Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Carol Linnitt observes that the Canadian public supports a shift from fossil fuels to cleaner energy by a 76-24% margin - even as they overestimate Canada's economic returns from oil and gas.

- Meanwhile, Alison takes a look at the spread of (primarily oil-funded) advertorials in Canadian media.

- Kate Heartfield writes that even if the Cons' cuts to refugee health hadn't crossed the line into unconstitutionality, we should still consider them to be unconscionable from a policy-making perspective:

Even if you come away unconvinced of the soundness of the court’s conclusion, it is hard to come away sanguine about the effects of this policy.

A policy that “shocks the conscience and outrages our standards of decency” is not defensible, politically and morally, even if it is legal. It is hard to argue against the court’s opinion that the government “has intentionally set out to make the lives of these disadvantaged individuals even more difficult than they already are in an effort to force those who have sought the protection of this country to leave Canada more quickly, and to deter others from coming here.”

This judgment might not be the final word on the constitutionality of refugee health care, but it’s a damning critique not only of a particular policy, but also of the way our government makes policy in general.

- And Jay Monaco notes that the U.S. Supreme Court's latest set of appalling decisions serves as evidence that we shouldn't lean too heavily on the judiciary to compensate for the regressive legislation and policy choices we tend to see in the absence of a strong labour movement:

SCOTUS, in other words, is always going to be antagonistic when the law itself is the problem. Legal protections like the weekend, the minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, the 40-hour week, and prohibitions against discrimination are of incalculable value. Perpetually orienting ourselves solely toward gratitude for past victory, however, deludes us into a self-defeating reliance on the law as our protector. Much more consistently, it has played the opposite role.

It wasn’t so long ago that former union president Ronald Reagan used the cloak of law to break the air traffic controllers’ strike, an act often seen as the opening salvo in the 30-year war on workers that continues to this day. Yet Reagan’s heavy-handedness was not innovative so much as it was a return to time-honored tradition. Concessions like the eight-hour workday were not granted out of some inherent justice found in the golden hearts of enlightened politicians. They were only granted when the torches were at the gates and those in authority had no other choice – and only then after well over a century of fighting.

- Finally, Matt Bruenig suggests that we shouldn't rely on employers or other private-sector actors to make choices about social development. And Hilary Wainwright points to Public Service International's call for a stronger public sector.

Sunday Afternoon Links

This and that to end your weekend.

- Daniel Goleman writes about the role of wealth in undermining empathy:

(I)n general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.

While Mr. Keltner’s research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.

This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.
...
Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century. This widening gulf between the haves and have-less troubles me, but not for the obvious reasons. Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes. Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

- Stephen Maher writes about the Cons' continuing problems with Stephen Harper's first set of patronage Senate appointments - which look to have arisen largely about of the perception that anybody sufficiently well-connected to be appointed would be above answering to the mere general public. And there's an echo of that theme in Kate Heartfield's discussion of the Cons' battles with Elections Canada as well.

- But when it comes to kicking the powerless while they're down, it's hard to top the Cons' thumb in the eye of war rape victims and child brides who need access to abortion as a means of remedying the human rights violations they've suffered - or the denial of health care to refugee claimants.

- Finally, the CP reports that Alberta isn't done trying to shut non-oil baron voices out of any environmental assessment of the tar sands.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your Saturday reading.

- Kate Heartfield worries that the NRA knows exactly what it's doing with its jaw-dropping response to the Newtown shootings - and that it should be all too familiar based on the tactics of the Harper Cons:

It’s ridiculous, but ridiculous works, time and time again. “Elite” no longer means rich and powerful. It means smart. It means anyone who takes the time to look at the evidence and construct a logical argument. Not to be trusted, that. So all academics and journalists are suspect. The only way a journalist can avoid being seen as an elite is to go on the attack against other journalists, to promise, for example, to provide the straight talk that the so-called Media Party doesn’t want you to know.

This works. The Conservative government doesn’t have to construct a fact-based defence of its environmental or crime policies, because it doesn’t matter that they don’t make sense. No conservative (in the ideological, not the partisan sense) really thinks that costly, top-down regulation is the best climate-change strategy, for example. But it doesn’t matter, when it comes to the party’s electoral chances, which is all the party cares about. The policies don’t have to make sense. They just have to come attached to some boilerplate about how ivory-tower academics don’t understand the real world, or how statistics lie.

