Wednesday Evening Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Andre Picard writes about the unjustifiable limitations and inconsistencies in Canada's health care system:

Break your leg and the X-ray and cast will be covered, but you will need to pay for the crutches. Break your jaw and it will be wired at no cost; break your teeth and you will pay the dentist. Get cancer treatment at the hospital and there will be no charge; take the same oncology medication at home and you will pay dearly. Suffer from severe depression and your hospitalization will be covered, but psychological care and medications will not be covered by public insurance after you’re released. If you have diabetes and live in Quebec, many more of your drugs and supplies will be covered than in neighbouring New Brunswick. Need trauma care while visiting another province, and you could get stiffed with a big air ambulance bill. Live out your final days in a hospital and the state will pick up the tab, but do so in a nursing home and you will pay.

The list of inconsistencies and absurdities is a long one. Coverage often depends on where you live, where you work, your age – but more than anything, public coverage is limited by historical accident.
...

The inconsistent coverage of mental health care (and psychological services in particular), home care and prescription drugs has been the subject of much debate, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

If we are going to have a semblance of a national health system across 13 provinces and territories – without forgetting the large federal health system – it’s important to have equitable (not equal) access for all Canadians. Yet, the variations in coverage between jurisdictions have never been more pronounced.

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Medicare cannot provide all care to all people at all times. We need to make tough choices on what is, and isn’t, in the medicare basket of services. We need to eliminate obsolete and wasteful practices, and embrace only new ones that are cost-effective.

We have the tools to do so. But good evidence isn’t enough. As the report notes, we need to “translate the language of science and evaluation into the language of decisions and public policy.”

- Jocelyn Timperley explores the long-term economic benefits of fighting climate change now, rather than having to answer for its effects later. And Merran Smith discusses the obvious risks of being left behind in a global transition to clean energy.

- Tammy Robert examines the Saskatchewan public's widespread recognition of the problem of climate change and willingness to help fight it - no matter how obstinately Scott Moe and the Saskatchewan Party try to stand in the way. And Jennifer Quesnel takes a look at the modest effect of an Alberta-style carbon tax even before accounting for rebates and investments from the new public revenue.

- Finally, Tom Parkin weighs in on the mirror-image cynicism of Doug Ford and Kathleen Wynne in Ontario's election campaign. And Donald Savoie discusses how Justin Trudeau is either taking Atlantic Canada for granted, or abandoning it altogether.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Allan Woods looks into the pitiful responses to states of emergency declared by First Nations, as well as a decade and a half worth of neglect of cries for help from Pikangikum First Nation in particular. Kristy Kirkup reports on the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's latest order requiring the federal government to stop dragging its heels in providing social services. And Kate Heartfield rightly argues that we need to treat Third World conditions on First Nations as matters of injustice which require correction - not merely a basis for charity.

- Meanwhile, Richard Wolff discusses the U.S.' example of racial disparity as an example of how discrimination and capitalism can feed off of each other.

- Heather Mallick looks at the development of pay-for-plasma schemes as the latest example of the commoditization of anything that can be exploited.

- Marco Chown Oved reports on the missing $40 billion which have been diverted offshore from Canada in the last year.

- Gary Mason reports that Christy Clark's big-money fund-raisers are translating directly into increased income for her due to a party top-up beyond her salary as premier, then rightly questions the ethics involved in that income stream.

- Finally, Donald Savoie summarizes what Canadians governments are doing well in their current form (which is unfortunately mostly limited to managing communications), and what they could do better by paying attention to the public services they're supposed to be delivering. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Bruce Livesey discusses Tony Blair's role in corporatizing social democracy. And Stephen Elliott-Buckley writes that there's little reason to listen to the policy prescriptions of a financial elite class which is conspicuously ensuring that its future bears no resemblance to that of the general population.

- Jane Taber interviews Donald Savoie about the importance of our public service - and the decline it's seen in recent years:

What happened?

It was wrong to think that we could make the public sector look like the private sector. Well, frankly, it started with Margaret Thatcher. She arrived in 1980 and she said, ‘I don’t want bureaucrats to tell me what I ought to do to do in terms of policy. We won a majority mandate so we will define policy. What I want the bureaucracy to be good at is to be good managers.’ Mandarins are not known to be good managers. So when Thatcher arrived and said, ‘I want you to become better managers,’ she drew a blank. They didn’t have any ideas about management. So, she said, ‘Right, I am going to go to the private sector.’ So, she got a lot of private sector advisors in as did Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney. We didn’t realize that the private sector plays by its own rules and businesses are good at what they do but they don’t have to deal with 12 officers of Parliament, they don’t have to deal with the [media]. The private sector remedy did not work. It demoralized the public sector.

