little job security. Getting a permanent full-time position after university is almost unheard of these days.

This graph is the first piece of quantitative evidence I’ve seen on the issue, and it raises serious questions about the prospects of young grads in the labour market.

Canada has a large low-wage sector, which has persisted despite economic growth and our increasingly better-educated workforce.

The graph above shows that there are some very well educated workers toiling in the low-skilled low-wage sector in Canada. Telling people to get more education is not a good solution to working poverty. It’s time to take a look at the demand side of the equation.

Canada invests little in research & development and is exceedingly focusing its export strategy on selling commodities with virtually no value-added manufacturing on top. Coincidence? I think not.

On the other hand, social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have shown how situations can override a person’s usual inclinations and cause them to do something which they would normally abhor, such as killing other people in wartime.

Our understanding of human behaviour has grown dramatically with the development of neuroscience. Many of my future posts will consider what these discoveries tell us about creating healthy human beings, and healthy societies.

Of course, these are very political questions.

One key concept is that of  “outside-inside” (in the words of psychologist Arthur Janov). We tend to internalize what we experience in our environments. Food and air, for instance, are obvious examples. It matters whether our food and air are clean or if they are polluted with various toxins.

A second key concept is “neuroplasticity.”  Neuroscience has shown that our brains are not static and unchanging. For instance, every thought and feeling in our minds corresponds to a physical change in our brains. Learn something new, and your brain changes.

In other words, every experience in our lives alters our brain.

A third element are the so-called “mirror-neurons,” which are a fundamental to our “social brain” (Dr. Dan Siegel). In brief, these neurons fire in our brains when we observe the feelings of others. In fact, we absorb the feelings of other people so much that Siegel suggested that we call them “sponge neurons.”

Finally, people tend to absorb the dominant values and beliefs of their culture, including its political ideology. Marx wrote that the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of society, and Gramsci elaborated on the concept of this ideological hegemony.

As political scientist Gary Olson wrote in Capitalism Short Circuits Our Moral Hard-Wiring, “Capitalists maintain domination, in part, through subtly but actively creating society’s prevailing cultural norms.”

Our brains as well as our beliefs are shaped, more than we realize, by the ideology of capitalism, with its emphasis on greed, selfishness, competition and individualism.

In the words of  Frans B.M. de Waal, “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

These norms and expectations often overrule our natural compassion, even though it is now clear that “the human brain is hard-wired for empathy,” in Olson’s view.

Finally, research has shown that poverty (e.g. stress, overwork, poor nutrition) take a terrible toll, not only on adults, but children, and even babies in the womb. Not only is physical health damaged, but emotional and intellectual health suffer.

We need to go beyond these symptoms and address the root causes of human suffering.

This month the new coalition government cancelled the controversial Building Schools for the Future program.  Michael Gove, the Conservative Secretary of State for Education said the P3 school program had been hit by:

“massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy.”

He said: “There are some councils which entered the process six years ago which have only just started building new schools. Another project starting this year is three years behind schedule”

Earlier reports also suggest Britain’s National Health Service is having problems with the cost and inflexibility of P3 hospitals.  The Financial Times reported:

Traditionally, when spending is tough, NHS hospitals put maintenance on hold to retain doctors, nurses and other services.

But Nigel Edwards, head of policy for the NHS Confederation, said: “A hospital with a PFI scheme does not have that option. They are contractually bound to keep the maintenance up – and if you are spending 10 or 15 per cent on your buildings it means all the other efficiency and productivity gains you need have to come out of only 85 or 90 per cent of your budget.”

Not surprisingly, despite problems with the P3s, parents in areas where projects to replace substandard schools have been cancelled are furious.  They are even more furious because the government appears to be funding plans to convert schools to “academies” that can ignore national curriculum.  These academies were just one more form of privatization promoted by the Tony Blair’s Labour government.  With academies, companies and religious institutions invest in schools and get to control them.

The problems with these P3 projects in the U.K. are only coming to light years after they were initiated.  Here in BC, and in Alberta with its commitment to P3 schools, it gives us something to look forward to.

