Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Shawn Gude comments on the choice Democratic primary voters will have between candidates seeking to regulate the economic system as it stands, and those pushing to fundamentally changing it. Ian Welsh points out the importance of supporting candidates such as Bernie Sanders with a genuine commitment to the more progressive policies on offer from many corners.

- John Horgan discusses the backlash against the extreme concentration of wealth amidst increased precarity in the U.S., while Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley report on new polling again showing strong support for higher tax rates on the extremely wealthy. And Jordan Weissmann highlights how Elizabeth Warren's child care plan would boost both the economy generally, and the cause of shared and equitable development in particular.

- Larry Elliott reports on a new study showing how austerity has devastated families in the UK. And James Sillars notes that the result is a country set to reach record levels of child poverty even before it shoots itself in the foot through an attempt to distance itself from the world.

- Mat Hope exposes the disinformation campaigns used jointly by big tobacco and the oil lobby to attack any action to promote public health where it might affect short-term profits. And the Canadian Press reports on the CRTC's findings of misleading and aggressive sales tactics by the telecoms who are already overcharging Canadian customers.

- Finally, the CP also reports on new research showing that Canadian governments need to do far more to try to reduce the harm resulting from alcohol abuse - rather than promoting that harm through deregulation and downward pressure on prices as so many right-wing governments have chosen to do in the name of populist appeal.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Linda McQuaig writes about the dangerous spread of privatized health care which threatens to undermine our universal system:

Privatization advocates want us to believe public health care is no longer affordable. But in fact, it’s private, for-profit medicine that’s unaffordable.

The publicly funded portion of our health care spending – doctors’ fees and hospital stays – has remained fairly stable as a percentage of GDP for more than 30 years. What is out of control is the part controlled by the private sector – drugs, home care, physiotherapy, etc.

If we want to control health care costs, we should extend the publicly funded portion, not open more services to the private sector. But that would require more public funding, which provincial and federal governments, after years of deep tax cutting, are reluctant to commit to.

High drug prices, for instance, are a major contributor to rising costs. The solution, as many studies have shown, would be a national universal pharmacare program, which would cost money to get started but ultimately save Canadians billions of dollars a year.
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In an age when the rich demand a fast lane to the front of every line, it will require resolve and determination to preserve our medicare system, a bastion of equality sharply at odds with the heartless corporate world we inhabit.

- Noah Smith discusses the connection between work and dignity, while noting that there's no reason to pretend there's any lack of work to be done by people who would like the opportunity to do it. But Van Badham notes that workers are instead being treated as disposable, with new challenges to employment and life security surfacing regularly. And Vincent McDermott highlights a Canadian example, as 170 camp workers near Fort McMurray are being terminated on Boxing Day for not agreeing to forfeit half of their income.

- Meanwhile, Elizabeth Thompson points out how the requirement of a high-speed Internet connection may freeze applicants from rural areas out of federal tribunal positions. And while the CRTC's steps to declare broadband Internet a "basic service" may help in the long run, they represent cold comfort for anybody whose employment prospects are limited now.

- The Australian Associated Press reports on research showing the minimal costs of paid domestic violence leave - such that there's no excuse for forcing anybody to suffer an abusive relationship in order to avoid employment consequences.

- Finally, Jennifer Graham, Jordan Pearson and Alex MacPherson each discuss the Wall government's refusal to be honest or accountable about past pipeline inspections. And Keith Leslie reports that Ontario's government has been tampering with document receipt dates in order to pretend to comply with its access-to-information obligations.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Ian Lovett reports on the use of "capital appreciation bonds" in California to ensure that future generations pay an inflated price to private-sector developers for infrastructure today.

- Justin Ling's review of Joyce Murray's message about electoral non-competition pacts is well worth a read - but I'll particularly highlight this part:

Do you want Stephen Harper to be defeated in the next federal election?

Alright, we’re already off to a rocky start.

Politics of negation is dangerous, ugly, and unfortunately rears its ugly head very often in leadership campaigns.

“Elect me and I’ll stop [gay marriage/abortion/separatists/Toronto elitists]” has long between a rhetorical sledgehammer that’s good at getting gut reaction from ignorant people. Nothing more.

So when Joyce Murray asks me if I want Stephen Harper to be defeated, my immediate answer is ‘no’ — I want a government that, if possible, is more competent than our current one. Everyone should want that. Murray, like Trudeau or Garneau, should be making a case that she can do that. Not offering an Ocean’s Eleven caper on how to dupe the prime minister.

- But of course, there's loads of room for improvement on the government we're currently stuck with. And on that front, Steven Shrybman points out just the latest example in commenting on Harper's dubious assertion that his party's misleading robocalls weren't in breach of CRTC regulations, while Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault laments the fact that the Cons are trampling on access to information more and more as their stay in office drags on.

- Herbert Gans discusses how the U.S. media can contribute to genuine democratic debate far better than it currently does. And Rick Salutin laments the state of the CBC in having fallen into the same infotainment format as other broadcasters:

The gold standard for anchors was the U.S.’s Walter Cronkite. He was ready to stand up against the state and the flow and was solid as the bronze statue of the American revolutionary minuteman who stood “by the rude bridge that spanned the flood/ His flag to April’s breeze unfurled.” He had rhetoric and a voice to accompany it: “All things are as they were then except — You Are There.” When president Lyndon Johnson heard Cronkite turn against the Vietnam War, he said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.” Compared to Cronkite, Mansbridge isn’t an icon, he’s a barometer.

