Wednesday Morning Links

- Thomas Walkom nicely summarizes what the Harper Cons want us to expect out of Canada's economy:

Young people should not expect good jobs when they leave school. The unemployed should not expect any work at all.

The sick should expect health care to be cut back. The poor should expect to get poorer.

The old should not expect the pensions they worked for.

In effect, the finance minister says, expect very little from this government. Take him at his word.

- And that only fits all too well with the Cons' general theme of spreading distrust and disinterest - which Alex Himelfarb identifies as one of the major challenges facing anybody who wants to see a public sector that responds more effectively to the needs of its citizens:

On the one hand, “blind trust” is neither desirable nor possible especially now that we understand the risks and the costs. The “age of deference” is well and truly over. But on the other hand, we are all the losers if the replacement is an “age of cynicism” which makes positive collective action impossible. The art is to find a middle ground and this won’t be easy if, as I fear, cynicism has the upper hand.

Yes, governments too often abused the trust we bestowed on them not simply by virtue of their political spinning and pathological partisanship which have always existed and now seem to have replaced all else, but also by too many instances where private interests trumped the public good or where majority interests trumped minority rights.
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Any organization or, for that matter, any relationship is doomed if it is built on distrust. We know from our experience that it is easier to break trust than to build it, and once broken we waste enormous energy on scrutinizing behaviour, looking for any signal of wrongdoing. And those on the receiving end of distrust will often feel diminished or become paralyzed, afraid to risk error or take responsibility. We have seen some of this in the layering of rules, controls and oversight in the public service that serves only to undermine performance, constrain creativity and innovation and stall an already slow machine. Distrust makes cooperation impossible and it is insatiable.

- Last time the Cons introduced an obnoxiously large piece of budget legislation, the opposition parties ended up scrambling to try to deal with massive changes in far too little time. So somebody with a few spare days may want to take a close look at the Cons' latest omnibus monstrosity - especially since its summary is carefully phrased to mention "better targets" and "reform" without actually clarifying what changes are being made.

- Finally, Dick Haskayne provides a national perspective on why a PCS takeover shouldn't be approved:

I...now offer my specific reasons for recommending that the federal Industry minister not approve the proposed takeover of PotashCorp by BHP:

- It would be the largest, most significant takeover of any Canadian mining company in history. This news would send a worldwide message that Canada is prepared to sell any of its prized resource companies;

- This takeover would further reduce Canada's stature as an important mining country and indicate that Canadians are satisfied with 'branch office' operations of our major resource assets;

- PotashCorp is so important for the world because of its enormous reserves. Canada should take a long view and jealously protect the management of that asset considering the interest of shareholders and what is best for Canada;
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It seems inconceivable that this takeover could be demonstrated as "a net benefit "to Canada because BHP offers nothing to PotashCorp that it is not doing now in terms of operations, finance or marketing. PotashCorp should continue to be a public company with all of the transparency involved, compared with a branch operation whose operations would be buried within a large multi-national corporation.