Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Kate Aronoff interviews Mariana Mazzucato about The Value of Everything, including some important discussion about the relationship between governments and markets:

Aronoff: You talk a lot about the power of the state in shaping markets. What does the idea that the government should only intervene to tweak markets get wrong?

Mazzucato: How we talk about governments and markets is very problematic. In traditional economic theory, governments are just fixing market failures. And I talk about governments—if they’re actually well organized—as different types of public institutions in society. I see them as co-creators of wealth. They co-create and co-shape markets, not just fix them. Regulation is even a problematic phrase, because it sounds like the market is just there and created by others, and the government is just there to regulate it and make it a bit more stable. Redefining markets is central to what I believe we should be doing, and that leads to very different types of policy.

Aronoff: Are there any places where you think the private sector simply shouldn’t play a role? What’s the balance?

Mazzucato: There are two issues. Whether it’s public or private ownership, a key problem is how public and private meet, right? So in the UK—take the railways. Forget for a minute whether they should be public or privately owned. If you are going to privatize them, you better get the contract right. In exchange for what he got in the contract to buy the public railway system, [Virgin CEO] Richard Branson—who bought the rails—should have been forced to promise that he would invest in the rail system and make it more efficient and more green. Whether it’s water or energy, companies should be made to invest profits in, for example, renewable energy, but also in methods that will improve the product itself and the value to the consumer. In the drive for outsourcing and privatization, these contracts have been written problematically.

Then the question is, should some areas be fully public? Well sure, those areas which are absolutely fundamental. I believe medicine is one of them. Essential medicine like vaccines are a human right. It’s very hard to apply the profit model there. Instead of companies just trying to charge a lot of money in order to recoup their cost, you could have the government set a prize for any company that wants to come in and produce this drug that will solve a certain disease, and lay out the metrics for evaluating whether that drug is what we’re looking for.

- Don Lenihan writes that climate change represents the ultimate example of an issue where obvious long-term needs are being ignored due to short-term political motivations on the part of voters and politicians alike.

- Chuka Ejeckam highlights how British Columbia's electoral reform referendum could be a first step toward change across Canada, while Andrew Coyne notes that London, ON's municipal election will offer a first example of ranked ballots in action. And Seth Klein offers his take on the three more proportional systems on the ballot.

- And finally, Martin Regg Cohn's criticism of Doug Ford's patronage highlights one of the main problems with first-past-the-post: when elections are seen primarily as a means of saying "no" to incumbents, it's all too easy to get stuck with an even worse alternative.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Arno Kopecky points out that new highs in nominal standards of living around the globe are being paired with unprecedented environmental damage which puts our future at risk. And Laila Yuile responds to John Horgan's version of the line that any smaller jurisdiction can avoid responsibility for the planet by minimizing its contribution to a collective action problem.

- Don Lenihan asks whether "polarizing" political developments are doomed to fail - though the example of a carbon tax seems like an odd one, as it drew support from across the political spectrum (including being implemented by B.C.'s right-wing Libs) before attacks became incorporated into the core message of the Cons and their provincial cousins.

- Arif Jetha discusses how precarity is harmful to workers’ health. And Michael Mendelson offers a reminder that complex rules and stringent requirements around social benefits lead to worse outcomes for both recipients and governments.

- Tom Parkin notes that the Libs are trying to paper over a failure to keep their infrastructure promises by repackaging planned projects through the high-cost privatized infrastructure bank. And Mairin Prentiss reports on the Libs’ outsourcing of military cleaning work.

- Finally, Owen Jones comments on how the UK’s oligarch-controlled media has distorted public impressions and stacked the political deck in favour of the right.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Beth Gutelius writes that any discussion about the future of work can draw important lessons from the past, with most of the issues facing workers today echoing or arising out of ones which have surfaced before:

The set of structural forces that has converged over the last forty years has shaped the economy and produced an uneven distribution of benefits, especially along lines of race, gender, immigration status, disability, and other markers of social difference. These are the ghosts of work, forces which include:

• Structural racism and gender discrimination that disadvantages people of color, especially African Americans, and women;
• Immigration policy that has resulted in a secondary labor market for undocumented immigrants and immigrants with certain visas;
• Industry reorganization that has led to an increasingly fissured economy and increasing reliance on outsourcing and worker subcontracting;
• Decline in union density, due to explicit and well-funded attacks on workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively, which has reduced the wage-setting capacity and political influence of unions;
• Shifts in corporate governance that have lead to increased shareholder power and CEO pay, and curtailed shared prosperity;
• Globalization and trade policy which produced a new set of low-road competitive dynamics, including offshoring;
• Attacks on the public sector which have resulted in policies skewed toward financial and private sector deregulation, privatization, and the overall shrinking of the role of government;
• Tax policy reform that has favored the wealthy and corporations, and has lead to a redistribution of gains toward the top of the income spectrum; and
• Financialization, which has bloated the role of the financial sector in the economy.

What a list! Taken as a whole, these major trends have shifted power and resources away from workers, and allowed or even incentivized employers to pursue a range of low-road approaches to profitability. These root causes may be shifting somewhat, but they are not going away.

...

1. The future of economic justice is a just transition to what will involve more technologically-mediated labor markets and jobs. A just transition should mitigate the costs and share the benefits of new technologies.
2. Change is certain, but its path is not, and giving in to inevitability will stifle our imagination. There are many alternatives, and it is our collective duty to create and promote them.
3. Efforts to confront the changing nature of work should strengthen the role of the public sector in setting and enforcing workplace standards and delivering a social safety net.
4. Those workers most affected by an issue should be involved in shaping any proposal or campaign to address it, and the process should help build workers’ voice and capacity to act.

- Meanwhile, the New York Times editorial board examines the long-haul trucking industry as a damning example of the combination of longer hours, greater demands and stagnant wages faced by so many workers in the U.S. over recent decades.

- The New York Times editorial board also points out how the Trump tax giveaway served only to further enrich the wealthy. And Thomas Piketty discusses the dangers of burgeoning inequality.

- The Economist offers a useful set of principles and proposals to make tax systems more fair and effective. 

- Finally, Don Lenihan writes about Canada's telecommunications oligopoly - and the need to treat access to the world as an essential service to ensure access is available in areas which won't receive equitable services based on profit motives. And Sarah Fischer discusses the dangers of increased concentration of local television broadcasting and other media.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David MacDonald offers some alternative suggestions that can do far more to reduce inequality and boost Canada's economy than the Libs' upper-class tax shuffle. And Karl Nerenberg reminds us that the most important scandal on our political scene is the constant stream of corporate tax giveaways which has done nothing to help anybody but the already-wealthy few.

