Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Roy Romanow, Linda Silas and Steven Lewis make the case for significant federal involvement in shaping health policy in Canada:

Provinces can’t transform their systems on their own regardless of how much money they spend. The politics of health care are simply too fraught, and the vested interests too powerful, to effect large-scale change. Even worse, the jurisdictions routinely engage in unconstructive bidding wars for personnel and are whipsawed by vendors, such as pharmaceutical companies, that exploit their isolation and vulnerabilities. Ottawa should play a major role in creating a more collegial and co-operative federation that overcomes obstacles to reform and bargains more effectively in the public interest.
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Ottawa must proudly stand up for single-payer, not-for-profit health care and ensure that its financial contributions reinforce this commitment across the country. Several provinces have turned a blind eye to blatant violations of the Canada Health Act, and Ottawa has stood by in indifference. The country needs to know where its government stands on the basic character and values of medicare.

And the general public agrees in overwhelming numbers: indeed, I'm not sure I can recall any poll question receiving the 97% support given to the idea that "the federal government's responsibility for the Canada Health Act is important". Which makes it all the more maddening that it's the other 3 per cent who are in charge.

- Dan Leger remembers when Stephen Harper promised open and accountable government.

- Paul Krugman points out that the 0.1% benefitting from trickle-down politics is already a remarkably homogeneous group - and likely getting more so due to decreased social mobility linked to increasing inequality.

- Sure, it may be piling on at this point. But Sixth Estate checks Canada's lobbying records and finds that if the Cons actually cared about limiting the influence of foreign wealth, they'd be a lot more concerned about the large amount of lobbying originating from foreign corporations.

- Finally, Paul Wells compares the Libs' convention to a "controlled flight into terrain":

I keep running into Liberals this weekend who are delighted by the “turnout” and the “energy” of their event, as though those were signs of something. I don’t have the heart to remind them they’re in a convention centre, which makes millions of dollars off organizations that fill it year-round with turnout and energy. Upcoming events at this same venue include the Autoshow, the NHL Fan Fair, the Helicopter Association of Canada’s 16th Annual Conference and Trade Show, and Sexapalooza. None of them is going to lead the next government either.

What wins elections is ideas large numbers of Canadians find attractive, ideally large numbers of Canadians who didn’t vote for your party the last six or eight times you asked. At a time of widespread economic uncertainty approaching mass panic, the ideas likeliest to intrigue Canadians are the ones closest to their own preoccupations about money, family and community. No, that’s not me swallowing the Harper koolaid: it’s a pretty good summary of the contrast Jean Chrétien drew with the Mulroney Conservatives when he ran his denim-vs.-Gucci campaign in 1993.

I ran into two friends at the convention who asked me, in the tone of the Liberal times, whether Canada should abolish the monarchy. I pointed out that most Canadians could not possibly care less. (As a kind of bonus, the ones who do care are divided in surprising ways.) Meanwhile, on the convention’s first day, NDP leadership candidate Peggy Nash unveiled an innovation platform that was uneven, but superior in important ways to anything any Liberal has produced in a half decade. The NDP leadership candidates are unanimous in supporting some form of carbon pricing. The Liberals, who bet all their marbles on carbon pricing only four years ago, are not considering any resolution on the question this weekend. But they’re all over the pot legalization debate that holds the nation in the grip of apathy.
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Students of flight safety are familiar with the terrifying, paradoxical notion of “controlled flight into terrain.” That’s when a well-functioning aircraft, with a conscious and alert flight crew, somehow flies into a mountain or the sea or a cornfield before anyone on board notices what is happening. The flight crew isn’t dead when this happens, or not until it does. They would be very upset if a prominent author tried to tell them they were dead. And in most cases they are working hard, in good spirits, until the last disaster happens. It’s just that they are distracted or oblivious, so none of their hard work does anything to change their course.