Why should we care?

Show me a weak country and I will show you a country with a weak public service. Every country needs a referee and the referee has to be the public service. No country can operate without a referee. You take the public service out of Canadian society and you will have chaos.

- pogge discusses what looks to be a glaring loophole in Canada's Access to Information Act - as a recent decision has determined that a government institution can delay an initial reply indefinitely without recourse. Meanwhile, Pat Martin is leading the charge to fix a few additional problems with our access-to-information legislation. And Newfoundland and Labrador are conducting a thorough review of their legislation - albeit only after the government rammed through highly dubious changes which made the system far more opaque than it was before.

- Alison contrasts the Cons' cringeworthy partisan ads against Elections Canada's entirely unobjectionable messages about voting which the Cons want to ban.

- Finally, Thomas Ponniah discusses the founding and first steps of the Tommy Douglas Institute.

On coopting

Paul Wells offers a note of warning for the Libs in recruiting Chrystia Freeland as a candidate. But I see a greater problem for Freeland herself in pursuing the role.

It's not hard to see how Freeland might seem appealing as a means of papering over the Libs' disconnection from the general public:

Chrystia Freeland, winner of the 2013 National Business Book Award for her book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Doubleday Canada), has confirmed her foray into federal politics.

The race to replace MP Bob Rae in the Toronto Centre riding is gaining momentum as the Thomson Reuters editor and managing director has confirmed she will be seeking the Liberal party nomination. 

But it wasn't long ago that an opposition party similarly looked to press its advantage in a perceived area of weakness for the incumbent government - with little regard for whether it intended to follow through on its assurances. And that didn't exactly work out well for the star candidate involved...

Years after a nondescript public servant wouldn’t play ball with institutional sleaze (and became a national hero in the process), Allan Cutler still has Canada on his mind. He is as troubled now as ever he was when Jean Chretien had his name embossed on golf balls to keep Quebec in Canada.

“I had hoped after Gomery that things would change. If anything, it has gotten worse. We have an epidemic of corruption at the federal level. Whistleblowers are even more unwelcome now than they were then.”

...nor for the writer whose criticism was seen to define the problem:

Savoie's passionate condemnation of centralization didn't slow it down. In an odd way, it may even have contributed to it.

"An adviser to a prime minister asked me if I'd sign a copy of Governing from the Centre," Savoie says. "I leafed through it and I noticed that he had read it, he had underlined a few things. And I said, 'Now you're going to do things differently?' He said, 'No, no, no. We use it as a manual.' "

Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of Libs hastily grabbing copies of Plutocrats for their summer reading. But given that the actual direction of the party under Justin Trudeau has involved backing the Cons and corporate interests at every turn, there's little reason to think Freeland's call to serve "everyone else" is being treated as anything other than a cookbook - nor that the Libs see an expose about the global elite as much besides a manual to gain entrance to the club.

We'll see whether Freeland herself manages to gain any traction on the Canadian political scene. But all indications now are that she's mostly being used to brand continued plutocratic rule with a large red "L" - and the rest of us shouldn't see that as an improvement.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Friday reading.

- Jennifer Ditchburn reports that the Harper Cons are making ample progress in their goal of removing Canada from any list of socially-developed welfare states, as Canada has dropped from being the world's leader in the UN's Human Development Index to a position outside the top 10 countries by that measure.

- Peter Penashue's resignation in the wake of a campaign financing scandal will open up plenty of lines of discussion - as well as an opportunity to flip a seat into opposition hands. But let's ask another question arising out of his stepping down from Cabinet: will anybody notice he's gone?

- Carol Goar expands on the futility of trying to apply business principles to government management (with help from Donald Savoie):

To Savoie, this anecdote encapsulated what has happened to Canada’s public service over the past 30 years: front-line workers have been sacrificed to make way for offices full of paper-pushers, managers, supervisors and evaluators. “It is ill-conceived, costly and misguided.”

The bottom-line doctrine took hold under prime minister Brian Mulroney, who decided the public sector should operate with the same market discipline as private enterprise. His four successors have adhered to it slavishly.

