Monday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Bruce Boccardy writes about the continued centrality of class struggle. Melissa Ryan comments on the realities that "Epstein class" is by far the most apt description of the people currently in charge of the U.S. (and far too much else). And Nick Chater and George Loewenstein highlight how self-serving corporations and billionaires are trying to force individuals to bear the responsibility and consequences for systemic ills. 

- Meanwhile, Jason Koebler writes that the gamification of war crimes in Iran has turned into just another appalling example of the depravity economy. And Rana Foroohar discusses how the U.S.' increasing adherence to petrostate logic is making everybody worse off (other than a tiny number of the most exploitative tycoons).

- The Economic Security Project examines how we could be ensuring a dignified life for everybody - even while helping individual recipients' employment prospects - through a readily-affordable guaranteed income. 

- Finally, Isaac Callan and Colin D'Mello report on the Ford PCs' decision to just stop informing the public of the measured consequences of their policies. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- The Guardian offers a few expert perspectives on how to fix the U.S.' broken economic system. And Hassan Yussuff writes that the centennial of the Winnipeg General Strike should remind us of the importance and power of mass political action.

- Randy Robinson challenges Doug Ford's multiple forms of austerity by pointing out Ontario's fiscal picture already involves a small public sector funded by insufficient revenues. And Martin Regg Cohn's revelations about plans for even more devastating cuts highlight how Ford's inclination is to do even more damage than he's inflicted already.

- Meanwhile, Cillian O'Brien reports on Oxfam's renewed push for a universal child care system which would lead to massive returns on public investments.

- Chris Hall writes that Canadians are recognizing the value of properly taxing the online services that have turned tech giants into some of the world's most powerful corporations.

- Finally, Marie-Danielle Smith reports on the Libs' failure to fund the Auditor General's office to allow it to carry out planned reviews. And Murray Mandryk rightly criticizes the Sask Party's decision to set aside any interest in facts as opposed to talking points.

New column day

Here, on Ryan Meili's evidence-based policy - and particularly his thoughtful recognition of the issues where it's better to seek out more expert advice than make promises in its absence.

For further reading...
- Again, Meili's platform is here, and the sections on revenue and Crown corporations referred to in the column are here and here respectively. And by way of comparison, Trent Wotherspoon's policy is here, including his tax proposals within his general economic plank.
- And while Meili is no longer listed as one of EvidenceNetwork's academic experts, some of his past contributions can be found here.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Stefan Stern writes that our current corporate culture needs to be changed in ways going far beyond reining in excessive executive compensation:

Wage inequality is also a symbol of something more fundamentally wrong in the business world. Too many corporations are competing to achieve the wrong results in the wrong way, led astray by perverse incentives that produce bad outcomes. And the excessive rewards for those at the top are a prize for the people who play this game best.
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This text was a compromise and a (weary) triumph of drafting. It was an attempt to acknowledge, in law, that business should consider its impact on many stakeholders. But it has not changed the world. It has served, in practice, to enshrine “shareholder primacy”, that is, the idea that businesses should worry about their shareholders first and above all, before thinking about anything else. This is a bad idea with bad consequences. And it has proven hard to shake off.

This is where the link to excessive CEO pay comes in. These complicated pay packages are structured to produce huge bonuses if share price targets are hit. The majority of shareholders are pretty impatient with businesses that do not deliver regular and repeated earnings increases over the short and medium term. The sort of long-term investment that might raise company performance many years from now, boosting productivity and wages for ordinary workers, is harder to push through. This in part explains why corporate Britain is notoriously sitting on a “cash pile” estimated to be as large as £700bn.

 

Instead of investing, what do corporate leaders do with all this cash? They pay “special dividends” to their shareholders, or buy back their own shares, thus boosting the share price and ensuring that their bonuses (so-called long-term incentive plans) will trigger a bonanza in two or three years’ time. That’s right: “long-term” is no more than five years away. 

- And in Canada's own example of corporate privilege running amok, Kevin Carmichael notes that "small business" lobbyists are leading the charge to try to preserve artificial tax loopholes based on incorporation. 

- Andrea Germanos discusses Donald Trump's unilateral cuts to the anticipated pay of U.S. civilian public workers.

- Canada Without Poverty weighs in on how disasters produce disproportionate damage for people already facing poverty.

- Elizabeth Raymer examines the effect of mandatory minimum sentences, finding that they increase incarceration rates without doing anything to deter crime. But Stephen Quinn's interview with Andrew Scheer makes clear that the Cons won't be changing their practice of ignoring all available evidence as to the effects of their policies.

- Finally, John Ivison points out how Justin Trudeau's idea of an accountable national security apparatus is to personally select representatives from other parties to receive secret access to whatever information he deigns to provide.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Asher Schechter examines new studies showing how massive markups are enriching corporations at the expense of workers:

The two standard explanations for why labor’s share of output has fallen by 10 percent over the past 30 years are globalization (American workers are losing out to their counterparts in places like China and India) and automation (American workers are losing out to robots). Last year, however, a highly-cited Stigler Center paper by Simcha Barkai offered another explanation: an increase in markups. The capital share of GDP, which includes what companies spend on equipment like robots, is also declining, he found. What has gone up, significantly, is the profit share, with profits rising more than sixfold: from 2.2 percent of GDP in 1984 to 15.7 percent in 2014. This, Barkai argued, is the result of higher markups, with the trend being more pronounced in industries that experienced large increases in concentration. 

