Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to end your weekend.

- As Thomas Walkom notes, it's an open question as to who will take up the cause of defending universal public health care in Canada - but easy to figure out who poses the greatest threat to it:

Writing in The Globe and Mail this week, political scientist Flanagan attacked the very idea of Ottawa spending money in areas of provincial jurisdiction like health. He lauded Harper for moving “incrementally” towards a more classic form of federalism, where aberrations such as national medicare would not exist.

Programs like medicare, Flanagan wrote, “create the illusion for both levels of government that they are spending something less than 100-cent dollars” and thereby lead to more debt.

All of this suggests we are in for a grim few years on the health-care front.

Don’t expect the Harper government to attack medicare directly. It’s too popular with voters.

But what we can expect is a hands-off approach from Ottawa, which, when coupled with federal transfer cutbacks, will encourage cash-strapped provinces to search for more privately funded alternatives — from user fees to private-pay clinics.

- I for one can't imagine how placing a national police force under the strict political control of a government could possibly go wrong.

- Nancy Macdonald rightly points out that the largest questions about the Gateway pipeline are being raised by First Nations in B.C. - not the foreign boogeymen being invented by the Harper Cons. But we should fully expect that the Cons will try to tie the historical occupants of the land into their spin about unworthy interlopers.

- Meanwhile, it's becoming glaringly clear who views a government which exists primarily in service of the tar sands as a enemy - and which dubious characters see that as the definition of an ally.

- And Andrew Nikiforuk highlights one of the dirty truths about the oil industry, as it provides a woefully small number of jobs for the amount of GDP generated - with the Keystone XL pipeline only figuring to make matters worse:

(For the record, the oil industry is not a jobs machine. It is the world's most capital-intensive industry and earns more than 10 per cent of the world's GDP. But it only employs less than one tenth of one per cent of the world's workers. In Canada it accounts for but 1.8 per cent of the workforce.)

No matter. TransCanada's immodest economic models, for example, piped out job estimates 13 times greater (199,000) than those done by U.S. State Department (5,000 to 8,000) over a three- year period.

A 2011 Cornell University Global Labor Institute report crunched the numbers too and revealed that the project's construction would inject no more than $4-billion into the U.S. economy and only create between 2,500 and 4,650 jobs.

Unlike Canadian Tories, the Cornell study pointed out that the pipeline, by exporting raw bitumen to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, would steal good jobs from Canada. Every time Canada exports 400,000 barrels of raw bitumen, economists calculate that the nation sends approximately 18,000 upgrading and refining jobs abroad and reduces Canada's GDP by 0.2 per cent.

- Sixth Estate documents how the Cons have sent every important report generated under their government down the memory hole.

- Finally, Andrew Jackson points out that the roots of inequality are largely political rather than a matter of inherent economic structure - no matter how feverishly some corporate apologists are working to pretend otherwise.