Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on a new Ontario study recommending a strong investment in child care to reduce the gender wage gap.

- Allan Moscovitch, Nick Falvo and David Macdonald offer a useful primer on social supports for seniors in Canada. And Marybeth Shinn, Scott Brown, Michelle Wood and Daniel Gubits examine (PDF) several options to address homelessness, finding that permanent housing subsidies are most effective in promoting housing stability and other benefits.

- James Wilt makes the case for the Libs to put an end to fatally-flawed pipeline review processes, rather than pretending that the Cons' biased structures serve as anything but rubber stamps which do nothing to confer social license. But Travis Lupick notes that restrictive rules around supervised injection sites are just another area where the Libs' plan is to continue on with the policies they criticized while in opposition.

- Jeremy Deaton and Mina Lee chart the health effects of climate change. And Shayndi Raice points out that paid sick leave works wonders in reducing the spread of the flu.

- Finally, Guy Caron continues his series discussing tax evasion by pointing out the urgent need for government follow-up when tax avoidance schemes surface in the public eye.

Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Murtaza Hussain nicely sums up why we should be pushing for businesses and wealthy individuals to contribute their fair share through a progressive tax system rather than through self-aggrandizing charity:

The private social safety net, provided by corporate donors as compensation for the public one which their tax avoidance helps shred, is a poor substitute for democratically accountable public spending. Besides being poorer, free of public oversight, and geared primarily towards public relations efforts, the private safety net is a rug that can and will be pulled out from under its beneficiaries at the slightest notice. Goldman Sachs, which generously gave $320M in charitable contributions in 2010 and $500M in 2009, drastically cut its charitable budget to $78M a year in 2011 in response to reduced profits while making minimal cuts to employee bonuses and other compensation. “Doing God’s work”, as Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously described the companies activities is apparently an elective commitment based on market conditions. Whereas...a strong public safety net is managed democratically by its beneficiaries, corporate charity can and will disappear the moment it is deemed necessary which exemplifies clearly why it is no substitute for government spending.

- Gregory Beatty points out the remarkable returns Canadians have achieved through the Canadian Pension Plan, and rightly asks who other the financial services industry than stands to benefit from pushing retirement savings toward more risky and costly programs like the ones preferred by the Harper Cons.

- Of course, if the Cons know that reality doesn't support their desire to demolish governments at every level, they're perfectly happy to pretend the facts don't exist. And evidence-based experimentation couldn't be further from the Cons' plans.

- But it can get awkward when the dogma runs into more thoughtful governments. And the comparison between the Cons and their Latin American counterparts on drug policy is reflecting rather poorly on Canada. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman points out that there's an important economic lesson to be learned from Brazil and other social-democratic countries in our hemisphere.

- Finally, Ryan Meili points out how investment in prescription drugs can result in positive results in terms of both health costs and outcomes.

Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- The Star makes the case for Canada's wealthiest citizens to pay their fair share:

Apart from their hefty pay packets, the top-earning CEOs are sitting on $2 billion in stock options that are treated as dividend income, and taxed at half the value. That’s a tax break worth $475 million, the centre calculates. Arguably, for those who need it least.

These numbers aren’t just about whipping up raw envy. They reflect public policy choices at a time when Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is looking to chop federal spending to erase Ottawa’s $31-billion annual deficit in the next few years. It’s hard to make a compelling case that the affluent need tax breaks that ordinary workers will never see when Ottawa is short on cash. And when 3.5 million Canadians live in poverty.
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The question such numbers do raise, however, is one of basic tax fairness, and whether Canada’s personal and corporate tax systems need change to ensure that the burden is shared more progressively and equitably. In the long run, ever-growing inequality undermines prosperity and well-being for everyone – including the super rich. This is not a debate the Conservatives are eager to hold, for ideological reasons. But it will gain urgency as the Harper government rolls out its austerity budget and Ontario, too, faces tough choices.
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As Finance Minister Jim Flaherty draws up the budget, tax reform ought to be up for discussion. If there’s one message the Occupy activists managed to get across, it’s that not all of us are contributing our fair share.

- Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail reports that at least part of the move to place corporate-friendly low-tax branding above all other priorities looks to have been put on hold, as Ontario is taking a second look at the corporate tax slashing pushed by the Harper Cons.

- Barbara Yaffe points out the cost of the Cons' attempts to shut down Insite. But it's worth noting that the financial cost of the court case may pale in comparison to the human and financial costs of refusing to facilitate harm reduction strategies elsewhere.

- Tim Naumetz reports on Paul Dewar's national organization. But the most important variable in assessing Dewar's chances may be this:

Mr. Dewar has been so determined to brush up on his French-language skills that he moved in with his male volunteer language tutor for an entire week before Christmas.
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Mr. Dewar, taking three days with his family skiing in Quebec this week, spent his free time before Christmas with his French instructor.

“In a week of full-time French immersion leading up to Christmas and then Boxing Day, to New Year’s, he stayed in Ottawa, but he moved in with his French teacher and he was allowed two hours of family time a day, but otherwise he was living with his French teacher,” Mr. Cressy said.

Of course, it's a plus for Dewar that he's assembling a strong organization. But Dewar's success in presenting himself in French in the debates to come may well determine whether that organization can convert potential support into actual votes when it counts.

- Finally, time is running short - but anybody interested in getting around the Libs' limitation on blogger certification to live-blog their convention should drop iPolitics a line.

Sunday Morning Links

Assorted material for your weekend reading.

- He's a bit too shy in pointing out exactly how thoroughly the Cons' position on the Canadian Wheat Board has been rebuked in CWB elections for ages. But Bruce Johnstone nicely describes the PR blitz designed to pretend there's no dissent at all to the Cons' plans to destroy the Wheat Board:

In the space of an hour or two on Friday, my e-mail inbox was crammed with messages praising the Harper government for giving farmers "marketing freedom."

The steady parade of press releases from the governments of B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Western Barley Growers Association, Western Canadian Wheat Growers, Grain Growers of Canada and Canadian Federation of Independent Business had all the spontaniety of a vote of the politburo of the Worker's Party of Korea.

Does anyone really believe that all these groups, acting independently, putting out press releases at the same time, all saying essentially the same thing, is just a coincidence?
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(T)he Harper government has done nothing to justify its decision to remove the single desk - other than wrap itself in the flag of "marketing freedom.''

It has done no detailed studies (that we know of) on the impact the removal of single desk will have on the CWB, farmers, rural towns, the grain handling and transportation system, the economies of the three Prairie provinces, etc.

All the Harper government has done is bluster and brazen its way through this debate, without consulting directly with the people its decision will affect the most - Western Canadian farmers. Hardly consistent with a government that claims to believe in giving people freedom to choose.

- But then, Jamie Biggar notes that demolishing the building blocks of democracy is standard operating procedure for those seeking to remove power from mere citizens:

Like the shock doctrine, the creeping erosion strategy was first implemented by the right-wing governments that rose to power in the 1980s. It is a powerful approach because it creates the conditions for further rightward shifts. For example, these governments repeatedly created massive public deficits by cutting taxes while raising security spending, and then they used these manufactured deficits to justify cuts to social programs. The Harper government's agenda of tax cuts, spending on fighter jets and prisons, and subsequent "we have no choice" cuts to social spending is a standard example of this tactic.

This creeping erosion undermines our belief that we can and should work together through our democracy to achieve progress. Again, the strategy is powerful because it continually creates the conditions that reinforce its own arguments by making the problems it identifies even worse. When the Harper government is secretive, authoritarian or incompetent it is also re-enforcing its political agenda to persuade Canadians that government cannot be trusted and that it is not the answer to our shared challenges. Similarly, policies that expose Canadians to greater economic insecurity, from trade deals to deregulation and union busting, also make Canadians more afraid of change, and therefore more resistant to government interventions in the economy that are designed to reduce inequality or protect the environment.