He’s happily gone with the flow — and the pressure. CBC has become numero uno for crime stories, weather coverage (today’s snow), product launches, celebrities and awards gossip. None of this is new, or news, and CBC itself doesn’t contest the point. The penny story was another example but the one that probably propelled me into this anchor obit was their infinite overkill on the new BlackBerry. (To give CBC radio its due, Carol Off did an item about that on As It Happens.) Also, to be clear, the Z10 drowned in pseudo-journalism everywhere. That’s my point: why have a public broadcaster if it duplicates everybody else’s obsessions? Nor do I want to romanticize the old CBC news. It was pompous and often misleading. But at least it distorted stories I cared about.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk rightly recognizes the significance of Jack Mintz' report on Saskatchewan's incoherent potash royalty structure.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Alison highlights the attempts of Sun TV to rally the most extreme reactionary movements in the country behind its bid for mandatory carriage. And the question of whether we want to publicly sanction a network beholden to such interest groups would seem to answer whether the application is justified.

- Paul Krugman comments that the Republicans' attacks on disabled workers are both thoroughly contrary to any sense of fairness, and utterly useless in practice:

(W)hen Reagan ranted about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, he was inventing a fake problem — but his rant resonated with angry white voters, who understood perfectly well who Reagan was targeting. But Americans on disability as moochers? That isn’t, as far as I can tell, an especially nonwhite group — and it’s a group that is surely as likely to elicit sympathy as disdain. There’s just no way it can serve the kind of political purpose the old welfare-kicking rhetoric used to perform.
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The point, I think, is that right-wing intellectuals and politicians live in a bubble in which denunciations of those bums on disability and those greedy children getting free health care are greeted with shouts of approval — but now have to deal with a country where the same remarks come across as greedy and heartless (because they are).

- Justin Ling spins a rollicking yarn about Justin Trudeau's whiplash-inducing reversals on federalism.

- Nick Cohen notes that even the U.K.'s Conservatives are starting to come to terms with the failins of doctrinaire free-market dogma. And Seth Ackerman offers an interesting discussion as to how the benefits of markets can be decoupled from the tendency toward corporatism found in our current version:

What is needed is a structure that allows autonomous firms to produce and trade goods for the market, aiming to generate a surplus of output over input — while keeping those firms public and preventing their surplus from being appropriated by a narrow class of capitalists. Under this type of system, workers can assume any degree of control they like over the management of their firms, and any “profits” can be socialized– that is, they can truly function as a signal, rather than as a motive force. But the precondition of such a system is the socialization of the means of production — structured in a way that preserves the existence of a capital market. How can all this be done?

Start with the basics. Private control over society’s productive infrastructure is ultimately a financial phenomenon. It is by financing the means of production that capitalists exercise control, as a class or as individuals. What’s needed, then, is a socialization of finance  — that is, a system of common, collective financing of the means of production and credit.
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At the end of the process, firms no longer have individual owners who seek to maximize profits. Instead, they are owned by society as a whole, along with any surplus (“profits”) they might generate. Since firms still buy and sell in the market, they can still generate a surplus (or deficit) that can be used to judge their efficacy. But no individual owner actually pockets these surpluses, meaning that no one has any particular interest in perpetuating or exploiting the profit-driven mis-valuation of goods that is endemic under capitalism. The “social democratic solution” that was once a contradiction – selectively frustrating the profit motive to uphold the common good, while systematically relying on it as the engine of the system – can now be reconciled.

To the same end, the accrual of interest to individuals’ bank deposits can be capped at a certain threshold of wealth, and beyond that level it could be limited to simply compensate for inflation. (Or the social surplus could be divided up equally among everyone and just paid out as a social dividend.) This would yield not exactly the euthanasia of the rentier, but of the rentier “interest” in society. And while individuals could still be free to start businesses, once their firms reached a certain size, age and importance, they would have to “go public”: to be sold by their owners into the socialized capital market.
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But the basic point is clear enough: since these firms buy and sell in the market, their performance can be rationally judged. A firm could be controlled entirely by its workers, in which case they could simply collect its entire net income, after paying for the use of the capital. Or it could be “owned” by an entity in the socialized capital market, with a management selected by that entity and a strong system of worker co-determination to counterbalance it within the firm. Those managers and “owners” could be evaluated on the relative returns the firm generates, but they would have no private property rights over the absolute mass of profits. If expectations of future performance needed to be “objectively” judged in some way, that is something the socialized capital markets could do.

Such a program does not amount a utopia; it does not proclaim Year Zero or treat society as a blank slate. What it tries to do is sketch a rational economic mechanism that denies the pursuit of profit priority over the fulfillment of human needs.

- Which leads nicely to Simon Enoch's analysis as to how the Sask Party is following a traditional right-wing model in trying to undermine the successful publicly-owned institutions we already enjoy in Saskatchewan.

- Finally, Josh Eidelson discusses the "alt-labor" movement seeking to improve the lot of workers through means other than traditional certification.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Winslow Wheeler compares the NDP's F-35 hearings to politics on the opposite side of the U.S. border:

The differences between Canadian politicians and members of Congress are utterly stunning. Unlike here, oversight in the Canadian Parliament is alive and well. In Canada, I found two political behaviors unheard of in the United States: Opposition politicians actually try to understand the issue they are talking about, and they take offense at being lied to.

My re-orientation started when, lo and behold, without giving long, windy, and poorly informed opening statements, the parliamentarians asked questions directly relevant to my testimony about the cost to buy and operate the Canadian version of the F-35. They were not reading off or cribbing from memos but were reacting to what I had said; we had an actual discussion, one member at a time. They probed my estimate of the potential $200 million-per-aircraft cost -- not the $75 million Canada's Department of National Defense (DND) had been advertising. They also poked at my prediction that the cost to operate the F-35, after purchase, would be at least three times DND's original estimate.

