Saturday, February 23, 2013

Episode 4: Lacking Leverage - The Culture of No, continued.

It has always been a "given" to me that when we create laws and policies that govern our society, we would be doing this with full recognition of the economic impacts of those laws and policies.  The reason, one hopes, that there are cabinet meetings in the Provincial government is so the different Departments don't step on each others' toes.  That, in the end, they act in the best interest of the people of Nova Scotia, and not only in the best interest of their own trivial silos.

It would make no sense, for example, for one Department or funding agency to hand out government assistance to a business start-up and another Department to make arbitrary policy decisions to make sure that money is wasted by selectively enforcing laws or policies, going out of their way to make things difficult or impossible for the start-up, or simply creating an environment in which no one wants to bother trying. But, of course, in The Culture of No, that's how we roll.


In the past, I have emphasized how the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation could help justify its existence by playing a greater, even a lead role, in the development of, or at least the support of, the Nova Scotia wine, beer and spirits producing industry. (The NSLC - The Devil We Know, 2009) I know that, at the time, my blog post was printed out and circulated around the NSLC (I actually saw it pinned on a wall).  I can also say that today, I regard the NSLC as a positive player in the industry.  My point at the time was that as an agent of the Provincial government, they had a role, and a responsibility to leverage their monopoly to the economic benefit of Nova Scotians wherever short sighted trade agreement language (like some in NAFTA, apparently) allowed.


The NSLC management may not agree with me, but I submit that since they changed their attitude to one of ignoring, almost deriding local products, to their current one of supporting them, we have seen astronomical growth in the number of Nova Scotia producers. I think their change of approach was a catalyst.  There are distillers, brewpubs, pico and micro brewers all over Nova Scotia, and more on the way.  There are probably twice the number of wineries, with more on the way.  Heck, I just spotted a maple syrup bottle (the one with the loop handle) with a clear liquid in it called "Cape Breton Silver" on the prime shelf beside the cash yesterday at the Quinpool Road store.


At the same time, government funding of agencies like Taste of Nova Scotia and the Winery Association of Nova Scotia have created a significant growth in interest in Nova Scotia wines in the local restaurant industry.  Nowadays it's only the dinosaurs (Bertossi etc) who don't serve local wines.  It is my hope that very soon they will also have to import their customers.


This all supports one of the basic simple economic theories espoused by Jane Jacobs, and others - Import Substitution.  That is, when we start making something here that replaces something we currently pay to have shipped to us, it's a really good thing.  It gets even better when we turn the tables and are able to sell locally made products to other markets. That's money injected into our economy, not just spinning around inside it.  I think that a lot of this has to do with small adjustments the NSLC and the Provincial Government made to the price structure of local products - how wineries and breweries can sell at their door and at farmers' markets and make more per bottle than through the NSLC mandated distribution system; and how breweries are taxed based on their production, a means that partially recognizes their much greater job generation capabilities than factory breweries, in terms of jobs per liter made (and consumed).  Drink a micro, create a job!



So we know that some very subtle government policies, working together, and developed in conjunction with the industry can make a big difference in how locally owned businesses survive and prosper.  I am sure you know of other examples, examples that show possibility in changing our Culture of No, to a Culture of Why Not.

There remain certain bastions of silo-ism, places where the protection of turf is more important than the good, or the will, of the people.  And one of these is most definitely a Provincial Department now named Nova Scotia Environment (NSE).  he Department of the Environment was established in 1973 to administer the Environmental Protection Act.  At the time, it was sorely needed.  North Americans were waking up to the fact that we'd been doing a lot of stupid things to our environment and that we, as humans, could actually cause harm to it.  So we drafted legislation and set up a Department to protect our environment.  Forty years later, however, much of those original concerns are gone, in some cases replaced by new ones, but most of the work now done by NSE, the current version of that original Department, is about issues and concerns that did not exist back then.  (I was in Grade 10).

