New column day

Here, on the CCPA's recent report on the continued shame of child poverty (particularly on reserve) and the Wall government's lack of any interest in changing the reality that over two-thirds of Saskatchewan children on reserve live in poverty.

For further reading...
- The CCPA's previous report from 2013 covering similar issues is here.
- The Wall government's throne speech - complete with climate denialism and zero mentions of poverty among other lowlights - is here (PDF). And the single mention of First Nations involves one power contract encompassing only one First Nation.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Since I haven't yet mentioned the September 9 federal council meeting which will set the rules for the NDP's 2012 leadership race, let's point it out now. Needless to say, now figures to be the time to discuss the best possible time frame and voting process - while candidates will need to be ready to announce or bow out shortly after the rules are set.

- Meanwhile, the Wikipedia page for the leadership race looks to be a useful resource - even if it contains a bit of superfluous information on candidates who look highly unlikely to run.

- Farron Cousins takes on the corporate right's constant bluster about "job-killing regulations" by pointing out the actual effect of regulatory standards.

- Finally, David MacDonald and Erika Shaker document how soaring tuition fees have made post-secondary education less accessible.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Chris Selley nicely summarizes Jack Layton's celebration of life today:

I can just hear people kvetching: Was this a funeral for a great man, or a rally for his party?

But again, this is surely to miss the point. Mr. Lewis said, son Mike and daughter Sarah confirmed in a lovely joint eulogy, and no one has plausibly disproved the concept, that for Jack Layton, “the private man and the public man were synonymous.” And that man was a New Democrat — for 40 years. He took his colleagues to unimagined new heights, rightly feared a tumble, and attempted to rally their spirits with his final words. We rightly lament the dearth of authenticity and sincerity in our politicians. Here was one displaying both in the most trying circumstances imaginable, and some of us turned up our noses.
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Frankly, it’s easy to imagine many of the complainers mourning Layton’s conservative equivalent just as passionately as Canadians mourned Layton — if only it was possible to imagine a conservative equivalent of Jack Layton. I only met Layton once, in his final and finest office on Parliament Hill. Judging by the stories and anecdotes I saw this week, in print and in voice and in chalk, two million or so Canadians knew him better, and believed he was genuinely interested in their lives — “a man of the people who made everyone feel special,” as Shawn Atleo said. Love him or hate him, this is pretty much what politics is supposed to be.

- Meanwhile, Stephen Lewis' stirring eulogy is here.

- The Leader-Post editorial board slams the crowded jails resulting from the Cons' dumb on crime policies, while Chris Putnam criticizes a similarly short-sighted publicity stunt on a smaller scale in the form of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's attacks on video games in youth facilities.

- Finally, Errol Black and Jim Silver serve up some fast facts as to who's pushing for perpetually-increasing inequality and why.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- thwap is among a few bloggers to rightly slam the Cons' obscene message to flooded Quebeckers that the only way they can hope for help is if somebody stands to profit from it:

Toews (is) justifying removing Canadian Forces from helping with the clean-up after a Quebec flood, NOT apparently as punishment for Quebec voters having rejected harpercon villainy, but because they're worried that they'll displace private sector service providers inspired by the idea of profiting from their misfortune.

Furthermore, the services you're asking for -- if they were authorized -- would place the Canadian Forces in competition with the private sector, at the local or provincial level, which could perform this type of repair work.

Ah! But Vic! Doesn't the same logic justify having all our work in Afghanistan carried out by mercenaries and private prison contractors? Why should we deprive mercenaries of a chance to make a buck out of some misplaced devotion to archaic ideas about who should fight wars on the taxpayers' dime?

- Erin notes the good news in the B.C. Libs' latest HST machinations:

Now that BC’s opposition has successfully pushed back on the HST, the government is starting to follow the logic of its own argument, promising to combine the HST with a corporate tax increase. However, the reversal of BC’s corporate tax cuts would not collect enough revenue to fully offset the removal of sales tax from business inputs.

Nevertheless, this development seems to improve the chances of BC restoring its corporate tax rate to a more appropriate level. More broadly, it weakens the narrative that corporate taxes must always and everywhere decline. The business lobby’s acceptance of the government’s plan undermines its usual claims that raising corporate taxes would be unimaginably horrible.

- But even while recognizing how the Libs' reversal fully validates the NDP's position on corporate taxes, Seth Klein points out some significant obstacles to the move based on their previous rationale for lowering the corporate income tax rate:

More importantly, the government has now acknowledged that we can increase corporate income taxes and the sky will not fall. It is no small irony that when Adrian Dix proposed during the NDP leadership race that corporate income taxes be returned to their 2008 level, he was accused by government representatives and media pundits of being a “class warrior”. Yet now Christy Clark has proposed doing just that (and even gone a step further with a proposed delay to planned reductions in the small business tax rate).

And another rather delicious irony: those corporate income taxes reductions since 2008 were part of the carbon tax’s revenue recycling regime. Meaning, if the government did actually increase the corporate income tax, they would have to amend their carbon tax legislation, which requires that the tax be revenue neutral. Again, I’m all for that. The CCPA has long said that making the carbon tax revenue neutral (and giving big tax cuts to business) made little sense, and that the carbon tax income should be partially used to fund other climate initiatives. So nice to know the new Premier is now ready to break with revenue neutrality there.