The members' questions were constructed by themselves on the spot and reflected that several of them had done their homework. For example, Matthew Kellway of Ontario had clearly read and understood an article in Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute's journal, written by the U.S. chief of naval operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, questioning whether radar-evading "stealth" technology was viable against current and future countermeasures -- a key question in Canada, where "stealth" dominates the debate about the F-35 almost as much as cost.

Most remarkable was their predisposition to listen, integrate the new information they heard, synthesize it to formulate a new understanding, and then ask more questions. 

 - But it's worth noting that Wheeler may have overgeneralized in linking his positive impression to Canadian politicians generally - as Allan Gregg points out that the Cons are doing their utmost to drain Canadian politics of evidence and critical thought:

I have spent my entire professional life as a researcher, dedicated to understanding the relationship between cause and effect. And I have to tell you, I’ve begun to see some troubling trends. It seems as though our government’s use of evidence and facts as the bases of policy is declining, and in their place, dogma, whim and political expediency are on the rise. And even more troubling …. Canadians seem to be buying it.
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The thing that is disconcerting and unsettling about all this is not just the substance of these Bills, but why a government would want to disguise that substance. Maybe dismantling the Wheat Board; or pre-emptively squashing collective bargaining; or sending more potheads to jail is a good thing. But before we make those decisions, let’s look at all the facts; have a fulsome and rational debate; and make a reasoned decision of what is in the best interests of all the parties involved. For voters to determine whether these are measures they support or oppose requires that they know what is at stake and what the government is actually doing. Moreover, for the rule of law to work, the public must have respect for the law. By obfuscating the true purpose of laws under the gobbledy-gook of double speak, governments are admitting that their intentions probably lack both support and respect. Again, the lesson here is Orwellian … in the same way that reason requires consciousness, tyranny demands ignorance.

 Raising this is not a question of right versus left. It is rather- in the words of Al Gore – a question of right versus wrong. And also make no mistake that this is not simply an attack on, or a claim that the sole practitioner of masking intent is The Harper Government. Jean Charest, introduced Bill 78 as “An Act to Enable Students to Receive Instruction from the Post Secondary Education They Attend”. Under some fairly benign circumstances, it basically bans the freedom of assembly. And under the pretext of another perpetual war – the so-called War on Terrorism – the President of the United States not only routinely orders the execution of foreign nationals, on foreign soil, without any semblance of due process whatsoever, but boasts that this as one of the greatest accomplishments of his Presidency. And the American media routinely applauds him for it. Now I know it’s not comfortable to offer suspected terrorists due process, but isn’t this exactly the kind of behaviour Orwell was warning us about?
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While the circumstance in Canada 2012 is obviously nowhere near as dystopian as what Orwell depicts in 1984, I really do think that there are some unsettling parallels going on here that we ignore at our peril. I also think it’s time to gather the facts….and fight back.

- Fortunately, Paul Wells for one is meeting the Cons' latest line of echo-chamber talking points with due mockery.

- Meanwhile, Stephen Maher reports that the Cons' illegal election tactics in Guelph may now be under investigation by the CRTC along with Elections Canada. And Glen McGregor notes that the Con staffer initially thrown under the bus seems to have had little to do with Robocon (even as his documented track record of party-sanctioned attempted vote suppression makes him a less-than-sympathetic scapegoat).

- Finally, John Dunbar offers his own broadly representational visualization of Enbridge's plans for Douglas Channel - featuring a supertanker in the middle of an island 500 metres above sea level.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Joe Stiglitz discusses the link between increased inequality and the U.S.' economic frailty:

Any solution to today's problems requires addressing the economy's underlying weakness: a deficiency in aggregate demand. Firms won't invest if there is no demand for their products. And one of the key reasons for lack of demand is America's level of inequality — the highest in the advanced countries.

Because those at the top spend a much smaller portion of their income than those in the bottom and middle, when money moves from the bottom and middle to the top (as has been happening in America in the last dozen years), demand drops. The best way to promote employment today and sustained economic growth for the future, therefore, is to focus on the underlying problem of inequality. And this better economic performance in turn will generate more tax revenue, improving the country's fiscal position.
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Countries with high inequality tend to underinvest in their collective well-being, spending too little on such things as education, technology and infrastructure. The wealthy don't need public schools and parks. That's another reason economies with high inequality grow more slowly. Indeed, the United States has grown much more slowly since the 1980s, while inequality has been growing more rapidly than it did in the decades after World War II, when the country grew together.

Public investments are of particular importance today; they increase demand in the short run and productivity in the medium to long term. Increasing public investment would help make up for continued weakness in the private sector. Investments in training for new jobs could facilitate the economy's structural transformation, helping it move from sectors with declining employment (like manufacturing) to more dynamic sectors. Strengthening education would help restore the American dream and help make the country once again a land of opportunity where the talents of our young people are fully utilized.

The right says that we can achieve greater equality only by belt-tightening. But that vision would result in a slowdown of the economy from which all would suffer. Because so much of America's inequality arises from rent-seeking and other activities that distort the economy, curtailing inequality would actually strengthen the economy. Investing public money in the collective good rather than allowing it to be captured by rent-seekers would enhance growth at the same time it reduced inequality.

- Meanwhile, Dan Leger highlights the desperate need to properly regulate the financial system:

Carney has the option of using his bully pulpit to call for sweeping change in financial regulations. No doubt any attempt at major reform will present enormous political complications because of the global nature of banking. But it must be tackled.

If it isn’t, we’ll just have repeats of the crises now dragging down the world economy.

That’s why this has to go beyond the central bankers and academics and into the political realm. Governments have to put the financiers on account and they have to hit wrongdoers where it hurts, in their fortunes and their freedom.