- Meanwhile, Paul Buchheit challenges the right's constant effort to demonize people living in poverty.

- Mariana Mazzucato discusses the need for entrepreneurial government to fund and manage a transition to a clean economy. And the Vancouver Sun comments on the need for actual leadership rather than mere talk. But Thomas Walkom highlights Ontario's green strategy gone haywire as a reminder that money alone won't lead to the results we need either if it isn't paired with effective management.

- Don Lenihan points out that openness in government needs to include the willingness to actually engage with the people affected by policy choices, not merely to allow people to see one's own unilateral decisions. And Jim Bronskill's story as to how the Cons view peaceful protests as security threats signals that there's a long way to go on both fronts.

- Finally, Elizabeth Thompson exposes the Cons' deliberate (and less-than-surprising) attempt to continue imposing their agenda on Canada from beyond the political grave.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- George Monbiot discusses the inherent conflict between consumption and conservation:

We can persuade ourselves that we are living on thin air, floating through a weightless economy, as gullible futurologists predicted in the 1990s. But it’s an illusion, created by the irrational accounting of our environmental impacts. This illusion permits an apparent reconciliation of incompatible policies.

Governments urge us both to consume more and to conserve more. We must extract more fossil fuel from the ground, but burn less of it. We should reduce, reuse and recycle the stuff that enters our homes, and at the same time increase, discard and replace it. How else can the consumer economy grow? We should eat less meat to protect the living planet, and eat more meat to boost the farming industry. These policies are irreconcilable. The new analyses suggest that economic growth is the problem, regardless of whether the word sustainable is bolted to the front of it.

- And David Roberts argues that Alberta's new climate change plan is well-designed precisely because it includes measures to cut down on consumption rather than aspiring to right-wing notions of revenue neutrality.

- Adrienne Montani makes the case for a plan to reduce child poverty in British Columbia. And Leilani Farha writes that the anticipated arrival of a new group of refugees should serve as an opportunity to evaluate and improve the plight of people already living in poverty.

- Meanwhile, Thomas Walkom points out that the Libs' pattern of walking back their most immediate post-election promise to help Syrian refugees bodes poorly for the rest of their campaign commitments.

- Finally, Don Lenihan comments on the psychology of the politics of fear:

Terrorism is effective not because groups like ISIS are so powerful, but because they are so good at turning our own psychology against us. Suicide bombings fool the brain into believing an evil empire is invading our shores.
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There is a vicious circle here that, ironically, turns us all into ISIS recruits, first, by getting us to agree to play the game by their rules; and then by drawing us deeper and deeper into its clutches. At the same time, talk of the need for ever-greater security and surveillance invades our public discourse. The politics of fear starts creeping in.

The moral is that the terrorist threat to our freedom and safety comes less from the thugs at ISIS than from ourselves. We hold ourselves hostage to a discourse of fear, then use it to sideline democracy in order to protect ourselves from the very threat we have manufactured.

On cautionary tales

I've previously offered my take on why all opposition parties - including the Libs - should and will ultimately vote the Harper Cons out of power when given the chance. But I'll note that Don Lenihan's argument toward the same conclusion actually offers a reminder why there's reason for concern.

Whatever lesson one wants to take from C-51 and Eve Adams (among so many other stories), one can't claim for a second that they offer examples of Justin Trudeau and company valuing the support of progressive voters over cynical measures to appease the right. And there's been no evidence that the Libs have learned much in the meantime.

Of course, it would be for the best if the Libs decided that they should consider a "storm of anger...among friends and allies" as reason to think carefully about a choice. But in light of their track record, I wouldn't hold my breath - meaning that our best hope to get the Libs on board probably lies in political calculations rather than any newfound concern for progressive principle.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- David Cay Johnston observes that the U.S.' extreme inequality goes far beyond money alone. And Jesse Myerson notes that a basic income can be supported based on principles held across the political spectrum, while making the case as to how it should be developed to serve as a counterbalance to the abuses of capitalism:

The engine fueling capitalism’s indefinite tendency to expand is mass dependence on the market to secure the means of subsistence. Because the majority of us have to work in order to afford the trappings of dignity, the market is able to impose its imperatives on all of society. Ellen Meiksins Wood articulates these drives clearly: “the compulsions of competition, profit-maximization, capital accumulation, and a relentless imperative to improve the productivity of labor so as to reduce costs in order to reduce prices.”

The way to break from this market subjugation is to guarantee material security as a human right, providing everyone with an “exit” from the job market. (Any good libertarian must concede that exit opportunity is a necessary precondition for a market to be “free.”)

While rights-based income wouldn’t stop capitalism’s advance, it would take the cinderblock off the gas pedal. It would also provide two critical tools to those trying to hit the brakes: social adjustment to the guaranteed right to a dignified life, and the provision of extra free time and cash to those motivated to defend and expand it. More patriotically, a basic income aimed at divorcing work from pay would provide the conditions for what the Declaration of Independence promises: the freedom to pursue happiness, however elusive.

- The American Heart Association discusses the social factors which stand in the way of reducing heart diseases (among other illnesses).

- Armine Yalnizyan points out that the Cons' economic track record is unimpressive even on their narrow choice of metrics and international comparators, while looking even worse from the standpoint of secure work for Canadians. And Mark Huelsman argues that the path to growth in the future involves making education readily accessible and affordable, rather than burying generations of workers under massive student debts.

- Amanda Connolly writes that travel bans like the one being peddled by the Harper Cons are standard fare for authoritarian governments, while the National Post concludes that there's no way around the fact that it has everything to do with politics rather than security. Michael Harris comments on Stephen Harper's cowardly retreat from anybody who hasn't been pre-vetted for his political convenience, while Don Lenihan writes that we shouldn't trust a government which so thoroughly distrusts the people it governs. And David Beers assembles a thorough list of the Cons' abuses of power.

- Finally, Tara Lohan points out that the U.S. is shifting more and more to renewable energy due to cost alone. But Zak Markan reports on yet another of the Cons' steps to avoid having the real costs of the oil industry paid by the people who stand to profit from it, as Shell's offshore drilling plan (approved by the Cons) allows it to leave any subsea blowout to spill oil for up to 21 days.