- Finally, Dan Gardner finds plenty of Stephen Harper positions which look to be mostly unassailable - but only if one goes back as far as 1996 when he was the one challenging the type of distorted top-down politics he now practices:

"In today's democratic societies, organizations share power," wrote two conservative intellectuals.

"Corporations, churches, universities, hospitals, even public sector bureaucracies make decisions through consultation, committees, and consensus-building techniques. Only in politics do we still entrust power to a single faction expected to prevail every time over the opposition by sheer force of numbers.

Even more anachronistically, we persist in structuring the governing team like a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power to appoint, discipline, and expel subordinates. Among major democracies, only Great Britain so ruthlessly concentrates power."

That's a pretty good summary of what I've been writing lately about the Conservative government.

Which is curious. Because the authors are Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper. Flanagan is a conservative political scientist. And Stephen Harper, well, you know him.
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"The two parties could begin by agreeing to advocate electoral reform." Scrapping the first-past-the-post system is a realistic possibility, Harper and Flanagan wrote, because the NDP would support it, "allowing even a minority conservative government to pass the necessary legislation."

It was an essential step. "Many of Canada's problems stem from a winner-take-all style of politics that allows governments in Ottawa to impose measures abhorred by large areas of the country."

Change a few details and the Harper/Flanagan essay could be published today. Word for word.
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"Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator, because there is no way to stop a majority government," Conservative senator Bert Brown observed recently.

There was a time when conservatives found that appalling. But an awful lot of them seem quite comfortable with it today.

What they find appalling, what makes them quiver with indignation, is a journalist who makes the same arguments they once did about a prime minister who has become what he once opposed.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Alice posts her scorecard for the 2011 election. And the NDP's overall results serve as a classic example of big changes overwhelming narrow-casting, as the party managed to make roughly equal gains in seats, 2nd-place finishes and rebate-eligible ridings despite the limited to non-existent overlap between the three measures of progress.

- It doesn't look to me like the numbers add up entirely. But Ipsos Reid's exit poll notes the striking breakdown of the NDP's support:

The New Democratic Party, which won 30.6 per cent of the popular vote, scored highest among recent immigrants, taking 41 per cent of the vote of newcomers who have been in Canada less than a decade.

But the Conservatives, who seized 39.6 per cent of the overall vote, won 43 per cent of immigrants who have been in the country longer than a decade.
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In general, the Conservatives did slightly better among those born outside Canada (42 per cent) than those born in Canada (37 per cent).

The NDP was the only one of the three major parties to score higher than their popular vote among those born in Canada, winning 36 per cent of their ballots.

The left-leaning party captured 29 per cent among those born in another country.

The Liberals -who obtained 18.9 per cent of the national vote -did slightly better among foreign-born voters (22 per cent) and slightly poorer among the Canadian-born (15 per cent).

Which looks to me to signal that for all the talk about the Cons' ethnic outreach, it's the NDP which has actually built the strongest connections to communities of new immigrants. And at the same time, it also managed to both change the minds of many people who had voted for other parties (particularly the Libs) in the past to more than double their count among Canadian-born voters. All of which would seem to leave ample room for growth in 2015, particularly to the extent the NDP can follow the Cons' efforts in reaching out to longer-established immigrants through multi-language media and community development.

- Murray Dobbin asks whether the NDP needs to become the Liberals in order to match their past electoral success - which seems to me to be something less than clear given its second-choice support at its current ideological positioning. But I'll certainly endorse part of Dobbin's take on what civil society will need to do over the next four years (based on the real lesson to be learned from Bob Rae's tenure in Ontario):

Should those outside the party focus on keeping the pressure on the NDP to be true to its philosophy and Canadian values – doing what we can to counter the inevitable fire-storm of criticism the party as the official opposition, will face from the media? This is not really an option – it is a necessity. When Bob Rae won unexpectedly in Ontario, the left there – inexperienced with NDP governments – decided to implement a sort of honeymoon period during which time they did not criticize the government.

It was a fatal mistake. The media and business groups launched a merciless attack. What Bob Rae needed was thousands of unionists, anti-poverty activists, women and youth in the streets demanding progressive change – a force he could point to, to justify keeping his promises. But there was no one. While not wishing to give Rae a pass on his policy failures (backing away from public auto insurance being the biggest), the left helped drive him to the right by failing to demand he keep to the left.

- Don't worry pogge, I'm sure a Con majority will end the problem of reports showing the idiocy of their crime policies being suppressed by declining to have them written in the first place.

- Finally, Armine Yalnizyan talks about inequality and democracy:

Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Joel-Denis Bellavance notes another noteworthy piece of the latest Quebec polling, as CROP shows the NDP's recently-increased support as being no less solid than that for any other party:

Mieux encore, les appuis au NPD se solidifient. Pas moins de 77% des personnes sondées qui comptent appuyer les troupes de Jack Layton ont «certainement» l'intention d'aller voter le 2 mai, jour du scrutin. Les électeurs qui comptent appuyer le NPD sont plus mobilisés que ceux du Bloc québécois (75%) et autant que ceux qui comptent donner leur appui au Parti conservateur.

