Opinion
Someone Needs Replacing at Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools
Once you put children safety at risk… I can’t be silent any longer.
From charitable tax receipts not being issued correctly… to having private information of your child’s educational performance being stored and “pushed” to you by foreign apps that you must agree to their terms saying that information is processed by foreign servers, to hearing wasteful spending radio ads, to leaving an entire bus route of elementary school children stranded for nearly an hour while their “bus status app” says “all buses on time”.
Yes, this is what the RDCRS has to offer you in just this past year alone.
I ran for trustee in 2013, so sure, some might try to spin this as sour grapes, but when you are tired of administrators that have stopped focusing on children and have become more focused on child recruitment, you have a problem. I ran for a trustee position to prevent this very type of thing going on, and here we sit.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the teachers, their assistants, and staff doing everything to help the children. But something needs to be done at the top.
Charitable Receipts
To be eligible for a charitable donation credit, all tax receipts must have the Registered Charity number on them. This is a 9-digit number followed by “RR” and then 4 more digits. Every single RDCRS receipt received by my accounting firm this past tax season was missing this number. This was raised by yours truly to their office on behalf of my clients. They did not reissue replacements until I pushed back repeatedly and individually per client. They said over the phone they would not be mailing out replacements for everyone. So, if you donated this past year, enjoy your reassessment.
Performance Reports
We all want to know how our child(ren) is(are) doing in school. This past year RDCRS decided to launch the use of PowerSchool LLC. They say all of your child’s information is held on Canadian servers. However, when you go to sign up for the app it says that the app uses foreign servers for you to access, view, and receive notifications on, your child’s performance. This is how a foreign app works.
While you may store information in Canada, it is being sent through other connections and servers in a foreign country like the United States. While I’m fine seeing pictures on social media or getting the quick note from a teacher about what “little Johnny” did today… when it comes to academic performance and review, privacy and security steps should be taken. When I raised this concern with the superintendent, his response is that commercial privacy laws do not apply to them.
In my request I stated:
“Further to my previous e-mail: although PIPEDA may not apply to RDCRS directly, by engaging a corporate entity, you are required under FOIP S.38 and 39(1) to have proper controls in place which would require our consent. The corporate entity PowerSchool LLC is to be bound by PIPEDA as well as the stricter Alberta version, PIPA, as it is not a government agency. The app from the Canadian version of the app store that you have instructed parents to use to access is warning us upon installation that the data is being routed via PowerSchool LLC’s US resident servers. This is not a violation of PIPEDA by PowerSchool LLC directly, as they are requesting our permission on installing the app. This warning does not exist unless you are in Canada. This is not a “default”, this is a requirement by PowerSchool for any notifications to Canadian resident users.
However, the letter sent to parents states that we are required to sign up, or we will not receive information. Requiring parents to use the app in order to access report cards and information on our children is not allowing for our consent, it is being forced. A government department forcing a parent to accept a foreign corporation’s “terms of service agreement” is in violation of FOIP.”
His response:
“In your message you reference Sec. 38 and 39(1) of the FOIP Act. Our school division is in compliance with these sections of this Act as we have proper controls in place because our student data is housed on our servers. We protect personal information by using reasonable security arrangements against risk of unauthorized access. As a result parent consent is not required.”
So parent consent is not required with the school division, but yet parent consent is required by the corporate entity, which then routes the data from Canada through their U.S. server. However, if you don’t consent, you don’t get updates other than a final report at the end of the “reporting term”. Sounds like forced consent to me. Why would I want to have my child’s personal and private information sent through a foreign country?
Radio Ads
Instead of focusing on children that they have, they would rather recruit more children instead. During the 2013 election, I was amazed how a former trustee chair stated, “if we convert just one child to Catholicism then it [advertising] is worth it.”
Apparently, conversion is more important than the education of the children already there.
I have asked how much was spent on advertising but the only response I received was “fill out a freedom of information request. There will be fees associated with it because it is not your personal information.”