A new paper by Jan De Loecker (of KU Leuven and Princeton University) and Jan Eeckhout (of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics UPF and University College London) echoes these results, arguing that the decline of both the labor and capital shares, as well as the decline in low-skilled wages and other economic trends, have been aided by a significant increase in markups and market power.

...

De Loecker and Eeckhout find that between 1950 and 1980, markups were more or less stable at around 20 percent above marginal cost, and even slightly decreased from 1960 onward. Since 1980, however, markups have increased significantly: on average, firms charged 67 percent over marginal cost in 2014, compared with 18 percent in 1980.

...

Markup increases, De Loecker and Eeckhout find, became more pronounced following the 2000 and 2008 recessions. Curiously, they find that economy-wide it is mainly smaller firms that have the higher markups, which according to De Loecker is indicative of widely different characteristics between various industries. Within narrowly defined industries, however, the standard prediction holds: firms with larger market shares have higher markups as well. “Most of the action happens within industries, where we see the big guys getting bigger and their markups increase,” De Loecker explains. 

- Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood and Stuart Trew rightly question the Libs' attempt to paint platitudes and corporate giveaways as a progressive trade agenda as they sit down to renegotiate NAFTA. And David Climenhaga notes that John Horgan may be nothing but pleased with threats from Alberta Conservatives to remove British Columbia from the corporate-driven New West Partnership.

- Muhammad Hamid Zaman comments on the importance of reliable and complete data to shape public policy choices in the health sector (and elsewhere).

- Meanwhile, Andrew Seaman reports on new research suggesting that poverty can manifest itself in arterial buildup even in young children. And Jordan Press discusses the link between foster care and youth homelessness.

- Katie Hyslop highlights the importance of preparing children to bring a critical eye to manipulative media. But Tom Pride notes that the UK Cons have other ideas - instead encouraging parents to teach children not to share (and to value their property over all else) to avoid even the slightest hint of social responsibility.

- Finally, Denise Balkissoon rightly points out the problem with a white supremacist and anti-social movement built around the preservation of undeserved privilege.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Atrios offers a reminder as to how means-testing tends to make social programs more vulnerable to attack without making our overall tax system more progressive:

We already means test through the tax code. It's called progressive taxation. There's no reason to add an entire additional layer of complexity and bureaucracy and verification to every new and existing government program out there. If we built the highway system today we'd probably toll it for everyone earning above, say, $100,000, but everyone earning less than that would have to get their income verified and a separate form and a special toll free card and would have to pay back the free tolls if they made too much money the next year blah blah blah. We'd have to contract out to private companies to hire "navigators" in order to guide people through the free toll application process. "Make the rich pay more" actually just means "make it harder and more costly for everybody else."

Usually this doesn't even "save" much money, even ignoring the individual cost of compliance and associated bureaucracy. Think rich people get too many nice things from the government? Raise their damn taxes. Don't use it as an excuse to make giving nice things to everyone else so complicated that it practically isn't worth bothering. The net cost of stopping a few Richie Riches from getting free state university tuition or pre-K is yuge. The cost of increasing taxes a tiny bit on rich people generally is essentially zero, except to the rich people in question of course.

- Ben Steverman highlights how the U.S.' Social Security disability benefit - like far too many other social supports - traps people in perpetual precarity by threatening to take away benefit from anybody seeking to earn income. But then, as Laura Ip notes, the norm for working Canadians is to be within two missed paycheques away from disaster - meaning that there's an urgent need to strengthen multiple strands of our social safety net.

- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on the pathetic level of enforcement of employment standards in Ontario which has given rise to an epidemic of wage theft.

- Elizabeth McSheffrey reports on the Saskatchewan government's admission that it likely won't be able to fully clean up the mess from Husky's North Saskatchewan River oil spill, while Allison Martell and Rob Nickel note that two previous spills from pipelines in the area went unreported in the previous year. Jordon Cooper highlights the importance of effectively regulating pipelines while contrasting that goal against the Sask Party's desire to be seen as serving the oil industry. And Tristin Hopper's story on the onetime (and future?) plan to exploit the tar sands through a nuclear explosion should remind us of the damage the oil sector is happy to inflict for a perceived cheap buck.

- Meanwhile, the Associated Press points out the myriad of unprecedented environmental measures recorded around the globe in 2015. And George Monbiot observes that it's all too rare to see the scope of our climate crisis accurately portrayed in the media.

- Finally, Nick Falvo discusses the importance of improved data to address homelessness and other social problems. And Kathleen O'Grady and Noralou Roos make the case to make academic research more accessible to the people who can use it in practice.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- John Thornhill talks to Mariana Mazzucato about the importance of public investment in fostering economic growth - along with the need for the public to benefit as a result:

As Mazzucato explains it, the traditional way of framing the debate about wealth creation is to picture the private sector as a magnificent lion caged by the public sector. Remove the bars, and the lion roams and roars. In fact, she argues, private sector companies are rarely lions; far more often they are kittens. Managers tend to be more concerned with cutting costs, buying back their shares and maximising their share prices (and stock options) than they are in investing in research and development and boosting long-term growth.