Enfin, Jack Layton domine outrageusement tous ses adversaires fédéralistes quand on demande aux répondants d'identifier quel chef de parti ferait le meilleur premier ministre. En effet, 38% des personnes sondées choisissent Jack Layton et seulement 11% optent pour le chef conservateur Stephen Harper et 8% jettent leur dévolu sur le chef libéral Michael Ignatieff.

- It's probably too late to make the difference I'd hoped for. But the Tyee fact-checks each of Stephen Harper's outraged declarations of "that's simply not true!" from the leader's debates - and finds that Harper flat-out lied about three, while declaring clarity on a muddled issue for the fourth.

- Craig McInnes asks when compromise became a dirty word. But the more appropriate question seems to me to be where compromise is a dirty word - and the answer seems to be among Kool-Aid-addled Cons, but far less of the general public than they think.

- Finally, Bruce Campbell issues a challenge to Canada's wealthiest 0.1% to stop putting their short-term interests above the long-term health of Canadian society.

Monday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- David Climenhaga critiques the questionable Star coverage given to Angus Reid's polling showing the NDP catching up to the Libs nationally:

(A)sk yourselves this: If a new poll had showed a huge surge in support for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, would reporters have "balanced" their stories by noting in the lead, "but their support could collapse by the time voters go to the polls"? Unlikely.

If the poll had shown a huge jump in support for Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals, would the Toronto Star have observed, "their support could collapse by the time voters go to the polls"? Impossible!
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Plenty of voters, myself included, have voted strategically for Liberals when we preferred New Democrats because in the ridings where we lived the No. 3 party, whichever it was, didn't have a chance.

If the New Democrats are on the cusp of becoming the No. 2 party, it may in fact be the Liberals who see their support peeling off toward the NDP by the time voters go to the polls.

Count on it that if that possibility rears its head, the mainstream media -- and not just the perennially Liberal Toronto Star -- will pull out all the stops to prevent it from becoming reality.

So look for plenty of stories in the next few days like the Star's, full of qualifiers, hedges and explanations of why what you're seeing isn't really what you're seeing.

But who knows where that might lead? As Layton observed in the same story, "A lot of Canadians don't like to be told what to do, and so we're seeing a lot of enthusiasm on the ground."

- Alice points out how "strategic voting" sites play directly into the Cons' hands:

You would think that with all these sites ganging up on Conservative candidates, that party would be up in arms for fear of losing its shot at a majority, right?

Hardly.

To the contrary: they are gleeful, as evidenced by the fact that they have not said one peep about the three sites publicly since the campaign began.
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If you didn't read my plea not to vote strategically in the last election, I urge you to take another look now. A vote "against" someone or something is a vote in favour of nothing. It gives no mandate to elected officials, creates all the wrong incentives for the politicians who are elected that way, and guarantees that Parliament will descend even further into the partisan barking we see there now. Indeed the perverse problems with the methodology itself have led respected website Democratic Space author Greg Morrow to stop publishing his "strategic voting guide" from previous elections.

In this election, read the platforms, watch the debates, take a measure of the leaders and the candidates, and vote your heart. If everyone did that, who knows what we might come up with together.

- Environmental Defence catalogues where Canada's federal parties stand on key environmental issues. Predictably, the answer from the Cons is "nowhere in sight".

- Douglas Bell suggests that the Libs may want to start making an election issue out of the treatment of G20 protesters. But I have to wonder whether anybody would be fooled by their suddenly raising the topic at the end of an election campaign when they've been perfectly happy to ignore it until now.

- Finally, Hugh Mackenzie highlights why there's no such thing as a tax cut which primarily helps the middle class - and notes what's really afoot when political parties pretend to offer that impossibility:

(T)ax cuts are presented as if they are some kind of magic key that benefits everyone equally. So in the current election campaign, the Conservatives are running on their tax cut platform as if it benefits everyone in the same way, when in fact the cuts are very tightly targeted to people who have enough disposable income to double their savings in their tax free savings accounts, or who have children in arts programs, or who are in a couple with one very high income earner and one very low (or no) income earner and when by far the biggest tax cut goes to corporations in the financial services and energy industries.

In the same vein, in the early 2000s, a smattering (of) broadly-based personal tax cuts masked a massive cut in corporate tax rates and a huge cut in capital gains taxes that stands as the single most regressive tax change in Canadian history.

Equally important, talking up tax cuts without coming clean about their impact on public services is profoundly dishonest. Every cut in public fiscal capacity results in cuts to public services that we depend on – services that a study by the CCPA estimated in 2006 were worth an average of $16,000 to every Canadian woman, man and child. To illustrate the point, that study found that if the Harper government had turned the money raised by 2 percentage points of the GST over to local governments to spend on local services instead of cutting the GST, 80% of Canadians would have been better off.

What that means is that, when you take into account what happens to public services as a result of tax cuts, there really isn’t such a thing as a middle-income friendly tax cut.