- Meanwhile, Andrew Coyne buries the lede in an otherwise unremarkable summary of the Cons' policy direction:

(A)t year’s end, it’s still not entirely clear whether the government has learned anything. We may stick with the F-35. We may not. We may go to competitive bids. We may not.
Meanwhile, the robocalls scandal has slowly dragged on, a steady drip of voter complaints, revelations arising from Elections Canada’s continuing investigation, and court testimony. Nothing as yet indicates any senior Tories knew about or colluded in attempts to mislead or harass voters in the last days of the campaign, but neither does it seem plausible that it was all the work of a few overzealous kids. The calls are too many, in too many ridings, with too much sophistication required.

Last, there are the omnibus budget bills, I and II: the point at which the government’s emerging policy ambitions and continuing contempt for Parliamentary democracy converge. I’ve said my fill about these earlier, so I’ll be brief here. When much of the government’s legislative agenda can be pushed through in a single bill, or two; when “debate” on these hydra-headed monstrosities is itself cut short by government fiat; when these arrive on top of the whole long train of abuses to which Parliament has already been subjected, starting under past governments but with conspicuous enthusiasm under the present – then the question for next year, and for years to come, is clear. It is whether we will still live under a Parliamentary system of government, or something else.

 - Michael Wolfson makes the case for a stronger Canada Pension Plan which pairs any age increase in benefit payments with recognition that lower-income seniors need an alternate source of income:

An expansion of the benefit levels of the CPP should be phased in more rapidly, say over 20 to 25 years rather than the 47 years implicit in all the current discussions. In parallel, the age at which full benefits from the CPP would start should rise gradually from 65 to 70. More rapid phase in of benefits, of course, means payroll taxes would have to rise. But a delay in the age when benefits become fully payable would reduce the need for tax increases.

Finally, the long run structure of the Old Age Security (OAS) and Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) portions of Canada’s public pension system should be coordinated with any changes to CPP to assure it is fair to those with lower incomes – a point clearly lost on the Harper government with their most recent cuts to OAS and GIS.

These options open the possibility of a more creative and better pension bargain – more adequate pensions that are also fiscally sustainable. Are Canada’s finance ministers ready to think outside the box?

- Finally, Brad Lavigne's analysis of the NDP under Tom Mulcair focuses almost exclusively on what Andrew Potter would consider the cynical side of the party's interests. But it's well worth noting that the NDP's upcoming policy convention will provide an ideal opportunity to discuss exactly where members actually want to be on that spectrum - and to assess Mulcair's responsiveness to members' concerns.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- The NDP follows up on the Tony Clement G8 scandal by pointing out the connection between his pork-barrelling and the 2008 federal election (which, let's not forget, was called at the Cons' behest):

The NDP is accusing federal Conservative cabinet minister Tony Clement of using a controversial, $50-million G8 legacy fund to buy re-election, prompting a heated denial from the government.

Municipal documents obtained by the New Democrats show Clement met with local mayors and councillors in the midst of the 2008 election campaign. They discussed how to identify projects that could be eligible for the legacy funding.

Twelve days after that meeting, a local news outlet reported that Clement had posted video endorsements from "local townspeople, mayors and council members" on his campaign website.

"It gave him a major advantage over the other candidates," New Democrat MP Charlie Angus said in an interview Thursday.

"I think the question has to be asked: Was this a $50 million price of an election?"

- But then, the Cons have obviously lost touch with any sense that public money should be used for anything other than to fulfill their political whims - as Kate Heartfield points out when it comes to their dumb-on-crime policy.

- Meanwhile, the Calgary Herald slams the Cons for eliminating any actual judgment and discretion from the criminal justice system:

The Canadian Bar Association passed a number of worthy recommendations at its recent annual conference that Justice Minister Rob Nicholson should take time to consider.

They include a measure asking that a "safety valve" be brought in with mandatory sentences, which would give judges an ability to deviate from the legislation in rare circumstances where they feel the sentence would cause an injustice.
...
(O)ne size fits all does not work in sentencing. We just have to look to the U.S. for numerous examples of what can happen in the extreme. Under California's three-strikes law, a man with a record of two felony convictions for burglary, was sentenced to prison for 25 years to life, after getting caught at a pro shop trying to steal three golf clubs. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that ruling. In another case a man whose third offence was stealing Batman and Cinderella videos from a department store, was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison.

These are not hardcore criminals and it is not in society's best interest to treat them as such.

- Finally, talk about this fall's Saskatchewan election is starting to heat up, if only in highly general terms so far. Both Three Hundred Eight and the Numbers Guy have posted overviews of what to expect - albeit with little discussion of the factors that figure to influence the race. And a new Saskatchewan General Election blog has also launched which should hopefully serve a useful aggregator for election news (as well as a reminder of the unreliability of non-random online polls).