Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- Joe Gunn argues that it's long past time for Canada to live up to its climate commitments. And Carol Linnitt writes that further delay will do nothing but damage to our economy and our democracy as well as our planet:

Taking meaningful climate action would mean increasing green infrastructure, prioritizing sustainable cities and investing in renewable and low-carbon sources of energy.

It would also mean slowing the rate of expansion of oil and gas projects including the oilsands, which would eventually put a stop to new pipeline projects. That would come with the added benefits of respecting the rights of local municipalities fighting pipelines and First Nations actively engaged in legal battles against both the provincial and federal governments for industrial incursions on traditional territory.

These are called co-benefits. They're something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted in a recent report, saying climate action comes with a host of "co-benefits, synergies and tradeoffs" that naturally result from responsible and practical long-term thinking.

In general, countries getting serious in the fight against climate change are setting themselves up to enjoy all sorts of co-benefits that Canada might miss out on, like energy efficiency, clean energy, pollution reduction, water conservation, greener cities, increased recycling, sustainable agriculture, forest preservation, healthier communities, stronger human rights practices, better protection for indigenous peoples and their way of life, cleaner oceans, more democratic and collaborative politics and more.

- Paul Krugman reminds us that it's entirely possible to push for fair wages while helping the broader economy:

(T)he market for labor isn’t like the markets for soybeans or pork bellies. Workers are people; relations between employers and employees are more complicated than simple supply and demand. And this complexity means that there’s a lot more wiggle room in wage determination than conventional wisdom would have you believe. We can, in fact, raise wages significantly if we want to.

How do we know that labor markets are different? Start with the effects of minimum wages. There’s a lot of evidence on those effects: Every time a state raises its minimum wage while neighboring states don’t, it, in effect, performs a controlled experiment. And the overwhelming conclusion from all that evidence is that the effect you might expect to see — higher minimum wages leading to fewer jobs — is weak to nonexistent. Raising the minimum wage makes jobs better; it doesn’t seem to make them scarcer.

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(I)t shouldn’t be all that hard to raise wages across the board. Suppose that we were to give workers some bargaining power by raising minimum wages, making it easier for them to organize, and, crucially, aiming for full employment rather than finding reasons to choke off recovery despite low inflation. Given what we now know about labor markets, the results might be surprisingly big — because a moderate push might be all it takes to persuade much of American business to turn away from the low-wage strategy that has dominated our society for so many years.

There’s historical precedent for this kind of wage push. The middle-class society now dwindling in our rearview mirrors didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was largely created by the “great compression” of wages that took place during World War II, with effects that lasted for more than a generation.

So can we repeat this achievement? The pay raises at Walmart and McDonald’s — brought on by a tightening job market plus activist pressure — offer a small taste of what could happen on a vastly larger scale. There’s no excuse for wage fatalism. We can give American workers a raise if we want to.

- Amy Minsky reports on the Cons' cuts to transport safety, while Kelsey Johnson exposes the Cons' concurrent cuts to meat inspection which are raising the risk of another listeria crisis. And Andrea Huncar reports on Alberta's actions to cut injured temporary foreign workers off from needed health care, while Ethel Tungohan introduces us to some of the people the Cons have declared to be illegal in Canada.

- Susan Delacourt argues that a focus on the Duffy bribery scandal is largely serving to distract us from more important issues. And Marina Hyde laments that the UK's election seems to be running on little more than auto-pilot in terms of both candidates' actions and the press' coverage.

- But the Independent writes that at least UK voters are enjoying far more choice as a result of years of coalition government.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Joe Gunn reminds us that ignoring the issue of poverty won't make it go away. And Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on a national campaign demanding a plan to deal with poverty at the federal level.

- Roderick Benns discusses the prospect of a guaranteed annual income with Wayne Simpson. And Whitney Mallett is the latest to look in depth at how the successful Mincome basic income plan might spread much further:

Critics of basic income guarantees have insisted that giving the poor money would disincentivize them to work, and point to studies that show ​a drop in peoples' willingness to work under pilot programs. But in Dauphin—thought to be the largest such experiment conducted in North America—the experimenters found that the primary breadwinner in the families who received stipends were in fact not less motivated to work than before. Though there was some reduction in work effort from mothers of young children and teenagers still in high school—mothers wanted to stay at home longer with their newborns and teenagers weren’t under as much pressure to support their families—the reduction was not anywhere close to disastrous, as skeptics had predicted.
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The recovered data from “Mincome,” as the Dauphin experiment was known, has given more impetus to a growing call for some sort of guaranteed income. This year, the Swis​s Parliament will vote on whether to extend a monthly stipend to all residents, and the Indian government has already begun replacing aid programs with direct cash transfers. Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich has called a BIG “alm​ost inevitable.” In the US, Canada, and much of Western Europe, where the conversation around radically adapting social security remains mostly hypothetical, the lessons of Dauphin might be especially relevant in helping these ideas materialize sooner rather than later.