Beyond that, states that benefit from the global commerce in money, including Canada, must fix what’s wrong. Carney and his peers have that challenge: to lead change that will actually make a difference in the tainted world of global money.

- Karen Howlett and Bill Curry report on a rare example of public outcry changing a politician's mind, as Christy Clark has been forced to stop pushing the Gateway pipeline on a province which is broadly opposed to the risks involved.

- That said, it remains to be seen whether a similar effort can come together in a short time frame in advance of today's Regina City Council meeting. But recent letters to the editor from Mark Cote and Marc Spooner are worth a read.

- Finally, there's a bit of good news on the accuracy-of-news front, as the CRTC has backed off plans to stop regulating the deliberate broadcasting of false news.

Sunday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your long weekend reading.

- Bruce Johnstone comments on the real source of Saskatchewan's relative economic success over the past few years - and not surprisingly, it has nothing at all to do with the Sask Party government that's so desperate to take credit:

Doug Elliott, publisher of Sask Trends Monitor, the statistical monthly newsletter, noted last year that the province's real economic growth (accounting for inflation) averaged a tepid 1.1 per cent during the previous five years, including two years (2005 and 2009) of economic contractions.

And Elliott observed that most of what was deemed to be an economic boom (such as the four-per-cent plus growth in 2008) was largely due to price increases for our resource commodities.

"There was no 'economic boom' in real GDP, the statistic used by most economists to measure economic activity. The growth in 2007 and 2008 was purely price-related," Elliott said in his October 2010 report.
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(T)he very resources and commodities that drive our economy - oil and gas, potash and uranium, grains and oilseeds - tend to fluctuate in price. As a result, our economic growth is likely to be bumpy and unpredictable, rather than slow and steady, like larger, more diversified economies.

That's nothing to be ashamed of.

But let's not jump to conclusions about how we came to enjoy such impressive economic growth as we've seen in the past couple of years.

Neither should we be under any illusions about how permanent and predictable our economy has become either.

Which, in addition to calling into question the Sask Party's attempt to claim credit for any development, would seem like a rather compelling case to make sure that short-term price boosts turn into longer-term development through a Bright Futures Fund.

- Via Aaron Wherry, the Literary Review of Canada publishes Jack Layton's take on the place of idealism in politics:

The idealist current holds that human society has the potential to achieve liberty when people work together to form a society in which equality means more than negative liberty, the absolute and protected right to run races against each other to determine winners. Idealists imagine a positive liberty that enables us to build together toward common objectives that fulfill and even surpass our individual goals.

In Canada and in other “developed” democracies, we have seen positive understandings of social institutions pushed aside in recent decades. Suspicion has been cultivated of anything done by “government” …

Canadians have not been quite so quick to jump to these absolute positions, however … When asked what they value most about their country, many Canadians will cite the fundamentals of our public healthcare system, even as they underline certain shortcomings. A collective project, caring for one another irrespective of financial means or resources, is seen as a fundamental, a defining characteristic, a source of quiet pride and a good reason to stay at home. Canada’s healthcare system is, in many ways, an incarnation of the positive perspective on freedom—the power to work together, through our democratic institutions, to build the kind of community in which we want to live.

In response to the challenges we face, we need to work together to build a Canada in which government is the vehicle for our collective efforts to make the better world we all hope to leave to future generations. Canadian Idealists can help guide our thinking.

- Meanwhile, Barrie McKenna questions the mindset that's limited the place of idealism for far too longer:

(T)hree decades of...supply-side policies have produced the same economic problems they were supposed to fix, including stagnant growth, high unemployment, deflationary pressures and piles of public sector debt, according to Mr. Curtis, a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont., and Mr. Ciuriak, former deputy chief economist at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

And now with the world awash in goods people can’t afford, the solution of choice in many countries is to spur even more production and to slash transfers to debt-burdened families.

There’s an inherent contradiction in the model. Those policies are causing household incomes to fall, making consumers less able to buy things, and driving inflation lower. The recent sharp plunge in the prices of oil, wheat, copper and other vital commodities suggests that’s exactly what’s happening.

Second-guessing supply-side economics is more than an academic exercise. Some of the prescriptions now on the table to get the world out of this mess may actually be hastening another recession.
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Accepted beliefs can, and do, change. Today’s orthodoxy can become tomorrow’s heresy.

It’s certainly worth asking the right questions so we avoid repeating the same mistakes.

- Finally, Michael Geist points out that consumers' interests are noticeably lacking in the CRTC's consultation report on Internet video services.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading...

- While I agree with Murray Dobbin's latest to a point, I'd think it's worth clarifying exactly what kind of fight we can and should expect from the NDP over the next four years.

To the extent one considers a "culture war" to mostly involve the U.S. issues normally linked to the term (abortion, gay rights, separation of church and state, etc.), I'd think the deciding factor in the NDP's strategy will be the Cons' actions. And while any attempt at backsliding in those areas needs to be met with a furious response, I wouldn't see the NDP getting any further than the Libs if it tries to focus on them at the expense of what's being discussed by the Cons and the media.

Which means that for the sake of clarity, I'd think the better term for the NDP's ideal plan is a "values war" - consisting of a clear clash of ideas including, but not limited to, what's normally considered to be cultural conflict. And I'll certainly agree with Dobbin that the measure of the NDP's success will be its ability to build a movement to overcome the one the Cons have developed on their side of the spectrum.

- Will Verboven highlights some of the extra costs of tearing down the Canadian Wheat Board:

The privatization of the Australian Wheat Board has set a bad precedent of what might happen once monopoly powers are removed. That marketing entity couldn't compete, was subsequently sold to private companies and has disappeared. Most anticipate a similar fate will face the CWB once its monopoly powers are removed.

