Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Michaeleen Doucleff offers an FAQ on the causes and consequences of long COVID in its various forms. Guy Quenneville reports on the need for COVID cases to keep declining just to get Saskatchewan's health care system back to its already-precarious state from the summer. And CBC News reports on the Moe government's choice to block SGI from protecting its workers and customers with a mask mandate.  

- Katherine Scott offers some lessons in income security from the pandemic, while Daphne Bramham laments that we don't seem to be learning anything about disaster prevention or response despite the constant opportunities to do so. And Gregory Beatty discusses how both low-income Saskatchewan residents and community organizations are paying the price for the Moe government's decision to deprive people of any housing security. 

- Marc Lee takes a look at what the Libs have promised on the housing front - and how their choice in which options to pursue may make all the difference between partially relieving the housing crisis and exacerbating it. And Farrah Merali points out the growing share of Ontario's homes held by investors rather than residents who are making living unaffordable for the province's citizens. 

- James Rowe, Jessica Dempsey and James Mager discuss how pension funds are being hijacked by oil lobbyists and petropoliticians to force continued production in a dying industry. 

- Finally, Ken Boessenkool and Mike Moffatt write that the proper response to inflation driven largely by supply bottlenecks is to communicate why an austerity playbook will do nothing to help. And Faiz Shakir highlights how the one source of inflation which could be controlled through public policy is corporate profiteering.  

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Jerusalem Demsas discusses the strong popular support for affordable social housing even as governments continually fail to provide it. Daphne Bramham rightly asks why we haven't seen far more of a move toward the Housing First models (including both secure housing and the availability of associated supports) which have consistently proven effective at assisting people facing addictions and homelessness. And Richard Warnica weighs in on the death toll from Ontario's reliance on for-profit long-term care homes. 

- Moira Wyton reports on the outcome of British Columbia's panel on a basic income - which found that more targeted income and basic services would represent a better use of public resources. And Heather Scoffield offers her take on why a basic income isn't the right option to try to eliminate poverty. 

- Timothy Bond, Jillian Carr, Analisa Packham and Jonathan Smith study how the timing of food benefits directly affects students' scores on tests which affect their future.

- Bill Blaikie puts some of the forces behind the U.S.' Trumpist insurrection into historical context. And Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan write about the needed push from social movements for change as the Biden/Harris administration begins its tenure.

- Meanwhile, Scott Harold Payne wonders whether the relentless flow of corruption and incompetence from the UCP will lead to the end of Alberta conservatism as we know it.

- Finally, Kendall Latimer reports on Saskatchewan's long-overdue end to the use of birth alerts - while also noting the need to make up for the damage they've done already.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Dan Lett discusses Stephen Harper's callous disregard for missing and murdered aboriginal women - and how it should serve as a call to Canadians generally to take a broader look at the causes of social inequality:

Why so much resistance to a broader, sociological analysis? A national inquiry of that kind would pose awkward questions and reveal uncomfortable realities about the diminishing role of the federal government in the lives of all Canadians.

A national inquiry would delve into questions such as familial dysfunction, child welfare, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, economic disparity and the shortcomings of the education and health-care systems. An examination of that scope would touch on issues that affect both aboriginal and non-aboriginal citizens.

An inquiry would no doubt expose growing income inequality and the ever-diminishing federal contribution to education, social programs and health care. And how that shrinking support tends to disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable in our society.

A commission of inquiry would be, to put it mildly, a potent and biting indictment of the culture of successive federal governments that have, for decades, placed the health and welfare of the neediest Canadians well below other, less profound policy goals.

- Murray Brewster explores the wide world of policy areas which the Cons have shrouded in cabinet secrecy.

- Meanwhile, the CP reports on how secretive meetings with oil lobbyists look to have been behind the Clark Libs' push to weaken environmental protections. Les Whittington exposes the Wall government's preference for back-room dealing - along with its willingness to spend millions in public dollars to try to buy influence in Washington. And Mike De Souza traces the connections between ALEC, the tar sands and Keystone XL.