“As soon as I started looking at these issues, I started realising how much language matters. If you just talk about the state as a facilitator, as a de-risker, as an incentiviser, as a fixer of market failures, it ends up structuring what you do,” she says. But the state plays a far more creative role, she insists, in terms of declaring grand missions (the US ambition to go to the moon, or the German goal of creating nuclear-free energy), and investing in the early-stage development of many industries, including semiconductors, the internet and fracking. “You always require the state to roar.”
...
There is a similar challenge with green technologies: how to create “systems of innovation” that provide a clear, publicly mandated direction and incentivise private-sector companies to jump on board. Mazzucato believes that Steve Jobs’ famous injunction to budding entrepreneurs — “Stay hungry, stay foolish” — should apply to the public sector, too. Why is failure worn as a badge of honour in Silicon Valley but viewed as a source of shame in government?

“We are living in a depressing era in which we no longer have courage. We no longer think governments should have missions. But the market never chooses anything. IT wasn’t chosen by the market. Biotech wasn’t chosen by the market. Nanotech wasn’t chosen by the market. So why should green technology be chosen by the market? It comes back to the austerity craziness that we’re in today where governments are not allowed to dream; and green is a dream.”

- Monia Mazigh slams Stephen Harper for his tiresome fearmongering. And Doug Saunders writes that governments more thoughtful than the Cons are realizing that the main risk lies in people looking for a set of beliefs as an excuse to put destructive tendencies into action - not in people who hold a particular set of beliefs to begin with.

- Amy Dempsey reports on the John Howard Society's findings as to how Ontario's justice system is doing nothing but harm by looking to punish people for mental health problems. And Bill Graveland reports on Kathleen Ganley's recognition that access to justice generally is a serious problem in Alberta (as it is elsewhere).

- Finally, Andre Picard argues that a strong civil service is necessary to building a healthy society. And Ryan Meili offers his take on what we've lost as a result of a decade of the Cons' government by wilful ignorance:

(I)n order to guide policy in ways that will improve our lives the most –that improvement being best measured by improvements in our health and wellbeing – we need to understand what is happening in a wide variety of fields. We need to be gathering new data, interpreting that information, and communicating its implications to decision-makers and the public.

In the last ten years decisions have instead been made to keep Canadians ignorant of the reality of our circumstances. The most obvious and egregious of these has been the cancellation of the long-form census, which has left a glaring gap in our ability to collect the data needed to make smart decisions. Even if a future government should reinstate a proper census, there has already been an irreplaceable loss of essential knowledge.

Dozens of agencies that interpret data and perform original research have been eliminated or deeply cut. These have been in varied fields, including women’s health, Aboriginal health, environmental surveillance and many more, prompting protests from the typically politically reticent scientific community, including the grim Death of Evidence funeral march on parliament, and the birth of organizations like Evidence for Democracy dedicated to highlighting how important scientific information is if citizens are to make well-informed decisions.
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Along with the decrease in information being gathered or analyzed have come deliberate barriers to communicating what we do know. From muzzling of government scientists to deep cuts to the CBC, the story of science and knowledge is being increasingly silenced. The strategy is simple, and sinister: if there is no data, there is no way to be held accountable. If people don’t see the way in which decisions being made are worsening the quality of their lives, they can be convinced to continue to vote in favour of policies that hurt them.

The war on knowledge is a war on the health of Canadians. We need a government that will embrace the information age and use evidence to improve our lives. We need a government that has the health of Canadians as its greatest priority. Ten years in, it’s clear that that government is not Stephen Harper’s.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- CBC follows up on the connection between childhood poverty and increased health-care costs later in life. And Sunny Freeman points out how the living wage planned by Rachel Notley's NDP figures to benefit Alberta's economy in general.

- Meanwhile, William Gardner laments our lack of accurate information on health and well-being in the wake of the Cons' census shredding, particularly among exactly the marginalized communities who are most likely to need help.

- And Richard Thaler reminds us why it's foolish to assume that people and economies can be treated as if they'll operate according to market ideals of perfect information and equality in bargaining power. 

- Gerald Caplan offers a warning to the Notley government as to what it can expect from a corporate establishment which considers itself to be above the will of the public. And in keeping with the theme of this week's column, David McGrane sees the NDP's victory as bringing Alberta's politics in line with those of the other prairie provinces.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne discusses how the Cons managed to fit nearly every possible indictment of their government into a single day's worth of legislative abuses and public deception. And Robin Sears highlights why the next federal election campaign figures to be far less predictable than the government which will be up for public scrutiny.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Wray Herbert examines Lukasz Walasek and Gordon Brown's work on the psychological links between inequality, status-seeking and reduced well-being. And Linda McQuaig writes about the harm increasing inequality has done to Canada both economically and socially:

(The OECD's recent) report puts actual numbers on how much growth has been reduced as a result of trickle-down. In the case of Canada, the reduced economic growth amounts to about $62 billion a year — which economist Toby Sanger notes is almost three times more than the estimated annual loss to the Canadian economy of lower oil prices.

But while dropping oil prices are grabbing headlines, the serious negative economic consequences of Canada’s pro-rich economic policies are largely ignored. Certainly the Harper government promises to entrench these policies more deeply if re-elected.
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The OECD’s powerful message is clearly of little interest to the Harper government, which is planning to exacerbate Canada’s rich-poor gap by introducing an income-splitting scheme that will benefit rich families almost exclusively. Harper’s plan to provide an additional $60 a month per child to all families won’t be nearly enough to allow the bottom 40 per cent of Canadians to invest meaningfully in their children’s education.

