Saturday Afternoon Links

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- Plenty of others have already pointed out Gerald Caplan's column on the work of Con Senators to keep AIDS drugs from reaching Africa. But let's note that the single vote on C-393 was the least of the problems with an unaccountable and easily-abused chamber that's taken both flaws to extremes since Stephen Harper took power:

Let me readily acknowledge that for my entire life I’ve believed the Senate, a wholly undemocratic 19th century institution, should be abolished and I have never understood how anyone could accept an appointment to it. But I’ve always seen how appealing it is. After all, you’re suddenly handed on a platter one of the great gigs this country offers – a fancy title, instant status, a minimum $123,000 a year plus expense accounts, air travel, pension and optional attendance. Or a high-profile forum if you choose to use it, as a few admirable senators do.

But to whom are senators responsible, if anyone? How do they decide what positions to support or oppose? They’re appointed by the Prime Minister personally and usually carry his party affiliation but they supposedly serve the country, or so it’s claimed. Do they show their eternal gratitude to this one man, which would make them simple hacks, or have they a higher duty to the public good? This is a genuine choice, and Bill C-393 gave us the pathetic answer when a majority of senators chose to slavishly follow the party line. All were Conservatives, no fewer than 35 of them appointed by Stephen Harper in violation of every word he ever uttered about the illegitimacy of an appointed Senate. But that was before he became PM.

There’s hypocrisy upon hypocrisy piling up here. Last November, for the first time in 70 years, this same Conservative-dominated Senate, without a hearing or debate, killed a climate-change bill that had been passed by a majority of elected MPs in the House of Commons. It was a bill Stephen Harper hated – he’s still mostly a global warming denier – and it was at his command that his senators transgressed against democracy, accountability, common sense and the future of our children all at the same time.

- Pay no attention to that inconvenient Nobel laureate and his take on what actually drives business investment. People for Corporate Tax Cuts forever!!!

- Also to be ignored in the interest of better serving our benevolently-self-interested overlords: the NDP's latest ad challenging the Harper Cons' record of corporate giveaways.

- Andrew Coyne offers up a prescription for more substantive and fairer election debates:

I’d like there to be several debates, perhaps one a week for the course of the campaign. That would take away some of the prize-fight nonsense: we would be less obsessed with who “won” or “lost” the debate, as if that were an indication of anything, and more concerned with what we learned about each leader and their positions on the issues, which surely ought to be the point. The leaders, in turn, would be less wired and over-rehearsed if they knew they could recover from a bad performance in subsequent debates.
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Holding more debates, each of them bilingual, would open the way for other innovations. Perhaps some of the debates could be devoted to particular subjects. Perhaps instead of just the leaders, they could be between the critics for a given portfolio. Perhaps we could experiment with different formats. And so on.

Best of all, more debates would give the media something to talk about, besides gaffes, and photo-ops, and broken-down bus metaphors. I can’t see us changing otherwise.

Anyway. Whatever format we choose, whatever rules we set, they should be set outside the confines of any one election campaign. We have to stop pretending that televised debates are some sort of novelty. They’ve been with us for 50 years, and are now as integral to any election campaign as lawn signs and all-candidates meetings. It’s time they were incorporated into the election laws.

To be sure, the parties would have their say: there’s no way of setting rules that could not involve them. But if no party knew where it stood in the polls — if the rules were set behind a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance” — then it should be possible to agreed on rules that were fair to all, and accepted as such.

- Gavin Friddell interviews Trevor Norris on the role of advertising in dumbing down politics and other personal decisions:

(R)egarding citizenship, consumerism relentlessly promotes infantile values and world views, such as instant gratification, easy commodified solutions rather than those requiring more sustained efforts, and so on. Infantalization is how consumerism compromises democracy because it turns citizens into children.

It is ironic that we don't let people vote unless they are of a certain age, and yet most advertising promotes infantile identities! So the innocence of childhood is compromised by consumerism even as consumerism promotes infantility among adults.

- Finally, while I've stayed out of the debate over CBC's Vote Compass, Simon Kiss' guest post at Pundit's Guide looks to fairly thoroughly evisecerate any sense that the compass is accurate in its treatment of NDP and Green preferences.