Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Norman Farrell highlights how following the reversal of the HST transition, B.C. businesses haven't given up on their goal of making sure that only individuals pay consumption taxes.

- Jordan Press and Lee Berthiaume report on the lack of any recent effort to ensure that federal government buildings don't jeopardize health and safety - which fits all too well with areas such as federal and provincial pipeline regulation as examples of short-term cost savings virtually certain to produce long-term disasters.

- David Suzuki argues that it's time to press the Trudeau Libs toward action on climate change (based in no small part on the recognition that they'll never bother of their own volition).

- Sheldon Whitehouse and Elizabeth Warren comment on how big oil has rigged the U.S.' political system to prevent anybody from even asking questions about its longtime climate fraud, while Greg Russell points out that oil operators seem set to abandon their offshore wells and cleanup responsibilities. And David Climenhaga examines how Enron suckered the Alberta PCs into the laughably unfair power deal which the NDP is now trying to reverse.

- Finally, John Conway discusses the many dark clouds looming over Brad Wall's tenure as premier. And Murray Mandryk notes that the summer's events have called most of the Saskatchewan Party's core identity into question. 

Parliament in Review: December 1, 2011

In the midst of a week of acrimonious debate over both the substance of the Cons' dumb-on-crime legislation and the government's procedural maneuvers to prevent even improvements which it recognized as necessary, December 1 served as a comparative beacon of cooperation (as noted specifically by Don Davies).

The Big Issue

That's because the government bill under discussion was C-26 on self-defence - which largely paralleled Olivia Chow's private member's bill from the previous Parliament by allowing for citizen's arrests in circumstances other than the moment when a crime was being committed.

Which isn't to say there weren't some noteworthy points of concern and clarification. Jack Harris wondered why the new provision would allow for a proportionality element only in defence of people rather than property - a question which was finally answered by Kerry-Lynne Findlay in a rare moment of Con recognition as to which ought to be treated as a more important priority:

In the case of self-defence or defence of another, these defences allow for the use of intentional deadly force, depending on the circumstances. This is because it is a life that is being threatened. It is only reasonable for individuals who face a serious threat from another person to protect themselves. If the nature of the threat is such that it is reasonable to counter that threat with deadly force, that may be acceptable, depending on the circumstances.

Threats to property are not the same. Human life always outweighs our interest in property. So when the situation is one where damage or destruction of property must be balanced against the determination of human life, the property interest must give way to the greater interest in human life.

Libby Davies expressed concern that the citizen's arrest power would be disproportionately applied to rid stores of targeted individuals. Helene Leblanc noted that in the Lucky Moose case cited as the impetus for the legislation, it was a reasonable judicial decision that resulted in a fair outcome - signalling the need to respect the judiciary rather than box it in as the Cons have so often done with mandatory minimum sentences in particular. Malcolm Allen discussed the importance of community policing generally. Tyrone Benskin worried that the bill might encourage vigilantism. And Sean Casey questioned the Cons' obsession with crime even while signalling his general support for the bill.

Unfortunately, the Cons did manage to fit in one example of jaw-dropping callousness. In raising a question after Irwin Cotler's speech, Blaine Calkins had the gall to joke about Cotler's impending retirement - turning his own party's unconscionable false robocalls into Cotler's riding into a matter of personal amusement.

Name That Party

An MP offered a member's statement about environmental concerns surrounding a project in his riding. Guess who had this to say about the need for a serious environmental review:

Mr. Speaker, the Highland Companies group, backed by a Boston-based hedge fund, proposes to dig a 2,300-acre limestone quarry on prime farmland in Melancthon Township in my riding....

The company wants to dig down 200 feet, well below the water table. The end result is that 600 million litres of water per day, enough for over one million (people), would have to be pumped out, treated, stored and injected back into the local aquifers. The project proponents say this procedure would pose no risk to the local environment.

(The area) is home to the headwaters of four major river systems flowing in all directions. To claim that there would be no effect on the headwaters and beyond stretches the realm of possibility.

I call upon the Minister of the Environment to order that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency conduct a full environmental assessment. The residents of my riding and of Canada deserve no less.

Naturally, the MP expressing that entirely valid concern was...Con David Tilson. And it'll be well worth watching whether he has any interest in similar concerns nationally as his government seeks to short-circuit environmental review processes for oil pipelines which could have far more severe consequences than a single local quarry.

