Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Friday reading.

- Trish Hennessy finishes up her election post-mortem with a call to action:

Now is not the time to play small. Condition the field for progressive governance to stick as a natural way of doing politics.

Don’t leave it just up to the politicians (though feel welcome to throw your support behind politicians when they do take a progressive stance).

Don’t stay in the familiar comfort of critique and opposition. We Canadians ask more of you. Democratic government should be of and for the people. That’s you and me. It’s up to us to build the Canada we would be proud to hand over to the next generation. Starting now.

That takes our active engagement. It takes you and I getting out of hyper partisan mode, or out of couch potato mode, talking beyond the converted and doing new things in fresh ways. The more people we bring into the progressive fold, the easier it is to face our deepest fears and move forward, together, to secure and build the Canada we want.

- As part of the Hill Times' coverage of the Canadian Association of Journalists' conference last weekend, Elly Alboim nicely sums up the problem with far too much election coverage:

Mr. Alboim, meanwhile, also chastised the media’s analysis of polling data throughout the election. Few polls indicated a Conservative majority, but he said the results wouldn’t have been a shock had more members of the media made a genuine effort to sift through the data to come up with accurate seat projections, particularly in areas like the GTA where the Conservatives picked up 18 new seats that were essential to securing a majority government.

“The core problem for journalists is that they treat election campaigns as news events. From my perspective, it isn’t structured that way,” Mr. Alboim said. “It’s an incremental process in which nothing really happens—the electorate makes up its mind. It’s like watching paint dry, and journalists don’t know how to report on the drying of paint.”

- With Stephen Harper having already found new and worse ways to break his previous promises about not appointing cronies to the Senate, would anybody be surprised if his fixed election date promise is the next to be re-broken?

- And one of the main components of the Cons' current structure may be the next to learn just what the party's promises are worth.

- Finally, David Olive writes about the U.S.' new role as sweatshop to the world:

U.S. and a few Canadian manufacturers have long been relocating in the low-wage U.S. South. They’ve now been joined by European multinationals, most of which also operate in Canada. The Euros leave behind the social-justice practices of their homelands, as keen to squeeze blood from a stone as the most avaricious business operator.

A stunning Human Rights Watch report from last September describes systematic exploitation of U.S. workers by such familiar European names as Ikea, Sodexo, BMW, Siemens, Daimler and Volkswagen.

“Even self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ companies can and do take full advantage of weak U.S. laws,” says Arvind Ganesan, HRW’s human rights program director. “The U.S. needs to close the loopholes in the country’s woefully inadequate laws to protect workers.”
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China is no longer the “off-shoring” jurisdiction of choice. With annual wage gains now averaging 15 per cent to 20 per cent, combined with stagnant wages in North America, China will lose its labour-cost advantage over North America in just four years time, according to a report this month by the Boston Consulting Group.

From Hamburg to Lyon to Stockholm, the question is why aren’t we serving the North American market from lower-cost facilities there? Which means that “guilt-free shopping” will soon mean avoiding “Made in USA” labels on products made by workers denied a decent living wage.