BUTT FLICKA

There are protests in Algeria against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, following his declaration to run for President for a fifth consecutive term, and if you are like me your first question is not “okay, why are there protests?” but instead “…is it just me or does that name look like it is pronounced “butt flicka”? The answer to that question is “yes, it is actually pretty damn close to that.” And now that we have that burning question out of the way, let’s talk about the protests and why these particular protests are significant.

Butt Flicka has been President of Algeria since 1999, and this is impressive since in Algerian Presidential terms of office are five years long and before Butt Flicka came to power there was a term limit of two terms, so realistically if he had played by the original rules he would have been unable to run for President ten years ago. However, in 2007 he appointed a Prime Minister who promised to hold a referendum to allow the people to vote on whether Butt Flicka should be allowed a third term in office. The referendum, however, was cancelled - most likely because they realized there was very little chance of it succeeding - and instead Butt Flicka appointed a different Prime Minister who instead got the People’s National Assembly (Algeria’s parliamentary body) to sign off on it, which wasn’t really that difficult because Butt Flicka already controlled a majority government anyways.

The only new rule was that he had to run as an independent candidate rather than as a member of his original party, so he did that and won a third term with over 90 percent of the vote in 2009. (As a general rule, when anybody or anything gets 90 percent of any vote, they cheated. 90 percent of human beings can’t agree on what type of pizza to order, let alone governance.) In between that win and his next win in 2014 (where he only won with 81 percent of the vote despite barely campaigning and multiple parties boycotting the election because they felt, for some reason, that there might be electoral fraud going on), he had a stroke.

Now, I know mentioning Butt Flicka’s stroke only in the third paragraph seems like I’m burying the lede a bit (I haven’t even mentioned that he was 77 when he had the stroke! He’s 82 now!) and I apologize for that but you have to appreciate that even before he was confined to a wheelchair (oh, yes - he’s also confined to a wheelchair, this sort of thing is why I don’t have a gig at the Globe and Mail. Also, all the swears) he was obviously corrupt, which is why there were ongoing and serious protests in Algiers for two years during the Arab Spring (from 2010-2012). So we don’t have to feel that sorry for poor old corrupt Butt Flicka. But, you may wonder, if he’s been corrupt all this time, why are people only getting angry again now?

Well, there are two reasons. The first one, which is fairly obvious if you know anything about people, is that the longer someone you think is corrupt stays in power, the angrier you get. If you think a political leader is corrupt, during their first term you will dislike them, but if they win re-election you will start viscerally loathing them, and if they come back a third time then really, all bets are off, and Butt Flicka is coming back for round five. This is basic psychology at work here: we all have an innate “this too shall pass” reaction to events that we recognize are bad but that we think will not directly affect us, but when this too doesn’t actually pass, we start to get more and more upset. (This explains, at least in part, why the Canadian left loathed Stephen Harper so much when he was by any standard far less corrupt than, say, Brian Mulroney or even his Liberal predecessors - or the visceral hatred of Ontario conservatives for Dalton McGuinty and then Kathleen Wynne.)

The second one is what it always is: money. Algeria’s economy is resource-based, which should surprise nobody given that the country is mostly the Sahara Desert plus a small fringe on the Mediterranean where people can live reasonably comfortably. Other than mining and oil, there’s very little that they produce themselves. (They’re a net importer of food, pharmaceuticals, manufactured goods - you name it, they don’t make enough of it to satisfy their own domestic needs.) As a result of this - and as a result of adopting a largely inept socialist government after they rebelled against the French in the 1960s - for a long time Algeria has been a state-run economy, with the majority of jobs existing as government jobs. Butt Flicka has been a longtime proponent of economic liberalization and diversification, which in Algeria’s case is probably the right way to go.

The problem, though, is that when you have a sorta-corrupt leader in charge of an economic liberalization programme, what usually happens is that the leader ensures that his cronies are the ones who primarily and disproportionately benefit from that liberalization. (Think Russia’s development into oligarchy. The average Russian isn’t doing great these days, but if you were friends with Putin in the old days, you’re likely doing much better than average.) When that is happening, and everybody knows it’s happening, and when you’re an Arabic country with a huge glut of underemployed young people - well, people start getting angry.

On top of those reasons, though, is one more reason that is much less generalized than those two are: there is a pretty large consensus that Butt Flicka isn’t really in charge any more - he barely appears in public these days - and that he’s just a figurehead for various tycoons working from the shadows. I know: you’re simply shocked that an 82-year-old stroke victim might not be physically able to run a government of a country with more people than Canada through a lengthy and complex economic restructuring programme, but believe me, that’s probably what’s going on.

As a result of this, these current protests are noteworthy because, for the first time, Algerian businessmen - company owners, the bourgeoisie, the boss class, whatever you want to call it - are openly voicing their antagonism towards the Butt Flicka regime and towards certain prominent captains of Algerian industry who are known for their extreme closeness to Butt Flicka. And that matters, because when people who aren’t poor get on board with social change, it starts to happen much faster.

All of this is still very early days as of yet. But the thing about Arabic country protests is that they can get extremely dramatic extremely quickly.

TORONTO, PROPERTY TAXES, AND YOU (OR NOT YOU, IF YOU DON’T LIVE HERE)

So this past week was Toronto City Council’s first round of budget meetings, and they were depressing, because our city is run by inept children who really shouldn’t be in charge of anything complex. Let me elaborate.

