The Struggle For Survival: Britannia Park Edition

Ah, yes, the never-ending struggle between predator and prey goes on all around us the natural world. Who hasn't watched these surreptitiously filmed battles in the wild between majestic beasts: lion vs. gazelle, snake vs. frog, shark vs. dolphin, and the list goes on. It is quite ordinary and unremarkable in most ways, despite the necessary cruelty, pain and death it engenders.

Perhaps less remarkable is when animals -- any animals, not only predators -- compete for the same food. Hyenas do it, as do litters of suckling newborns. It can even be witnessed on the manicured lawns of local parks, it seems.

It was during one of those rare periods this weekend when it wasn't raining that I saw an unusual sight. What looked like a chunk of bread, whether purloined from picnickers or intentionally left for the birds, was being fought over by a small flock of about a dozen gulls. This is a common enough sight if you've ever had occasion to throw food to these flying garburetors. This was not the thing that struck me as unusual. It was what happened next.

Into the mix there appeared a squirrel. It intrepidly jumped in among the squawking quarrelers and grabbed the bread in its mouth. As it was making its getaway, the gulls finally noticed what had happened and the lot of them turned to chase the furry thief. They kept low to the ground, half running and half flying, trying to impede the squirrel's escape.

The squirrel was quickly surrounded and was being flown at from all sides by the enraged flock. The squirrel darted to and fro, avoiding their sharp beaks but not quite able to break from the circle. In the general melee, the squirrel did finally find an opening and darted through it, and broke into a loping run toward a stand of brush a short distance away. The gulls gave chase, dive-bombing the squirrel as it ran.

The bushy-tailed rodent did succeed in making its escape since once among the bushes the gulls were no longer able to fly at it. What was a barrier to the birds was a protective fence for the squirrel. Now free of the pursuit it took its prize up the nearest tree where it presumably ate the bread. Except that we're talking about a squirrel, so it's equally possible that it dropped the bread, stowed it among the branches to be lost forever, or left it to be retrieved and buried a while later by itself or another squirrel.

So ends another majestic episode of struggle among the beasts in the wilds of Ottawa's park system. I have to wonder if it was crows instead of gulls, whether the squirrel would have come out quite so well. A squirrel may be brighter than a gull, but crows should outperform most rodents on an IQ test.

Riding the Wave

There is an increasing probability of a federal election this fall because the Liberals under Michael Ignatieff see the gleam of opportunity. We do not know as yet what pretext they will use to foment a confidence vote that will overturn the government, and it is also quite possible that neither does the leader of the opposition. All we can be certain of, is that when it is presented it will seem utterly credible, whether or not it is of enough moment to justify a change in government. That is the Liberals' political challenge.

I know that this must make me seem either very cynical or anti-Liberals. Neither is true. It is more of an acknowledgment that political parties, no matter their policy objectives, are organized to acquire and maintain power as their first priority. The reason is a sensible one: without power, their policies are not implemented, and even if they are, the credit will go to the government of the day, not them.

Ignatieff is also being very cagey about his policy priorities. He and the Liberal Party know that the Conservative Party is very effective with negative advertising. By delaying policy announcements, there will be less time for their opponents to develop, produce and distribute their attack ads. It's a tricky balancing act, with public impatience on learning what this guy stands for on one side, and the waiting attack dogs on the other side. Further, the timing must be carefully coordinated with the campaign to bring down the government on arguably solid grounds.

"...Ignatieff...failing to tell Canadians why the Harper government should be defeated and what he would do if he were prime minister."

Whatever justification Ignatieff ultimately chooses to promote, I do not believe it will be the real reason. I expect that the true, and hidden, reason will be the same one why he has chosen to support the government until now: the economy. More specifically, they want to stain the Conservatives with the economic downturn and recession, while making sure they are in government when the economy turns around later this year, and employment climbs through 2010. For this purpose it is enough that they form another minority government; a majority is an unnecessary luxury.

