Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Frances Woolley points out how the coronavirus pandemic is exposing the effects of decades of austerity on Canada's health care system. Martin Regg Cohn discusses how the spread of the coronavirus is requiring us to seriously rethink how much of our society and economy are set up. And George Eaton highlights how COVID-19 has offered a reminder of the unique power of government to act in the social interest, while Mariana Mazzucato offers some suggestions as to how the coronavirus response can help us restore democratic governments to a lead role in shaping the economy.

- The ILO highlights the brutal impact of the pandemic on workers, while Jim Stanford points out how it has exposed the undervaluing of the people who are now ensuring the continued provision of the necessities of life even as much of our economy shuts down. Evelyn Kwong reports on the workers who are being forced to keep putting themselves and their loved ones at risk by employer demands. And both Reid Rusonik and Rebecca Long-Bailey discuss the need for a basic income to ensure personal security.

- Both Stanford and David Macdonald examine the response so far from Canada's federal government, including how it falls short both of covering all the people who need help and distributing benefits fast enough to deal with immediate needs.

- Andrew Nikiforuk offers his advice as to be an engaged citizen - rather than a selfish consumer - in a public health emergency.

- Finally, Craig Altemose examines how things would be different if we responded to the slower-moving but equally-dangerous climate crisis with the same urgency as the coronavirus. Jeff Sparrow discusses the irreconcilable conflict between growth and environmental limitations which can be seen in both crises. Kate Aronoff points out the value in making green jobs the focus of our rebuilding after the coronavirus recession. And Jason Hickel argues that a transition to a clean economy offers an opportunity to refocus on quality of life rather than GDP.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Andrew Jackson discusses a few of the choices the Trudeau Libs need to get right in order to actually set Canada on a more progressive fiscal path:

Progressives who worry about growing income inequality will note two key features of the new government's tax plans. First, the plan is not quite as redistributive as it looks at first sight since it  leaves out below-average income workers. Second, the net effect is not to expand the federal income tax base.

True, the Liberal platform talks of examining some loopholes, such as the favourable taxation of stock options, but it rejected major revenue-raising measures – including higher corporate taxes or higher income taxes on anybody except the top 1%. This leaves little fiscal room to fund needed social programs such as child care or pharmacare.
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The key problem facing the new government is that its three major short-term promises – child benefits, income tax cuts and infrastructure investment  – effectively use up all of the fiscal resources it has at hand, including temporary deficits.

This shows up in the Liberal platform in the very modest amounts allocated to new spending on health care (which goes from just $400 million in year one to $1 billion in year four.) This is far from the amounts needed to offset the Harper government's pending cuts to transfers to the provinces, as the premiers will quickly point out when they meet with the new Prime Minister.

The Liberal platform also allocates very limited new funds to such “priorities” as educational and other programs for indigenous peoples, employment insurance reform, social housing programs, environmental programs, enhanced government regulatory capacity, and the list goes on. Short-term term deficits cannot sustain needed long-term public investments in all of these areas.

We can expect few surprises and some very welcome new policies from the Trudeau government in the next budget. But progressives will have to press hard for broader tax reform to expand the choices at hand.

- And Frances Woolley uses the example of pumpkin seeds to point out that rhetoric about "waste" is far too easily substituted for genuine value judgments about resource allocation.

- Bruce Johnstone summarizes the burgeoning disaster that is the Boundary Dam carbon capture project - featuring Brad Wall regularly misleading the province by substituting hoped-for outcomes for actual ones even as he tries to sell non-functional technology to other gullible buyers. And Murray Mandryk is skeptical as to whether Wall's coal cheerleading and climate inaction will accomplish anything at the upcoming Paris climate change conference.

- Mark Gollom writes that there's little time to waste in ensuring that Canada has a more fair electoral system in place for the next federal election. And Stuart Parker argues that we need to set a higher standard on that front than "anything but first-past-the-post".

- Finally, Renata D'Aliesio exposes the epidemic of suicide among Canadian veterans - along with the Cons' callous attempts to hide the problem while portraying themselves as defenders of the military.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Greg Keenan exposes how corporations are demanding perpetually more from municipalities while refusing to contribute their fair share of taxes to fund the services needed by any community. And Sean McElwee points out how big-money donations are translating into a warped U.S. political system:

Available data reveals that donors not only have disproportionate influence over politics, but that influence is wielded largely to keep issues that would benefit the working and middle classes off of the table.

