Why are kids getting fatter?

Kids are getting fat in BC. Heck, our whole baby-boomer skewed population is getting fatter – but the growing tummies under the Spiderman t-shirts among the school-age set is particularly troubling.

This is simply not just an aesthetic issue. By letting our kids eat too much of the wrong things and not get the exercise they should be having we are setting them up for a lifetime of completely preventable, potential health problems including diabetes, heart disease and various cancers.

The question that this epidemic of chubbiness raises is should we be doing something to reduce the inevitable crisis for the public health care system – or do we leave nutrition and activity decisions to parents?

During the election campaign, the BC Liberals promised to eliminate junk food from BC schools within four years. Most school districts in this province, with the exception of Vernon, Okanagan and now this week, Abbotsford, bring in additional funds for sports teams or extra-curricular activities with vending machines stocked with chips, pop and chocolate bars.

School districts know that children shouldn’t be eating this stuff – and many are taking steps to explore funding of their athletic teams or class trips with alternatives including water, juice, and fruit bars.

But this is only one element of the problem. While I applaud schools for the work that they are doing to reduce access to these foods during the day, what else should we be doing to help our kids step away from their computer games and put down the cookie jars?

Is this something that we leave to parents? They are their kids after all – and most of us don’t take kindly to governments pushing propaganda on how to live our lives.

If you are like me, you believe that people are perfectly capable of making the right choices about their lives – given full and complete information. We don’t need governments to ban certain “bad” foods and we don’t need governments to institute mandatory daily exercise sessions.

This is one of the worst aspects of universal health care – parents aren’t confronted with the financial consequences of their unwillingness to deal with their kids’ fat problems. If they had to assume the full cost of caring for their child’s expensive diabetes or heart disease crisis, they might think twice about filling up their grocery carts with convenient, but potentially health-threatening, foods.

Because, at the bottom of it all, parents need to take responsibility for their kids’ health –we can’t leave it to the schools and we can’t leave it to government.

While we no longer throw our kids out the door at 9am and tell them to be back for dinner at 6pm, like when we were kids in earlier, safer times, we can make choices that will keep them healthy. We can have walks after dinner, choose fruit and yogurt over cookies and cakes, and turn the TV off – at our house we’re just coming off a successful TV-free June, so I know it can be done.

Government’s role should be to educate, but it is parents who need to get off their butts, remind themselves that pizza and fast food are treats not staples, and re-acquaint their kids with fruits and vegetables.

None of us want to see our entire public health care system crash under the weight of our fat kids.


(As published today in 24 Hours Daily)

Feeling freer?

Tax freedom day has come and gone in BC - slightly sooner than in previous years. And yes, my socialist friends, this study does take into account all those insidious user fees.

The Fraser Institute does an excellent job of this study - including cross-jurisdictional comparisons. (The link is in the title.)

Corporate Tax - Who Wants It Anyway?

Sometimes the right ideas are the toughest to sell in Canada. And the Premier’s newest idea to refund corporate taxes to biotech companies who stay in BC and develop their products here should get the shirts of all the usual suspects in a big, fat knot.

Premier Gordon Campbell visited Philadelphia this week to attend Bio 2005 – the largest gathering of the biotech industry in the world. According to reports, over 600 Canadians were there, but nary a Federal politician was in sight. Not surprising, I guess, given the on-going gong show in Ottawa.

Biotech, despite its futuristic sounding name, is the industry that researches and builds everything from medicines for Grandma to new enzymes to break down wood fibre for the pulp and paper industry.

The biggest thing about biotech, though, is the amount of money it takes companies to develop their products. Millions of dollars and thousands of long, labour-intensive research hours go into the development of drugs like Visudyne.

Manufactured by QLT here in Vancouver, Visudyne is prescribed for people struggling with age-related macular degeneration – and helps them from losing their eyesight. QLT has stayed in BC, but they’ve seen their peer companies pack up and leave.

Jobs in research are the kinds of jobs that our kids here in BC should be striving for: good pay, interesting work, and lots of opportunity.

But all that investment in research only gets a biotech company to the starting line; from there it has to manufacture, market and sell its products.

That’s where the Premier’s idea comes in. BC and Canada have decent
regimes to support research. Add that to our highly educated and skilled
work force and we have a combination that encourages biotech companies in the research phase to set up shop – especially now that they can attract specialist employees to BC given the changes to the personal income tax under this government.

However, once their research is complete, companies look south to the US or across the pond to Asia and realize that the costs associated with manufacturing in Canada and marketing from BC can make them uncompetitive. And they leave. Or they leave a skeleton operation and locate their manufacturing facilities elsewhere.

BC, and Canada as a whole, is losing out on this work – again, high-paying, highly skilled jobs – the kind the we need to grow a balanced and sustainable economy.

The Premier’s suggestion to refund corporate tax to encourage these companies to stick around doesn’t sound quite so out-there once you consider the upside: more jobs, more tax revenue for the government, more opportunities for our kids.

And in fact, loss of employment was cited by many economists as the most damaging element of the Federal Government’s reversal on federal corporate tax cuts in collusion with the ideological NDP, who never met a corporation they could respect the next morning,

Good for the Premier, for helping out the biotech industry.

