#Elxn44 Roundup

The latest from Canada's federal election campaign.

- The Maple examines how the timing and format of the campaign chosen by Justin Trudeau could hardly have been designed for lower expected turnout.

- PressProgress looks into the background of Lib candidate Mary-Jane Bennett as both a cheerleader for privatization, and a senior fellow connected to climate change and residential school deniers at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. 

- Jim Stanford discusses how the Cons' plans predictably involve crushing austerity for Canadians in the name of balancing budgets, but no plan to actually reach that outcome. Stephanie Taylor points out how Erin O'Toole is rejecting the latest round of global agreements on climate change. And Aidan Chamandy talks to experts about how that choice to backtrack would violate Canada's commitments under the Paris agreement.

- Meanwhile, Matthew Alexandris points out how the NDP's benefit for renters can put a substantial dent in poverty and homelessness. And Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong make the case to build a truly universal and complete health care system.

- Finally, Loretta Fisher interviews Paul Taylor about the importance of working through the political system to make sure nobody is left behind.

New column day

Here, on the Frontier Centre for Public Policy's unapologetic role in trying to minimize the harms of residential schools - to to mention otherwise undermining any attempt at truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

For further reading...
- Tammy Robert's post exposing the recent radio ad is here, with CBC following up here and here. And the Frontier Centre's only apparent response is the statement reproduced here absolving Roger Currie of any editorial role - but acknowledging no concerns about its own content. 
- Beyond the latest ad and related report, the Frontier Centre's own content on Indigenous issues includes such gems as other posts minimizing the effects of residential schools and the Sixties Scoop; a call to relocate First Nations to unwanted settlements; a push to take away socially-funded housing on reserves; a statement of opposition to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and an apparent endorsement without comment of the White Paper calling for an end to any official status.
- For some other background on the Frontier Centre and its funders, DeSmogBlog has a handy summary here. And Barrick Gold's contempt for Indigenous rights has been well documented.
- By way of contrast to the Frontier Centre's response to its cavalier attitude toward residential schools and the racism behind them, see Alberta's response to the inclusion of a similarly-ahistorical question on a distance learning assignment. And Robyn Pitawanakwat and Garret Smith contrast the Saskatchewan government's forcible removal of the Justice for our Stolen Children camp against Calgary's welcoming of a similar initiative.
- Finally, Greg MacDougall discusses how colonialism continues to be a cause of alarming Indigenous suicide rates, while Kathleen Martens reports on the RCMP's stunning treatment of Brittany Martel's death as non-suspicious as an example of how Indigenous lives continue to be treated as disposable. And anybody looking for a reminder as to how residential schools actually fit into Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples would be well-served to give another read to the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Update: See also Murray Mandryk's column today. 

On destructive preconditions

Shorter Elizabeth Nickson:

I'll consider accepting the need for policies to preserve the environment just as soon as we've seen exactly how much gets destroyed in their absence.

(h/t to PressProgress.)

Slavery is freedom

Shorter Brianna Heinrichs:

Oh sure, you soft-hearted progressives think you're helping workers with your "employment standards" and your "occupational health and safety". But have you ever considered some people might prefer to have serfdom as an option?

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Richard Seymour rightly calls out right-wing lobby groups in the UK for distorting the facts in order to attack social programs:

The report calls for benefits to fall in real terms, and refers to "the regrettable 5.2% blanket benefit increase put through in 2012". It doesn't mention that this was an inflation-linked rise. For a single recipient of employment support allowance, for example, the increase is a mere £2.80. The TaxPayers' Alliance can rest comfortably in the knowledge that things will get much worse for people on benefits for the next three years, as the government keeps rises below the rate of inflation.

And so on, and so on. To this extent, the report is a jumble of Tory tabloid thematics. The underlying case is that millions of people are on benefits because they are not habituated to work. For this reason, it proposes a compulsory work scheme for those who have been in receipt of benefits for a certain length of time. The aim is to force them to work for their poverty, giving them a total 30-hour working week (but not much time to seek paid employment).