Do donors really rule the world? Recent research suggests that indeed they do. Three political scientists recently discovered that a 1 percent increase in donor support for a policy leads to a 1 percent increase in the probability the president supports the policy, if the president and donor are in the same party. On the other hand, they find no similar effect from general public opinion on presidential policies. In another study, Brian Schaffner and Jesse Rhodes find, “the roll call voting of members of Congress may be more strongly associated with the views of their donors (including outside donors) than with those of their voting constituents.”
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The solution to big money is two-fold. First, we need mass voter participation. The path is simple: Eliminate unnecessary barriers to voting, shift the burden of registration off of people and onto the government and expand nonpartisan mobilization efforts. But that won’t be enough as long as donors rule democracy. So we should broaden the donor pool with a vibrant public financing system. Evidence from New York suggests that a donor-matching system could increase the diversity of the donor pool, further bolstering democracy. Demos has profiled a number of candidates that fight for working class and non-white Americans but were massively out-raised by their opponents, and showed how small donor democracy would boost their chances of winning. Candidate Eric Adams, when commenting on the New York public matching system noted that, “a large number of people who contribute to my campaign have never contributed to a campaign before.” A world in which big donors are less powerful is a world where average Americans have more of a say in politics.

- Ole Hendrickson writes about the absurdity of austerity as a philosophical foundation for public policy. And Bruce Johnstone notes that the Cons' austerian economic plan is failing by all standards - including the Cons' own arbitrary measures of fiscal management. 

- Shawn Fraser discusses Regina's first count of its homeless residents, while summarizing a few of the policies needed to ensure that they can find the housing they need. And Justin Miller offers an abominable example of how social support systems are set up to punish the poor, as a Michigan mother was cut off welfare due to her daughter's brain cancer which kept her out of school.

- Natasha Geiling reports on the continued effect of Enbridge's Kalamazoo River spill five years after the fact. And Andrew Nikiforuk comments that British Columbia (like so many other places) is seeing a dramatic increase in earthquake activity as a result of fracking.

- Frances Woolley highlights how the "sharing" economy may only serve to perpetuate prejudice and inequality.

- Finally, Alison presents the Harper Cons' new advisory system for fearmongering about terrorism.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.

- Frances Woolley reminds us of some of the hidden advantages of the rich, and suggests that they point toward the fairness of taxing wealth in addition to consumption:

The greatest freedom money offers is the freedom to walk away. Your bank doesn't offer you unlimited everything with no monthly fees? Walk away. There's always someone else who wants your money. Your phone plan is too expensive? Walk away (o.k., that may not be the best example).

People with money have alternatives, which makes their demand for goods and services elastic. Food may or may not cost more in poor areas. But a rich person can shop at Value Village if he chooses. A poor person may not be able to afford expensive purchases which save money in the long run, like bread machines or high efficiency appliances or pressure cookers. Consumption taxes aim to tax the amount of stuff people actually consume. But if poor people pay a higher price for their stuff than rich people, is a system that taxes only consumption spending, without taking into account the ability to command consumption wealth conveys, fair?
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Some might argue that taxing consumption taxes capital - once that capital is spent. But wealth generates benefits for the holder even if the holder never spends a cent. Canada has relatively low taxes on capital - we do not have an inheritance tax, do not tax capital gains on principal residences, provide dividend tax credits to offset corporate tax paid, and provide room for tax-free savings within pension plans and tax free savings accounts.

The noted economist Tony Atkinson has recently made the case for introducing an annual tax on wealth. His argument is that taxing wealth would reduce inequality.

Even those who find Atkinson's argument for wealth taxation on purely distributive grounds unconvincing, and believe that consumption is the most equitable basis for taxation, should still be open to the idea of wealth taxes - because such a tax would recognize the comforts of being comfortably off.

- Meanwhile, Jameson Parker points out how one tycoon's excess wealth is being used to suppress scientific research which shows how fracking causes earthquakes. Rita Celli exposes both the appalling secrecy surrounding Ontario's resource royalties, and the pitifully low loyalty revenue amount which managed to leak out. And Samantha Page discusses the damage the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade agreements could do to our climate.

- Garry Leech points out that we're far too willing to accept corporatist terminology such as the language of entrepreneurship to describe activity which should be seen in social terms.

- Ethan Cox discusses the Cons' strategy in trying to limit and control the leadership debates in this fall's election.

- Finally, Dave Cournoyer weighs in on the frivolity of the Alberta right's attacks on NDP MLA Deborah Drever for having been young in the social media era.

On youth outreach

David Akin claims that Canada's political parties should ignore youth turnout in an election year and focus on older citizens who are more likely to vote. But it's worth taking some time to examine the issue in a bit more detail.

