Monday Afternoon Links

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- I wouldn't go as far as he does in suggesting a need for austerity. But Barrie McKenna nicely highlights the waste involved in the Cons' self-promotion blitz:

You can’t turn on a TV these days without seeing one of the government’s messages.

The problem is that the Action Plan money is all but gone, making the term “action plan” a bit of a misnomer.

The government’s plan is more than two years old and the once-yawning federal surplus is now a deficit. Ottawa is borrowing money on your tab to explain where the cash went.

Surely, it’s just a coincidence that the ad campaign matches the Conservative government’s political message in the lead-up to the next federal budget, and a possible spring election.

Put aside for a moment the fact that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is running his next campaign with your money.

The message is also disturbingly disingenuous. The reality presented in the ads obscures the financial condition of the federal government and the major fiscal challenges that lie ahead.

- Meanwhile, David Olive writes about the reasons to doubt that a major part of the deficit will produce any positive results:

The non-financial sector of Corporate Canada already is sitting on $489 billion in idle cash, awaiting certainty that it’s not in danger of a double-dip downturn. In the U.S., that figure is more than $2 trillion (U.S.) What business needs is a recovery in consumer and export markets, not an additional taxpayer-financed windfall at the expense of other social priorities.

The Tories’ own finance ministry economists aren’t alone in regarding corporate tax cuts as the weakest of stimulus tools. Most economists prefer infrastructure spending as a powerful short-term job creator. Which incidentally provides the schools, hospitals, roads and water systems that businesses rely on, too.
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Even without the tax-cut regime the Tories launched in 2007, Canada’s 25 largest publicly traded companies alone created 112,564 new jobs between 2005 and 2010. (The last two of those were Great Recession years.)

Yet many of those new jobs, notably in the case of the Big Five banks, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion and Bombardier, have been created outside Canada as our firms increasingly expand beyond our borders. And many companies restored to pre-recession profitability have spent heavily on efficient machinery that reduces payrolls. Or they’ve been lavishing their restored profits on dividends, share buybacks and executive bonuses.

There are better ways to stimulate the economy.

- In reporting on the Cons' smears against critics of their fighter-jet disaster in the making, David Pugliese serves up a quote nicely suited to stories about most of the Harper government's personal attacks:

In the e-mail Hawn says Defence Department officials working on the JSF project have integrity and experience while suggesting those who question the aircraft program are ill-informed.

“We also have a guy named Mike Slack, who has been exclusively involved with JSF for close to 10 years, and who knows the BS that former ADM (Mat) Alan Williams is spreading,” Hawn writes.
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Neither Hawn, Slack, nor the Defence Department could provide details about the “BS” that Williams was allegedly spreading.

- Finally, it may be of limited use as long as the Cons feel free to thumb their nose at access to information law in any event. But a review of the use of cabinet confidences would figure to go a long way in eliminating the rationale for centralizing power over both substantive decisions and information in the PMO for the sake of avoiding any public accountability.