Jobs and Taxes – How going Local will get you more Jobs and Less Taxes

So now we have elections on both sides of the border. All parties in both countries will be making promises about jobs, gas prices, taxes, security, families, health care and education.

In short the deal will be I will get you more for less.

I think you can get more for less but not in the conventional way. Let’s see how a more energy and food independent PEI or your place can deliver on the idea of “More for less”.

Taxes – One of the biggest taxes we all pay are our energy bills – our oil bills. More than $300 million leaves PEI in our payments to non Island providers. What stays here are the wages of a few tanker drivers and gas station workers. This “tax” affects the poor more than the rich and buys us NOTHING. It is just a drain.

As the price of oil rises, so will this tax. Look at the heating bill of the Eastern School Board – up a million dollars in the 2008 season. I wonder what the heating bill for the Hospitals and Manors are? The money we pay as individuals and as a province on oil takes away from every thing we do. It will reduce our ability to have an education and health system, it will reduce our ability to feed our families and it will reduce our ability to go to work.

So reducing every litre of oil we use as individuals or as a province, puts more money back into our pockets.

Jobs – We are in the last stages of a work design model of centralization and bigger and bigger. With the Maple Leaf crisis we have found that ONE plant in Canada that makes most of the processed meat. With the pet food crisis, we found that one plant makes all the pet food in North America! We have said good bye to our bottler – soon there will be only one bottling plant for Canada! Will there be a Canadian car making plant left soon? How long will we have 5 banks

PEI and other places that are on the edge lose out in two ways. First of all, we are not at the centre. None of these jobs will be coming here. They can’t. Secondly, these jobs are going to disappear anyway. So long as we operate in a global market, wages will have to settle to meet the reality of a 6 billion person world. All factory wages will move to a global price.

The traditional jobs that working people had are going away and being replaced with minimum wage jobs. The few entry jobs that used to take the well educated up the ladder now take you to a dead end in a call centre.

There are no traditional good jobs coming here. They can’t so long as we stay inside the old model.

So where will be the new GOOD JOBS? The new good jobs will be local and they will be in doing things that are valuable locally not Globally. What might these be?

• Growing local food. We grow almost none of our food locally. Like for Oil, we pay companies like National grocers and Sobey’s to supply our food. Like for oil, most of our food dollar is a “tax” that leaves the Island – only the minimum wages of the local staff remain here. Most of the income of our traditional farmers goes to their suppliers in oil and chemicals. They get left with the scraps. The interest and fees that they pay go to a financial system that sucks the money from our region. What might growing our food locally look like? It would be lots of small high intensive mini farms with large regional local farmers market where nearly all the money we spend would stay on PEI

• Building and operating a local energy system – pellets, wind, hydro, hydrogen – and conservation will all supply jobs that have to stay here and will be paid in connection with local realities

I am sure that out of these will come another host of good local jobs. For as we ourselves become more local on PEI, work of all sorts will return to our local communities. The village store, the village school, workshops …

Health care – With a more local world, there will be less alienation and hence better health anyway. It is not access to drugs and doctors that keep us well. The more control you have in your life is the most important factor in health. With better food, the healthier we will be.

Education – With a more local world there will be less stress in family life. The single most important determinant of a child’s potential is the stability of its family life. The village that we will need to raise our kids can come back in a more local world.

Of course none of this is on any official agenda yet. I am sure that we will be offered to take it on trust that governments will lower our taxes and yet put more money into jobs etc.

What’s your take?

Energy Costs – Maybe the biggest threat to our schools?

This slide shows the energy costs of the Eastern School Board since 2003. The big spike in the middle is the jump in heating oil costs – up nearly a million dollars in 2007/8!

The ESB also spends just under a million in diesel fuel. All the school boards have energy costs and energy cost risks like this.

It is very helpful to see these numbers – I have done the same for my own house. What I used to take for granted is now a major problem. For if we don’t have a plan both for our homes and for our schools and other government buildings – we will get into a financial jam.

Of course it’s not just schools but Manors and Hospitals and even government offices that are exposed to increases in energy costs.

So we can say “the sky is falling” or we can create an opportunity. In the school system there is the beginning of an opportunity:

Beginning in the fall of 2008, École Évangéline in Abram-Village will be using a pellet-fuel furnace as its primary heat source, with an oil-heat system used only to supplement the pellet-fuel system. The school now spends approximately $100,000 per year on heating oil, but expects that the addition of the system which burns pelletized wood will dramatically cut its annual bill.

“By adding a new fuel source to our building, we are looking to promote green energy, reduce our energy costs and reduce our exposure to volatile heating oil prices. We hope this move will ensure more of our budget goes to where that money is best spent – on the education of the students,” said Brad Samson, director of business operations for La Commission scolaire.

The heating system being installed is an Austrian-built 300 kilowatt Kob Pyrot pellet furnace, supplied by Atlantic Cool Air of Wellington. The unit arrives in a ready-for-installation container designed to be placed outside the school building and integrated into the heating system through two pipes that connect to a heat exchanger inside the building. The system will burn pellets made from wood but can also burn pellet fuel made from other agricultural plant material such as straw.

“This burner uses fuel that can be supplied from forest resources or from plant sources grown specifically as fuel, with a carbon emission level much lower than that resulting from the consumption of heating oil,” said Minister Webster.

“The fact that this system can be installed with very little renovation to an existing building suggests that, if this burner performs as we hope, renewable fuel heating systems could be an option for similar institutions hoping to save money while reducing their environmental footprint.”

I will be visiting the school and hope to bring back more details of this experiment.

But there is I think more.

When PEI started it now successful wind power project, the Province and the Federal Governments kick started the project by agreeing to take a major block of power. My hope is that we can use the government buildings to do the same for a more local heating strategy.

A great start would be to decide on an energy conservation target and a local energy supply target for government buildings. This is what Israel has just done.

The government will also be serving as an example to the public: each government ministry must present an energy efficiency plan with savings to be reinvested in that ministry. All new government buildings from now on must be built according to green building standards.

The breakthrough in wind came from a commitment to use Wind Power by the Government – let’s go for an Energy Plan now as well.