The truth is that neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals are responsible for either the recession or the coming economic resurgence. The economic cycle is almost entirely due to what is going on in the United States. With our economy so closely dependent on commodities exports to the US, we are simply going along for the ride. The Liberals hope to ride this wave to renewed popularity and a majority government by 2011.

They, as we, are riding the same wave. No one and no party in this country should take credit for the wave.

More Nonsensical Reporting on Market Statistics

It just never stops. Here we have a Globe and Mail market commentator cherry-picking numbers to suggest that a company, BMO in this case, is falling out of favour with investors in advance of its earnings report.

Yes, the stock is 10% of its nearly $55 12-month high, but so what? Why not focus instead on the fact that the $54.75 high-water mark is 128% above its $24.05 12-month low. With that choice of data points, it is very reasonable to expect that some investors will take their profit in front of earnings rather than risk a surprise in the quarterly report. That perspective, however persuasive it may be, makes for a far less interesting headline. Look at the chart and decide for yourself which story better fits the picture.

Too often the media is more interested in grabbing your attention than in providing reasoned analysis. Reader beware!

Misinterpreting Trading-Volume Statistics

It seems that every summer there are articles published about how price movements in the stock markets are less than meaningful since many investors, both retail and commercial, are on vacation. The contention is that the resulting low volume has two significant effects:

1. Trends in equities and other securities and commodities are untrustworthy since market action is not fully representative of investor sentiment.
2. Lower volume means higher volatility in individual issues.

Supposedly, so the story goes, that post-Labour Day these effects may be reversed as the totality of the investor community is back on the job. I believe this belief is completely wrong. I will demonstrate this by qualitatively countering the arguments of the purveyors of this wrong-headed idea with some elementary statistics.

Let's start with the first point by quoting from this Reuters article that exemplifies the argument:

Reuters data shows volumes for the Dow Jones industrial average for the full day on Tuesday were only 56 percent of the index's 90-day average daily volume. They were higher for the Nasdaq, but still only 73 percent of the norm.

In Europe, the FTSEurofirst 300 volume was 69 percent of its daily average on Tuesday, while on Wednesday it looked likely to be even thinner -- it was at less than 40 percent with a little more than two hours to go.

As for China, where the Shanghai Composite Index has fallen more than 18 percent this month, volumes have mostly been less than half what they were in July, especially in the past eight trading sessions.

It is harder to gauge volumes for other assets -- foreign exchange trading data, for example, tends to come with a lag, from central banks -- but anecdotally, participants say it has also been thin.
...

Given this, investors might be better off waiting until September to see what is really happening to financial assets.

These percentages can be rigourously treated as a sample over the total population of investors. As anyone will know from various political polls, as the sample size grows in proportion to the population the expected error in the results, the variance and standard deviation decline. In this manner we typically see variances (typically stated with a 5% confidence, or 19 times out of 20) of several percent when the sample size is several thousand out of a voting population of over 20 million citizens, or on the order of 0.02% of the population. Variances are higher when the polling results are broken down further by province, sex or other factors since the sample size is a smaller percentage of the population (or a similar percentage of a smaller population).

Yet for the case of the stock market we have effective population samples of 40% to 75% of peak season trading volumes. The variance in these instances is well under 1%; that is, summertime equities quotes should accurately reflect the thinking of the entire investor community, including those at the beach. The only way around this is to hypothesize that bulls or bears, but not both, are more (or less) active in the markets during the summer. I have seen no evidence to indicate that this is true, and I would be suspicious of any evidence that would be presented since it seems so unlikely.

There is one psychological factor that may strike the market in September that could give a false indication. People who return from vacation tend to be mentally refreshed and therefore somewhat more optimistic. I wonder whether it is possible that these individuals are more likely to press the 'buy' button when they first get back to work. Even if this conjecture is true (and it could actually be the opposite if the news flow is persistently negative over the summer) their belief structure should quickly revert to the norm once they find that their new-found optimism isn't confirmed by their trading returns.