In Brief

Marie-Claude Morin highlighted the gap in life expectancy based on income as an example of inequality which demands action. Guy Caron expanded on the list of Con-connected appointees to the Immigration and Refugee Board, while Don Davies noted that even the screening committee was worryingly Con-heavy. Nycole Turmel slammed the Cons for sending auditors to Attawapiskat instead of actual help, then pointed out that a 50% gap in social program funding ($9,000 per person on the reserve compared to $18,000 nationally) figures to be one of the main explanations for the community's difficulties. Peter Julian criticized the Cons' lack of cooperation with B.C. in developing a process to remove the HST after citizens voted it down. Mark Eyking and Anne Minh-Thu Quach wondered when the Cons' promises on AIDS funding would result in their actually sending a dime. John McCallum pointedly questioned why the Cons had shifted money out of green infrastructure funding to other departments without authorization, only to be told by Denis Lebel that Industry Canada's 2011-12 Report on Plans and Priorities was authority enough. Irene Mathyssen noted that hundreds of thousands of seniors aren't receiving benefits to which they're entitled. Roxanne James spoke to her private member's bill to limit complaints by prisoners - only to be told by Candice Hoeppner on behalf of her own party that it didn't go far enough in silencing anybody who raised concerns about prison conditions, even as Sylvain Chicoine pointed out that there's a good reason why a large number of complaints might originate with a few relatively well-educated inmates. And finally, Glenn Thibeault wondered why the Cons' promises to create a real code of conduct for credit cart providers had come to nothing.

Credit where due

I suspect there's still going to be plenty of room for argument as to how much attention we ought to pay to inequality in the development of economic policy. But let's give Kevin Milligan and other UBC economists full credit for their observations when prompted by Pete McMartin on issues of inequality and economic structure, including both in terms of why the GDP-above-all-else model has sometimes fallen flat with the public...

The majority of respondents in that poll agreed with Milligan. They, too, felt that, overall, the HST would benefit the economy.

But...while they recognized the HST would benefit the economy, they also felt that, on a personal level, none of the HST’s benefits would accrue to them.

A message resided in that distinction, Milligan felt, one that perhaps spoke to a greater malaise.

“With all the growth in the economy the HST promised,” Milligan said, “these people couldn’t bring themselves to vote for it because they didn’t see that growth benefiting them.”

Read that way, the HST vote wasn’t a referendum on a tax: It was a referendum on the nature of the economy.

It was a signal, perhaps, that many British Columbians felt they were disenfranchised from an economy that no longer worked in their interests. Their incomes were flat or falling. They struggled to cover their bills and mortgages. They watched all the economic gains of the last 15 years go to an increasingly affluent minority. Why vote for a tax that would, in their eyes, only exacerbate those trends?

...and their policy prescriptions to ensure an economy where everyone benefits:

So what, they were asked, would they recommend to close the income gap opening up in Canadian society?

Well, there were no easy answers, was their reply, but there were broad themes. Some of those:

• End programs such as the Temporary Foreign Workers Program that artificially encourage low wages in service industries.

• Recognize that unions — once a bulwark of the middle class — have encouraged better wages not only for unionized workers but non-unionized workers as well, and reconsider government policies that have made the process of union certification more difficult.

• Concentrate efforts for income equality where it is now most needed, not with seniors, who have fared relatively well, but with younger workers, young families and single parents, who have suffered most from income inequality.

• Improve the tax-and-transfer system to increase social assistance to those in the lowest income brackets.

• Re-examine the flatness of our tax structure, which lags behind that of the U.S. in that regard, and the fact we don’t have increasing tax rates for very high incomes. Said Riddell, “We definitely should be looking at higher tax rates at the very top of the income distribution.”

• Begin a national conversation to look at the issue of income inequality, to consider if Canadian society is going in the direction we want it to go. It needn’t be something so cumbersome and official as a Royal Commission, but a task force, perhaps, that shines a more focused light on the concerns the global Occupy movement has brought to the public eye.

And if we can get enough of the Economist Party on board with a similar set of prescriptions in response to an acknowledgment that inequality is an issue worth addressing all along the income scale (rather than merely for the bottom 10%), then there may well be some prospect of incorporating its overall principles into a political platform that succeeds as a matter of both policy and politics.

Good riddance

At long last, B.C.'s HST has met its end. Vaughn Palmer reminds us why, while Iglika Ivanova looks at what comes next.

On hollow victories

Sean Holman raises the possibility that Christy Clark and the B.C. Libs may be no better off if they manage to hang onto the HST in the province's ongoing referendum than if they lose the vote. But I wonder whether it's worth going a step further.

If the vote to axe the HST succeeds despite any manipulations on the part of the government, then it seems at least vaguely plausible that the province might see itself as having sufficiently punished Clark and the Libs for their sins - and thus pay somewhat less attention as future revelations surface. But if Clark uses large amounts of public money and other resources to get her way on the HST, then every bit of news figures to feed into a sense that the Libs have escaped unpunished - making it easier for the NDP to build the case that the next election needs to do the job instead.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- In case anybody held out hope that the Harper Cons might follow up on their residential school apology with some concrete action to change First Nations relations for the better, here's the predictable result: a gratuitous ultimatum on land claims which seeks to force First Nations to take whatever is on the table now or risk being left with next to nothing.

