Wednesday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Nathalie Schwab et al. study the results of autopsies, and find that COVID-19 appears to be the actual cause of death even for many patients treated as having died of other causes. Eva Hejbol et al. examine COVID's wide range of effects on muscles as one explanation for the fatigue it causes. And Deborah Dowell, William Lindsley and John Brooks make the case for improved ventilation to reduce the harm from COVID and other airborne dangers. 

- Kenny Stancil writes about the growing demand for a windfall profits tax based on price gouging by the oil and gas sector. John Woodside highlights how continuing (and even increasing) reliance on fossil fuel assets is setting Canadian investors up for a collapse, while Eszter Matyas, Laura De Rosa and Marek Jozefiak point out the folly of pouring even more money into gas infrastructure which couldn't responsibly be used for anything approaching its full lifespan. 

- Meanwhile, Christopher Flavelle discusses the spectre of the Great Salt Lake drying up as an example of the imminent and devastating effects of climate change and associated environmental negligence. 

- Ian Welsh discusses Emmanuel Wallerstein's work in asking whether capitalism is reaching a breaking point where there's nobody left to exploit. And Moises Canales-Lavigne reports on the wide range of necessities whose prices are being inflated beyond the means of Canadians. 

- Stephen Wentzell writes about Doug Ford's increased majority based on big-money donations and a complete lack of democratic accountability. And Andrea Houston discusses the need for electoral reform to ensure minority-of-a-minority parties can't exercise absolute power, while Max Fawcett makes the case for mandatory voting to ensure everybody's voice is included in electoral decision-making. 

- Finally, Kisha Supernant and Sean Cameron push back against the residential school denialism which is being lent wholly undeserved credence by the corporate media. 

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Gerald Caplan suggests that Rogers and Bell might be ripe for nationalization - though it's also worth pointing out that we don't have to guess what happens when a Crown delivers telecommunications services:

The British Labour Party has begun to make the case that market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism, is not necessarily the best way for society to operate. Specifically, it’s been trying to show that private enterprise is not always superior to public enterprise.

Beginning with Margaret Thatcher, British governments have denuded the UK of almost all public enterprises, from British Airways to the Royal Mail. The Labour Party Opposition wants to remind Brits that some entities actually make more sense under public auspices. Fortunately for them, I am in a position to offer my Labour comrades foolproof evidence for their gambit. Two words: Rogers and Bell.
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Long ago, when I was co-chairing the federal task force on Canadian Broadcasting, a few creative Canadians advocated that the telecommunications oligopolies be put under public ownership. It made perfect sense and was even arguably the Canadian way, like the CBC. But it was a political non-starter. No government has been prepared to consider it. The Harper government has tried to make easy political points by calling for a another major national player to join the game, as if that would force the existing predators to shape up. It’s a bad joke on us poor suckers.

But maybe it’s not too late for a real solution. Hey, Tom Mulcair: bringing Bell and Rogers and Telus and Shaw under public ownership? Now that’s a cause worth marching for. You’d unite suffering Canadians in their tens of millions from coast to coast to coast, getting them out onto the streets at last. Occupy Rogers! Occupy Bell! Everyone’s mad as hell at these guys, so why do we still have to take it?

- The Vancouver Sun is right to highlight the importance of the labour movement in advance of the Labour Day weekend. Meanwhile, B.C.'s provincial government has repeatedly attacked workers with unconstitutional legislation before shifting to a strategy of trying to bankrupt teachers rather than funding a functional education system - which apparently doesn't rate a mention.

- Robyn Benson discusses how the Cons are further restriction workers' access to employment insurance, as well as what unions and workers can do to fight back:

Under restrictive new rules introduced by the Harper government, working people who have paid into the EI fund for years receive no assistance when they find themselves jobless. Sure, they can always appeal, and then wait more than a year for a hearing. There used to be 1,000+ part-time referees to hear their cases: that’s now down to fewer than 70 people, trying to handle a backlog of 10,000 appeals. And after a lengthy delay, more than 80% of claimants lose their appeals anyway. Small wonder, we might think: the new EI appeals tribunal members are Conservative appointees, and several have donated money to the Conservative party.