Regarding the second point about volatility, there is validity to the idea. Illiquid issues do show higher volatility (increased short or medium-term variations from longer duration time-lines such as 200-day moving averages), and that volatility does show a modest inverse correlation to trading volume. However, we are talking about volatility and not longer-term trends. This means that if the price of a stock makes a sharp swing up or down, there will be investors that will quickly take advantage of any "mis-pricing". We then see a reversion to the mean. It may not happen the same day, but it will almost always occur.

Canadian investors should be well-versed on volatility since the majority of stocks listed on the TSX have low average daily volumes. This is not surprising since there is a comparable number of public stocks in Canada as compared to the US, yet our economy is less than one-tenth the size. Our investors have to spread themselves thin if they are to avoid piling onto the relatively small number of liquid stocks with a large market cap. The point here is that low-volumes, while resulting in higher volatility, are irrelevant to long holding times. Traders, however, do care since their holding times are typically measured in hours or even minutes.

Expect to see more of the same sort of story in mid-December when the Christmas-New Year's doldrums hit trading volumes. The only difference is the shorter duration: two weeks rather than two months.

CRTC Decision on Usage-Based Billing (UBB) for Gateway Access Services (GAS)

The first wave of reaction to the CRTC decision on UBB is done, making this a suitable time to review how it came about and what it tells us about the future for broadband competition in this country. If you are looking for rant, sorry. You can find plenty of that here and here, and in many other forums. I will cast emotion aside and look into this decision as well as I can considering that I can not read the Commissioners' minds. Besides, those minds could change in the future, making that fictitious procedure largely pointless.

First, I would like to hearken back to a point I made in an earlier article on pure-play VoIP providers. When your business is absolutely and utterly dependent on your fiercest competitor, you live in a state of constant jeopardy. This is equally true for ISPs that depend on GAS. It is only sustainable if you have a big brother (the CRTC in the present case) that is able and willing to beat up on the local bully. This is necessary for two reasons: providing GAS is not in the business interests of the large corporations compelled to sell it, and; the totality of small ISPs that subscribe to GAS are only a small portion of the market, and thus have little market power of their own.

With that understood, we are in a position to look closer at the CRTC, the power broker in this conflict, and its decision on UBB. Within the scope of the law governing it, the CRTC has wide-ranging power to set and implement policy. They could rigourously slant GAS to favour the small ISPs if they wished to do so. The way to accomplish that is to treat the providing ISPs, the facilities-based carriers, as utility providers of an essential service for which they have a dominant (not monopoly!) position. The essential service in this case is DSL (of a specified generation) over copper telephony loops.

In the past, the CRTC has made it clear that it is very reluctant to declare as essential copper loops and the services provided by the incumbent telcos over those loops, except in select situations. This policy goes back to the 1990s when they opened the telephony market in Canada to competition, breaking the monopoly held by a fairly small set of telcos. As happened in the US, Canadian CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) demanded access to the incumbents loops so that they could connect those loops to their own switching equipment. The CRTC did provide that access, but the restrictions and pricing they set down made that access far less favourable to the CLECs here when compared to what the FCC and state PUCs approved in the US.

The CRTC strongly favoured (and still seems to favour) facilities-based competition, not competition dependent on facilities and services from the incumbents. In contrast, Congress and the FCC chose to give the competition a strong, initial, but not perpetual boost by mandating aggressive availability and pricing. The US incumbents were also required to offer telephony services at wholesale rates, which CLECs could choose to wrap in their own branding and billing, but at the cost of low margins. The CRTC was very hostile to this idea (resale) since it was anathema to their policy of promoting facilities-based competition.