Most of the report's claims are unsourced or only vaguely attributed. Taken altogether, the report is nothing that a half-competent undergraduate couldn't have put together using materials from the rightwing blogs. It is trivial, reactionary fluff.

But this has consistently been part of the Tory agenda, and that of its business backers. It will not significantly reduce their tax bill. It might offer some a pool of "free labour", just as workfare has done in the US. But its most salient effect would be to make people a lot more dependent on the market, and to increase the bargaining power of employers. Underpaid and badly treated? Too bad – try getting another job, or living on welfare.

The pseudo-populist right often tries to recruit "the working man", Joe-the-Plumber or whomever, in alliance against welfare recipients. But, whether or not they are in employment, it is workers who lose out from this.

- In a similar vein, David Doorey finds a perfect match between the textbook definition of "bullshit" and the corporate astroturf attack on unions.

- And Mary-Jane Bennett of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy provides another classic example of propaganda-tank nonsense - arguing in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion that the Auditor General's recognition of a "serious lapse by regulators in ensuring safety compliance" is somehow an argument for further deregulation rather than evidence of the need for a stronger public role.

- Meanwhile, Tim Harper points out that the Cons' rhetoric about balancing the federal budget (which was, of course, already balanced before they started their slash-and-burn attack on tax revenues and public services alike) conspicuously omits any allowance for disaster relief.

- Finally, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found that generosity rather than stinginess tends to lead to the best outcomes from an evolutionary perspective:

In generous strategies, which are essentially the opposite of extortion strategies, players tend to cooperate with their opponents, but, if they don’t, they suffer more than their opponents do over the long term. “Forgiveness” is also a feature of these strategies. A player who encounters a defector may punish the defector a bit but after a time may cooperate with the defector again.

Stewart noticed the first of these generous approaches among the zero determinant strategies that Press and Dyson had defined. After simulating how some generous strategies would fare in an evolving population, he and Plotkin crafted a mathematical proof showing that, not only can generous strategies succeed in the evolutionary version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in fact these are the only approaches that resist defectors over the long term.

“Our paper shows that no selfish strategies will succeed in evolution,” Plotkin said. “The only strategies that are evolutionarily robust are generous ones.”

On progressive choices

Thankfully, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy's call for a flat tax was so bizarre and ill-timed that even the Sask Party couldn't use it as an excuse to move in that direction. But it's still worth pointing out part of the position taken by the Frontier Centre's David Seymour which deserves notice as a novel (if completely ill-founded) angle on the issue:

Seymour added that income is often a function of age, arguing that putting higher tax rates on higher income is just shifting the taxpaying to different stages of life rather than between people with different life fortunes.

Of course, Seymour doesn't appear interested in dealing with the cumulative impact of all taxes which results in an overall system that's barely if at all progressive. And on its face, there's ample reason for doubt about the argument that progressive taxes won't have some redistributive effect among individuals. But let's ignore those glaring problems with the argument and deal with income taxes alone on Seymour's footing.

Let's assume that an individual has the choice as to when to pay a fixed amount of income taxes during the course of his or her lifetime, but will have a "standard" income progression consisting of escalating income through his or her working life, followed by retirement at a lower income level.

From that starting point, which of the following seems like a more plausible statement?
(a) The individual would be best off paying a constant rate of income tax regardless of his or her income at any given time.
(b) The individual would be best off paying income tax at a rate which varies based on income, such as to pay a lower rate when money is tighter (early in his/her career and on retirement), and a higher rate when more money is available.

In effect, Seymour's argument relies on the premise that the population at large would take (a) as a given and prefer a flat tax as a result. But doesn't (b) actually make far more sense as a matter of rational self-interest?

(Edit: added link.)

