Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Ethan Corey and Jessica Corbett offer five lessons for progressives from Naomi Klein's forthcoming This Changes Everything.

- Following up on this post, Andrew Jackson fact-checks the Fraser Institute on its hostility toward the CPP. And the Winnipeg Free Press goes further in challenging the motives behind the "study":

Since the authors started out believing that the Canada Pension Plan and its investment arm are a "self-serving bureaucracy," it was predictable that they would find something objectionable about CPP administration. The surprise in the study is that the authors produced no evidence that private-sector pensions are more efficient. It is possible that they found evidence on that point but left it out of the published paper. Either way, their silence on the comparison suggests that the CPP stands up well to scrutiny.

A more useful study would produce evidence both from the public and private spheres. That study would have to be written by authors who gather the evidence first and then draw their conclusions. The study published this week seems more like the work of an agency with a narrow agenda -- what you might call a self-serving bureaucracy.

- Krishna Pendakur points out that the background to the B.C. Libs' latest war against teachers is several bargaining cycles worth of abuses of power which have left public educators with the lowest pay and the largest class sizes in the country. And Emma Graney reports that the Wall government's meddling with Saskatchewan's education system was based on precisely zero thought or consultation as to how shiny announcements would affect students in reality.

- Joel-Denis Bellavance and Hugo Grandpre break the story that the federal Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development assembled an internal list of people requesting information about Jim Prentice's expenses.

- Finally, Carol Goar discusses how we need our health care system to be more inclusive rather than putting up barriers for marginalized people. And Scott Stelmaschuk makes the case for a guaranteed annual income.