At the outset, I'd think there's little doubt Canada's main political parties have a far more sophisticated view of potential voter pools than Akin. Yes, older voters may turn out in larger number as a whole, but all age groups can be split into numerous subgroups based on other demographic subgroups - and there are certainly some younger ones which would have a higher turnout than some older ones.

But let's put that issue aside and ask: what does a political party have to gain in making a strong effort to win younger supporters? And the most important answer arises from exactly the factor which makes Akin think it's worth focusing on older voters alone.

Younger voters may not yet have developed the habit of voting at all. But by the same token, it's equally true that they're less likely to have developed the habit of voting a particular way.

So even for the current election cycle, if a party is calculating the value of outreach efforts based on the likelihood of winning votes, there's a simple trade-off to be made. The value of reaching a voter is presumably defined by how that contact can change in the voter's likelihood of going to the polls, and how it can change the voter's preference as between parties and candidates.

Akin effectively hand-waves away the possibility that participation rates can be improved. But it's not clear that he has any basis for doing so based on the factors which actually affect youth participation rates. The best evidence suggests that younger voters who have contact with candidates and parties are in fact far more likely to make the effort to vote - so a refusal to try may represent little more than a self-inflicted injury.

Moreover, even if one assumes that rates of voting won't change, younger voters will have less-entrenched voting patterns than people who have participated in elections (and formed preferences among parties) over a period of decades. Even if the youth turnout rate is then half that for older voters, that gap could be cancelled out entirely by a proportional willingness to consider a wider range of options rather than following past voting habits.

And that's before we get into the potential spinoff effects of reaching younger voters from a partisan perspective.

For one thing, younger voters figure to be at the point of forming habits for the longer term - meaning that an investment in earning support today is disproportionately likely to offer continued benefits in future campaigns.

What's more, the existence of a large pool of younger non-voters means that a successful pitch may have greater effects in the current election. Given the importance of personal connections in influencing voter behaviour, a single young voter persuaded to take democracy seriously is likely to have at least some impact on friends and family. And the large pool of non-voters means there are far more new votes to be gained than by similarly reaching a single older voter whose personal connections are less likely to be subject to persuasion.

Of course, there are also broader civic benefits in encouraging people to join the voting pool. But even if we assume our political parties place no value on that outcome (which it itself a questionable view, particularly for parties with relative strength among Canada's youth), they still have ample reason to make a strong effort to reach out to younger voters.

For further reading, see Frances Woolley on the disproportionate input political parties receive from older Canadians, David McGrane on the factors shaping youth voting preferences, and RossK on Brigitte DePape's work to mobilize younger voters.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Harvey Kaye discusses how the rich's class warfare against everybody else has warped the U.S. politically and economically. And PressProgress observes that the Cons' reactionary politics have produced miserable results for Canadian workers.

- Which isn't to say the Cons plan to learn any lessons anytime soon, as James Fitz-Morris reports on the PBO's report showing how little anybody stands to gain from the massive cost of income-splitting. And Frances Woolley points out the utter frivolity of other vote-buying tax baubles, while also lamenting how much time is being spent studying pointless policy choices.

- Jim Stanford offers a primer on the investor-state dispute mechanisms being used to limit democratic decision-making in favour of corporate control around the globe. But Thomas Piketty writes that instead of handing still more power to our corporate overlords, we should instead be looking at a wealth tax as the best means of reining in inequality:

The ideal solution would be a global progressive tax on individual net worth. Those who are just getting started would pay little, while those who have billions would pay a lot. This would keep inequality under control and make it easier to climb the ladder. And it would put global wealth dynamics under public scrutiny. The lack of financial transparency and reliable wealth statistics is one of the main challenges for modern democracies.

Of course there are alternatives. China and Russia, too, must deal with wealthy oligarchies, and they do it with their own tools – capital controls, and jails whose bleak walls can contain the most ambitious oligarchs. For countries that prefer the rule of law and an international economic order, a global wealth tax is a better bet. Maybe China will come round to it before we do. Inflation is another potential solution. In the past it has helped lighten the burden of public debt. But it also erodes the savings of the less well off. A tax on vast fortunes seems preferable.

A global wealth tax would require international co-operation. This is difficult but feasible. The US and the EU each account for one-quarter of world output. If they could speak with one voice, a global registry of financial assets would be within reach. Sanctions could be imposed on tax havens that refused co-operation. Short of that, many may turn against globalisation. If, one day, they found a common voice, it would speak the disremembered mantras of nationalism and economic isolation.

- Jim Bronskill reports on CSIS' involvement in monitoring peaceful protests long before the Cons' terror bill is pushed through Parliament. Brent Patterson discusses the connection between that existing attitude and C-51. And Pete Dolack writes about Stephen Harper's contempt for any citizen activism.