New column day

Here, expanding on this post as to the Harper Cons' choice between short-term tactics and long-term viability.

For further reading, Jamey Heath argues that the Libs are serving only split voters who have a common interest in change, and that the progressive vote should coalesce behind the NDP. But in contrast, Don Lenihan theorizes that the content-free brokerage model long associated with the Libs is set for a comeback dressed up as "open government".

That said, it seems that there's one possible outcome of this fall's election and its aftermath which fits all of the above pieces together. It may be that the NDP can both form government immediately, and position itself as the long-term progressive contender for government. Yet at the same time, if the Cons' brand is repudiated thoroughly enough by voters, the Libs may well offer a more promising right-wing vehicle for all but the most fervent of Con partisans.

So Stephen Harper's goal of Westernizing federal politics might take us...to the NDP/Lib dichotomy which is already the default in British Columbia.

On closed-door decisions

Memo to Don Lenihan:

It's well and good to point to past backroom policy debacles such as utterly unwanted Crown corporation giveaways as examples of a complete lack of public engagement.

But before lauding Kathleen Wynne as the face of open government, might it be worth noting that she's doing the exact same thing on too short a time frame for public consultation, while paying lip service to "dialogue" after it's too late?

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- CBC reports on the latest research showing that Canada would save billions every year with a national pharmacare plan. And Thomas Walkom argues that politics are standing in the way of what should be a no-brainer from a policy standpoint.

- Richard Gwyn writes that most Canadians seem to be willing to put up with nearly anything in order to keep a relatively secure job - even as it's far from sure that many workers can count on that being available.

- Lawrence Martin discusses the Cons' strategy of provocation, pandering and prejudice as a substitute for running on a defensible record - though he does win a place on the list of pundits who continue to hold out for some shame from a government which has never shown a trace of it. Dan Leger writes that the latest outbreak of bigotry reflects the Cons' own extremism. And Don Lenihan asks whether truth and values still matter as long as the Cons are on the political scene, while noting that the best antidote to cynical politics is a healthy dose of reflection:

Rove’s fingerprints are all over the Harper PMO, from micro-targeting to the use of wedge issues to play one group off another. The gun registry, the crime agenda and the energy pipelines are all examples.

We can also include talking points, omnibus legislation, time allocation, committee interference, and media control in this bag of tricks. All are quintessential Rovian tactics.

And the abandonment of truth? Here too the Harper government has followed suit, showing a sometimes ruthless willingness to deny, discredit and even suppress evidence that conflicts with its positions. It has done so on crime and climate change, for example, and is now doing so on the new security law, C-51.

But last week may have been a turning point of some kind. The Harper government seemed to be taking this Rovian story-telling to a new level.
...
But when the three opposition leaders rose to challenge both him and Canadians to take a step back from our emotions and reflect on the nature of our political rights, a very un-Rovian thing happened.

Many commentators began arguing that Muslim women’s right to wear the niqab was more important than their feelings of suspicion and doubt.

In Rovian politics, this is not supposed to happen. The public isn’t supposed to be reflective and rational, especially when they’re scared.

Of course, these responses came mainly from members of the political class. I don’t know what would have happened if the debate had carried on. Would ordinary people also have risen to the occasion? I couldn’t help wondering what Rove would say.

The clear lesson from last week is that we have two very different views of politics in our country and they appear to be getting ready to square off.

- Michael Harris reminds us that Mike Duffy's trial figures to offer a valuable look into the manipulations of the Harper PMO just in time for the federal election. And Andrew Mitrovica worries that the same command-and-control political dynamic which has us waiting for a trial to spill the truth about the Cons has left CSIS shrouded in secrecy.

- Finally, Taylor Bendig points out the Wall government's massive - and growing - expenditures on private highway consultants.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Michal Rozworski reminds us that while a shift toward precarious work may represent an unwanted change from the few decades where labour prospered along with business, it's all too familiar from a historical perspective:

(P)recarity is what it means to have nothing to sell but your labour power, to use Marx’s turn of phrase. Taken in this sense, precarity is wide-spread: today, the bottom 40% of Canadians today own a measly 2% of national wealth and the bottom 60% own just over 10%. The fact of owning relative peanuts gives precarity an important part of its meaning – it’s certainly nicer to live in a rich country, but the “outside option” remains the wage with all its attendant risks.

The fight against precarity is also the foundation of the welfare state. The welfare state provides a social wage in addition to the working wage and thus undermines precarity. Its genesis was an experiment in social compromise. On the one hand, it gave workers greater security – a springboard to potentially fight for more. On the other, it gave elites a tool to manage labour unrest, especially the wave coming out of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the means to incorporate workers into new cycles of accumulation. For now, however, this experiment is sputtering. The last several decades have seen the breakdown of the compromise and, perhaps unsurprisingly, have brought precarity back to the fore, if for now in a more limited sense.
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The major transformations we are witnessing are not just (or even primarily) in how work contracts are organized but how work itself is organized – its speed, the way tasks are assigned, how production (whether of goods or services) is managed, and so on. The system of just-in-time production – while still reliant on large-scale investments in some goods sectors but not necessarily so in others or in services – has its own specific, internal precarity: flexible production that at the same time creates and demands flexible workers. Canada, for instance, has seen an increase in the size of its tradable goods and services sectors, particularly tradable services, since the adoption of a series of free-trade agreements, notably NAFTA. This has opened more jobs to international competition and attendant pressures.

There is a concurrent removal of the anchors that characterized the attempts at managed post-war capitalism. You don’t need to become a contract worker to lose your defined benefit pension; it can be bargained away by your boss. In fact, this is what has happened in Canada and elsewhere. Similar things are happening at the level of the state: eligibility for unemployment benefits, for example, has been slashed to the point that less than 40% of the unemployed in Canada currently receive benefits. Both of these increase precarity without necessarily changing the kinds of contract governing employment.

In some ways, the sense of growing precarity seen as a rise of contract and temporary work is an epiphenomenon of renewed attacks on workers’ rights generally. It could also be reflective of what Moody characterizes as a struggle that has not yet recognized and internalized the changing circumstances in which it is fought.

- Meanwhile, Elizabeth Renzetti writes that Canada's climate poses extra difficulties for citizens with mobility issues.

- Andrew Mitrovica slams Stephen Harper as Canada's Chicken Little-in-chief. And Don Lenihan questions whether the Cons' terror gambit is going to accomplish much politically even as it creates a more fearful society.