- Ellen Russell comments on how the corporate right has turned financial crisis into a way of life for its own benefit:

Because the appetite for risk is so pervasive (#4), financial instruments and practices are so complex (#5), regulations are so inadequate (#6), and markets are so interdependent (#7), the "contagion effects" of a panic in one market or country can spread to far-flung and unexpected places. Thus the problems in Greece may spread to other EU countries, to the banks and other investors holding the debt of eurozone countries, to those exposed directly or indirectly to these banks and other investors, to any entity that provided financial "insurance" on anything sucked into the crisis, and anywhere else that financial panic touches down.

Awareness is growing that the arcane workings of financial markets have big impacts on their lives. No one is exempt from the devastation once a financial tsunami gathers momentum -- especially since economic contractions and government downsizing often follow closely behind the financial wreckage.

Financial crisis do not have to become a way of life. Ultimately, financial crisis is a political problem. It will take a massive shift in political mobilization to counter the current hegemony of financial interests.

Democratic financial reform must be a cornerstone for all of our agendas for economic change. Since we ultimately bail out these financial titans when crisis hits, we are entitled to make sure that finance is serving the public interest. Neoliberalism has made financial crisis a way of life. To move beyond neoliberalism, we need crack down on the financial sector so that a different way of life is possible.

- Yes, the shift to an HST model is all about benefitting the well-connected. But it's quite thoughtful of the B.C. Libs to serve up Exhibit M just in time for the referendum.

- Which offers all the more reason to answer "Absolutely!" to Rafe Mair's rhetorical question.

- Finally, Digby reminds us of the dangers of cult conservatism.

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- I'll join the seemingly long list of commentators who wouldn't ever have expected to cite David Brooks, but can't avoid it based on his latest column:

Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard have recently, with federal help, been exploring a third theory, that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.

A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.

These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.

Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. They appear to have lower I.Q.’s. They have more trouble controlling their attention. They are more shortsighted. Scarcity creates its own psychology.

- Meanwhile, Katie Hyslop points out that the Cons are ensuring that arbitrary scarcity remains the norm when it comes to educational funding for First Nations - and that efforts to make such a basic service as Internet access available are being cut off:

Earlier this year Aboriginal Affairs announced they would no longer be funding internet connectivity for First Nations schools.

This not only threatens to cut kids in remote areas off from connection with an increasingly globalized world, according to Williams, but also prevents students from taking distance education courses or conducting online research.

"We would lose access to online library services, and that's really important, as in the elementary and secondary schools kids are asked to do research. Most of our schools have very, very poor libraries, if they have a library, and so now that, I think, is a basic service that kids are entitled to," she says.
...
While schools will be forced to reexamine their budgets in order to afford Internet fees, they'll have to take into account a 15 per cent holdback on targeted programming funds for First Nations education as of April 1. The government announced the holdback earlier this year, citing an uncertainty in funds for First Nations education thanks to the federal election delaying the budget.

"That means that there would be 15 per cent less money available to First Nations schools this year to implement programs such as parent involvement, support for teacher retention and recruitment, for language programming, for some of the literacy programming that we've put into place," says Williams, adding government hasn't said when, if ever, the 15 per cent will be restored.

- But at least offices outside the Cons' control aren't similarly looking to restrict the availability of information. And in fact, the PBO's new website discussed by Bill Curry looks like an excellent step in allowing Canadians to see how their money is being spent.

- Finally, Jim Stanford eviscerates the coalition supporting B.C.'s HST (and the "no" side of the current referendum) as being dishonest, unethical, and flat-out wrong. And the Conseil de Presse du Quebec much the same labels to two of the province's most recognizable right-wing names.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- With health care once again receiving plenty of attention on the U.S. political scene thanks to the Republicans' plan to dismantle publicly-funded Medicare, the differences between Canada and the U.S. are once again serving as a major point of discussion. And Aaron Carroll has posted a neat defence of Canada's universal system from the standpoint of patients and health practictioners alike.

- Megan Leslie highlights the Cons' continued failure to do anything meaningful on the climate change front - which looks all the more glaring when even oilsands operators are crying out for a clear and predictable system rather than another half a decade of delays and uncertainty.

- For all the talk about opposition parties' votes now being irrelevant in Parliament, it's noteworthy that the Bloc is planning to vote for the Cons' budget - even after the party had declared earlier this year that the HST money for Quebec which reflects the main change from the budget rejected in March wouldn't necessarily be enough to earn its support.

That would figure to mean the Bloc sees so little prospect of achieving much in the years to come that it has no choice but to paint the HST money as its main accomplishment for the next little while. Which may be an entirely reasonable conclusion - but seems to suggest that a Bloc resurgence is a long ways away.