Time will tell if eliminating the CWB monopoly will put an extra dollar in a grain grower's pocket. Those located far from the U.S. border and seaports will find their grain shipping costs dramatically increased. And as with so many surplus farm commodities, producers may well find themselves competing for the lowest price. At least the CWB was able to mitigate and average out that all too usual practice.

The surefire loser in this change will be the taxpayer. When the U.S. launches its inevitable trade actions against an anticipated flood of Canadian grain into American border grain elevators, it will be the Canadian government that will have to pay the bill to fight those actions, not the diminished CWB.

The CWB also carries liabilities of millions on past sales that went bad, and of course, it carries employee pension and severance liabilities that could exceed $100 million. The government may try to prop up a new CWB to avoid facing those realities, but somehow you just know the taxpayer will be on the hook. I guess for a few, it's a small price to pay for one of the founding ideological goals of the Reform and Conservative parties.

- Michael Geist continues his coverage of the CRTC's net neutrality/UBB hearings with this observation:

While the arguments about network congestion from dominant providers such as Bell remained much the same, as the week wore on it appeared the commission was beginning to realize that congestion claims may be overstated and being used to mask fears of competition from the independent ISPs.
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The CRTC commissioners appear to have recognized that proposals based on limiting the volume of Internet use are not only bad policy — discouraging Internet use benefits no one — but are ineffective in dealing with network congestion. The reason is that the amount of data consumed has very little to do with whether the network is congested.

Consider a four-lane highway that can comfortably accommodate 24,000 vehicles per day. If the vehicles are spread evenly at 1,000 per hour throughout the day, there is no traffic congestion. But if 20,000 of the vehicles attempt to use the highway over a four-hour period, the highway becomes very congested during that time frame. The aggregate volume of traffic may be the same, yet the congestion implications are very different.

The same is true of networks, which can be used to capacity without congestion concerns.

It is only when there is simultaneous demand — called peak periods — that there is the prospect of congestion and the need to augment the network. Pricing to peak periods is precisely what the independent ISPs have proposed, noting that volume pricing hurts their competitive flexibility and does little to address congestion.

After years of debate, that message may finally have resonated. In her questioning of Bell, CRTC Commissioner Candice Molnar said, “We all, I think, can hopefully agree that there is no marginal cost to using the network when you are not causing augmentation.”

- Finally, Erin picks up on the fact that the TILMA which the Wall government promised not to sign is has been entirely rolled into Wall's WEPA.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Christopher Michael points out the real problem underlying the News of the World's scandalous demise:

The Sun is either clairvoyant at predicting the results of British elections, or instrumental in determining them. It has supported the winning side ever since Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979. Politicians quickly internalized the idea that you needed Mr. Murdoch on side to win, and lived in fear that The Sun would unleash its worst. Tony Blair quietly flew to Australia in 1995 to court him. The morning after Mr. Cameron became Prime Minster, Mr. Murdoch was seen leaving 10 Downing St. by the back door; former NOTW editor Andy Coulson (arrested Friday) was already on board as Mr. Cameron’s head of PR. Mrs. Thatcher spent Christmases with Mr. Murdoch, yet failed to mention him in her autobiography. As Marina Hyde wrote in the Guardian, “Like Voldemort, he must not be named.”

After The Sun helped sweep Mr. Blair to power in 1997, the Labour PM loosened the UK’s restrictions on foreign media ownership. Indeed, Mr. Murdoch’s shuttering of NOTW was likely calculated to smooth the way for his purchase of a majority stake in the huge British satellite broadcaster BSkyB, which would centralize even more media power in his hands.

Thanks to the scandal, the BSkyB deal may no longer happen. If so, we should all be grateful. Mr. Murdoch’s suffocating influence in Britain has been grossly undemocratic, and deserves to be punctured. From this strange and lurid story of a great democracy brought temporarily low, Canadians can learn a powerful lesson: Keep media ownership as diffusely concentrated as possible, and never be afraid to speak anyone’s name.

- Meanwhile, the current public debate over the ownership and regulation of vital communication tools looks to be getting more interesting by the day, as the CP and Michael Geist summarize the day's CRTC Internet regulation proceedings.

- Murray Mandryk is the latest to point out that the track Saskatchewan is on seems to be leaving mere workers behind while having no particular direction for the future:

If we are "on track", then we also are spinning our wheels in a bit of a rut. And it comes at a time when higher oil prices suggest we should be less vulnerable to such economic problems. After all, Alberta is recovering as well. It's also important to note that some of the biggest losses in June were in construction (3,000 jobs), where Premier Brad Wall's government changed labour legislation last year under the notion we needed more flexibility to meet the boom.

If Saskatchewan is "on track" shouldn't we be seeing signs our economy is less vulnerable to the whims of the resource sector? Shouldn't we be seeing more signs of economic transformation? And with a looming debt default crisis in the U.S. threatening to send the world economy into another recession, how stable is our resource-based economy?

- Finally, Angus Reid provides the latest edition of "Stephen Harper has turned Canada into a more Conservative country!!!" by pointing out that public attitudes toward the Senate are moving toward both abolition over election, and holding a referendum rather than having Harper alone dictate the future of the Senate. [Update: Apparently the Globe and Mail's snark detector is broken.]

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Kai Nagata's post on why he quit his job as a reporter is well worth a read in full. But let's particularly note his observations which may apply just as much to many other jobs as to positions in the media (even if the restrictions on public speech likely aren't spelled out as clearly):

I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo. And if I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.