Like most large cities in the world, Toronto creates a lot more national (and provincial) tax revenue then it gets back. This is just the basic math of cities: the big city where the money gets concentrated makes more money, which then helps to pay for everybody else living across the country so they can get services that are basically as good (mostly) as what you would get in the big city, so they stop whining about people who choose to live in the big city. Except that the last bit never, ever happens, not anywhere: literally everywhere I have ever been, people who don’t live in the big city whine about the big city, whether the big city is New York or Paris or Auckland or Johannesburg or Prague or whatever. (Big city dwellers like me, for the sake of fairness, simply rely on being condescending about everybody’s else perfectly nice inferior places that make them happy as our defense mechanism of choice.)

Anyway, whenever the big city needs extra money - no matter where it is - it will always say “come on, we make all the tax dollars the rest of everybody spend, let us keep some of it extra so we can build A Thing.” Sometimes this works. Often it does not. And then the city has to figure out where it is going to find the extra money to build The Thing, and that is really the big question that underlies ninety percent of municipal politics. And what makes Toronto special is that our political leaders have, by and large, chosen to skip answering that question.

Certainly, over the last nine years, John Tory and Rob Ford before him and their primarily-conservative enablers on council have been asked to address this issue. (To be clear, Toronto’s municipal political scene does not officially have political parties, but all of Canada’s political parties have an unofficial presence at City Hall and unofficially help candidates they like fundraise in municipal elections. Canada is a country built on plausible deniability more often than we would like.) They have been asked to deal with this problem repeatedly. Usually every year by the city manager, who is the official who explains to city council “this is how much money we have, and this is how much money things cost.”

Their response has been: nothing. *Literally nothing.8 The city right now has very few monetary tools available to it: it has property taxes, various fees and tickets, and it has the land transfer tax, which is a tax the city collects on property sales. (The land transfer tax was vilified by conservative councilmembers a decade ago when David Miller introduced it during his terms as Mayor, but they haven’t gotten rid of it because the LTT produces a lot of money for Toronto’s coffers.)

However, it doesn’t produce enough, and this year in particular - when the real estate market was relatively stagnant - the lessened LTT meant that we had a budget shortfall. City council’s response was to refuse to raise property taxes beyond the rate of inflation.

(What is often misunderstood about property taxes in Toronto is that property taxes here aren’t a fixed tax rate, like your income taxes are: when we talk about raising property taxes by, say, five percent, that doesn’t mean everybody’s property tax bill goes up five percent. It means the total property tax revenue target goes up five percent instead, which isn’t the same thing because that revenue is based on property value. This is why saying “we will not raise property taxes beyond the rate of inflation” is essentially keeping property taxes static in terms of cost versus value of one’s home in terms of inflation. Except, of course, that keeping property taxes relatively low means that the home’s value increases as an investment, so in fact keeping property taxes low benefits homeowners far more than the simple dollar value of the property tax savings.)

Toronto’s property taxes are stunningly low. They are on average lower than every other major municipality in the Greater Toronto Area except Milton - and the properties in Toronto are worth, on average, much more than they are anywhere else in the GTA. They’re also lower than most of Southern Ontario, while we’re at it. (My brother-in-law in Guelph complains about this regularly.) Toronto’s City Council is, effectively, just refusing to pay for things with property taxes. Instead, they’re cutting back on services, cutting back on cost-of-living pay increases for city staff (except for the police, who get their pay raises as they always do), increasing user fees (the money Toronto residents pay to use city services - many of which are predominantly used by poor people) and letting Toronto’s municipal repair backlog grow faster and faster. (Almost half of our capital repair funds are devoted to the Gardiner Expressway, which serves less than ten percent of Toronto’s commuters.)

There is no real secret as to why property taxes remain low. The city councillors and Mayor who vote for low property taxes were primarily elected by property-owning Torontonians who tend to be richer than average, and they want low property taxes. Their biggest campaign contributors are real estate developers, who want low property taxes as well because that makes selling new condo builds easier. And so this is just going to keep going until something breaks, at which point the usual suspects are going to act like it was somehow a surprise.

PS: if you don’t live in Toronto but do live in a pretty big city, do a little research and see how much of this article could apply to your city. The answer will probably be “a lot more than you thought it did.”

A BRIEF NOTE ABOUT AN EXTENSIVE SERIES OF LAWS THAT WILL NOT PASS

The Democrats in the House of Representatives passed HR-1 this week, which is an exhaustive voting and civil rights bill. Among the things it does: public financing of elections; it forces political action committees and other dark-money political organizations to make their donations public record; it requires Facebook and Twitter to disclose who pays for political ads on their platforms; it requires the President, Vice-President, and all candidates for either position to disclose 10 years’ worth of tax returns; prevents Congresspersons from using public funds to settle sexual harassment and discrimination cases (yes, that is a thing that happens all the time); creates new automatic voter registration at the federal level that is opt-out rather than opt-in, so people will be easily registered to vote; makes Election Day a federal holiday; bans gerrymandering in federal elections; prohibits voter roll purging; and provides for public funds for additional election security and poll workers to prevent long lines.

It is a large amount of mostly common-sense stuff, so it’s not going to become law because the Republicans in the Senate have already made clear they won’t vote for it; nor will they vote for the DC and Puerto Rico statehood bills that are currently making their way through the House and will also pass. But it’s good to see the Democrats acting like a party with some balls for once.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Captain Marvel (2019, Anna Boden/Ryan Fleck, theatre) - 4/5

Operation Finale (2018, Chris Weitz, Netflix) - 3/5

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005, Garth Jennings, Blu-ray) - 3/5

The “rubber” episode of This Giant Beast That Is The Global Economy on Amazon Prime is astounding and educational in so many ways. Also on Amazon, we’re working our way steadily through old episodes of 30 Rock. We’re currently on the second season, where it’s just brilliant episode after brilliant episode - I mean, the Greenzo episode is also the episode with Kenneth’s party! Those two stories are in a single show! It’s nuts how on they were.

See you next week.