Saturday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- Chris Dillow discusses the connection between the failure to understand the role of luck in producing unequal outcomes, and the perpetuation of policies which exacerbate inequalities:

As Ed Smith writes in his lovely book, Luck: “randomness is routinely misinterpreted as skill.”

Why do people do this? I suspect it’s not just because of a lack of statistical literacy: many of the subjects in the experiments I’ve cited had taken statistics classes. It’s also because of two reinforcing biases. One is the outcome bias. We judge a performance by its result so if a team wins the game, or if a fund manager beats the market, we infer that they did well rather than got lucky. The other is the narrative fallacy. We are story-telling animals. We seek links between things and detailed explanations even if the truth is only that a bit of good luck happened, then a bit of bad. I suspect that most football punditry is like this.

All this is about how we attribute skill rather than luck to other people. But of course, we also do so to ourselves, and asymmetrically: good results are down to skill and bad to luck. A study of day traders has confirmed what you probably suspected:

Retail day traders in the forex market attribute random success to their own skill and, as a consequence, increase risk taking.

The upshot of all this is that the successful are apt to become bumptious arrogant prats because they attribute their success to their own talents rather than luck. And observers are apt to take them at their inflated self-estimation.

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This, of course, colours our whole social and political structure. Our tendency to see skill where there is just luck causes the successful to have an exaggerated sense of entitlement and the rest of us to be overly deferential to them. Very few people are luck egalitarians. This is one way – of perhaps many – in which inequality sustains itself.

- Meanwhile, Harry Glasbeek argues that capitalism (as opposed to democracy or liberalism) lies at the core of Canada's political power structure, resulting in the government's willingness to hand out corporate welfare at the drop of a hat while attacking workers and lower-income residents. And Rebecca Jennings examines some of the problems with a culture of CEO worship.

- Kristin Rushoway and Laurie Monsebraaten discuss how Doug Ford's plan to shred the regulatory state in Ontario will endanger children in child care. John Michael McGrath points out that a campaign promise not to do any harm to Ontario's greenbelt has been scrapped in favour of a scheme which will allow for its destruction at the whim of any municipality. And Edward Keenan notes that Ford has relabeled virtually any type of public protection from corporate excess and abuse as "red tape" to be systematically destroyed.

- Finally, Michelle Zilio reports on the consistent message from experts in the field that Andrew Scheer's anti-immigration bleatings about a UN migration compact lack any basis in fact. And Andrew Coyne connects the Cons' message to that of nativist and racist parties internationally.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Robert Reich examines how a concerted attack on organized labour has pushed the vast majority of American workers into living paycheque-to-paycheque (or worse) while income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated at the top end of the spectrum:

Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.

Blanketing all of this are stagnant wages and vanishing job benefits. The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.
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(T)he share of total income going to the richest 10 percent of Americans over the last century is almost exactly inversely related to the share of the nation’s workers who are unionized. (See chart below). When it comes to dividing up the pie, most American workers today have little or no say. The pie is growing but they’re getting only the crumbs.

Over the same period time, antitrust enforcement has gone into remission. The US government has essentially given a green light to companies seeking to gain monopoly power over digital platforms and networks (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook); wanting to merge into giant oligopolies (pharmaceuticals, health insurers, airlines, seed producers, food processors, military contractors, Wall Street banks, internet service providers); or intent on creating local monopolies (food distributors, waste disposal companies, hospitals).

This means workers are spending more on such goods and services than they would were these markets more competitive. It’s exactly as if their paychecks were cut. Concentrated economic power has also given corporations more ability to hold down wages, because workers have less choice of whom to work for. And it has let companies impose on workers provisions that further weaken their bargaining power, such as anti-poaching and mandatory arbitration agreements.
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The combination of high corporate profits and growing corporate political power has created a vicious cycle: higher profits have generated more political influence, which has altered the rules of the game through legislative, congressional, and judicial action – enabling corporations to extract even more profit. The biggest losers, from whom most profits have been extracted, have been average workers. 

- William Davies points out how the trumped-up complaints about campus free speech peddled by the right serve primarily to distract from the takeover of most other spaces by the corporate sector. And Nora Loreto comments on the deliberate choice by right-wing pundits to stoke fear and hatred in the wake of the Toronto Danforth shooting.