Thursday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- Sure, it's nice to see some relatively principled Conservatives abandoning the party. But was there anything about the Harper Cons' vote-buying that shouldn't have been obvious long before the latest revelations in Vaughan?

- Meanwhile, some might see reason for concern that the Cons are working to keep people from voting in Guelph. But from the standpoint of living up to their campaign message, I suppose one can say they're walking their talk in considering elections to be an inconvenience that are best rendered as meaningless as possible.

- Adam Chapnick makes the case for keeping per-vote funding to political parties as a means of making sure that every vote counts. And I broadly agree - even if there are other reasons to vote one's conscience beyond the subsidy.

- Gloria Galloway thanks Rick Mercer for getting students to pay attention to politics.

- Finally, Simon Enoch points out that we can already see the results of Con-style austerity in the UK - and that a focus on the Cons' idea of economic management figures to do far more harm than good.

Monday Afternoon Links

Content goes here.

- Let's start with a couple of slightly older pieces which I didn't post originally. First, the CCPA's This or That graphic nicely contrasts the costs of Con priorities compared to what the same amount of money could accomplish if directed toward social spending.

- And second, Dennis Gruending's list of organizations defunded by the Cons speaks volumes about the Canada they've been working to destroy.

- Following up on yesterday's post, Saskboy and Dr. Dawg have more on Stephen Harper's willingness to add a repeatedly-convicted fraudster to his inner circle.

- What thwap said, especially this paragraph on the long-term damage done by the Harper Cons:

What's really depressing though is that a lot of the damage has already been done. Our national political culture has been infected with harper's contempt for our fragile and limited democracy. The view that Parliament is a "kangaroo court" where everything is all stupid, self-interested partisanship all the time, is more ingrained in our minds than ever. The view that all politicians are all crooks, the view that our political process is a joke, and will always be a joke, and that this joke is told by a completely inferior grade of people, and is therefore of no account, is more firmly entrenched than ever. Furthermore, the extremes of executive arrogance, secrecy, and abuse of power that harper has tested pushed the envelope for subsequent governments. Will it be the case that just like Obama has in many ways gone beyond the abuses of the bush II regime, that later Canadian governments will use harper's extremism as the new normal and further denigrate our system's democratic restraints on the powers of the executive branch?

- And finally, deBeauxOs catches Lib candidate Scott Bradley in a lie that likely makes him a prime candidate for Stephen Harper's inner circle in terms of both honesty and ethics.

Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jim Stanford challenges the Cons' spin on how Canada's economy compares to others around the globe:

In reality,...the claim that things may be tough here, but they’re better than anywhere else, has never been statistically valid. And it’s getting increasingly inaccurate, the more it is regurgitated on the hustings.

Among the more than 30 industrial countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada’s performance has been middling at best. In real GDP growth, Canada tied for 10th in 2009, falling to 13th in 2010. As for the unemployment rate, Canada ranked a gloomy 21st in 2009, tying for 18th by 2010.

Since OECD countries account for a declining share of total world output, let’s consider a truly global sample. The International Monetary Fund reports annual real GDP growth rates for 107 countries, and quarterly data for about half of those. In 2009, Canada ranked 61st of 107. Over the first three-quarters of 2010 (year-end figures aren’t ready yet), we ranked 25th out of 53 countries reporting.

In labour-market terms, Canada’s relative performance is no better. The International Labour Organization reports unemployment data for about 70 countries. In 2009, Canada’s unemployment rate jumped 2.2 percentage points. That ranked us 56th (of 72) that year. Over the first three quarters of 2010, Canada ranked 28th by the same measure.

That’s not exactly a gold-medal performance. In fact, it sounds more like our ranking in international soccer (84th in the world, according to FIFA), than our glorious domination of world hockey.

- Fortunately, there are some competing visions on what parts of our economy need to be emphasized. And Andrew Jackson sums up the NDP's economic proposals, including by noting that the job-creation tax credit has been on the radar in the U.S. as well.

- Douglas Bell reminds us of the simple truth behind a possible coalition government:

(John Ibbitson writes) about the dangers lurking should the Liberals having won fewer seats than the Tories buck “the popular will” and form a coalition government with the NDP. But here’s the thing, two out of three Canadians voted against the Tories the last time around (and will again if Nanos the soothsayer proves correct).

The popular will as expressed in one party or another seeking the confidence of the House is clear.

- And finally, Joyce Green and Mike Burton weigh in with their take on the Cons' many displays of contempt for Canadian democracy:

This latest expression of contempt of the government for its parliament and its peoples is an indication of poor democratic health, but it is only one of a number of manifestations of that malaise. The widening gap between the very rich and the working and very poor is another measure of democratic and moral failure. The increase in propaganda at the expense of environmental science is another. The demonization of political opponents is a third. The lack of a serious medium and long term national economic strategy, other than obeisance to "the markets," is a fourth. The lack of policy attention to the social supports we all need, such as childcare, elder care, palliative care, and rational affordable health care is a fifth. Our collective inability to provide appropriate education, from post-secondary education to the trades, is risible. Our national lack of concern for Aboriginal peoples is an international embarrassment. We could go on.
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The consequence of toxic levels of anti-democratic contempt has left many Canadians questioning the health of public politics. But they must do more than sit back on the sofa and change the channel. That would be contemptible. As we watch brave people in the Arab Spring risk life and well-being to obtain democratic change, we may want to collectively maintain our own democratic practices with rather more vigour.