- Erika Shaker points out how a lack of precision in defining the middle class has eased the way for policies which promote inequality at the expense of people who likely self-identify with the term:

The distribution of wealth has shifted, but the self-identification as middle class has not; if anything, identification of and with the middle class has expanded to include more people than ever. And rather than political leaders addressing the vast disparities across the economic spectrum, we hear how their policies will benefit the “middle class” when even a cursory analysis reveals the real beneficiaries of many of these policies are those with much higher incomes (the very upper crust of the middle, so to speak).

So, for example, we’re told the middle class will be the beneficiary of income splitting, when they really mean families (with kids) making over $125,000 a year—the richest 20%–who still self-identify as middle class.

In spite of the “middle class” framing, tax policies are being used to help enrich the already most affluent. Meanwhile, everyone else labouring under the false impression that they are part of the middle class that politicians are talking about is left wondering why at the end of the day the so-called middle class-friendly numbers don’t seem to add up for the people who need the most help.

- Michael Geist highlights the CRTC's continued ineffectiveness in enforcing the principle of net neutrality:

The Commission unveiled its Internet traffic management practices in October 2009, establishing enforceable guidelines touted as the world’s first net neutrality regulations. Where a consumer complains, Internet providers are required to describe their practices, demonstrate their necessity, and establish that they discriminate as little as possible. Targeting specific applications or protocols may warrant investigation and slowing down time-sensitive traffic likely violates current Canadian law.

While there was a lot to like about the CRTC approach, the immediate concern was absence of an enforcement mechanism. Much of the responsibility for gathering evidence and launching complaints was left to individual Canadians who typically lack the expertise to do so. Nearly two years later, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) posts an investigation into the system that reveals those concerns were well-founded.

Although the CRTC has not publicly disclosed details on net neutrality complaints and the resulting investigations, I recently filed an Access to Information request to learn more about what has been taking place behind the scenes. A review of hundreds of pages of documents discloses that virtually all major Canadian ISPs have been the target of complaints, but there have been few, if any, consequences arising from the complaints process. In fact, the CRTC has frequently dismissed complaints as being outside of the scope of the policy, lacking in evidence, or sided with Internet provider practices.

- Finally, Cracked's article on the most disturbing examples of corporate capture is well worth a read.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- Great (and true!) news from the CRTC:

CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein says the commission tried to stall the amendment to its prohibition on false and misleading news for 10 years, but eventually gave into pressure from the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations when it proposed its amendments in January.

But now that the regulations committee has agreed to no longer pursue the issue, the chair says the CRTC will drop it.

“We never wanted to touch this thing. We put it forward because we were ordered to do it. We did what we thought would be a workable compromise,” von Finckenstein said in brief interview Friday at the Prime Time conference in Ottawa, organized by the Canadian Media Production Association.

“I was perfectly happy with what it was before, and I’m sure at the next commission meeting, we will withdraw this attempt at rewriting.”

- The Globe and Mail takes up the idea of birth bonds in contrast to the Cons' desire to spend billions on prisons. And it's hard to imagine that many Canadians would choose the Cons' side given the choice:

Assuming Canada had extra billions in a time of large deficits, consider the birth bond – a government investment to be made each time a child is born. The investment would be held until the child turns, say, 18, and then made available for postsecondary education or an apprenticeship program. Canada has 370,000 births a year. How much could it afford to put into an ambitious investment for each newborn, instead of into jail expansion?
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If Mr. Page is right, Canada could seed an education account for each newborn with $13,783. Outlandish? Maybe, but it makes more sense than prison expansion, if the government is intent on spending an extra $5-billion. Canada wouldn’t need a birth bond, anyway; net tuition paid by all students is $3.5-billion a year. Instead of Truth in Sentencing, the country could afford Free in University, with change left over.

Let’s assume, for the moment, Mr. Page is wildly out of touch, as Ottawa claims. The federal government’s published budget estimates for federal corrections show an annual hike of $861-million – 36 per cent – by 2012-13 (compared with 2009-10). Now assume, conservatively, that the provincial costs rise by the same amount as a result of the federal crime bills. For that $1.722-billion extra a year, what could Canada do that is forward-looking, and has a long-term economic payoff?

It could pour resources into research. Currently, the government spends about $3-billion on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Canada could take the $1.08-billion given to the CIHR each year and double it, and still have $700-million to spend on an enormous expansion of subsidies for master’s and PhD students.

- I'm sure we can all agree the general public is too jaded about politics to think that forgery or deception matter. Right? RIGHT?

- But at least some people do still admire Bev Oda. Take for example Tabatha Southey:

Sure, some of us were, and I imagine still are, capable of changing a C to a C+, but very few of us are “courageous” enough to change a C into a “NOT a C.” This is essentially what Ms. Oda did when she (or so she now claims) arranged for a recommendation prepared and signed by the Canadian International Development Agency to be altered to state that CIDA did “NOT” recommend that funding for the church-based foreign-aid organization Kairos be continued, when in fact continuing funding is exactly what CIDA did recommend.

This wasn't a matter of changing $7-million to $3.7-million in funding. Any of us could've done that. This was no such small feat. Fraudsters, we've found our saint.

Not only did Ms. Oda give a false impression regarding what CIDA had recommended, she oversaw the alteration of a document already signed by two signatories and possibly herself so that it would support her claim, if and when the document were ever to be examined by complete and utter morons.

On balancing interests

As promised, let's follow up on the CRTC's push for false news with a brief look at some of the cases that need to be taken into account in determining what limits can properly be applied to freedom of speech.

Most of the discussion has revolved around R v. Zundel, in which the Supreme Court of Canada struck down a Criminal Code offence against spreading false news. But that decision is rife with points of obvious distinction: the statutory provision couldn't be justified based on even remotely modern rationales since it had been passed to protect nobles of the realm from slander by commoners, to the point where the Court majority couldn't find any valid public policy rationale for the prohibition; it was found to be overbroad in extending to any "statement, tale or news"; and it involved the "most draconian of sanctions" (i.e. criminal prosecution for an indictable offence) against an individual offender.