- Ronald Crelinsten argues that CSIS needs more resources to exercise its current role, not a vast new array of powers it's ill-equipped to use. Malone Mullin wonders about C-51's effect on academic freedom. And Wes Regan calls for MPs to show the courage needed to stand up to the Cons' bullying tactics.

- The Cons' latest step toward pointlessly harsh criminal law hasn't passed without comment either, with Irvin Waller and Michael Kempa along with the Star's editorial board weighing in. But in case anybody was under the illusion that the Cons cared in the slightest about people in the prison system, Patrick White reports on their instructions to argue than an inmate with mental health issues who spent 162 days in solitary confinement was responsible for his own suicide.

- Finally, David Dayen offers a warning about the dangers posed by the increased shipment of oil by rail, while noting that the risks are only getting worse due to lax regulation.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Armine Yalnizyan counters the Cons' spin on tax-free savings accounts. And Rob Carrick points out that raising the limit on TFSAs would forfeit billions of desperately-needed dollars to benefit only the wealthiest few in Canada:

TFSAs are Swiss army knives – a financial knife, corkscrew, screwdriver and more. But doubling the annual contribution limit of $5,500 is a bad idea.

Message to the federal government: Please don’t, because we can’t afford it.
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A report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer this week says the federal government would lose $14.7-billion a year in revenue by 2060 and the provinces would lose $7.6-billion a year. That’s a tremendous amount of money to forgo in a country with a population aging as quickly as ours.

The latest population estimates from Statistics Canada suggest that seniors will account for 25.5 per cent of the population by 2061, up from 14.4 per cent in 2011. You can imagine what this trend will mean for government spending on health care and income programs such as Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

In fact, Ottawa was so concerned about the sustainability of OAS – it’s funded from general government revenue – that it announced that it would gradually increase the age of eligibility to 67 from 65 starting in 2023. Ottawa saved a whack of money doing that. Now, it’s looking at depleting the savings it realized with a higher TFSA contribution limit.

- Thomas Walkom offers some suggestions to save Canadian capitalism from its own most destructive impulses. And Don Lenihan discusses another set of big ideas worth considering, while recognizing that none of them will come to pass without a more effective political process.

- Elizabeth Douglass writes that between plunging prices and increasing recognition of safety and climate risks, 2015 is off to a rather rough start for the oil industry. And that's before doctors start highlighting pollution and climate change as serious health issues - which Kyle Plantz reports to be a foreseeable and desirable possibility.

- Meanwhile, Bruce Johnstone reminds us that farmers are still suffering from the Cons' choice to prioritize the use of rail to transport oil.

- Aarian Marshall discusses what the Cons' census vandalism has cost Canada:

Though Peterborough’s situation is particularly difficult, it’s not an anomaly. In 2006, 93.5 percent of Canadians responded to the then-mandatory long-form census. In 2011, 68.6 percent returned the NHS. This is despite the fact that census officials distributed more surveys to compensate for the predicted drop in response rates—to one in three Canadians in 2011 instead of the one in five in 2006. Still, Statistics Canada withheld 2011 NHS data for 1,128 of 4,567 Canadian census subdivisions. “[A]pproximately 25 percent of geographic areas do not have reliable National Household Survey data available for their use,” Canada’s auditor general wrote in a 2014 report.
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“Because of the move to the voluntary NHS, Canada is a richer, whiter, more educated country now,” says Ryan Berlin, a Vancouver-based economist and demographer with the non-profit Urban Futures Institute. Berlin is making a joke here, one that’s been making the rounds in Canadian academic conferences for the past few years. But he’s not wrong. Certain populations—low-income residents, immigrants, the disabled, aboriginal peoples, and those without a firm grasp of the English language—were far less likely to return the voluntary census. These are also often the communities most in need of social programs. The question marks are particularly disconcerting in the wake of the worldwide  recession. Where are the needy? Canada isn’t entirely sure.

While statisticians with the Canadian government do have sophisticated mathematical tools to help estimate how many underserved citizens they missed, the 2011 still survey left glaring uncertainties. In one example, the NHS found that Filipinos were the most represented group among immigrants who entered Canada between 2006 and 2011. But a footnote in the Statistics Canada release notes that this result is “not in line with administrative data from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada which provides the number of recent immigrants by their country of birth settling in Canada each year.” Why the gap? It could be sampling errors, it could be response patterns, or it could be an “under or over estimation of certain groups of recent immigrants in the NHS.” Officials say they just can't be certain why they don’t know what they don’t know.
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Academics also stress that census data is often used as a benchmark, to check whether other data sets derived from alternative sources are correct. Now there appears to be no universally-acknowledged set of numbers against which to check one’s own work.

- Finally, PressProgress points out that the Harper Cons and their mouthpieces seem to be the only people alive - whether in Canada or elsewhere - who don't think the tragic and ongoing history of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada merits a public inquiry. And Stephen Maher highlights the complete disconnect between the Cons and Canada's First Nations who rightly expect far better.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Cameron Dearlove laments the fact that Canada is failing to recognize and replicate other countries' successes in using the social determinants of health to shape public policy:

Today we know that social and financial inequities — particularly the experience of poverty — has a greater impact on our health than our healthcare system, genetics, even lifestyle choices. For a society facing spiking healthcare costs, the social determinants of health (things like housing, food security, social inclusion, early childhood development, employment, and working conditions) arguably present the greatest public policy opportunity since the creation of our social safety net, after the Second World War. While Canada is at the forefront of research in the social determinants of health, we are laggards in turning this research into healthy public policy — while Finnish babies benefit from sleeping in their care-filled boxes, Canadian children rest outside the box.

If the social determinants of health hold such promise, what are we doing locally, provincially, and nationally to apply these ideas? How do we rewrite conventional wisdom so that governments, institutions and communities are using the powerful social determinants framework to encourage longer, healthier, happier lives?

- Meanwhile, Donald Hirsch writes about the changing - and sadly spreading - shape of child poverty in the UK. And Barbara Howard offers a moment of perspective on how the disasters which some people can easily brush off cause far more problems for the working poor.

- Paul Krugman notes that the Republicans' tax policy continues to reflect little more than bare class warfare by other names in cutting taxes on the rich while raising them for everybody else.

- Heather Mallick traces the demise of Sun News to its constant bullying, while Christopher Waddell sees it as having been based largely on a failed attempt to game Canada's broadcasting system.