Tuesday Morning Links

Some general reading to start your day.

- Armine Yalnizyan chimes in on the problems with the Cons' income-splitting plank:

But the families that will most benefit from Harper’s income splitting promise will be those who need the least help. The higher the income, the bigger the tax break, and a much lesser challenge of keeping one parent at home.
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Today’s reality is that it is getting harder for young families to get into and stay in the middle class. Today, with rare exceptions, it takes two to do it. We need policies that meaningfully address that reality.

- Meanwhile, the CCPA has unveiled its new Making it Count blog - which looks to be a must-read for the balance of the campaign.

- After accurately describing Stephen Harper as "a bit chilling...(in) his willingness to self-righteously attack his opponents for things that he would do himself" and exhibiting "excessive aggressiveness", and Michael Ignatieff as "ill-prepared" with a "confusion" stance on coalitions, Stephen Maher has this to say about Jack Layton:

Unlike any of the other leaders, Layton has had a consistent and mature line on coalitions throughout his career. He is willing to work with other parties to get things done.

Layton looks good as the campaign begins. Having rejected a Tory budget that did not go far enough to meet NDP requests, he can hold his head high in front of his supporters.

- And he's now able to do so in several new ways, as the NDP has release a suite of new online tools for the campaign.

- Finally, as much as the Cons have been slammed for trying to act like a majority government even with only a minority of seats, Murray Dobbin points out that matters could indeed get worse if they actually held the majority they're shooting for:

One of the few checks on Harper's power has been the parliamentary committee structure, where the Opposition -- which controlled the committees through their numerical majority -- could do far more than they could in the House of Commons: deciding what issues would be investigated, calling witnesses (and even subpoenaing them), demanding documents and shining the public eye on otherwise secretive workings. The committees infuriated Harper the control-freak, to the point where he produced a book of dirty tricks for his MPs to use to scuttle their work.

With a majority, all of that will end. The committees will be effectively shut down. The Conservative majority will decide what's discussed, who testifies and what documents are asked for. There will be no Afghan detainee scandal, because the relevant committee (if it still exists) won't be asking for any embarrassing documents.

Well said

Simon Enoch provides the definitive response to the Sask Party's budget:

Despite an obvious and acute housing crisis, this budget offered a paltry $1.7 million for two new affordable housing initiatives while the immediate need for new housing in the province is approximately 3000 units. For those who cannot wait for the construction of new housing, no relief was forthcoming to prevent the regular rent increases that seem to have become the norm in our province.

Despite ranking dead last among the provinces in child-care space, the budget offered to fund the creation of only 500 new child-care spaces when the need is closer to 5000. Currently, Saskatchewan has licensed child-care spots for only 9.1 per cent of children between the ages of zero and five, compared to the 20.3 per cent national average. While we applaud the government for committing to the creation of these new spaces, our province desperately needs a much more aggressive and long-term policy to address our child-care needs.

Despite the desperate need to replace the only psychiatric hospital in the province, this budget offered absolutely nothing for those suffering from mental illness.

In contrast, business owners will reap almost $80 million in tax savings due to the reduction of the small business tax while off-sale beer vendors will enjoy a $5.1 million discount. While the government has made much of it’s low-income tax reduction policy, a tax cut on nothing is still nothing. If we were to measure what constituencies this government covets by the amount of largesse given to them in yesterday’s budget, it is obvious where the poorest in our province rank.

But an even closer look at the meager housing funding in Ken Krawetz' budget makes the Sask Party look even worse. There, the brand-new province-wide fund to encourage the construction of affordable new homes (through tax abatements of course) has been allocated a paltry $200,000 per year - or less than the cost of a single average home in one of Saskatchewan's major cities.

Of course, part of the problem is that a focus on property tax utterly misses the point as to what makes housing unaffordable for those who need it. But it also speaks volumes that while feeling the need to pretend to do something, the Sask Party saw no problem with such an embarrassing excuse for a plan.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading...

- Carol Goar chimes in on the Harper Cons' shadow civil service which combines wasteful public spending with private-sector profiteering:

(David MacDonald) He sifted through 300,000 government contracts and pored over the five years’ worth of public accounts to find out what was happening, pinpoint the big spenders and track the trends. The deeper he looked, the more troubling the pattern became.

Not only had the cost of contract workers ballooned, the nature of their work had changed. No longer were they brought in for short-term projects or hired to provide expertise the government did not have. They did exactly the same work as public servants. They sat alongside them, had government email addresses and handled confidential government information.

“They look like government employees, but they’re not,” the economist said. They are exempt from the government’s normal hiring requirements such as bilingualism and proven ability to do the job. And they aren’t on the government payroll; their remuneration comes from a private outsourcing firm (which usually means they have no job security or benefits.)

Macdonald also discovered a large discrepancy between the value of the contracts the government signed and what it actually spent. Contracts were repeatedly revised, extended and modified driving up the final price by as much 700 per cent. Once an outsourcing deal had been signed, government managers had “considerable leeway” to reach back into the public purse to buy more services.
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Why should taxpayers care?