Before discussing these, however, people should be aware that in my day job I am a researcher for the Canadian Union of Public Employees which represents some of the non-teaching staff of the Board.  I do not normally work on issues regarding schools.

I am not going to discuss specific budget issues since I lack the financial information.  What I do want to look at are both process and policy issues that arise from this report.

The School Act gives the Minister of Education the right to appoint “special advisors” in school boards to examine a broad range of issues regarding achievement and educational, financial or community matters.  These appointments do not require consultation with the board under review.  The Minister of Education sets terms of reference and the advisor reports to the Minister.

On April 14^th the province appointed B.C.’s Comptroller General, Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland as special advisor in the VSB to examine “the board’s budget development process, benchmarks, financial forecasts and position, management capacity, administrative expenditures, and opportunities for economies of scale, and make recommendations to assist the board to meet its obligations under the School Act. “

By setting the terms of reference for this review the Minister set the agenda.  The Comptroller notes in her report that:

Specifically excluded from our scope of work was the structure of the provincial funding model for education.

In other words, the terms of reference forbid the special advisor to even look at the issue being raised by every school board in British Columbia.  This automatically limited the review to only those issues the province wanted to address.

The Comptroller’s report goes far beyond what the province will permit its own auditor, the Auditor General to look at.  The Auditor General Act stipulates that the AG:

must not call into question the merits of program policies or objectives of the government, a government organization or a trust fund

The AG may examine the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of the province’s operations but he must not call into question policy choices made by the government.  Many of the things the Comptroller questions are policy choices made by the VSB to serve their community.  The School Board is mandated to meet the educational needs of children yet the Comptroller complains in her report that “cost containment is not their first priority.”

The Comptroller writes at length on what she considers the VSB’s extensive advocacy activity.  This advocacy activity is focused on the province’s funding model for education, which of course the Comptroller is forbidden to even examine in the context of the Board’s finances.

Finally, in terms of process, when the Auditor General reviews some aspect of provincial government activity he is required by law to provide a copy of his report to the Minister of Finance seven days before e provides the report to the legislature.  In fact, he generally goes much further providing government a chance to respond in writing.  These responses are included in his reports.

In contrast, before being released publicly the Comptroller’s report went only to the Minister of Education and, apparently, the government’s communications shop.  The government issued a press release when the report was made public highlighting all negative comments in the report.  The School Board was not given an advance copy nor was it permitted to add its reaction to the report as the government normally does with Auditor General reports.  The School Board was left to respond on the fly.

The Comptroller’s report says:

The Ministry of Education describes the governance approach [for school boards] as a “co-governance” model between the Ministry of Education and school districts.

From a policy perspective her report demonstrates just how little “co-governance” the province is now prepared to permit school boards to exercise.  The government gave the VSB no say in whether or not a “special advisor” was required, who that advisor would be nor what their mandate would be.  They were not even permitted to see the report before publication.

Despite the fact that virtually every school board in the province is raising issues about the education funding model the VSB was singled out for “review.”  From a policy perspective it must be asked if this is an attempt to deal with provincial issues or an exercise in intimidation.

The review clearly goes far beyond what the province will allow itself to be subjected to in reviews by the Auditor General.  This double standard also raises questions about the so-called co-governance model.

The choice of the Comptroller as the special advisor raises questions as well.  The Comptroller is not independent in the sense that the Auditor General is independent.  She works for the provincial government.  People have spoken highly of her integrity but one of the results of this report is that no one in the future will accept that the Comptroller can be trusted as independent when she is assigned by the province to review politically sensitive issues outside of the provincial government.

In recent years school boards in British Columbia have been allowed less and less room to exercise their mandate in support of children and education.  Both the province’s funding model and changing provincial mandates have limited the ability of boards to make decisions.  One final policy question arising from the Comptroller’s report is whether this is the first step in an agenda to even further strip school boards of their powers in a move to more direct provincial control.  If it is the province may have cause to regret the move.  Once the curtain of school boards is removed the province will be visible to everyone as the man behind the curtain.

The Minister’s imposition of the province’s Comptroller General as a budget cop for the Vancouver school board sends a clear message to other school districts.  The message is stop complaining about the money we give you or you might get the same treatment.

