Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Tom Parkin writes that the Trudeau Libs and Bill Morneau have taken the side of wealthy shareholders over workers who want only the secure retirement they've already paid for through deferred wages:
Morneau should be requiring companies to tell Canadians’ pension regulator about their dividend plans. He should be setting processes and rules that get healthy companies to fully fund pensions — before there’s another Sears-type pension fiasco.

Instead, Morneau is sponsoring Bill C-27. True, it does help eliminate pension liabilities — but not by funding them. Morneau’s bill would help employers permanently shift potential liabilities onto workers by replacing defined benefit plans with “target” plans.

On pensions, tax havens and private infrastructure finance, Bill Moreau has shown he’s a rich guy’s rich guy. That’s what he was as leader of a C.D. Howe Institute, which is little more than a CEO lobby group. That’s what he is as Finance Minister. He can’t be gone soon enough.
- And Alan Freeman echoes the view that Morneau can't be kept in a position which he's used mostly to enrich his own class of vulture capitalists.

- Meanwhile, Chris Varcoe reports on the Notley government's push to make sure that federal bankruptcy law doesn't leave the public on the hook for the costs of remediating abandoned oil wells.

- Alex Hemingway discusses the role tax fairness can play in reducing inequality - and how to make that work in British Columbia's next budget. And Dean Beeby reports on the Canada Revenue Agency's first steps toward cracking down on tax avoidance in the country's wealthiest neighbourhoods.

- Finally, Ed Finn writes that citizen happiness correlates far more strongly with genuinely democratic and responsive government than with raw GDP.

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