This last idea is very pertinent to DSL and GAS. If you have only read the articles about the UBB decision (and the many rants in the comments), I suggest that you read the actual decision. It won't take long. What comes across in this short document time and time again is that the CRTC perceives, but does not explicitly state, GAS as effectively being resale of the telcos' low-speed DSL retail service. In every instance where Bell Canada and the other telcos impose restrictions or conditions on their own retail subscribers, the CRTC agreed that the same should apply to the GAS subscribers' users. They even went so far as to allow impositions on individual users, despite the fact that those users are not the telcos' DSL customers. This is an interpretation of the GAS tariff that is quite opposite to the perception (or wish) of those adversely affected of GAS as a wholesale service that is provided bulk (no visibility of individual DSL users) and neutral (raw transport of bits through incumbents' access networks).

Say what you will about the CRTC, they are consistent. Over almost two decades, several governments and numerous changes of Commissioners, they continue their preference for facilities-based competition, while only tolerating competitive dependence on the incumbents as a brief-as-possible transition phase. They know very well that facilities-based competition is an exceedingly-expensive proposition where cable/wire/fibre must go in the ground, but I imagine they believe that there is no point in delaying the chance for progress by giving competitors easy access to the incumbents' networks, whether it be for basic telephony or broadband. The policy message is becoming clearer with every CRTC action: they will not be the small guys' big brother to ensure that GAS is provided unencumbered.

Competitive alternatives are regrettably elusive. These are currently limited to dry copper loops (unbundled by the telco), mobile wireless and fixed wireless (e.g. Wi-Max). Dry loops aren't cheap, but they are largely unencumbered since everything at the network-end of the loop belongs to the competitive provider of telephony and DSL. However, if you are far from a central office, you may see poor data rates; this is overcome by the telco with the deployment of remote DSLAMs, but these access points are unavailable to competitors.

With no relief expected, ever, for GAS encumbrance, perhaps this will give a small boost to emerging wireless providers. I say 'perhaps' since, as noted earlier, the number of potential subscribers most adversely affected by throttling, privacy and UBB on GAS are a small minority of broadband users. This will change as more people use the internet to access higher-bandwidth media sources, but it could still take some years before those numbers become sufficiently attractive to justify investment in new wireless and fibre networks. If you are one of that small, high-usage minority at present, I have little hope to offer for the next few years.

Bleeding for the Perseids

Ah, another meteor shower. The Perseids aren't overly spectacular most of the time, although they do conveniently arrive when a parka isn't required. Then again, parkas do have advantages.

I spent ten minutes late Wednesday evening trying to glimpse a few meteors. I had some measure of success. My total count over that brief time was: one airplane, one helicopter and one meteor. At least the meteor was a Perseid, as determined by its apparent source in the constellation Perseus, then rising in the northeast.

The ten minutes was my limit, because I had no parka. That gave the mosquitoes ample time to locate me in the calm air. There is only so much blood I am willing to lose to see a bright (or in this case, dim) streak crossing the light-polluted sky.

The Leonids aren't often much better, although some years they can be spectacular, but at least they come in November when blood loss is a far lesser concern. I am looking forward to wearing a parka.

VC: It's Not Just About the Money

This National Post article reprises a now-popular refrain: the venture capital industry got too big for its own good.

First, the problem with venture capital is not the lack of capital, rather it is excessive capital. Far too much has flowed into the industry in the past decade, flooding companies with cash that should never have been funded, skewing investment valuations and overdiluting the management talent pool.

This is true, but like much punditry it focuses too exclusively on the money aspect of VC. It is certainly the case that money is absolutely key -- it is the fuel that start-ups need in their pre-profitability stage and to accelerate growth in markets where speed is essential -- yet for many years there was a lack of attention paid to the cars they would pour the fuel into and the roads the cars would travel on.

We could sum up the dot-com VC funding criteria to be along the following lines:

• Is the sector hot?
• Is the management team able to execute, to reach a required level of product and business maturity before the sector falls out of favour?
• Are there other investors in the market that are hungry for what this company can become with our investment?

Too often, this is about all they did. There was much talk and busy-work to puff it up, and demands placed on the company's management to help them build a good case, but once the above criteria were met, the decision was made. It was then a matter of negotiating (or bullying) to get the best terms.