The OECD stresses the need “not only for cash transfers, but also increasing access to public services, such as high-quality education, training and healthcare” — areas where Harper’s planned cutbacks to the provinces will hit hard.

What’s striking about the entrenchment of policies favouring inequality is how out of sync they appear to be with popular will.
...
While the world’s elite may still be slapping their knees and marveling at what they’ve managed to pull off, the fact that the most prestigious international economic bodies have lined up against trickle-down orthodoxy may mean there are now prospects for real change.

At the least, it suggests that, in a showdown with the world’s billionaires and multi-millionaires, the world’s people may actually stand an outside chance.

- Of course, if free money for the rich is a demonstrably foolish policy, the Cons remain all too happy to destroy the evidence. But Tavia Grant reports that we can still see an alarming number of Canadians living with low incomes - signalling that the promise of trickle-down economics remains as empty as ever.

- Stephen Gordon takes a look at the fiscal squeeze Stephen Harper has placed on the federal government. But it's well worth pointing out one more piece to the puzzle, as the eroding resources nominally allocated for public services are increasingly being applied to spin rather than anything which could help anybody besides the Cons themselves.

- Thomas Walkom weighs in on the fallout from the Ontario Libs' failed P3 schemes - including needless debts which the province will be paying off for decades to come.

- Finally, Pablo Iglesias discusses how social justice principles reach far beyond partisan lines - even as they've been applied to turn Podemos into an emerging political force (as both a party and a movement) in Spain:

When you study successful transformational movements, you see that the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels. And that is very hard. It implies riding out contradictions.
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Politics is not what you or I would like it to be. It is what it is, and it is terrible. Terrible. And that’s why we must talk about popular unity, and be humble. Sometimes you have to talk to people who don’t like your language, with whom the concepts you use to explain don’t resonate. What does that tell us? That we have been defeated for many years. Losing all the time implies just that: that people’s “common sense” is different [from what we think is right]. But that is not news. Revolutionaries have always known that. The key is to succeed in making “common sense” go in a direction of change.

César Rendueles, a very smart guy, says most people are against capitalism, and they don’t know it. Most people defend feminism and they haven’t read Judith Butler or Simone de Beauvoir. Whenever you see a father doing the dishes or playing with his daughter, or a grandfather teaching his grandkid to share his toys, there is more social transformation in that than in all the red flags you can bring to a demonstration. And if we fail to understand that those things can serve as unifiers, they will keep laughing at us.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Robert Jay Lifton discusses the "stranded ethics" of a fossil fuel industry which is willing to severely damage our planet in order to protect market share:

Can we continue to value, and thereby make use of, the very materials most deeply implicated in what could be the demise of the human habitat? It is a bit like the old Jack Benny joke, in which an armed robber offers a choice, “Your money or your life!” And Benny responds, “I’m thinking it over.” We are beginning to “think over” such choices on a larger scale. 

This takes us to the swerve-related significance of ethics. Our reflections on stranded assets reveal our deepest contradictions. Oil and coal company executives focus on the maximum use of their product in order to serve the interests of shareholders, rather than the humane, universal ethics we require to protect the earth. We may well speak of those shareholder-dominated principles as “stranded ethics,” which are better left buried but at present are all too active above ground.

...

The climate swerve is mostly a matter of deepening awareness. When exploring the nuclear threat I distinguished between fragmentary awareness, consisting of images that come and go but remain tangential, and formed awareness, which is more structured, part of a narrative that can be the basis for individual and collective action.

In the 1980s there was a profound worldwide shift from fragmentary awareness to formed awareness in response to the potential for a nuclear holocaust. Millions of people were affected by that “nuclear swerve.” And even if it is diminished today, the nuclear swerve could well have helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.

- But Mike De Souza reports on ALEC's latest meeting - demonstrating that there are plenty of well-funded corporations (including TransCanada and other tar sands operators) and their pet legislators doing everything in their power to make sure ethics get shouted down in any political discussion of climate change.

- Travis Lupick discusses how the Cons' anti-social crime policies are creating more dangerous prisons.

- Meanwhile, Tim Harper comments on Stephen Harper's aversion to asking "why". And Don Lenihan points out that Canada's premiers may be less than accepting of federal-provincial relations that consist of nothing other than Harper imposing on the provinces while refusing to accept questions, examine evidence or offer explanations - with Harper's intransigence toward missing and murdered aboriginal women being the most appalling example at the moment.

- Finally, Ajamu Nangwaya discusses the contrast between organizing people to better give voice to their own concerns, as opposed to merely mobilizing them toward others' causes - and emphasizes the ultimate need to do far more of the former.