As an aside, others are asking how it is that a network seemingly set up to further the Cons' interests didn't actually get enough preferential treatment to survive despite its lack of merit. But I'll note that the government isn't the only force which could have kept the network afloat - and given the massive amount of money put into corporate communications, it's telling also that Canada's plutocrats didn't have any interest in footing the bill for a media outlet which seemed to fit their political interests.

- Finally, Craig Forcese and Kent Roach offer a detailed look at the contents of the Cons' terror bill. Thomas Walkom - who deserves plenty of blame as the media originator of the theory that no opposition party would oppose C-51 - is finally beginning to recognize that the NDP is in fact standing up for civil rights against the Cons' fearmongering. Stephen Maher talks to a former CSIS officer and finds even more reason for concern with what the Cons are trying to pull. And Don Lenihan writes that he sees the Cons primarily as having made Canadian politics more authoritarian rather than more conservative - though I'm not sure it's an either-or proposition.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- The Globe and Mail joins the chorus calling for Canada to welcome more citizens, rather than exploiting cheap and disposable workers. But Bill Curry reports on yet another corporate lobby group demanding that the Cons actually expand the flow of temporary labour to secure profits at the expense of workers.

- Andy Radia discusses the laughable attempt of the Cons to rebrand themselves as anything other then enemies of the environment after eight years of constant attacks on regulations and advocates alike. And Daniel James Wright points out that the organization chosen to greenwash the Cons was subject to a full corporate takeover.

- Meanwhile, the CP reports on a mercury advisory for fowl near the tar sands - being just the type of health and environmental disaster the Cons are always happy to sweep under the rug in the name of oil profits. Chris Varcoe writes about the complete takeover of Alberta's government by the oil sector. And Bob Weber reports on Alberta's moves to make sure the same people who have pointed out exactly the types of environmental dangers which have come to pass never get a word of input into further development:

Critics say Albertans are in danger of being shut out of discussions on how the province's natural resources are developed.

Expert observers and opposition politicians worry Alberta's new energy regulator is drawing the circle of who can speak so tightly that one hearing on a proposed energy project had to be cancelled because no one was allowed to appear.

...

The Alberta Energy Regulator is responsible both for holding public hearings on oilsands proposals and other energy developments and for determining who has the right to appear. The regulator is obliged to allow only those "directly and adversely affected" to appear.
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Blakeman said decisions such as what happened with the Kirby project ignore important realities.

"The government seems to believe that the air doesn't move, water doesn't flow and soil doesn't leach," she said.

- Harry Neufeld notes that the Unfair Elections Act remains a serious step backward for the prospect of free, fair and transparent elections even after the absolute worst abuses were altered by amendments. And Amira Elghawaby reviews Alison Loat and Michael McMillan's Tragedy in the Commons as a basis for asking whether there's much worth salvaging in Canada's current system of party politics.

- Finally, Don Lenihan argues against mandatory voting on the basis that popular turnout can serve as a measure of a government's mandate. But I can only respond by wondering whether there's any evidence whatsoever to support the theory that governing parties are more open to competing ideas based on a low turnout - or whether we should take the Harper Cons' determined exploitation of every lever of power based on a modest mandate as a cautionary tale against the hope will restrain power-mad leaders.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Robert Reich calls out four fundamental lies used to push corporatist policies. But perhaps more interesting is the truth which no amount of concentrated wealth seems to be able to suppress:

But the more interesting thing here is the memo’s concession of a hurdle AFP faces: That people support the idea of “taking care of those in need and avoiding harm to the weak.” That this is seen as a messaging problem is telling.
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As it happens, the AFP memo is right. Majorities of Americans do see the economy as rigged for the wealthy and don’t believe everyone has an equal shot at getting ahead. Majorities support a minimum wage hike. Though polling is admittedly mixed on the proper role of “government,” polls have shown majority support for the idea of policies that tax the wealthy to fund programs for the poor, and more Americans think government programs for the poor help rather than hurt. During the 2012 election — which the AFP memo cites as a teachable moment — polling showed strong support for preserving the safety net.

- Meanwhile, Duncan Cameron kicks off Rabble's UP! series with a look at the history of Canada's labour movement. But Tyler Cowen points out that Canada may be on a "super-unequal" trajectory - meaning that there's ample work to be done in shaping a country that looks for ways to serve anybody beyond the wealthy few. And Linda McQuaig also weighs in on the disproportionate growth of concentrated wealth:

Even Republican President Theodore Roosevelt argued in 1906 that the U.S. should place "a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate."

The slashing of those high tax rates in recent decades has contributed greatly, Piketty notes, to today's return to inequality.

Piketty also dispels the notion that today's fortunes are the result of talent, noting that 60 to 70 per cent of them are due to inherited wealth, and that we're on track to return to a world -- like late 19th-century Europe -- dominated by inherited wealth.

Stephen Harper is no doubt hoping we'll be distracted by sports, and by reports we're doing about as well as middle-class Americans, who've been crushed by the brutal, ongoing, Wall-Street-induced recession.

Meanwhile, an immensely rich and powerful class right here in Canada is quietly amassing ever greater wealth and power to hand down to their heirs, who will be still richer and more powerful. But, go Habs, go! Why would we care? 

- Joseph Heath writes about the apples-to-oranges comparison between defined-benefit pensions like the CPP which offer retirement security to all workers included in their scope, and the Cons' preferred message that retirees can expect not a dime more than they can buy through an individual annuity.

- And Danielle Martin, while pointing out that there's reason for pride in Canada's universal health care system, also highlights the room for improvement in our health policy:

I see three big ideas out there that could raise the bar for the health of Canadians in the next decade.

The first is to improve access to prescription medications. Public insurance, either provincial or national, should cover the 20 most effective medications for chronic disease for every single Canadian. If we purchased those 20 drugs in bulk for the whole country and bargained effectively on the price we pay, we could put this program in place without spending a single penny more of public money than we already spend.

The second big idea flows from a campaign called Choosing Wisely. It taps into the reality that today’s health care consumers are increasingly well prepared to have conversations about the risks of tests and treatments. Too many Canadians are harmed every year by inappropriate, wasteful and often harmful tests and prescriptions. Radiologists agree, for example, that 30 per cent of CT scans are unnecessary, and these scans involve radiation. And do we really need to be taking 80 per cent more drugs than we did 10 years ago? It’s time to challenge the belief that more is always better when it comes to health care, and start a conversation between patients and health care providers that is more honest about what good research tells us are the risks and benefits of our interventions.

