Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Geoffrey Stevens discusses the basic problem behind the Cons' insistence on cutting back actual help to people while wasting billions on prisons and fighter jets:

(I)f the government did have a weakness (which, as noted, it does not concede), it might be that it does not suffer fools gladly — “fools” being loosely defined as anyone who fails to applaud everything the Conservatives do. This is quite a large category, encompassing (or so pollsters tell us) two-thirds of the Canadian populace.

Not only does the government not embrace criticism, it does not trust experts. The overhaul of the old age security system that Harper announced, minus details, in Davos (safely removed from the fools in Parliament) illustrates the point. As Harper sees it, the changes — which apparently will require seniors to wait longer and accept smaller pensions — are needed to make OAS sustainable for future generations. But is that really the case?

Non-partisan experts argue that if the Conservatives factor in economic growth and increases in the working-age population though immigration, they will discover a quite different picture, and not a bleak one at all. One of those experts is Kevin Page, the parliamentary budget officer (and a troublesome fellow in Tory eyes) “We don’t have a long-term sustainability problem,” Page says. “I think he (Harper) is doing it for broader problems.”

Common sense would suggest that the Conservatives acknowledge that independent experts just might have a point worth considering (by a royal commission perhaps?). At very least, the public deserves a more convincing explanation and some reassurance before the best finance minister on the planet attacks a pension system that has served the country well over the years.

- Bea Vongdouangchonh reports on Joe Comartin's efforts to make Parliament more open and democratic.

- Sixth Estate laments the embarrassment of riches in trying to choose a single weekly Flack Award.

- Last week's column looks to have been particularly well-timed, as word gets out that the Wall government is trying to recruit some of the same people taken in by Ireland's false promise of an economy built on corporate giveaways to help build a similar set of bubbles in Saskatchewan.

- Finally, kudos to the team of labour activists which succeeded in demonstrating that the Wall government's essential services legislation was unconstitutional. And Murray Mandryk nicely sums up how Justice Ball's findings that the Sask Party's essential services legislation was the most draconian in the country serve to undermine the Wall government's pretense at moderation.