New EI policies, designed to hurt rather than help; new appeal mechanisms, rigged against claimants; and employee cuts everywhere, made without rhyme or reason across the public service, as the Parliamentary Budget Office has just reported. And those cuts are far from over.

This is obviously a recipe for disaster from an unemployed person’s point of view. But it’s no picnic for our front-line workers in charge of the EI programs, either. All too frequently they get blamed for the bad policies they are required to administer. Yet it is government-created backlogs and delays and tight new rules that are the problem here, even if that very government has pointed the finger at its own employees on occasion to cover up its poor decision-making, and gone after conscientious whistle-blowers who object to being ordered to treat EI claimants unfairly.
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It’s pretty easy to see how common cause can be made here. This Labour Day, we should re-commit ourselves to forging these natural alliances between ourselves and the general public. We’re in for a challenging few months with the current round of collective bargaining—maybe the toughest period we’ve ever experienced as a union. But we’re not facing this government alone. Countless Canadians have their own reasons to want the Harper government gone, and can’t wait until the federal election next year. Time to join forces, folks. We’re going to need each other. 

- Andrew Duffy reports that in the absence of a functional census, Statistics Canada is now looking for alternatives which will involve amalgamating far more information about Canadians through a bevy of government databases in the hope of assembling the information which can no longer be collected directly.

- Meanwhile, Susan Delacourt wonders whether mandatory voting may be the best way to ensure broad public participation in the political decisions which affect us all.

- Finally, Jane Taber and Shawn McCarthy report on the agreement of Canada's premiers as to the outline (PDF) of a national energy strategy. But one point in particular stands out:

A Canadian Energy Strategy should:
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• Maintain the highest degree of environmental safeguards and protection, including by addressing climate change, climate resilience and reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally.

Which is to say that even Canada's oil-producing provinces are able to agree that a federal energy strategy should take into account the need for global emission reductions - leaving no justification at all for the Cons' habit of cheerleading for fossil fuels without accounting for the environmental damage done by their use elsewhere.

Sunday Morning Links

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- The Globe and Mail joins the chorus calling for Canada to welcome more citizens, rather than exploiting cheap and disposable workers. But Bill Curry reports on yet another corporate lobby group demanding that the Cons actually expand the flow of temporary labour to secure profits at the expense of workers.

- Andy Radia discusses the laughable attempt of the Cons to rebrand themselves as anything other then enemies of the environment after eight years of constant attacks on regulations and advocates alike. And Daniel James Wright points out that the organization chosen to greenwash the Cons was subject to a full corporate takeover.

- Meanwhile, the CP reports on a mercury advisory for fowl near the tar sands - being just the type of health and environmental disaster the Cons are always happy to sweep under the rug in the name of oil profits. Chris Varcoe writes about the complete takeover of Alberta's government by the oil sector. And Bob Weber reports on Alberta's moves to make sure the same people who have pointed out exactly the types of environmental dangers which have come to pass never get a word of input into further development:

Critics say Albertans are in danger of being shut out of discussions on how the province's natural resources are developed.

Expert observers and opposition politicians worry Alberta's new energy regulator is drawing the circle of who can speak so tightly that one hearing on a proposed energy project had to be cancelled because no one was allowed to appear.

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The Alberta Energy Regulator is responsible both for holding public hearings on oilsands proposals and other energy developments and for determining who has the right to appear. The regulator is obliged to allow only those "directly and adversely affected" to appear.
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Blakeman said decisions such as what happened with the Kirby project ignore important realities.

"The government seems to believe that the air doesn't move, water doesn't flow and soil doesn't leach," she said.

- Harry Neufeld notes that the Unfair Elections Act remains a serious step backward for the prospect of free, fair and transparent elections even after the absolute worst abuses were altered by amendments. And Amira Elghawaby reviews Alison Loat and Michael McMillan's Tragedy in the Commons as a basis for asking whether there's much worth salvaging in Canada's current system of party politics.

- Finally, Don Lenihan argues against mandatory voting on the basis that popular turnout can serve as a measure of a government's mandate. But I can only respond by wondering whether there's any evidence whatsoever to support the theory that governing parties are more open to competing ideas based on a low turnout - or whether we should take the Harper Cons' determined exploitation of every lever of power based on a modest mandate as a cautionary tale against the hope will restrain power-mad leaders.