- Finally, John Schwartz writes that for the first time, 2014 saw economic expansion without an increase in greenhouse gases caused by energy production - signalling that we're not limited to assuming a correlation between the two.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson link inequality and climate change as massive problems which are generated by political choices (and thus amenable to correction through the political system):

Rising inequality is no more natural than global warming. And just as with global warming, our biggest fear should be that it becomes increasingly self-reinforcing — not because of some “natural” economic process, but because economic power begets political power, which can be used to further increase economic advantage. Look around, and the evidence that this is a real threat abounds. To cite just one example of many, the Koch brothers network, led by businessmen who are committed libertarians opposed to any effort to reduce inequality, are planning to spend almost $1 billion in next year’s election.

In other words, read beneath the headline of Leonhardt’s article and you have an argument for greater alarm about the toxic relationship between rising inequality and the dysfunction of the federal government — a message exactly opposite of the one that the inequality deniers want to hear.

- Frances Woolley writes that tax-free savings accounts - and particular the expanded version which the Cons are planning to push soon - represent both a deliberate choice to exacerbate inequality, and one of the most devastating attacks yet on Canada's federal revenue system:

RRSPs leave a legacy of tax revenue to future governments. Increasing TFSA contribution limits does just the opposite – it creates an investment vehicle that is ripe for abuse, whether by generating super-normal returns, or by sheltering income in a TFSA while claiming government benefits. At the same time, it deprives future governments of the opportunity to tax investment income.
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There’s a saying in policy circles: “the costs are the benefits.” For some, the revenue foregone by expanding TFSAs is a cost. For others, it’s a benefit. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is on the record as believing in small government. One sure-fire way to shrink governments is to deprive them of revenue. Doubling the TFSA limit will do that. Not now, and not in a year from now. But in 10, 20, or 30 years’ time, the doubling of the TFSA limit will gradually erode the ability of Canadian governments to raise revenue, redistribute income, and pay for public services.

- But then, individual savings likely aren't the best means of ensuring retirement security in any event, as David MacDonald finds that a retirement system based on mutual funds diverts massive amounts of savings toward financial sector compared to the alternative of effective pension plans. 

- Michal Rozworski notes that while Canada's wage picture isn't quite as bad as the U.S.' over the past two decades, it's most certainly nothing to celebrate - particularly since any gains were tied up almost entirely in since-deflated oil prices.

- Finally, Haroon Siddiqui laments the Cons' wilful stupidity in dealing with the Middle East. And Paul Adams calls out the tantrum-based foreign policy which includes pulling funding from friendly service providers for having the nerve to question John Baird.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Robin Sears offers his theory that the upcoming federal election could represent a meaningful referendum on competing visions for Canada - and Paul Wells seems to expect much the same. But while that might make for a useful statement of the actual consequences of electing the anti-government Cons as opposed to having a progressive coalition materialize, it's hard to see a clash of visions represent the core of the campaign - particularly when the party currently in power won't admit to its active hostility toward social programs and the environment, while another major party seems to be planning to hold off on deciding what it believes in until it has no choice but to do so.

- In the alternative, Crawford Kilian suggests that we should make 2015 the year to mock the Harper Cons in advance of the impending federal election.

- In keeping with that theme south of the border, Dylan Matthews identifies the worst argument for wealth inequality yet. And Danny Feingold interviews Bill de Blasio about the growing recognition that inequality affects everybody.

- Meanwhile, Michael Lewis again discusses the psychological dimension of wealth inequality:

A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more likely to shoplift than the poor. Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector, revealed that people with incomes below 25 grand give away, on average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand a year give away only 2.7 percent. A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: If you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people's brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people's. (An inability to empathize with others has just got to be a disadvantage for any rich person seeking political office, at least outside of New York City.) "As you move up the class ladder," says Keltner, "you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results."

[There is an obvious] chicken-and-egg question to ask here. But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn't that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.

Or even a happy one. Not long ago, an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank's rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: A rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That's not all that surprising; it's what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. "All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier," says Norton.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: The happiness will come from the money they don't yet have.

- Finally, Frances Woolley nicely summarizes how our relationship to possessions affects economic theory.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Frances Woolley rightly challenges the conventional wisdom that there's no such thing as a popular and efficient tax:

Few taxes generate enthusiastic popular support, but some are more popular than others. Those are the ones that fill the red circle.

