Wednesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- Jim Stanford highlights the Cons' thoroughly imbalanced view of labour disputes by pointing out that their concern for the economy has been limited to action by workers rather than employers:

When employers hold the better cards, as they do in today’s unforgiving labour market, they happily go for the jugular – work stoppage or not. Consider another epic dispute that ended last month: the 50-week lockout at the United States Steel Corp. factory in Hamilton. The company starved out the union with far-reaching demands to gut pensions and other long-standing provisions. The economic cost of that bitter, lopsided dispute didn’t slow the company, nor did it spur any level of government to action.

I estimate that the direct loss to GDP resulting from the lockout in Hamilton was four times larger than the effects of a one-week full shutdown at Air Canada. Indirect spinoff losses made the steel lockout even more painful. If government were truly concerned with “protecting recovery,” why didn’t it intervene? True, steel falls within provincial (not federal) labour jurisdiction. But Ottawa had plenty of leverage if it wanted to act – not least U.S. Steel’s galling violation of the production and employment commitments it made when it took over the former Stelco Inc.

In Hamilton, where workers held little power, the government stood idly by. It seems it’s only when workers have some leverage that it acts powerfully to “protect the economy.”

- Which is to say that while most of Canada may have reason for concern that we're sinking in global rankings of human developing (especially when inequality is taken into account), the Cons likely see that development as reason to celebrate.

- Paul Dewar is calling for Canada to support a financial transactions tax - rather than standing in the way as the Cons have done for years. Thomas Mulcair, while raising more complaints about the race, is targeting 20,000 new memberships in Quebec for his campaign alone - giving an indication that the previous membership numbers have little to do with where the race is headed. And in what may be the worst-kept secret of the NDP leadership race so far, Niki Ashton is about to join the field.

- Finally, Paul MacLeod points out that the NDP was able to ask one of its own committee chairs a question in question period. And it's worth wondering whether a consistent strategy along those lines - cutting the Cons out of questions period entirely as long as they're doing nothing but spouting utterly irrelevant talking points - might be just what the doctor ordered to force some more substantive discussion.