First, the government is bulking up its own workforce, while preaching austerity. Second, outsourcing is expensive. Finally, Harper is weakening one of the pillars of democracy: an impartial public service that serves all governments regardless of ideology with professionalism and integrity.

- Dan Gardner is right to note that the single example of a nuclear power plant facing explosions and radiation leaks shouldn't be the deciding factor one way or the other. But it's equally true that contrary to the spin of the pro-nuclear camp, the absence of equally major incidents for some time previous didn't eliminate the risks associated with nuclear power either. And a stark reminder of the real downside may well serve as a spur to work harder on developing lower-risk alternatives - even if the need should have been obvious sooner.

- Not that I agree with all of the CCPA's ideas from its alternative budget. But who wants to be the one to argue against the position that creating 300,000 new jobs and reducing the unemployment rate by 2% is a goal worth pursuing?

- Finally, filed under "necessity as the mother of invention", the NDP may end up making more of a push toward online engagement in an upcoming election campaign in order to ease the travel burden on Jack Layton:

The NDP leader was back to work just hours after leaving Toronto's Mount Sinai hospital last Wednesday, five days after surgery to mend a fracture in his hip.

An election call would put Layton's physical stamina to the test during what would likely be a five-week, cross-country campaign.

However, Layton suggested he would work the phones more and use technology, such as the Internet, to get his party's message across if campaigning were to become too onerous.

Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Pogge is absolutely right to see the Bloc's threatened withdrawal from the Afghan cover-up commission as utterly useless:

(T)he serious consequences expected to result from the Bloc's withdrawal?

"Our withdrawal could weaken the political committee and would take away its credibility," he told La Presse.

I think that train left the station some time ago. So the Liberals and the Conservatives will vow to carry on and we'll never hear another word about it.

- Silly CCPA, bothering to report on massive increases in government outsourcing costs. Don't they know that public money used to enrich private consultants is free?

- There's some remarkable follow-up to Erin's calculations on potash royalties, as PCS isn't bothering to challenge the conclusion that Saskatchewan is seeing less return on PCS' massive mining operations than Trinidad and Tobago take in from a single nitrogen facility:

I suggested that the company may be paying less corporate income tax to Saskatchewan than to Trinidad. PotashCorp could clear things up anytime by simply disclosing the amount of corporate tax it paid to the Saskatchewan government.

Rather than doing so, its spokesman argues that the province of Saskatchewan is not comparable to the country of Trinidad. He has a point: most Canadian corporate taxes flow to the federal government as opposed to provincial governments. That fact underscores the need for higher provincial royalties to collect a fair return on potash, a provincially-owned resource.

- Finally, I'll be hoping to see much more from LeadNow, including some more effort to paint public involvement as downright desirable rather than merely something not to be ashamed of. But this is a great start in looking to normalize political participation:

Wednesday Morning Links

Assorted content for your midweek reading.

- It's generally agreed that the Cons' level of popular support involves a fairly firm floor at about 30%. But for those looking to determine the proportion of people who have given themselves over entirely to the Harper hive mind, we now have our number at 18%:

But when it comes to calling on the government to disclose all estimated costs for crime-related legislation, Canadians are clearly on the side of the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Quebecois. Eighty-two% said the government should be compelled to release the figures. Eighteen per cent said they should be kept secret if the government says they should be.

- It should never have been much of a secret that the Harper Cons are looking to take Canada down the same path as their Republican cousins. But Susan Delacourt is starting to trace the similarities for a wider audience.

- And the CCPA's report on the destruction of regulatory systems will offer plenty more fodder for Delacourt's series.

- All of which suggests that the growing realization of just what the Cons have in store for the country may have something to do with the fact that Harper's long-sought majority is getting less and less popular as an option (even as the Cons talk about it more overtly as a goal):

Only about 26 per cent of Canadians say they would be comfortable with the Conservatives winning a majority after the next election, according to a new poll conducted for The Globe and Mail and CTV by Nanos Research.

That number is lower than in any other Nanos survey that asked the same question.

Sunday Afternoon Links

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- Aside from the occasional attempt by the likes of Jim Flaherty to pretend that Ireland's disaster could never have happened to a country which so zealously bought into the free-market religion, few seem to be foolish enough to put forward the Irish experience as a model to follow for the moment. But in tracing Ireland's decline, Bruce Campbell points out that its boom wasn't anywhere near what it was hyped to be either:

Foreign direct investment—led by the computer and pharmaceutical sectors--poured in. It became the preferred location of (mainly US) multinational corporations seeking to keep their profits out of reach of their home country tax authorities. (Google, for example, is reported to have saved $3.1 billion over the last three years by setting up shop in Ireland). Ireland became the largest jurisdiction outside the US for declared pretax profits by American firms. The transfer of profits out of Ireland accounts for 20% of Irish GDP.

While indigenous Irish industry expanded, it never lived up to expectations. The hallmark characteristics of an enclave economy—weak linkages to the domestic economy, benefits accruing to a narrow segment of society—were clearly in evidence. Industry remained dominated by a relatively small group of multinationals. Data from the Irish Development Agency, show that while the foreign and domestic sectors each employed about 150,000. The foreign-owned sector accounted for over 80% total output.

