Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Richard Smith highlights how there's no general connection between the cost of health care and patient incomes across different models of funding and delivery, but an obvious connection between profit motives and increased expenses which don't produce improved outcomes. 

- Meanwhile, K.J. Aiello discusses how increased discussion about the importance of mental health has all too often excluded the people facing the most severe illnesses.

- Jason Warick reports that the Moe government has chosen a program with a 26% graduation rate as the basis for online instruction across the province, signaling once again that it's more interested in promoting cronies' failures than anybody's successes. Jeremy Simes reports on the reality that a provincial tax agency will create increased costs for businesses and the province alike, with little apparent purpose other than to ensure that giveaways to the fossil fuel sector aren't rolled back through federal action. And Martin Been writes about the folly of eliminating both jobs and profits from public liquor stores in the name of an ideological crusade against non-corporate economic activity.

- Marc Lee discusses how the combination of higher consumer prices and higher interest rates is creating devastating effects on household finances (while capital takes advantage of both phenomena to goose its own returns).

- Finally, Emily Leedham exposes how the Globe and Mail's "top employer" awards represent little other than pay-to-play self-promotion which overlooks workplace abuse and even death to reward corporate sponsors. And it should be no surprise that the most notorious examples are found in the fossil fuel sector given its pattern of disinformation and deception in the name of preserving profits.