Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Paul Krugman discusses how toxic masculinity is being used by the oil and gas sector to keep people addicted to dirty fossil fuels. And Cathy Orlando highlights the need for Canada's energy policy to be based on the recognition that renewables are cheaper, cleaner and more secure, rather than letting the burn-it-all fantasies of oil tycoons dictate our plans. 

- Joseph Gedeon reports on the latest U.S. court decision decreeing that the most basic consumer protections (in this case the requirement for providers to offer a mechanism to cancel services) offend the overriding principle that corporations have a right to avoid restrictions on their extraction of wealth from the public. And Paul Glastris and Kainoa Lowman report on the problems with the U.S.' rural broadband strategy created by incumbent providers and their Republican spokesflacks which are now being trumpeted as reason to avoid public action altogether.  

- Meanwhile, Paris Marx discusses the need to build our own digital infrastructure rather than being subject to the whims of either corporate monoliths or the Trump regime. And Joseph Stiglitz warns that Mark Carney's capitulation to Donald Trump on the digital services tax is threatening the global discussions which were supposed to offer an alternative. 

- More broadly, Blayne Haggart questions how Carney can pretend to be so clueless about the constant bad faith action of the Trump administration. Neil Moss points out that even former Lib cabinet ministers are sounding the alarm that their party's new leader is selling us out. Christopher Holcroft points out the lack of any defensible rationale for increased military spending (especially where it serves to tie us even more tightly to the U.S.), while William Eltherington reports on the damage Carney's planned austerity will do to our civil service capacity. And Tom Goldsmith writes that the problem is Carney's determination to follow a corporate playbook rather than having any vision for Canada as a country. 

- Finally, David Macdonald and Martha Friendly write that there's a long way to go for the promise of $10 per day child care to be fulfilled at the national level - even as Scott Moe and other right-wing premiers look to reverse the progress that's been made by refusing to sign on to an extension of funding.