School boards get all of their funding from the province and the provincial government argues it has consistently raised per student funding.  This is true.  But school boards respond the increases have not been enough to cover wage increases, increased benefits, general inflation, full-day kindergarten and mandates like paying to become carbon neutral.  The net result, school boards say, is an actual cut in money available for kids in classrooms.

The Vancouver School Board has been the most vocal in its complaints and this has become a political embarrassment for the government.  But virtually every other school board in the province has been saying the same thing. 

Richmond is talking about a $6 million deficit and the possibility of cutting 100 positions.  Kamloops Thompson is looking at a shortfall of $2.4 million.  The Greater Victoria District and Okanagan Skaha see a shortfall of about $1.5 million.  Prince George trustees have been wrestling with how to deal with a $5 million shortfall. 

Surrey School Board chair Laurae McNally told Surrey Now that “The ministry has given us the $5 million for the teachers’ raise, but they’re not funding increased teachers’ pension plan contributions or increased MSP premiums.”

Those two costs alone add up to $4.1 million for the 2010-11 fiscal year and there are others the budget allocation won’t cover. All in all, the district budget is about $12 million shy of what’s needed McNally said.

Obviously, the biggest issue here is, does the provincial government provide school districts with enough money to do the job?

However, there are at least two other important issues in play here.  First, what is the relationship between school boards and the provincial government?  Like municipal councilors, school trustees are elected in their communities to do a job.  But municipal governments get treated very differently.  The Community Charter, passed in the government’s first term, recognizes municipalities as a separate order of government.  It commits the provincial government to consultation before funding is cut. 

Those commitments are pretty limited but they are way more than school boards get.  School boards routinely see their mandates changed without any input.  So the question is, just what does the province have in mind for school boards?  Are we looking at measures that will further undermine their powers?

The second issue is the role being played by the province’s Comptroller General.  The Comptroller General is responsible for the overall quality and integrity of the provincial government’s financial management and control systems.  Increasingly, though, CG Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland is being used as a provincial enforcer.  Her last assignment was TransLink and BC Ferries.  The province will use her report there as an excuse to impose its vision for transportation on TransLink.  Now she is acting as the Premier’s Luca Brasi in the Vancouver school board. 

I am uneasy about the Comptroller being asked to play this role.

In the short term the message to school boards is clear.  You might need to close schools and cut programs but make sure the provincial government doesn’t take the blame.

The government’s “pandemic response framework”, announced by the Ministers of Education and Healthy Living and sport deals with issues like transporting the sick, communications, roles of emergency response teams, school instruction and post-pandemic recovery plans.

What was missing?  There was no discussion of clean schools.

Some people seem to think keeping schools (as well as colleges and universities) clean is an important step in dealing with a possible pandemic.  The Public Health Agency of Canada issued a guidance last May saying:

Influenza viruses can survive on some surfaces for several hours to days but are rapidly destroyed by cleaning.  Cleaning of objects and surfaces that are frequently touched by multiple students or staff, high touch surfaces such as doorknobs, faucet handles, toys, computer keyboards, telephones, school bus hand rails, etc., will help to prevent the transmission of the influenza virus from person to person through contaminated hands.

It is recommended that high touch surfaces in schools and child care centres be cleaned at least twice daily.  No special disinfectants or waste handling practices are required for influenza; regular household or commercially available cleaning products are sufficient for this purpose, and waste handling would be according to usual standards.

Schools are advised to increase the frequency of cleaning during school hours as well as monitoring hand cleaning supplies.  All sinks in washrooms, kitchens and classrooms should be well stocked with hand washing supplies at all times. (i.e., soap and paper towels).  Consider the supervised use of alcohol-based hand rubs (with 60-90% alcohol) in classrooms without hand washing sinks. (emphasis added)

The American Centre for Disease Control had similar advice.

But here in British Columbia many schools are in no position to clean high contact areas twice a day.  In fact, many of our elementary schools have no daytime custodian at all.  Custodians come into schools only at night and if a mess occurs it is often the principal who cleans it up.

Things got worse this spring during the election campaign as many school boards across the province, faced with budget shortfalls, among other cuts trimmed custodial staff even further.

