Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your weekend.

- David Olive highlights the complete lack of need for the Cons' planned attacks on Old Age Security:

Say what you will of Stephen Harper’s success in scaring Canadian seniors with his recent musings about cutting seniors’ benefits. It does not warrant the public debate that the most charitable of the PM’s critics on this issue have tepidly welcomed.

The affordability of a higher-quality health care system does merit debate. Also affordable housing, the cornerstone of poverty reduction. Also education reform that better matches students with a workplace that, as a business think tank complained last week, is suffering a “desperate shortage” of skilled workers despite 1.42 million Canadians out of work.

The PM is wrong about the sustainability of Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, paid to the poorest Canadians. And Canadians have let him know it.
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On his return from swanning with the swells in Davos, the improbable venue where Harper first floated his soak-the-seniors idea, the PM was given an earful from his own caucus. They have been inundated with complaints from constituents fearful and angry about the prospect of either themselves or someone they love being deprived of some portion of their average modest $500 a month in OAS payments. (That’s $6,000 a year, considerably below the poverty line. Hence the Guaranteed Income Supplement paid to the poorest seniors.)

Neither Harper or his more excitable ministers have explained why OAS and GIS suddenly are a “crisis.”

Nor have they offered a scintilla of convincing evidence for their case. Which is not surprising, perhaps, given the weight of contrary evidence in the many reports on this topic. But you’d think the PM would at least have read those reports before needlessly frightening a large part of the population.

- Meanwhile, Selena Ross reports from an NDP meeting to consult with citizens about the rumoured cuts to OAS.

- Thomas Walkom points out the futility of trying to justify torture as a matter of evidence-gathering as the Cons are determined to do:

(T)icking-time-bomb cases are so rare as to be almost non-existent. Countries like Morocco that use torture employ it not just for exceptional threats but as a standard investigative technique.

Thus Syrian jailers tortured Canadian Maher Arar in 2002 — not because they believed he was about to blow up downtown Damascus, but because that’s what Syrian jailers do.

Naturally, Arar told his torturers whatever they wanted to hear. His “confession” was then passed on to Canada.

But, as Justice Dennis O’Connor’s inquiry into the affair later discovered (and CSIS, to its credit, confirmed), the confession was useless — because it just wasn’t true.

And that is the practical problem with torture. It is unreliable.

- Tria Donaldson and Max Fineday write that Romeo Saganash's leadership campaign offered important inspiration to young First Nations activists.

- And finally, Alice offers a look at whether the Toront-Danforth by-election campaign stands in its early stages, while Linda Diebel presents Olivia Chow's take.