Extending our analogy, the company's founders had to build a car sufficiently sound to make it from their workshop to a nearby gas station. If they had no fuel on hand, they could push it there or pick a station at the bottom of a hill. The gas station operator would then look over their handiwork and decide whether to fill it up, or at least give them enough gas to get on the road and make it to the next station. Getting the car on the road and rolling along with some grace was critical since that got the car noticed by others, who were often potential buyers. A car sitting in a parking lot with its tank empty doesn't get noticed, and it is easily passed by cars with gas.

Unfortunately the industry got to the point where the 'vehicles' that showed up the station only superficially resembled cars -- they were more like children's go-carts -- and the gas station owners lost their glasses and couldn't see very well. Soon there was gridlock on the roads with cars burning fuel and going nowhere.

Well, enough of that -- it would be painful to push the analogy further! It is enough to conclude that the last generation of VC model was not sustainable. The author of the National Post article is correct to warn against government diving in to sustain the broken model with taxpayers' money. Except that now we are in a position where we have moved too far backward, where any risk at all is frowned upon, and there is no money at all. This is a particular problem for new companies that have yet to make it to the first gas station. When they do get there, the pumps are shut down or the surly owners turn up their noses at their vehicles no matter how fine they are. Instead they dwell on remembrances of previous losses. The truth is that many of these gas station owners never did have a good eye for vehicle quality.

Can government help? Perhaps. If we still believe in or, better yet, want to build a strong technology sector in Canada, and that there is a future for technology businesses in general, some prudent steps would be helpful. They should do the same as any careful investor: nurture start-ups with small amounts of cash to keep them alive and innovating, and therefore viable when the economy and markets recover. If done properly, the companies will remain fiscally conservative and the government will risk only a modest amount. If the core beliefs prove correct, private investors will gradually come back to the table and fuel the technology recovery with not just money, but the business expertise to build and grow successful enterprises.

Governments should not invest in established and failing businesses. They should invest small amounts in promising and young companies that could become tomorrow's winners. They should not be concerned about building the next Nortel or RIM: that will emerge naturally if the environment is friendly to new and growing companies. While we will continue to see most start-ups fail, if done right the overall net return should be strongly positive.

Multi-generational Technology Sectors

I was perusing the online New York Times this weekend and came across an interesting article of the problems of large physics projects. It focused not so much on the large costs and uncertainties associated with doing something that has never been done before, but rather on the belief structure that is necessary to see such a project through to completion.

"All of these multigenerational projects are based upon a strong and ongoing belief system in how the world works,” Dr. Leventhal said. As long as that system stays intact, he said, “construction continues and is slightly modified within each generation to fit the current time.” If not, all bets are off.

The above quote is in reference to the Large Hadron Collider and the Standard Model of particle physics, but can just as easily be applied to other human endeavours such as the great cathedrals of Europe which could each take over 100 years to build. The belief system in that case was religion. Or even countries such as Canada and its belief in a democratic model of representative government which is at least as strong now as when the country was born.

I want to do something a little bit odd, by extending the application of the multigenerational model to growth-oriented technology companies. There should be a fit since all businesses are human endeavours that are often larger than any of the individuals within them.

Founders believe in the technologies and products they want to commercialize, or at least they ought to. If the belief is strong enough they will attract investors and a team that will also believe. While their particular interests may only partially overlap, the belief must be strong enough to hold it all together for several years or longer. The founders may be driven by money, but more likely they will have a belief in changing the world, if only by a tiny amount, or to achieve some measure of success and recognition. Employees will be strongly motivated if the belief radiated by the founders is strong enough, and investors will believe if the technology and business sectors the company operates within are ones that are widely believed in by the market at large. The belief should be supported with some rigourous analysis, and a strong business plan and management team, but belief is the foundation on which everything is built.