- Shorter Murray Mandryk, serving up as embarrassing a sop to Brad Wall as one could imagine this side of John Gormley:

(insert Saskatchewan Party advertisement here)

- Finally, Rob Rainer nicely counters the perennial anti-tax spin from the Fraser Institute (which the Cons are working feverishly to promote) with a suggested Tax Benefits Day:

(H)appy Tax Benefits Day 2011! A day to remind ourselves that, far from being “bad” – as even Prime Minister Harper is on record as believing – taxes and our willingness to pay them make possible our democratic institutions and the many public goods and services that Canadians value.
...
(O)f all the recommendations of McQuaig and Brooks, the most important may be to “strive to bring about a change in social attitudes toward taxation and its essential role in a democracy.” Hence the inauguration of Tax Benefits Day – to fall on the day immediately after the Fraser Institute’s Tax Freedom Day, to counter the misguided view that taxes are bad.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- thwap is among a few bloggers to rightly slam the Cons' obscene message to flooded Quebeckers that the only way they can hope for help is if somebody stands to profit from it:

Toews (is) justifying removing Canadian Forces from helping with the clean-up after a Quebec flood, NOT apparently as punishment for Quebec voters having rejected harpercon villainy, but because they're worried that they'll displace private sector service providers inspired by the idea of profiting from their misfortune.

Furthermore, the services you're asking for -- if they were authorized -- would place the Canadian Forces in competition with the private sector, at the local or provincial level, which could perform this type of repair work.

Ah! But Vic! Doesn't the same logic justify having all our work in Afghanistan carried out by mercenaries and private prison contractors? Why should we deprive mercenaries of a chance to make a buck out of some misplaced devotion to archaic ideas about who should fight wars on the taxpayers' dime?

- Erin notes the good news in the B.C. Libs' latest HST machinations:

Now that BC’s opposition has successfully pushed back on the HST, the government is starting to follow the logic of its own argument, promising to combine the HST with a corporate tax increase. However, the reversal of BC’s corporate tax cuts would not collect enough revenue to fully offset the removal of sales tax from business inputs.

Nevertheless, this development seems to improve the chances of BC restoring its corporate tax rate to a more appropriate level. More broadly, it weakens the narrative that corporate taxes must always and everywhere decline. The business lobby’s acceptance of the government’s plan undermines its usual claims that raising corporate taxes would be unimaginably horrible.

- But even while recognizing how the Libs' reversal fully validates the NDP's position on corporate taxes, Seth Klein points out some significant obstacles to the move based on their previous rationale for lowering the corporate income tax rate:

More importantly, the government has now acknowledged that we can increase corporate income taxes and the sky will not fall. It is no small irony that when Adrian Dix proposed during the NDP leadership race that corporate income taxes be returned to their 2008 level, he was accused by government representatives and media pundits of being a “class warrior”. Yet now Christy Clark has proposed doing just that (and even gone a step further with a proposed delay to planned reductions in the small business tax rate).

And another rather delicious irony: those corporate income taxes reductions since 2008 were part of the carbon tax’s revenue recycling regime. Meaning, if the government did actually increase the corporate income tax, they would have to amend their carbon tax legislation, which requires that the tax be revenue neutral. Again, I’m all for that. The CCPA has long said that making the carbon tax revenue neutral (and giving big tax cuts to business) made little sense, and that the carbon tax income should be partially used to fund other climate initiatives. So nice to know the new Premier is now ready to break with revenue neutrality there.

- Finally, Dan Gardner finds plenty of Stephen Harper positions which look to be mostly unassailable - but only if one goes back as far as 1996 when he was the one challenging the type of distorted top-down politics he now practices:

"In today's democratic societies, organizations share power," wrote two conservative intellectuals.

"Corporations, churches, universities, hospitals, even public sector bureaucracies make decisions through consultation, committees, and consensus-building techniques. Only in politics do we still entrust power to a single faction expected to prevail every time over the opposition by sheer force of numbers.

Even more anachronistically, we persist in structuring the governing team like a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power to appoint, discipline, and expel subordinates. Among major democracies, only Great Britain so ruthlessly concentrates power."

That's a pretty good summary of what I've been writing lately about the Conservative government.

Which is curious. Because the authors are Tom Flanagan and Stephen Harper. Flanagan is a conservative political scientist. And Stephen Harper, well, you know him.
...
"The two parties could begin by agreeing to advocate electoral reform." Scrapping the first-past-the-post system is a realistic possibility, Harper and Flanagan wrote, because the NDP would support it, "allowing even a minority conservative government to pass the necessary legislation."

It was an essential step. "Many of Canada's problems stem from a winner-take-all style of politics that allows governments in Ottawa to impose measures abhorred by large areas of the country."

Change a few details and the Harper/Flanagan essay could be published today. Word for word.
...
"Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator, because there is no way to stop a majority government," Conservative senator Bert Brown observed recently.