- Robert Booth exposes how a UK right-wing "think tank" has been actively selling both research outcomes, and access to the Con government. 

- Alan Freeman points out the fiscal price of mindless populism. And Tom Parkin highlights the need for a plan for citizens to organize against the authoritarian tendencies of the likes of Doug Ford.

- Finally, Edward Keenan calls out Ford's choice to gratuitously undermine municipal democracy for the sole purpose of wreaking vengeance against perceived political opponents.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Ed Finn comments on the massive amounts of public money being funneled toward Canada's wealthiest corporations:

When it comes to listing countries on the basis of the social services they provide to citizens compared to the subsidies they heap on corporations, Canada doesn't fare well.

A study from the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy published in January reports that our federal government and the four largest provinces spend $29 billion a year subsidizing business firms.

The study's author, John Lester, says that half of these huge subsidies fail to improve economic performance and therefore constitute a colossal waste of government revenue.
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While Ottawa and the provinces maintain and even increase the amounts of their tax revenue expended on business subsidies, they have proportionately limited their spending on social services.

The latest OECD report on the social expenditures of its 34 member countries ranks Canada 24th for the relatively low 17.2 per cent of GDP it spent on social services in 2016. Most of the 23 countries that surpass Canada have social spending rates of 23 per cent of GDP or more. Some, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Belgium, Italy and Ireland, have rates higher than 28 per cent. Incredibly, even the United States ranks above Canada with a social spending rate of 19.3 per cent of GDP.

The preference of Canadian governments to serve the interests of big business and the rich elite rather than the broader public interest has had appalling consequences. They include our ailing health care system, our lackluster performance on the environment, our mistreatment of indigenous peoples, and, most of all, our disgracefully steep rate of child poverty and our abysmally low level of child care.

- Elizabeth McSheffrey reports on the growing gap between the billionaire class and the rest of us. Jordan Weismann discusses the link between corporate monopsony and stagnant wages. And Alana Semuels takes note of a growing class divide within the U.S.' labour movement, which is holding its ground among white-collar workers while struggling to organize their blue-collar counterparts.

- Bridget Yard points out the squeeze facing Saskatchewan's low-income residents whose stagnant incomes need to be stretched to cover higher prices and regressive taxes.

- Laurie Monsebraaten examines the gap between the needs of Toronto's homeless citizens. And the
Telegraph reports on Jeremy Corbyn's simple and direct plan to provide houses to the people who need them.

- Finally, Edward Keenan explains why Patrick Brown and other politicians who recognize the need to address perception in every other aspect of their public presentation can't expect the benefit of the doubt in the face of credible accusations of sexual exploitation.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Alan Freeman notes that the Libs' aversion to raising public revenue may lock in some of the Cons' most damaging actions:

With the new Liberal government facing fierce economic headwinds — plus a billion-dollar shortfall created by its middle-income tax cut, and a growing need for revenue to cover promised spending on everything from infrastructure and veterans to First Nations and refugees — it would seem logical to at least mull the possibility of raising the GST.

That appeared to be what Finance Minister Bill Morneau was doing earlier this week when he gave a convoluted response to a journalist that was interpreted as opening the possibility to a GST hike sometime in the future.

Within hours — probably after a panicked call from the Prime Minister’s Office — Morneau tweeted a climbdown of his own: “Contrary to misleading headlines, we are not considering changes to the GST.”

What Morneau made clear is that the Liberals are scared to death of being slammed as tax-grabbers by the Conservatives. While much of the Harper legacy is being scrapped — his obstinate refusal to take action on climate change, his surly, tough-guy foreign policy — the anti-tax mantra lives on.

It’s notable that the first thing on Parliament’s to-do list after the Liberals’ election win was the middle-class tax cut. The Liberals want Canadians to believe that the government’s tax burden (except on the super-rich) can continue to decline as it has since 2000.

- Eric Jaffe reports on new research showing how social deprivation can keep children from meeting their potential for intellectual development. And the Globe and Mail argues that Quebec should be honest about any plans to eliminate a high-quality, public child care system in favour of pushing parents toward more expensive private care.

