Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your morning reading.

- Linda McQuaig weighs in on the choice between public and private pension savings:

The notion that we can’t afford strong public programs — that we’re better off buying services or benefits on our own — is one of the central falsehoods blocking meaningful progress toward improving Canadian well-being.

An excellent example is the looming battle over public pensions, an issue that will be the focus of a meeting of Canada’s finance ministers in December.
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According to Jonathan Kesselman, professor of public finance at Simon Fraser University, management costs at Canadian mutual funds eat up nearly 2 per cent of assets — the highest rate in 20 countries surveyed. By comparison, CPP management costs were just 0.17 per cent last year.

This enables the CPP to pay out more in pension benefits. Kesselman argues that significantly extending the CPP would be “by far the best of all savings vehicles.” In fact, expanding the CPP would ultimately save governments money, by making future retirees less financially dependent.

But this eminently sensible, cost-effective public solution has been resisted by some on the right, who argue that the mandatory CPP deprives Canadians of the choice not to invest in their retirement.
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Of course, those making such arguments are usually well-off financially, with little risk in their own lives. Still, they fiercely defend the right of the poor to experience the risky pleasures of life without a safety net.

- And the CCPA helpfully points out that the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of Canada's population continues to grow:

The higher up the income scale, the more dramatic the gains. For the richest one per cent, the share of all Canadian incomes almost doubled between the late 1970s and 2007. For the richest 0.1 per cent of tax files, their total share almost tripled during those 20 years.

And for the creme-de-la-creme — the richest 0.01 per cent making more than $640,000 a year — their share of total incomes more than quintupled.

The trends shown in the tax data are undeniable, analysts say.

- Jason Kenney's apparent epiphany that relationships matter shouldn't make for anything particularly surprising. But the relationships-vs-policies question is worth linking back to this fall's discussion about brokerage politics.

After all, it would make sense that relationships and soft perceptions are likely to play a far larger role in political outcomes where there's less discussion about differences in policy. Which seems to me to explain in part why the Cons have continued to pay lip service to issues like climate change even while doing everything in their power to prevent any action - and to present both a need and an opportunity for the opposition parties to sharpen their policy distinctions against the Cons so that the relationships developed by Kenney and the rest of his party on the public dime play less of a role in shaping electoral outcomes.

- And a focus on a broader view of public policy goals might not be a terrible place to start.