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- George Monbiot writes that contrary to the theory that wealth is a precondition to environmental standards, increased consumption tends to correlate to disregard for the our impact on the environment:

For years we've been told that people cannot afford to care about the natural world until they become rich; that only economic growth can save the biosphere, that civilisation marches towards enlightenment about our impacts on the living planet. The results suggest the opposite.

As you can see from the following graph, the people consulted in poorer countries feel, on average, much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in rich countries, even though those impacts tend to be smaller. Of the nations surveyed, the people of Germany, the US, Australia and Britain feel the least consumer guilt; the people of India, China, Mexico and Brazil the most.

The more we consume, the less we feel. And maybe that doesn't just apply to guilt.

Perhaps that's the point of our otherwise-pointless hyperconsumption: it smothers feeling. It might also be the effect of the constant bombardment of advertising and marketing. They seek to replace our attachments to people and place with attachments to objects: attachments which the next round of advertising then breaks in the hope of attaching us to a different set of objects.

The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become. Even if you somehow put aside the direct, physical impacts of rising consumption, it's hard to understand how anyone could imagine that economic growth is a formula for protecting the planet.

So what we seem to see here is the turning of a vicious circle. The more harm we do, the less concerned about it we become. And the more hyperconsumerism destroys relationships, communities and the physical fabric of the Earth, the more we try to fill the void in our lives by buying more stuff.

All this is accompanied in the rich anglophone nations with the extreme neoliberalism promoted by both press and politicians, and a great concentration of power in the hands of the financial and fossil fuel sectors, which lobby hard, in the public sphere and in private, to prevent change.

- But then, it's hard to say our problem lies solely with an exclusive focus on human needs when xkcd points out the EPA's valuation of oil reserves as exceeding that of humanity.

- Meanwhile, Tim McDonnell interviews Ken Silverstein about his reporting from the world of oil fixers.

- Felix Salmon discusses why salaries should be open to scrutiny rather than remaining hidden. But in addition to Salmon's focus on transparency, I'd point out one additional reason why we should favour greater disclosure of what people make: if CEOs have managed to improve their bargaining power and claim a larger share of income based on greater knowledge of what their counterparts are making, the same principle might well apply further down the income scale as well.

- Toby Sanger takes a look at the real effects of Tim Hudak's slash-and-burn plans for Ontario. And Linda McQuaig writes about the utter implausibility of Hudak's associated promises:

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak claims he has a plan that will create One Million Jobs. Everywhere he goes in the current election campaign, he stands in front of a backdrop that proclaims One Million Jobs.

Nowhere does he mention that those jobs are imaginary.

His job creation strategy is based heavily on the notion that cutting corporate taxes causes businesses to create jobs — a theory that relies, according to Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, on the “confidence fairy.”

It’s a striking comment on how far to the right the mainstream media has drifted that Hudak’s ‘plan’ is being treated somewhat seriously.

While media commentators have expressed skepticism, they still refer to the plan as “bold” — an adjective that gives it more credence than, for instance, “nutty” would.

Well, yes, bold it is — in the same way that it would be bold for Hudak to say he’ll create one million jobs by cutting Ontarians’ consumption of French fries.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne makes the case for mandatory voting as part of a larger recognition of our civic responsibilities:

The argument for compulsory voting is analogous to that for taxation. No doubt, if paying for public services were voluntary, many people would do so, purely out of a sense of civic duty. But many more would not, reasoning that the first group’s willingness to pay would still ensure these services were provided — only to find their own numbers were so great that the services they had hoped to “free ride” on were unavailable. So instead we force everyone to pay, for services everyone receives.

The same applies to the vote. Voting isn’t like buying a soft drink. When you cast your vote, you aren’t just making a choice about you and your needs. You’re helping to make a collective decision about providing for everybody’s needs. The broader the sample of voters, the more representative of everybody it is likely to be — rather like the census — and the greater the combined stock of experiences and insights brought to bear. Conversely, if some “free ride” on others’ willingness to vote, the whole of the community suffers.