- Andrea Germanos reports on the latest Human Development Index rankings which show Norway at the top of the pack.

- And in what may not be a coincidence as to the importance of respect for workers in generating shared prosperity, the ILO highlights Norway's leadership in ratifying a new protocol against forced labour among other conventions protecting labour rights. And Edward Keenan discusses the different sides of a gig economy - and notes that the 1% may be confusing its own ability to engage in highly-paid consulting with the reality facing precarious workers.

- Finally, Branko Milanovic offers a theory as to the limits in how much worse income inequality could get in the U.S.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Joseph Heath discusses how the Volkswagen emission cheating scandal fits into a particular type of corporate culture:

(W)hen the Deepwater Horizon tragedy occurred, or now the VW scandal, it was hardly surprising to people who follow these things. Certain industries essentially harbour and reproducing deviant subcultures. This is one of the reasons that much of the best work on white collar crime has been inspired by, and draws upon, work in juvenile delinquency. Whereas delinquents tend to exist in subcultures that reproduce deviant attitudes toward authority, many corporations reproduce subcultures that promote organized resistance to regulation.

This is a well-known feature of the automobile industry, and apparently this is what was happening at VW as well. One executive, speaking anonymously, blamed “the company’s isolation, its clannish board and a deep-rooted hostility to environmental regulations among its engineers. “
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What can be said about this? Perhaps a few lessons: First, it serves as a helpful reminder that white collar crime remains a very serious social problem, one that attracts far too little public concern. This is partly because of an almost entirely supine business press – it remains that case that while the “news” section of newspapers focuses very heavily on criticizing the government, the “business” section almost never criticizes business, and does almost no investigative reporting or muckracking. (Notice that while political scandals are almost always uncovered by political reporters, the VW story was not broken by an “automotive” reporter.) Second, it is important to be aware that these criminogenic business subcultures, once developed, can be extremely difficult to eliminate. Thus it is a very important responsibility of management to set the right tone, to keep a careful eye on the corporate culture, and to take hard line when things start to get out of hand. Finally, there are many people who, for reasons of political ideology, are strongly critical of environmental law, health and safety regulation, financial regulation, the FDA, etc. These political ideologies are often appealed to by corporate criminals, as a way of legitimating their law-breaking activities. It seems to me, therefore, that those who express an ideological hostility to regulation bear a special responsibility for ensuring that their views are not misused in this way. This can be achieved, in part, by emphasizing the very significant difference between claiming that a law should be repealed and claiming that a law need not be obeyed.

- And on the subject of cultures where lawbreaking is seen as normal if not outright desirable, Andrew Nikiforuk reminds us of the multiple scandals surrounding Bruce Carson - involving both illegal lobbying and publicly-funded shilling for the oil industry.

- Meanwhile, Joseph Stiglitz sees the Trans-Pacific Partnership as nothing more than a means of entrenching corporate abuses into law around the globe. But Michael Harris notes that plenty of voters and activist groups will be fighting that choice in Canada. 

- Edward Keenan makes clear that the Cons' campaign of discrimination is intended to foment hatred against Muslims in general, while Sean Fine reports that the Cons' target voters are taking up the invitation to do violence against fellow Canadians. And Paula Simons highlights the arrogance involved in claiming to tell women what they may and may not wear.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui discusses the domestic damage being done by the Cons' politically-obsessed foreign policy.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Joseph Stiglitz notes that the recent stock market turmoil may be most important for its effect in highlighting far more important economic weaknesses. And Richard McCormack discusses the link between stock buybacks, inequality and economic stagnation - meaning that a plan to eliminate loopholes for stock options may also have positive spillover effects for the economy as a whole.

- Barry Schwartz writes about the meaning of work, while noting that a focus on theoretical efficiency by eliminating all satisfaction from a work day may be leading to worse results for employers and employees alike:

(W)hen given the chance to make their work meaningful and engaging, employees jump at it, even if it means that they have to work harder. Such cases should serve to remind us there is a human cost to routinizing and depersonalizing work. Too often, instead of being able to take pride in what they do, and derive satisfaction from doing it well, workers have little to show for their efforts aside from their pay.
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In the face of longstanding evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?