The area labelled "both" in the diagram above includes two types of taxes. The first is the tax that produces concrete, tangible benefits, but does not distort people's behaviour in undesirable ways. For example, carbon taxes are popular - polls (or, at least some polls) suggest that the majority of Canadians support them - because they produce benefits, in the form of a cleaner environment. To the extent that they distort people's behaviour, they do so in desirable ways.  Taxes introduced during wartime have also had widespread support (their efficiency may be more debatable). Their popularity was achieved, as this Disney propaganda film shows, by framing them as part of a patriotic war effort: "taxes will keep democracy on the march."

A second type of efficient and popular tax is one that the majority of people do not have to pay, and the minority cannot avoid. The incidence of cigarette taxes falls on the minority of Canadians who smoke, grow tobacco, or own shares in tobacco manufacturing companies. The tax is popular with the majority (for US poll numbers, see here, here, or here) because they do not have to pay it. Unless cigarette taxes are very high, they are also relatively efficient: because nicotine is so addictive, smokers often would rather pay the tax than change their behaviour. (To the extent that cigarette taxes induce behavioural change, this may be a good thing).

Taxes on resource rents are also, I would argue, a tax paid by a minority within the population - the owners of the corporations that extract those resources (Andrew Leach has a primer on Alberta oil tax royalties here). Why? As a general rule, the economic burden of a tax falls on whoever cannot change their behaviour to avoid it. A tax on call centres can be shifted to call centre employees, because call centres operations can make employees a take-it-or-leave-it-offer: "accept these wages or we'll move to a lower-tax jurisdiction." Resource extraction companies, however, have to stay where the resources are if they wish to keep on extracting them. They have few alternatives to just paying up.

But it's particularly worth noting that Con-style anti-tax ideology represents the greatest obstacle to any attempt to move toward the "both" area: to the extent the public accepts the claim that any increase in any tax must be avoided at all costs, it becomes impossible to discuss how best to rearrange our current structure to both improve efficiency and achieve concurrent goals.

- Meanwhile, Larry Rousseau comments on the cost of deregulation.

- Henry Blodget discusses why corporate control over our economy has reached the point where even people predisposed to dislike unions can't help but to see the desperate need for better labour organization. And Duncan Cameron points to public opinion as the other essential counterweight to elite control that's been far too ineffective in our recent past.

- Finally, in keeping with the theme of yesterday's column, Adam Ramsay writes about the need to redefine "progress":

If we aren't going to be motivated by a desire, which is destroying the planet, for ever more trinkets, what else can drive us?

There are of course, lots of answers to that. I hope we can all spend more time caring better for each other. I'd like all of us to be allowed to spend more time making art. But there's something else too. I am certain that our innate desire to explore and to understand is as strong as out (sic) innate desire to accumulate and consume.
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Environmentalists must re-imagine what civilisation is for, what humanity is for. Yes, that should include being inspired once more by magnificent forests and quirky plants and incredible animals. These things are wonderful.

But I think it also has to include a vast expansion in the amount of time and money we invest in advancing and disseminating all human knowledge. We ought also to care about exploring the makeup of the cosmos, and of atoms and of chemicals. Because we are humans, and asking questions is what we do best.

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading.

- Daniel Kaufman notes that the EU is on the verge of implementing new standards for transparency in oil extraction - while recognizing that big oil has fought the effort every step of the way in an effort to keep its activities secret. And Shaun Thomas discusses the no-knowledge zone set up around the Northern Gateway pipeline, as Nathan Cullen's questions within the review process revealed that the federal government hadn't so much as talked to First Nations or affected industries about the possible impact of an oil spill.

- But then, the Cons can at least claim consistency in their general preference for ignorance. And the sudden elimination of a low-cost, high-use library program from Prince Albert's federal penitentiary certainly fits into that worldview. Meanwhile, Frances Woolley asks some questions as to how economists should deal with the first data set from the National Household Survey since the Cons scrapped the long-form census.

- And in case there was any doubt why the Cons and the facts tend to end up on opposite sides of any issue, Randeep Ramesh points out that the numbers being thrown around by the U.K. Conservatives as the basis for attacks on social programs aren't any more plausible than the since-debunked ones used to justify austerity for austerity's sake.

- Haroon Siddiqui continues his criticism of the Cons' push toward temporary and disposable foreign workers, this time labelling Jason Kenney as the headhunter-in-chief for employers looking to drive wages down.

- Finally, Tabatha Southey nicely lampoons Fox News North's attempt to strongarm the CRTC into handing it mandatory subscriber funding:

(A)n ideologically right-wing news organization is asking a governmental regulatory body to force private businesses, in the form of television providers, to carry it in their basic packages – thus demanding that cable subscribers pay for a channel whether they want to watch it or not.