The upshot is a decline in our trust in our institutions, and in our society. When people believe that government is dominated by self-interested elites, or that their neighbours will find a way to cheat the system, then they are far more likely to oppose collective approaches to problems that involve any short-term cost or uncertainty. This decline in public and social trust is not just a consequence of political strategy, it is highly connected to the longer term decline in "social capital," identified by the likes of Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, but the creeping erosion strategy is designed to cynically leverage this decline for political power.

- Peter McKnight is the latest to lament the Harper Cons' disdain for science and evidence:

In a desperate attempt to discredit Insite, Clement presented an essay critical of the facility as the equivalent of the aforementioned peer-reviewed studies.

In so doing, he essentially suggested there is nothing special about scientific studies -that scientists are not in a privileged position to discover truth about the natural world. Rather, any individual's opinion on a scientific topic is just as good as a scientist's, whether it is informed by science or not.
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According to this view, since science isn't in a privileged position to discover truth, we shouldn't privilege it in any way.

Such disdain for science is clearly evident in the Conservatives' elimination of the Office of Science Advisor and of their muzzling of Environment Canada scientists. But more than anything, their elimination of the mandatory long-form census, and their bizarre proclamations that they can still gain necessary knowledge about Canadian society without it, reveals their open hostility, not just to scientists, but to science itself.

Given that the Conservatives embrace this strange philosophy, their opposition to listing chrysotile, while still shocking, isn't surprising. But much like chrysotile, it is deadly. Also much like chrysotile, it ought to be buried deep in the ground, before it buries us all.

- Dr. Dawg reports that the parliamentary committee set up to formally convert criticism of government policy into anti-Semitism has issued its report - with predictable results.

- Finally, the official birth of South Sudan offers one good-news story for the weekend.

Wednesday Morning Links

The links just keep on coming...

- Paul Wells has expressed disbelief that John Geddes' report on the RCMP funding flawed anti-Insite research then suppressing its didn't result in more outcry. But the reason seems obvious to me - as while it might be slightly different to have such a crystal-clear example coming from an organization that we'd like to think of as independent, the same attitude toward information is so familiar from the political side of the Harper government that it hardly registers as newsworthy.

- In fairness, though, surely it's all worth it given how the Harper government is getting Canada noticed around the world.

- Barbara Yaffe is right to note that the litigation surrounding B.C.'s HST petition has helped to highlight the role of the Harper government in imposing the regressive tax scheme. But let's not forget that for all Jim Flaherty's efforts to distance himself from the HST after the fact, he was cheerleading for it long before anybody took the Cons up on their offer.

- Finally, Murray Mandryk atones for yesterday's press release by getting to the crux of the issue of how the provincial and federal governments should handle potash ownership:

(M)aybe now would be a good time for the potash companies to tell the real shareholders of this resource -- the Saskatchewan people -- what's in this takeover bid for them. Instead of settling for the usual easily-made, easily-broken pie crust promises of local corporate office jobs, maybe we should be demanding the next PotashCorp owner commit to a more fair and equitable royalty regime with less tax holidays for mine expansion and corporate jobs.

In fact, this current bidding war for our love and affection would seem to be the perfect time for the Saskatchewan government to insist on such commitments from the potash industry.

Dealing in lies

As others have pointed out, John Geddes' piece on how the RCMP was ordered not to be honest about the positive effects of Insite is well worth a read. But it's worth noting that the RCMP angle is just one piece of the story as to how the Cons have manipulated public discussion on the issue of drug policy - as one can see by examining how the groups commissioned to do the RCMP's dirty work have been treated by the Harper government.

