Aglukkaq also announced new rules to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, such as industrial leaks and gas flares, which makes up a significant portion of the industry's total emissions.Notably omitted, of course, is the rest of the industry's total emissions.
I'm very disappointed in all of you for my government's longstanding failings, and demand that you take responsibility immediately.
It's absolutely essential that we align our greenhouse gas emissions policies with the U.S. if that means delaying regulations which could limit pollution from the tar sands. Also, it's absolutely essential that we refuse to align our greenhouse gas emission policies with the U.S. if they're committing to targets which could limit pollution from the tar sands.
A team of researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 Americans and found that, by some wide margin, the rich were more likely to shoplift than the poor. Another study, by a coalition of nonprofits called the Independent Sector, revealed that people with incomes below twenty-five grand give away, on average, 4.2 percent of their income, while those earning more than 150 grand a year give away only 2.7 percent. A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: if you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people’s brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people’s. (An inability to empathize with others has just got to be a disadvantage for any rich person seeking political office, at least outside of New York City.) “As you move up the class ladder,” says Keltner, “you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results.”- Lucinda Platt discusses the devastating effects of poverty on childhood development - while noting that more than half of children experience poverty at some point.
There is an obvious chicken-and-egg question to ask here. But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: it triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.Or even a happy one. Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. “All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,” says Norton. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. “While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,” says Norton, “spending it on others increases happiness.”
It's libellous to suggest that I privately demanded that Sam Tutanuak apologize for exposing the fact that my constituents are going hungry. But while I have your attention, I may as well take the opportunity to publicly demand that Sam Tutanuak apologize for exposing the fact that my constituents are going hungry.
Despite conditional approval from the National Energy Board, most believe the Northern Gateway pipeline will never get built because of opposition to it. The courts have given First Nations new powers to fight developments that encroach on their land. Outside of aboriginal communities, public opinion regarding pipelines is at best divided – although there seems to be a growing societal angst about climate change that is palpable.- And CBC reports on Kinder Morgan's failed attempt to criminalize opposition to its pipeline expansion.
Kinder Morgan, which also wants to add a pipeline to the West Coast, is encountering that sentiment now. Protests at Burnaby Mountain, where the company is trying to do some exploratory work, have become daily events and have spawned arrests and ugly international headlines. Once upon a time, the odds of the Kinder Morgan pipeline going ahead were considered extremely good. Not any more.
As inequality has become a hot-button issue, the solutions on offer tend to focus either on taxing the extremely wealthy or on raising workers’ wages. What makes the bad business fee particularly attractive is that it does both of those things. It makes the connection conceptually between the low wages at the bottom of the work chain and the outsized incomes at the top, and sets out both to punish companies that keep wages low, and to create value out of that punishment for the people struggling on low incomes.- And Truthout notes that corporate bureaucracy tends to be far more harmful than anything found in the public sector - as a similar tendency toward complexity is paired with both a lack of accountability, and a profit motive which can be at odds with any attempt to actually meet the the needs of customers:
In that way, the fee is win-win. If companies seek to avoid it, they end up doing something just as good for their employees, or even better. Martin says, “For me in particular, the better part is my boss may be thinking, ‘Well, I should just pay my employees better. I should just pay a living wage. I should just give Cliff some benefits.’”
To Liz Ryan Murray, policy director at NPA, the bad business fee bridges the issues of workers’ rights and taxpayers’ rights. Often conversations around public benefits get mired down in arguments about deficits and the cost to the taxpayer, ignoring the value of the programs to the people who depend on them and rarely conceiving of “the taxpayer” as a low-wage worker herself. But, Murray notes, on this issue there’s no way to split them apart — the taxpayer and the worker have the same interest in seeing big companies pay their fair share.
If I had had a problem with a government bureaucracy, like the Veterans Administration or the Social Security Administration, I could have called my senator or my congressman and they would have given hell to those agencies on behalf of me. I could lobby Congress to change the way they do things, the way vets are today successfully lobbying for changes in the VA.- Adrien Schless-Meier points out that grocery stores are among the worst offenders both in paying poverty-level wages, and relying on public subsidies for employees.
But if I had stood outside of my cell phone company's headquarters and protested, they could have had me arrested for trespassing.
That's the difference between government bureaucracies and corporate bureaucracies.
Government bureaucracies are ultimately answerable to "We the People" and our elected representatives. It's called "the American system of government."
Corporate bureaucracies, on the other hand, are ultimately only answerable to their shareholders, who don't give a rat's patootie if the company they own screws their customers because that means more money in their pockets.