In contrast, none of those considerations applies to the CRTC's standards for false news. So the more relevant case looks to me to be Thomson Newspapers Co. v. Canada (Attorney General), which led to a far more balanced analysis on the question of whether the publication of polling results could be banned in the final days of a federal election campaign. The Supreme Court majority did strike down the law in question, but only based on a lack of minimal impairment after concluding that there was a legitimate objective involved in ensuring that some meaningful opportunity existed to challenge the accuracy of a poll. Which signals that there can be a legitimate role for the government to play in preventing some types of information from going unchallenged where it might unduly affect an election.

Now, I'd think there's some need to expand that analysis to apply to the wider public debate - as would be the case in discussing false news in general rather than a specific type of data at a specific time.

But that can be balanced against the fact that the CRTC's rules apply only to broadcasters. That means that they only affect the limited range of actors who wield disproportionate power to choose what content will be presented to Canadian viewers. And the ultimate sanction for a violation of the public's trust reposed in a broadcaster is merely a loss of a privilege (the license that allows for more direct access to viewers than would be available otherwise), rather than a limit on any individual's freedom of speech.

What about the argument that we should rely on the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council rather than providing for any role by a government regulator?

To start with, I'd note the obvious public vs. private bias involved in assuming that there's no problem in limiting speech as long as it's carried out by a private actor. But more importantly, the CBSC is itself made up of exactly the parties who have at least a theoretical interest in expanding their ability to distort the public debate on issues which affect them and their advertisers.

That makes for exactly the type of situation where at least some backstop is needed - both to keep the CBSC focused on the interests of the public rather than those of its members, and to ensure that possible sanctions are significant enough to keep individual broadcasters honest. (After all, a broadcaster which knows that it can air the Liberals Engage in Treasonous Sharia Bestiality Hour for the duration of an election campaign while facing no sanctions other than a possible obligation to issue a retraction after it's too late isn't going to be the least bit deterred - while the potential loss of a license figures to do far more to ensure at least some standard of reality.)

So the big questions to me look to be: should we refuse to acknowledge any imbalance between broadcasters and their possible subjects in their ability to influence the public? And should we trust private parties to protect the public interest in reality-based broadcasting with no regulatory backstop except in cases of threats to safety?

While there's room for debate on both points (and a revised standard of knowing falsehood may make sense), the ultimate answers figure to be "no" and "no". And so I'll stick with the view that it's worth fighting for some public protection of truth in broadcasting.

Update: It looks like Avaaz covered most of the above and more in its submission to the CRTC (warning: PDF). h/t to Dr. Dawg.

On fixed outcomes

The CRTC's move to enable the dissemination of false news leads to a major public outcry:

Canada’s broadcasting regulator has received more than 3,000 responses from the public about its plan to change a regulation that prohibits the dissemination of false or misleading news, most of them passionately opposing the proposal.

The comments are posted on the website of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

So how do the Libs respond to the public's demand to keep some semblance of truth in broadcasting?

Despite the outcry, the joint committee for the scrutiny of regulations is unlikely to back down, said Liberal MP Derek Lee, a long-time committee member.

“The fact that a lot of Canadians are concerned about this means we will have to handle it carefully at committee. We represent them,” Mr. Lee said in a telephone interview Thursday.

“But our main function is to assure legal compliance of all government regulations. I think we will simply proceed with the files as they are, put on the record our response, and acknowledge the desire of the public to do everything we can to assure truth in broadcasting.…”

So for those who made a submission in response to the push for false news, rest assured that the Libs - who figure to hold the median vote on any committee decision - plan to proceed no matter what you say. (Though they will "acknowledge" your interest in the truth before declaring it inconsequential.)

And next time, the media will be free to report that all good Canadians agree with them - no matter what the submissions to the CRTC actually say.

The broader truth

Yes, it's utterly asinine for David Akin to complain that keeping the law on truth in broadcasting as it currently stands will result in the sudden emergence of "truth squads". But let's put that non sequitur aside and take a look at what's even more obviously wrong with Akin's take on the wider media picture.

To the extent one wants to assume that any standard requiring truth in broadcasting will inevitably lead to crackdowns on the media, the change Akin is defending doesn't help matters in the slightest. After all, a broadcaster is still subject to sanction if it broadcasts false news "that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public". But apparently Akin is entirely fine with "truth and safety squads", so long as the media can lie without consequence when nobody is arguing that lives are at stake.

But that presents even more serious problems. I don't see much room for doubt that Akin's example of a crackdown in Egypt is exactly the type of situation where a controlling government would waste no time in shutting down dissent based on the public safety excuse that the Cons have so readily abused in other contexts.

So the question isn't whether the CRTC should be policing truth to some extent, as Akin is defending a change which keeps that role in place. Instead, the question is whether the CRTC should try to hold broadcasters to a standard of reasonable correspondence with reality at all times, or whether it should step in only in exactly the situations where state power is most likely to be misused. And the answer from Akin and the rest of the Sun Media Party suggests not only that they plan to play fast and loose with the facts under normal circumstances, but also that they see no problem with suppressing any notion of free speech when it matters most.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Pogge rightly calls out the "supportive stakeholders" who are eagerly giving up any credibility in order to serve as spokesflacks for the Harper Cons:

At least three major business organizations -- the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and the Canadian Trucking Alliance -- quickly issued statements praising the framework agreement Friday.