How many textbooks could we have purchased for the amount they spend on advertising in a year? I’m sure many parents would like to know.
This brings me to today.
Transport
An entire bus route of elementary school children did not get picked up today. Instead, they were sitting outside for 45 minutes when my children contacted me in panic tears and said the bus didn’t come. Like any parent, at first, I was questioning my kids… then worried for other children… then mad.
Why did I get mad?
Well, you see the RDCRS has a wonderful “app” that is supposed to notify parents if a bus is canceled or running late. But the status for the route said “On time”.
So I asked my kids if they missed the bus, they said no, because the other kids at their stop were there too.
When I picked up my children (and one of the neighbour’s kids after getting permission from her parent) we continued along the route and saw many more children waiting along the route. We pulled over to tell them to contact their parents as it appears there is no bus.
When I arrived with my children at the school I informed them of the issues. Now, to the school’s staff credit, the school responded quickly and the vice principal drove the route to check the safety of the kids.
However, when I called the transport office, which is owned and run by RDCRS, they stated that they “had a no-show and only found out now.” They still did not update the bus status on the app and this was one hour after the route was to begin.
Every employer has some sort of attendance system. Couriers use radios and GPS to track vehicles and routes. But somehow the RDCRS transport office doesn’t have a way to track if a driver showed up to work or not? Or if a bus is on a route or not?
Then what is the point of an app to notify parents if you don’t use it?
I’ve been relatively quiet publicly on these things, but today, when you put children safety at risk, it was the last straw.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
A new narrative is making its way through major media outlets about major oil corporations: climate change that they purportedly caused is taking lives, and they could be held liable for homicide.
In recent weeks, numerous outlets have run stories or opinion pieces promoting or otherwise examining the novel legal theory, which is the subject of a new paper published by the Harvard Environmental Law Review, according to a Tuesday E&E News report detailing the architects’ efforts to market their idea to prosecutors. The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Newsweek, Inside Climate News and other outlets have all recently published pieces promoting the idea that leading oil companies could or should be charged with murder for their role in climate change, which the theory’s architects claim has caused thousands of deaths in the U.S.
David Arkush, who runs Public Citizen’s climate program, and Donald Braman, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, articulated the theory in a March paper. Public Citizen is a left-of-center organization founded by failed Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader that, among other things, pressures American International Group (AIG) to stop providing insurance coverage for fossil fuel companies, according to its website and Influence Watch.
“Activists and journalists have called executives of major oil companies ‘mass murderers,’ lamenting that ‘millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,’ and a growing chorus of communities devastated by [fossil fuel companies’] lethal conduct have begun to demand accountability,” the authors state in their paper. “But as of this writing, no prosecutor in any jurisdiction has charged [fossil fuel companies] with any form of homicide over climate-related deaths. They should.”
The paper also suggests that the American Petroleum Institute (API), a leading trade association for the oil and gas industry, was involved in the industry’s purported attempts to obscure the effects of emissions.
“The record of the past two decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of providing affordable, reliable American energy to U.S. consumers while substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint,” a spokesperson for API told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
The two authors contend that energy corporations were aware of the warming that emissions from their products and operations would cause for decades, and that those companies decided to mislead the public and obscure what effects those emissions may have. A similar narrative lies at the heart of climate lawsuits that have been filed against energy companies in numerous jurisdictions across the U.S. in recent years.
Arkush wrote a Wednesday piece for Newsweek laying out his theory and referencing these climate lawsuits, opining that the fossil fuel industry’s purported “crimes may be among the, if not the, most consequential in human history.” The Boston Globe ran a similar opinion piece authored by Arkush and another official for Public Citizen on March 17.
The Guardian ran its own piece about the climate homicide theory on March 21, using the headline “Fossil fuel firms could be tried in US for homicide over climate-related deaths, experts say.” Clean Technica, a site that promotes green energy, ran a March 16 piece on the new legal theory with the headline “Climate Criminals — Prosecuting Big Oil For Environmental Crimes.”