The answer, I think, is that the ideas of Adam Smith have become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: They gave rise to a world of work in which his gloomy assumptions about human beings became true. When you take all opportunities for meaning and engagement out of the work that people do, why would they work, except for the wage? What Smith and his descendants failed to realize is that rather than exploiting a fact about human nature, they were creating a fact about human nature.

The transformation I have in mind goes something like this: You enter an occupation with a variety of aspirations aside from receiving your pay. But then you discover that your work is structured so that most of those aspirations will be unmet. Maybe you’re a call center employee who wants to help customers solve their problems — but you find out that all that matters is how quickly you terminate each call. Or you’re a teacher who wants to educate kids — but you discover that only their test scores matter. Or you’re a corporate lawyer who wants to serve his client with care and professionalism — but you learn that racking up billable hours is all that really counts.

Pretty soon, you lose your lofty aspirations. And over time, later generations don’t even develop the lofty aspirations in the first place. Compensation becomes the measure of all that is possible from work. When employees negotiate, they negotiate for improved compensation, since nothing else is on the table. And when this goes on long enough, we become just the kind of creatures that Adam Smith thought we always were.
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To be sure, people should be adequately compensated for their work. Recent efforts across the country to achieve a significant increase in the minimum wage represent real social progress. But in securing such victories for working people, we should not lose sight of the aspiration to make work the kind of activity people embrace, rather than the kind of activity they shun.

- Tana Ganeva exposes how some of the lucky few most insulated from homelessness and poverty demean the people who struggle to face those obstacles every day. And Jeffrey Simpson theorizes that our politics are lacking for big ideas and generosity.

- Edward Keenan writes that the most disturbing aspect of the G20 police abuses was the eagerness with which the people responsible for maintaining social order abandoned any attempt to preserve democratic rights.

- Finally, Aaron Wherry discusses the "snowflake" organizational model which is developing as the alternative to top-down messaging. And that model may make for an interesting contrast against the Cons' most limited broadcasting structure yet, as candidates are being told not to engage with media, public debates or any other format which could possibly deviate from central messaging.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Edward Keenan weighs in on the role a basic income could play in a job market marked by increasingly precarious work:

I am an enthusiastic supporter of better workplace protections and wages. I have a good, unionized, stable job. I like it. But regulation of work and workplaces isn’t likely adequate to solve the problem we face. No matter how high minimum wages are, they will not help people unable to get a job that pays them. And there are a lot of reasons to think that no matter how good workplace safeguards are, the number of people who can expect to hold a conventional job will continue to drop.
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A post-jobs world seems unlikely to be a post-work world. Most people want to be productive, but are forced by economic circumstance to do things they hate doing. If we all had the equivalent of a trust fund, I think most of us would do as many trust fund kids do: we’d throw ourselves into creative and artistic projects, charitable enterprises, politics and community work, entrepreneurship — the fulfilling (and useful) labour that is difficult or risky to depend on financially, and so is now overwhelmingly the province of the privileged.

It is a long-promised science fiction premise: a world in which people are freed from the drudgery of mindless work they hate and able to pursue the things they love. The future’s looming crisis isn’t a lack of jobs; it’s a lack of the income those jobs have traditionally distributed. Solve the latter problem, and the post-job world looks like nothing to fear.

- Meanwhile, Ian Gough points out how a focus on short-term returns and benchmarks prevents us from pursuing upstream policies which could do far more good in the long run.

- Andrew Jackson discusses the damage needless austerity is doing to the global economy. And John Cartwright argues that a push toward renewable energy could do wonders for our economy and our environment alike by freeing us from the twin traps of austerity and fossil fuel dependence.

- Finally, Ralph Surette is rightly livid that the Cons are spending their time and our money building monuments to Stephen Harper rather than a better Canada. But Lana Payne writes that the public is more than ready for change, rather than wanting any part of making the Harper legacy more permanent.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Alan Rusbridger explains the Guardian's much-appreciated effort to provide both space and analysis of the need to fight climate change. And Naomi Klein makes the case for a Marshall plan-style response to transition the world to a sustainable society, while highlighting the need for a public push to make that happen.

- Meanwhile, Jim Stanford discusses the fallout from the Cons' single-minded obsession with oil development. And Thomas Walkom calls out their blatant attempt to avoid discusses the economy now that they've left it sputtering.