You owe your fellow citizens your counsel, in other words. You benefit because they vote. You owe them no less in return — just as you owe them your share of the cost of public services. We ask very little of citizens in a democracy. Showing up to vote once every four or five years hardly seems much of an imposition. We’re not talking about throwing anybody in jail: a small fine would suffice, or perhaps a tax credit or some such positive incentive for compliance. You could still decline the ballot, or spoil it, or otherwise register your dissatisfaction with the choices on offer. You just wouldn’t be able to sit on your duff.

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.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Michael Katz looks back at how the U.S. abandoned its poor - and how that choice continues to affect people across the income spectrum today. And Michael Valpy discusses how Canada can and should avoid travelling any further down the same path - with his "Big Four" ideas focusing on mandatory voting, proportional representation, a guaranteed basic income and protections for vulnerable workers.

- Jeffrey Simpson describes the Cons' narrow focus on about 10 per cent of the Canadian electorate in the lead up to the next federal election, while Andrew Jackson previews what we can expect out of future federal budgets. And Michael Harris laments the fact that Stephen Harper is far more interested in using public money to promote his own image than in actually governing competently:

The Tories carpetbombed the NHL playoffs in 2013 with ads for the Economic Action Plan, tagging this shameless self-promotion with EAP 2013 identifiers. The playoff ads cost $95,000 a pop. But the Harper government had to admit later that the ads did not contain any actual measures from the 2013 budget.

In other words, not only was it a freeloading political announcement paid for by Canadians on behalf of the Conservative party, it was false. The Canada Jobs Grant which was being advertised at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars didn’t even exist.

When Harper himself was forced to explain his profligate ad offensive at the public’s expense in the House of Commons, he no longer talked of informing citizens about government programs, the way Rona Ambrose had. Now it was a matter of national pride — in him.

No one is better at giving himself straight As than this PM. The new explanation went something like this: The ads were worth it because after seeing their key message — that Canada was doing better than any other developed country in tough economic times — Canadians would burst with pride at what a good government they had.

Setting aside the neck-snapping shift in the justification, there was another problem with the ads.  They weren’t true either. Canada does not have the highest growth rate in the G7 — the United States does. Outside the G7, the economies of Australia and some Scandinavian countries also grew faster than Canada’s did.

The Economic Action Plan was a propaganda vehicle originating in the Finance Department to make Canadians think Jim Flaherty is the best finance minister on the planet … you know, ‘STFU’ Jim.

Believers in that steroid pantomime known as Wrestlemania may have been taken in. People who can read are a tougher sale.

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The bottom line? No prime minister has any business spending hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s money to boast about his accomplishments. If only the PM would unmuzzle his ministers — and give a few interviews where he didn’t supply the questions in advance — the media would be delighted to offer the air time and column inches for free.

What a terrifying concept that would be for a control freak not particularly restrained by the facts — someone who would rather spend pots of public money creating them.

- John Ivison gives us advance warning that there are plenty of years of diplomatic darkness ahead if the Cons get their way.

- And finally, Dan Leger theorizes that we may look back on 2013 as the year citizens pushed back against constant surveillance in the name of security.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- As we approach the anniversary of Jack Layton's death, Tom Mulcair discusses some of the lessons he learned from his predecessor as NDP leader:

(W)hen Mulcair first joined the NDP caucus in 2007, he was sometimes frustrated by the 'go-around' sessions — seemingly endless, repetitive meetings at which MPs debated issues and batted ideas back and forth.

"Sometimes I would find the go-arounds in caucus to be really long processes, but then I realized what (Layton) was doing. He was working with every single person in the room and there was a real art to it.
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He also learned something about the fine art of political persuasion from Layton.

"Jack rarely tried to convince people by saying to them, 'This is what I'm going to do for you.' Jack had a way of talking to people, which was, 'Things have to change, here's how you can help bring about that change.' That's subtle but it's something that Jack really did intuitively and it's something I picked up on."

Mulcair said he's tried to adopt a similar approach, "rather than lining up policies and saying this what we're going to do, it's we want to listen to you, we want to work with you and we think we can do things better together."

 - Duncan Cameron echoes the view that Layton's willingness to listen set him apart from far too many of his political colleagues:

Reaching out to people, getting to know what they were thinking, opening a two-way dialogue (even with serious adversaries) was what characterized Jack Layton as a leader. Canadians had Jack right. He was the guy to be with for a beer, or to share a bottle of wine. He enjoyed himself, and was easy to like, as people guessed. He wanted to share his thoughts -- after he had heard from you first.

