Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday.

- Lawrence Martin points out what looks to be a highly interesting committee appearance by disgraced former Integrity Commissioner (and Harper appointee) Christiane Ouimet. But what's most noteworthy for now is that the Cons are spending the time before Ouimet's appearance making excuses for hiding key information rather than providing it as ordered:

Ms. Ouimet (rhymes with Antoinette) is the public servant who, according to Sheila Fraser’s damning report, did not do her job properly – choosing to investigate just seven of 228 complaints about wrongdoing in the public sector – possibly saving the Harper government multiple embarrassments. After failing to appear before a parliamentary committee despite being subpoenaed, she sent a rather terse message to the committee through her lawyer saying she was willing to return March 10 to face interrogators. What a show it promises to be. Given the large number of uninvestigated cases that came before her, the possibility of smoking guns suddenly appearing on the government’s doorstep can hardly be discarded.

Opposition members will be out to determine whether Ms. Ouimet was acting at the behest of her political or top bureaucratic superiors. The Public Accounts Committee has passed a motion requiring the delivery of all correspondence between her office and other government departments.
...
It is also clear, said Mr. D’Amours, that there was correspondence between her office and the Privy Council Office. Given that Ms. Ouimet was supposed to be operating an independent agency, he wonders why. “And now the PCO is saying they don’t have time to get us all the documentation.”

Which would seem to be explained only by either an absolute mountain of documents that should never have existed in the first place, or by a conscious choice to spend the time before Ouimet's appearance in cover-up mode. But either way, the result would seem to bode poorly for the Cons.

- Jim Stanford points out that the relationship between minimum wages and employment levels is far more complicated than free-market dogmatists pretend:

In practice, the effect of minimum wages on employment is probably a wash. Gradual increases in minimum wages, within reasonable bounds, have virtually no impact on employment at all, in either direction. So long as levels are set realistically relative to productivity and profitability, minimum wages can be increased with no measurable damage to employment.

Perhaps influenced by this recent sea-change in economists’ attitudes, policy makers in most provinces have begun to revitalize minimum wages. After years of stagnation, the real purchasing power of minimum wages has increased markedly since 2005, boosting incomes across the lower tiers of Canada’s labour market. With business profits simultaneously reaching their highest share ever of Canadian GDP, it could hardly be argued that these modest but important increases squeezed out private sector activity. On the other hand, those higher minimum wages contributed notably to the first real wage gains enjoyed by Canadian workers in a generation.

This successful policy trend should be continued. Minimum wages (now at or near $10 per hour in most provinces) should be increased gradually but steadily in the years to come.

- Part of the problem has as much to do with the concept of endorsing a government in a multi-party FPTP system where outcomes are far more complicated than simply selected a single party from a list. But nonetheless, Declan's chart comparing voter preferences with media endorsements highlights just how far removed the corporate media is from the majority of Canadian voters.

- Finally, Richard Wolff comments on how corporations have managed to turn the tax system to their advantage.