Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Tim Harper wonders what's next for the Occupy movement, but rightly notes that state crackdowns are completely unwarranted. And Jacqueline Kennelly highlights the value of the Occupy movement as part of the work in progress that is democracy:

From the Occupy movement is already emerging new energy, new commitments, and new conversations. The Occupiers themselves are figuring out how to run their small communities, and more: they're reaching out to others to ex-pand the conversations begun within their tent cities. The Occupy Ottawa movement is engaging with academics at Carleton and the University of Ottawa to develop panel discussions, in order to educate the public and themselves about the complexities of the capitalist system that they know is not working. The original movement in New York, Occupy Wall Street, has had regular visits from scholars and writers. The blogosphere, Facebook, and Twitter are alive with conversations about what this movement means and what it is trying to achieve.

But beyond these conversations lies the more important legacy of a movement such as this one: the embodied experience of lived democracy. It is a recognition that at the root of democracy lie human relationships, in all of their messiness, complexity, and beauty. And it is the realization that the process of building a better world is just that: a process. That is the point.

- Ann Cavoukian speaks out against the Cons' Internet surveillance legislation.

- Michel Drapeau weighs in on the Cons' desire to torch the data from Canada's gun registry:

Mr. Drapeau, who is a historian who recently co-wrote a tome on military law with Federal Court Justice Gilles Letourneau, said he’s “shocked.” The records are “part of our history. It’s part of our makeup, it’s part of our culture, it’s part of making us the way we come,” he said.

“This is what they used to do in the former Soviet Union—wipe out portions of history, or in East Germany and so on, and in China. I find that from a democratic standpoint, let alone an archival standpoint, this is without precedent, and a very, very serious event in the life of a nation...”

- Finally, Donald K. Johnson takes the problem with John Ibbitson's analysis of charitable giving rules a step further. But let's make it clear just how far off base Johnson is by pointing to his example of a system he wants Canada to follow:

It’s now vital for our government to capitalize on this enormous success by expanding the capital gains tax exemption to include charitable gifts in the form of private company shares and real estate. I should note that charitable gifts of both of these asset classes are exempt from capital gains taxes in the United States. By introducing these measures in the next budget, the government would be levelling the fundraising playing field for our not-for-profit sector with their American counterparts.

So who wants to make the case that the U.S.' greater tax dodges for charitable giving (coupled with the rabid anti-tax doctrine taken as a given by Johnson) have produced better social outcomes?