Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Alex Himelfarb nicely highlights the need for citizens to get involved in driving political activity rather than counting on parties to handle it for them:

Preston Manning recently wrote an insightful piece on the limits of political parties and the importance of an independent civil society. Political parties, Manning says, too easily become machines designed only for winning, more skilled at identifying and avoiding risk than at developing public policy. Parties increasingly treat us not as citizens but as consumers. It’s easier. Rather than engaging us in honest but risky debates, they market themselves, pandering to our preferences, feeding our prejudices, and smearing their opponents. Manning argues that grassroots social movements are key to getting unstuck. They are, he says, an essential element of our “democratic infrastructure” and have been at the heart of most important social and political change here and throughout the world. He has a point. Big change involves risk and difficult trade offs, exactly what governments prefer to avoid and political parties typically duck.

Put simply, we only get Parliament that matters if citizens force the issue. Absent an engaged and independent civil society, we get the politics of banality and brutality, pretending that we can balance the books without real sacrifice, that climate change will right itself, that crime policies that have never worked anywhere will make us safer, and that there’s just not much we can do about growing inequality so why talk about it. And here lies the Catch-22: Citizens become further disenchanted; elections and parties lose their hold. And we stay stuck, unable even to begin to address the big issues.
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Surely, sooner or later, we will say “enough”. Surely, sooner or later, we will stop waiting for inspiration from a new political saviour. Sooner or later, we will say we cannot simply stand and watch. We are talking more these days about democracy. We seem increasingly to understand that however fortunate we may be, we cannot afford to be complacent. And, most important, some Canadians, often young Canadians, are getting involved, increasingly taking responsibility, not waiting for our political leaders or political parties, both locally and globally, independent of government, to do what they can to make things better.

But if we are to make our democracy stronger, we need new forms of association, new ways to engage citizens in defining the Canada they want and the options for getting there and for making our democracy work.

Which isn't to say that parties don't have important choices to make as well in determining how much (or how little) to engage with the public and with grassroots participants. But those decisions are far more likely to come down on the right side if citizens are already working to make sure they get heard.

- Meanwhile, it's also worth noting what parties can do to encourage - or discourage - citizens from. And on that point, I agree generally with Stephen's take on the B.C. NDP's social media policy debate.

Simply put, a party that puts more of its energy into filtering out interested members based on mere image issues than defending their right to participate is one which is unnecessarily limiting the number of people who can possibly see themselves getting involved. And the current argument over Nicholas Simons' refusal to turn over personal passwords looks like a classic example of risk-averse party figures erring on the side of the former consideration.

- Michael Lewis points out the windfall that banks have received from corporate tax cuts (with little if any indication that it figures to result in any associated economic growth):

Banks paid as little as $2 billion in total tax in 2008 when their profits were hit by the financial crisis and as much as $8.7 billion in 2010 when their earnings recovered sharply, according to Statistics Canada. Banks including TD and RBC, Canada’s most profitable corporation, reported record earnings this week, with TD paying out its first dividend to shareholders in more than two years.

Banks will gain half a billion dollars alone from cuts in Ontario’s corporate income tax and elimination of the provincial corporate capital tax, said Armine Yalnizyan, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, also based in Ottawa.
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Economists estimate the finance industry as a whole will save $1.5 billion annually once planned reductions in the federal corporate income tax rate from 18 per cent last year, to 16.5 per cent in 2011 and 15 per cent in 2012 are in place.

That $1.5 billion, coincidentally, is exactly what the federal government estimates it would have cost to temporarily expand benefits for Canada’s unemployed, an extension that is being eliminated this month under the Harper government’s plan to phase out its stimulus package.

“Instead, (Ottawa) will now spend $1.5 billion per year to enhance after-tax profits in the financial industry,” said Jim Stanford, an author and economist at the Canadian Auto Workers union.

“Incredible.”

- Charlie Smith notes that a more diverse group of candidates could help the B.C. NDP in seats beyond those occupied by the new recruits.

- Finally, Heather Mallick highlights yet another reason to be wary of the Harper Cons' attempts to redefine Canada's political landscape:

George Orwell, wintry conscience of the English language, said that the great enemy of clear language was insincerity. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” one turns one’s claws on language. Harper has always been a spiteful man, a yeller at work who was forced to tone it down in public.

But he cannot help himself. The terrorizing of officials and the rewriting of language are revealing the malevolence that lies beneath Harper’s hair. It is ungood, to use Orwell’s Newspeak. It is crimethink.