Indeed, a cogent argument can now be made for a massive downsizing of this Department, based mainly on how the world has changed.  Development and construction practices, other laws, and public expectations in the marketplace, provide more protection than the effective enforcement this Department achieves now.  This Department expends a large percentage of its efforts (budget) persecuting and prosecuting people who are already trying hard not to damage the environment, but are perhaps not following paper based procedures dictated by policies and legislation this Department has written for itself. Yes, they expend their efforts not in the protection of the environment, but in the protection of their processes, paper trails, policies, and bureaucracy.  The only thing they clearly can be shown to wishing to be sustainable is their own authority and jobs.

This loss of sight of their original mandate is so misguided now, that much of their efforts are involved in enforcing their Act on other Provincial Government Departments and on Municipalities. Other taxpayer funded initiatives are harmed by the costs of complying with set procedures, strictly enforced by government paid inspectors, when they are already intent on not harming the environment.  Often their well intentioned, but inexperienced inspectors force people to do things in a manner that causes more harm than they would have without any intervention.  We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in self enforcement - literally a dog chasing its own tail.  This while multi-national corporations clear-cut our land, extract our minerals, and harness our tides and wind.

One example of this absurdity that illustrates how bad it has become can be found in a relatively obscure court case on the South Shore.  Out Provincial Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal (TIR) decided a bridge needed to be repainted, to protect it from corrosion.  The bridge is 10 metres above the river it crosses.  They wrapped it in a net and tarp below the bridge, and cleaned off the old paint, making sure none fell down into the river, and as is normal for them, cleaned up as they went.  Their specifications for this work were developed and proven some time ago, back when Nova Scotia Environment (NSE) worked WITH other agencies to make sure the Environment was protected.  One NSE inspector must have been held up while driving over the bridge one day and wondered if they had the "all important Approval" from their Department, because, surely they would have to. But the TIR people had looked at the rules, and they said they needed permission to work "in" a watercourse, and being 30 feet above it, they would never be in it. Engineers do tend to think in 3D more often than bureaucrats, after all.

Not to be fooled by this ruse, our industrious civil servants on Team NSE got together and decided that no, Team TIR was in the watercourse, because, looking at a map, it was clear that the road and the river intersected, and that had to mean they were "in" the watercourse.  So they called the TIR local engineer into a meeting and presented him with a charge under their act for working without an Approval.  That engineer challenged them (probably told them to go pound sand I hope) and ignored them.  If that charge had been successful, one Department would score taxpayer points, and the other would lose them, with, of course, the underlying loss due to administrative friction. Not what an outsider would term an entirely productive exercise.

In the true spirit of wasting taxpayers dollars, the NSE pressed charges, both side have legal representation in house, or via contracts, and last I heard they were headed for court.  If they do make it to court,  do hope they get a judge with common sense that tells them to go home and learn the share the sandbox better.

So we have a case where work was being done for the public good.  It was being done in a manner that fully protected the environment.  No adverse effect occurred.  The work had to happen regardless of whatever NSE would have asked under an Approval.  The reasoning to pursue charges appears to be over the definition of a two letter word ("in") that most everyone on the planet would say means, in this case, the same as "wet", and our civil servants are taking up valuable court time, spending time on numerous meetings and measurements to build cases and defend actions, all over....  Sweet. F. All.
One would be excused for asking how we got to this point, how it is that we see our tax dollars abused to the point where they are being sucked into this useless piece of theatre to satisfy a pissing match between mid level bureaucrats.  

I say this is but one more example of a Department that has outlived its usefulness in its current manifestation.  I don't say abolish them, because there are still things out there affecting our environment where we need some protection.  But I do advocate a refocussing of the efforts of this group, and a move to abandon, almost entirely their current enforcement group.  In fact I challenge them to show enforcement cases where an adverse effect, which is what the Environment Act is intended to avoid, actually occurred and was successfully prosecuted.  How many in 2012?  And I challenge the Department to seriously look at how much of its time has been spent on enforcement actions, oversight and correspondence between it and other Government Departments.  I know for a fact that the Department which does the most work that might present a potential to create an adverse effect has its own Environment Services Group that is substantially better trained and experienced in the actual world of preventing adverse effects, not by filling our paperwork, but by ensuring the actual work is done correctly, without causing an adverse effect.