There are other compelling arguments for a guaranteed income now. Despite record corporate earnings, most people are not benefitting. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high, ​student debt and health care costs are soaring, and the job market is not rewarding those who are already employed with enough money for a decent way of life. The so-called ​Uberization of the workforce, in which workers are paid by the task rather than on a salary or under an established hourly rate—is increasing the precariousness of work. (And that's not to mention ​robots and artificial intelligence taking away jobs.) As the concept of universal healthcare spreads and minimum wage is debated, conversations around reconsidering or expanding social security are growing.

- Ryan Meili interviews Harsha Walia about the importance of building healthy connections between immigrants, refugees and our wider communities.

- Michael Adams and Maryantonett Flumian muse about some of the causes of low voter participation rates. But as Craig Scott points out, the Cons' message to (selected) voters that their democratic involvement isn't welcome can't be helping matters.

- Finally, Thomas Walkom rightly argues that even if the Cons would accept some parliamentary oversight over new CSIS powers, that wouldn't represent an acceptable tradeoff for the public. Karl Nerenberg offers four reasons to be alarmed by C-51. And the Winnipeg Free Press concludes that the Cons' terror bill risks far too much for no apparent benefit.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Thomas Walkom writes that the Cons' economic prescriptions are doomed to fail because they're based on a fundamental misdiagnosis:

(T)hat half of the Conservative theory is correct. There is still persistently high unemployment.

But the other half, the study found, does not hold water: With the possible exception of Saskatchewan, Canada does not suffer from a surfeit of unfilled jobs.

In reaching this conclusion, the parliamentary watchdog looked at evidence compiled by the Bank of Canada and the Conference Board of Canada, a centre-right think tank.

This evidence shows that an undue number of jobs went begging in the years before 2008, when the economy was booming. But that certainly is not the case now.

The problem now is that there are not enough jobs. Period.
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Conservatives soon reverted to their old-time religion. If unemployment was high, the fault lay with the jobless. They either didn’t have the right skills or were too lazy to move to where the work was.

The answer was threefold. First, cut into employment insurance in order to give layabouts an incentive to move. Second, bring in temporary foreign workers to fill the alleged skills shortages. Third, subsidize employers so as to encourage training.

Along the way, the government also took swipes at its old nemesis, the trade union movement. And it eliminated a law requiring construction companies working on federal projects to pay fair wages.

The result was that Canada ended up with stagnant wage growth among middle-income earners, more temporary foreign workers serving coffee at doughnut shops and not much else.

- Gene Lyons rightfully labels the Koch brothers as the U.S.' most prominent oligarchs. And Paul Krugman recognizes why the need to counter the Kochs' billions has become an effective fund-raising message for the Democrats:

David Weigel reports that Democrats are finding the Koch brothers an effective fundraising tool — emails that bash the Kochs raise three times as much as emails that don’t. 

And you can see why: the Kochs are perfect villains. It’s not just what they are — serious evildoers who use their wealth to push hard-line right-wing, anti-environmental policies that redound very much to their own benefit. It’s also what they aren’t: they’re wealthy heirs, not self-made men, they aren’t identified with innovation (which you can at least argue for Bill Gates), they haven’t made money for other people like Warren Buffett. So focusing on the Kochs is a way to personalize a vision of conservative politics as a defense of people with unearned privilege.

- Meanwhile, David Atkins sees the tycoon funder of a campaign to secede from California as exemplifying the antisocial rich who can't even fathom the presence of humanity among their fellow elites:

It's always a big shock to selfish rich people that most other well-to-do people aren't as selfish as they are. It's important to remember that many of the very wealthy are like Warren Buffett, people who vote primarily for Democrats and aren't afraid to pay a little more in taxes to have a fruitful, stable and fairer society. It's not even the 1% that are ruining things for the rest of us; it's a very sociopathic, very energetic fraction of that 1%. And they're really shocked when other people don't behave as asininely as they do.

- Finally, following up on today's column, Joe Gunn discusses why fair elections are a moral issue. Dan Lett recognizes the gap between the public interest in maximizing voter participation, and the (varied) partisan interest in suppressing it. And Lawrence Martin makes the case that voting should be compulsory.