Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Tabatha Southey eviscerates the Cons' determination to force Canadians into a state of constant and unregulated online surveillance at their own expense:

Bill C-51 seems to indicate a shift. It makes accessing our most private data easier by essentially conscripting telecom companies and ISPs into operating more sophisticated version of warrantless wiretaps.

At the same time, it allows the private companies that have a virtual lock on the market – a situation that our supposedly pro-competition government seems to be remarkably at peace with, and one that does, coincidentally, make this monitoring relatively simple – to recoup those costs as they see fit.

Perhaps as a result, there has been little opposition to Bill C-51 from the big six ISPs.

It feels a bit like a lighter version of the Stasi, only privatized. The spies send you a monthly bill, but they're endlessly happy to talk to you about bundling.

- Jeffrey Simpson is equally scathing in criticizing the Cons' ugly determination to keep pushing asbestos around the world:

(W)e mine asbestos, we ship it, we make money from it, and we’ll use every diplomatic trick in the book to defend this odious practice. We are the Ugly Canadians.

The Harper government could care less. It vigorously defends mining asbestos because of one little corner of Quebec, near Thetford Mines, where the asbestos is mined and shipped to developing countries, mostly in Asia. Stephen Harper’s top Quebec minister, Christian Paradis, used to head the Thetford Mines chamber of commerce. Mr. Harper campaigned in the area and supported the mining. He spent part of Friday, St. Jean Baptiste Day, in Thetford Mines, thereby reinforcing his government’s political marriage to asbestos.
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It’s true that some countries haven’t banned the substance, claiming they monitor how and where it’s used. If anyone believes the myth that developing countries with poor bureaucracies and widespread corruption oversee the substance’s use, then that person is engaging in willful self-deception.

Canada is a curious place when it comes to lecturing others about their bad practices while protecting our own.

- While I'm generally a fan of Susan Delacourt's, her article on the cost of abolishing the Senate looks to avoid or downplay a couple of rather important contextual points.

First, as Delacourt mentions once then omits from all subsequent conmparisons, even the most extreme estimates of possible total severance costs are lower than the cost of operating the Senate for a single year - leaving no plausible argument that abolishing the Senate would be anything but a net plus from a fiscal standpoint on a time frame longer than about 18 months.

And second, Delacourt doesn't mention that allocating one-time spending to buy out current employees elsewhere in the public service is part of the Cons' general austerity plan. In fact, the Cons' supplementary estimates include a total of $1.9 billion ($1.3 billion of it new since March) for purposes including "entitlements on cessation of service or employment" - dwarfing any possible estimate of Senate severance costs, while also highlighting the absurdity of funding the Senate without question while pretending to be interested in identifying and eliminating wasteful expenses.

- Finally, John Geddes' article on Jack Layton is worth a read in full. But it's particularly worth noting Layton's take on the value of collective action:

Layton expounded on his view of urban affairs in “City Politics in Canada,” an essay published in a textbook in 1990. He paints a cityscape rife with class conflict. The business class hires “experts, lobbyists and lawyers” to push its development interests. Community groups dominated by the middle class occasionally face off against business. Poor neighbourhoods “can almost always count on defeat.”

His response is to urge organized community action. He’s aware that his slant raises questions about his perspective on individual liberty. Layton addresses the tension between individual and group interests in the forward he contributed to Trent University lecturer Robert Meynell’s new book, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom. (Meynell includes Charles Taylor among the seminal idealists.) “The idealist current,” Layton writes, “holds that human society has the potential to achieve liberty when people work together to form a society in which equality means more than negative liberty, the absolute and protected right to run races against each other to determine winners.” He sums up: “Idealists imagine a positive liberty that enables us to build together toward common objectives that fulfill and even surpass our individual goals.”