So these three groups aren't just self-interested lobby groups. They're quite happy to collude with the Conservatives to keep secrets from us. That pretty much confirms their willingness to be dishonest in their dealings with the Canadian public and eliminates any credibility they may have left. Don't be surprised to see me link back to this post any time that John Manley of the CCCE or Perrin Beatty of the Chamber of Commerce open their mouths in public. I'll assume from now on that any public statements they make are part of another conspiracy to deceive us.

- For all the justified criticisms of the Cons' plan to axe per-vote party funding, I don't see much reason to think Nik Nanos is right in theorizing that the result would be a two-party system. Instead, based on the historical information which Alice has already assembled, the main effect would look to be a very slight expansion of all of the current gaps between the national federal parties - which is much of the reason why I don't see it making sense for any of the opposition parties to go along with the plan unless it's more focused on fighting off the parties in the rear-view mirror than trying to advance its standing.

- Shorter Sun editorial: we must prove our independence from the U.S. by taking its orders to buy F-35s!

- Though in fairness, the Cons' stubbornness is at least resulting in some winners in Canada.

- Finally, David Beers points out one of the largest problems with the current usage-based billing debate:

This week, we heard small Internet service providers say that what the big telecoms want to charge for “extra” gigabytes used is 10, even 100 times more than the actual cost. Big telecoms also have other motivations to discourage you from downloading Netflix – by charging a lot, they can then offer a discount on their own movie download products. Or nudge you back to their broadcast television properties.

So how much is too much to charge? Sadly, as we’ve learned, the CRTC itself can only base its decisions on cost estimates provided by the big telecoms, because there is so little independent auditing in this area. We won’t know until what a Globe and Mail editorial called the “black box” of Internet infrastructure costs is opened to public view. Then maybe we’ll know why South Koreans pay a fraction of the cost for 10 times the bandwidth we get here.
...
The very way in which we address these issues needs profound reform, to be opened to the light of debate and scrutiny. Until then, the regulators of Canada’s digital future have lost the public trust.

Burning question

David Akin and Brian Lilley are leading the Sun Media Party's attacks on the NDP for suggesting that truth in broadcasting might matter.

But since they're the ones defending a change to the status quo, I'd think the onus is on them to let us know why. So exactly what falsehoods do they want to broadcast under the new rules that they can't get away with now?

On responsibilities

Iain Marlow comes close to the point when it comes to usage based billing. But let's push forward to a full recognition of what we should expect when the CRTC sets its policies:

Lawrence Surtees, the lead telecom analyst at research firm IDC Canada, points out that the cost to transport each byte is constantly falling – especially on fibre cables, buried in bundles of multiple strands. Of the CRTC’s average monthly download rate, which companies argue could strain their networks, Mr. Surtees says, “That’s nothing; one fibre strand can carry more than that per second.”

And this is where the question of Internet metering hits a logical brick wall that most people tend to forget. Internet service providers are for-profit, publicly traded companies with responsibilities to their shareholders. CEOs of the country’s phone and cable companies would be fired if they didn’t capitalize on exploding bandwidth usage. Not forcing metered use on their small rivals, something they already do on their own customers, would inevitably hemorrhage customers to their rivals.

Even as Mr. von Finckenstein said he would review their decision, he stood by the idea of a metered Internet. “Usage-based billing is a legitimate principle for pricing Internet services,” he told the MPs. “We are convinced that Internet services are no different than other public utilities.”

But unlike gas and electricity, which are consumed and disappear, the amount of bandwidth being used simply swells and contracts in the carriers’ pipes. The cost to transport a gigabyte can be lower than a penny, though Bell charges between $1.50 to $2.50 for each gigabyte you go over your plan – a fee that varies not by time of day, but whether you are in Ontario or Quebec.

Of course, it's absolutely true that the biggest ISP's responsibility is to try to wring every dollar they can out of their networks, even if it means charging completely disproportionate rates to their customers and third-party providers alike.

But it's equally true - and equally important to remember - that it's the job of the CRTC to regulate those same ISPs in the public interest, rather than prioritizing the freedom of big telecoms to wring every cent they can out of their dominant position. And the current outcry over UBB looks to be providing exactly the type of reminder needed to get our public institutions back to that task.

On implied standards

Sure, the Cons' appointment of a former ADQ candidate with links to Stephen Harper's chief spokesman as vice-chairman of broadcasting at the CRTC is utterly inexplicable based on the posted job description. But can't we agree that the hiring makes a lot more sense once the implied "doing Harper's bidding" part of any federal job description is taken into account?

Sunday Morning Links

Content goes here.

- 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.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday.

- Pogge rightly notes that the cover-up coalition of the Cons, Libs and Bloc has successfully managed to ensure that the Afghanistan documents ordered to be produced by Parliament remain safely buried - and points out whose position is looking more and more astute as a result:

May I once again commend Jack Layton and the New Democrats for walking away from this bit of political theatre. After the supposedly historic ruling by the Speaker in support of parliamentary supremacy, the Libs and the Bloc have joined with the Conservatives in turning the whole thing into a farce.

- Abacus' latest message poll looks to provide yet more evidence that the Cons' party line is sounding less and less plausible among the general public.

- Presumably the Cons' MPs are under even an even tighter muzzle than usual (to the extent that's possible). But if a story is going to be based on nothing but finding "signs of rattled nerves" in the absence of any evidence, would it really be that tough to get somebody to talk about defending a vulnerable Con seat as well rather than referring only to opposition parties?

- Finally, the Cons' decision to respond to public pressure by declaring that the CRTC's decision to allow large ISPs to impose usage-based billing on their competitors will be overturned is undoubtedly for the best. But before the issue fades away, it's well worth noting the hilarity in seeing supposed free marketeers like the National Post editorial board claim without a trace of irony that the fact that large companies have traditionally billed in a certain way should serve as evidence that no other options should be available.

[Edit: fixed wording.]