Here's Geddes on the background to one of the flawed reports criticizing research on Insite which the RCMP acknowledged to have been improperly commissioned:

The RCMP asked for two more reports, by Garth Davies, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, and Colin Mangham, research director of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, a group opposed to Insite’s harm-reduction model, founded by former Conservative MP Randy White. Both were sharply critical of the academic literature. Mangham faulted the research into Insite for failing to discuss the fact that “only a small percentage of IV drug users use Insite for even a majority of their injections.” Davies cast doubt on the statistical validity of the whole body of research into safe injection facilities, including those in Europe. But neither review was published in a peer-reviewed journal, the usual sign that an academic paper stands up to expert scrutiny.
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By last October, the RCMP seemed ready to fess up to the shortcomings of its bid to generate critiques of the centre’s research. “Soon after Insite was opened, the RCMP commissioned several reviews on the impact of supervised injecting facilities, including Insite,” Harriman said in his email proposing “messaging” for a joint media release. “These reviews, conducted by Cohen and Corrado, concluded that supervised injecting facilities, including Insite, were associated with positive impacts. Subsequent reviews were commissioned by the RCMP or one of its affiliates (i.e. the Addictive Drug Information Council) to provide an alternative analysis of the existing [supervised injection facility] research. The RCMP recognizes that these reviews did not meet conventional academic standards.” Harriman’s email admits the police should never have waded into the debate: “The RCMP is not qualified to comment or engage in discussion over the merits of this research.”
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Senior RCMP officers might have been ready back in 2008 to acknowledge the “extensive body” of studies on the benefits of supervised injection sites, but federal cabinet ministers have never accepted anything of the sort. A key figure in the saga is Clement. At the 2007 annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association, he took the doctors to task over the CMA’s support for Insite. Clement claimed there was “academic debate going on” over the research into supervised injection, and alluded to new studies “questioning of the research that has already taken place.”

It’s likely he was referring to the critique of Insite produced for the RCMP, given that his remarks came a few months after Mangham’s review was posted on the Internet.

What Geddes doesn't cover, however, is the fact that while the RCMP has recognized that the research from Mangham and his group fell short, the Cons have done nothing of the sort after using it to manufacture dissent about the effectiveness of Insite. In fact, at last notice the Drug Prevention Network of Canada was still one of the Harper government's hand-picked participants in its advisory committee on drugs.

Which is to say that the RCMP's genuine effort to wrestle with the question of what to do about its involvement in a flawed study stands in stark contrast to what the Harper Cons have done. Indeed, this serves as another example of the Cons encouraging the development of policy by biased and well-connected parties based on inaccurate information. And there's little reason to think that the RCMP will improve their willingness to make decisions based on sound evidence as long as they're taking instructions from a government so averse to reality.

The reviews are in

The Star Phoenix editorial board slams the Cons' continud insistence on ignoring actual evidence about the effectiveness of policies - in this case Insite - in order to push their "tough on crime" message:

It takes a special brand of ideological blindness for federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson to waste taxpayers' money in trying to protect a demonstrably ineffectual national anti-drug strategy by fighting stubbornly to shut down a demonstrably effective provincial health program.
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What has Mr. Nicholson twisting logic on its head and giving short shrift to provincial and civic politicians, health experts and community groups in British Columbia, is his government's law-and-order agenda.

Apparently, it's (sic) ideological base is so rigid that there's no room for good sense, flexibility or even sound medical evidence that support the continued operation of Insite...

Were he less intent on pushing through a failed agenda, Mr. Nicholson might learn something from B.C. Health Minister Kevin Falcon, who too was a skeptic about Insite and considered it no more than an enabler for junkies, but did a 180-degree attitude adjustment after carefully considering the medical evidence.

And if Mr. Nicholson truly wants to focus on helping the addicts, he would be promoting Insite as a model for other jurisdictions and committing to them the public money he's now wasting on desperate legal appeals.

Burning question

Can all agree that by a "people taking to the streets" standard, the Cons are in some trouble?

Update: See also...