-  And Joan Bryden reports on polling showing just how fondly Layton is remembered by Canadians in general:

12 months removed from the emotional intensity of the moment, a new poll suggests a majority of people believe last year’s remarkable national display of remembrance was both authentic and appropriate — and they continue to hold Mr. Layton and his legacy in high esteem.

Some 62 per cent of respondents to the poll, conducted by Harris-Decima for The Canadian Press, said they viewed the torrent of public grief for Mr. Layton as genuine, compared with just 27 per cent who said they felt mourners simply got caught up in the moment.
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And a whopping 91 per cent said they believe Mr. Layton made a positive contribution to Canada, 33 per cent of them describing his contribution as “very positive.”

 - On another note, Steve Morgan makes the case for universal pharmacare:

A recent study found that one in 10 Canadians can’t afford to fill their prescriptions as directed. Such financial barriers often increase costs elsewhere in the health care system — from the public purse. For example, if a parent cannot afford the necessary drugs for a child’s asthma, they may be forced to visit the emergency department when the asthma gets out of control.

Thus, the question is not whether it is fair to provide refugees with prescription drug coverage; the question is whether it is fair — and even fiscally responsible — not to provide such coverage to all Canadians.
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In truth, a universal Pharmacare program would save Canadians billions of dollars; some estimate up to $10 billion per year.

The proof is found in virtually all countries comparable to Canada, countries like Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In comparison to Canada, pharmaceutical spending is lower and has been growing more slowly in all of these countries. Yet they all provide better, more equitable access to prescription drugs than Canada through universal Pharmacare systems of one form or another.
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If Canadians take pride in their medicare system, and want to achieve better access to medicines at lower costs than they pay today, then maybe it is time for the original vision of medicare, which included Pharmacare, to be completed as planned.

- And finally, Don Lenihan has his doubts that mandatory voting is necessary to encourage political parties to reach out to disaffected voters. But while I'd agree with Lenihan that mandatory voting without a cultural shift would have only a limited impact, it seems to me entirely possible that one might facilitate the other - both by forcing a government elected by a small proportion of the population to reach out to a far larger group, and by setting up incentives for parties to build long-term connections to voters who they know will be participating for decades to come.

Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Toby Sanger discusses how wealthy Canadians - especially in the financial sector - are making more and more use of offshore tax havens to avoid paying their fair share:

The latest Statistics Canada figures  show 24% of Canadian direct investment overseas in 2011 went to the top twelve tax havens, up from 10% in 1987.   In fact, tax havens of the Barbados, Cayman Islands, Ireland, Luxembourg and Bermuda were five of the top eight national destinations of total Canadian investment abroad, with the US, UK and Australia the only countries not considered tax havens in this group.
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These totals would be even higher if they included figures for other tax havens such as Monaco, Liechtenstein and many others where the figures either aren’t available or weren’t made available for confidentiality reasons.  They also don’t include money going to tax havens associated with the UK and the US, such as Channel Islands, or through banks in those countries.

The finance and insurance sector now accounts for over 51% of Canada’s total direct investment overseas, more than double its share from 1987, more evidence that a large share of this money is going overseas to avoid taxes.   The Harper government has lauded Canada’s growing investment overseas, claiming it shows looser foreign investment rules (which allowed numerous takeovers of Canadian industry) have been beneficial, but the actual figures show the reality is quite different.  A large and growing share of this money isn’t going into real capital investments that could ultimately benefit people overseas or in Canada; it’s going into tax avoidance that benefits a wealthy few at the expense of the large majority in Canada and around the world.

 - Meanwhile, Art Eggleton is learning that the best way to make the case to help Canadians living in poverty is to advocate for greater equality at all levels of income.

- Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher report on the Cons' response to polling data on the effect of Robocon. But it's most noteworthy that a shotgun approach may have shot the Cons' own case in the foot since so many of the Cons' attacks have been pre-refuted for the court's convenience:

In her 35-page affidavit, Corbin says Graves’ results cannot be relied on because the survey was conducted so long after the fact.

“It is implausible that consumers would remember not only getting a call a year after it occurred, but specific details of the call.”