Third, we need to acknowledge that health is about more than just health care. Rather than spending more and more at the repair shop, we need to attack the causes of ill health. Income is the most important predictor of health: the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have negative health outcomes. The Guaranteed Annual Income, a simple and powerful concept that is supported both by local and international evidence, could dramatically improve the health of all Canadians by reducing poverty.

- Finally, Don Lenihan discusses the stark distinction between academic and political commentary. But it's well worth using his analysis as a starting point to discuss how political can be made less war-like, and more open to actual discussion of public policy choices.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Frances Russell writes about the corrosive effects of inequality. And Robert Reich points out one creative option California is considering to address inequality at the firm level: tying corporate tax levels to wage parity, under the theory that shareholders will then have an incentive to push for a fair distribution of wages.

- Peter Richardson reviews Matt Taibbi's The Divide:

 Taibbi explores why Wall Street bankers are seemingly exempt from criminal prosecution, even as New York City targets petty crime — much of it manufactured by police in minority neighborhoods — more aggressively than ever. He cites statistics to make his argument, but mostly he reports on specific cases. One involves a working-class black man who finally decided to fight a misdemeanor charge for blocking pedestrian traffic — that is, standing on the sidewalk in front of his home. Taibbi also considers the zeal with which government agencies investigate and humiliate welfare recipients and undocumented residents for trying to provide for their families during hard times — times made all the harder because of unprosecuted crimes at the top of the economic food chain.

Everyone knows the rich receive special treatment in this country, especially in court. But Taibbi concludes that the government now offers a sliding scale of civil and criminal protection to U.S. residents. At one end of the spectrum, the very rich are virtually beyond accountability, no matter how massive and destructive their crimes may be. At the other end, the nation’s most vulnerable residents face unremitting investigation and prosecution by bureaucracies determined to find them guilty of something.

Taibbi also surfaces a new set of targets: Justice Department prosecutors who seek settlements for even the most outrageous white-collar scams. Many of them are recruited from law firms whose clients include the largest Wall Street banks. Lanny Breuer, who headed the department’s criminal division when the financial meltdown occurred, is Taibbi’s poster boy for this conflict of interest. Both he and Attorney General Eric Holder were partners at Covington & Burling, which represents JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. All too often, Taibbi argues, the prosecutors have continued to behave like defense attorneys. When Holder was a Clinton administration official, for example, he wrote a memo arguing that prosecutors should consider “collateral consequences” when determining whether to charge persons or corporations. If a criminal prosecution would unduly harm innocent shareholders and employees, the logic went, it made more sense to settle. But once bankers realized they were beyond criminal prosecution, the incentives to transgress increased dramatically.
...
“The Divide” marks a shift in Taibbi’s tone. More Lincoln Steffens than Hunter Thompson, Taibbi drops most of the histrionics to reveal the corruption and injustice at hand. He even goes out of his way to be reasonable. He acknowledges that prosecuting financial cases can be expensive and risky, especially when the alleged crimes are complex and the defendants have vast legal resources at their disposal. That fact motivates prosecutors to settle such cases rather than try them in criminal court. He also concedes that many disadvantaged neighborhoods may benefit from tough policing. But he maintains that when combined, the two law-enforcement strategies add up to a glaring injustice. He also notes that it’s far too easy to introduce jurisdictional complications in financial cases that would never be allowed in less consequential cases. To make that point, he recounts a horrific case in which high-profile Wall Street financiers escaped punishment after trying to destroy a company they bet against as well as harassing its executives and their family members. 

- And David Dayen also discusses the consequences of a culture of impunity for the financial sector, with a particular focus on a home-seizure complex which has neither any incentive nor any apparent means to figure out whether a given claim to enforce a mortgage has any basis in fact:

(D)espite the fact that the nation’s courtrooms remain active crime scenes, with backdated, forged and fabricated documents still sloshing around them, state and federal regulators have not filed new charges of misconduct against Bank of New York, Deutsche Bank, U.S. Bank or any other mortgage industry participant, since the round of national settlements over foreclosure fraud effectively closed the issue.

Many focus on how the failure to prosecute financial crimes, by Attorney General Eric Holder and colleagues, create a lack of deterrent for the perpetrators, who will surely sin again. But there’s something else that happens when these crimes go unpunished; the root problem, the legacy of fraud, never gets fixed. In this instance, the underlying ownership on potentially millions of loans has been permanently confused, and the resulting disarray will cause chaos for decades into the future, harming homeowners, investors and the broader economy. Holder’s corrupt bargain, to let Wall Street walk, comes at the cost of permanent damage to the largest market in the world, the U.S. residential housing market.

By now we know the details: During the run-up to the housing bubble, banks bought up millions of mortgages, packaged them into securities and sold them around the world. Amid the frenzy, lenders failed to follow basic property laws, which ensure legitimate transfers of mortgages from one legal owner to another. When mass foreclosures resulted from the bubble’s collapse, banks who could not demonstrate they owned the loans got caught trying to cover up the irregularities with false documents. Federal authorities made the offenders pay fines, much of which banks paid with other people’s money. But the settlements put a Band-Aid over the misconduct. Nobody went in, loan by loan, to try to equitably confirm who owns what.

...
There was another solution available here, if Holder’s Justice Department didn’t throw up its hands and settle. Judges could have disassembled the broken mortgage system, and appointed a special master to handle all loans in question. It may have taken years, but the preservation of the public property system makes the time and expense worth it. Unless you would rather kneel to the wishes of the financial industry to keep everything rolling, and let the wound fester.

If you or I pick the lock on a house and try to steal everything in it, we’d probably go to jail. But if I were a bank, and I wrote down on a piece of paper that I simply owned that house, I’d get away with it. That’s the sad legacy of trying to cover up massive fraud instead of dealing with it.

- Don Lenihan responds to Lawrence Martin's suggestion that key PMO staffers be elected by Parliament by pointing out that there's more to democratic accountability than intermittent elections.

- And one of the more important factors needed to hold governments to account is accurate information about what they're doing. Which means there's all the more reason for concern about the Cons' pattern of refusing to release public data and covering up their own actions. But on the bright side, the NDP's push to make government information public by default offers a much-needed contrast.