There was a time when conservatives found that appalling. But an awful lot of them seem quite comfortable with it today.

What they find appalling, what makes them quiver with indignation, is a journalist who makes the same arguments they once did about a prime minister who has become what he once opposed.

On selective benefits

We'll find out before too long whether the B.C. Libs' latest attempt to survive the imposition of the HST will be any more successful than what they've tried for the last two years. But the more interesting effect of today's announcement may be its impact on the other province which harmonized its taxes at the same time.

Here's the message which I'm sure will be repeated plenty more as the HST referendum progresses:

In order to head off that fiscal reckoning, the B.C. Liberals propose to raise corporate taxes by two points effective Jan 1 of next year and to postpone a scheduled reduction in the small business tax.

The moves constitute a reversal of longstanding tax policy under the B.C. Liberals, who've systematically reduced taxes on the business sector. When the New Democrats proposed similar increases, the Liberals denounced them, saying it would negatively impact the investment climate.'

But Finance Minister Kevin Falcon justified the increases by saying that the corporate sector had enjoyed most of the benefits of the tax shift under the HST.

Of course, in Ontario that benefit to the corporate sector from the HST was packaged with...more benefits to the corporate sector in the form of income tax cuts. And all this just before the McGuinty government declared that it had to start cutting back on public services due to the deficit which ballooned as a result of those giveaways.

Now, with B.C.'s government publicly acknowledging the real consequences of the HST and at least trying to paper over its effects, the Ontario Libs figure to have an even tougher time defending their choices. And it shouldn't come as much surprise if it's the party which has offered the more accurate critique of the HST all along that benefits as a result.

Monday Morning Links

Assorted content to start your week.

- Trish Hennessy calls out the Cons' fear campaign - while hinting at the reality that their insistence on gambling more and more of our prosperity on faith-based market schemes only serves to reinforce their message that we can hope for nothing better than a state of constant panic:

In the lead-up to the 2008 recession, during the best of economic times, Canadians were taking on epic levels of household debt.

Research from Statistics Canada, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and elsewhere documents a disturbing rise in income inequality over the past generation, reversing what, post-World War II, had become a more egalitarian, compassionate Canada (though not a perfect Canada).

Research also showed that Canadian households were working longer hours, toggling multiple jobs and relying on multiple income earners in the household just to keep afloat.

A concentrated number of elite Canadians were getting so rich from economic growth that it was starting to look like the 1920s all over again — for the lucky few.

But a growing number of Canadians were admitting to pollsters they were one or two paycheques away from financial disaster. In essence: They were one piece of bad news away from having the dream of a middle class lifestyle fall to pieces.
...
The thing about insecurity is that it breeds fear – fear of change, fear of chaos, fear of decline.

The politics of fear exploits, rather than protects. It distracts at a time when we need focus. It divides when what we need is unity.

What we saw in Canada during the 2011 federal election was a master at the politics of fear – Stephen Harper – playing the game like his life depended on it. And he won.

- But at least when it comes to workers' rights, the Star for one isn't buying the line that we should immunize businesses from all laws and obligations in hope that they'll reward us with a few more jobs:

Workers at the bottom of the pay scale have long been among the most exploited. Their desperation to keep a job they can’t afford to lose makes them easy targets for unscrupulous employers.

But the extent to which vulnerable workers in Ontario are being ripped off by some employers, as outlined in a new study, is startling.

One in three low-wage workers has had wages unfairly withheld or outright stolen by employers, according to the Workers’ Action Centre report. For some, it’s paycheques that are short hours, for others it’s being denied vacation pay or forced to work copious overtime hours for no pay at all.

This amounts to “wage theft” and an indictment of the government’s ability to enforce its labour laws and regulations on behalf of those who need the protections the most.
...
When a substantial complaint of wage theft is verified, that should trigger a broader labour investigation into the company involved. And the ministry needn’t wait for complaints to roll in. Inspectors should more proactively target employers in high-violation industries.

On paper, Ontario has strong laws. But they need to be enforced in a way that offers real protection for the poorest and most vulnerable workers.

- Harvey Oberfeld describes the real tradeoff at play in British Columbia's HST referendum:

(The HST) may be smart, from a corporate point of view, but how fair is it really for a company, let’s say, that measures revenues in millions to enjoy an EXTRA tax break at the cost of single parent families, young couples struggling to buy their first home, single people unable to even afford an unshared apartment or seniors struggling to make ends meet?

What the Tax Alliance doesn’t seem to realize is that the HST was not a tax break: it was tax SHIFT … from business to individuals.

Over the next few weeks, the public will see and hear Smart Tax Alliance ads, featuring “financial professionals” saying the HST helps business re-invest and acts as the “engine for economic growth”, cutting administrative costs and headaches.

We get it.