What is missing here goes back to the start of this post.  Can there actually be knowledge of this money sucking vortex at Cabinet level?  Do the Ministers of each Department recognize the competition and backstabbing that exists between their areas of responsibility.  Do they understand the opportunities to save and even generate economic health that would exist is they all sat back and were reminded that they were all work for the same client?  (that would be we taxpayers).

Like that engineer at TIR who took the time to review a staid old policy for access in my earlier post in this series (Why Not? - Exploring The Culture of No), we need more civil servants who are in what might be called a gatekeeper position, to think of their job as someone who helps you navigate through the gate, instead of someone whose job it is to make sure you can't even find the latch.


I'll end with one more real life example of the latter.  An enterprising young gentleman on the South Shore wants to establish a new pub in an old fish processing plant.  That plant previously employed a number of people but, sadly, now sits empty.  He proposes to renovate it (it's right on the waterfront in his village and is run down) and hopefully create as many as 20 jobs in summer, less in winter, of course. It is right on the Lighthouse Route.

The old fish plant would have generated maybe 4000 litres a day of sewage. Plus the fish waste. For years, all that went into the harbour, untreated.  The owner knows he has to do something - that outfall pipe from the washrooms has to be treated.  It's just not right (we have had an Environment act since before he was born).  So he hires an engineer to design a system to PROTECT the ENVIRONMENT, so he can CREATE JOBS.  This is what we want to see.  He could have started up the fish plant and probably no one would have said anything if the toilets kept flushing.  But he wants to do things right.

This type of case, that of a straight pipe to the bay, is still very common in Nova Scotia.  NSE has an enforcement approach that is almost solely complaints based.  So if no one in the community complains, no NSE person ever shows up.  Let's face it, there are not many Nova Scotians who'd rat out their neighbour.  When they are discovered, the normal response is to consider them under a Section of the Regulations that defines them as a "malfunction,  a "system" that is not providing adequate environmental and/or public health protection.  So the design engineer looks at this and approaches it that way - a malfunction that can be addressed by a type of on-site sewage disposal system, under regulations that recognize a solution that is as good as can be done under the circumstances, under the Regulations Respecting On-SIte Sewage Disposal.  And in this case, let's assume the system design will accomplish just that for the potential pub owner.  It will PROTECT the ENVIRONMENT, so he can CREATE JOBS.  But in the Culture of No, this cannot be allowed to proceed with ease.

And here The Culture of No turns its ugly head to the project.  The local NSE office, after two months of deliberation, which was delaying the start of work on the pub and probably causing a delay in the much needed opening to match with tourist season, replies with a two line email saying the system must be applied for as a Sewage Treatment Plant, not as an on-site sewage disposal system.  To his political masters, this probably sounds innocuous - they'd approve it, but not as an on-site system under the malfunction clause.  To the owner, this might kill the project.  The same system, providing the same treatment and protection of the environment, under this similar but inequitable regulation, would require him to spend about $12,000 a year on testing, oversight and, of course,  paper based reporting. Forever. 

The reason for requiring this given by the NSE was that the building had stood empty for too long, so it was being treated as a new development, and was therefore not a malfunction. There is no definition of "too long" anywhere in the Act or Regulations, so what we have is an arbitrary, almost whimsical decision by a mid level bureaucrat that may kill 20 jobs for no real reason, other than the warped motivation of our  Culture of No.

My point here is that we need to use any leverage available in our legislation to do positive economic development.  In cases where the choices only differ in the costs and burdens to a new business, we should lean toward the lower cost solution, so that the business will be more viable and stand a better chance of creating sustainable employment. The Government had an opportunity to allow this to happen in a manner that was economically viable, but is choosing the other.  The reflex reaction was to burden the business.  This is fundamentally wrong.

Of course this discussion is probably all a moot point, isn't it?  I mean, really, up next for a pub, serving the demon alcohol, would have been the Nova Scotia Liquor Licensing Board, home of religious senility since 1949.  And they have the rituals inherent in our Culture of No down pat, heck, they probably created them.