It has never worked and it never will, Savoie says.

The first problem is that the public sector is not in the business of making money. In the absence of profit-loss statement, it has no way of measuring how well it is doing. So it fabricates yardsticks and backs them up with reams of reports showing how efficient, effective and indispensable it is.

The second problem is that government is incapable of “creative destruction,” the process by which industry gets rid of outmoded products and develops new ones. Bureaucrats don’t have the power to pull the plug and politicians seldom do it for fear of offending vested interests. “The problem is not that government is spending more on new things, but that it spends massively on old things.”

...

The remedy is obvious, Savoie says with the same clear-sightedness that once scandalized his boss. Figure out what a government department is supposed to do, then fit the employment level to the workload.

- David Climenhaga proposes that the Alberta NDP make a concerted effort to become the province's "city party".

- Finally, Scott Feschuk nicely summarizes the effect of the unaccountable Senate - and the futility of trying to defend it:

Having existed for more than a century, the Senate has produced a number of memorable achievements, such as having existed for more than a century. Also, there was one day that a plucky young upstart openly defied the two-nap minimum. He was subjected to a thorough harrumphing.

Being a senator sounds like a pretty sweet gig. You get an office, a staff and an annual salary of $132,000. You are also entitled to collect up to $22,000 a year in living expenses if a) your primary residence is more than 100 km from Parliament Hill, or b) you feel like it.


Are there any downsides? Not a ton. Sure, you become: a drain on the federal treasury; an object of national mockery, stereotype and derision; and a feckless member of a legislative chamber that Liberal and Conservative prime ministers alike have sullied and undermined over decades by treating it as a repository for cronies, bagmen and talentless, self-promoting partisans.

But on the other hand: Taco Tuesdays!

Alas, now that Canadians have been made aware of the existence of the Senate, a lot of them want to abolish it—simply because it’s a wasteful appendage that costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year and provides no tangible or intangible benefits to any human.
...
The bottom line is that even though our senators are beleaguered, they have the opportunity to be viewed by Canadians with a more sympathetic eye—if only they can draw attention away from every aspect of their job, everything they do and all that their institution has come to represent.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Lawrence Martin discusses how the B.C. Libs, Harper Cons and other governments have responded to transparency requirements by deliberately refusing to record what they're doing and why:

News from the government of British Columbia. Sorry citizens, we have no files. There is no written record of our decisions. You want to know how we operate? Sorry.

It’s no joke. A report from Elizabeth Denham, the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, says the rate of ‘no records’ responses to freedom of information requests is soaring. At the premier’s office, no less than 45 per cent of requests were turned back for that reason.

The file cupboards are increasingly bare, the commish says, because emails are being destroyed and senior officials are communicating orally rather than putting anything in writing.

If you want a formula for deniability, it’s a hard one to beat. It means that on any controversy that emerges, there is no documented way to establish culpability. No records. No accountability.

If the oral culture of governance is booming in British Columbia, how might it be doing in other provinces and in Ottawa? I remember first learning about this kind of thing while writing about the Afghan detainees’ affair. A bureaucrat from the defence department described it this way: “I get a call from the Privy Council Office. They’re setting up a conference call. The first thing that is said is, ‘No note-taking, no recordings, nothing. We don’t want to see anything in writing on this.’” The bureaucrat said this was the way policies were being developed. “It’s scary.”

- Meanwhile, Canadians for Tax Fairness notes that the Cons' attitude toward tax revenues lost to overseas tax avoidance is "don't know, don't want to know". And Murray Brewster's report on soaring defence contracting costs led the Cons to hastily reallocate nearly $800 million to try to save face - suggesting that there's all the more reason to worry that the Cons indeed lack any clue how public money is being used (and want to make sure nobody else can piece the truth together).

- Kathryn May reports on Donald Savoie's conclusion that business-style decision-making has done nothing but damage to Canada's public sector:

The drive to improve management flopped. An industry mushroomed within the bureaucracy to fabricate a bottom line with new oversight units designed to help evaluate and audit programs, manage risk, measure performance and hand out performance bonuses. These shops are filled with bureaucrats and hired consultants who, Savoie says, “turn cranks attached to nothing,” and churn out reports for Parliament that are barely read. Savoie argues this oversight bureaucracy has come at the expense of front-line services.