- Finally, Tim Harper suggests that the temporary foreign worker program is beyond fixing. And
the CP discusses the obvious alternative: rather than binding helpless temporary workers to a single employer for the sole purpose of suppressing their wages and working conditions, we should look to fill with immigrants who can hope to make a future in Canada.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Laura Ryckewaert looks in more detail at the continued lack of any privacy protection in the Unfair Elections Act. And Murray Dobbin is hopeful that the Cons' blatant attempt to suppress voting rights will instead lead to a backlash among those who are intended to be excluded:

(W)hatever the outcome, perhaps the best possible response of democracy activists would be to treat this loathsome piece of legislation as a useful crisis. This is exactly what leaders of the African-American and Latino communities have done in their fight against the blatant voter suppression efforts in the U.S. -- where individual states determine voting procedures for federal elections. "A Center for Social Inclusion report entitled "Citizens Denied: The Impact of Photo ID Laws on Senior Citizens of Color" warned that nearly half of black voters over age 65 and one in three Latino senior voters would have a more difficult time registering and voting on election day due to photo ID laws passed in some 33 states."

In at least some cases efforts at voter suppression in the U.S. have backfired because the attack on black and Latino communities has galvanized them to get out the vote. The government of Florida reduced the early voting period which prompted black churches "to conduct a two-day 'souls to the polls' marathon. And even as election day turned into a late election night, and with the race in Ohio, and thus for the 270 votes needed to win the presidency, called by 11 p.m., black voters remained in line in Miami-Dade and Broward, two heavily Democrat counties in Florida, where black voters broke turnout records even compared to 2008."

Efforts to suppress the vote in civic elections in North Carolina and Texas also backfired, resulting in record turn-outs of the people targeted by Republican party controlled board of elections.

With young people, the homeless and First Nations voters at the low end of the turn-out numbers, the Harper government's crude effort to suppress their votes even more can and should be used to galvanize the vote from those communities.

Student organizations, anti-poverty groups, the Idle No More movement and senior's groups are well placed to take up the challenge, with help from groups like Democracy Watch and perhaps the NDP.

While many in those communities have found little reason to go to the polls given the slim likelihood of any change in their lives, no one likes to be told what they can and can't do -- especially when it comes to rights. For the people targeted by Harper for disenfranchisement, the 2015 election could be purely about democracy itself.

- Dave Seglins reports on even more rail safety incidents which were left unreported by the railways involved. And Wendy Gillis notes that Transport Canada and MMA are refusing to release the details of the safety plan whose failure caused the Lac-Mégantic disaster - effectively declaring that so far as they're concerned, the plans approved by the government as being sufficient to keep the public safe are none of the public's business.

- Don Lenihan looks at the military procurement process, and highlights the problem with governments allowing contractors to dictate public procurement goals.

- Donald Gutstein tests Andrew Coyne's fudged numbers used to argue against the need for public revenue. But Coyne's figures look downright healthy compared to those being spun by the CCCE - who are trying to claim income taxes and other taxes merely remitted by big business on behalf of others as part of their calculation of what the corporate sector contributes.

- Finally, Barrie McKenna comments on Thomas Piketty's observations about the link between growing inequality, and the corporatist goal of promoting capital returns over broad-based growth:

Prof. Piketty challenges one of the underpinnings of modern democracies – namely, that growth and productivity make each generation better off than the previous one. With hard work and education, conventional thinking goes, anyone can achieve upward mobility, and live the Canadian (or American) dream.

Prof. Piketty warns instead that global economic growth will limp along at just 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent for the rest of this century – roughly half the pace of the past century. The spoils will flow increasingly to the wealthy – entrepreneurs, owners of capital and those fortunate enough to inherit wealth, he argues. Workers will fall further behind.

Think of Prof. Piketty’s world as the antithesis of free-market champion Milton Friedman’s mantra that capitalism spreads the “fruits of economic progress among all people.”

Without radical intervention, the result will be growing inequality and social strife, Prof. Piketty argues.
...
Just as controversial as his dissection of the problem is his recommended solution – a global tax on wealth. Prof. Piketty would slap an annual graduated tax on stocks, bonds and property, which are typically not taxed until they are sold (capital gains). The tax would thwart the concentration of wealth and limit the flow of income to capital.

To be effective, it would have to be applied not just in one country, but virtually everywhere.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Edward Robinson laments the willingness of European centre-left parties to abandon any attempt to argue against austerity even when the evidence shows that's the right position to take:

Centre-left parties in Europe appear to have completely lost the argument for pragmatic fiscal policy, much in the way that US Democrats seemed to lose their own case precisely at the moment when stimulus was working. Consider again how little financial commitment it would have taken to have shored-up confidence in Greek sovereign debt via Eurobonds. Greek debt in 2010 represented only 3.6% of Eurozone GDP. François Hollande’s government was supposed to be making the case for Eurobonds.

What is worse, the centre-left now appears to have let the very explanation of (or blame for) the crisis slip away from them into the hands of neoliberals. Instead of constantly reminding voters and markets that sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios were falling in the Eurozone (and the UK) before the crisis, they have given up. Voters seem to have forgotten that the massive public debts accrued since 2008 had been private debts before then.

From this analysis flows austerity’s legitimacy. To social democrats, it seems profoundly misguided to be prescribing supply-side medicine to a problem which was fundamentally caused by a huge uptick in private-sector debt, necessitated by steadily falling effective demand for 30 years. Of course, there is always inefficiency or corruption, but these were not the primary causes of the crisis. Nonetheless, centre-left parties are assenting.
...
While elections are on the table we must campaign hard, both within our respective national parties and within the broader argument at European level. But if that cannot shift the balance, then genuine social democrats will soon need to decide whether or not to stand by the fading hope of a return to economic pragmatism in the Eurozone or whether to throw their lot in with those calling for the tried and tested routes out of chronic indebtedness.

Choose the former and we risk being permanently subsumed into European austerity elites, choose the latter and we find ourselves, against the European project, with some unattractive intellectual companions and just as much uncertainty. It is a real dilemma.

But surely the status quo of never-ending internal devaluation is politically unacceptable, damaging to the ideal of a united Europe and harmful to democracy and economic development.

- Meanwhile, Matthew O'Brien writes that plenty of U.S. families with relatively high gross incomes are nonetheless living paycheque to paycheque - meaning that precarious financial situations aren't limited to the lower end of the income scale. And while workers across the board are struggling to get by, Paul Krugman highlights how the right is pushing for ever more giveaways to people who live off of wealth rather than labour:

In my last post I tried to document the extent to which modern Republican rhetoric has already adopted the values of “patrimonial capitalism”, even though America’s top one percent still owes its high incomes largely to compensation rather than wealth. On reflection, I thought I should also document the extent to which the GOP has put its money — or, actually, taxpayers’ money — where its mouth is, with concrete policies that favor wealth over work.