While it created a lot of employment—much of it in the form of low wage service jobs—the Irish boom accentuated income and wealth inequality. Rather than apportioning gains to strengthen the welfare state to be more in line with European norms, the Irish model gave precedence to the interests of foreign capital and to a small domestic elite that had successfully ridden the Irish prosperity wave.
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Income and capital gains tax cuts left the government coffers with a narrower tax base much more vulnerable to collapse of the construction and real estate sectors.

When the global crisis hit, the bubble burst: foreign finance dried up, exports tanked, construction came to a halt and property values plunged, exposing the toxic debt at the heart of the Irish banks. Ireland’s budget surplus and low public debt turned bad with lightening (sic) speed.

- Hugh Segal nicely points out how his own party's prison growth strategy makes absolutely no sense as a destination for public money:

At a time of government restraint, prisoners are, in a word, expensive. With all costs factored in, Canadians spend more than $147,000 per prisoner in federal custody each year.

By contrast, it would take between $12,000 and $20,000 annually to bring a person in Canada above the poverty line. Even at the high end of the GAI scale, this represents savings to taxpayers of $127,000 per federal prisoner each year. Those are figures that should be of interest to any federal or provincial finance minister — of any party background.

- But as Haroon Siddiqui notes, we're the ones left paying the price for the Cons putting Stephen Harper's political games ahead of even a minimal level of engagement with reality.

- And finally, Greg asks:

Liberals, is there no Conservative trick they won't fall for?

Only if you count the ones they're in on to begin with. This has been another version of simple answers to simple questions.

Sunday Morning Links

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- Michael Geist rightly points out that the current protests over usage-based billing only scratches the surface of the artificial limitations on Canadian access to the Internet:

While addressing the CRTC decision is a good start, Canadians will be disappointed — some even surprised — to learn that Internet “metering” is already almost uniformly in place. The “caps” are the existing and common provider limits on usage, above which you are billed extra. They are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, what ever the CRTC decides after its review.
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The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that Canada stands virtually alone with near universal use of caps and our cap rates are set lower than those elsewhere. For example, while U.S. giant Comcast has a 250 gigabyte per month cap, some Canadian providers have caps as small as 2 gigabytes per month.

The caps are already having a consumer impact. Bell admits that about 10 per cent of its subscribers exceed their monthly cap (resulting in an extra charge), a figure that is sure to increase over time. The effect extends far beyond consumers paying more. The extra cost has a real negative effect on the Canadian digital economy, harming innovation and keeping new business models out of the country.

- The CCPA's Hugh MacKenzie notes that the political pressure on Ontario's government to focus on deficits rather than jobs figures to have serious ramifications for the province's economy.

- The Cons may be so accustomed to being able to force whatever they want through Parliament as to have forgotten they can't always run rampant over all other interests. But the decision concluding they aren't allowed to ignore the purposes of a law in issuing ministerial edicts looks to be major step in the right direction.

- Finally, Johann Hari's discussion of UK Uncut looks to provide a great model for progressive protest. But it's also worth asking the question of how the same enthusiasm can be channeled at times when there isn't such a strong connection between generous treatment of business and immediate cuts for everybody else.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday.

- It would be nice to be able to believe that the U.S.' greenhouse gas emissions regulations would lead to some action on our side of the border as well. But is there actually any realistic prospect that the Cons' won't simply give the Wheel of Excuses another spin - likely landing on "Made In Canada!" again - in order to avoid doing anything meaningful in response?

- The Star weighs in on the ever-more-appalling gap between CEO pay and the income of Canadians in general, and echoes the CCPA's proposed solution to at least part of the problem:

Basing pay on the stock market is like rewarding a quarterback on the basis of whether his team beats the point spread, says Martin. And in the long run, the whole economy suffers, not just individual companies, as CEOs spend their time “jerking around expectations.”

Some argue that executive compensation ought to be of concern only to shareholders and corporate directors. But as Mackenzie notes, directors and CEOs are all members of the same “club,” and executive pay is based on what other club members are paid. “The logic is perfectly circular,” he writes.

As for giving shareholders “say on pay,” that just allows them to say they are unhappy with executive pay, says Mackenzie. “It does not mean they can actually do anything about it.”

A better option, adds Mackenzie, is for government to intervene -- starting with treatment of stock options as regular income, not capital gains, which are taxed at half the normal rate. That’s an idea for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty to consider in his upcoming budget – or, if he is disinclined, for the opposition parties to adopt in their platforms.

- And amazingly, even Kelly McParland may not be entirely disagreeable toward the idea:

There is no question CEO pay has grown faster and more steadily than other income levels, and that much of it receives a favourable level of tax treatment the rest of us can only wish for. It’s a matter worthy of discussion, and serious treatment.