Graves had said in his affidavit that he dealt with the possibility of “over-remembering” by comparing his results in the seven ridings with a control group of 1,500 people in other ridings.

Corbin suggests Graves didn’t make his raw data available for others to review. However, the poll results have been posted on ekospolitics.com since shortly after his affidavit was filed.

- And pogge offers up another election fraud roundup, with Con MP Peter Penashue apparently joining the list of Con MPs who manage to stand out in the cover-up department even by his party's pathetic standards.

- Finally, Susan Delacourt follows up on the idea of mandatory voting with an apt observation as to how it would change the complexion of election day:

In Australia, voting is mandatory. In Canada, it’s not. Muttart told me earlier this year that he was struck by how quiet things are there on election day — all the frenzied get-out-the-vote efforts by parties in Canada simply don’t exist in Australia.

Ask any Canadian political volunteer, of any stripe, about that big E-day push, known by the acronym GOTV. It can be a circus. And in the midst of that melee in the 2011 federal election, someone got the idea that the tools of GOTV, the databases and the phone contacts, could be used just as easily to keep voters away from the polls.

Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Pamela Palmater discusses how the Cons' push to monetize First Nations reserves ultimately looks to be little more than another giveaway to the oil industry:

By now most of you have heard about the Harper government's intention to introduce legislation that will turn reserve lands into individual holdings called fee simple. The legislation has been referred to as the First Nation Property Ownership Act (FNPOA). Some media outlets have referred to it as "privatization" but what the legislation would really do is turn the collective ownership of reserve lands into small pieces of land owned by individuals who could then sell it to non-First Nations peoples, land-holding companies and corporations, like Enbridge for example.

The idea is not a new one. Hernando de Soto has been trying to sell the same idea to Indigenous populations all over the world. The evidence seems to show that the Indigenous peoples are far worse off for it. Prior to de Soto's destructive world tour, the Indigenous Nations in the United States suffered the sting of fee simple legislation in the Dawes Act. Once the lands were given to individuals, the lands were subject to state laws. The same would happen in Canada where the lands would be subject to provincial instead of federal law.

The primary purpose of the Dawes Act was to assimilate Indigenous peoples in the U.S. by breaking up their Indigenous governments. The legislation allowed the government to divide up communal lands into small parcels to be held by individuals. It has been described by historians as:"the culmination of American attempts to destroy tribes and their governments and to open Indian lands to settlement by non-Indians and to development by railroads" (Oklahoma Historical Society). In the Canadian context, similar legislation will open up "Indian lands" for big oil, gas and mineral extraction.

- Meanwhile, Les Whittington reports that the Cons retaliated against Attawapiskat for rightly challenging their own improper actions by then denying federal support for a desperately-needed housing plan.

- Dan Leger notes that the Cons have set themselves up to wear full political responsibility for pushing the Gateway and other pipelines, but recognizes that they have plenty to lose in having made it so.

- Finally, Mia Rabson comments on mandatory voting - including this from one former PM who sees some merit in the idea:

Former Prime Minister Joe Clark told the Free Press in June he was slowly changing his mind about the idea of mandatory voting.

"I used to dismiss it because it seemed to be ordering people to do something they wouldn't do by their will," Clark said, following a forum on youth voting hosted by Elections Canada. "But I think the analogy with speeding laws, with other rules holds. It is a national interest that the public have more participation in the political process and perhaps a requirement to vote would lead to that."

Clark said he hasn't studied the issue much himself, nor has he looked at the experience of mandatory voting in Australia, "but I think we're in a sufficiently serious situation now that we need to look at other alternatives. I don't think we should exclude anything."

On mandates

Following up on this post, here's another interesting tidbit from Angus Reid's post-election polling:

In addition, almost two out of three Canadians (and British Columbians) favour "mandatory voting" like in Australia.

Which makes for a striking finding, considering that somewhat less than two-thirds of Canadians actually voted in the absence of an obligation to do so. But it also suggests that the mandatory debate happening elsewhere may have some resonance with the general public - and also suggests that despite the Cons' efforts to paint even minimal compulsory contributions like the long-form census as being beyond the pale, the current public mood may in fact support greater government action to ensure public involvement in shaping our country's direction.