Saturday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- Matthew Yglesias writes that while increased automation may not eliminate jobs altogether, it may go a long way toward making them more menial. And Jerry Dias recognizes that we won't see better career opportunities emerge unless we make it a shared public priority to develop them:

(I)ncreasingly, the people I meet – both in the labour movement and outside (including in some business circles) – talk about the need for greater dialogue on the issues of the day, particularly as they relate to jobs and the economy. People have expressed to me an urgent need to bring the best ideas together to come up with real solutions to us move out from under the dark shadow of long-term chronic underemployment. People are also expressing their frustration that we are being told that good jobs are a thing of the past. We know good jobs are possible. And people are telling me they want labour, business and government leadership to work together to ensure we all have access to good jobs.
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The Good Jobs Summit will bring together seemingly disparate parties – industry, government, NGOS, students, academic institutions, workers and trade unions – to discuss the need for decent jobs and come up with solutions. Up for discussion will be the chronic underemployment of young, overqualified workers; growing precarity in the labour market; how we can make ‘bad jobs’ better and where the good jobs will come from in the economy of today and in the future.
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I’m confident that we can do better, that we can create an economy that churns out far more good jobs than bad, that creates an environment where precarious employment is a thing of the past, and that everyone who is able to work can find a decent job that helps support themselves and their family.

- But Graham Lanktree notes that the Cons are instead looking to push CETA on the country - which figures to both drive away existing jobs, and limit the ability of Canadian governments to support new ones. Which means that it's no wonder Canadians are increasingly pessimistic (PDF) about both their own positions, and the overall prospects for workers. And Andrew Jackson observes that tax giveaways to businesses - likely the only public policy tool not taken off the table by the corporate trade movement - don't do anything at all to boost innovation or development.

- John Thompson rightly slams Stephen Harper for rejecting an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women based on nothing more than wilful stupidity. And Catherine Latimer comments on the Cons' elimination of factual research into criminal justice policy lest their "tough on crime" posturing be exposed for its ineffectiveness.

- The New Republic weighs in on the Cons' silencing of climate scientists, while the Ottawa Citizen editorial board calls on the Cons to let them speak. And Michael Spratt discusses the Cons' broader fight against inconvenient reality and the evidence which tends to expose it.

- Finally, near the top of the list of areas where we have reason to worry about the Cons' aversion to facts lies their willingness to ignore safety standards for Arctic deep-water drilling. And Lana Payne reminds us what happened last time the Cons figured they could let the oil industry handle public safety for itself.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Duncan Cameron writes that Stephen Harper's CETA triumphalism may result in serious long-term damage to Canada for the sake of a temporary political reprieve:

Promoting the big bamboozle means Harper is gambling with Canada's economic future. The PM is touting a deal not yet finished. Making himself its chief sales agent encourages the Europeans to get tough in negotiating the hard parts to come, knowing Harper has overplayed his hand, just like Mulroney did before Canada signed a bad deal in 1988.

Harper has made himself politically vulnerable by his penchant for secrecy and conspiracy against potential adversaries. The draft CETA accord is unknown to cabinet, let alone parliament, and every aspect of the negotiation has been kept hidden from Canadians, including provincial leaders, who are as much in the dark as anyone else.

Harper came back from Brussels with an interim trade agreement, what the Europeans called a "political" understanding.

Following four years of secret negotiations not one page of official text has been released. Unlike with the Canada-U.S. negotiation, no serious public consultations have been undertaken by parliamentary committees. The Conservatives must believe the more the public learns about commercial accords, the less they will find to like...

- But plenty of commentators have declined to let the Cons set the agenda - with John Ivison, Andrew Coyne, Aaron Wherry, Michael Den Tandt and others noting that Mike Duffy's revelations of Harper and the Cons' involvement in his expense scandal figure to offer a lead story for plenty of time to come.

- PIPSC's poll results quantify just how far the Cons have gone in suppressing independent and accurate commentary on their actions in government by the people charged with guarding the public interest.

- Keith Banting and John Myles discuss why we need a new politics to address inequality. And Patrick Cain and Anna Mehler Paperny highlight how the Cons have trashed the data needed to help people on social assistance - adding yet another layer of public expense to the task of trying to alleviate poverty:

“Unless a policy-maker knows how those poor families live, how can he or she know how to reach them, or what those families need?” said Carleton University economist Frances Woolley. “How can the policy-maker prevent poverty, unless he or she knows what causes people to fall into poverty?”

Public health agencies and other groups who’d normally rely on census data are now wondering what they’ll do without it. Many may try to collect it themselves – paying for data collection by cutting the very services they’re trying to provide.

“It means that I have to take some of the funding that’s available for programmatic activity and redirect it into information collection,” said Paul Van Buynder, Chief Medical Officer for Fraser Health in B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

- Finally, David Doorey thoroughly rebuts the claim that right-to-work-for-less laws will do anything but further squeeze workers in Ontario (or anywhere else).

Tuesday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your day.

- Bloomberg reminds us of the nest egg Norway has built up by taking ownership of its own natural resources (and the consensus among conservative parties and business groups in favour of social spending is also worth highlighting). And Canadians for Tax Fairness point out the growing global movement calling for tax justice as part of a more fair distribution of wealth.

- But sadly, Jimmy Gutman notes that Saskatchewan is following a rather different path - with piracy taking the place of stewardship.

- And our local regressives certainly have their peers elsewhere in putting the public interest last - ranging from Republican bullies to UK Conservative manipulators.

- CBC reports on the most positive step we've seen in electoral fairness for some time, as Elections Canada has set up a non-partisan group of experts to advise on federal elections. Which means we can expect the Cons to complain about that plan being beyond Elections Canada's mandate in 3...2...1...

- And finally, Andrew Langille discusses the need for better labour market data to inform Canadian public policy.