Consider, as Exhibit A, the Bush tax cuts. Bush did cut the top tax rate on earned income from 39.6 to 35 percent, a 12 percent reduction. But he cut the rate on capital gains from 21 to 15, a 28 percent reduction; he cut the rate on dividends from 39.6 (because dividends were previously taxed as ordinary income) to 15, a reduction of more than 60 percent. And he put the estate tax on a path toward zero — a 100 percent reduction.

The estate tax made a partial comeback thanks to the awkward fact that a Democrat was in the White House, and there have been some tax hikes on capital income. The point, however, was that Bush tried to give people living off wealth, inherited wealth in particular, much bigger tax cuts than he gave high earners.

...
Even now, 6 of the 10 wealthiest Americans are heirs rather than self-made entrepreneurs — the Koch brothers plus a bunch of Waltons. There’s every reason to believe that the role of inheritance will only grow over time.

And if it does, half our political system will be cheering it on and offering the ever-more-empowered heirs as much assistance as possible.

- And Alison highlights how the Kochs in particular have used their money to warp Canadian politics in favour of their own interests.

- Mariana Mazzucato reminds us that public policy can set a necessary foundation for innovation, while pointing out that the Cons have preferred to hand free money to entrenched corporate interests and resource extractors rather than encouraging the development of new ideas.

- Finally, Don Lenihan offers a useful set of criteria for open government - while highlighting how far we are from the ideal.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Sunday reading.

- Frank Graves recognizes that the dismal mood of young Canadians is based on the economic reality that the expected trend toward intergenerational progress has been reversed.

- Meanwhile, Jesse Myerson discusses five policy proposals which would give younger citizens a far more fair chance at success than they currently hold. Ben Irwin lists twenty elements of life in poverty which figure to be unfamiliar to anybody at higher income levels. And Dennis Raphael nicely boils down the policy choices we face in addressing family poverty:

Research carried out by UNICEF points out that those nations with the lowest child and family poverty rates are, not surprisingly, those nations with the smallest proportion of low-paid workers. Low-paid workers are much more common in nations where the labour sector is weak, government does little to manage the economy in the service of all, and public participation is less than the case in other countries. They are also the nations with a system of proportional representation that allows greater citizen input into the election process. It is not only the Nordic nations that do well in reducing child and family poverty. The Continental nations of Europe also do far better than we do in Canada. 

This analysis suggests that the best means of reducing child and family poverty is to reduce the imbalances in power and influence that exist among Canadians. The best — and easiest way — to do this is to make it easier to organize workplaces, increase the progressivity of income taxes, and assure that all members of the population, regardless of their class status, have the benefits and supports necessary to avoid poverty. 

The recent history of public policy in Canada has been to do the opposite. There have been sustained attacks on organized labour, taxes have been reduced on the wealthy, and the social safety net has been weakened.

- And Don Lenihan rightly questions the corporate media's attempts to downplay the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us, while recognizing the most important influence on escalating executive wealth extraction:

CEOs’ high compensation also relies on a culture of collusion. Boards of directors hire CEOs and set their compensation. But this has at least as much to do with the collegial nature of the corporate executive world as with markets. Boards are an elite professional club. To become a member—most of whom are still men—people work hard to cultivate the right connections, say the right things, dress properly and be recognized as a “team player.” If not, they don’t get in—or at least they don’t last. And therein lays the problem.

Many members sit on multiple boards and depend on this for a substantial part of their income. The more robust the compensation packages for CEOs, the more likely board members are to see their own status and compensation enhanced. No one wants to upset the applecart. On the contrary, there are very strong incentives to support the trend to ever better packages, and serious risks for opposing it—even if one thinks it is unnecessary or wrong.

“The market” provides the perfect alibi. It allows board members to ascribe CEOs’ salaries to an impersonal calculus. They talk about the remarkable skills and learning of CEOs, the small talent pool available to run big organizations, the risk of losing such talent, and so on.

In a private moment, however, the same people can be surprisingly candid about how becoming a successful CEO has less to do with exceptional management skills than proper grooming, meticulous planning, and a ruthless dedication to the goal.

- Finally, Chantal Hebert suggests that Stephen Harper would be smart to say "no" to the Northern Gateway pipeline. But given his apparent lack of concern that Canada's top spy watchdog - responsible for overseeing agencies reported to have plotted with oil interests to spy on First Nations and environmental groups - is himself lobbying on Enbridge's behalf, we can safely say that Harper isn't the least bit concerned with maintaining the appearance of intelligence or unbiased evaluation.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Don Lenihan is the latest to highlight the difference between citizens and consumers - as well as why we should want to act as the former:

In the old view, public debate is all about defining the public interest by establishing collective needs. This requires a very different view of public debate. Rather than seeing it as a chance to advance my wants, it asks me, as a citizen, to consider the needs of the community. This means I must listen to others, weigh their claims, examine the evidence, and make trade-offs and compromises.

When Delacourt talks about citizens having once had a sense of the common good or being willing to make sacrifices for it, we don’t need to believe there was once a golden age of civic participation to agree with her.

The real point is that, not so long ago, citizens had a much clearer sense of their responsibility—as citizens—to balance their personal wants against the public good. Rob Ford’s proclivity to treat citizens first and foremost as taxpayers—and Ford Nation’s inclination to respond—shows just how far we have strayed from this vision.

- Andrew Leach offers his take on what the National Energy Board's rubber-stamping of Northern Gateway means. And Stephen Hume points out the absurdity of the Cons' carefully-scripted process.

- Meanwhile, having managed to eliminate environmental considerations from the Gateway's environmental review process, Stephen Harper has once again kicked any possible greenhouse gas emission regulations past the next federal election. That may break the streak of consecutive "next year!" promises before it reaches an even ten - but it also seems to leave no room for any pretense that a Con government will ever regulate the oil sector.

- Andrew Jackson calls out the Cons' doublespeak on the affordability of a secure pension system. And John Geddes identifies Stephen Harper's pension rhetoric as yet another example of the Cons' beggar-thy-neighbour, every-man-for-himself philosophy.

- Finally, CAUT finds that a strong majority of Canadians both support and recognize the need for unions - while only the predictable 28% would rather see unions and workers silenced.