- Mike Moffatt weighs on on how the Cons' latest EI scheme will only make employment more precarious in mid-sized businesses by offering employers incentives to fire workers.

- Finally, Daphne Bramham writes about the need for us to be involved in public life as citizens, not merely as taxpayers:

To be a citizen means to belong, to have responsibilities, rights and shared values. It means having a stake in the future and, in democracies, a voice in determining what that future might look like.

In Canada, it means having the guarantee that laws will be applied fairly to every person and every institution (including governments), as well as the right to an education and health care.

That is why we pay taxes. It’s the cost and the duty of belonging.

As the terminology has shifted from citizen to taxpayer over the past three decades, maybe it is only coincidental that the gap between rich and poor has widened.

Perhaps it’s also only coincidence that voter turnout has spiralled downward as the poor and the young (too many of whom are unemployed or under-employed and often burdened by huge debts from post-secondary education fees that have nearly tripled in the last two decades) decide not to bother exercising their franchise.

A growing body of economic research confirms that wealth isn’t the best predictor or guarantor of happy or healthy societies.

What matters more is feeling connected, belonging and having a say. In other words, being a full citizen.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- As quickly as the Fraser Institute churns out corporate propaganda, Sixth Estate responds - this time nicely debunking a report encouraging yet more giveaways to big pharma:

(T)here’s a glaring lie by omission in the summary for this document: although the Fraser Institute really wants you to know that we spend about the same amount as the Americans do on drugs, what they don’t think you need to know is that, according to their own numbers, we actually spend almost 21% less per prescription than the Americans do. So government controls work, if not as well as we might hope, and the Fraser Institute wants to get rid of them anyways.

Secondly, the most interesting thing about healthcare comparisons is that Canadian brand-name drugs cost half as much as in America, but our generic drugs cost twice as much. Both are due to government price controls: our government forces prices low on brand-name drugs, but also allows generic drugmakers to charge high prices. You might think the solution, if the goal is lower drug prices for consumers, is to impose lower price controls on the generic market, or even just to let it float freely, like the Americans do.

That’s not the Fraser Institute’s solution. They say if you completely deregulate the industry, then the drugmakers will drop the prices on generic drugs, but they’ll still respect the artificially low rates for brand-name drugs. This sort of economic wizardry is exactly why we should take the Fraser Institute and dump them into the sea — an economical solution because they’re already near the ocean.

- While Andrew Jackson points out that plenty of think tanks from across the political spectrum prefer an expanded Canada Pension Plan to the Cons' gift to the financial sector, Carol Goar sums up exactly why the Cons' choice makes no sense:

(The Cons' plan) is a second-best solution and a poor substitute for strengthening the Canada Pension Plan, which covers the entire working population, is mandatory for all employers and employees, has worked well for 45 years and is actuarially sound for the next 75 years.

The only problem with the Canada Pension Plan is that it doesn’t provide enough to live on. The average annual payout is $6,150 a year. Even when that is combined with Old Age Security — the universal payment to all Canadians over 65 — the average is just $12,100, which falls roughly $6,800 below the poverty line.

That was fine when it was a supplement to the workplace pensions that most families could count on a generation ago. But today, 11 million workers have no pension. Many have no retirement savings at all.

Academics, actuaries, nonbank economists, labour leaders and seniors have urged the government since the recession to expand the Canada Pension Plan. Polls show Canadians would be willing to increase their contributions to assure themselves and others a dignified retirement.

The Conservatives are offering a less comprehensive, less reliable alternative.

- The Ottawa Citizen decries the Cons' willingness to run billions of public dollars through a shredder for the sake of posturing on crime. And Daphne Bramham notes that the prison-industrial complex is making inroads in B.C. as a result.

- Finally, Mike Smith's take on how to get anything done at the municipal level is well worth a read.