Leading the evidence

Paul MacLeod's post-mortem of Nova Scotia's election campaign is well worth a read. But following up on Kevin Milligan's astute point, I'll point out how one of the main factors in the outcome looks to hint at partisan politics taking yet another turn for the worse - even as it signals what activists may need to do to bring about change which may become increasingly difficult through the party system:

It was around this point that the Liberals decided they needed a new game plan. They had recently been trounced in the federal election and the Liberal brand was at an all-time low.

That fall, the provincial party hired Toronto’s Gandalf Group to do an extensive (and expensive) poll of voters — what they liked and what they didn’t like.

This poll, combined with business roundtables and other research, created a wealth of data.

Reading through the numbers, the Liberal campaign team decided the weakness of the NDP was electricity. If they could paint Dexter as an ally of Nova Scotia Power and McNeil as a champion of ratepayers, they could move votes.

It was, in the words of one senior Liberal, the first time they had an evidence-based plan instead of just following their gut instincts.

Now, it isn't exactly news that most parties are interested in developing evidence-based politics even if their policies don't match. After all, the Cons have quite happily trashed the census and other forms of public knowledge about Canada at the same time as they hungrily collect (and limit access to) constituent information for their own political uses.

And that trend doesn't much figure to change if conventional wisdom coalesces around the idea that success in politics revolves solely around poll-tested campaign messages rather than competent governance or coherent plans.

Indeed, I have to wonder whether the Libs' lack of principles might actually create some advantages on that front just as it did when politics were seen more as a matter of brokerage rather than contrasting visions. While a party with a reasonably well-defined set of core beliefs may have a more limited range of options in testing messages for public presentation, one which is accustomed to simply following the leader might adapt more easily to changing messages at a moment's notice to fit the latest poll numbers.

But if partisan politics are headed toward more sophisticated efforts to be seen as the main pitchman for whatever voters seem most likely to buy, that creates an opportunity for anybody focused on issues rather than parties.

Anybody looking to see an issue promoted to the forefront of an election campaign can get there by persuading a party that the cause can shift votes. And if the worst danger of that approach is that all parties might be forced to echo one's message in order to avoid having it turn votes against them, that's hardly a disastrous outcome - especially if political competitors continue to have an incentive to force the government's hand once a campaign is done.

Of course, in the longer term I'd think it's well worth trying to ensure political discussion - in both partisan and non-partisan form - takes place more in the realm of "what will be best for the public in the long run?" instead of "what will shift votes in our favour today?" But the more political parties are prepared to follow evidence in at least some form, the more likely we are to see a successful effort to bridge the gap between the two.

[Edit: added link.]

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- There was never much doubt that the Cons' demolition of Canada's long-form census was intended to ensure that we lack data needed to develop evidence-based policies - and that the effects would be most significant among the most marginalized (or exclusive) groups. And Toby Sanger, pogge and the Globe and Mail editorial board all lament the result, while Sara Mayo observes the suspicion that the data trashed by the National Household Survey includes information about the ultra-wealthy.

- Meanwhile, Frances Russell highlights how the Cons are creating an expectation of falling standards of living and deteriorating social supports. And Jack Monroe speaks from experience about the devastating impact of poverty and inequality in the UK.

- The Globe and Mail identifies another serious regulatory breakdown which may have contributed to the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster, as highly flammable cargo was improperly labelled (without apparently attracting any attention until it exploded). Which naturally means that it's time for the Cons to head out to evangelize for more oil transportation - be it by rail, pipeline or tanker.

- The Ottawa Citizen takes aim at the Cons' pattern of constant and gratuitous cover-ups. 

- Finally, for those under the impression that there's no political choice but to accept and propose perpetual tax slashing, Jon Eligon writes about Missouri governor Jay Nixon - who has managed to put his state's Republicans on the defensive by showing people what they stand to lose if the anti-taxers get their way.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Arthur Haberman argues that our universal public health care system helps contribute to a more democratic society:

There is something that political philosophers — those like Tocqueville and Mill in the 19th century — have come to call living democratically. By this it is meant that voting is but a small part of what being in a democracy is about. It also includes volunteering in small ways to make our communities better, participating in decisions about what happens to your town or your neighbourhood, judging your fellow citizens by the quality of their character and not by the size of their homes or wealth, and treating all as equals.

Our society has decided that we needed to expand what living democratically means to the realms of education and health. We hope to make education universally available to all, a good education, providing more equal opportunity. We don’t succeed here as well as we would like, but the goal is a meaningful one.

We also hope to make health care available to all so that no one will face the misfortune of not being able to afford decent care and so that all have access to something that will enhance the quality of their lives. Here, it seemed to me in those eight weeks in the waiting area, we are succeeding very well in living democratically.

So universal health care is not only about the bodies of our citizens. It is also a statement about the values we want to forward in the body politic. May it flourish.

- Meanwhile, Bob Hepburn comments on the importance of a functional Parliament as part of the same end goal of a viable democracy. And Sean Holman's new project documents how B.C.'s parties in particular have come to expect discipline rather than participation by MLAs.

- David Wiegel writes that the Cons aren't the only political party fighting a war against social science, as their Republican cousins are actively defunding research in the area. But fortunately, Michael Adams for one doesn't intend to give in to the anti-research movement.