“And why does Sun News Network believe the CRTC should do this?” you might ask.
“Is this not the same Sun News Network whose vice-president, Kory Teneycke, complained in a 2010 commentary in the Sun chain’s newspapers that mandatory carriage was ‘tantamount to a tax on everyone’ with cable or satellite service?” You wonder, because you are very well read.

“Is it not a bit surreal that we should be forced to pay for a television station that devotes much of its airtime to complaining that we are forced to pay for another television channel, the CBC, which we watch in far greater numbers?” You demand to know, because you spend a lot of time thinking about Canadian broadcasting regulation.

Well, the Sun News representatives explained, the CRTC should grant them increasingly difficult-to-obtain mandatory carriage status because, without this government assistance, the network cannot survive as a business, and also because Canadian content is inherently good for us.

Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are apparently no free-market capitalists in a financial black hole, and the people at Sun News cannot spread the blame for their poor ratings thin enough.

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Thomas Walkom highlights the lesson we should draw from the economic devastation caused by the shutdown of an Electro-Motive plant which was supposed to serve as a poster child for corporate giveaways:

Using tax breaks to encourage domestic production is a standard prescription. Yet, ironically, that’s exactly what the Harper government did.

In 2008, it offered tax write-offs worth an estimated $5 million annually — not to Electro-Motive (which, at the time, was owned by two hedge funds) but to Canadian railway firms that used locomotives.

The idea was to encourage companies like CN to replace their engine stock more quickly. And if it hadn’t been for globalization, the scheme might have created a few more jobs in London.

But globalization does exist. Canadian railways can still get those tax breaks on new locomotives. It’s just that now they will buy them from Indiana and Mexico.

None of this means that manufacturing has to be doomed. Ottawa could take a leaf from the U.S. and pass Buy Canadian legislation. The province (which is not tightly bound by international trade agreements) could penalize companies that purchase goods from jurisdictions with unfair labour laws.

Governments could even copy the tactic of Trudeau-era trade minister Ed Lumley, who famously threatened to hold up the import of Japanese autos until companies like Honda built assembly plants here.

But Canadian governments don’t do such things. To be seen as anything but avidly free-trade spooks both politicians and business.

- Meanwhile, Erin notes that artificially low royalties are doing nothing at all to spur resource development, but plenty to ensure that the public doesn't benefit when resources are exploited.

- Barbara Yaffe theorizes that the NDP should abandon its environmental principles in order to try to win seats in the West. To which I can only offer a reminder what happened - in Western Canada and elsewhere - to the last official opposition to try to appease the oil sector rather than providing some meaningful alternative to a government which acts as a wholly-owned industry subsidiary.

- pogge wonders whether any self-pronounced speech warriors will take up the cause of environmentalists singled out for silencing by the Con government for the content of their message.

- Finally, Frances Woolley compares the relative effects of RRSPs and TFSAs. But it's worth pointing out that the people who benefit most from the multiplicity of tax-sheltering devices are those who don't have to choose between them, but can instead take advantage of all of them.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Alex Himelfarb nicely summarizes the price of austerity:

Let me be clear that I share in the broad consensus that we must be fiscally prudent. But let’s pause on what fiscal prudence really means: It means spending wisely, reducing waste, collecting sufficient taxes to pay for the public goods and services we want, and keeping debt coming down, at least during reasonably good times.
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Today’s austerity, however, is not primarily about fiscal prudence. If it were it wouldn’t be proceeding in tandem with large, unaffordable and unnecessary tax cuts for the most affluent among us. These tax cuts make deeper program cuts inevitable.

The persistent emphasis on low taxes and cuts to services and public goods looks more like ideology masquerading as fiscal common sense. In this light, austerity seems rather to be about cutting back the state and rolling out the free market agenda. Less public, more private; less collective, more individual. It is, in other words, the fulfillment of the neoliberal counter-revolution rather than an economic plan for the future.
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I, for one, would propose that inequality, not austerity, be the defining issue for us now. Income inequality is growing fast in Canada and even the traditional deniers are coming on board. The gap is simply too big, the risks too high to ignore. Indeed, extreme inequality will continue to grow in an agenda dominated by austerity and tax cuts, an agenda that reduces our capacity for mutual aid and for collective solutions to our major challenges – our low productivity, climate change and environmental deterioration, and declining political participation.

Of course we ought to be fiscally prudent and that means asking of each cut and each expenditure, including every tax cut: will this help reduce inequality or will it make things worse?

Let’s make inequality in all of its manifestations – child poverty, the reemergence of elderly poverty, the squeeze on working Canadians and students, and the excessive incomes at the top – a national priority.

- Paul Waldie documents the results of the Cons' insistence on demolishing the single-desk Wheat Board with no consideration of the resulting consequences. And predictably, the outcome looks to be plenty of damage and confusion rather than any of the supposed benefits the Cons have been claiming.