- On that front, Edward Keenan writes that Stephen Harper's fearmongering seems more like a parody of over-top-top rhetoric than anything which could possibly be taken seriously:

On occasion, the Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shown an inclination to take on the role of the press — by producing and distributing its own approved news items to print and broadcast media through the PR agency News Canada Ltd., for example. It now appears it has decided to do the work of satirists, too. How else to explain the transparent layers of irony running through the Conservatives’ public communications, the ham-fisted illustrations of doublespeak that so effectively lay bare the cynical, hollow heart and totalitarian inclinations of their new legislation?

One imagines the frustrated novelists and comedians in the Conservative StratCom writers room shaking their heads at the efforts of editorial cartoonists and TV sketch troupes: You call that parody? Let us show you how this is done.

“They hate us because we love freedom and tolerance.”

See, the devastating self-skewering element of this line is that it is nominally intended to serve as the justification for a proposed law, Bill C-51, that will restrict freedom. And it is offered at a time when members of the government are using the bill as a means of whipping up intolerance against Muslims to score cheap political points. Here we have a piece of legislation that would, among other things, curtail freedom of speech fairly broadly on matters related to terrorism and give an espionage agency domestic policing powers that allow it, in secret, to be specifically exempted from honouring the Charter of Rights.

An extra-constitutional secret police and surveillance agency, and criminal penalties for expressions of dissent. If “we love freedom and tolerance” isn’t the perfect punchline to explain that, what is?

- But the spin has had real-world consequences, as Chris Selley laments the fact that the Cons' scare tactics have managed to interfere with a a cheerleading competition scheduled for the West Edmonton Mall. And Humberto Dasilva comments on how the terror push both relies on and encourages xenophobia, while Haroon Siddiqui exposes the McCarthyite hearings being held by the Con-dominated Senate.

- Finally, CBC examines how the millionaire investors being prioritized for immigration purposes actually contribute less tax revenue than the refugees the Cons want to shut out.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Edward Keenan is the latest to point out that any reasonable political decision-making process needs to include an adult conversation about taxes and why we need them:

This week, when asked about the prospect of raising taxes beyond the rate of inflation in coming years, John Tory called the idea “an admission of failure.”

This is distressing to hear. Consider the context: Tory’s current budget turns out to require a lot of dipsy-doodling that edges the city perilously close to its debt ceiling while hiking TTC fares and garbage fees. Meanwhile the unexpected bills keep rolling in: lookee here, Metrolinx just tossed another $95 million onto the city’s obligations! Whoah, lookee there, Toronto’s Union Station obligations just went up another $60 million because the province and feds are telling us to stuff our pleas for help. That’s without beginning to even ponder the 10-figure numbers involved in keeping the TTC and social housing in good enough shape that they can safely continue operating.

What Tory calls admitting failure, we might instead call “math.”

It’s difficult math to face up to, but it’s the result of more than a decade of childishly pretending we can avoid the calculations by thinking happy thoughts and wishing on the first star to the right.
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The federal and provincial governments have refused to rain money on us from their own tax revenue. The quest for “efficiencies” has been on a long time, but has never shown the potential to be a miracle cure for our revenue woes. The City of Toronto needs to raise more money, either through property taxes or new “revenue tools.”

Maybe people don’t want to hear that. But telling it to them straight is not “admitting failure.” It’s owning up to reality, in the hopes of avoiding a civic failure that will follow if we continue to act like children who can’t handle basic math.

- But then, Ian Welsh reminds us that often what's right is also what's most efficient - as in the case of providing homes for the homeless.

- Bruce Western and Linda Forman Naval make the point that governments should make a concerted effort to make work available to released offenders - particularly if the alternative is to exploit current prisoners. But Jacob Boon reports on Drew Butler's sad example of how people are instead treated even after serving a sentence in full.

- Meanwhile, Thomas Walkom writes that while the Cons fearmonger about terrorism, they're deliberately ignoring the far greater security threat posed by climate change. And Thomas Mulcair presents the NDP's case against the Cons' terror bill.

- Kimberly Brown reports on the Canadian government's shameful interventions in Mexico on behalf of human rights abuses in the mining sector.