But all this is accomplished … not by getting rid of the costs and headaches … but by passing them on to the rest of us … many, many people with much less money than the companies that now get the savings. How is that justifiable, especially in a province that was already boasting BEFORE the addiitonal HST savings, that BC had some of the lowest corporate taxes in North America?

- Finally, now that the initial media rush to scrutinize and criticize Ruth Ellen Brosseau seems to be winding down, the media is starting to cover a few more of the NDP's new MPs. And Daniel Leblanc's profile of Mathieu Ravignat paints exactly the picture the NDP figures be looking to develop among all of its elected members:

Mr. Ravignat is focusing on local issues for now, such as economic development and protecting the pensions of workers, including those in the forestry industry in the Pontiac region. But he says he entered politics on behalf of Sophia and Gabriella, his two daughters,

“I’ve long been politically active, but running as a candidate was something else,” he says. “That decision was made for my kids. There is a future to build for them. They are so precious, and I want to make sure they still have access to education and health care.”

Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- About the only caveat I'll add to Jesse McLaren's election analysis is that the NDP's almost universally-improved position benefitted at least somewhat from the party starting behind the Cons who turned out to be the ultimate competition. But it's otherwise hard to disagree with McLaren's take:

The electoral map represents Parliamentary elections, but the main source of change happens between elections, driven by what happens outside Parliament. So to truly understand what has happened to people's consciousness between the past two elections we need to look at the shift in vote. From 2008-2011 the NDP gained votes in 293 of 308 ridings, had the same vote in 10 ridings, and only lost votes in five ridings (one in Newfoundland & Labrador, three in Nova Scotia and one in Ontario). This is better than any other party, and shows that the "orange wave" was truly pan-Canadian.
...
(T)he Harper majority is not based on a surge to the right, but a Liberal collapse. The corporate vote became concentrated in the Tories (who were endorsed by nearly every mainstream newspaper), while the real surge across the country was towards the NDP. This is an important step forward in quality as well as quantity. The aspirations of Quebec previously rooted in the corporate Bloc Quebecois, the "strategic voting" for the corporate Liberals to stop the corporate Tories, and the isolated "neither left nor right" politics of the Green Party have shifted to a pan-Canadian labour party with links to the antiwar and other social movements.

- Niki Ashton offers some good advice to the NDP MPs who have taken her place as the youngest representatives in Parliament:

Ashton said the NDP caucus is a welcoming place for young people, with colleagues often asking her what she thinks on a given issue — if she has not already told them. That is not always the case for the broader political sphere, especially Question Period, so Ashton advises her new caucus colleagues to stand their ground. “Absolutely you’re going to come up against a wall of discrimination or condescension or paternalism and you’ve got to push back,” said Ashton, who hopes the influx of youth to politics changes the tone. “You’ve got to call it for what it is and you’ve got to raise your voice a little louder and make sure they don’t silence you.”

- It shouldn't come as much surprise that the B.C. Liberals are once again looking to pull a fast one on their province when it comes to the HST. But it's much more shocking that this time they gave some advance warning - and I'd fully expect the latest bait and switch to ensure that an issue which has animated B.C. voters for the past two years remains live whenever the next provincial election takes place.

- Finally, Matt Taibbi has a must-read article on how the complete lack of accountability for Goldman Sachs' financial manipulations looks to be a test case as to whether or not the U.S. can be said to be even slightly governed by the rule of law as opposed to the rule of the wealthy.

Harmonic convergence

It's never been much of a secret that the HST has been at the centre of the NDP's message to defeat Harper Cons in British Columbia. But with the party having just released a new ad on the subject, it's worth noting that for all the frustration over the tax itself, the greatest impact of any discussion of the HST may be to turn the tide against the Cons on their choice of ballot question.

Keep in mind that the decision to impose the HST was made after an election campaign where Gordon Campbell ran as a steady-hand economic manager, promising no nasty surprises for the province while trying to portray the alternative as too risky to justify public support. Sound familiar?

Needless to say, it took approximately .5 nanoseconds for Campbell to decide that his majority in the Legislature meant all previous promises - including his commitment not to impose an HST - were inoperative. And so B.C. was plunged into the political chaos and public outrage that's marked the last two years.

Now, Harper is trying to win a majority off of exactly the same message that proved so dishonest and destructive the last time B.C. voters heard and accepted it. And reminding voters about the HST serves two strong purposes in helping to avoid that outcome: not only does it direct anger over the HST itself toward one of the parties responsible, but it also serves as Exhibit A as to why it's dangerous to hand a majority mandate to a government which has proven that it can't be trusted.

Sunday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your weekend reading.

- It remains to be seen whether Canadians Against 41 in 41 will get noticed by many who aren't already fully engaged in Canada's political system. But I'll fully endorse its reasons why Canadians should make the effort to vote, particularly this one:

Reason to vote #3: You deserve to be represented. If you don't cast a ballot, your values and beliefs will not be heard. The best way to make sure the things you care about are actually reflected in society is by actually supporting those things at the polling station. If you don't vote for what you believe in, no one else will do it for you.