Unlike building cathedrals or the LHC, the life of technology companies is not measured in decades or centuries; there are other, more applicable measures of multigenerationality. For one, is the belief strong enough that it can survive hand-off from the founders to another management team? Will the investors and management be able to communicate that belief well enough to bring in additional investment, including an IPO or M&A, hopefully at ever increasing valuation? The belief must be of a quality where these are possible or the company will fail. For example, if the founders can't convince others to get involved in their venture, either the belief is false or their pitch is wanting. It doesn't matter which since either is fatal.

Certainly there was a loss of belief preceding the failure of Natural Convergence, which I wrote about last week. The founders were long gone, as were the original investors. Belief in their business and technology diminished over the years, in particular when the founders and original investors were out of the picture. The original spark, and belief, gradually dissipated. For a variety of reasons, the idea of VoIP-oriented business services and servers has faded in the market at large, and that market is now dominated by other companies. No belief could survive these developments. Technology changes rapidly so the belief must be fulfilled reasonably quickly or things begin to unravel.

The unravelling can be slower for established companies, unlike the rapid unravelling that startups may experience. Consider Nortel and its long unravelling. It can be considered to have begun in the late 1990s when the management team led by John Roth realized that their old belief structure was losing its validity: that large telecommunications carriers around the world would continue to dominate, often supported by governments fiscally or through regulations, and would only accept high-quality and high-priced equipment from equally-large vendors with whom they have had a long relationship. The unravelling began with the rise of the internet and packet communications, and then accelerated as deregulation, beginning in the US, swept the globe.

Nortel tried to come up with a new belief system and then change their product mix and operational behaviour to match the emerging belief system: best effort service, everything IP, rapid product introduction, and lower price and cost structure. Momentum of the existing products and businesses, and customer relationships, for a time hid their failure to achieve the needed change, but failure did come in the end. Nortel never did make a successful transition, although they did have a few successes such as in select VoIP products. The old beliefs were never truly excised from the company: they continued to be slow and high-cost, and when they did move quickly to acquire needed technologies, they made poor choices and spent exorbitantly on those acquisitions.

Today, there are new beliefs prevalent in the technology sector. These include social networking, smart phones and wireless data, location-based services, media and entertainment shifting to the internet, SaaS, and cloud computing. We cannot know how long these beliefs will last, so it is important that anyone eager to start a company centred on one of them should plan a growth arc that is sufficiently steep that, if successfully executed, will reach one or more key milestones before the belief falters in the broader market. Belief in the company and its business must of course be sustained, but if the belief in the sector fails, the company is also bound to fail, regardless of any initial commercial success.

I admit that this is a blatantly short-term and opportunistic way to view the world, yet I claim that it is absolutely necessary. To a founder, especially if young and full of energy, today's beliefs may seem eternal. They aren't any more than those long past, and will likely be even shorter lived.

Even Cisco, an extraordinarily successful company that has eclipsed Nortel in many of the areas it used to dominate, is showing signs of faltering. The now old belief of IP everywhere has been largely fulfilled (even if VoIP is still spreading at a maddeningly-slow pace) and they are largely absent from new belief areas that are more user-visible rather than in the "piping" of the internet. The pipes are becoming commodities, and are no longer a key growth sector.

No company is immune to shifting beliefs. How many generations will your company have to survive to achieve success, before there is a loss of belief?

Another One Bites the Dust

Many Ottawa high-tech companies have come and gone over the years, and now one more has come to light: Natural Convergence. Considering the near-dead investment climate and a deep recession, it is hardly the only one, and so it may seem pointless to mention this particular news item.

Natural Convergence's failure has struck close to home since it has been a survivor, struggling mightily to win customers and continued investor confidence over many years. Unlike many other startups, it did have a product (Sihouette) and customers, and even revenue. Unfortunately they were trying to carve out a niche in a field that is populated with too many similar products - telephony business feature and application servers. Their unique product attributes could not win it enough business to sustain even a skeleton product staff. That they were bought out by a customer, Broadview Networks, indicates that its other customers have long since abandoned Natural Convergence for successful competitors such as BroadSoft, which is happily also a Canadian-based company.