- Meanwhile, the Cons are also working on making Canada's food supply less safe. And don't take my word for it: here's what their own spinners said in adding the jobs the Cons are now cutting:

The new investments being announced today will improve the Government's ability to prevent, detect and respond to future foodborne illness outbreaks. Among other improvements, the Government will:
-hire 166 new food safety staff with 70 focusing on ready-to-eat-meat facilities...

So if the hirings were an improvement to the "ability to prevent, detect and respond to future foodborne illness outbreaks", then surely the firings have to be the opposite. Right?

- Frances Woolley posts about the effect of moral hazards in allocating health care resources. But while the principle is worth discussing, I have to seriously question how much of a problem is demonstrated when the sole example of actual gratuitous consumption of health care comes from Homer Simpson.

- Finally, Linda McQuaig criticizes the Cons' preference for foreign capital over Canadian workers:

Ironically, the Harper government has complained forcefully about “foreign” interference from outside environmentalists protesting a proposed pipeline across the Rockies. But when it comes to foreign companies stripping Canadian workers of half their wages and then moving operations out of the country, the government hasn’t a negative word to say.

Harper is of course staunchly pro-capitalist, and has aggressively lowered corporate tax rates, while refusing to link lower taxes to investment or job creation.

But his anti-union stance, evident in disputes at Air Canada and the post office last summer, has been particularly provocative. He seems determined to turn Canada into an anti-union paradise — prompting the Ontario Federation of Labour to call for a mass rally at the Caterpillar plant in London this Saturday.

As the PM gears up for his coming battle against federal public sector unions, he will no doubt draw inspiration from Mitt Romney’s stirring words: “I like to be able to fire people who provide services.”

Tuesday Evening Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Glen Pearson follows up on the importance of organized labour - particularly as a desperately-needed counterweight to the pressures faced by public officials which may not be obvious to anybody less connected to the political scene:

I often thought about this during my time in the Canadian Parliament. Corporate presence and pressure was everywhere – hard to ignore and even harder to oppose. Politicians blessed with benefits, holiday pay, and the kind of pensions that unions struggled so hard to attain for everyone, learned to give lip-service to union representatives while at the same time passing legislation that serviced the corporate sector but deprived not only union protections, but the abilities of average workers to gain a productive wage.

And so we come to a sad truth. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations on both sides of the 49th parallel undertook a comprehensive assault on unions. In Canada, opportunities emerging in the global economy meant that they didn’t want to be linked to Canadian labour legislation anymore. While the majority of small and medium-sized businesses continued to abide by the arrangements, the large corporations wanted to slip the reins and move unhindered. Unions slowly awoke to the reality that a new unfettered capitalism was about to sever the historic link between employers and their workers.

- The CCPA has released its annual focus on soaring executive compensation. But if one needed to know how striking the 27% jump over last year actually is, take a look at Mike Moffatt's immediate suspicion that the numbers had to have been torqued by a redefinition of the term "CEO" to produce such a massive increase - followed by his subsequent recognition that in fact the CCPA has merely measured what's actually happened from a consistent baseline.

(Of course, now that the increase is known to be a real phenomenon rather than merely a shocking number, Moffatt is back to suggesting that it's nothing worth worrying our pretty little heads over.)

- Meanwhile, Frances Woolley points out how the unintended consequences can be seen in past building construction - raising a nice illustration of the importance of focusing taxes on the right sources of funds. Though I'd argue that high-end incomes which have relatively little positive impact in terms of either economic or social outcomes would look to be a more important source than consumer-based reserves.

- Jean Sorensen points out that B.C. voters have intervened in a couple of attempts to privatize drinking water.

- Finally, Anu Partanen points out that Finland's efforts at improving education as a matter of equal access to quality schools have produced far better results than the U.S.' competition-driven system.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Frances Woolley points out just how much more efficient public-sector health services are compared to private-sector alternatives by contrasting the cost of surgery on people with the far higher rates charged to private payors for veterinary services.

- Which leads nicely into Erin's critique of the Saskatchewan Party's effectively-nonexistent health care plan - particularly when the negligible amount of funding on offer is put in the context of the party's determination to push private service delivery.

- Just months into the Cons' majority, they're already starting a war on grandparents.

- Finally, Marc Lee takes on the luck vs. merit argument as to how the wealthiest among us reach that status - pointing out that the former factor is a major component in virtually any case. And that goes a long way to explaining how Mike Moffatt's salary analogy breaks down in utterly neglecting the possibility that the factors which add value to a business might arise from factors other than the sheer charisma of a single executive.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your weekend reading.