- Darwin makes a great point as to how the Cons' refusal to follow Parliament's orders may have resulted in a precedent which will strengthen the hand of MPs in dealing with recalcitrant executives in the future (emphasis added):

Because constitutional conventions is the source of both cabinet confidentially and Parliament’s right to demand documents it wasn’t clear to me which would take precedence. I suspected that the Speaker would rule that Parliament could not demand documents that where subject to cabinet confidentiality but these documents could be demanded because cabinet confidentially does not extend to supporting documents for a decisions that had already been made. Because the cabinet had decided to move forward with these crime bills the supporting documentation, like the cost estimates, where no longer confidential.

Instead in his ruling he seemed to suggest that there is no limit to what Parliament can demand, not even cabinet confidentiality. He quoted House of Commons Procedure and Practice:

The Standing Orders do not delimit the power to order the production of papers and records. The result is a broad, absolute power that on the surface appears to be without restriction. There is no limit on the type of papers likely to be requested, the only prerequisite is that the papers exist—in hard copy or electronic format—and that they are located in Canada….

No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of the power rooted in the House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting the power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers and records.

Cabinet Confidentiality isn’t completely dead. It has been just lowered in status to the level of other documents that are not publicly available by access to information requests, like military secrets and personal information, but is available to parliament if requested.

- Meanwhile, Stephen notes that the Uncut movement is starting to develop in Canada - even if you may never know it if your news intake is limited to mainstream sources.

- And finally, Rachel Maddow points out yet another U.S. state facing an all-out Republican assault on less-connected people, as Michigan's governor has launched attacks on both the financial and democratic fronts:



But Maddow's initial riff is particularly striking given that two of Canada's largest provinces have just gone through a similar shift in their tax systems to privilege corporate activity at the expense of mere citizens, even while exacerbating the deficits that are supposedly the impetus for change.

[Update: fixed link.]

On arbitrary lines

Apparently Jim Flaherty is looking to keep pressure on the other parties in Parliament (and keep the Cons' excuses for an election open) by announcing that he won't be setting aside the HST transition funding demanded by the Bloc in the Cons' next budget.

Now, I'll leave aside the issue of harmonization in general, particularly since Quebec has had a different arrangement in place than the other provinces in the pre-negotiation stage. But let's remind ourselves that the last time they went on a harmonization kick, the Cons happily set aside $5 billion at a time when not a single province was expressing any interest in taking it. So there shouldn't be any doubt that their latest excuse is a matter of sheer politics rather reflecting than any principled reluctance to set aside money if there are a few Ts to be crossed and Is to be dotted.

Ask and answer

In a more sane political environment, the NDP's list of conditions for supporting the 2011 federal budget would be seen as a modest, reasonable set of demands which any government would eagerly meet. But in this one, even though they likely make for the least the NDP can possibly justify asking for as the price of support, the odds of the Harper Cons actually going along with the proposals look to be slim to none.

Yes, the Cons were fairly slow to rule out increased pension benefits over the last year or so, waiting for Alberta to shoot down any proposal before doing so themselves. But they've since taken a firm public line that we have to avoid improving the CPP in order to save it. And the GIS has never apparently been on their radar, since it would involve what would likely turn into a permanent improvement in the type of social benefit that the Cons most loathe.

On eliminating the HST from home heating costs, the Cons have conspicuously avoided any substantive response to a proposal that the NDP has worked hard to sell over the course of the fall.

And on a home retrofitting tax credit, the Cons have already rejected the NDP's entreaties in last year's budget - even though the proposal makes for nothing but a slightly more environmentally friendly recasting of part of the Cons' much-ballyhooed economic action plan.

So while the NDP's laundry list may serve as a starting point if the Cons are particularly desperate to avoid an election, I wouldn't see much prospect of it serving as the basis for a budget otherwise - particularly when Harper can buy off the Bloc for a one-time payment to Quebec without doing anything to increase the scope of any social program in the long term.

On choices

No, I won't reinforce yet another example of the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation having its nonsense published without a serious challenge. And indeed, the CTF makes an embarrassing show of talking up changes related mostly to relative provincial inflation rates while conspicuously omitting the main reason why inflation actually was an issue in Ontario.

But in running with the theme of tax changes for 2011, the Star does point out a handy contrast in looking at what's being treated more and less generously for tax purposes:

Ottawa is also allowing a five-point increase in the deductible portion of meal expenses for long-haul truckers, from 75 to 80 per cent.

But, starting Jan. 1, Canadians will no longer be able to receive a federal credit of up to $1,500 for improving the overall energy efficiency of their homes.