- Finally, Neal Lawson and John Harris have some suggestions for the UK's Labour Party which may resonate in Canada as well:

The new paradigm understands the nature of capitalism: a dynamic force that is as creative as it is destructive. Unless confronted, regulated and shaped, it undermines society and community - and crucially, its own positive aspects, as the trailblazing entrepreneur is sidelined by the monopoly corporation, and the once-thriving town centre gets killed by the faceless out-of-town mall. Moreover, if we don't regulate free markets, we end up regulating people, to force them to behave as the market desires - a fact glaringly reflected in the huge growth of the authoritarian state. Crucially, however, most regulation will increasingly have to happen at a transnational level - at the very least, via the European Union. Economic sovereignty will have to be pooled to ensure that damaging effects of capitalism are tamed. Every second of every day the bond market pools its sovereignty to destroy whole economies. This week it's Ireland, next week it is wherever they decide. This means controls on speculative capital flows and the ability to shift location and production to where taxes and labour conditions are lowest; it means coordinated corporation taxes and establishing the principle of a European minimum wage. The old social democracy never got this. Neither did it understand the demands of people for meaningful voice at their place of work. Capitalism is a tiger that we cannot ride but must tame.

New Socialism knows the state is vital but recognizes too the crisis of the bureaucratic and market state. It is Labour's grip of statism that must be broken. The New Socialism seeks to balances our need for security through the state with our right to freedom from the state. It wants a state whose scope is democratically determined and made accountable, responsive, sensitive and local through the most radical political reforms of public service this country has ever seen. A more proportional national electoral system is only one part of the change required: we have to reinvent the state from top to bottom to entrench people's involvement through the principle of co-production and the critical role of both producers and users of services. Health, education, social care and much more need to be liberated from the bureaucratic and outsourced state and reshaped accordingly, aiming at two transformative effects: creating in-built efficiencies through ongoing improvements on the frontline, and helping to make the tax case for the public sector. In the midst of the current fiscal crisis, the importance of this second element cannot be overstated.

Monday Afternoon Links

Some light reading for all those CEOs who can afford to take the rest of the year off...

- I'd like to think I haven't missed too many Con outrages over the past few years. But Emily Dee's list includes a few which had largely flown under my radar, as well as plenty of greatest hits which deserve another look.

- The CCPA makes its predictions for 2011 - though it's well worth noting how many of them are understandably based on what's all too obvious from what we've seen on the political scene in the past few years.

- Am Johal presents a prescription for the NDP in the course of deconstructing how the Harper Cons took power:

The right has rather effectively used the mantra of simplified messages like 'we'll put more money in your pocket, they'll support the bureaucracy.' When the center-left should have been pushing for democratization and local control, they were left defending bureaucracy. It was the very unionized working class members that voted NDP that were now voting for Preston Manning. The NDP became the conservatives and the Reform Party became the radicals in the early 90's. The Reform Party's biggest gains in the 1993 election were not just from Progressive Conservatives, but also from the NDP. They stole populism from the CCF'ers and gave it a distorted, anti-government storyline.

If the center-left wants to recapture the political imagination, it needs to have a critique of government as its beginning point and a defense of the Commons as its follow up. It also needs to synthesize its policy narrative down to three or four big ideas. The government isn't Santa Claus -- it can't do everything.

The NDP needs a simplified message. Re-energizing the populist base of the NDP while genuinely joining with emerging political and social movements should be the new blueprint for the NDP. At the federal level, social democrats don't need to be the majority government or even the official opposition to set the progressive agenda in the country. They do need to be winning between 50-75 seats at election time to have sufficient leverage to influence the policymaking sphere of the country. The NDP doesn't just need to move either to the left or the right in order to grow as a party or be more relevant -- they actually need to do both simultaneously to reach that level of support so it's a rather silly, cyclical debate to be having. The need to reignite their base to show up to the polls and they need to reassure a broader public universe that they can be effective, but principled managers of the economy.

- And finally, the Real News features an interview with Michael Hudson on the history of the U.S.' income tax:



But I do wonder whether there's another lesson beyond those drawn by Hudson: might the fact that the U.S. made a conscious choice to favour taxing private owners (who obviously kept a strong interest in reducing those taxes in order to bolster their own wealth) have made for a more unstable system than one which actually put more of its economy in public hands directly?

On overcompensation

Plenty of others are rightfully highlighting the CCPA's annual comparison of enormous executive salaries to the relatively tiny amounts paid to mere workers in general. But perhaps the most important piece of news in this year's article is that the corporate sector has responded to pressure on the amount being paid to CEOs...by declining to report on how much executives actually make:

The CEO pay figures may even be underestimated owing to a change in the way stock option compensation is reported, according to the report.

Corporations used to report the amount of income that executives actually realized when they cashed in their options.

Beginning in 2008, rather than reporting the amount their executives realized during the year by cashing in options, they reported a statistical estimate of what the options might have been worth in the market when they were granted.

The centre argues in its report that the amounts reported tend to be understated.

Which offers reason to suspect that even the glaring 155-to-1 gap being reported today between may in fact be even higher if one takes into account actual amounts cashed in by top executives rather than an easily-manipulated estimate (which executives would have every incentive to deflate in order to give the perception of adding share value over time). And the fact that corporate reporting is apparently moving further and further away from acknowledging the reality of executive income should give us reason for concern that it's going to spiral even further out of control in the years to come.