What’s common to both of these stories is not only the willingness of local candidates and riding associations to defy the powers that be but their obstinate insistence that these races should be what party leaders claim they are: open nominations. With any luck, this obstreperousness will spread. Thanks to redistricting, there will be other ridings where incumbents face off against incumbents; in others, the promise of open nominations will run into the reality that leaders have favourites. Ridings that resist the inevitable attempts to stage-manage these races will do their parties a favour. Tilted nominations are not open nominations. They’re not even nominations, really.- But of course, we should be hoping for greater democratic participation (and yes, influence over results) within the broader electorate as well. And PressProgress notes that the Cons' Unfair Elections Act looks to benefit Pierre Poutine and his fraudster ilk at the expense of actual voters - while Alison points out the risk that any report on Robocon may be pushed past the next federal election due to the Cons' blindside attacks against Elections Canada.
The tendency, when these fights break out, is to view them as signs of weakness and division, if not anarchy. The tone of news coverage is often disapproving, as if party leaders were indulgent parents who neglected to discipline their children. Reporters pepper their stories with words like “messy,” “ugly,” even “vicious.” This is what you get, they seem to say, when you leave it to ridings to decide these matters. Yes, it is. Isn’t it glorious?
The OECD is a fierce defender of free-market capitalism. But Saint-Amans says politicians are realizing that rules set up in the 1920s need reform because allowing corporations and the very rich to hang on to huge amounts of wealth is bad for the economy.
“When you have a political crisis, I am sad to say it, you have political support and political heat,” he says in an interview from OECD headquarters in Paris. “European countries are turning to corporations and saying, ‘You don’t want us to become bankrupt. Please, pay your taxes and let’s make the changes together, otherwise we collapse. And if we collapse so will you.’”
Last year, several G20 finance ministers asked him for a report on how big companies move vast profits around the globe to avoid being taxed. Saint-Amans will release the report on Feb. 12.
- Doug Saunders notes that Canada's foreign policy has taken a colonial turn in Africa as the Cons work to promote resource interests rather than humanitarian issues.
“I didn’t anticipate it would happen so fast,” he says. “The fiscal crisis has turned into a budget crisis. . . . The ministers from G20 cannot explain to their people that they should pay more tax but big, profitable companies will not pay more.”
In fact, aside from the occasional intervention to grumble about how much scrutiny the bills in question had undergone during previous parliaments -- an occurrence that diminished in frequency as the hours ticked by -- the Conservative contingent was largely silent throughout the discussion, popping up only to make the occasional point of order or when the chair called for a recorded vote.- Paul Wells rightly points out the trend line that's seen federal fiscal capacity drained at every turn over the past decade:
Given all that, Van Loan's suggestion that he had given careful consideration to the Cotler amendments before deciding to proceed down a different route -- one that, as it turned out, would ultimately be blocked by the speaker -- is difficult to reconcile with the facts.
More importantly, though, it should also raise a red flag for the government on the wisdom of sending MPs to committee to act as automatons, rather than heed the recommendations that come forward for ways to improve a particular piece of legislation, whether it comes from a witness or from the other side of the committee table.
The money isn’t rushing out of Ottawa. Taken in isolation, there’s a kind of fiscal responsibility in the reduced-after-2017 rate of “health”-transfer growth. This isn’t a fire sale. Canada’s ninth-longest-serving prime minister, still seven years younger than Jean Chrétien was on the day Chrétien became prime minister, can afford to be patient.But it's worth asking whether that trend figures to continue for long, or whether Canadians will be willing to listen to a strong pitch in favour of the type of social programs most detested by the Cons by the time 2015 rolls around. And if so, then the NDP may be in exactly the right place at the right time to present that alternative.
But he will spend ever more money on jets and jails, while taxing less as a fraction of GDP than any federal government has since the 1960s, and sending a constantly-increasing share of money to the provinces, which can spend those dollars as they like. You can hear the air going out of the federal government’s — any federal government’s — ability to “encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction.” From day to day this prime minister zig-zags in ways that would break a snake’s back. From 2001 to 2011 the line is as straight as a ruler.
Ottawa plans to negotiate a single national health accord, not separate agreements with each of the provinces and territories, the federal health minister says.Of course, the content of that single accord is rather important as well - and indeed there wouldn't be much to gain in the short term from Aglukkaq's declaration if (as expected) the Cons seek the lowest common denominator in setting any terms on federal funding.
“We want one agreement,” Leona Aglukkaq said Monday in St. John’s. She said the position was non-negotiable.