- Finally, Paul Adams muses about what we could expect from a Lib government and reaches exactly the right conclusion (if not one which is any surprise based on historical precedent): when it comes to the economy and social programs, Justin Trudeau and his party will be exactly as progressive as the NDP can force them to be and not an iota more.

More Layton Links

Another day, another set of commentaries on the life of a great Canadian leader.

- Chantal Hebert notes Layton's contribution to Canada's broader political scene:

(Layton) taught Canada's jaded chattering class that retail politics and the attending appeals to the lowest common populist denominator need not be the only route to victory.

When all is said and done, his greatest gift to the country may have been to restore a measure of humanity to its national politics.

- The Star focuses on Layton's message of hope:

Layton’s final message demands attention. Even without the poignancy that comes from being his last public words, it is a powerful appeal to the best, most optimistic parts of our nature. We live in an age of sadly diminished expectations, especially in public life. It was left to Layton, with only hours to go in his personal journey, to remind us that while Canada is a great country, “we can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice and opportunity.” We don’t need to choose between prosperity and fairness, he wrote. We can – and should – have both.

It was typical of Layton that he was in the political fray up to the very end, not passing on a chance to persuade voters that the way to get all this is to vote NDP. He was a committed, partisan politician at a time of deep cynicism about politics and politicians. But he managed to find the elusive formula that allows some leaders to connect with voters in ways that go beyond the issues of the moment.

- Chris Selley points out Layton's rare combination of principles and pragmatism:

(M)ore than anything else, he believed in Canada — not just in the federalist-vs.-separatist sense, but in that he clearly believed we are a country that can do bold things, things we haven’t done before, if we just decide to do them. To ponder Jack Layton’s absence from Canadian politics is to realize how rare a bird he was: He didn’t insist on the perfect at the expense of the good; he didn’t catastrophize every proposal from his opponents; he fought, unapologetically, for a very different Canada, and he did it with a grin.

Without even bringing policy into the equation, he was pretty much everything you could want in a politician, in an era when Canadians are accustomed to getting nothing they need. It’s tempting to say they broke the mould when they made Jack Layton, but that’s too depressing to contemplate.

- Rick Salutin highlights Layton's work to provide a voice for the powerless:

Jack would surely have called himself a socialist, then and later. But I think it was this kind of battle for justice, especially on larger social issues, that drew him in. He seemed most at home speaking for those who lacked the levers of wealth or power. (The comfortable, of course, have a right to their rights. But they tend to be well-represented in the public realm.) He liked being a kind of tribune for the relatively powerless and voiceless; it meshed with his flare for attention and focus. For this reason I see him more as a man of the left — almost in the sense of the French Revolution — than a classical socialist. By the time he became active in party politics, socialism wasn’t much of an issue anywhere, and it has become less so ever since. Justice is another matter.
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His reactions to what I wrote were always positive and generous. I don’t think this was just smart politics, though there’s no point in alienating the press. I think it also sprang from his character: a belief he could help bring people of basic good-will — which includes most humans — together to build a better society. Maybe he even thought there was something he could learn from a little of the negativity he was so averse to in himself.

- Jamey Heath offers up an insider's perspective on the beginning and early years of Layton's NDP leadership.

- And finally, Sandra Martin discusses Layton's three families who will carry on his legacy.

Update: Let's add Edward Keenan's personal take:

I don’t cite my own personal anecdote here because I think those moments were among the most noteworthy in his long and storied career, nor because I think I merit even a footnote in that story. I mention it mostly because I, like a lot of others, have been blindsided by how deeply personal the loss of Jack Layton feels. As someone I know wrote on Twitter, “This isn’t any old sad. This is loss of family sad.” I’m grasping to try to connect the actual physical tears I shed on Bay Street this morning after I was informed of his death by a phone call with something other than political analysis.

I suspect that my personal story is, rather than exceptional, typical. Jack Layton made believers out of cynics, and in that he was exceptional: a hopemonger of the first order before Obama was out of school. You could see that personal connection even in those he hadn’t met personally, in the way the NDP’s surprising support in Quebec was so often summed up by residents saying, “I’m voting for Jack.”