Inside Climate News published an April 4 story on the subject, using the headline “Should Big Oil Be Tried for Homicide?” and including excerpts from interviews with the two architects of the climate homicide theory. The pair suggested that the aim is not to punish individuals or seek vengeance, but instead achieve results that would prompt companies to shift their investments away from fossil fuels, according to Inside Climate News’ story.
However, Inside Climate News did quote legal experts who expressed skepticism about the theory’s merits.
“I do not believe that a criminal prosecution on homicide charges against the major oil companies is appropriate or can be sustained,” John Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in corporate law, told the outlet.
Nick Pope is a contributor at The Daily Caller.
From the Fraser Institute
In the minds of most Canadians, there’s little connection between housing affordability and productivity growth, a somewhat wonky term used mainly by economists. But in fact, the connection is very real.
To improve affordability, the Trudeau government recently announced various financing programs to encourage more investment in residential housing including $6 billion for the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund and $15 billion for an apartment construction loan program.
Meanwhile, Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, recently said weak business investment is contributing to Canada’s weak growth in productivity (essentially the value of economic output per hour of work). Therefore, business investment to promote productivity growth and income growth for workers is also an economic priority.
But here’s the problem. There’s only so much financial capital at reasonable interest rates to go around.
Because Canada is a small open economy, it might seem that Canadian investors have unlimited access to offshore financial capital, but this is not true. Foreign lenders and investors incur foreign exchange risk when investing in Canadian-dollar denominated assets, and the risk that Canadian asset values will decline in real value. Suppliers of financial capital expect to receive higher yields on their investments for taking on more risk. Hence, investment in residential housing (which the Trudeau government wants to promote) and investment in business assets (which the Bank of Canada warns is weak) compete against each other for scarce financial capital supplied by both domestic and foreign savers.
For perspective, investment in residential housing as a share of total investment increased from 22.4 per cent in 2000 to 41.3 per cent in 2021. Over the same period, investment in two asset categories critical to improving productivity—information and communications equipment and intellectual property products including computer software—decreased from 30.3 per cent of total domestic investment in 2000 to 22.7 per cent in 2021.
What are the potential solutions?
Of course, more financial capital might be available at existing interest rates for domestic investment in residential housing and productivity-enhancing business assets if investment growth declines in other asset categories such as transportation, roads and hospitals. But these assets also contribute to improved productivity and living standards.
Regulatory and legal pressures on Canadian pension funds to invest more in Canada and less abroad would also free up domestic savings for increased investments in residential housing, machinery and equipment and intellectual property products. But this amounts to an implicit tax on Canadians with domestic pension fund holdings to subsidize other investors.
Alternatively, to increase domestic savings, governments in Canada could increase consumption taxes (e.g. sales taxes) while reducing or even eliminating capital gains taxes, which reduce the after-tax expected returns to investing in businesses, particularly riskier new and emerging domestic companies. (Although according to the recent federal budget, the Trudeau government plans to increase capital gains taxes.)
Or governments could reduce the regulatory burden on private-sector businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, so financial capital and other inputs used to comply with often duplicative or excessive regulation can be used to invest in productivity-enhancing assets. And governments could eliminate restrictions on foreign investment in large parts of the Canadian economy including telecommunications, banking and transportation. By increasing competition, governments can improve productivity.
Eliminating such restrictions would also arguably increase the supply of foreign financial capital flowing into Canada to the extent that large foreign investors would prefer to manage their Canadian assets rather than take portfolio investment positions in Canadian-owned companies.
Canadians would undoubtedly benefit from increases in housing construction (and subsequently, increased affordability) and improved productivity from increased business investment. However, government subsidies to home builders, including the billions recently announced by the Trudeau government, simply move available domestic savings from one set of investments to another. The policy goal should be to increase the availability of risk-taking financial capital so the costs of capital decrease for Canadian investors.
Author:
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