That's right: the long-distance transfer of goods through the mode of transportation which causes the greatest possible energy use and damage to infrastructure is being rewarded with increasing tax breaks by the Cons - at the same time as efficiencies which reduce the need for wasted energy are being treated as unworthy of any support.

Of course, in the greater scheme of the Cons' efforts to use the federal government as a marketing wing of the oil sands, the 2011 tax changes make for extremely small moves. But the fact that the Cons are taking deliberate steps to encourage avoidable energy use even while cutting what few programs still exist to support greater efficiency nonetheless offers a strong hint as to whose interests they're really serving.

(Edit: fixed wording.)

Friday Morning Links

Assorted material for your end-of-week reading.

- Chris Selley points out just how odd it is that Michael Ignatieff is serving as an apologist for arbitrary security measures:

Michael Ignatieff was asked on Wednesday if he’d endured the new indignities being foisted upon air travellers, which are the subject of an ongoing backlash on both sides of the border. “I’ve long ceased worrying about these issues,” he responded. “We have to keep this country safe and the people I feel strongly in support of are the hardworking security scanners.”

In other words: Everything Transport Canada approves must be designed to keep us safe, right? Why else would they do it?

This seems an oddly credulous thing for any leader of the opposition to say — his duty being, in part, to oppose the government. It’s odder still for an ostensibly liberal leader of the opposition. And it’s downright bizarre for a leader of the opposition who was once celebrated as a human-rights brainbox. We’re talking about the needless, hideously expensive violation of basic privacies Westerners used to take for granted.

- Sometimes, the system doesn't work - and the G20 example looks to be glaring enough to raise questions about whether it was ever intended to. After all, even if it's difficult for an outsider to determine which police were responsible for which abuses, shouldn't it be possible to do so, presumably at least some of the officers at the scene would have some idea who had done what - making the lack of any answers look highly suspicious.

- Just when you thought the HST was nearly done with as an issue, it looks to be back on the front burner in Quebec. And if the Bloc indeed sides with the Quebec government (which doesn't seem like a sure thing to be given that harmonization would result in an unpopular federalist government ceding authority to Ottawa), then the NDP's efforts on the issue in Ontario and B.C. should put it in perfect position to capitalize.

- Finally, I don't entirely disagree with Norman Spector's theory that the NDP can do more to build and shape a protest movement on Afghanistan among other issues. But one would think Spector should take the time to at least check, say a simple Twitter feed to see what NDP MPs are doing across the country before pretending that they're nowhere other than in Ottawa.

Try again

Chrystal unfortunately misses a rather important point in Gordon Campbell's attempt to buy his way back into favour with B.C.'s anti-tax crowd:

Carole James has this to say:

I believe in a competitive tax environment but this is a ridiculous way to set tax policy... Fiscal irresponsibility and a government trying to buy back public support is the only thing I saw with this tax cut... It's unclear where the money will come from.

Might it not be from the HST that you and your party have been campaigning so fiercely against?

Needless to say, the answer is: no, it mightn't.

After all, the extra money being paid by consumers is balanced out by $1.9 billion in tax breaks for corporations in what's intended to be a revenue neutral shift in government income. And that's without even mentioning the shiny baubles offered alongside the HST to try to make it more palatable to B.C.'s voters in the first place.

Mind you, it's not hard to see why Campbell did what he did. After all, the move to keep slashing taxes even further should at least help him to break the anti-HST movement into its constituent parts and bring part of the Vander Zalm wing back into the Libs' fold - perhaps staving off the prospect of another right-wing party annihilating the Libs in 2013 or sooner.

But for the NDP and others whose concern all along has been Campbell's combination of fiscal mismanagement and desire to benefit the corporate sector at the expense of working-class British Columbians, the move only makes matters worse. And that should offer all the more reason to ensure that the Libs don't stay in power any longer than can be avoided.

On outreach

Leaving aside whether the NDP's home heating plan is ideal from a policy perspective, there doesn't seem to be much doubt that it has the potential to make for a strong political position. And the party's latest ad figures to be another key step in getting voters to warm up to the party.

Brian Lilley paints that effect primarily in terms of reaching Con voters. And there's certainly a point to be made there - particularly when the Cons themselves have now spent months talking about being focused on economic issues while explaining why they plan to do nothing to improve matters any.

But it's worth noting that the same factors which figure to play well against the Cons are equally significant in differentiating the NDP from the Libs. Not only does the push on home heating call attention to the Libs' support for the HST, but its focus on immediate action which can reduce the costs actually being borne by Canadians should present a strong contrast against the Libs' mostly speculative platform.

Of course, the campaign does figure to be based primarily on reaching other parties' soft voters rather than motivating the NDP's strongest supporters. But the NDP has done plenty of work in that department which has largely gone unnoticed in the media - and it certainly makes sense to make sure the party is prepared on both fronts both to improve its standing in this fall's by-elections, and to be prepared for a general election which may not be far away.