- As I'd suspected, the Cons are making clear that the kind of behaviour that would get any mere civil servant fired on the spot will be treated as entirely unobjectionable in a parliamentary secretary like Bob Dechert.

- Meanwhile, it shouldn't come as much surprise that the massive cost of losing access to Camp Mirage was obvious long before the story reached the public. Nor that the Cons will keep pretending they never could have foreseen the result no matter how clear the paper trail to the contrary.

- Frances Woolley points out the moral hazards involved in pension funding - while also recognizing that the dangers are lower in publicly-administered plans than in schemes which count on individuals to monitor exactly the advisers they've hired for their greater expertise.

- Finally, as BigCityLib points out, both Karen Kleiss and Geoff Dembicki have started to dig into the Ethical Oil Institute. But I'd think the most interesting part of the astroturfing effort is the belief that it can be turned into something more:

Velshi has since staunchly maintained his independence, telling the Globe and Mail he "won't take money from any foreign corporations, any governments." (Though he did admit in the same interview he wouldn't refuse money from a Canadian company).

At the same time, he's pleaded with ordinary Canadians to donate to his cause.

"We rely on small donors like you to sustain our grassroots advocacy," reads the EthicalOil.org website. "Please consider making a $5, $10, or $15 donation."

That's right: well-connected political insiders are asking for grassroots donations to fund PR for an industry that's already making billions on its own. Which figures to be at most a drop in the bucket for the money that will be spent promoting the tar sands - but figures to be more useful to getting donors to think they've done something socially useful while actually helping the same multinationals who profit from exactly the same human rights abuses presented by the Cons' allies as demanding action.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Carol Goar asks whether the Harper Cons learned anything whatsoever from a recession which they first deemed impossible, then minimized before acting only under political duress:

We have less manoeuvring room today than we did three years ago. Our budget is $30 billion in deficit, our employment insurance account has a $10.4 billion shortfall and we have the highest level of household debt in our history.

If Canada falls back into a recession — or if we’re already in one that hasn’t shown up in the statistics — millions of families will have no cushion.

It didn’t have to be this way. Our government had the time, had the money (it poured $39.9 billion into economic stimulus) and had the incentive to tackle these problems. Yet it brushed off calls from business, labour, the opposition parties and the unemployed to fix Canada’s broken economic stabilizers.

But sadly, the answer was already an emphatic "no" - and the EI system is only one of the many ways in which the Cons seem more interested in shredding safety nets than strengthening them.

- Andrew Coyne nicely sums up Jack Layton's last election campaign:

Much of the preposterousness of politics stems from the participants’ lunatic enlargement of the stakes, the “this is war” mentality with which they justify to themselves each appalling act. How childish these games must seem, when you are fighting for your life.

In (Layton's) last campaign, it all seemed to merge: the message of concern for the less fortunate, his personal bravery in the face of his own misfortune, the courtly, happy-warrior tone—in some ways a traditional protest campaign, but without a hint of anger. The whole was combined in the image of that cane: symbol of frailty, brandished in cheerful defiance.

Well, is that so unusual? All over this country there are thousands of people confronting cancer in their own lives, with no less courage or dignity. Layton was an admirable but not extraordinary man in life: is his death any more extraordinary? Only in this respect: that he was required to act it out on the public stage. We watched, like the ancients, and learned what it is to be a man.

- And John Geddes writes about the real Jack:

If he was a born politician, Layton didn’t rely solely on instinct. He prepared. It was Ignatieff who risked many unscripted outings during the last election—and failed miserably. Layton, like Harper, stuck mostly to reading speeches from a teleprompter at well-orchestrated rallies. His signature moments were not improvised. “Bon Jack” didn’t just happen to be in a Montreal sports bar, raising a beer mug to the cameras, for the first game of the Canadiens’ Stanley Cup playoff run—a turning point in the NDP’s Quebec campaign. “Every trick in the book about getting media,” former deputy leader of the Ontario NDP Marilyn Churley once said, “I learned from Jack Layton.”

Layton’s canny, self-conscious side must be reconciled now with the frequently expressed public sentiment that he was the rare, genuine article. The two perspectives aren’t really contradictory. Layton had been smiling and campaigning for one cause or another since boyhood. That was him. He didn’t have to reinvent himself for politics. In that respect, even when he was reading a stump speech for the 20th time, or hitting his marks for a staged photo-op, Canadians were seeing the real man.

- Finally, Frances Woolley considers the difficulties facing economists who start considering actual human behaviour as reason to challenge the assumption of perfectly rational and informed decision-making that underpins standard economic theory.