Maybe this can be one more step on the road to a corporate tax free British Columbia –now that should get the anti-corporatists going!

Health Care Questions

No answers this morning (well, some) but mostly questions...

1.Why is private involvement in health care "un-Canadian"?

2.Was that Tommy Douglas' vaunted vision for Canadians - that government run everything?

3.How can we make sure that our fellow Canadians are looked after, that our children have adequete health care and that we care for our elders, without bankrupting our country?

4. Do Canadians, outside special interests and health service unions, care who delivers their health care, as long as it is universally accessible?

Food for thought - and discussion.

Public Eye Online

Welcome back online, Sean. We missed you!

Is There An Opposition?

It is more a testament to Joy McPhail than anything else. By both volume of media coverage, and by key issues raised by the opposition in the last month, you would never know that the NDP are 15 times their size compared to under her leadership.

Joy McPhail, along with her sidekick Jenny Kwan, made enough noise over four years that you would not have known that they were outnumbered 77 to 2 in the Legislature unless you happened to turn on the legislative channel – and I’m sure we all try to avoid that.

So, here we are a month after the election and we're all still waiting to see the evidence of a strong, united opposition working hard for the best interests of British Columbians.

Now, it is fair enough that everyone got some time off after the campaign - the candidates all needed a bit of a break. Frankly, we all needed a bit of a break after 24/7 political coverage. But it has now been a month – where are the fireworks, the big issues, the passion that we saw during the campaign?

It isn’t like there is any shortage of compelling issues. An excellent one to start with would be the action by the dump truck operators in the Lower Mainland. Where was the opposition standing up for the interests of the building trades, or the drivers, or commuters. Or anyone?

How about the newly raised “let’s legalize pot” crusade. Why aren’t the Vancouver NDP MLAs railing against the irresponsibility of school board trustees saying kids shouldn’t be suspended for using drugs and, in fact, they shouldn’t be criminally charged either.

Or for that matter, why aren’t they joining the parade waving those ubiquitous leaf banners?

Whether they are for or against, it would be nice to see them at least taking a position.

Their silence, on all issues, is odd. And forces people to wonder what
they are up to.

It is going to be a long four years if Carole James didn't figure out election day is the first day of the rest of her life as the opposition leader.

Sworn in or not, their lack of profile and involvement in critical issues speaks volume about organization and leadership, two qualities that people will want to see from Carole James and her merry band if they ever expect to get handed back the keys to the treasury.

This isn’t the first time Carole James has disappeared from public view. The void between the time she was elected leader and the start of the election campaign, over 18 months, provided a pretty choppy start to the campaign for her strategists. The NDP even had to move forward the launch of their platform because people were starting to doubt they had the royal jelly to gain a respectful number of opposition bench spots.

Apparently they haven’t learnt their lesson from the spring. In politics, if you aren’t seen doing anything – you aren’t in the race.

And Carole James shouldn’t kid herself. If her party doesn’t see her running hard for the brass ring of government, they’ll find someone willing to put in the time to make it happen.

Spending for Votes - Not for Canadians

As the political storms swirl in Ottawa, are Canadians paying attention to the dangerous financial decisions of the desperate Martin government?

We’ve all heard about the new spending; the opening of the vaults and the gleeful pouring out of money by politicians who, because of the loss of the moral authority to govern, have decided to revert to the old-fashioned (but often successful) model of flat-out vote buying.

Good politics, sure – but good fiscal management for our country? I think not.

Yesterday, Jason Clemens of the Fraser Institute released a summary of the increases in spending by the Federal Liberals. It is enough to strike fear into the hearts of Canadians who consider thoughtful fiscal policy the cornerstone of responsible government.

I know that this isn’t particularly exciting stuff – especially when we have scandal after scandal shaking Parliament. The headlines are compelling - Federal Liberals are leaving their party over a lack of open debate on same-sex marriage and Federal Conservatives are riding out the pain of suspect tapes.

Paul Martin’s whole shtick was responsible, fiscal management for Canadians. But what has become clear since he began this wide spending ride, egged on by the NDP, is that his government is willing to sacrifice that principle – along with the future well-being of our country – to cling to power however necessary.

$9.1 billion in extra spending has been announced since the 2005 budget was approved. Program spending has increased from $141.4 billion to $163.7 billion in just two years. This is over twenty billion dollars in two years – a 15.8 percent increase - far, far higher than inflation.

But even worse than this madness of spending is the Martin government saying they are going to fund some of it by finding $10.9 billion in internal savings over the next five years. Unfortunately, this is downright unbelievable from a government under whose watch the public sector has ballooned to levels not seen since the dizzying 80s and 90s when most Canadians accepted that government growth was out of control.

There are effectively no surpluses available now, after the Contingency Fund is reinstated – in fact Clemens says that the government can’t even put money aside this year for that rainy day fund because it has already been allocated in this pell-mell spending spree. If we get another SARS or September 11th, we are going to be running deficits. These deficits, and the interest associated with them, will hamper our ability to fund the priorities of Canadians, like health care.

Just a reminder - this is your money. How do you feel about your money being spent to prop up what is by all accounts, a corrupt and directionless government?