- Scott Clark and Peter De Vries highlight the need to track down the $3.1 billion disappeared by the Harper Cons. And Michael Harris contrasts the Cons' demands for accountability from everybody else against their expectation that nobody will question even their least plausible talking points:

Here is another big thing that has been Harperized: the need for everyone to be accountable with public funds — Indian Bands, unions, the provinces, et. al. A lot of people have wondered why Tony Clement, the Sultan of Slush, was ever put in charge at Treasury Board — except maybe to slowly suffocate the CBC. This is the guy and the government that couldn’t be bothered to properly appropriate the funds for the G-8, G-20 and simply lifted the money from the budget of the Canada Border Service Agency. The auditor-general’s report bristles with irony.

Now that Michael Ferguson has confirmed that $3.1 billion has gone missing-in-action from the Public Security and Anti-Terrorism Initiative, when can we expect the Attawapiskat Doctrine to kick in? That’s when you set the sharp-pencil boys on a tiny First Nations Band to make sure there’s been no hanky-panky with taxpayers money — and then publish their incompetence.

But Deloitte won’t be doing Tony, either before or after he becomes finance minister. It’s all about making sure that enemies come transparent and with a leash, and the regime remains behind the curtain — as no one knows better than the Wizard.

- Finally, Carol Goar discusses the current committee study of income inequality. But it's difficult to separate inequality in both opportunity and outcomes from a system set up to benefit those with the most - such as the tendency to allow the likes of Goldman Sachs to avoid the full consequences of tax evasion.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Thomas Walkom writes that yesterday's minor tinkering aside, the goal of the Cons' temporary foreign worker program is still to drive down Canadian wages. And Miles Corak argues that the resulting distortion of employment markets shouldn't be any more acceptable to a libertarian than a progressive:

Flooding the market with workers from elsewhere, year in and year out – even during a major recession – is not about an acute labour shortage. It is nothing more than a wage subsidy to low-paying firms, a subsidy that stunts the reallocation of goods, capital, and labour that is the basis for efficient markets.

Not only that, but by blunting the rise in wages that market forces are calling for, the Temporary Worker Program is exacerbating the inequality of earnings in the lower half of the income distribution.

It will continue to displace Canadian workers silently if not directly, despite government assurances, for the simple reason that it artificially keeps wages low, and spoils the magic of the market.

The entire program amounts to a needless intervention that creates both inefficiency and inequity. Perhaps libertarians can see that more clearly than politicians. The whole thing should simply be scrapped.

- Doctors for Fair Taxation make the case for Ontario to balance its budget through more progressive taxes rather than through massive cuts. And Andrew Jackson again debunks the Fraser Institute's anti-tax hysteria by pointing out that it's based on falsely counting corporate taxes, user fees and any other public revenue as household-level taxes - while deliberately omitting any income for anybody but individuals in order to present artificially high rates.

- Tim Naumetz reports on the Cons' power grab to take control over the CBC. Lauren Strapagiel collects a few of the Twitter responses as to what #harperscbc would look like.

- Finally, Joseph Heath pens a defence of sociology (and criminology in particular) against the Cons' attacks:

The common-sense conservative disdain for sociology is long-standing. After delivering a swingeing 25-per-cent budget cut to Ontario universities in the 1990s, then premier Mike Harris specifically fingered “sociology” as one of the useless disciplines that the universities might consider cutting.

As a liberal intellectual, whenever I encounter this sort of hatred, I naturally ask myself, “What are the root causes?” What did sociologists ever do to them? Why isn’t “society” something that conservatives consider worthy of study?

In this case the root cause is not hard to find. It comes from an accident of intellectual history, which is that criminology developed as a subspecialty of sociology. The people who conservatives actually hate are criminologists. They hate criminologists because criminologists are pretty much unified in the conviction our common-sense ideas about crime, both with respect to its causes and its remedy, are wrong.
...

(M)ost of us have a huge bias in the way that we think about punishment, which affects our judgment in everything we do, from raising kids to managing people at work, and, of course, to thinking about crime. The only way to correct this, and to figure out what actually works, is to collect data and look at long-term trends.

This is why people who read books and study statistics are much more likely to support programs that appear to coddle criminals (what conservatives like to call “hugs for thugs” programs). It’s because social scientists actually know something important about how the world works, and in this case reality does have a liberal bias.

Hostility to expertise in all of its forms is the closest thing that Canadian conservatives have to a unifying ideology. Criminologists, however, rankle them just a little bit more than others, because their expertise happens to touch on an area that many conservatives feel strongly about. Recent changes in Canadian criminal justice have served no productive purpose, other than promoting punishment for the sake of punishment and vengeance for the sake of vengeance. This may make some people feel better, but it does nothing to prevent crime. Criminologists are the ones with the data to prove this, so it’s no wonder they’re unpopular with the government.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Ellie Mae O'Hagan and Nicholas Shaxson annihilate the claim that perpetually lowering corporate and upper-income tax rates offers any competitive advantage:

Tax "competition", it turns out, is always harmful. First, while people rarely move in response to tax changes – flighty financial capital does move. Governments "compete" for it by cutting tax rates on mobile capital (which means, in effect, cutting taxes on the rich.) And if you're not taxing the rich, you've got to make that up elsewhere. How do you do that? You tax people who can't afford to move, and can't afford to complain. The poor end up paying more.