I can't say I'm surprised by this turn of events since the persistent silence, broken only when they picked up the remnants of another failed company, Newstep Networks, spoke volumes about their business. No news means there were no sales successes to celebrate. There is only so much money that investors can afford to plow into a venture that continues to find success elusive, or can at least reach financial break-even. It had its chance, and perhaps that will have to suffice. Not every startup can succeed.

I knew some of the players in this company since my career has been in the telecom field. Perhaps that's why I took particular notice when their passing made a small ripple in the news flow. In the end it will fade into obscurity, as so many have done so in the past, or will over the coming months and years. All I can do is salute their effort; it is better to try and fail than not to try at all. All the talented people that worked there are certain to show up elsewhere in the industry, hopefully in Ottawa, to pass on what they've learned to other ventures. That knowledge will give those newer companies a better chance of success, which I can only see as a hopeful sign.

Political Parties and Ottawa City Council

With Larry O'Brien back in the mayor's office, there is an opportunity to get back to business as usual at Ottawa City Hall. This is a very depressing prospect since Council and our city government are less than stellar performers. We get poor governance, poor representation, poor management and, therefore, poor results. Some of this is presented in a few stark numbers by John Ivison in the National Post. Those numbers may be slightly misleading, by not considering Ottawa's particularly unique situation, but are a regrettably believable indicator of systemic problems. I was personally against Nepean becoming part of Ottawa in days gone by because of Ottawa's fiscal mismanagement and Council incompetence. Rather than learn from the municipalities that got rolled into Ottawa, all of us rolling in the same pig sty that was once kept at a comfortable distance.

I voted for O'Brien since I wanted a leader that would at least promote a business-like approach to government. However I had few illusions, knowing that he had no political experience and his top-down management style could not work without some serious modification. Still, something was better than nothing. Time has proven that he has been ineffective in reigning in spending and administrative inefficiency, which is disappointing while also being unsurprising. I think he's learned a few things during his tenure about leading a fractious Council and directing a recalcitrant bureaucracy, though his ability to credibly implement change in the remainder of his term is doubtful. I would like to be proven wrong.

Into this mix we have a study that suggests we permit political parties into the process. Today, the individual councillors have strong party affiliations (such as my Councillor, Alex Cullen with the NDP), but parties themselves are excluded from the actual process. The basic idea is to combat the tendency for each Councillor to look out for "number one" by allowing the unifying force of parties to create natural alliances and majorities that seem elusive in the current environment, thus shortening the time (and expense) of implementing policies. Another alternative that has been discussed is to create an Executive body, composed of elected councillors and the mayor, that would operate in the manner of a cabinet. Council would continue to vote on measures, but the Executive could take action on routine and even specific files without getting tied up in cantankerous, lengthy and mostly unproductive debate where individual councillors often primp and preen in front of the cameras (and voters).

My view is that this discussion of structural change, while useful in many ways, is misdirecting our attention from the root problem: us, the citizens of Ottawa. There is a well-worn cliche that goes along the lines of: in a democracy the people get the government they deserve. If that's true (and I believe it is), there is no point in casting blame on our elected representatives who, after all, we have elected to their positions. Repeatedly. When voters persist in returning to office the very Councillors who are most incompetent and obstructive, or who promote high-spending programs, it is not the Councillors who are at fault. We must blame those who elect them.

In this light, the debate over government structure is a red herring. With the introduction of political parties we would only change the campaign signs and introduce formal voting blocs, blocs that already form more informally. If the voters don't change their ways, we will end up with the same set of councillors, but operating day-to-day somewhat differently. However, they will largely pursue the same agenda, therefore continuing to underachieve and to waste our time and money.

My advice is to change how you vote next year (2010). If you haven't regularly voted in local elections (true of a large majority), this is a good time to start. If you don't change, neither will our government.