On examples

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy's David Seymour tries mightily to paint Saskatchewan's success over the past couple of decades of NDP government as somehow vindicating extreme anti-government ideology. But even leaving aside the reality that Saskatchewan's success comes in large part thanks to factors such as a strong public sector which has kept life affordable for its citizens, Seymour's own chosen indicators only highlight the lack of evidence to support his claim:

This year, the Saskatchewan economy is forecast to grow in the midst of a global recession, while governments elsewhere can't seem to figure out their proper role. So, it is time to reflect upon the cause of this effect, and give credit where it is due: to the immediate past and current governments in the province.
...
The Fraser Institute recently and properly reflected on this trend by downgrading the United States to behind Canada on its Economic Freedom of the World index. By the same measure at the provincial level, Saskatchewan now generally ranks sixth or seventh out of 10. It ranked seventh or eighth in the early '90s.

This shift should be recognized in any honest assessment of what now defines the province's political culture. Saskatchewan has certainly proven over successive generations that haphazard interventions based on the politics of envy, utopianism or vested interests all spell economic stagnation. However, just as other governments are about to find that out for themselves, Saskatchewan's more modest approach to economic management has revealed a future for the sunshine province that is arguably brighter than ever before.

In other words, Saskatchewan has apparently moved from roughly seventh on the Fraser Institute's list of ideologically correct provinces, all the way to...roughly seventh on the Fraser Institute's list of ideologically-correct provinces, with at most a one-rank change over the course of nearly two decades. By my count, that would leave five or six provinces ahead of Saskatchewan by the Fraser Institute's standards for corporate-friendly policy who are conspicuously lacking for economic success to show for it. And it would seem highly likely that at least a few would have boosted their position by a greater margin on the Fraser Institute's list.

But Seymour is so desperate to portray Saskatchewan's progress as vindicating conservative economic thought that he happily ignores the fact that he's really only shown that a province can stand out for its economic success without turning its treasury and policy apparatus over to corporate lobbyists.

Mind you, there are plenty of lessons which other provinces should be looking to take from Saskatchewan's progress. But since those won't be found in Seymour's column, we'll have to settle for these two messages: that the strategies which the Fraser Institute would claim to lead to prosperity bear no particular correlation to the ones which can actually bring about that result, and that facts are still no object when it comes to the right-wing noise machine's attempts to push its ideology on Canadians.

On tangled webs

The Cons haven't made any secret of their intention to make use of the Conadscam scheme again in the next federal election unless a court tells them they can't (and regardless of whether Elections Canada or anybody else points out that it's against the law). But let's note that it isn't only the central party which is stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that it's in legal jeopardy, as the Cons' Calgary foundation is also showing signs of rot:

Although the University of Calgary has severed all ties with the Friends of Science and shut down the accounts which were set up in 2004 by political science professor Barry Cooper, the anti-Kyoto group is still using the same charity, the Calgary Foundation, to collect money and issue tax deductible receipts for anonymous donors.

The money is now going through an independent think tank, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg, which has received at least $50,000 since last fall, according to a document released by the Calgary Foundation. The Frontier Centre has indicated that it wants to produce a climate change video for children in schools.

Of course, it's worth pointing out one glaring flaw in the article's discussion.

In case there was any doubt, the new, "independent" recipient of Barry Cooper's largesse would be the same Frontier Centre for Public Policy which was hand-picked by the Cons for a six-figure federal contract to consult about electoral reform - despite the group's acknowledged lack of expertise in the area, and a clear bias against electoral reform in what little material it had disseminated on the topic. Naturally, it didn't take long for the group to be embarrassed when one of its subcontractors decided to put together its focus groups based on word of mouth rather than any process which could possibly lead to a diverse set of viewpoints. And the Frontier Centre was also called on to speak for the Cons' position on the farcical Canadian Wheat Board barley plebiscite.

In other words, after being caught wrongly interfering with the 2006 election, the Friends of Science have simply pivoted from direct political intervention to taking on a role funding a different part of the Cons' right-wing noise machine. Which can only make it clear just how little claim any of the groups involved can have to anything approaching independence - and how little plausibility the Cons themselves having in trying to deny links to or among the groups involved.