The public service added about 70,000 jobs over the past dozen years, concentrated in the National Capital Region where most departments are headquartered, rather in the field where the “rubber hits the road” and public servants deliver services to Canadians. Thirty years ago, 72 per cent of public servants were in regions, and today that has shrunk to 57 per cent.

He puts much of the blame for the growth of oversight on the auditor-general, whom he calls “the biggest proponent of new public management,” and on other parliamentary watchdogs.

“The essence of the public service is to provide front-line services to Canadians and we have lost sight of that. The public service is tasked with managing the paper burden, feeding the beast and managing processes and we can lay much of that at the doorstep of the auditor-general and other parliamentary officers.”

- Finally, while I've seen plenty of others discuss the massive gaps between inequality in reality, as it's believed to be and as it ought to be, a video reminder is always a plus.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Michael Harris discusses the impending moment of truth for the Cons in owning up to their substantive failures toward Canada's First Nations:

Whether it’s Canada’s natives or its health ministers, Stephen Harper’s preferred place for his opponents is under his thumb. He has replaced the alternating current of democracy with the direct current of oligarchy. Ordinary people remain as invisible to him now as they have been since 2006.

For that reason, Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike has been a disaster for the man who doesn’t like to negotiate, let alone negotiate with a nobody, especially a nobody who has managed to put him under the gun. Remember, this is a guy who wouldn’t even talk to Canada’s premiers. Now they know the drill: stop eating.
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What aboriginals need is for treaties to be honoured on something other than the long hours of the geological clock. What they need is legislative protection for their lands and equal say in the laws that govern them as guaranteed by the Constitution. But what they have gotten from Stephen Harper since his “official” apology to Aboriginal Peoples in 2008 has not quite lived up to the billing of a “renewed” relationship.

The Harper government has unilaterally changed the Indian Act. It has unilaterally changed environmental legislation that weakens protection of fresh water and endangered fish species. It has made it easier for major developments to take place with less study of the environmental impact and no equal say for aboriginals. And in 2012, the very year Stephen Harper pledged to renew the search for justice for all native peoples, his “little minister” — as Chief Spence described John Duncan — announced sweeping cuts for core aboriginal organizations across Canada.

One hundred expert academics signed a damning letter to Duncan last November decrying the loss of funding for native communities in the area of health, clean drinking water, education and infrastructure. “The potential loss of expertise is staggering, and could take a generation to recover from,” the researchers warned.

- Frank Graves rightly notes that social media hasn't yet had as strong an impact on our political scene as some might have expected. But I'll note that it's still an open question whether it will eventually fulfill its potential - especially when it's possible to look to the U.S. for obvious examples of success in reaching new voter groups.

- Donald Savoie writes that the decades-old fad of trying to run government like a business has proven unsuccessful:

Public servants of yesteryear would emphasize proper data-gathering procedures and produce analyses with predictive power. Politicians grabbed the policy-making levers and decided to turn bureaucrats into better managers. Public servants were not about to admit that their management skills were lacking, so politicians looked to the private sector for inspiration. As a result, strategic plans were turned into business plans, citizens into customers and cabinet into a powerless board of directors, and attempts were made to tie pay to performance.

The notion that public administration could be made to look like private-sector management has been ill-conceived, misguided and costly to taxpayers. Management in the private sector has everything to do with the bottom line and market share. Administration in the public sector is a matter of opinion, debate and blame avoidance in a politically charged environment. It doesn’t much matter in the private sector if you get it wrong 40 per cent of the time so long as you turn a handsome profit and increase market share. It doesn’t much matter in the public sector if you get it right 99 per cent of the time if the 1 per cent you get wrong becomes a heated issue in Question Period and the media.
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Public servants now produce all manner of reports and navigate various accountability requirements to fabricate a bottom line. The result: Ottawa has an oversupply of officers of Parliament, accountability and oversight processes and performance and evaluation reports. Hundreds of reports are carted every year to Parliament, where they remain unread unless one of them has information to embarrass the government.

The business vocabulary in government has, if nothing more, empowered managers to grow government operations by stealth. The Chrétien-Martin review (1994-98) eliminated 45,000 positions, but by the time Stephen Harper launched his own review in 2011, the government had added more than 70,000 positions. Thousands of new oversight positions have been created in Ottawa to manage accountability processes. Thirty years ago, 70 per cent of federal public servants were located in the regions; today, the number is 57 per cent. Without putting too fine a point on it, public servants in the field deliver public services, while those in Ottawa provide policy advice and manage processes and oversight requirements.

