Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Thomas Walkom suggests that the systematic eviction of Occupy camps from Canadian cities may only help the movement to evolve from its first form:

City administrations in places like Toronto, Halifax and Vancouver are inadvertently handing demonstrators something they desperately need — a way to honourably end stage one of their protest and build on it something more pointed.

As a short-term tactic, the decision to occupy parks in order to draw attention to global inequality was spectacularly successful.

In a world buffeted by recession, it focused public attention on the epicentre of the economic crisis — the global financial system.
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There must be an end point at which those involved in the action can say: Yes we won something. Not everything, maybe, but something.

In cities like Halifax and London, Ont., where the occupy movements have been expelled from public parks, city officials provided that end point. Depending on how a superior court judge rules Saturday, Toronto protesters may face the same fate.

Yet none of this need spell defeat for the occupiers. They now have a chance to strengthen their fragile alliances with other organizations, such as labour unions, that are dissatisfied with inequality in Canadian life.

More important, they can now redirect their energies toward the specific elements of Canadian political economy that encourage such inequalities — from the tax code to municipal outsourcing to the provincial welfare system to the federal government’s war on labour.

- Don Drummond points out that there's plenty to be done to improve Canadian health care besides giving in to the right's relentless demands to privatize.

- Yes, it's outrageous that the Cons are raiding the Canadian Wheat Board's contingency fund (which would otherwise have been distributed to farmers) to pay a small portion of the costs of demolishing the CWB's single desk on its way to being sold off. But it's well worth noting the more basic point that the existence of a fund which gives farmers a share of the benefits of commodity arbitrage is the type of collective benefit that will be lost as the CWB is thrown on the mercy of the market.

- Finally, Ben Christopher notes that labour and management alike are aghast at the Cons' attacks on Canadian unions.