Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading...

- Tabatha Southey delivers a thoroughly entertaining smackdown of Stockwell Day's antics over the past week:

I mention all of this as context for my reaction to Stockwell Day’s press conference this week in which he explained that the government must spend $13-billion on prisons, despite statistics showing that crime is down in Canada, because of an “alarming” increase in “unreported crime.”

I'm having trouble sharing and understanding his particular personal vision. I'm not sure that prisons are a good “if you build it, they will come” investment.

In fact, I thought the Treasury Board President looked pretty crazy and scared. I felt like I was watching a man light himself on fire.
...
The strength of the Conservatives for so long was their ability to get inside the heads of ordinary Canadians. Lately, it’s as if they’re bored with that, so instead they are getting inside the heads of the most bashful of property-crime victims and some Cold War re-enactment enthusiasts.

- It's great to see John Rafferty's work on pensions getting some positive media attention. And while I'm less optimistic than Rafferty seems to be about the prospect of getting much done in a Con-controlled Parliament, it's definitely worth working getting C-501 passed to make sure that workers aren't left out in the cold when an employer goes under.

- I've mentioned before that it strikes me as entirely too narrow a focus to view the Cons' gutting of the census as merely a communications issue. But Bruce Anderson is still worth a read from that angle:

(T)he long-form-census debate is almost case-study worthy, as communications goes. Before the announcement, there was no effort to rally interest in the problem that the government felt needed to be addressed. The blow-back was predictable, but from the get go, it seemed that the government kept bringing rhetorical pen-knives to a gun fight.

After the blow-back became a source of political anxiety for the Conservatives, two or three different lines of argument were inflated and trial ballooned, none of which have soared. Net-net, the Harper Conservatives added a public-opinion risk with no reward anywhere in sight. If they wanted a debate about which party best respects your privacy, there is little evidence or prospect of this happening now. The more likely question vexing centrist voters is whether the Harper government prefers ideology over information as a way to make decisions with their money and about their services.

- Which is why the Cons may want to take another look at the Chronicle Herald's suggestion:

In the past month, while Mr. Harper has been largely unseen and unheard, the government has been anything but focused on the economy. It has stirred up a national backlash over replacing the mandatory long-form census with a voluntary one that will cost more and yield less reliable data on which to plan government services and make economic policy. It has expended energy talking "tough on crime" and arguing the need for more prisons even in the face of falling crime rates.

Although the PM has left his ministers to conduct an inept defence of both these diversions, the policies clearly come from his office and wouldn’t be getting their misplaced prominence if he didn’t want it that way.
...
Mr. Harper should accept the compromise he’s been offered on the census and get his attention back where he says it belongs: on economic management.

- Finally, while I've mentioned the Saskatchwan NDP's candidate nominations as they've happened, it's worth noting that the Sask Party has also been carrying out plenty of nominations. And their acclamation of Paul Merriman in Saskatoon Sutherland looks to reflect two of the party's major weaknesses: not only does the free ride for a familiar name play into concerns about connections mattering more than substance, but the fact that this is the second Sask Party-held riding where Wall and company couldn't even find a second interested candidate plays into the perception that they're little more than a Potemkin party.