Page, dispatched by MPs on the government operations committee in October to help them get a handle on the impact of the operating freeze, came back empty-handed. The government won't tell him details and has refused his requests for any information citing cabinet secrecy.- And Aaron Wherry provides a timely example of what happens when a forum like question period is seen as not being intended to convey actual information. And indeed it's hard to see who's supposed to be better off waiting for new set of revelations before anything approaching the truth starts to trickle out when there was a chance to start having a meaningful conversation months ago.
Page said the government's secrecy and blanket refusal to release basic documents is blocking the work of Parliament and, if left unchecked, poses all kinds of risks, including the temptation to hide mistakes.
He argues the blocking of information is getting so out of hand that someone should be monitoring what's being refused to ensure they really are cabinet confidences.
Getting big companies like PayPal and Amazon and Visa to hit WikiLeaks in the pocketbook is as idiotic as it is predictable. So, too, threatening Assange with untold prosecutions on trumped-up charges – and even now prosecuting him in a case that looks, to many of us, highly coincidental and therefore suspect. To me, what I see in the papers this morning are the institutions that people truly hate these days – banks, and huge corporations, and bellicose governments – doing what they always do: reacting stupidly, corporately, and way too late. They should all send a bunch of “secret” cables to each other about their plans. They do that a lot, apparently.- And finally, it's always nice to see some new discussion about why the Cons' choice to gut the census figures to have damaging side effects. But while less accurate information is surely a problem for those actually interested in solving problems, I'm not sure the Cons can be expected to see this precise form of inaccuracy as anything but a plus for them:
I tried to think of a metaphor that fits, to make my point. I settled on a fight between a big, slow, dumb dinosaur – being besieged by an army of fast, smart, tiny mammals with really sharp teeth.
And we all know what happened to those big, slow and dumb dinosaurs, don’t we?
Ms. Nakamura noted that simply changing the weights could lead to CPI under-estimating actual inflation. That could help government budgets achieve politically preferred results.
On the revenue side, if personal incomes rise faster than measured CPI, more people get bumped into higher tax brackets. (Tax brackets are indexed to CPI.) That amounts to a tax increase without any discussion in Parliament.
On the expenditure side, CPP and other inflation-adjusted transfers grow more slowly, as do public sector wages and benefits. This holds down government spending below what it would otherwise be.
Lower-than-actual values for CPI would be valuable to the Harper government in other ways too. It would make Canada look good to both foreign and domestic investors who value price stability. It also puts less pressure on the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates.
Federal, provincial and territorial health ministers, who are meeting in Newfoundland this week, will agree that the recommended daily intake of sodium should be cut to 2,300 milligrams from 3,400 mg, sources said Tuesday.Now, I'm not entirely sure which provinces have a salt lobby which would oppose reducing even the recommended amount of sodium (knowing that it has absolutely no binding effect on actual food production). But how else can one explain the report that the meeting of health ministers will be "dominated" by what would seem to be an entirely non-controversial issue?
That amounts to about a teaspoon of salt per day and was the recommendation emanating in July from a federal task force.
...
Federal Heath Minister Leona Aglukkaq joins the table Tuesday and the emphasis is expected to shift to matters like sodium. Ms. Aglukkaq, is however, expected to offer her opinion on Newfoundland's plan to conduct observational studies of liberation therapy.
But the issue of salt is expected to dominate a significant chunk of the discussion at the closed-door meeting.
Mrs. Carol Hughes (Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, NDP):Now, if one wants to be generous, one could note that it's possible that working with provinces and territories could conceivably have some impact on the spread of AIDS. But the fact that Aglukkaq doesn't even mention the word herself seems to speak volumes about the Cons' actual lack of interest in having anything to do with the issue. Indeed, Aglukkaq says nothing more than that the other levels of government will have money to work with when it comes to general health spending which they can choose to apply to the problem.
Mr. Speaker, last week's throne speech indicated that we will improve the conditions of aboriginal women in Canada.
When it comes to HIV-AIDS, the infection rate for aboriginal women is running ahead of Canadian averages and is increasing. Aboriginal women are overrepresented in the Canadian epidemic. To bring this number down requires money and political will.
Will the government commit necessary funding to bring the HIV-AIDS infection rate down among aboriginal women?
Hon. Leona Aglukkaq (Minister of Health, CPC):
Mr. Speaker, we continue to increase the transfers of funding to provinces and territories. Again this year we are increasing the transfers by six per cent. We will continue to work with the provinces and the territories to deal with health issues.