- But if there's one lesson we should hope to take from a business mindset, it's that we shouldn't leave obvious sources of revenue on the table - and plenty of voters look to have bought into that view.

On manual adjustments

For all the failings of a Con government that combines extreme centralization with an utter lack of vision, let's give Stephen Harper credit for successfully bludgeoning satire to death. Just this week, I considered this to be at least somewhat of an exaggeration in the department of "using what's been criticized or outlawed as a template for action":

Mia Rabson notes that the Cons are looking to outlaw on First Nations exactly the type of negative and deceptive politics they practice for themselves. But in noting that the practice is similarly outlawed in federal election campaigns, Rabson points to an even bigger issue: the Cons are apparently looking to what's banned during election campaigns as their playbook for the next four years.

And yet, here's Dan Gardner sharing a story from Donald Savoie:

Savoie's passionate condemnation of centralization didn't slow it down. In an odd way, it may even have contributed to it.

"An adviser to a prime minister asked me if I'd sign a copy of Governing from the Centre," Savoie says. "I leafed through it and I noticed that he had read it, he had underlined a few things. And I said, 'Now you're going to do things differently?' He said, 'No, no, no. We use it as a manual.' "

Savoie wouldn't tell me who the adviser was but he confirmed that the prime minister he worked for is Conservative. "And you can now assume which one I'm talking about," he added with a laugh.

Sunday Morning Links

Content goes here.

- Donald Savoie's analysis of politics in the U.K. is no less applicable at home:

We ought not to be surprised that voters today are less inclined to identify themselves (with parties) as their parents tended to do. They have little reason to do so given that political parties are increasingly election-day machines. This has important implications for representative democracies. When we move away from political parties to pursue more narrow interests, the connection between citizens and government is further fragmented. It also speaks to the rise of more "personalised realities".

The problem is that the economic and political interests of the political, intellectual and economic elites are heard at the expense of the broader community. The power and influence of political parties and even formal policymaking processes have given way to powerful individuals and actor-centred institutionalism. This, in turn, has made it virtually impossible for many elected representatives, let alone ordinary citizens, to play any meaningful role in shaping public policies or even holding government to account. We ought not to be surprised at voter apathy and the growing cynicism about government in society.

- From the "how to use Twitter" department: Edmonton-Leduc NDP candidate Artem Medvedev has responded to a request for more ideas (instead of negativity) with a steady stream of policy proposals.

- In contrast, from the "how to abuse Twitter" department, the Libs are apparently trying to draw nonexistent connections between the deliberately nonpartisan CAPP and the explicitly partisan (at least in the sense of directly challenging the Cons) Unseat Harper site. Which isn't to say I disagree with the aims of the latter in the least - but surely it's worth being honest about who's actually part of what project.

- And finally, Dr. Dawg notes that any commentary about police abuses is apparently off limits for publicly-displayed art in Ottawa. Place your bets as to whether Canada's Speech Warriors (TM) choose to ignore the suppression of speech entirely, or justify it based on their fondness for abuses of authority as long as it's directed toward people they don't like.

Thursday Morning Links

Assorted content for your perusal...

- Dr. Dawg picks up on a stunningly evasive answer from Gérard Latulippe of Rights and Democracy about the "forensic audit" which was supposed to have been made public six months ago. But I'm not sure that I agree with his description of the answer as "bafflegab": isn't it more of a flat-out declaration that he refuses to talk about the main issue facing his organization?

- Donald Savoie continues to be thoroughly unimpressed with the empty promises coming from Cons and Libs alike in New Brunswick's ongoing election. But while I can understand his not wanting to be seen taking any party's side, wouldn't it be worthwhile to mention the alternative which is actually talking honestly about the province's fiscal mess?

- Meanwhile, the federal NDP's push to make the Cons look completely out of touch with rural Canada seems to be proceeding nicely thanks to a concerted focus on issues that matter more than the long gun registry. Though as I noted yesterday, the especially fun part will come when the Cons get to stand up to try to defend keeping the registry as it stands as the NDP works to improve it.

- Finally, the Cons' distrust of evidence-based government has taken its most extreme form yet: apparently it's too intrusive to bother keeping track of how many health inspectors are actually monitoring livestock transportation.