We still don’t know what the impact of H1N1 will be but the province is making it issues of individual responsibility.  They are telling parents to have their children wash their hands and cough into their sleeves.  That’s good advice but Canada’s Public Health Agency has also had good advice for the government about clean schools.  The province should make sure school boards have the resources to follow that advice.

These cuts have been devastating to many service delivery agencies and will result in the cancellation of programs that benefit the least fortunate in our society: children growing up in low income families, women at risk of violence, the poor. In a recent news release, the CCPA has called for the government to repeal all the cuts made since the February budget.

Make no mistake: these cuts are made because our provincial government wants to end up with a smaller deficit at the end of the fiscal year, not because we cannot afford to help vulnerable groups during a serious recession. Despite the recession, BC is one of the wealthiest provinces in this country. Our provincial debt is relatively low. We certainly have the capacity to cushion the blow of the economic downturn to the more vulnerable individuals and families among us. But our government is choosing not to.

In fact, in their obsession with minimizing the size of the deficit, our policy-makers are pushing people into further hardship. And those who have to endure the pain are those who can least afford it. Kudos to Bill Good for recognizing this simple fact on his CKNW show this morning.

The savings from reduced government grants to social service agencies are $354 million, a mere 0.9% of the overall $40 billion provincial budget for 2009/10. These cuts could easily have been accommodated in only a slightly higher deficit.

The recession is temporary, and so are the current deficits, but the lost educational opportunities for children would never be recovered. It’s penny wise but pound foolish to cut funding to programs that have already been pared to the bone and that provide services with long-term payoffs.

The government is trying to create the impression that cuts are concentrated among “nice to have” but non-essential programs. This is simply not the case. Many of the initiatives that are now being cut have been set up to fill a need that exists because the government is not providing adequate social services and supports out of its core budget. Literacy initiatives, supports for violence against women and children or seniors’ activity programs that keep people healthy and out of hospitals should not be left to the whim of discretionary grants funding. We need to ask ourselves questions such as whether we prefer to pay for programs that enrich the lives of disadvantaged children as they grow up, or for policing and anti-gang measures a few years in the future.

The secrecy with which these cuts have been implemented is also egregious. Without knowing exactly what is being cut, we cannot evaluate the impact of the cuts, and without openness and transparency it is simply not possible to have an honest public debate about priorities. This is why we’ve launched our own effort to track the cuts and we are asking affected groups or individuals to come forward and share their stories.

From a purely macroeconomic standpoint, any government spending is better than none in the midst of a recession as it will boost the economy in the short term. In the long term, however, the best use of government borrowing is to finance investments that will bridge our current economic needs with long-term social and environmental goals. Think investments that leave us with healthier and better educated citizens, that increase long-term productivity and set us up for the “green” economy of the future, while also increasing the quality of life for all people.

It’s here where the current government policy leaves a lot to be desired. We would be better off running higher deficits and making these public investments now, than running smaller deficits and having to pay them off with a less productive economy in the future. Let’s not forget that public dollars can be invested in initiatives that will have long-lasting benefits for said future generations.

According to a new study by UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership, just under 30% of BC children entering kindergarten are “developmentally vulnerable” (read, not ready to learn), and the resulting depletion of human capital is estimated to cause BC to forgo about 20% of GDP growth over the next 60 years, a value equivalent to investing $401.5 billion today at a rate of 3.5% interest (for more details, see this Vancouver Sun article).

By failing to make public investments now to eliminate child poverty and ensure that our children grow up healthy and have access to good quality education, we are wasting our children’s potential and leaving them with a less productive economy in the future. Yes, making these investments will cost money and increase the government debt, but at this point leaving debt to our children seems far preferable to the alternative of saddling them with the (often very expensive) consequences of our unresolved social and environmental problems.

There is, however, a type of debt that we should not leave to future generations. It’s the debt incurred from hosting lavish parties for ourselves (Olympics, anyone?) or creating wealth by destroying the environment (through subsidizing natural gas extraction, for example).

Increasing government debt in itself is not as large a problem as some of the recent media coverage would suggest, but both BC and Canada’s governments could and should be making better spending choices.