Second, tax "competition" gives big business an unfair, unproductive advantage. Every "competitive" tax system has tax avoidance built into it – whether through low taxes, or by allowing the use of tax loopholes, and so on. Usually it's only larger multinationals that can afford the expensive tax lawyers and accountants necessary to harvest these tax subsidies. So they can use the offshore system to drive smaller, more locally based competitors to the wall – on a factor that has nothing to do with genuine business productivity or true innovation.

Tax "competition" is economic warfare, where countries fight over businesses by lowering taxes. In the United States, for example, an in-depth New York Times report provides an example of how bad the problem has become:

"A recent bidding war [between US states] for United Airlines … drew more than 90 cities. The airline had set up negotiations in a hotel, and its representatives ran floor to floor comparing bids. Jim Edgar, then the governor of Illinois, called for a truce, but many states would not sign on, he said."

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Above all, investors want good roads, a healthy and educated workforce, and the rule of law. All of which mean tax. And let's not forget what else taxes are used for: to care for the sick, to educate our children, and to look after the vulnerable. Whenever you hear a politician utter the words "competitive tax system", it's probably an indication they have no idea what they're talking about. Tax "competition" is economic warfare: a beggar-my-neighbour race to the bottom, worse than a zero-sum game. It is always harmful.

- Meanwhile, Martin Regg Cohn notes that Canadians are starting to become duly skeptical of big banks who have been among the foremost advocates and beneficiaries of corporate tax giveaways. And Clayton Ruby makes the case for being equally skeptical when oil barons claim that their short-term profits should be the sole focus of public policy.

- Marc Jaccard argues that the U.S. should reject Keystone XL - while recognizing that the effect won't be to end the use of fossil fuels in the short term, but merely to encourage a longer-term transition toward sustainable energy.

- Pat Atkinson reasonably suggests that Saskatchewan might be better off using public money to improve its education system rather than following through on the Wall government's mandatory testing scheme:

Let's take that $6 million and begin to put together an early learning and care system that includes day care, pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten, all with a play-based learning curriculum led by qualified early learning and care professionals. Play-based learning is not about children sitting in desks.

This approach will lead to a more successful high school completion rate in our province and ultimately get us what we all want - better results. Let's not waste our tax dollars on an approach that simply doesn't work.

- Finally, Michael Harris wonders whether there will be anybody left to make policy suggestions to a Con government whose modus operandi is to refuse to listen anyway:

(T)here are two things the Harper government hates: criticism, and sources of information other than those ministerial manure machines that go by the name of government communications. Who would have thought that spinning gold into straw could ever be so big?

So far, the Harper government has managed to rid itself of a great many obstacles to its practice of decision-based evidence to support an agenda that is rarely declared. So many evidence-based riders — experts, knowledge-lovers, rationalists — have been shot off their horses.

The long form census died, (even though its replacement cost $30 million more) because it professionally gathered nuanced information that got in the way of governing by ideology.

The Experimental Lakes Area was erased because its scientists might have come up with irrefutable reasons to reconsider the breakneck development of the tar sands at all costs.

The Law Reform Commission was put out of business because some of the brightest legal minds in the country thought too much about constitutional and legal considerations that might create inescapable restraints for political bullies.

And now the Health Council of Canada.

Slightly Aged Column Day

Here, on how Brad Wall's willingness to see the long form census scrapped suggests that his government's push toward mandatory annual standardized tests for all students can't be explained by any real interest in evidence-based policy - and how the move looks to damage students' education in substance rather than providing any useful information.

For further reading...
- Wall's position on the census is discussed here, as he helped to block any agreement among Canada's premiers on trying to reverse the shredding of the long form census.
- Emma Graney's initial report on the Sask Party's mandatory testing scheme is here, while Janet French followed up as to the government's lack of any clear explanation what it was doing and why. And Jennifer Graham reported on the Wall government's refusal to consider classroom cap sizes or other steps which would actually encourage individualized attention to students' educational needs.
- Michael Zwaagstra makes the (easily rebutted) case for standardized testing here.
- Finally, No SK Tests has offered a steady stream of reading material on how an obsession with standardized testing may hurt Saskatchewan students.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Alan Feuer writes about New York City's brilliant use of "big data" to connect the dots in making public policy. And the examples look like a rather compelling reason why we should be looking to expand public-sector data collection and analysis as part of any remotely viable regulatory structure - rather than following the right-wing model of reducing the public sector to checking whether private-sector actors have filed paperwork claiming to have complied with the law.

- Chantal Hebert theorizes that the Harper Cons may be facing their seven-year itch. Alison's updated list of Perps with Perks offers an obvious reason why Canadians are indeed getting sick of Harper's stay in power.

- But then, Lana Payne notes that having been caught in so many electoral violations (and egregious cover-ups), it's long past time for the Cons to face some legal consequences to go with public-opinion concerns.

- Joan Bryden's coverage of the Libs' leadership race highlights the failure of the Libs' "supporter" model: even having eliminated any membership requirement for leadership voters, the Libs will still have less eligible voters than the NDP did in the vote which elected Tom Mulcair. And that failure to achieve significant follow-through on widely-trumpeted sign-up number - even with Justin Trudeau receiving fawning media coverage throughout the campaign - suggests the change in relative positioning signalled by the 2011 election continues to apply.

- And finally, Sixth Estate offers some compelling reasons to give up on the Globe and Mail as a general source of editorial content.